Downfall

by J. A. Jance

  I’m choosing life for both of us, she told herself and Sage, too. But we’re not getting out of this mess without a whole lot of help from the Man upstairs. Somehow, between here and the top of the mountain, I’m hoping He’ll give us a chance to get away.

  CHAPTER 37

  IT WASN’T UNTIL CHIEF DEPUTY HADLOCK WAS ALONE IN HIS TAHOE and speeding west on US Highway 80 that the whole situation threatened to overwhelm him. At that point, the shakes hit so hard he was afraid he was going to have to roll down the window and heave. He’d made it through the briefing, thank God, including running the damned PowerPoint presentation without a hitch and without losing his cool, either. But it wasn’t just God he had to thank for all that, it was Sheriff Brady, too.

  She was the one who had insisted that he spend a year joining a Toastmasters club and learning how to do solo public-speaking presentations. She was the one who had tossed him out in front of countless packs of clamoring reporters and forced him to figure out how to handle them. She was the one who had given him this job—one he had coveted but had hardly dared hope would ever be his.

  Now it was, but with Sheriff Brady’s life in jeopardy, Tom wondered if he was up to the task. Had he made the right calls? He had deployed his assets in the way that made the most sense to him, but were they being used in the most effective manner? And if they weren’t—if he’d been wrong about any of it—chances were Joanna Brady wouldn’t live through the night. If that happened, responsibility for her death would land squarely on his shoulders.

  Tom remembered speaking to Butch Dixon out in the lobby. Under similar circumstances, he knew Joanna would have reached out to a frightened loved one and said something calming and reassuring. What was it he had said to Butch? He couldn’t remember the exact words but he worried that he’d given the poor guy the dreadful news about his wife’s situation in far too blunt a fashion and then more or less ordered him to take a hike.

  Which Butch hadn’t done, of course. Later on, Tom had noticed the man lurking in the back of the conference room during the briefing, and he’d been secretly glad to see him. At least now Joanna’s husband knew what was going on not only with the investigation but also with Tom’s course of action. These weren’t things that would need to be explained later, if things went sideways, which they very well might.

  Lost in thought, Tom approached the turn at the end of the cutoff going far too fast. He had to jam on his brakes in order to make the awkward left-hand turn onto Yuma Trail. Fortunately, the vehicle right behind him—driven by Terry Gregovich—was maintaining enough distance that he didn’t slam into Tom’s SUV from behind.

  The dog, Tom thought as he accelerated up the narrow, winding street. Failure or success depends on nothing but a dog—a single damned dog.

  He had seen Spike in action on occasion, usually in training situations where Terry was putting his canine partner through his paces. The dog was quick. He’d be able to charge up the mountain way faster than a human while making very little noise in the process. Unless, of course, he barked. Terry claimed the dog was capable of operating in silent mode, but could he really? Tom Hadlock had never owned a dog in his life, and he had no idea if Terry’s claim was true. He hoped it was, but if it wasn’t, one tiny bark from Spike could spell disaster.

  Tom crested the top of Yuma Trail with enough speed that for a second or so his Tahoe went airborne. Behind him, one set of headlights after another went dark. Everyone appeared to be following orders.

  So far so good, he thought.

  Once the Tahoe was parked, Tom was the first one out of his vehicle, with Spike and Terry joining him before he reached the cattle guard. The three of them set off at a brisk pace, walking side by side toward the shadow of mountain looming in the near distance against a star-studded sky. Some of the younger guys—the daily workout guys—jogged around and past them. Tom kept walking with Ernie Carpenter trudging along behind. There hadn’t been much discussion about who was going where, but since Tom himself would be left guarding the disabled escape vehicle, he was grateful to have an old hand like Ernie for backup.

  A little over a mile later, the GPS coordinates provided by Tica led them directly to Jeremy’s parked Tahoe. It was locked. There was enough of a signal that he was able to send a text to Tica back at the department, who was able to unlock it remotely. Before opening the door, Tom shielded his Maglite long enough to risk a glance inside the vehicle. Sitting there in plain sight on the front passenger seat was just what he had hoped to find—a clump of blue cloth. Standing in stark relief against the dark material were three four-inch-tall, white capital letters—SSE.

  “Hot damn,” Tom said to Terry as he doused the flashlight. “I think we just found the hoodie.”

  He removed a pair of gloves from his pocket. “I’m going to be tampering with evidence here,” he told Terry. “We can’t photograph it in place because we can’t risk the camera flash. If need be, I may ask you to swear this is where we found it, and before you touch it, you’ll need gloves, too.”

  While Terry located his own pair of gloves, Tom cracked open the door, grabbed the hoodie, and shut the door again as quickly and quietly as humanly possible. The dome light flashed on and off briefly. In that instant, it seemed incredibly bright compared to the relative darkness surrounding them. From Tom’s point of view, the light seemed to linger forever—a telling beacon shining in the dark. He held his breath for several moments afterward, hoping but not knowing whether or not the light had attracted Jeremy’s attention or if their intrusion would be met by a hail of gunfire.

  Finally, Tom handed the hoodie over to Terry, who in turn held it down until it came in contact with Spike’s eagerly twitching nose.

  “Find, boy,” Terry ordered. “Silent and find.”

  For a moment, Spike stood still with his muzzle raised in the air. Then with only the tiniest whimper of excitement, the dog set off at a dead run, heading straight toward the steepest part of the mountain with Terry Gregovich following to the best of his severely limited two-legged ability.

  CHAPTER 38

  AS JOANNA CONTINUED TO CLIMB, THE STARLIGHT GREW STEADILY brighter. With her vision now completely adjusted to the gloom, this could have been nothing more than a trick her eyes were playing on her. She could feel that she was tiring. Had she had lunch? Or even breakfast? She wasn’t sure. Couldn’t remember back that far. What she did know was that she had to keep going no matter what.

  A couple of times she slipped for real and came very close to tumbling backward down the mountainside. One of those times was while pulling herself up onto the ledge where she and Agent Watkins had startled the horned toad days earlier. It was nighttime now. Surely the toad was safely tucked away in a cozy underground burrow and out of harm’s way. She hoped so.

  Behind her, she heard the sound of Jeremy’s labored breathing. He seemed to be having as much or even more trouble with the climb than she was, but then he had more weight to lift. She was counting on the chance that as he grew more fatigued, he would become more vulnerable to an unexpected attack. She hoped that her continued show of utter compliance would increase the effectiveness of her intended course of action. She needed to catch him completely off guard.

  One thing in her favor was the fact that Jeremy had no idea she had ever climbed Geronimo or had even the slightest idea of the landscape on top of the peak. As she climbed, she tried to envision it—the placement of each of those thriving clumps of hedgehog cactus and their relative distance from the cliff’s edge. Joanna was counting on that population of isolated hedgehogs—the very ones that had ultimately caused Desirée Wilburton’s death—to help prevent hers. That was the crux of her plan—to either trip or shove an unsuspecting Jeremy hard enough to make him fall into one or more of those clumps of wicked thorns. And once he was distracted by that, she hoped to make good her escape. The chute down to the spring was still there—she had seen it herself. If she made it that far, the grove of scrub oak at the bottom of the chute would
offer her some cover.

  Yes, she still had her Glock, but she didn’t kid herself about the prospect of surviving some kind of shootout at the top of the mountain. There was no such thing as a quick draw from an ankle holster. Jeremy would be all over her long before she could raise her weapon. Once she reached the relative safety of the trees, though, she might be able to pick him off when he came down the mountain after her.

  Finally, Joanna scrambled up the last rise. She was several steps ahead of Jeremy by then, and she had enough time to hurry over to the small indentation that formed the dividing line between the mountaintop’s two small humps, the spot that marked the top of the chute. She looked around, noting the distance between her and the nearest clumps of cactus.

  Just then Jeremy topped out, too. First his head appeared and then the rest of him. He stood still for a moment catching his breath—a black shadow outlined against a starlit sky. And on that shadow she noted the distinctive bulge of a holster that told her he was carrying more weaponry than just his Taser. What if he decided to draw the gun and simply shoot her from the far side of the knoll? Well then, it would all be over, wouldn’t it? For her last-ditch plan to succeed, she needed to draw him closer—closer to her and closer to the cactus.

  “How did you do it?” she asked, speaking quietly between gasps as she, too, attempted to regain her breath. The ploy of speaking softly worked exactly as she intended. Jeremy came several steps closer before he answered.

  “Do what?”

  “Get Susan to go with you. How did you get her to leave the school in the first place?”

  “That was easy. She was glad to go along for the ride. Like I said, she knew I was pissed and thought a quick roll in the hay would fix me.”

  “Surely she must have known you were up to no good and that she was in danger.”

  “When she caught on for real, that’s when I threatened her with the Taser,” Jeremy answered. “She was absolutely petrified of the damned thing and did everything I said. You’re doing the same thing.”

  Yes, I am, Joanna thought. But only up to a point.

  She remembered the earlier discussion back in the conference room after her officers had all watched Susan Nelson seemingly being force-walked off the school grounds. At that point there had been some speculation about whether her assailant had been carrying a weapon in his left hand—possibly a knife or a gun. Now Joanna understood that neither had been involved. Jeremy’s weapon then had been his temper. Only later, when Susan had realized she was in real danger, had he employed his department-issue Taser.

  When Tasers had been distributed to officers in her department, everyone who was given one—including Joanna herself—had been Tased as a part of their training. She remembered from then and also from only an hour or so ago that Tasers delivered a powerful punch that amounted to five seconds of exquisite pain followed by nothing at all. She suspected that the momentary dizziness she had experienced earlier had more to do with hitting her head on the sidewalk when she fell than it did with being Tased.

  But Susan Nelson had been a civilian—someone who had never encountered the realities of Taser weaponry. For her, the prospect of being Tased must have been terrifying. No doubt Jeremy would have had talked it up some, too—exaggerating the effects enough to scare her into doing exactly as she was bidden. If he used the Taser as a stun gun on Joanna now, she knew that the effect would be much the same—not fun but not fatal, either. She’d get over it. She suspected that recovering from a fall into a batch of thorny cactus would take quite a bit longer.

  “Why the duct tape?” Joanna asked.

  Jeremy shrugged. “Why not? I couldn’t risk having her kick her way out of the trunk between Sierra Vista and here.”

  Just then, out of the corner of her eye, Joanna saw a tiny pinprick of light near the base of the mountain. The flash seemed to emanate from somewhere near where Jeremy had parked his SUV. It came and went so fast that once the spark was gone, she couldn’t be sure she had seen it at all. She glanced in Jeremy’s direction and saw no visible reaction. From where he stood, the flicker must have been outside his line of sight.

  For the first time, Joanna felt a tiny burst of hope. If someone was out in the desert tonight—in the desert and in the dark—there was a good chance that whoever it was had come looking for her. That meant that, with any kind of luck, help really was on the way.

  CHAPTER 39

  “COME ON,” JEREMY SAID, MOVING A FEW STEPS TOWARD HER. “ON your feet. It’s time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “What do you think? To do what we came here to do.”

  As he came nearer, Joanna saw him draw a weapon from the shadowy holster on his hip and point it in her direction. The starlight didn’t offer enough illumination for her to make out exactly what it was, but she guessed he was most likely holding his service weapon—a Beretta. At that point the Taser and the Beretta offered unevenly bad options. A pulse from the stun gun would render her momentarily senseless, while a bullet from the handgun would render her dead. As for her cactus plan? He was still too far away.

  “I can’t,” she whimpered.

  “You can’t what—you can’t die?”

  “I can’t get up. I’ve got a cramp in my leg.”

  He came another step or two forward—reaching out to her with his right hand while still holding the pistol grip in his left. Just then, Joanna heard a sudden scrabbling noise that seemed to come from somewhere short of the crest of the peak. Something unseen was out there in the dark, speeding toward them and sending a cascade of rocks and gravel skittering down the mountainside.

  Joanna first thought was that their presence on the mountain had most likely alarmed a wandering herd of javelina—boar-like creatures that roam the nighttime desert that tend to scatter in fear when faced with humans.

  Joanna didn’t care what kind of animal was out there, but the noisy racket was an audible answer to her fervent prayer for a desperately needed distraction. Jeremy heard the noise, too. He moved closer to the edge, peering into the darkness in an attempt to catch sight of whatever was down there.

  Once he drew even with her, Joanna flew into action. She flung herself in his direction, head-butting him in the side of his knees. Arms windmilling in a futile effort to regain his balance, he fired off a single wild shot before tumbling to the ground. He landed just as Joanna had intended him to land—with his right cheek impaled on the spines of the nearest clump of cactus.

  Jeremy howled in agony, but Joanna didn’t wait around long enough to see if he had dropped his weapon. She was already on the move, making for the top of the chute. As she scrambled over the edge and started downward, a dark form shot past her. A bobcat maybe? A coyote? Whatever it was, the animal was Jeremy’s problem now, not hers. Joanna hit the top of the chute hard with her backside. The trip down wasn’t as smooth as she remembered, and it wasn’t nearly as fast, either. There were numerous starts and stops. Expecting a bullet to slam into the back of her head at any moment, she maneuvered around the occasional fallen boulder and then pushed off again in order to keep her downward momentum going.

  Behind and above her, Joanna heard Jeremy’s scream change from one of agony to one of pure rage. “Get off me, you damn dog!” he yelled. “Get the hell off me.”

  Dog? Joanna wondered. What dog?

  And then she knew. It had to be Spike. Someone had sent the K9 unit to rescue her, and Spike had arrived just in time.

  At last Joanna gained the shelter of the trees and was able to tug the Glock out of its holster. With a weapon in her hand, things were a little more even. If Jeremy came after her now, she’d be ready and waiting.

  But then, to her horror, she heard the sound of a gunshot, followed by the shocked yipe of an injured animal. That was followed by a long moment of total silence.

  Joanna knew how her K9 unit operated. If Spike was here, Terry Gregovich would be somewhere nearby. That meant in terms of taking Jeremy down, it was now two to one, which
made for better odds.

  “You’re surrounded, Jeremy,” Joanna called up the mountainside. “Drop your weapon and show us your hands! Now!”

  She caught the barest glimpse of him, peering down from above, trying to catch sight of her. But he didn’t follow her order to drop his weapon. Behind and beneath her, she heard the sounds of someone else, another human, laboring up the mountain.

  “Hang in there, Spike,” Terry called. “I’m coming to get you.”

  Gazing back up toward the mountaintop, Joanna caught sight of something that looked like an enormous night bird taking wing. A second or so later, her mind made sense of what she was seeing. The flying creature wasn’t a bird at all. Jeremy Stock had made good on his threat and had taken a final flying leap off the mountain.

  Time stood still. With his arms spread like an eagle, Jeremy seemed to stay airborne for a long time—as though he had been caught up in winds aloft. But then gravity took hold and he tumbled earthward. In utter silence, he did three acrobatic somersaults in the air before plunging headfirst into the ground.

  He landed close enough to Joanna’s sheltering grove of trees that she heard the sickening thud as his head smashed into something hard. It was the same sound she had heard earlier in the summer, when Dennis had accidentally dropped their Fourth-of-July watermelon.

  There could be no doubt. In that moment, Joanna knew Jeremy Stock was dead.

  Good riddance were the first words that came into her head. As for the second ones? May you rot in hell!

  Just then Terry, panting with exertion and barely able to speak, stumbled into her protective thicket. “The son of a bitch shot Spike,” he gasped as he rushed up to her. “Are you okay, Sheriff Brady?”

  “I’m fine,” she told him. “Go get your dog, Terry. Let’s hope he’s okay.”