Remains of Innocence

by J. A. Jance

  “How much do you know about Ruth’s family?” Joanna asked.

  “Not a lot,” Jason answered with a shrug. “Her parents are divorced. They moved here from somewhere in New Mexico. Her father is a missionary or something on an Indian reservation.”

  “Where in New Mexico?” Joanna asked.

  Jason frowned. “Some little town. I think it has something to do with cowboys.”

  For a moment, Joanna was stumped—Indians, cowboys, horses. Then it came to her. “Gallup, maybe?”

  “Right,” Jason said. “That’s it—Gallup.”

  It didn’t surprise Joanna to hear that Lucas and Ruth came from a fractured family, but it did surprise her to learn that they were left to their own devices much of the time while their mother was hanging out in bars. They lived just up the street from Moe and Daisy Maxwell. Was there a chance one of them had been out and about the night Junior died? If so, they might have spotted something out of the ordinary.

  Eager to ask the Nolan twins about that very thing, Joanna stood up. “Thanks so much for your help, Jason. How about I take you home?”

  Jason shook his head. “Thanks,” he said, “but I’d rather walk. There’s a shortcut from here. I go that way all the time.”

  He jerked his head in the direction of a series of steep stairs that zigzagged between houses perched on the side of the canyon. Joanna didn’t envy Jason the climb. She also understood the real reason he was refusing her offer of a ride. He didn’t want to run the risk of having friends and neighbors seeing him climb out of a vehicle with a Sheriff’s Department logo on the side. After thinking about it for a moment, Joanna concluded that maybe he was right. With a possible wannabe serial killer loose in the neighborhood, being branded as a potential snitch was a bad idea. It might, in fact, be downright dangerous.

  “Sure thing,” Joanna said, stepping away from the bench. “Suit yourself.”

  “Sheriff Brady?” Jason called after her.

  Joanna turned to look back at him. “What?”

  “Thank you for telling me that you don’t think Junior hurt that cat. When I thought he had done it, I was almost glad he was dead. Now I can be sorry. He’s still dead, but it makes me feel better somehow.”

  “I understand,” Joanna said, and she did. Jason was still sitting alone on the bench, staring at the ground and wrestling with a storm of conflicting emotions as Joanna drove away.

  Half a mile down Tombstone Canyon she turned right past St. Dominick’s and drove up the hill to Rebecca Nolan’s place. Joanna wanted a chance to talk to Ruth again and to speak to Lucas as well, but when she knocked on the door of the little tin-roofed house, no one answered. Joanna stood on the small porch for several minutes in hopes someone would come back home. When they didn’t, she got back into the car, drove straight to Grady’s, and parked in a lot crammed with close to a dozen motorcycles.

  For the better part of forty years the worn clapboard building had functioned as a hamburger joint that catered mostly to generations of teenagers dancing to a blaring jukebox. Now the hamburgers, fries, and milk shakes were long gone. Even though it was broad daylight, a red neon cocktail glass complete with a green neon olive glowed brightly in the window facing the street. Beyond the sign hung a blackout curtain designed to keep any outside light from entering the building.

  Joanna was a small-town sheriff—a female small-town sheriff at that. Even in the twenty-first century, her walking into a bar alone during daytime hours would be sufficient to set local tongues wagging. As she entered the artificially darkened room, Joanna more than half expected to find her nemesis, Marliss Shackleford, lurking at the bar.

  Once Joanna’s eyes adjusted to the light, she was relieved to see that Marliss wasn’t there, but Rebecca Nolan was, slouched on a wooden-backed barstool with a mostly empty pitcher of beer parked on the counter in front of her. Next to the pitcher sat an ashtray with a half-smoked cigarette resting in one of the slots. Bright red lipstick that resembled the faded shade on Rebecca’s lips had left a stain on the cigarette’s filter. Joanna guessed that Rebecca had most likely gone outside to smoke and then returned to the bar with the remainder of the half-smoked cigarette on hold for later.

  Timothy Grady himself stood behind a grungy homemade counter, one that still hinted at its humble fast-food origins. The wooden surface was scarred with hundreds of carved initials. As Joanna entered the joint, both Timothy and Rebecca were staring up at a major-league baseball game playing silently on a flat-screen TV fastened to the faded wooden paneling on the wall above the bar. Joanna noticed that the other customers, most of them clad in leather motorcycle riding gear, were seated in booths around the perimeter of the room. Rebecca was the only person seated at the bar itself.

  Timothy Grady initially glanced at Joanna with a welcoming grin as she slid onto the stool next to Rebecca’s. Then, recognizing her or perhaps registering the significance of her uniform, his grin faded abruptly.

  “Great,” he muttered. “To what do we owe the honor of a visit from one of our local gendarmes? I assume you’ve dropped by to hassle me for some phony reason or other?”

  “If you don’t mind, I came here to talk to Mrs. Nolan,” Joanna said pleasantly. “I’ll have a cup of coffee if you have it, a Coke if you don’t.”

  Hunching closer to the glass and staring into her beer, Rebecca sat with her arms resting on the edge of the bar. “Never did like cops much,” she muttered under her breath.

  The woman’s mumbled delivery told Joanna that Rebecca Nolan was probably already over the limit. If she tried driving back home rather than walking, she would be ripe for adding another DUI to her collection, not to mention driving without a license. Joanna knew better than most that drunk drivers didn’t lose their driver’s licenses over one measly DUI conviction.

  “You were a lot more friendly up in the parking lot the other morning when we were searching for Junior Dowdle,” Joanna observed.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Rebecca shot back. “I was out there with my kids doing our civic duty. This is me on my free time. What I do on my free time is no business of yours.”

  “Speaking of your kids,” Joanna said, “where are they?”

  “At home most likely,” Rebecca answered glumly. “Why do you want to know?”

  “They’re at home alone?”

  “That’s where I left them,” Rebecca replied. “Hey, they’re fourteen. That’s a little too old to need a babysitter, especially in broad daylight. Come to think of it, why were you there talking to Ruthie this morning? What’s that all about? I didn’t think cops could talk to minors without their parents present?”

  “Usually,” Joanna agreed. “As for talking to Ruth earlier? Our getting together was her idea. As I told you earlier, she wanted to interview me for her blog. She said it was a homework assignment.”

  “Was a homework assignment,” Rebecca muttered. “I already told you, that was months ago. She wrote that one essay and then that geeky Radner kid—what’s his name?”

  “Jason.”

  “Yeah, right. That’s the one. He told her that if she wanted him to, he could put it up on the Internet for her and turn it into a blog. So, yes, the first one was a homework assignment, but it sort of got out of hand. To begin with, she wrote the entries and Jason posted them. Now Ruth has learned to post them herself. She calls it ‘Roxie’s Place,’ ” Rebecca added, drawing a pair of sarcastic airborne quotation marks around the last two words. “God, how I hated that yappy little mutt!”

  Timothy came back and slammed a mug of coffee on the bar in front of Joanna, slopping some of the coffee in the process.

  “That’ll be five bucks,” he announced. Joanna suspected he had doubled the usual price on her account. That’s how much lattes went for downtown. He stood there staring at her belligerently. Joanna couldn’t tell if he expected her to argue about the price or if he was simply waiting for his money. Either way, he made no move to offer her a coaster or a napkin. Reaching into he
r purse, Joanna pulled out five one-dollar bills. She carefully counted them out and then slapped them onto the bar in the middle of the puddle of spilled coffee.

  Coffee money, Joanna thought, half smiling to herself and wondering if any of Sandy Henning’s bank tellers would notice and sound an alarm.

  Glowering at her, Timothy picked up the sodden bills. “What about the tip?” he demanded.

  “What tip?” she replied. “You spilled a third of my coffee.”

  He stalked off, and Joanna turned back to Rebecca. “Who’s Roxie?” she asked.

  “You mean, who was Roxie,” Rebecca replied. “I never wanted a dog to begin with, but my ex dragged that nasty little dog home from the pound. She peed and crapped all over the place. One day she disappeared. Slipped out of the house somehow. Lots of coyotes where we used to live. One of them probably got her. Good riddance. That’s all I’ve got to say about that. Ruth acted like losing that damn dog broke her heart. It sure as hell didn’t break mine.”

  A shiver went up and down Joanna’s spine. A pet goes missing for some unexplained reason, a loss that pushes a troubled young girl closer to the edge. Was it possible that months later, that same girl might turn Sunday school songs into a siren call and lure a mentally impaired man to his death? And what were the chances that the same girl would find a way to insert herself into the framework of the investigation into a murder she herself had committed?

  How many times had Joanna heard of instances of serial killers insinuating themselves into criminal investigations? They did it to find out whether the cops were onto them, true, but there was often another reason as well—they truly believed they were better than everybody else and that no one would ever be smart enough to figure it out.

  Ruth Nolan had come to Joanna, in all her blue-eyed, purple-haired innocence, asking to do an interview. She hadn’t mentioned the Junior Dowdle situation in the beginning, but the interview had certainly led there. The possibility that Junior’s killer had been right under Joanna’s nose shocked her to the core, and it galled her to think that Ruth might have played her for a sucker.

  Joanna took a tiny sip of Timothy’s bitter, hours-old coffee while she assessed the situation. Rebecca was already drunk—enough so that not only was her speech slurred but her tongue was loosened as well. It was in Joanna’s best interests and in Junior Dowdle’s, too, that Joanna keep the woman talking as long as possible.

  “Sounds tough,” she said, feigning a sympathy she didn’t feel. “When did all this happen?”

  “When did Roxie disappear?” Rebecca’s reply included a careless shrug. “Long time ago, before the divorce. When we came here, I put my foot down. I told Ruth that we were not getting another dog. Period!”

  “Perfectly understandable. Losing a pet is hard on everybody, especially kids. Speaking of kids,” Joanna added. “Did any of the detectives ever get around to talking to Ruth or Lucas?”

  “About Junior Dowdle, you mean? Maybe they did or maybe they didn’t. I’m not sure. Why would they?”

  “For one thing, you live just up the street. Ruth and Lucas strike me as smart kids. They might have been outside the evening Junior died. Perhaps they noticed something unusual. Maybe they saw a stranger of some kind hanging around the neighborhood.”

  “I don’t think so,” Rebecca said. “They were home all day and for most of that they were inside. Lucas was on the computer working on an online algebra program. Algebra’s beyond me. I can do arithmetic out the yin-yang, but since algebra is way over my head, I signed him up for an online tutorial. As for Ruth? She was out of it completely—never left her room all day except to go to the bathroom a couple of times.”

  “What do you mean, ‘out of it’?”

  Rebecca poured more beer, emptying the remains of the pitcher into her glass. “She got her period. Had the cramps. She was crying and bellyaching and wanting me to take her to the doctor. My ex still has the kids on his health insurance, but it only covers major medical. Doesn’t cover doctor’s visits or prescriptions, so I gave her one of my muscle relaxers. Put her out like a light. No more complaining.”

  Rebecca’s casual admission of having given her daughter an illegal dose of prescription medication was enough to take Joanna’s breath away. There was nothing warm and fuzzy about this woman; nothing maternal or loving, either. Here was a textbook case of a dysfunctional family breeding a dysfunctional child. How many defense attorneys had used that as an excuse to ask for leniency for their clients’ murderous actions? If Ruth ended up on trial for Junior’s murder, would Burton Kimball point at Rebecca Nolan and attempt to use the same defense in Ruth’s favor?

  Suddenly Joanna’s focus narrowed. She stared hard at Rebecca’s ashtray and the lipstick-stained cigarette hanging off it. What she had just learned about Ruth Nolan put Rebecca’s DNA-drenched cigarette filter in a whole new light. After a moment of consideration, Joanna picked her purse up off the back of her stool. Standing up, she swung the purse in a seemingly careless fashion, managing to crash it into Rebecca’s still half-full glass of beer and into the empty pitcher as well. Spilled beer poured off the counter and onto Rebecca while the pitcher crashed to the floor on the far side of the bar, shattering into a thousand pieces.

  “You stupid broad!” Timothy roared as he raced toward the mess. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  While Rebecca gazed down in despair at her suddenly sodden tank top, Joanna plucked the cigarette out of the ashtray. Avoiding touching the filter, she slipped the cigarette into her purse. Pulling a twenty out of her purse, she slapped it down on the bar.

  “Sorry about that pitcher,” she said. “I’m pretty sure this will cover the damage.”

  With that she turned on her heel and walked away in an exit that was, in its own way, worthy of Columbo.

  CHAPTER 23

  DRIVING WEST ON I-40 AT 75 MPH THROUGH THE WIDE OPEN LANDSCAPE of northern New Mexico, Liza Machett found herself speeding around the semis lumbering along at much lower speeds and sticking mostly to the right-hand lane of the freeway. Alone and vulnerable in her little Camry, she was the hare to their slow-moving tortoise. She had felt safe and protected tucked away in the upper berths of those immense long-haul vehicles. Now, out in the open, she couldn’t help wondering what secrets the trucks she passed were carrying along with their stated and advertised loads.

  Her want-ad Camry had a radio. At least there was a device with knobs and buttons on it occupying that part of the cracked and sun-faded dash that was designated for a sound system. Unfortunately no sounds came out of it, so Liza traveled along in silence with nothing to divert her or keep her mind from straying back to the people who had already died because of her.

  Other than the drivers’ lounges in the various truck stops along the way where flat-screen TVs ran nonstop programming from Fox News, her traveling cocoon had been almost completely devoid of news coverage. Had it not been for the computers reserved for truckers to use, she wouldn’t have known about Candy’s death. When she made a pit stop just outside Gallup, she looked longingly at the lounge reserved for professional drivers, wishing she could go inside and glean more details about what progress, if any, was being made in the murders back home in Great Barrington and the one in Stockbridge, too. It sickened her to think that three people were dead for no other reason than having known and/or tried to help her. This was all her fault. Their blood was on her hands as surely as if she herself had murdered them.

  Tonight was Sunday. By the time she stopped for the night, the public libraries would all be closed. She had heard that some of the more upscale hotels had business centers where she might be able to go online. If she could manage that, maybe she’d be able to learn more. If that proved impossible, however, she would show up in Bisbee on Monday morning without any more details than she already had. Guy was enough older than she was that Liza hoped he’d be able to supply some of the missing threads about their father’s involvement with the mysterious bread trucks. That�
��s where this all led—back to those damnable bread trucks.

  Whatever the outcome of her conversation with Guy, however, Liza was determined that once it was over, she would go to law enforcement. She would go to the cops with him or without him. She was the one person who could tie together the two homicide cases back home in Massachusetts. She alone had the power to put the cops on the right trail and bring the murderer or murderers to justice. If she had to relinquish what money remained in her roll-aboard to make that happen, then so be it. The money had never been hers to begin with.

  When she crossed the border into Arizona, she was surprised and disappointed that there were no saguaros anywhere in sight. Where had they gone? After all, didn’t Arizona and saguaros go together like bread and butter or peanut butter and jelly? Instead, the long straight road rose gradually through a vast wasteland toward a line of blue-tinged mountains that had suddenly appeared on the far horizon. By the time she neared Flagstaff, she was amazed to realize that she had gone from empty desert into a forest of stately pines. Arizona was supposed to be a desert. Why were there so many trees?

  Liza had expected to find some place to stay the night in Flagstaff, but as she drove through town, she realized it was too early to stop. Flagstaff was still a long way from Bisbee. Liza wanted to show up at Guy’s office bright and early in the morning. Besides, if her pursuers had somehow stumbled on her connection with Candy’s Underground Railroad, Liza wanted to put as much distance as possible between her present location and that of William, her most recent driver. She kept right on driving.

  Heading south on I-17, she was amazed to see signs warning her of elk crossing the freeway. Elk? On a long downhill grade, she drove past the exit to Sedona. It was a place Liza had always wanted to visit. She remembered seeing photos of Sedona while she was still in school. The red cliffs had been hauntingly beautiful, but just now she felt no temptation to turn off and go exploring. Focused on her mission, she refused to be sidetracked.