Rattlesnake Crossing : A Joanna Brady Mystery (9780061766183)

by Jance, Judith A.

  It took the better part of a minute for the computer to reboot and re-create the file. Sarah watched the process in abject astonishment. Once Frank had called up the proper files, Joanna glimpsed a fax cover sheet followed by two more pages. The fourth page held a picture. Maybe it wasn’t quite as sharp as it might have been with the help of a good laser printer, but the likeness was close enough for Joanna. She recognized Alton Hosfield’s son at once. The likeness was close enough for Sarah Holcomb, too.

  “That’s him, all right,” she said. “That’s little Frankie’s friend. How’d you find him? And what’s his name again?”

  “Merritt,” Joanna said. “Ryan Merritt.”

  Sarah shook her head. “Never heard tell of no Merritts. Must not be from around these parts.”

  He’s from around here, all right, Joanna thought. From far closer than anyone ever imagined.

  “So, then,” Sarah was saying, “is that all there is to it? Is that all I have to do?”

  “No, Mrs. Holcomb, it isn’t. I’m going to have to insist that you spend at least tonight and maybe tomorrow night as well in Tucson with your daughter.”

  Sarah tapped her cane on the floor. “Now, see here, Sheriff Brady. Mr. Montoya said that as long as I had someone here to look out for me—”

  “That’s not going to cut it anymore, Mrs. Holcomb. The man you’ve just identified is the prime suspect in five murders. That’s five, as in one, two, three, four, five. At the moment, you and a discredited police officer are the only people who can link him to two of the dead. And if you’re our only witness, I want to be damned sure nothing happens to you. Now, I can understand if you don’t feel up to driving yourself at the moment. In fact, I’ll be more than happy to have one of my deputies drive you there. Otherwise…”

  “Otherwise what?” Sarah asked.

  “I’ll have no choice but to place you in protective custody. Mr. Montoya will drive you over to Bisbee to the Justice Complex and lock you up for the night.”

  “You mean in a cell?” a shocked Sarah demanded. “In jail?”

  “In jail.”

  “Why, that’s outrageous. I never heard of such a thing.”

  “Please, Mrs. Holcomb,” Frank said smoothly. “Sheriff Brady is right. I’m sure you’d be much more comfortable at your daughter’s house. Won’t you call her now and let her know you’re coming?”

  “She won’t be pleased, havin’ me show up like this on such short notice. She likes to have plenty of warnin’ so she can get the house all spiffed up before I come to call.”

  “I doubt she’ll mind that much,” Joanna said, “once you explain all the circumstances.”

  After a flurry of phone calls back and forth to Tucson, Sarah reluctantly agreed to go see her daughter. Meanwhile, Joanna read through the rap sheet.

  “So what’s the deal?” Frank asked when he finally had Sarah packed, loaded, and backing her Buick Century out of the drive and onto the street.

  “Ryan Merritt’s juvenile record is sealed,” Joanna said. “I have no idea what he did to land himself in the slammer for twenty-one months prior to his eighteenth birthday. They let him out of Adobe Mountain and he was loose for a total of three months before he was arrested again on a parole violation. Because he was no longer a juvenile, he ended up serving the rest of his sentence in Florence. He didn’t get out of there until May fifteenth of this year.”

  “Does that mean he was out of juvie when Rebecca Flowers was murdered up in Phoenix?”

  “We can’t be sure because no one knows exactly when Rebecca was killed. But it looks right.”

  “So what do we do?” Frank asked. “Call in an Emergency Response Team and go stake out the Triple C?”

  Joanna covered her eyes with her hands. “I’m thinking. I’m worried that if we try that, he might pull the kind of stunt Monty told me about.”

  “The FBI profiler,” Frank said. “The guy I called for you yesterday. You never said you’d talked to him.”

  “That’s because I didn’t tell anybody,” Joanna said. “You’re the only one who knows.”

  “Tell me,” Frank demanded. “What did he say?”

  “Let’s see…that the guy was young and white. That he’d had problems with authority figures. That he’d been in and out of prison and had no compunction about killing or hurting people. Monty also said he was probably leaving a message for us in the way he posed his victims. How does this sound to you, Frank? I think scattering dead bodies all over his father’s property qualifies as a pretty strong message.

  “Monty Brainard also said that our boy probably no longer cares whether or not he gets caught. He thinks he’ll opt for going out in a hail of bullets, taking as many people with him as possible.”

  “Including his family.”

  “Right,” Joanna said.

  “But if we go up against him, he may very well be armed with some of Clyde Philips’ fifty-caliber sniper rifles. Our guys won’t be, so what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Joanna said. “We can’t pick him up for questioning because what we have now is strictly circumstantial. If we don’t come up with enough to charge him, God only knows what will happen if we have to let him loose again. The problem is, the longer we wait to arrest him, the more danger his family is in. Sarah Holcomb told us Frankie Ramos was Ryan Merritt’s friend. Look what happened to him.”

  For a long time neither Joanna nor Frank Montoya spoke. In the silence, there was nothing to be heard but the buzzing of a thousand locusts. High above them, a jet from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base arched across the blue sky, leaving behind a narrow band of condensation. Not the writing on the wall, Joanna thought. The hand of God writing on the sky.

  “I have to warn them,” she said.

  “Warn who?” Frank asked.

  “The Hosfields. I have to let them know.”

  “But if you warn them, aren’t you warning Ryan, too? What if they tell him we’re after him and he takes off? He might get away.”

  “But what if we’re right about him? What if we keep our mouths shut long enough to collect evidence and he ends up killing his family before we actually get our act together? No,” Joanna declared, making up her mind. “I’m going to go talk to them right now.”

  “Alone?”

  “Look,” she said, “the Triple C has been crawling with cops for days now. If a single officer shows up to talk to Alton and Sonja Hosfield, that’s one thing. If a whole armored division shows up, that’s something else. If I had killed three people in as many days and left a couple of other stray corpses lying around here and there besides, I’d head for the hills if I saw two or three cop cars drive into the yard all at once.”

  “You’re right,” Frank agreed. “Only one cop car, then, but with two cops in it. You and me, Joanna. Both of us together.”

  Joanna nodded. “Fair enough,” she said.

  Frank frowned. “But what if it goes bad? What if all hell breaks loose and he comes out with all barrels blazing?”

  “That’s what we have the cell phone for.”

  “By then it may be a little late to call for help.”

  “Who says we have to wait to call?” Joanna demanded. “We’re going in the Blazer and I’m going to drive. While we’re headed that way, you’ll be on the horn to Dick Voland to bring in officers and position them as our backup.”

  They headed for the Blazer, climbed in, and fastened their seat belts. “Shouldn’t we have Dispatch send for Eddy Sandoval? I don’t know exactly where he is at the moment, but chances are he’s closer to Cascabel than any of the other deputies.”

  “We can’t call Eddy,” Joanna said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I just fired him.”

  “Oh,” Frank Montoya said. “I see. Care to tell me about it?”

  “Later. Talk to Dick first.”

  Frank did. Voland was back in his office at the justice complex when Frank finally reached him. After letting loose with a barr
age of objections, Dick Voland finally gave up trying to talk Joanna out of her plan of action and began establishing contingency strategies. By the time things were settled, the Blazer had already turned off Pomerene Road onto the Triple C. When the Hosfields’ tin-roofed Victorian came into view, nothing at all seemed amiss.

  “It looks almost idyllic, doesn’t it?” Joanna said.

  “Right,” Frank Montoya said. “And so did the farmhouse in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.”

  “I never read that,” Joanna said.

  “You don’t have to,” Frank told her. “We’re living it.”

  As they drove into the yard, Joanna looked around anxiously, trying to catch sight of the faded blue panel truck Ryan Merritt had been driving three days earlier. There was no sign of it, or of the ATV, either. The door to the building where the truck had been parked stood wide open, and the space inside was clearly empty.

  While Joanna was parking the Blazer outside the gate, the front door of the house opened and Sonja Hosfield, with a purse slung over one shoulder, came striding across the porch. Joanna was so relieved to see the woman alive that she had to restrain herself from running up to Sonja and giving her a hug.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Hosfield,” Joanna said, rolling down her window. “This is my chief deputy, Frank Montoya.”

  “I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Montoya,” Sonja said. Then she spoke directly to Joanna. “I wish you had called to let me know you were coming. I would have told you not to bother. Alton had a meeting in town this afternoon, so it’s the cook’s night out tonight. We’re meeting in Benson. Alton’s supposed to take me to dinner. In fact, I was just on my way out the door when you drove up.”

  “And your sons?” Joanna asked.

  “They’re gone, too. They left a couple of minutes ago, as a matter of fact. Ryan offered to take Jake up into the hills to do some target shooting.”

  Target shooting! Joanna thought. With twelve-year-old Jake! As her heart filled with dread, some of it must have surfaced on her facial features. Sonja covered her mouth with her hand.

  “What’s the matter?” Joanna asked.

  Sonja shook her head. “I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  “Shouldn’t have mentioned what?”

  “Target practice. You see, Ryan’s been in some trouble with the law. It happened before he came here to stay with us, but I remember Alton saying that he’s not allowed to have access to guns. Still, since the boys were just going to be on our own property, I didn’t think it would matter that much.”

  Sonja stopped talking and stared questioningly into Joanna’s face. “I mean, Ryan hasn’t done anything wrong, has he? They won’t put him back in jail for that, will they?”

  “They might.” Joanna opened her car door and stepped down onto the hard-packed ground. “It might actually be far worse than you think.”

  Behind her in the Blazer, she heard a series of cellphone beeps as Frank Montoya redialed the department. “Houston,” he said to Dick Voland. “We have a problem.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  SONJA HOSFIELD stood absolutely still. “What is it, Sheriff Brady?” she asked. “What’s going on? What’s Ryan done now?”

  “You gave him a weapon?” Joanna asked.

  “I…yes. I told him he could use his dad’s deer rifle. He caught me so much by surprise when he asked that I just said yes without thinking.”

  “What do you mean he caught you by surprise?”

  “Ryan offered to take Jake along for the evening. All on his own, without my even suggesting it. I was pleased. The whole time he’s been here, he’s barely acknowledged his little brother’s existence, while all Jake wants is to be included in what the big guys are doing. I was thrilled Ryan was willing to have Jake go along. Since they were just going to be right here on the ranch, I didn’t think it would hurt anything. Sort of like Jake riding the ATV, even though he’s too young to have a driver’s license on a regular road. Not only that, having the two of them go off by themselves meant that Alton and I could have dinner alone for a change. Almost like a date. I may have graduated as a Home Ec major, but I don’t have to prove it by cooking every meal every single day.”

  Frank got out of the Blazer. “Dick’s gathering up everybody he can, including the Emergency Response Team. They’re on their way.”

  Sonja looked alarmed. “Do you have any idea where the boys were going?” Joanna asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sonja said, shaking her head. “They loaded Jake’s ATV into the back of Ryan’s truck. I told them to stay away from those areas where all those investigators have been working the past few days, but they could be anywhere else. It’s a big ranch.” She paused and frowned. “Sheriff Brady, I heard him say something about an Emergency Response Team. That means something’s happened, something bad. You’ve got to tell me what it is.”

  “Where does your stepson stay?” Joanna asked. “Does Ryan have a room here in the house?”

  “No, we have a little building out behind the barn, a combination house and toolshed. Back in the old days when Alton could still hire them, braceros used to stay there year-round. Now we usually hire people who live elsewhere. The place isn’t much, but when Ryan came to live with us this summer, he wanted to stay there. He asked to stay there. So that’s his home—when he’s home, that is. He spends a lot of time in town with friends.”

  “What friends?”

  Sonja shrugged. “I don’t know, really. I’ve never met any of them. Remember, I’m only a stepmother. He doesn’t tell me any more than he absolutely has to, but his dad probably knows.”

  “Could we see his room, Mrs. Hosfield?” Joanna asked. “If you’d be good enough to allow us access so we don’t have to go tracking down a search warrant, it could save everybody a whole lot of time and trouble.”

  “Why would you need a search warrant?” Sonja said. “Of course you can see it. There’s nothing there, nothing to hide. It’s just a little apartment with a bed, a dresser, and a refrigerator.”

  She led them across the yard to the far side of the building where the truck had been parked. Half of it was a garage/toolshed. The other half of the building served as living quarters. When Sonja tried the door, it was locked. “That’s funny,” she said, looking back at Joanna. “There’s nobody on the ranch except us. Why would Ryan need to lock his door?”

  “Break it down, Frank,” Joanna ordered, drawing her Colt. “That’s all right with you, isn’t it, Mrs. Hosfield?”

  “Why, of course…if you think it’s necessary.”

  The door shuddered under the first two blows from Frank Montoya’s shoulder, but it didn’t give way until he slammed into it a third time. It splintered into pieces that fell out of the jamb.

  “Wait here,” Joanna said, and then she stepped inside.

  The room was hot. It was also dark and gloomy. The only light came from a single dingy window shrouded by dirt and cobwebs. Unfortunately, there was an odor in the air—a heavy, coppery smell that was all too familiar.

  It took several seconds for Joanna’s eyes to adjust to the dim light. When she could see, she noticed a terrible dark smudge on top of the narrow cot—a smudge and a small, still figure. Hoping that it wasn’t what she thought and yet knowing it was, Joanna moved gingerly across the room to the bed.

  “Don’t let Mrs. Hosfield come in here, Frank,” she warned. “There’s a body in here. Keep her outside!”

  “What is it?” Sonja called from outside the broken door. “For God’s sake, someone tell me what’s going on!”

  Sickened, barely able to breathe, Joanna stood over that terrible scene and came face-to-face with the appalling knowledge that they had arrived too late. She reached down and touched Jake Hosfield’s lifeless wrist. The body was still warm to the touch, but the boy was dead. The cute kid with the bright red hair was dead, and his hair was…gone.

  Joanna closed her eyes. In her mind’s eye she tried to replay the past few hours—the confrontation
with Eddy Sandoval, the time spent thumbing through the year-books, the time it took rebooting the computer, the few minutes spent arguing with Sarah Holcomb and making sure she was safely out of town. All those moments and minutes had added up into too many. For Jake Hosfield, those seemingly inconsequential decisions had made all the difference—the difference between life and death.

  Squeezing her eyes shut to squelch the tears of rage that were forming and then holstering her weapon, Joanna wheeled and sprang back across the room, almost without touching the bare wooden floor. Outside, Frank stood just in front of the single wooden step with his fingers buried deep in the flesh of Sonja Hosfield’s upper arm. For a second, Joanna thought he was physically restraining her, when in fact he was simply holding her upright. As soon as he let go of her arm, she sank down on the rough plank step like a lifeless doll.

  “Not Jake,” Sonja sobbed. “It can’t be. Please, not my Jake.”

  Joanna saw the woman’s mouth move, but she heard nothing. Something had happened to her in that darkened, bloody room. In those few seconds standing at Jake Hosfield’s deathbed, she had confronted her own culpability. As sheriff, Joanna had sworn to save people like Jake from people like his half brother. That was her duty, her responsibility. She had failed, and that failure made her deaf to Sonja Hosfield’s scream, inured her to the poor woman’s pain, and galvanized her to action. If she paused for even a moment to give comfort, she wouldn’t be doing what had to be done.

  “Frank!” Joanna barked. “Give me the phone!”

  Removing it from his jacket pocket, Frank tossed the phone to her. She caught it in midair and was dialing almost before it ever settled into her hand.

  “Mrs. Hosfield, how long ago did Ryan leave?” she asked as her fingers raced across the keypad.

  “I don’t know. Ten minutes? Not much more than that.”

  “And did you see which way he turned when he reached the road?”

  “No.”

  Frank said, “We didn’t meet him along the road between here and Pomerene, so he must have gone the other way.” Joanna nodded her acknowledgment as the emergency dispatcher answered the phone.