Skeleton Canyon

by J. A. Jance

  George Winfield shook his head. “No, by looking at her watch,” he said. “It stopped at nine fifty-one on Friday, June fourteenth. It could have been broken during the initial attack or during the plunge off the mountain. I’d say from the condition of the body that disposal took place within an hour or so of lime of death.”

  “I see,” Joanna said. In a way, she was relieved. It salved her conscience a little to know that Brianna had already been dead long before Joanna herself had taken refuge in the twenty-four-hour rule. What she had or hadn’t done once she and Ernie had been summoned to Green Brush Ranch would have made no difference in whether or not Bree O’Brien survived.

  By the time the Eagle neared the big wash, the storm was starting in dead earnest. First came hard, wind-driven drops that pounded into the dry earth and sent up little puffs of powdery dust. Then came a cloud of needle-sharp hail while jogged forks of lightning crackled across the sky. After that, the sky seemed to open up and the rain fell in torrents. The laboring windshield wipers couldn’t come close to keeping up.

  Lack of visibility forced Joanna to slow to a crawl.

  “Unbelievable!” George shouted over the roar of the wind, rain, and thunder. “I’ve been here for months and never knew it could storm like this.”

  Going into the big wash, Joanna stopped at the crest of the Bill to examine the roadbed. The process of extricating the van had torn it up, leaving great gouges in the sand. If the wash started running, those deep, gaping holes would fill first. Peering through the windshield, she spotted a new set of tracks that detoured around the damaged roadway. Deciding those had most likely been left by Frankie Stoddard leaving and the two deputies corning, Joanna followed them. She heaved a sigh of relief when they were safely across.

  Winfield looked. behind them. “Are those washes really dangerous? I keep suspecting that all the flash flood nonsense is so much hooey-something old-timers tell new arrivals just to scare their pants off and keep ‘em in line.”

  “They’re not nonsense,” Joanna told him. “When you see a sign that says DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED, don’t. A wash like the one back there can fill up with water in less than a minute. In fact, in less than sixty seconds it can swallow a car.”

  “How can that be?” George asked. “It doesn’t look that deep.”

  “The sand liquefies in the water,” Joanna explained. “What looks like a foot-deep little drop right now can turn into a six-or seven-foot killer during a storm. People drown in them all the time.”

  “No shi-” Winfield stopped himself. “No kidding,” he corrected.

  Joanna looked across the seat at George and smiled. In the last several hours, they had worked so hard together and in such a focused, purposeful manner, that all personal considerations had somehow melted away. They had been sheriff and coroner working together as professionals. Now, his small verbal slip brought the personal back into view.

  “It’s all right if you use the word shit around me,” Joanna assured him. “You don’t have to edit what you say and you certainly don’t need to apologize. I’m a big girl. I’ve heard it all before.”

  “It’s just that..”

  “That’s one of the differences between my mother and me,” Joanna continued. “On occasion, with enough provocation, I’ve been known to use that particular expression myself and a few that are worse. I don’t believe, however, that any of those words have ever passed Eleanor Lathrop’s lips. As far as know, she’s never moved a whit beyond a heartfelt ‘My stars and garters.’“

  George smiled and nodded. They reached the fence then. Joanna waited while George climbed out into the driving rain lo open the gate. When he stepped back inside, he was soaked to the skin.

  They were almost to the turnoff at Apache before he spoke again. “Why do you call her that?” he asked.

  “Why do I call my mother Mother?” Joanna asked.

  “No. Why do you call her Eleanor?”

  Until George pointed it out, Joanna wasn’t even aware of it. She had to think about her answer for some time before she save it. “I’ve always called her that,” Joanna said.

  “Do you call her that to her face, or is it just when you speak of her to other people?” George persisted.

  Again, Joanna considered her reply. “I don’t suppose I’ve ever called her that to her face,” she admitted honestly. “But it is how I talk about her, and it’s how I think about her, too. As Eleanor.”

  “I see,” George said, nodding thoughtfully and rubbing his thin, “So what you’re saying is that it’s not so much a matter of disrespect as it is a matter of distancing.”

  And because the questions and George Winfield’s resulting conclusion came far too close to home, Joanna had to lash out sit him.

  “She I tied to hold me too close,” Joanna snarled. “She tried to smother me.”

  For a long time after that, while they traversed the rest of the gravel track into Apache and then for several miles after they turned onto the blacktop, they drove through the curtain of pouring rain with neither of them saying a word.

  “Ellie isn’t doing it anymore,” George Winfield said at last. “I believe she’s willing to let you go, Joanna. Isn’t it about time you did the same?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  By the time they reached Douglas, Joanna realized she had been wrong in her assumption about that first storm of the season. The rain wasn’t soaking in after all. Water came down in such a swift deluge that there wasn’t time for soaking. The dips on Highway 80 northeast of Douglas were already trickling with water that, Joanna knew, could turn into a torrent at any time once runoff from higher elevations drained into the willies and washes.

  In Douglas proper, the highway’s railroad underpass was closed-for good reason. Years earlier, the highway department had painted markers on the wall in foot-long increments in order to measure and warn otherwise unsuspecting motorists of the water’s dangerous and potentially lethal depth. Joanna was surprised to see that the water filling the Southern Pacific underpass-murky, reddish brown stuff topped by a loamy white froth-had already topped the four-foot mark and was still rising.

  “Now I see what you mean,” George Winfield murmured as the Eagle sat idling next to the yellow-and-black sign that stated the all-too-obvious-DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED.

  Southeastern Arizona’s summer thunderstorms are often fierce but brief. For some reason, this one, after that first incredible outburst, had now settled into a steady downpour. George Winfield’s clothing, still damp from getting out to open the gate, made the windows inside the Eagle keep steaming up. Unfortunately, because the air-conditioning compressor wasn’t working, neither was the defroster. As they waited in the detour line to be routed around the flooded underpass, Joanna thought she glimpsed Marianne Maculyea’s 1960s vintage VW far ahead of them.

  Seeing the car reminded Joanna that Marianne hadn’t shown up in Skeleton Canyon. Had she been there with the Search and Rescue Unit looking for Angie, Joanna surely would have heard about it. Something serious must have come up in Bisbee, Joanna reasoned. It wasn’t like Marianne not to show up in person when one of her friends and/or parishioners was in trouble.

  Thinking of Angie reminded Joanna once again of just how wrong she could be. And how often. This supposedly welcome rain storm was turning into a veritable flood. Instead of spending an unauthorized weekend with her boyfriend, Brianna O’Brien was dead-at the hands of person or persons unknown. And Dennis Hacker, who had struck her as a nice man, had turned out to be a jerk instead.

  You’re batting a thousand, old girl, Joanna told herself. just keep it up.

  At the Double Adobe turnoff, Joanna stopped to let George Winfield into his own vehicle. “Do you want to transfer her into my van now?” he asked before opening his door. “‘That way you could go straight home from here.”

  Joanna shook her head. The rain was still falling. The coroner’s office up in Tombstone Canyon was housed in a former funeral home that came complete with
a covered portico. “I’ll take her the rest of the way to your office,” Joanna told him. “That way she won’t get wet, and neither will your satchel.”

  “‘Thanks, Joanna,” George told her, climbing out. “See you there.”

  The usually dry creek in Mule Gulch was running bank to hank where it crossed the highway, and there were fallen rocks anti muddy debris on the roadway in the high cuts between there and Bisbee. Wanting to report the hazard and summon someone to clean it up, Joanna reached for her radio. For the dozenth time that day, it wasn’t there. Her ability to communicate with Dispatch was at home in the Crown Victoria, parked in the yard of High Lonesome Ranch.

  That does it, she thought. Budget or no budget, I’m getting a cellular phone.

  It was almost four in the afternoon as Joanna made her way up Tombstone Canyon. That wasn’t easy, either. The deluge had washed what looked like at least one vehicle down Brewery Gulch. It was stuck in the subway, a massive storm drain designed for just such occasions. Driving past emergency vehicles and personnel out in the downpour trying to pull whatever it was out, Joanna couldn’t help being grateful that this latest incident, whatever it might be, was inside the Bisbee city limits rather than outside. That made it someone else’s problem, not hers.

  She realized then that she was hungry. Not just hungry-starving. She’d had nothing to eat all day long. She had missed Eva Lou Brady’s Sunday dinner, which had probably been something wonderful like a pork roast or fried chicken. Health-conscious badgering might have persuaded the Colonel to change a few things at KFC, but there had been no change in Eva Lou’s philosophy of what was appropriate fare for Sunday dinner.

  Fantasizing about that missed meal, Joanna failed to notice the black Lexus parked by the curb just down the street from the coroner’s office. Joanna was sitting in the Eagle under the portico and waiting for George to pull in behind her when someone tapped on the window beside her head. She looked outside to see the grief-ravaged face of Katherine O’Brien.

  Joanna opened the door. In the more than two hours she had been in the car with the body, Joanna’s olfactory senses had somehow become deadened to the stench. Only when she opened the door and moved into the fresh air could she tell the difference. The evil cloud that came out of the Eagle with her sent Katherine reeling backward, gagging and holding her mouth.

  “That’s not…” she wailed, shuddering and pointing at the mud-encrusted back gate of Joanna’s wagon. “It can’t be…”

  “Mrs. O’Brien,” Joanna said quickly. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “I had to come and see for myself,” Katherine said. “Miss Stoddard told us that it didn’t look good, but I had to know for sure. I had to know what really happened.”

  Seeing the Lexus now, Joanna squinted through the rain. “Where’s your husband, Mrs. O’Brien? Is he waiting in the car?”

  Katherine shook her head. “I came by myself. I told him I was going up to St. Dominick’s to light a candle and pray. He doesn’t know I’m here.”

  “And you shouldn’t be,” Joanna admonished. “Dr. Winfield wasn’t planning to try to ID the body until after it’s been properly taken care of for evidence reasons.”

  “It?” Katherine said, her voice rising until it verged on hysterics. “You’re calling my daughter an ‘it’? And what’s she doing stuffed in the back of a station wagon like that?”

  Thank God Deputy Raymond didn’t drive up with the body in the back of his pickup, Joanna thought.

  Just then Doc Winfield pulled in behind the Eagle. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “‘This is Katherine O’Brien,” Joanna explained. “She came to find out what’s happened to her daughter.”

  George Winfield’s clothing was still plastered to his body. The man was a mess. Still, with a look of total and grave concern, he reached out and took Katherine O’Brien’s hand, grasping it firmly. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. O’Brien,” he said, his voice softened by genuine warmth and dignity both. “It will lake some time for me to prepare things so you can actually view your daughter. If you wouldn’t mind going inside to wait, I’ll come get you as soon as possible.”

  Taking Katherine by the arm, he escorted her to the door while Joanna stood there waiting. She knew George Winfield had been a doctor once, an oncologist, before he had left that field to study forensic pathology. As she watched Katherine O’Brien lean against him, taking comfort from whatever he was saying to her, Joanna realized she was seeing a demonstration of bedside manner in action-an impressive demonstration at that.

  Joanna knew the body was far too heavy for her to manage on her own. During the next few minutes, she occupied herself with hauling George Winfield’s equipment case out of the back of her Eagle. In less than five minutes, the coroner reappeared. He was dressed in clean, dry scrubs and wearing a lab coat. He was also pushing a gurney.

  “If you can help me load her onto this,” he said, “I’ll be able to handle things from here.”

  “What about Mrs. O’Brien?” Joanna asked. “Do you want me to have her go home and come back later?”

  Winfield frowned. “I’m not used to having family members waiting outside quite this soon,” he said. “But you could just as well let her stay. The face is so badly mangled from being squashed flat by the falling truck that there isn’t that much that will soften the blow. Not only that, if the mother can’t positively identify her by sight, then we’re better off knowing now that we’ll have to get the dental records.”

  Joanna nodded. “Do you want me to wait with her?”

  “If you don’t mind,” George Winfield said, “that would be a big help.”

  Painfully aware of her own scruffy appearance-of her dirty clothes and dusty hiking boots-Joanna Brady ventured inside. The Cochise County Coroner’s Office was housed in quarters once occupied by Dearest Departures, a bankrupted discount funeral home. George Winfield had stowed Katherine O’Brien in a small, darkened room that had probably been intended to function as a private chapel. Katherine sat on one end of an upholstered love seat, weeping quietly into a hanky. Joanna walked over and sat down beside her.

  “You probably shouldn’t do this alone,” Joanna said tentatively. “Would you like to have someone go out to Sombra-” She slopped and corrected herself. “-to Green Brush Ranch and bring your husband here to he with you’?”

  Katherine O’Brien shook her head. “I’m a trained nurse,” she said. “It’s better if I do it.”

  Joanna nodded. “All right, then,” she said.

  Katherine blew her nose. “Tell me about Ignacio Ybarra,” she said.

  “I didn’t think you knew anything about your daughter’s boyfriend,” Joanna returned. “That’s what you told us yesterday.”

  “I didn’t,” Katherine said. “Not then. Frankie Stoddard picked up the name earlier by listening to radio transmissions on her police scanner. As soon as she mentioned the name, I recognized it. He’s the football player from Douglas-the one who was injured in the Bisbee-Douglas game.”

  “The one your daughter quit the cheerleading squad over’?” Katherine nodded.

  “That’s him,” she said.

  “My mother is a liar.” Unbidden, the words from the last entry in Brianna’s journal came back to Joanna in a rush. What kind of liar?

  There were lots of ways to lie, Joanna realized. Eleanor Lathrop had lied, not by spinning some outrageous fib but by keeping silent. By marrying George Winfield on the sly and then by not mentioning it to anyone, not even to her own daughter. That was what Ogden Nash and the Catholic church would have called a sin of omission rather than a sin of commission. So what kind of untruth on Katherine’s part had so offended her own daughter that Brianna had retaliated by weaving her own web of lies?

  “Are you aware that two of your daughter’s journal volumes are missing from her room?”

  “No,” Katherine replied. “I had no idea.”

  “One was found at the crash site. The second-the current one-
wasn’t there.”

  “So it is her, then, isn’t it,” Katherine said doggedly, her tears starting anew. “I kept hoping and praying it might be some other truck. There are lots of those around, you know. I saw one just like it on my way uptown. But the journal…” She shook her head. “That pretty well settles it. How did it happen? The accident, I mean. Tell me. I need to know.”

  Joanna sighed. With no certain confirmation from the autopsy, it was still way too early to discuss the possibility that Bree’s death might prove to be a homicide rather than an accident. Still, as long as Frankie Stoddard continued to monitor all departmental radio transmissions, it wouldn’t be a secret for long. Joanna nonetheless decided to try.

  “The truck ran off a cliff out in the Peloncillos,” she said. “It turned over several times. It looks as though Brianna was thrown clear. When the truck finally came to rest, she was crushed underneath it. Under the cab.”

  Katherine closed her eyes. “She died instantly, then?”

  Joanna shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “Dr. Winfield is the only one who can answer those kinds of questions. That’s why he needs time to collect evidence.”

  “Yes,” Katherine said. “Of course.”

  “Tell me something,” Joanna said. “Yesterday, when your husband wanted me to notify the FBI, he raised the issue of a possible kidnapping. Is there anything in your husband’s business dealings that would lend itself to that kind of scenario?”

  The change in Katherine’s demeanor was abrupt. “What exactly do you mean by that?” she demanded. “And what does a question like that have to do with my daughter driving her truck off a cliff?”

  She’s doing it again, Joanna thought, watching in fascination as Katherine O’Brien seemed to collect herself and make an almost instant transformation into a tigress defending her young or den. It was the same kind of almost schizophrenic behavior she had exhibited the day before when Ernie and Joanna had been interviewing her. One moment she had been falling apart. The next, in a daunting display of willpower, she had pulled herself together and assumed the role of gracious hostess. This time she came out swinging in her absent husband’s defense.