Outlaw Mountain (32 page)

“I’m sorry,” Joanna said. “This must be terribly painful for you.”

For the first time, Monica Foster softened. Her eyes welled with tears. “It is,” she said. “It hurts like hell.” And then she was gone.

As soon as Joanna was left alone, she picked up the phone and dialed Dena Hogan’s number. A receptionist answered, “Dena Hogan, Attorney at Law.”

“This is Joanna Brady, Sheriff Joanna Brady,” Joanna said. “I was wondering if it would be possible for me to see Ms. Hogan early this afternoon. Say between one-thirty and two?”

“Sure,” the receptionist said. “I can pencil you in, but I don’t have access to her official calendar. There could be a conflict that I don’t know about.”

“That’s all right,” Joanna said. “Since I’m coming out that direction anyway
,
I can afford to take my chances.”

Just then Joanna’s call waiting sounded, telling her there was another caller on the line. “Hello.”

“Joanna? Fran Daly here. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“No. What’s going on?”

“I just had a call back from Al Paxton, the computer nerd at Holloway/Rimblatt Pharmaceuticals.”

“And?”

“We are, if you’ll pardon the expression, a couple of smart cookies. That particular numbered batch of insulin went first to a distributor in L.A. who ships to drugstores all over the Southwest. From there it went to the O.K. Pharmacy in Tombstone, Arizona, where Cletus Rogers just happens to have his insulin prescription filled on a regular basis.”

“How very interesting,” Joanna said. “I’ll have one of my detectives go have a chat with Hizzoner the Mayor. Do you suppose Detective Lazier would be interested in being in on that interview?”

“Wait just a minute,” Fran Daly complained. “I no sooner finish telling you you’re smart when you start acting like a complete fool. You don’t mean that, do you?”

“No, I don’t mean it at all,” Joanna said with a laugh. “I was just checking to see if it would get a rise out of you. And it worked.”

“I’ll say,” Fran agreed. “That man bugs the daylights out of me. Don’t you dare invite him along.”

“Believe me,” Joanna said. “I wouldn’t think of it.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It was high noon when Joanna stepped through the swinging doors into the dim and shabby interior of Clete Rogers’ Grubsteak. The bottle-blond hostess, looking nervous and out of sorts, led Joanna to a table for four, where Jaime Carbajal and Ernie Carpenter were already waiting. Considering the relative distances involved, Joanna should have beaten Ernie there by a good ten minutes. Around the department, the detective was sometimes called “Lead-foot Carpenter,” and for good reason.

“I can see Ernie didn’t let any grass grow under his steel-belted radials,” she said pointedly as she sat down.

“When the boss offers to meet for lunch, I figure it must be important,” Ernie countered.

“Important,” Joanna agreed, picking up her menu. “But not a matter of life-and-death.”

Nancy returned to the table and sloshed a brimming coffee mug onto the table in front of Joanna.

“Is the mayor around?” Joanna asked.

The hostess responded with a narrow-eyed glare. “Mr. Rogers wasn’t here five minutes ago, when he asked,” Nancy said, jerking her head in Jaime Carbajal’s direction. “And he still isn’t.”

With that the hostess turned and flounced away from the table.

“What’s the matter with her?” Joanna asked.

Jaime shrugged. “Who knows? I asked about Clete when I first showed up, and the woman nearly bit my head off.”

Whoever had designed the menu for the Grubsteak had been cute enough to create entree items with names that matched a selection of local mining claims. When the waitress came around with her pad, Joanna ordered a Lucky Cuss hamburger and coffee. Jaime settled for the Tough Nut steak sandwich, while Ernie decided on a bowl of Contention stew. When the food came, Joanna’s hamburger and Ernie’s stew were both fine, but from all the knife-sawing and necessary chewing, it was clear the steak in Jaime’s Tough Nut sandwich lived up to its name.

During the course of the meal, Joanna had to endure some good-natured ribbing about her “doorknob” diamond, followed by a discussion of Dick Voland’s abrupt departure. Later on, Joanna brought the two detectives up-to-date with everything she had learned that morning, and they did the same. Susan Jenkins had turned up for the inventory meeting at Alice Rogers’ house, but Clete hadn’t appeared. Susan had verified that Alice’s television set and a VCR were missing along with several pieces of antique jewelry. In view of Clete’s possible involvement in his mother’s death, his failure to show up for the inventory seemed far more ominous.

Ernie pushed back his chair. “I suppose we’d better get with it. Do one of you want to ask the lady where Clete Rogers is, or should I?”

“
You
go right ahead,” Jaime said with a smile. “I believe in taking turns. This Bud’s for you.”

The third time around, Nancy’s reaction was downright explosive. “What the hell’s the matter with you people? I’ve already told you, Clete isn’t here!”

“How about telling us where he is then?” Ernie prodded gently. “It’s about his mother, you see. That’s why we need to talk to him.”

To Joanna’s surprise, Nancy immediately collapsed onto the fourth chair at their table, buried her face in her hands, and then sobbed into them. “That’s just it,” she wailed. “I don’t know
where
he is! I haven’t seen him all morning. He’s usually here when we open for breakfast. I’ve called the house at least a dozen times now, but he doesn’t answer. I even went over there looking for him. His car’s there, but he isn’t. Or, if he is, he wouldn’t come to the door.

“I’m scared to death something awful has happened to him. I thought about breaking the window in the door and letting myself in to see. But the thing is, if nothing’s wrong, he’ll be furious. He hates it when i fuss over him or when I do something he calls fussing. But what if he’s passed out, or even worse? What if he forgot to take his medicine?”

“His insulin?” Joanna asked, innocently.

“Yes. His insulin. Ever since that business with his mother, he’s been so upset that his whole system has been out of whack. He hasn’t been able to stabilize his blood sugar. What if he forgot to give himself an injection and he’s gone into diabetic coma or something? Or maybe he got mixed up and gave himself too much. Either way, it could be bad for him real bad. I know he’ll be all bent out of shape with me for telling on him like this, especially if it turns out to be a false alarm. He hates it when people treat him like an invalid. But you people are all cops, aren’t you? If you break into his house to check on him, it’ll be all right. It’s not like you’d be going in to steal something. I just want to know that he’s okay.”

When Nancy finally stopped talking long enough to draw a breath, Joanna and Ernie exchanged discreet glances. The last thing they needed was to enter a prime suspect’s home with-out the benefit of a search warrant. Here in the restaurant, with a tearful Nancy begging them to go check on her boss’s well-being, the idea of breaking and entering seemed perfectly reasonable—necessary, even. But Joanna knew that if Clete Rogers was ever brought to trial for his mother’s death, even the most dim-witted of defense attorneys would be able to make hay out of what would then be considered an illegal search.

“What do you think?” Ernie asked.

It was a tough call. On the one hand, a man’s life might be at stake. On the other, a conviction. “We’d better go check,” Joanna said. “In and out. In the meantime, Jaime, how about if you streak back to Bisbee and pick up a search warrant. Just in case.”

Ten minutes later they were standing in front of Clete Rogers’ modest tin-roofed house. It was a white clapboard affair that clearly dated from Tombstone’s mining heyday. On three sides the house was surrounded by a thicket of agave. Some of the cacti had done their century plant performance, leaving behind long skeletal stalks that still held shriveled and blackened seed pods while all around a new generation of tiny plants sprouted from the hardened earth.

Seeing the dying cacti gave Joanna a weird feeling, as did spotting Clete Rogers’ much-dented F-100 Ford. The pickup, parked almost out of sight in a narrow-faced, one-car detached garage, had a forlorn, abandoned air about it.

Joanna and Ernie stepped up onto the porch and Ernie knocked on the front door. It was an old-fashioned piece of antique craftsmanship with a glass window at the top. Etched into the window was a magnificent stag, standing on a promontory in the middle of a forested glade.

Joanna and Ernie waited for several long moments before Ernie knocked a second time. This time, the old door shuddered under the force of his blows. Still no one answered.

“I guess we’d better break it,” Ernie said.

“Let’s try the back door,” Joanna suggested. “This one looks too much like a valuable antique for my taste.”

The back of the house contained a shaky but fully enclosed utility porch. The door with its horizontal panels dated from the same era as the one at the front of the house, but here the etched glass had long since been replaced by a single pane of ordinary window glass.

“Break away,” she told Ernie. “At least this one won’t cost as much when it comes time to replace it.”

Seconds after shattering the glass, Ernie unfastened the inside latch, opened the door, and let Joanna into the house. “Hello,” she called. “Anybody home?” But there was no answer.

With Joanna leading the way, they walked through the makeshift laundry room that had once been a back porch and on into the kitchen and living room. The whole house couldn’t have been more than eight hundred square feet. The tiny rooms all had the enormously high ceilings of houses built before the age of air-conditioning. The furnishings were threadbare, but everything about the place—from the worn linoleum to the brass push-button light socket—was spotlessly clean. Joanna had expected typical bachelor-pad debris—with clothing and trash littering the floor and with dirty dishes stacked on the counters and attracting bugs in the sink. She had visited several pits like that during her tenure as sheriff. It surprised her a little to see that Cletus Rogers didn’t play to type.

While Joanna stood in the middle of the living room peering around, Ernie disappeared into what was evidently a bed-room. “Hey, boss,” he called. “I think you’d better come take a look at this.”

The bedroom was crammed with furniture. Not only did it contain a bed, a huge mirrored dresser, and a nightstand, it also held a frail cherry-wood dining room table that evidently functioned as a desk. Here there were papers—neatly stacked and/or assigned to folders. In the middle of the desk sat a computer, an old desktop model that looked old-fashioned and clunky even to Joanna.

“What?” she asked.

“Come around here and look. The screen’s so bad that you’ll have to stand directly in front of it before you’ll be able to read it.”

Joanna squeezed her way between the table and the foot of the bed until she was standing beside Ernie. From that vantage point she could read the only two words printed on the sickly-green screen. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” Joanna asked.

“Doesn’t say.”

“What does that sound like to you?” Joanna asked.

“Well,” Ernie said. “Taken with our suspicions about what happened to Alice Rogers, my guess would be it’s the beginning of a suicide note. Or else it’s a complete suicide note.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Joanna agreed. “And since his car is here, he didn’t go far. Let’s go check the garage.”

The pickup was not only unlocked, it was also empty. The single-car garage, most likely built in the era of the Model Ts, was too small for the whole of the truck to fit inside. Only the front hood and fender nosed into the garage’s darkened interior. At the front of the garage the two officers found a series of wooden shelves, sagging under burdens of neatly labeled boxes and paint cans. Paint and boxes, but no sign of the missing Cletus Rogers.

Back out in the yard, Joanna and Ernie made their way around the whole of the agave hedge, but there was no sign of a body there and no hint that anything had been disturbed. Once back in the front yard, Joanna stopped and looked back. “I think it’s time to call in Search and Rescue,” she said.

“Good,” Ernie replied. “That makes two of us.”

From the moment Joanna called Dispatch and summoned Mike Wilson and his Search and Rescue team, she knew it would be at least an hour, maybe even an hour and a hall, before the team could rendezvous at Clete Rogers’ house. Forced to wait outside lest they be accused of doing anything improper, Joanna found herself frustrated with the idea of just standing around. Finally she opened the small suitcase she kept in the back of the Blazer. From her selection of “just-in-case” crime scene clothing, she removed a pair of tennis shoes, put them on, and laced them up.

“I’m going to walk around a little,” she told Ernie. “You don’t need a search warrant for that.”

Tombstone may have been the Town Too Tough to Die, but the same couldn’t be said for municipal infrastructure. Within three blocks on either side of the main drag, thin layers of long-ago-laid asphalt had now reverted to potholed gravel trails. As Joanna set out walking, she had to keep her eyes glued to the disintegrating pavement in order to avoid falling in one of the holes and twisting her ankle. The necessity of watching her feet meant she didn’t necessarily notice where she was going. Two blocks from the house, a large shadow intersected with hers. Glancing up, she saw a huge buzzard riding the updrafts.

In the desert, a circling buzzard carries its own ominous message of death and dying. Sighting in on the bottom of the bird’s lazy circle, Joanna found herself staring at a small concrete complex carrying an identifying sign that said, TOMBSTONE MUNICIPAL SWIMMING POOL. Joanna made her way toward the pool, suspecting in advance what she might find there.

The fully clothed body of a man lay sprawled face-down on the bottom of the deep end of an empty swimming pool. There was no question about whether or not he was dead. Joanna could tell from the rag-doll way his head canted off to one side that his neck had been broken.