by J. A. Jance
The entire Fox family-James and Connie and Rose’s younger sisters-burst into the ICU waiting room half an hour later. Recognizing them from photos on the websites she had accessed and grateful that there was no accompanying media, the nun hurried to meet them. “I’m Sister Anselm, your daughter’s patient advocate. You’re Mr. and Mrs. Fox?”
“James and Connie,” James Fox answered. “We were told our daughter was being treated here in the ICU, but they didn’t have her name at the front desk.”
“She’s listed on our records as Jane Doe. When she was admitted, we had no way of knowing who she was,” Sister Anselm told them. “But yes, at this point, I believe Jane Doe is your daughter.” She turned to the younger girls. “And these are her sisters?” She asked the question, though she didn’t really need to. The family resemblance between these girls and Rose’s shattered visage was striking.
“Yes,” Connie said. “Lily and Jasmine. But what can you tell us about Rose? Is she going to be all right? When can we see her?”
“Not right now,” Sister Anselm explained, directing them into chairs. “Without her express permission, I can’t provide any details about the extent of her injuries or her course of treatment, but you need to understand that she was seriously injured before she was brought here, and those injuries are likely to impact her health for some time. If you do see her, you need to prepare yourselves for the idea that she won’t look like the person you remember.”
“If we see her?” Connie asked. “What do you mean if? She’s our daughter. She’s here. We’re here, and I don’t care what she looks like. I just want to see her and to know that she’s alive, that she’s okay.”
“Alive, yes,” Sister Anselm replied. “Okay, no. The problem is, she doesn’t want to see you.”
“She doesn’t want to see us?” Connie echoed. “I don’t believe it. Why not? How can that be? We’re her parents. We’ve been trying to find her for years.”
“You’re her mother,” James Fox said. “She’ll see you even if she won’t see me.”
Hearing the regret in his voice, Sister Anselm studied the man. She had heard the all too common horror stories in which running away was the only option for children stuck in abusive homes. More times than she could count, that abuse had been perpetrated by stepfathers. That wasn’t the reading she was getting from this particular stepfather, however.
“You’re saying you and she were at odds?” Sister Anselm suggested.
“I was a lifelong bachelor who had never been married when Connie and her girls came into my life,” James Fox said. “Rose and Lily were already in their teens. I had never been a father, but I was an engineer. When I see something that’s wrong, I want to fix it.”
“What was wrong with Rose?” Sister Anselm asked.
“Nothing, really. Rose was smart. She had huge amounts of potential, but she couldn’t see it; she seemed determined to squander it. I tried to push her too hard in one direction-toward doing better in school, getting her education. She wasn’t interested. I thought all I was doing was trying to create a little order in their lives by giving them a better place to live, more opportunities. But I can see now that she must have thought I was bossing everybody around. I got smarter after she left. I’ve done a lot better with her sisters, don’t you think?” he asked Connie.
Connie reached out, took his hand, and nodded. The younger girl, Jasmine, sidled up to him and gave him a hug.
“When that young man Al Gutierrez showed up at the house last night, he said he was with the Border Patrol, but he wasn’t in uniform, and I thought he was trying to scam us,” Fox continued. “That’s happened before. I’ve seen Connie put through the wringer enough times by people claiming to know what happened to Rose when all they really wanted was Connie’s money. When the detective from Phoenix called this morning, I figured out that Gutierrez must have been telling the truth-that Rose really was alive. And now that we know she may be involved in a homicide-” His voice broke. He stopped speaking abruptly.
“Did they say whose homicide?” Sister Anselm asked.
James Fox nodded. “The guy’s name was Hernandez-Chico Hernandez. Rose evidently worked for him as a …” He paused, looked at Jasmine, and added, “A call girl. He was murdered late last week, and Rose’s fingerprints were found in his vehicle. That’s why Detective Rush called us this morning.”
“Does that make any difference?” Sister Anselm asked. She didn’t say “call girl” aloud, but that was what she meant.
“Damn right it makes a difference!” James Fox declared.
Sister Anselm’s heart fell. Rose is right, she thought. If they figure out she’s been working as a prostitute, the family will disown her.
“Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said?” he demanded. “Rose is a person of interest in a homicide. I don’t care if she wants to see us. That doesn’t matter, but if she’s mixed up in a murder, she probably needs our help. That’s why we’re here. Tell her that, please.”
Which was not at all what Sister Anselm had expected. She stood up. “Wait here,” she said. “Let me go talk to her. I’ll see what I can do.”
36
11:00 A.M., Monday, April 12
Vail, Arizona
By the time Detective Ariel Rush showed up on Al Gutierrez’s doorstep in Vail, he had printed out the crime scene photos, the ones Dobbs had told him not to bother keeping. His printer wasn’t the best, so neither was the resolution.
“I took these on Friday,” he said, handing them over. “They’re not very good.”
“You’d be surprised,” she said. “I’ll go get my computer and copy what’s on the memory stick so the lab can take a look at it.”
By the time she returned with her laptop, he had taken the memory stick out of his camera.
“Any thing else on here besides your crime scene photos?” she asked.
“My graduation picture,” he said. “From the academy.”
“We don’t want anything to happen to that,” Rush said with a smile. “Have you been on the job long?”
“Awhile,” Al admitted. “I just don’t take that many pictures.”
In a way, Detective Rush reminded him of his old junior high principal from back in Wenatchee. Mrs. Baxter had looked scary but wasn’t. Al suspected Detective Rush was pretty much the same.
“Ready to saddle up?” she asked, closing her computer and returning the memory stick.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Want me to bring my camera along?”
“Don’t bother,” she said. “I’ve got my own.”
On the forty-five-minute drive from Vail to King’s Anvil Ranch, south of Three Points, Al told Detective Rush everything he could remember about the incident on Friday afternoon and everything he had learned about the victim.
On Friday, he had carefully recorded the location of the crime scene from his GPS so he’d be able to find it again later. Now, as they headed toward the crime scene in Detective Rush’s vehicle, that notation proved to be invaluable; without it, they would have been flying blind through the mesquite-dotted landscape. His note helped him make sense of the countless tracks that meandered here and there across the desert. Eventually, he spotted something familiar.
“Stop here,” he ordered. “It’s on the far side of that clump of mesquite.”
Before they got out of the car, Detective Rush slipped off her black low-heeled pumps in favor of tennis shoes. Stepping from the vehicle, she brought along Al’s crime scene photos as well as her own camera. Out on the desert floor, Al helped her down the bank and then led her to the spot where the roiled sand indicated a lot of activity. It was April. All weekend long the wind had blown in from the west, shifting sand into what might have been usable tracks. Comparing the photos to the landscape, Detective Rush combed the wash for twenty yards in either direction. Then she examined the part of the bank where Al suspected something had been rolled down the steep incline, taking photos of bits of broken grass, horse nettl
es, Tucson burr ragweed.
“Look here,” she said, pointing toward a plant with a bit of fabric tangled in one of the spiky burrs. She held up both the burr and the thread before dropping them into an evidence bag.
“It’s not from the victim’s clothing,” Al said. “She wasn’t wearing any.”
When it came time to exit the arroyo, Al climbed up the steep wash. Then he reached down and helped Detective Rush up and out.
“I thought this was where the attack took place, since this is where I found the blood spatters,” he told her. “They were tiny, though, and it looks like they’re pretty much gone.”
He was right. Whatever spatters might have been there on Friday afternoon had been blown away over the weekend by a scouring windstorm.
“This seems like the back of beyond,” Detective Rush said. “So why bring her here? If the incident began somewhere in the Phoenix area, they had to go to some trouble to get her this far.”
“Because it is the back of beyond,” Al said. “It was lucky for her that I turned up when I did. There are thousands of acres of empty desert out here. She might’ve lay dead in the wash for weeks or even months before someone found her. Illegals come through here all the time, and some of them die. As Sergeant Dobbs demonstrated, no one worries about it all that much. One dead illegal is pretty much like another. Whoever did this put her here because they thought nobody would pay attention. Turns out they were almost right.”
“You never saw the vehicle?”
“No, I heard it start up. It sounded like a truck of some kind or maybe an SUV. I’m pretty sure they heard me coming and took off.”
“On foot?”
“Yes. This track dead-ends at a barbed-wire fence about half a mile north of here. It’s a private road, but it’s better than the one we’re on. Made for a faster getaway. I tried calling it in at the time, but if anyone saw the vehicle, it didn’t seem worth stopping. Or else they missed it altogether. There’s a security checkpoint just west of Three Points.”
“There are cameras at those checkpoints?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll try to get a look at the films and see if I notice anything out of line. Maybe we can convince Sergeant Dobbs to help me out with that. What time was this again?”
“Late afternoon. The time should be in the report.”
“If and when said report surfaces,” Detective Rush said.
“I have it on good authority that it’s been located and sent along to Pima County.”
“I’m puzzled about those cigarette burns,” she said thoughtfully.
Al had thought of little else. The deliberate burns on the victim’s skin had haunted his nightmares for two nights. How could someone do that to another human being? “Burns and cuts both,” he said. “What about them?”
“Fresh?”
“I’m no expert. Maybe a day old, but it could be more or less.”
“You found her on Friday afternoon. If the burns were part of what could be called an ‘enhanced interrogation,’ what were her assailants looking for? Presumably, Chico, her pimp, was dead by then. So was this recreational torture only, or were they looking for specific information, something she knew and no one else did?”
Detective Rush pulled out her cell phone. She punched in a number and held it up to her ear. Al was surprised. There were plenty of places in this expanse of desert where cell phone communication was either spotty or nonexistent. Evidently, this wasn’t one of them.
“I want you to check something for me,” she said into her phone. “Go into the ViCAP database. I’m looking for unidentified female homicide victims with evidence of cigarette burns.” She paused. “Let’s say the last five years.” Another pause. “No, anywhere in the country. Get back to me as soon as you can.” Closing her phone, she looked back at Al. “You say this road dead-ends at a fence?”
Al nodded.
“Let’s walk, then,” she said. “You take one side; I’ll take the other.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Anything that doesn’t belong.”
Several yards short of the fence line but within view of the other road, Al came to a sudden stop. “When you say something that doesn’t belong, would you mean like maybe a cigarette butt?”
Ariel hurried over to where he was standing. The filtered butt lay on the weedy shoulder of the track. “Looks relatively fresh,” she told him. “Way to go. Good spotting. It’s too far from the fence to have been tossed out by a passing vehicle, which means whoever dropped it was walking here.”
Extracting an evidence bag from her jacket pocket, she collected the stub and examined it before slipping it into the bag and back into her pocket, along with the bagged cockle burr.
“Like I said, lots of illegals walk through here,” Al cautioned.
“Yes,” Detective Rush agreed. “I’m sure they do, but how many of them smoke filtered Camels?”
“They took off in a hell of a hurry when I showed up,” Al said. “It doesn’t seem likely they’d have taken time out for a smoke.”
“Maybe not as they were leaving,” Detective Rush said, “but what about on the way in?”
When Al and Detective Rush reached the fence, they found one additional bit of useful trace evidence. A tiny thread, similar to the one on the burr, dangled from one of the barbs on the wire.
“See there?” she said triumphantly. “They were in a hurry, and they got careless.”
“Assuming they parked here,” Al said, “how did they transport her from here to the wash? Did she walk there under her own steam?”
Detective Rush looked at Al questioningly. “How big is she?”
“Hard to tell, but not very. Five-five or so. Maybe a hundred and twenty pounds.”
“So most likely, one guy couldn’t carry her that far by himself. It would take two, at least, to cover this much distance.”
With Detective Rush in the lead, they started back the way they had come. When her phone rang, she stopped to answer and listened for a time.
“Okay,” she said finally. “If you’ve got any connections across the line in Mexico, you might see if there are any similar cases down there. In the meantime, we’ve got another victim with similar injuries. Only so far, this one isn’t dead.”
“What?” Al asked when she closed her phone.
“So far we’ve found three similar cases. Unidentified victims. Cigarette burns. Found in areas frequented by illegals. One in New Mexico, one in southern California, and another one over by Yuma, here in Arizona.”
“So it’s a serial killer?”
“That’s my first guess.”
“What happens if the killer finds out Rose Ventana isn’t dead?”
“Maybe we’d better go try to talk to her, and to that nun you told me about, and let her know that the patient might be in danger.”
“I think she already figured that out,” Al said. “Last night, when I showed up unannounced, she pulled a Taser on me.”
Detective Rush stopped short. “Really? A Taser?”
Al nodded.
“My kind of nun,” Detective Rush said with a laugh. “Definitely my kind of nun.”
“Are we going to stop by Pima County and let them know that the delayed assault report may be connected to a series of homicides?”
Rush thought about that before she answered. “I think we’ll just let it sog for a while. So far all Pima County has is an attempted homicide on their books. I have more than that in my jurisdiction because the victim, Mr. Hernandez, is dead. The last thing I need is to be caught up in some kind of jurisdictional pissing match when I really want to clear my case. And I don’t want anyone swooping in and screwing up my trace evidence. If Pima County comes online and starts working the case, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“What do we do next?” Al asked.
“We’re going to stop by your office and see about getting a look at those checkpoint videos.”
“And meet K
evin Dobbs?” Al asked.
Detective Rush grinned at him. “Remember what I said about people like that?”
“You mean you go around them or over them?”
“With Sergeant Dobbs,” she said, “I’m choosing the go-around option. Since you’ll be working with him after I leave, that’ll be a better choice than a direct confrontation.”
Doesn’t matter, Al thought. No matter how you slice it, Kevin Dobbs is going to be pissed as hell!
37
11:00 A.M., Monday, April 12
Tucson, Arizona
For Ali, pulling the pieces together for the drive to Patagonia was a lot like herding cats. When Teresa had said she’d call her uncle Tomas, it sounded easy, but it wasn’t. Tomas Kentera was Maria Delgado’s brother. Unlike her, he had a cell phone and no landline. Unfortunately, he had forgotten to recharge the battery. As a consequence, his cell phone wasn’t working. Ali had to drive to his house on the far west side of town to find him and then convince him to ride along with her to retrieve Teresa’s minivan.
They were on the freeway and headed for Patagonia when Ali’s phone rang.
“We closed the restaurant right after breakfast and gave ourselves some extra time off,” Edie Larson announced. “The agreement is signed, sealed, and delivered. The Sugarloaf is sold. Your father is over the moon, and so am I. Can you believe it?”
“I do believe it,” Ali said. She couldn’t remember her mother ever sounding so excited. “Congratulations.”
“In the meantime,” Edie continued, “we’ve got an appointment later this afternoon to take a look at the available units at Sedona Hills. Since we really will be moving in a matter of weeks, we need to get our ducks in a row about where we’re going. One thing is for sure-we’ll need to have a yard sale or two.”
“What about the mayor thing?” Ali asked.
“Yes,” Edie said, “the mayor thing is still on. Your father hasn’t exactly come around, but I’m guessing he will eventually.”