Devil's Claw (43 page)

“Sweetie pie,” he said. “The whole time you’ve been gone, I’ve been inside your house and looking over the damage. What you’re wearing is what you’ve got.”

“There’s nothing left?”

“Nothing salvageable. But there is some good news.”

“What’s that?”

“I talked to Dr. Ross a few minutes ago. She says she thinks both dogs are going to pull through. Come on.”

Joanna looked up at Butch through suddenly tear-dimmed eyes. That was just about the time a photographer from
The Bisbee Bee
caught the two of them in mid-embrace. Joanna started to object, but Butch took her hand.

“Forget it,” he said. “They got what they came for. Let them have it.”

“Wait,” she said. “What about Kristin? I’m sure she was planning on spending the night tonight as well.”

Butch nodded. “Fortunately for Kristin, all her stuff was in Jenny’s room, which means it’s fine. She’ll be spending the night at Terry’s. I don’t think she minded very much,” he added with a smile.

An hour later, with a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and single stiff Scotch under her belt, Joanna lay next to Butch in the queen-sized bed of his Saginaw-neighborhood home. “Remember, we weren’t going to have any more sleep-overs before the wedding,” she said wistfully.

“This isn’t a sleep-over,” Butch returned. “You’re a refugee.”

“With all this going on, maybe we should postpone the wedding,” Joanna hinted.

“No.”

“The honeymoon, then. What if we took it later?”

“No. If anything, we need the honeymoon more than ever.”

“But, Butch. How are we going to get the mess cleaned up? It’s so much—”

“Don’t you mean how am
I
going to clean up the mess? Well,
you
don’t have to. As the guy on that “
Red Green
Show” says, we’re all in this together. I’ve talked to a whole lot of people tonight. When Frank Montoya came back and shut down the crime-scene investigation, people were ready to go to work cleaning up right then.

“I sent everyone home tonight, but they’ll be back first thing in the morning. Jeff and Marianne will be there. Angie Kellogg and her boyfriend, that parrot guy. Jim Bob and Eva Lou. My folks. Your brother and his wife, to say nothing of your mother and who knows who else. And the fact that all those people will be doing salvage and cleanup means you don’t have to. You go to the department and do what you have to do in order for us to be out of town next week. Besides, it’s not going to be that bad. Except for the bathroom and kitchen the repairs are mostly cosmetic. Once we clean things up and dry the place out, it will be livable again. But maybe we don’t want to do that.”

“Don’t want to do what?”

“Live there. I’ve been reading articles in newspapers and magazines about a contractor from Tucson, a guy named Quentin Branch, who specializes in building rammed-earth houses. The house is actually constructed so the walls are made of layers of compacted dirt. A lot of time, whatever soil needs to be moved from the site in order to make way for construction can be worked into the construction of the house itself rather than having to be hauled off in dump trucks. Due to the miracle of natural insulation, rammed-earth houses are warm in the winter and cool in the summer. If we did that and built from scratch, we’d be starting married life fresh in a place that didn’t belong to somebody else first, either to you and Andy, or to me. It could be our place, Joanna, yours and mine.”

“It sounds like you’ve been giving this idea a lot of thought,” she said quietly.

“I have,” Butch admitted. “Long before what happened today. I’ve been worried about how all our furniture was going to fit into one place. How we’d all survive with that one bathroom and still be friends, to say nothing of lovers.”

“You were worried about that?” Joanna asked. Butch nodded. “So was I. I couldn’t figure out how it would work, but now it’s not nearly such a problem since all my furniture is wrecked.”

“Not all of it,” Butch said. “Jim Bob and I were talking about how to repair the damage to the dining room table and the buffet. But going back to what we were talking about—what would you think of the idea of building a new place?”

“I guess we could think about it,” Joanna conceded. “After all, thinking doesn’t cost anything.”

At nine o’clock the next morning, feeling grubby in her clothing from the previous day, Sheriff Joanna Brady hurried into the conference room just in time for the morning briefing. Frank Montoya and the two detectives were already present and drinking coffee.

“Hi, guys,” Joanna said, trying to keep things on a businesslike basis. She knew from meeting with Kristin Marsten a few minutes earlier that on the morning after the disaster at High Lonesome Ranch expressions of sympathy tended to erode her emotional control.

“Sorry I’m late,” she announced breezily. “I just got off the phone with Lucy Ridder. I’ve made arrangements for her to come here to be interviewed by Frank and Ernie and to do the composite drawing. I was in such a hurry yesterday that I forgot to bring Sister Celeste back here to the department to pick up her car. Right this minute, it’s still out in the parking lot, so she’ll be coming along with Lucy. That way, she can give Lucy some moral support and pick up her car at the same time. And since Sister Celeste already met you, Frank, I told her you’re the one who will come to Saint David to pick them up.”

“Good enough,” Frank said. “How soon?”

“As soon as you can get to Saint David after we finish up here. So where do we stand?”

“I already told Jaime about the computer thing,” Ernie Carpenter offered. “About Sandra Ridder’s work record being erased out at Fort Huachuca. He has some thoughts on the subject.”

All eyes in the room focused on Jaime Carbajal. “Which are?” Joanna urged.

“I started to tell you about this last night. When I was talking to Catherine Yates yesterday afternoon, she finally admitted that she hadn’t been entirely truthful when she spoke to us earlier. She told us she knew weeks earlier that Sandra was due to be released from prison. It seems somebody from the Justice Department came to Sandra several months ago. Whoever it was told her that somebody had finally gotten around to investigating allegations of security leaks that had occurred at Fort Huachuca back in the early nineties.

“He told her that investigators had somehow tied her into a plot that involved the lifting of top-secret command and control codes from STRATCOM for delivery to the Iraqis. The agent from the Justice Department offered her a sweet deal—an early out, full immunity from prosecution, and witness-protection status if she would tell them everything she knew. Sandra Ridder was nobody’s dummy. According to Catherine, she agreed to the deal and then upped the ante by offering to deliver an actual diskette containing encrypted codes in exchange for an extra cash bonus.”

“Any idea which agent made the deal?”

Jaime Carbajal shook his head. “None. My guess is that something like this is going to be damned difficult to trace from this end or from the bottom up.”

Joanna nodded. “Full-immunity packages don’t get passed out by lower-echelon players. I’ll give Adam York a call over at DEA. He may have some idea as to where we should start looking. But here’s my real concern: Why didn’t Catherine Yates bother to tell us any of this earlier?”

“She was afraid to,” Jaime answered. “Sandra had sworn her to secrecy. She told her mother that the other people involved—the people she used to work with—would kill her in a minute if they knew she was spilling the beans. She said that’s what they did to Tom Ridder. He found one of the disks before she had a chance to deliver it. Ridder hid the diskette and threatened to blow the whistle on the entire Fort Huachuca operation. Whoever was running the show tried to get the diskette back, but Ridder wouldn’t tell where he’d hidden it. So they killed him, and convinced Sandra to take the fall for it. They told her that if she didn’t plead guilty to Tom’s death and keep the conspirators’ involvement out of it, they’d kill Lucy the same way they killed Tom Ridder.”

“And she believed them?” Joanna said.

“Evidently. If I’d been in her shoes, I think I would have, too.”

“You’re saying Sandra Ridder spent all those years in prison in order to
protect
her daughter—to save Lucy’s life?”

“That’s what Catherine Yates told me.”

“Assuming she’s telling the truth now, that is,” Joanna said. “At this point, I’m not sure I’d believe a word she says. What do you think, Ernie? Does any of this relate to what you told us about Sandra Ridder’s civil-service existence being erased from Fort Huachuca records?”

“Possibly,” Ernie Carpenter replied. “It could be part of a witness-protection protocol. I’m not entirely sure how that stuff works.”

“Another question for our source at Justice whenever we manage to find one,” Joanna said. “One other thing keeps bothering me. I know what our pet hacker said about even old encryption codes being valuable. Still, how valuable can they be? Three people are dead right now, and it could easily have been four.

“Melanie Goodson has to have been involved from the get-go. When Lucy placed those three rest-area calls that night, she thought she was calling people who would help her. And two out of the three—Sister Celeste and Jay Quick—did try to help. I’m guessing Melanie Goodson traced the call—possibly through caller ID—and then sent somebody out to the rest area looking for Lucy.”

Jaws dropped all around the conference table. “Are you saying somebody came to Texas Canyon looking for Lucy?” Frank Montoya demanded.

“That’s exactly what I said. And you’ll never guess who it was, folks—the same guy who shot Sandra Ridder the night before. He came there and spent the afternoon hanging around the phone booth. And Sunday morning he came looking for her again. If it hadn’t been for Lucy’s pet hawk calling out a timely warning, we’d have another victim on our hands. I figure there’s only one way an eight-year-old computer disk can still be worth the price of four separate lives. Whatever was happening back then must still be going on.”

“Wait a minute,” Ernie said. “That would mean whoever pulled Sandra Ridder’s records might have had nothing at all to do with the Justice Department and everything to do with keeping suspicion from falling on him.”

“Exactly,” Joanna said. “And someone with that kind of time-in-place shouldn’t be all that difficult to find. My brother, Bob Brundage, has spent the last six years of his life working in the Pentagon. He’s out at the house today cleaning up the mess, but he might be able to point us in some likely directions. One of you might give him a call, or I’ll talk to him when I go out there at lunchtime and see if he has any ideas.”

“What about Sheriff Forsythe?” Frank Montoya asked. “Has he heard any of this?”

“How could he when we’re all hearing it for the first time? We’ll take this morning to track down the leads we have now. Once we do that, interview Lucy Ridder, and have the composite drawing in hand, I’ll call Sheriff Forsythe personally. In the meantime, I don’t see any need to rush. After all, he wasn’t in any hurry to help us. Anything else?”

“Yes,” Ernie Carpenter said. “I want to know about your dogs. How are they?”

Joanna took a deep breath. “I talked to Dr. Ross first thing this morning. When Reba Singleton checked into the Copper Queen Hospital for observation before transport to Tucson, she had a whole collection of pharmaceuticals and designer drugs in her purse—antidepressants, sleeping pills, muscle relaxants, whatever. She told us she slipped the dogs a double dose of her Valium. It knocked them out for the better part of twenty-four hours, but it’s not fatal, and there shouldn’t be any long-term damage. Now that they’ve slept it off, they’re on their feet and ready to come home.”

“That’s a relief,” Ernie said. “And how are you?”

Joanna looked from one face to the other. “Grateful,” she said at last. “It could have been so much worse.”

The meeting broke up several minutes later. Back in her office, Joanna found she already had a stack of messages. She was reaching for the phone to return the first one when it rang before she could pick it up.

“Joanna, how are you?” Eleanor Lathrop Winfield asked without preamble. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Mother,” Joanna replied. “I guess I’m a little tired, but otherwise fine. How are you?”

“Busy,” Eleanor replied briskly. “Maggie Dixon, Eva Lou, Marcie, and I just came back from the house.” Marcie Brundage was Joanna’s sister-in-law, the wife of a brother who had been put up for adoption by Joanna’s not-yet-married parents. Only recently, after the death of his adoptive parents, had Bob Brundage sought out his birth family.

“The men are busy as can be,” Eleanor rattled on. “They’ve brought in a Dumpster to clean the mess into. Milo has an insurance adjuster on the scene monitoring everything that’s broken and keeping track of whatever’s being hauled out. That way, in case Reba Singleton
doesn’t
pay up, you’ll at least be able to file an insurance claim.”

Milo Davis of the Davis Insurance Agency had once been Joanna’s boss. Even now, several years later, he remained her insurance agent.

“Watching all that stuff being thrown out was just too hard on Eva Lou,” Eleanor continued. “She couldn’t bear to watch, since so much of your furniture used to be hers. I’m sure Butch noticed how upset she was. I believe that’s why he suggested we girls run some errands for him. He gave us a list. We’re off to Tucson to see what we can do about it.”

The idea of Joanna’s sister-in-law, her former mother-in-law, her mother-in-law-to-be, and her mother all driving around in the same car together struck terror in Joanna’s very soul. There was no telling what might happen. “What kind of list?” she asked warily.

“Never you mind,” Eleanor replied firmly. “But I do have one piece of wonderful news.”

“What’s that?”

“I talked to a girl from Nordstrom’s. I called their company headquarters up in Seattle, and guess what? Once I told them what had happened, they managed to locate another dress just like your wedding dress—same size, same color, everything. They found it in their store in San Francisco. They’re Fed-Exing it out today—this afternoon. It should arrive here in Bisbee tomorrow. Early afternoon, one-thirty at the latest. What do you think of that?”