Skeleton Canyon

by J. A. Jance

  “In any case, you won’t be able to talk to Alf today. He’s out of town. Today’s his day off. He asked for tomorrow off as well. He said he had some pressing business out of town. He left the ranch early this morning. I don’t expect him back before tomorrow night.”

  “You don’t know where he was going?”

  O’Brien shook his head. “I have no idea. What my employees do on their own time is none of my business.”

  “Would his wife know?”

  “Maggie? Maybe.”

  “Where would we find her?” Joanna asked.

  “If she’s home, she’s most likely down in the workers’ compound. First trailer on the right-hand side of the road.”

  “We’ll go see her, then,” Joanna said.

  “Suit yourself,” O’Brien said with a wave of his hand. Dismissed, Ernie turned and left the room while Joanna hovered in the doorway. Thinking both his visitors had left the room, David O’Brien hunched back over his desk and buried his face in his hands. His shoulders heaved. A strangled sob escaped his lips. Joanna didn’t like the man, but she couldn’t help being moved by such abject despair.

  “Mr. ()’Brien?”

  Al the sound of Joanna’s voice, he started but didn’t lower him hands or look in her direction. “What?”

  “Please accept my condolences about your daughter. I know how much it must hurt…”

  “‘Thank you,” he mumbled almost inaudibly.

  Warned by some guiding instinct, Joanna glided away from the door and moved back into the room. She didn’t stop until she was standing directly in front of the desk. In a pool of golden lamplight she saw a single piece of paper-and a pen, a Mount Blanc fountain pen. Years of working over the counter In the Davis Insurance Agency had made Joanna Brady adept at reading words that were written upside-down. What she saw scrawled across the top of the single piece of paper chilled her. “To whom it may concern.”

  “I thought you told me the other day that O’Briens aren’t quitters,” she said quietly.

  O’Brien dropped. his hands and glared up at her, his vivid Glue eyes probing hers. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that suicide isn’t the answer. It never is.”

  Hurriedly, David O’Brien covered the revealing paper with his hands. “What would you know about it?” he asked.

  “When my husband died, I felt the same way. As though I couldn’t possibly go on.”

  “No, you didn’t, Sheriff Brady,” David O’Brien interrupted. “You couldn’t have felt exactly the same way. You lost a husband. That’s different from losing a child, I’ve done that before. Twice. I’ve had three children, and I’ve outlived all three.”

  “There must be a reason.”

  “Oh, there’s a reason, all right,” he conceded bitterly. “I tried to outwit God, and this is what it got me. As far as I can see, I’ve got nothing left to live for.”

  “What about your wife?”

  “What about her?” He shrugged. “Katherine’s had one foot out the door all these years. With Brianna gone, there’s no reason for her to stay. And there’s no reason for me to hang around, either. I built all this for my daughter,” he added. “If I can’t give it to her, what’s the point?”

  “There may be another answer,” Joanna told him. “One you’ve missed so far. The problem is, suicide is a permanent solution. If you’re dead, you’ll never have a chance to find out what that answer might be. Talk to a counselor, Mr. O’Brien. Or to Father Morris from St. Dominick’s. You need some help.”

  “What I need is for you to get out and leave me alone,” David O’Brien said wearily. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Ernie met Joanna at the door. “What happened?” he asked. “I got all the way to the door before I figured out you weren’t right behind me. What’s going on?”

  “Where’s Mrs. O’Brien?”

  “I’m pretty sure she’s home now. The Lexus was just driving into the yard when I started back to find you.”

  “Good,” Joanna said grimly. “We’d better have a word with Katherine before we go see Maggie Hastings.”

  “Why?” Ernie asked. “Is there a problem?”

  “There will be if someone doesn’t do something to prevent it,” Joanna replied. “Unless I’m mistaken, David Mitten is right on the brink of blowing his brains out.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I’m going to tell his wife.”

  As it turned out, they met up with Katherine O’Brien in the entryway. She had just come in the door and was depositing his keys and purse on a gilded entryway table. She was dressed in a sedate navy blue shirtwaist dress. There was makeup on her face. Her graying hair was swept up into an elegant French twist. The cumulative result made Katherine O’Brien far different from the casually attired, makeup-free woman Joanna had met on two previous occasions. The one hung that remained constant, however, was Katherine O’Brien’s ironclad emotional control.

  “What’s going on, Sheriff Brady?” Katherine asked. “I saw two sheriff’s cars out in the drive. Has something happened? Did you catch Bree’s killer?”

  “No,” Joanna said hastily. “Nothing like that. We’re here on another matter-to see your husband about Alf Hastings. But Mrs. O’Brien, I must warn you, I think your husband is taking vow daughter’s death very badly.”

  “Of course he’s taking it badly,” she returned. “It isn’t the kind of thing you take well.”

  “I believe your husband is suicidal,” Joanna added. “You need to talk to him about this. Or find him some help, someone to talk to-a priest or a counselor. Unless you want to be planning two funerals instead of one.”

  Katherine O’Brien seemed to draw back. Her eyes narrowed, her lists clenched. “God helps those who help themselves,” she said.

  The woman’s brusque response was so different from what Joanna expected-so different from the concerned and hovering helpmate Katherine had appeared to be previously-that Joanna was momentarily taken aback. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that. I mean David’s a grown-up. If he wants to find someone to talk to about this, he’ll have to find help for himself. It’s not up to me.”

  “But isn’t-”

  “Look,” Katherine interrupted, her eyes blazing with anger, “I spent eighteen years of my life walking a tightrope and running interference between those two. While Brianna was here, nothing she did ever quite measured up. No matter what, she wasn’t good enough to suit him. If he’s going to go off the deep end now that she’s gone, it’s up to him. He’ll have to come to terms with his own guilt for a change. I’m finally out of the middle, and I have every intention of staying that way.”

  Looking at Katherine, Joanna couldn’t help remembering David O’Brien’s words. Katherine’s had one foot out the door for years. Was that what was going on here, then? Was this one of those cases where an incompatible couple had stayed married for the sake of a child? And, now that the child was gone, did that mean the marriage was over? Unfortunately, in trying to help David O’Brien, it seemed Joanna had only succeeded in pouring oil on the flames.

  She decided to take one last crack at smoothing things over. “We all have to learn to live with the consequences of our actions,” she said.

  Katherine nodded. “I figured that out a long time ago,” she said. “David never has. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” She turned toward the kitchen. “Olga,” she called, “I’m going to go lie down for a little while. Please don’t let me sleep past three. I have a four o’clock appointment with Father Morris.”

  Left alone in the foyer, Joanna and Ernie let themselves out the front door. “Whew!” Ernie exclaimed, once the door closed behind them and they were alone on the verandah. “What the hell was that all about? Katherine O’Brien isn’t what I’d call your typical grieving mother.”

  “Maybe there’s no such thing,” Joanna said thoughtfully. “Come on. Let’s go see Maggie Hastings.”

  CHAPTER TW
ENTY-ONE

  Taking two separate cars, Ernie and Joanna drove back up the road to the Y that led off through the lush grass to the Green Brush Ranch employee compound. It consisted of five separate fourteen-by-seventy mobile homes. They were set in a slight hollow, out of sight from both the road and the main house. The mobile home sites were newly carved from the desert. The trailers were surrounded by raw red dirt punctuated by baby landscaping of reed-thin trees, tiny cacti, and leggy clumps of youthful oleander.

  The first trailer on the left-hand side of the road was flanked by a six-foot-high chain-link dog run. As soon as Joanna stopped her Crown Victoria and stepped outside, the German shepherd she had seen on Saturday threw himself against the gate, barking and growling.

  Ernie, joining Joanna beside her car, gave the dog run’s fierce occupant a wary look. “Let’s hope to hell the damned thing holds,” he said.

  The dog was still harking furiously when a woman opened the door in answer to Ernie Carpenter’s knock. “Yeah?” she said, holding on to the doorjamb with both hands and swaying unsteadily on her feet. “Whad’ya want?”

  “Maggie Hastings?” he said, opening his wallet and displaying his ID. “Would it be possible to speak to you for a few moments? Could we come in?”

  Maggie Hastings was a disheveled, dark-haired woman in her mid-to-late forties. Her graying, lackluster hair was pulled back in a greasy ponytail. She wore a soiled man’s shirt over a pair of too-tight shorts. She was also quite drunk.

  Stumbling away from the door, she allowed Joanna and Ernie to enter. “Whaz this all about?” she slurred.

  The room’s curtains were tightly closed. The difference between the interior gloom and the brilliant exterior sunlight left Joanna momentarily blind. The stench of booze combined with a lingering pall of cigar and cigarette smoke was so stifling that Joanna could barely breathe.

  “Sorry the place is such a mess,” Maggie muttered, kicking something aside. “Haven’t had a chance to pick up today. Waddn’t ‘xactly expecting company.”

  From the sound, Joanna suspected that the invisible object was an empty bottle of some kind. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she was shocked by the disarray. To the outside world, Alf Hastings presented a neat, well-pressed countenance. It was hard to believe that his starched khaki uniform could have emerged from such filth. The living room wasn’t merely a mess. It was a disaster. Empty bottles-gin mostly, but some beer as well-littered the newspaper-strewn floor. The dining room table, visible from the living room, was covered with stacks of dirty dishes, milk cartons, margarine containers, and bread wrappers-several days’ worth at least. A line of what seemed like mostly can-and-bottle-filled garbage sacks lined one side of the room, marching from the kitchen doorway toward the front door.

  Remembering all too well how many bugs the new cook had rousted from what supposedly had been a clean jail kitchen, Joanna shivered. No doubt there were plenty of well-fed but currently invisible bugs hiding in this very room.

  Turning her back on her visitors, Maggie staggered as far as the end of the couch and then fell onto it. She picked up a remote control and muted the droning television set, turning an afternoon talk show into a wordless pantomime of moving lips and wagging heads. She stared at it with such avid interest, however, that Joanna wondered if she even remembered that someone else was in the room.

  “This is about your husband,” Joanna said.

  Maggie Hastings’s eyes never wavered from the set. “What about him?” she asked.

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “Work.” Maggie’s reply was little more than a grunt.

  “No, he’s not,” Joanna told her. “Mr. O’Brien told us your husband went away for a day or two.”

  “Well, that’s news to me,” Maggie said with a noncommittal shrug. “If he was going somewhere, don’t you think he’da told me?”

  Not necessarily, Joanna thought. And even if he did, who’s to say you’d remember? “This is serious, Mrs. Hastings,” she said aloud. “Do you have any idea where he might be?”

  The firmness in Joanna’s question somehow must have penetrated Maggie Hastings’s drunken haze. “Why all the questions?” she asked, finally glancing away from the television set for the first time. “Whiz going on?”

  “On Saturday night, a young man was severely beaten out-side the gate to Green Brush Ranch,” Joanna replied. “Not only was he beaten, but burned, too, with the lit end of a cigar.”

  Joanna said no more than that, but it was evidently enough. Maggie Hastings’s response was instantaneous. Her face seemed to collapse. Her mouth went slack while her eyes brimmed with tears. “Oh, no,” she wailed. “Not that. Not again.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t believe it. How could he? What if we lose this job, too?” Maggie whispered brokenly but with far less drunken slurring. “And the roof over our heads, too, just like the other time. You don’t know what it was like then. We lost everything-our house, our furniture, our friends. Stevie will kill him when he finds out. He’ll just plain kill him.”

  Overcome with a combination of emotion and booze, she fell into a long series of racking sobs. For several minutes, she was totally incapable of speech. Joanna had no choice but to wait until the sobs subsided before she could ask another question. “Who’s Stevie?”

  Maggie took a ragged breath, blew her nose, and wiped her eyes. “Stephan Marcovich,” Maggie answered. “Alf’s cousin up in Phoenix. He’s an old friend of the O’Briens. He’s also the one who arranged this job for us. If it hadn’t been for Stevie, once the lawyers got done with us, we’da been sunk. We had no place to go. Alf couldn’t find a job anywhere in Yuma, not even flipping burgers. It was like we had a disease or something. We were one step away from living on the street when Stevie sent Alf here. Oh, my God. And now he’s done if again. 1 can’t stand it,” she wailed. “I just can’t.”

  Once more Maggie’s voice trailed off into a torrent of hope-less tears.

  “Mrs. Hastings, would your husband’s cousin have any idea where Alf might be?”

  Blowing her nose again, Maggie shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “If I don’t know where he is, how would Stevie?”

  “Just the same, can you give us his number?”

  “Stevie’s? Up in Phoenix?”

  Joanna nodded. “Please,” she said.

  “I guess so.” Unsteadily, Maggie Hastings hoisted herself off the couch, then she wobbled across the room and staggered down a short hallway. For several minutes, Joanna and Ernie could hear her in a room down the hall, mumbling and cursing. Finally she returned, carrying a frayed business card.

  “Here it is!” she announced triumphantly, handing it over to Joanna. “Alf says I never can find anything in all this mess, but he’s wrong, you know. There’s a system around here. He just doesn’t understand it, that’s all.”

  She belched then, spewing a cloud of stale gin throughout the room. “Can I get you something?” she asked.

  Looking down at the card, Joanna barely heard her. “Air Conditioning Enterprises,” the raised print said. “Stephan J. Marcovich, President.”

  “No,” Joanna managed, coming to her senses. “Nothing, thank you. We’ve got to go.”

  As soon as the door opened and they stepped out into the fresh air and light, the dog resumed its barking. “What’s going on?” Ernie asked as they headed toward the cars. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  In a way, Joanna had seen a ghost-her father’s. She was remembering a breakfast from long ago. Her father, D. H. Lathrop-only a deputy back then-had been working on a case. “When it comes to homicide,” he had announced over his bacon and eggs, “there ain’t no such thing as coincidence.”

  “Isn’t,” Eleanor had returned at once, correcting his gram-mar as usual. She was forever doing that, trying to weed out the remnants of her husband’s Arkansas childhood. “There isn’t any such thing,” she added for good measure.

&n
bsp; It was one of the few times Joanna could remember her mother’s habitual corrections riling her easygoing, even-tempered father. “Ellie,” he had said, banging his coffee cup back into the saucer. “It would be nice if, just once in your life, you’d listen to what I mean instead of picking apart whatever I say.”

  With that, he had stood up and stalked out of the house. “Well?” Ernie pressed. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m remembering something my father said years ago,” she told him, handing over the card. “He told me once that, in a homicide case, there’s no such thing as coincidence.”

  “I’d have to agree, but…”

  “Did I mention anything to you about Jim Hobbs being offered the opportunity to get in on an illegal Freon buy? The guy trying to put the deal together was Sam Nettleton.”

  “Nettleton? The scuzzball towing operator from up in Benson?”

  “Right.”

  Ernie shook his head. “You didn’t say a word to me about it.”

  “Sorry. With everything else that happened, it must have slipped my mind. But I did call Adam York about it. He said the DEA is investigating a big Freon-smuggling deal up in Phoenix, something involving one of the big refrigeration con-tractors. So here we have a Cochise County Freon case, supposedly unrelated to theirs, and a Phoenix air-conditioning contractor connected, however loosely, to one of our homicides. What do you think?”

  Ernie handed Joanna back the card. “You’re right,” he said. “There’s no such thing as coincidence. What are you going to do about it?”

  “As soon as I have some lunch, I’m going back to the office to call Adam York. What about you?”

  “I’m supposed to meet Rose uptown. After that, I’ll run by the coroner’s office to see if George has that official copy of the autopsy typed up for us by then.”

  Joanna nodded. “Good deal,” she said. “I’ll see you back at the office right after that. I don’t know about you, but I can do a whole lot better job of strategic planning on a full stomach than I can on an empty one.”

  On her way back to the office, Joanna stopped long enough to grab a hamburger. She sat alone in the midst of Daisy’s noisy lunchtime clatter, letting her thoughts wander back to Green Brush Ranch. What had happened to Bree was an appalling tragedy, but it seemed to Joanna that there were other tragedies looming there as well. She had read somewhere that the death of a child was one of the most difficult marital storms for a couple to weather. From what she had seen that afternoon from both David and Katherine O’Brien, Joanna didn’t hold out much hope for the long-term survival of their marriage.