Left for Dead ar-7

by J. A. Jance

  Ali thought so, too. “He usually does.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Edie objected. “When you say it that way, you make your father sound henpecked.”

  “What I’m really saying is that you deserve each other,” Ali said. “You both have your moments.”

  “All right, then,” Edie said, changing the subject. “How are things on your end? How is your friend doing?”

  “Better,” Ali said, looking at Teresa’s uncle, sitting in stolid silence in her front seat. “Better but not completely out of the woods.”

  A few miles later, Ali’s next call was from Leland Brooks. The cement pour had gone well. Neither of the Askins nominees had RSVPed, but it was early days, the two teas were almost a whole week away. As for the garden? The long-term weather report indicated that some of the hardier items could start being planted the following week.

  “So things are moving forward?” Ali asked.

  “Absolutely, madam,” he said. “You didn’t think I’d let you down, did you?”

  “No,” Ali said. “Actually, I didn’t.”

  Feeling guilty about carrying on not one but several telephone conversations in her passenger’s presence, Ali switched her phone off. By then they had turned off I-10 onto Highway 83. Ali was trying to figure out how to initiate a conversation with this relative stranger when Tomas Kentera did it for her.

  “Why do you think Sheriff Renteria ordered his people to stay away from the hospital?” Tomas asked.

  “He what?” Ali demanded.

  “I know lots of people in Nogales, and that’s what they’re saying-that Sheriff Renteria ordered his people to stay away from the hospital and from Jose.”

  Ali was astonished. “That can’t be.”

  “Have you seen any people from the sheriff’s department at the hospital?”

  “No, but-”

  “Someone should ask the sheriff about this,” Tomas said. “I would really like to know.”

  “Believe me,” Ali said determinedly, “so would I.”

  Teresa and Jose’s mobile home was located in a housing development that had mostly failed to develop. Ten acres had been divided into ten one-acre lots, seven of which remained empty. Two other mobile homes, one obviously a derelict, were situated on the property. The Reyes lot was the only one that was completely fenced.

  It was just past noon when Ali stopped at the gate. Tomas got out to open it. The minivan sat in a free-standing carport at the back of the house. Teresa had told Ali that the car keys were in a drawer in the kitchen and that a spare house key could be found under an empty flowerpot sitting next to the front steps. The key wasn’t there, but by the time Ali reached the front steps, she realized no key would be necessary, because the front door stood ajar.

  Ali knew that Duane Lattimore had executed a search warrant on the house, but it seemed unlikely that he would have gone off leaving it unsecured. She suspected that an enterprising burglar might have decided to take advantage of the current uproar in Teresa and Jose’s lives. If so, it was possible the intruder might be inside the home.

  Holding up one hand and motioning for Uncle Tomas to stay where he was, Ali eased her way up the wooden steps. By the time she was ready to pull the door open the rest of the way, she had her Glock 17 out of its small-of-the-back holster.

  Ali peered around the door frame and came to an abrupt stop. During the time she had worked with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department, she had seen the messy aftermath of several executed search warrants. This wasn’t anywhere close to messy. Everywhere Ali looked, she saw wanton destruction.

  Living room and dining room furniture had been overturned and the upholstery shredded, spilling fill into snowdrift like piles of cotton. Lamps had been flung to the floor and broken; a glass coffee table had been smashed into thousands of shards. In the kitchen, the fridge had been tipped over on its side, spilling contents into a sticky, broken-jarred mess on the floor. Drawers had been removed from the cupboards, dumped, and then stomped apart. Dishes and glassware had been pulled out of cupboards and smashed to pieces. Something that looked like super glue covered the glass stove top. What appeared to be a collection of cookbooks had been thrown to the floor, and something wet and sticky, like Karo syrup, had been poured over them, swelling the covers and sticking the pages together in a sodden mass.

  Picking her way through the debris field as carefully as possible, Ali searched the remainder of the house, feeling more and more heartsick as she went. In the room Jose and Teresa had prepared for Carmine’s nursery, Ali found the wreckage of a crib and mattress as well as a demolished changing table. Diapers, tiny clothing, and piles of receiving blankets had been thrown on the floor and then covered with a thick substance that appeared to be a mixture of the contents of two Costco-size containers, one of baby powder and one of lotion. The last bedroom-the one at the far end of the mobile, which evidently belonged to Lucy and Carinda-seemed to have been spared, making Ali wonder if the intruder had run out of time or energy or both.

  On the opposite end of the house, in Teresa and Jose’s master bedroom, the level of destruction once again escalated. Gaping holes had been slashed into the mattress and box spring. Clothing had been pulled from the closet, ripped apart, dumped on the floor, and soaked with bleach from an empty two-gallon jug that lay nearby. Bottles of still-tacky nail polish had been spilled onto the torn bedding, sparing none of it. Bottles of shampoo and conditioner and lotion had been poured into an oddly flowery-smelling soup in the bathtub. Chunks of jaggedly broken glass left in the bottom of that mixture presented a cutting hazard for anyone trying to clean up the mess.

  After searching the house from end to end and finding no intruders, Ali returned to the living room, where she found Tomas Kentera standing dumbstruck, staring at the destruction.

  “Who would do such a thing!” he exclaimed. “And why?”

  Ali had no ready answer for that question. Shaking her head, she put away her Glock, pulled out her cell phone, turned it on, and dialed 911.

  “Nine-one-one,” the operator replied. “What are you reporting?”

  “A burglary,” Ali said. She read the address Teresa had given her to program into the GPS. “That’s just north of Patagonia, between Patagonia and Sonoita.”

  “I’m aware of where it is,” the operator said. “Is anyone injured?”

  “No. Someone broke into the house while no one was home.”

  “And the intruder is no longer at that location, is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Ali said, “but-”

  “That address is in the county, so responders would be coming from the Santa Cruz Sheriff’s Department. However, many of their personnel are currently involved in a complex emergency situation. If there’s no immediate threat to life or property at your location, I’ll need to take a report. They’ll send someone out as soon as a deputy becomes available. What is your name, please?”

  Ali gave her name, but before she could say anything more, the operator interrupted.

  “I’m sorry. I’m going to need to take another call. Someone will be there as soon as possible.”

  With a click, she was gone. When Ali turned to look at Tomas, he was bent over and reaching into a pile of what looked like the debris of a kitchen junk drawer. He pulled out a key fob, held it up, and waved it triumphantly in the air.

  “Look what I found,” he said. “The minivan keys. Why didn’t they steal it?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know, too,” Ali said.

  She scrolled through the numbers on her phone and dialed the one listed as Juanita Cisco’s office number. She was astonished when Juanita answered her own phone.

  “What’s up now?” the defense attorney asked. “Has Lattimore showed up at the hospital for a return engagement?”

  “This is something else,” Ali said. “I’m standing in the middle of Teresa and Jose’s house in Patagonia. It’s a wreck.”

  “Maybe Teresa’s not a good housekeeper,” Juanit
a suggested cheerfully. “After all, if someone came into my house unannounced, they’d say the same thing about me-that my house is a wreck. Give the poor woman a break. She’s got an armload of little kids. What do you expect?”

  “You don’t understand,” Ali said. “This isn’t a housekeeping problem. This is a breaking-and-entering problem. Maybe not so much breaking. Teresa told me there was a spare key hidden outside. It wasn’t there when I got here, but someone has torn the place apart.”

  “What about the search warrant?” Juanita asked. “Maybe Lattimore’s DPS guys are responsible for what you’re seeing. Do you want me to ask him?”

  “You can if you want,” Ali returned, “but I don’t think we can lay this at Lieutenant Lattimore’s door. He’s a cop. He may be a jerk, but from what I could see, he pretty much goes by the book. This looks like a frenzy of absolute destruction with a whole lot of malice thrown in on the side. I’m talking about broken dishes, smashed furniture, sliced mattresses, dumped food. Someone went through this house in a deliberate fashion, systematically destroying everything they could lay hands on.”

  “Have you reported it?”

  “I tried,” Ali said. “It turns out the local sheriff’s department is totally preoccupied with something else at the moment. Believe me, once I leave here, I’m going directly there and then to Sheriff Renteria himself.”

  “If Teresa is released from the hospital tomorrow, will she be able to go home?”

  Ali looked around at the ugly mess. “No way. The place looks like what you’d expect in the aftermath of an F5 tornado. Everything is wrecked-food, clothing, furniture.”

  Juanita sighed. “All right,” she said. “If you’ll handle the police report, I’ll be responsible for letting Teresa know what’s happened. I’ll try to find out who carries her homeowner’s insurance and see if I can get them to call out an adjuster. I’ll also let Teresa know that she’ll probably need to make other arrangements for a place to stay once she leaves the hospital.”

  “Thank you,” Ali said.

  “All right,” Juanita said. “Considering the circumstances, I guess this set of phone calls is off the clock. In the meantime, you need to get out of the house so you don’t get accused of messing up the crime scene.”

  “Believe me,” Ali told her, “there’s no way I could make this crime scene any worse than it already is. And thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” Juanita said. “Just remember, the next time you talk to Victor Angeleri, tell him he owes me.”

  Ali stowed her phone and turned to Tomas, who stood in the middle of the shattered room, seemingly unable to move.

  “What are we supposed to do now?” he asked. “Should we start trying to clean things up?”

  “We can’t even begin that process until after the cops have been here to make an official report,” Ali said. “A police report has to be in place for insurance coverage to come into play.”

  “So who did this? A bunch of juvenile delinquents?”

  Ali thought of the nail polish spilled on the bed. Nail polish didn’t pour in a hurry. She thought about Teresa’s wrecked cookbooks, with the sodden pages permanently glued together.

  “I doubt it,” she said thoughtfully. “Whoever did this devoted a lot of time and energy to the effort. The nail polish on the bedding wasn’t completely dry, so this didn’t happen all that long ago, probably sometime this morning. Today’s a school day. That makes kids’ involvement unlikely.”

  “Illegals, then?” Tomas asked.

  “Maybe,” Ali said, “but the level of destruction suggests this is a lot more personal.”

  “What do we do, then?” Tomas asked. “Just walk away?”

  “No,” Ali said. “I have a better idea. I’m going to document as much as I can.”

  Disregarding Juanita’s advice, she went back through the house room by room, using her iPhone to snap one photograph after another. There were places on the carpet, especially in the hallway near the wrecked nursery, where a trail of baby-powder shoe prints remained, the white print in stark relief against the gray carpet. Ali did her best to avoid marring the prints in any way. If they were evidence, she wanted them left intact.

  She was almost done taking photographs when Tomas came to find her. “I’m heading back to town,” he said, holding up the minivan keys. “I just got off the phone with Teresa. She knows what’s going on, and she’s terribly upset, but I told her that she and the kids and even Jose, if necessary, can stay with me until we can get this place cleaned up and livable again. It’ll be crowded at my place, and I’ll need to move furniture around, but it’ll be better than having them try to come back here.”

  Ali and Tomas stepped outside. After he drove away, Ali examined her surroundings. The house was set back from the road with empty lots on either side. The nearest house was three lots away, and the road was far enough that it seemed doubtful anyone driving by would have noticed or paid attention to what cars were parked at which house.

  On her way out of the development, Ali stopped and banged on the door of the two neighboring houses, hoping that someone would have noticed something out of the ordinary. At the first house, a dog barked, but no one came to the door. At the second one, Ali was greeted with total silence. No one was home, and from the general air of neglect, it looked as though no one had been in or out of the house in weeks. Most likely, the person who had broken into the Reyes’s household had done so secure in the knowledge that there would be no witnesses.

  After Ali left, it took her a little over half an hour to drive to Nogales, the Santa Cruz County seat, where she was hoping to make contact with Sheriff Renteria. He wasn’t there, and the only information his secretary handed out was that the sheriff was “currently unavailable.”

  Rebuffed, Ali returned to her vehicle and her iPhone. Logging on to one of the local Tucson television channels, she found a breaking-news alert that the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department was currently investigating a reported homicide in Patagonia.

  Ali didn’t try to find out the exact location of the homicide before she headed back to Patagonia. She didn’t need to.

  She figured the town was small enough that she’d be able to find a homicide crime scene there on her own.

  38

  11:30 A.M., Monday, April 12

  Patagonia, Arizona

  Aside from the delivery guys, the Patagonia post office itself was a one-woman operation. Patty Patton might have made a pitch to the higher-ups, asking to have some part-time help to cover the windows during lunchtime and breaks, but she didn’t want to rock the boat. There was a lot of talk these days about shutting down “underperforming” post offices, and she didn’t want hers to be one of them.

  As a consequence, between eleven and twelve each day, Patty closed the window and then sat at the sorting table to eat her peanut better and jelly sandwich and to down the remains of her thermos of coffee. Once upon a time, she had imagined her life would be different, that she and Roland would travel around the world and dine in all kinds of exotic places. She hadn’t expected to live her whole life without venturing outside the confines of Patagonia. But those were the choices she’d made and the way she’d lived her life, and most of the time she had few regrets.

  It was quiet in the back room. Over the bank of mailboxes, she could hear people chatting and greeting each other. At some point, while she was eating dessert-a container of banana yogurt-she heard a siren or two. She wondered about them, but not that much. She was a lot more perturbed by the fact that Jimmy Carson hadn’t bothered to come back by to let her know what was going on with Phil. That seemed odd-out of character. Jimmy was usually far more dependable than that; his mother, Eunice, had seen to that long ago.

  At twelve sharp, Patty downed the last slurp of coffee and put away the remains of her lunch. She didn’t want people from out front looking through the service window and thinking she used the sorting table as a cafeteria.

  Patty was not a tall woman.
In order to reach the window and conduct business, she had to spend most of the workday perched on a three-step stool hidden behind the counter. When Patty opened the window after lunch, Maxine Browning, Patagonia’s ace gossip, was waiting outside the window, drumming her fingers on the counter and looking pointedly at her watch.

  “It’s not like you to be even a minute late,” Maxine complained. “But I suppose with what’s going on over at Phil’s, we’re lucky you’re open at all. I’d like a sheet of those breast cancer stamps, please.”

  “What is going on over at Phil’s?” Patty asked, trying not to sound too concerned or alarmed as she retrieved the page of stamps.

  “Something bad, I guess,” Maxine said. “There are cops all over the place. I wouldn’t be surprised if that woman finally got around to putting a bullet in her head. Christine Tewksbury has been crazy as a loon for all these years. I’m surprised Phil didn’t place her in some kind of home long ago. I probably would have. Having that ugly Christmas tree around year after year would have driven me batty.”

  Patty felt a clutch in her stomach. If it had been something wrong with Christine, Phil would have called. This had to be something else, maybe something far worse.

  “And what about Deputy Reyes?” Maxine continued. “I’m hearing that the reason he got shot is that he was dealing drugs on the side. With his poor wife pregnant and everything. I swear, if the cops are crooked, who are you supposed to trust these days?”

  At that point, the woman behind Maxine, Annie Davis-who was head volunteer in the all-volunteer town library-jumped into the conversation. “That’s right,” she said. “I heard they found drugs galore when they searched Jose Reyes’s house. The sheriff’s department isn’t releasing squat about it-they’re claiming that the Department of Public Safety has taken over the case, but all that’s doing is giving Sheriff Renteria a chance to save face. If he’s got a bunch of crooked drug-dealing cops working in his department, that man is history. There’s no way in hell he’ll be able to weather that kind of scandal and get reelected.”