Paradise Lost (9 page)

“Yes,” Joanna admitted.

“And you’re doing a good job.”

“As far as I know, although the final decision on that score will have to be up to the voters.”

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“Is there anything you’d want to do more than what you’re doing now?”

“Nothing that I can think of,” she answered.

“Well, then,” Butch said with a shrug, “as tar as I’m concerned, it really is up to you. Have you discussed it with Marianne?”

The Reverend Marianne Maculyea had been Joanna’s best friend since junior high. She was also pastor of the Tombstone Canyon United Methodist Church, where Joanna was a faithful member. Marianne and her stay-at-home husband, Jeff, were in much the same position Joanna and Butch were—with Marianne being the primary breadwinner while Jeff took care of their two small children and worked on the side refurbishing old cars. In the old days, Joanna had asked Marianne for advice on almost everything.

“With the new baby and going back to work, she hardly ever has time to talk anymore,” Joanna said.

“What about Jenny?” Butch asked. “Have you talked to her about it?”

Joanna shook her head. “Not really.”

“Maybe you should ask her opinion,” Butch persisted. “Your decision is going to have a lot bigger impact on her than it will on anyone else.”

“Even you?” she asked.

“I’m a big boy,” Butch said.

In the silence that followed, Joanna thought about what had been said. She couldn’t remember her father ever asking for her opinion about whether or not he should run for office. Fathers did what they did. Discussion from outsiders was neither solicited nor accepted. Joanna had always idolized her father and been slightly embarrassed that her mother had never “worked outside the home” or had what Joanna would have considered a “real” job. Instead of being grateful for having a stay-at-home mother, Joanna had chafed under Eleanor’s ever-vigilant attention.

“I’ll ask her,” Joanna agreed finally.

The miles flew by on the almost deserted roadway. As they neared Flagstaff, fiat desert gave way to mountains and forest. As soon as they were within range of a signal, Joanna’s cell phone began to squawk. Butch plucked it off the seat.

“Who is it?” she asked.

Butch examined the caller ID. “It says Winfield,” he answered, “so it’s either George or your mother.”

“I’m voting for George,” Joanna said, as she took the phone, but it wasn’t.

“Has your phone been turned off, or what?” Eleanor Lathrop Winfield demanded when she heard her daughter’s voice. “I’ve been trying to reach you for over an hour.”

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“We’re between Page and Flagstaff, Mother,” Joanna replied. “The signal’s just now strong enough for the call to come through. What’s up?”

“What in the world were Jim Bob and Eva Lou thinking! For all they knew, Dora Matthews is a juvenile delinquent who could have stabbed them to death while they slept.”

“Dora spent the night?” Joanna asked.

“You mean you haven’t talked to them yet?”

“We’re driving, and we left the hotel bright and early. If anyone’s been trying to call me, they’ve had the same luck you have. The last I heard, Jim Bob and Eva Lou were taking Dora home because no one could locate her mother.”

“And they still haven’t!” Eleanor huffed. “The woman went oil without telling anyone where she was going or when she’d be back, so Jim Bob and Eva Lou kept Dora overnight, which I think was completely unnecessary—and atyour house, too,” Eleanor pointed out. “That’s why this county has foster homes, you know—licensed foster homes—to care for justthose kinds of children. And what kind of influence do you suppose that little hooligan is exerting on Jenny?

Cigarettes! Why, of all things!”

“Mother,” Joanna managed, “Jenny and Dora found abody . Someone had been murdered.

When you think of what might have happened to them, trying a cigarette loses some of its impact, don’t you think?”

“I don’t think anything of the kind,” Eleanor returned. “And I don’t care if Dora’s grandparents were pillars of the Presbyterian Church up in Old Bisbee. The daughter and granddaughter are totally out of control. A child like that shouldn’t be associating with our sweet little Jenny and leading her astray. You don’t put a good apple in with a bunch of bad ones in order to make the bad ones better, now do you? Life doesn’t work that way.”

As Eleanor continued to rail about the cigarettes, Joanna’s own temper began to rise.

“Mother,” she said, trying to sound unflap-pable. “There’s no use trying to blame the whole thing on Dora Matthews. Jenny has some culpability in this situation, too. Dora didn’t exactly force Jenny to take that cigarette. Dora offered it, and Jennytook it of her own volition. She told me that herself.”

“But the point is, Dora should never have had cigarettes at a Girl Scout camp-out in the first place,” Eleanor continued. “That isn’t the way Girl Scouts worked when I used to be involved.

What kind of a soft-headed leader is Faye Lambert anyway?”

“She happens to be the only person who stepped up and volun-teered for the job,” Joanna returned. “She’s the one person in town who was willing to say she’d take over the troop when it was about to be dissolved for lack of a leader, remember? She’s also someone who’s volunteering because she thinks Girl Scouting is important and not because she happens to have a girl of her own in the troop.”

“That’s my point exactly,” Eleanor said. “Faye Lambert doesn’t have a daughter. As a matter of fact, she doesn’t have any children at all. How much can she possibly know about girls Jenny’s age? What makes her think she’s qualified?”

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I’/\It/U )I’.1 I ( As usual when dealing with I{Iearlor, Joanna Zell iici temper I is ing. On occasions like this it seemed as though Eleanor never heard a word Joanna said.

“Mother,” Joanna countered, “if you’re talking about parenting skills here, let’s put the blame where it really belongs--on me. I’m where you should be pointing the finger. IfJenny and Dora are 0111 of line, haul me on the carpet, and Dora’s mother, too. But it’s not Faye Lambert’s fault that our children misbehaved any more than it’s yours or Eva Lou’s.”

“I should hope not!” Eleanor sniffed. “Faye Lambert isn’t the only one I’m ticked off at either,”

she continued. “I’m disgusted with George, too. He knew all about this last night—knew that Jenny was in some kind of trouble. He should have told me about it at the time and had me go along out to pick those girls up instead of calling on Jim Bob and Eva Lou. I can tell you for sure, if I’d been the one in charge, a girl like Dora Matthews would never have spent the night at High Lonesome Ranch!”

Luckily for her you weren’t in charge,Joanna thought. “How did you find out about it then?”

Joanna asked mildly.

“Jenny called a few minutes ago,” Eleanor said. “I’m sure Eva Lou made her call. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known a thing about it. All I can say is, I certainly hope you’re coming home today to get this mess straightened out.”

That, of course, had been Joanna’s intention—to drop Butch off in Peoria and head for Bisbee, but now, with her mother issuing orders, Joanna’s first instinct was to balk. “Now that the phone is working, I’ll be talking to the department and to both Jenny and Eva Lou before I make any decisions,” Joanna said.

Across the car, Butch Dixon smiled tolerantly to himself and shook his head. He was growing accustomed to the ongoing battles waged between his new wife and her overbearing mother.

“Aren’t you evenconcerned about this?” Eleanor continued. “It doesn’t sound like it. Here’s your own daughter spending time with the wrong kinds of friends and most likely headed for trou-ble, but you’re totally blasé. I don’t think you’re even worried about it.”

“Of course I’m worried,” Joanna began. “It’s just ...” Then, as though she’d been blindsided, Joanna had an inkling of what was going on with her daughter. When Jenny had agreed to sneak away after lights-out and when she’d tried that fateful cigarette, she had simply been trying to fit in—to be one of the regular kids. The same thing had happened to Joanna when she herself had been Jenny’s age and when Joanna’s own father, former copper miner and deputy sheriff, D. H.

Lathrop, had been elected sheriff of Cochise County.

In the tight-knit and socially stratified community of Bisbee, where what your father did dictated your social milieu, Big Hank Lathrop’s change of job and elevation to the office of sheriff had dropped Joanna out of her old familiar social context and into another—one in which she hadn’t been especially welcome. Her former friends felt she was too stuck-up to play with them, while kids with white-collar parents didn’t think she was good enough to be included in their activities and cliques. Some of her discipline troubles at school—like the fierce fistfight that had cemented her lifelong friendship with Marianne Maculyea—grew out of Joanna’s efforts to fit in, of trying
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to find a place where she would be accepted.

Before Eleanor could say anything more, the phone beeped in her hand. “Look, Mom,” Joanna said, knowing Homicide Detec-tive Ernie Carpenter was on the line. “One of my detectives is try-ing to reach me. I have to hang up now.”

“Tell me one thing,” Eleanor demanded. “Are you coming home today or not?”

“I’ll have to call you back on that,” Joanna replied, ending the call. After dealing with Eleanor, getting on board a homicide investigation sounded like a relief.

“Good morning, Ernie,” Joanna said. “What’s up?”

“I’m working the Jane Doe from Apache Pass.”

“What about her?”

“Doc Winfield says it looks like she’s been dead for a day or two. He thinks what killed her is blunt-force trauma. He’ll know more about that when he does the autopsy this morning. But believe me, Sheriff Brady, there’s a lot more to it than just being whacked over the head. The woman was tortured before she died. It was ugly—really ugly.”

Joanna closed her eyes and wondered how much of that Jenny and Dora Matthews had seen and how much of it they would carry with them, waking and sleeping, for the rest of their lives.

Meanwhile, Ernie continued. “We’ve had a crime scene team out there since first light this morning, and that’s why I’m calling you. They may have found something important. It’s one of those medical ID warning bracelets that says no penicillin and no mor-phine. It gives a name and address in Phoenix. One of the links was broken, so there’s no way to tell for certain whether or not it belonged to our victim, but I think the odds are good that it did because it doesn’t look like it’s been out baking in the weather tin very long. Frank tells me you’re going to be in Phoenix today. I was wondering if you’d be interested in trying to track down this address and see if you can find someone named Constance Marie Haskell. Otherwise, either Jaime or I will have to do it.”

Joanna’s homicide detective division consisted of two officers—Ernie Carpenter and Detective Jaime Carbajal. It was silly for one or the other of them to make a seven-hour round-trip drive to and from Phoenix in order to do something Joanna could handle without having to go more than a few miles out of her way.

“Do you have an address and phone number?” she asked. Motioning to the notepad on her dashboard, Joanna pantomimed to Butch that she needed him to write something down. Ernie read off the name from the bracelet as well as the phone number and an address on Southeast Encanto Drive. Joanna repeated the information for Butch’s benefit so he could jot it down.

“Anything else I should know about this?” Joanna asked when they finished.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Ernie said. “Just what I said a minute ago. The bracelet could belong to our victim, but we don’t know that for sure.”

“In other words, you don’t want me bouncing up to the front door and saying, ‘Does
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Constance Marie Haskell live here and, if so, would you mind letting me talk to her because I need to find out whether she’s alive or dead’? I should be able to come up with something a little more appropriate than that.”

“But if you’d like me to ask someone from Phoenix PD to han-dle it . . .” Ernie began.

“No, no,” Joanna told him. “It’s no trouble. What’s Frank up to this morning? I haven’t heard from him yet.”

“I’m not surprised. He was out at the crime scene most of the night. He’s most likely home grabbing some shut-eye.”

“Probably a good idea,” Joanna said. “But I’m curious about something. Did you two discuss the possibility that this latest homicide might be related to our carjacker?”

Ernie Carpenter gave a hearty chuckle. “You sure you didn’t already talk about this with Chief Deputy Montoya or Doc Winfield?”

“No,” Joanna said. “I never discussed it with either one of them.”

“Well, then it’s a case of great minds thinking alike. The three of us were talking it over last night out at the scene. The problem is, there haven’t been any fatalities before this, but our guy could be turning up the heat. My understanding was that Frank was alerting all deputies and Border Patrol agents to be on the lookout lot another stolen car. But we have no idea what kind of car we’re looking for. That’s where checking out that address up in Phoenix comes into play.”

It made Joanna feel good to realize that the theory she had dreamed up on her own during a relatively sleepless night was the one her investigators had come up with as well.

“What’s the scoop on Dora Matthews? My mother just told me that she’s still out at the ranch.”

“You know who she is, don’t you?” Ernie asked.

“Eva Lou told me last night. Her mother used to be Sally Pommer. I know of her, but not all that much. She was a couple of years ahead of me in school. You still haven’t found her?”

“That’s right. We sent a deputy up to the house last night and again this morning, but there’s still no sign of her.”

“That’s not so surprising,” Joanna said. “If Sally Matthews thought Dora would be out camping the whole weekend, maybe she decided to do something on her own—go on a trip up to Tucson or Phoenix, for example. Single mothers are allowed a little time to themselves on occasion.”