Rattlesnake Crossing (32 page)

"Well," Butch said, "that's what I thought I had figured out. I thought I'd write books about a kind of tough-guy cop. Now I'm not so sure."

"Why? What changed your mind?"

"You."

"Me?" Joanna said. "How come?"

"Because from what I've seen in the last few days around here, being a cop is a whole lot harder than I ever thought. And I'm not so sure I want to write about a tough guy, either. There are a lot of those in fiction, you know."

"Are there?"

"Sure. So maybe I'll write a book with a female protagonist instead."

"I see. A lady detective." Joanna thought about that for a time before she spoke again. "Have you always liked mysteries?" she asked. "Did you read all those old books when you were a kid, the ones about the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew?"

"I was a boy, I'll have you know," Butch replied indignantly. "I wouldn't have been caught dead reading a Nancy Drew."

"But you did read the Hardy Boys," Joanna persisted.

"Of course. Didn't everybody?"

Again silence filled the room and they ate without speaking. Joanna, wanting to keep things light, tried drawing him out. "Have you chosen a pen name yet?"

"Since I haven't written Chapter One yet, that seems a bit premature. So no, I haven’t"

"Well, you should," she said. "When it comes time to start, that's what's supposed to go on the title page—the book's title and the author's name."

"Butch Dixon," he said slowly, sounding it out. "That doesn't have much of a ring to it. Sounds like somebody who'd write auto-repair manuals. No. Butch Dixon isn't going to cut it. And Frederick Dixon isn't much better."

"Then what's your middle name?" Joanna asked.

"Why do you want to know?"

"I just want to, that's all."

Butch sighed. "I hate my middle name," he said. "I haven't had enough to drink to start telling people my middle name."

"You're not telling people," Joanna objected. "You're only telling me."

"Wilcox," he said with a glower. "Not two 1's like the town. One 1."

"Why don't you use your initials, then?" Joanna suggested. "If you're writing about a female protagonist, people might think you're a woman. Let's say Faye Wanda Dixon."

Butch choked on a sip of champagne. "Faye Wanda!" he repeated. "'That's awful."

"But you see what I mean."

"Okay, F. W. Dixon, then. That's all right, I suppose. But doesn't it sound familiar? I'm sure I know of a writer by that name."

When they finally managed to dredge the name Franklin W. Dixon out of their Hardy Boys memory banks, they gave up eating altogether and collapsed on the floor amid gales of helpless laughter. Joanna couldn't remember laughing like that in years. It felt good. What remained of her day's awful burden lightened and disappeared entirely.

"No wonder the name sounded familiar!" Butch gasped, wiping the tears from his eyes. "We were just talking about him. And I can still see it now, the name and the initials printed on the skinny little spines of those tan-and-brown books. What's funny is, I already owned both the F and the W and I didn't even realize it. And you're right, of course. Good old Franklin W.—F. W.—was a woman masquerading under a man's pen name, right?"

"Right," Joanna agreed. "Turnabout's fair play."

Eventually they got up, cleared the table, and loaded the dishes into the dishwasher. With the kitchen cleaned up and the dishwasher running, they took their last glasses of champagne out onto the front porch to sit in the swing and watch the stars. It was chilly enough outside to make Joanna wish she'd brought along a sweater.

Butch noticed her rubbing her arms. "It never gets this cool in Phoenix during the summer," he said. "Too much humidity. Too much pavement."

"Are you going to miss Phoenix?" she asked.

"I wondered about that, but don't think so." He paused. In the interim, a roving band of coyotes howled back and forth across the valley.

"See there?" Butch added. "You don’t hear very much of that in Peoria anymore. No, I don't think I'll miss the city at all."

"So that's why you were so busy the last few weeks? You were working on the deal to sell the Roundhouse?" He nodded.

"I was worried," she said. "Especially when I called and the phone was disconnected. I thought maybe ..."

"Maybe what?"

"I thought maybe you'd taken up with some other woman."

"That was bothering me, too," he said glumly. "I wasn't hearing much from you, either. You kept saying you were helping out a lot with Ruth and Esther, but I was obsessed by the idea that some other guy had moved into the picture."

"So we were both . . . well . . . jealous."

"I guess so."

"Don't you think that's funny?" Joanna asked.

"No," Butch said, shaking his head. "It's not funny at all. I'd hate like hell to lose you, Joanna." His voice seemed to break when it came time to say her name, as though he could barely stand to say the word aloud. Surprised, Joanna turned to look at him, but he kept his gaze averted.

"You mean that, don't you?" she said.

There was real wonder in her voice. After months of bantering back and forth, after months of what she had regarded as just having fun, she had finally caught a glimmer, a hint, of the depth of feeling Butch Dixon kept hidden under layers of jokes and easy laughter.

"Please, Joanna," he groaned. "Let's just drop it. I promised last night that I wouldn't rush you, and I'm not going to. I just want to be here, that's all. I'm not asking for anything more than that. I'm not making any demands."

She moved closer to him on the swing, letting the bare skin of her leg meet tip with the soft, worn denim of his jeans. Then she reached out and took his hand. "I wouldn't want to lose you, either," she said. She raised his tightly clenched fist to her lips and kissed the back of it. Under that light caress she felt the tension recede from Butch's hand and body both.

"Wouldn't you like to come inside?" she whispered. "No," he said. "Really. I think I'd better go. Now, before things end up getting out of hand."

For months Joanna had determinedly refused to acknowledge the aching tensions and urgent sexual needs of her body. By denying their very existence she had managed to survive, had managed to keep the fires inside her banked, her longings under wraps. Now, though, to her utter amazement, Butch Dixon had broken through her resolve, and had let a demanding and insistent genie out of its carefully bottled imprisonment. After months of self-denial, Joanna Brady suddenly realized that she was still young and still alive. It was time.

Letting Butch's hand fall back in his lap, she reached up and brushed her lips across the firm muscles of his jawline. "Things are already out of hand," she whispered. "So maybe we'd both better go inside."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The dream overtook Joanna hours later. The sky overhead was deceptively blue as she walked across a grassy field. Far away, under a tree, stood a group of boys. "What are you doing?" she called to them. "What are you up to?"

They didn't answer, but even without being told, Joanna somehow knew. They had captured a frog from a nearby stream, and she hurried forward, determined to rescue the creature. In order to save it, she had to move faster, but her feet and legs seemed mired in mud or deep, river-bottom sand.

"You stop that now!" she shouted. "You shouldn't do that. It's not nice."

One of the boys turned and peered at her over his shoulder. Then his mouth twisted into an ugly, gargoylelike smile. He laughed and pointed, and the other boys looked, too, while Joanna churned forward, propelled by a terrible sense of urgency mixed with an equal amount of dread.

She reached the outside of the tightly knit circle. "Let me in," she shouted. "What are you doing?" As she tried to see over one boy's shoulder, he seemed to swell before her very eyes, growing upward and upward until he towered over her. She went to the next boy, and the same thing happened. One at a time, the boys transformed themselves into huge, thick-limbed giants. They closed ranks and shouldered her out of the way, but now there was a sound coming from inside the circle—a terrible whimpering.

"Please stop now," Joanna pleaded. "Please. Didn't your mothers teach you any better than this?"

One of the giants whirled around and glared down at her. "Mothers?" he said. "Mothers? We don't need no stinkin' mothers." He laughed. Then, with a shrug, he turned and walked away. One by one, the others followed. Joanna watched them leave. Only when the last one had disappeared beyond the crest of a hill did Joanna turn her attention to the bloodied form of the unfortunate creature they had left behind.

At first she couldn't tell what it was. But when she stepped closer she realized it was a child: Jenny. A Jenny with no arms or legs, lying helpless and screaming in the gore-covered grass.

The horrifying dream dissolved as suddenly as if someone had flicked a switch. In the nightmare's absence, the keening; awful scream remained.

"Joanna," Butch said, gently shaking her naked shoulder, "wake up. You're having a bad dream." He reached over and flipped on the bedside lamp. "Are you all right?"

"Yes," she said, "I'm okay," but her heart was hammering inside her chest. Sweat-soaked bedclothes clung to her naked body. Unbidden tears filled her eyes while a sob choked off her ability to speak.

Butch encircled her with both arms and held her against his chest. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Joanna took a deep breath. "He disables his victims," she said. "He cripples them and then he leaves them to bleed to death. After they're dead, he mutilates the bodies."

"Someone in your dream did this?" Butch asked. His warm breath lingered on her ear.

"No," she said. "The serial killer we're tracking. The real one. I talked to an FBI profiler named Monty Brainard. He says we're dealing with a spree killer."

"But the killer was in your dream?"

"No, there were boys in my dream. I thought they were pulling the legs off frogs. But when I got close enough to see, it turned out they had Jenny."

"Boys had Jenny, not the killer," Butch mumbled. He sounded half asleep. "I don't understand."

"I do," Joanna replied determinedly. "Frogs and snails and puppy-dog tails, that's what little boys are made of. The profiler is right. The killer's a boy, and we've got to find him before he kills somebody else."

"Don't worry," Butch said, sounding now as though lie was more than half asleep. "It was only a dream. We'll talk about it in the morning." With that he reached across and switched the light back off.

Joanna could tell by the way Butch had spoken that he was already drifting off. She waited until he was snoring softly before she eased her way out of his grasp, pulled on a robe, and crept out of the room. The clock in the kitchen said 4:15 as she turned on the kitchen light. After starting coffee, she slid into the breakfast nook to wait.

In the familiar confines of her kitchen, with the lights on and with coffee slowly bubbling into the pot, the dream receded from her consciousness, but it left behind a strange sense of both uneasiness and comprehension. Monty Brainard and her subconscious mind had dealt with the same problem and arrived at the same answer. The killer was a young man, little more than a boy. A man/boy with no sense of right or wrong, and with a video-game player's concept. of life and death.

Intuitively, Joanna suspected that whatever his name, he was most likely the person Sarah Holcomb had identified as Frankie Ramos' loutish friend. With Frankie dead and unable to tell them who the friend was, Joanna knew they would have to come up with some other way of finding him.

There was always a chance that the evidence techs would discover a usable fingerprint. In the old days, latent finger-prints could help convict a known perpetrator, but they had been virtually useless in identifying unknown criminals. Now, though, with the help of AFIS—the Automated Finger-print Identification System—that had changed. By using computers, it was possible to compare points of similarity on unidentified prints to those of millions of prints, often booking prints, that had already been loaded into the system. With the computer searching for similarities, it was sometimes possible for a crime-scene fingerprint to lead directly to a named suspect.

AFIS made the odds of that happening better, but it wasn't foolproof. For one thing, assuming Monty Brainard's assessments were right about the killer's previous run-ins with law enforcement, his prints were likely to be in the system. The problem was, he was also being extremely cagey about not leaving prints behind. Even if a usable print existed at one of the crime scenes, Joanna knew her people were utterly overwhelmed by the avalanche of crime-scene evidence that had come in over the past few days. It might take weeks or months to sort through it all. In the meantime, how many more victims would die?

So how do we do this in a timely manner? Joanna asked herself. How do we sort through masses of crime-scene evidence to identify the killer?

When the coffee finished brewing, she poured a cup.

Then after donning a warm jacket over her robe, she tools her coffee cup out to the porch. There, sitting on the swing and soothed by the companionable presence of both dogs, Joanna considered the problem.

Monty Brainard claimed the killer was a loner. Maybe Frankie Ramos had been his one real friend—a fatal offense which had also qualified him as victim. But were there other acquaintances, other people who ran in the same crowd? They might not have been as close to the killer, but that didn't mean they didn't know him. Whoever those people were, they might very well suspect what the killer had done. They'd be scared now, worrying that perhaps they, too, had moved from the role of pal to potential victim.

The answer, when it came, seemed to materialize directly out of the steam wafting from Joanna's cup of coffee—Deputy Eddy Sandoval. Quietly easing the door open so as not to disturb Butch, she retrieved the portable phone from the living room and went back outside. Sitting on the swing, she dialed the department's number. Stu Farmer, the night watch commander, took the call.