Downfall (2016)

by J. A. Jance

  Nelson sighed. “When we started out, she was sixteen and I was thirty-one. At the time, the age difference didn’t seem like such a big deal. But a few years ago, I developed . . . well . . . a bit of a problem. Not fatal, and something a little blue pill can fix, but they’re very expensive. That’s when things started going downhill.

  “At first I tried to see things through her point of view. After all, she was a young woman and sex had always been important to her—to us. I thought if she strayed on occasion, it might not be that big a deal. Then I found the condoms and hit the roof. She had them hidden right there in the bedroom, and I felt like she was rubbing my nose in it. That’s when I reminded her of her wedding vows. I told her my problem was the sickness part of ‘in sickness and in health.’”

  He paused and closed his eyes. “You know what she told me?”

  “What?”

  “If I thought she was going to go the rest of her life living without sex, I could go straight to hell, and I have been. I’ve been living in hell ever since.”

  For the first time in the whole interview, Reverend Nelson shuddered and broke into sobs. Not, Joanna noted, because he was sorry for his dead wife but because he was sorry for himself. She waited until he quieted and blew his nose into a hankie he had extracted from the breast pocket of his PJs.

  “How long ago did you find the condoms?” she asked.

  “Three years.”

  “Before or after Susan’s affair with the principal?”

  “Before.”

  Joanna rose to her feet and motioned to the others to do the same. “Do you have someone we could call to come be with you?”

  “No, I’ll be fine.”

  “We should go, then,” she said. “In the meantime, please accept our condolences. If we require any more information, we’ll be in touch.”

  Reverend Nelson didn’t move from his rocker. Joanna and the others let themselves out, closing the door behind them before huddling next to their collection of parked cars.

  “I think Reverend Nelson could bear a whole lot more scrutiny,” Ian Waters said. “Three years is a long time to be packing that kind of grudge. I think he may have finally snapped.”

  “Okay,” Joanna said as weariness suddenly overwhelmed her. “If it’s okay to have Detective Waters on board, what about if we gather at my office tomorrow around noon. By then the autopsies should be complete. Maybe by then we’ll be able to come up with some kind of game plan. Right now I’m done for.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Chief Montoya said. “And as far as Detective Waters is concerned, for the time being, consider him yours.”

  CHAPTER 5

  JOANNA AWAKENED TO THE SMELL OF FRYING BACON AND EGGS. IN the past there would have been a background aroma of brewing coffee as well. Not now, however, and not in the immediate future, either. Most of Joanna’s early-pregnancy morning-sickness symptoms had abated—except for her inability to tolerate the smell or taste of coffee. As a consequence, Butch and she had recently agreed to stick to tea for the duration of her pregnancy.

  That morning, for once, Joanna didn’t have to worry about being late. She had left a note at the office letting Kristin know that she wouldn’t be in until later in the morning—after the autopsies were over and just in time for the noontime task force meeting. That was no accident on her part. She had timed her arrival to be well after the end of Tom Hadlock’s ten A.M. press briefing. Not having to encounter Marliss Shackleford played a big part in Joanna’s scheduling decision.

  Instead of rushing into the bathroom to shower and dress, she pulled on a robe and went to the kitchen. Denny, as Dennis preferred to be called, had graduated from a makeshift booster seat on the breakfast nook’s wooden bench (a ten-pound copy of Butch’s Webster’s International third edition) to just the bench itself. His abandoned high chair, a harbinger of things to come, lurked in the corner of the kitchen.

  Butch handed Joanna a cup of hot presweetened tea on her way to the nook. Slipping onto the bench next to her son, she watched as Dennis drew pictures on his plate with pieces of ketchup-drenched scrambled eggs before popping them into his mouth. Weeks earlier the sight of scrambled eggs and ketchup would have turned her stomach on end.

  “You got in late,” Butch observed mildly, putting an egg-laden plate in front of her.

  Joanna nodded. “After midnight. Casey Ledford was able to get a positive ID on the second victim. It turns out she’d gone missing from Sierra Vista on Saturday afternoon. Deb Howell and I drove out to do the next of kin.”

  Butch went back to the stove, flipped another set of over-easy eggs with practiced ease, and slid them onto a plate. That was what he had been doing years earlier when he and Joanna had first met. He’d been the short-order cook in a restaurant he had owned, the Round House Bar and Grill in Peoria, Arizona, near Phoenix. Newly elected sheriff and determined to become a fully qualified police officer, Joanna had sent herself off for a law enforcement training course at the nearby Arizona Police Academy. At the time, the last thing she had expected was that she would walk into a restaurant, meet someone, fall in love, and get married again. But as she sopped up the yolk from her perfectly done over-easy eggs, she couldn’t help but be thankful. Marrying a talented cook certainly had its merits.

  Butch set down his own plate and cup of tea and then took his place next to Joanna. “Your brother called to give me their ETA,” he said. “He and Marcie are due to fly into Tucson from DC about four this afternoon. They’re renting a car and coming straight here. They’ve booked a room at the Copper Queen until Sunday. Bob wanted to take us to dinner at Café Roka tonight, but I told him since it’s Tuesday and the restaurant isn’t open, we’ll have steaks here. He said that was fine as long as he can treat tomorrow night. We’ll get Carol to look after Denny, so it’ll be an all grown-up evening.”

  “I want to go, too,” Denny said, pouting. “Why can’t I go?”

  “Because your mom will need to have some time with her brother,” Butch explained. “And she won’t need you interrupting every two minutes. They’ll most likely be discussing the wills.”

  “Right,” Joanna said sarcastically, “it’s going to be just peachy.”

  Always attuned to his mother’s moods and tones, Dennis looked quickly from Joanna to Butch. “What’s a will?” he asked.

  “Never mind,” Butch answered. “None of your beeswax. Now, if you’re done eating, clear your plate and go brush your teeth. We need to head out to school in five. Kindergarten isn’t like preschool, where you could show up whenever you wanted to. Now you have to be there when the bell rings or else your teacher marks you tardy.”

  Without further objection, Denny did as he was told. Not only was Butch a great cook, Joanna thought, he was also a terrific father.

  “With everything that’s going on, I’m not sure that I’m up to dealing with Bob and Marcie today,” Joanna said. “Couldn’t we put them off until tomorrow?”

  “Look,” Butch said. “I know how much it hurt your feelings that Bob was privy to some of Eleanor and George’s final wishes when you weren’t. And I also know what a big deal it is that they named him to serve as their executor instead of you, but if you want to have any kind of relationship with your brother in the future, you need to get over these hurdles, the sooner the better.”

  My brother, Joanna thought bitterly. I think I liked it better when I didn’t know I even had a brother.

  Butch was right, of course. Learning from Burton Kimball, the local attorney who had drawn up George and Eleanor’s new wills, that Bob would serve as both of their executors had been yet another bitter pill to swallow.

  “Why should I have a relationship with him?” Joanna demanded. “He’s my mother’s son—my mother’s ‘perfect’ son,” she added, drawing air quotation marks around the word “perfect.” “He’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “He’s your father’s son, too,” Butch reminded her. “Stop building a case. Like it or not, Bob Brundage is a b
lood relation, and I think it’s ill-advised to cut him out of our lives.”

  For the better part of thirty years, Joanna Brady had thought of herself as an only child. Always at odds with her mother, she had been the apple of her father’s eye right up until Sheriff D.H. Lathrop’s supposedly accidental death at the hands of a drunk driver while Joanna was still in high school. Her father’s untimely demise did nothing to improve her testy relationship with her mother. In fact, it had taken a turn for the worse as a headstrong Joanna began acting out against what she regarded as her mother’s too-restrictive parenting style.

  Part of that rebellion had included Joanna’s decision to start dating Andrew Roy Brady, a local guy much older than she. In no time at all, at age seventeen, she found herself unmarried and pregnant while still in high school. There was never any question about Andy’s “doing the right thing.” They had married in time for their wedding to predate Jenny’s birth, but only just barely, and the shame of what Eleanor called “your shotgun wedding” was something she had chided Joanna about for years.

  Bob Brundage had first appeared in Joanna’s life while she was in Peoria, Arizona, undergoing her police academy training. Spotting him as he approached her across a hotel lobby, Joanna had been shocked. He had looked so much like her father that for a moment she had thought she was seeing a ghost.

  But Bob wasn’t a ghost. He was, in fact, the spitting image of his biological father, who, she soon learned, also happened to be Joanna’s father. As the story gradually emerged, Joanna had finally understood why Eleanor Lathrop had been so upset by her daughter’s unwed pregnancy—Joanna had unwittingly been following in her mother’s footsteps.

  When Eleanor had turned up pregnant in high school, her parents had shipped her off someplace back east to have the baby, who was immediately put up for adoption. When Eleanor returned home, her parents had forbidden their disgraced daughter to have anything to do with D.H. Instead, the two of them had continued to date in secret and had married, against Eleanor’s parents’ wishes, the moment the bride turned eighteen and no longer needed parental permission. Her parents had responded by disowning their daughter completely, all of which went a long way to explain why Joanna had grown up with zero contact with her maternal grandparents.

  Bob had been raised in a loving adoptive family. He had grown up, enrolled in ROTC in college, and joined the military. He had been a full colonel and nearing retirement when both of his adoptive parents had passed away within months of one another. Then, and only then, had he come looking for his birth parents, and Eleanor had welcomed him with open arms.

  Try as she might, Joanna could never quite get beyond her resentment of her mother’s hypocrisy—her insistence that Joanna should never have gotten pregnant in the first place—all the while completely disregarding and not owning up to what she and D. H. Lathrop themselves had done all those years earlier.

  After Bob’s surprising entrance into Joanna’s life, she had maintained a cordial but rather distant relationship with him—an acquaintance relationship, really, one where they sent each other Christmas cards, but that was about it. Meanwhile her mother had gone completely gaga over the man. Once she and George married, the two of them had visited with Bob and Marcie on several occasions. Each time they had returned home with a slew of vacation photos and stories, Joanna had found herself growing more and more resentful. Why was it Eleanor was so completely enamored of a son who had been absent from her life for most of his while constantly criticizing and denigrating the daughter who had been with her the whole time?

  Last week, while dealing with the aftereffects of George and Eleanor’s deaths, Joanna had been forced to come face-to-face with the fact that in many ways, Bob had known more about the current realities of George and Eleanor’s lives than Joanna had. For instance, Bob, rather than Joanna, had been well aware that the couple had planned to return from Minnesota to Bisbee by way of Salt Lake City. That stop to visit some friends who were also snowbirding retirees had routed them down I-17 and into the pathway of their shooter. As far as Joanna was concerned, Bob’s revelations about the cemetery negotiations had been the last straw.

  “You can’t let things eat at you like this,” Butch advised. “Whatever arrangements Eleanor made with regard to Bob are on her head, not his. You can’t blame him for your mother’s shortcomings.”

  Dennis turned up in the kitchen. “How many LEGOs do you have in your pocket?” Butch asked. Startled at being caught red-handed, Denny held up a single finger.

  “Give it to me, then” his father ordered sharply. “I already told you. No LEGOs at school. Understand?”

  “Okay,” Denny grumbled, nodding, removing the offending piece of plastic and handing it over. Sulking, he headed for the door without giving his mother so much as a passing glance.

  “I guess I don’t merit a good-bye kiss this morning,” Joanna said.

  “You do from me,” Butch said, brushing the top of her head with his lips on the way past. “Once I drop Denny off, I’ll need to go by the store and pick up a few things for dinner. Be safe.”

  “Will,” she said.

  Surprised at having a weekday morning with some alone time, Joanna poured another cup of tea, led the dogs into the living room, and settled down on the couch. Lady, her rescued Australian shepherd, crawled up on the sofa next to her, while Lucky, Jenny’s deaf black Lab, curled up at her feet. Clearly, both dogs were missing Jenny. So was Joanna.

  She sat there for a while, absently stroking Lady’s soft coat, and, inevitably, thinking about her mother—about the things that shouldn’t have been said that had been said and vice versa. All those said and unsaid things were haunting Joanna every step of the way this week, along with all the condolence wishes being offered by everyone she met. She knew people were sorry about what had happened. She was sorry! But carrying all that sorrow around with her in public was a very tall order right about now, and she wasn’t sure she was up to it.

  And that was one of the reasons she had thought sending Jenny off to school on time was a good idea, rather than keeping her at home for a week of nonstop mourning. It was far more important for an eighteen-year-old college student to start her freshman year along with the rest of her peers, rather than hanging around home to help with funeral arrangements.

  On the way into the living room, Joanna had stopped by the bedroom long enough to retrieve her phone from its charger. Now, on impulse, and without knowing the first thing about Jenny’s class schedule, she tried calling.

  “I’m busy right now,” Jenny’s voice mail announced. “Please leave me a message.”

  Joanna did so. “It’s Mom,” she said. “I miss you. Denny misses you. Dad misses you. Lady and Lucky miss you. Call me back when you can.”

  Once that second cup of tea was gone and with the baby kicking up a storm just under her belly button, Joanna roused herself from the couch. In the bathroom she indulged in a far more leisurely shower than usual. When it came time to dress, she reached into the closet, pulled out one of her two new uniforms, and peeled off the plastic cover. She had bought the uniforms and had them professionally altered the week before. The shirt was a size larger than she usually wore and had needed to have the sleeves shortened, but the shirttail was now large enough that she could fasten the bottom button. The pants featured elastic inserts on each side of the waistband that made allowances for a waist that was expanding at an alarming rate.

  Putting on her shoes and socks was another issue. It was no longer as easy to do that as it had once been nor as difficult as it would be shortly, but dealing with the shoes reminded her of the most-likely-still-wet boots that were stowed outside in the Yukon. Once dressed, she went outside, retrieved the boots, and set them on the shaded porch to dry. By the time she returned to the house, it was almost time for the briefing. She reached at once for her iPad. Knowing that her presence in the room would have amounted to a distraction for Tom, she had made arrangements for Kristin Gregovich to attend the pre
ss conference and Skype the entire proceedings to her.

  Once the call connected, Deputy Chief Hadlock began by reading from the prepared statement Joanna had helped him compose the night before: “The Cochise County Sheriff’s Department is investigating the deaths of two women who died of multiple injuries suffered in falls while climbing a mountain peak east of Warren sometime over the weekend.”

  His original version had said “two homicides.” Joanna had changed that to something less specific. The original version had mentioned the time of death as being “late on Saturday night.” Joanna had revised those words so they were less specific as well. Tom Hadlock had yet to learn the subtleties of telling as much as necessary while, at the same time, leaving out key details. Being brusque and straightforward was fine if you were running a jail, but they weren’t traits that served one in good stead when you were dealing with the media.

  “The two female victims have been positively identified. The first is Desirée Monique Wilburton, a twenty-seven-year-old teaching assistant at the University of Arizona who has been in the area around Bisbee for some time studying local flora. The other victim is Susan Marie Nelson, a thirty-six-year-old teacher and debate coach at the Sierra Vista School for Scholastic Excellence. Ms. Nelson reportedly went missing from her home in Sierra Vista sometime Saturday afternoon.

  “The bodies of both victims have been transported to the Cochise County Medical Examiner’s Office in Bisbee, Arizona, where they are awaiting autopsies. At this time, anyone who may have seen either of the two women or who may have information that will aide us in our investigation are urged to contact the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department.

  “The investigation is ongoing, and we have no additional information to offer at this time. Questions?”

  Kristin turned her iPad toward the audience, which consisted of three sets of Tucson-based TV crews, along with a dozen or so other local and not-so-local print reporters. Naturally, Marliss Shackleford, in the middle of the front row, was the first to leap to her feet, waving to be recognized.