Shoot, Don't Shoot (3 page)

At that point, all he had wanted was a token—something that belonged to her, something to remember her by. The moment he had found the red parities in a drawer, a tradition was born.

Over the years, he had figured out how stupid he had been. It was a miracle nobody had seen him going to or coming from Rochelle’s apartment. Now he either took the panties at the time of killing—if he thought he could take them without investigators seeing it as a signature M.O.—or did without.

For years after killing Rochelle, he had lived terror—waiting for the knock on the door that would mean the cops had finally caught up wit him. The knock never came. And then one day Rochelle’s name had turned up on the list of missing persons who were thought to be the possible victims of one of the Northwest’s most notorious serial killers. The very night Rochelle’s killer read her name in the paper, he went to bed safe in the knowledge that the and slept like a baby, safe in the knowledge that the cops were no long looking for him. They were looking for someone else, someone they called a serial killer.

He had quit his father’s firm the next day and gone off on his own, working at two-bit jobs, but savoring the freedom. And knowing that his mother would always slip him a little something he got caught short.

Once on the road, he realized there was a world of difference between serial killers and recreational ones. The first kind kill because some evil compulsion forces them to. The second ones do it for the fun of it—because they want to.

Breathing deeply, he fondled the swatch of bright red silk. Rochelle. She was the one who had shown him the rules and taught him how to play the tne. Once he knew how simple it was to fake the cops out and trick them into looking the other way, everything else was easy.

All six pairs of panties were out on the table now, laying there in full view. Allowing himself to become excited again, he studied them under the glow of the candle’s flickering light, stroking each one in turn. One at a time, he held five of the six up to his face once more, trying to make up his mind.

As he did so, his heartbeat quickened. Which would it be tonight? Which one should he choose? Other than Rochelle, he had never raped his victims, not at the time. He knew better than that. DNA tests were far too reliable these days, and some cops were a whole lot smarter than they looked. Besides, he didn’t want to pick up some kind of sexually transmitted disease. One way or another, all women were whores. When it came to that, he believed in the old adage, Better safe than sorry.

At the time he was doing it, he enjoyed killing them. That was satisfying in a way, but he took his real pleasure from them later on, over and over, in the privacy of his own home. There—with the doors carefully closed and locked, with the blinds pulled, and with a scented candle burning on the table—they offered him the relief he craved. No questions asked.

By then his breath was coming in short, sharp gasps. His pants were bulging so badly that it hurt. He breathed a sigh of relief when he finally opened the zipper and allowed the caged prisoner to roam free. A moment later his other hand settled on newest prize in his collection—Serena Grijalva’s thin white cotton briefs.

It didn’t take long. He grasped himself and masturbated into the soft material, groaning with pleasure when he came. Afterward, he hurried to bathroom and washed out the panties with soap and water before hanging them on the towel bar to dry. Then he went back to the kitchen table, turned on the overhead light, and blew out the candle.

Sitting down once more, he picked up a single piece of paper that had slipped out of sight temporarily under Maddy Piper’s black lace panties. The paper was a fragment hastily torn from the corner of a yellow legal pad. A few words had been noted on it in painstakingly careful printing. “Rhonda Weaver Norton,” it said. “Fourteen twenty-five Apache Boulevard, number six, Tempe, Arizona.”

Using a strip of tape, he fastened the piece of paper to the bottom of the box and then sat there for a moment, admiring his handiwork.

“Rhonda,” the man whispered aloud. “Rhonda, Rhonda, Rhonda. You’d better watch out, little girl. The big bad wolf is coming to get you.”

CHAPTER TWO

Joanna Brady zipped the last suitcase shut and then sat down on the edge of the bed. “Off you go,” she said to her daughter, who was sprawled crosswise on the bed, thumbing through a stack of family photos.

“I like this one best,” Jenny said, plucking one out of the stack and handing it to her mother. The picture had been taken by Joanna’s father, Big Hank Lathrop, with his Brownie Hawkeye camera. The irregularly sized, old-fashioned, black-and-white snapshot showed an eight-year-old Joanna Lathrop, dressed in her Brownie uniform. She stood at attention in front of her mother’s old Maverick. In the foreground cartons of Girl Scout cookies were stacked into a Radio Flyer wagon.

Joanna was almost thirty years old now. Big Hank Lathrop had been dead for fifteen years, but as Joanna held the photo in her hand she missed her father more than she could have thought possible. She missed him almost as much as she missed her deputy sheriff husband, Andy, who had died a victim of the country’s continuing war on drugs only two months earlier.

It took real effort for her to speak around the word-trapping lump that mysteriously filled throat. “I always liked that one, too,” she managed.

Joanna usually thought of Jenny as resembling Andy far more than she did her mother’s side of the family, but studying the photo closely, she could see that Jenny and the little girl in the twenty-two-year-old picture might have been sisters.

“How come none of these are in color?” Jenny asked. “They look funny. Like pictures in a museum.”

“Because Grandpa Lathrop developed them himself,” Joanna answered. “In that room below the stairs in Grandma Lathrop’s basement. That was his darkroom. He always said he liked working in black and white better than he did in color.”

Carefully, Joanna began gathering the scattered photos, returning them to the familiar shoe box that had been their storage place for as many years she could remember. “Come on now,” she urged. “It’s time to go to bed in your own room.”

Jenny pouted. “Oh, Mom, do I have to? Can’t I stay up just a little longer?”

Joanna shook her head. “No way. I don’t know about you, but I have a big day ahead of me tomorrow. After church and as soon as dinner is over, I have to drive all the way to Phoenix—that’s a good four-hour trip. I’d better get some sleep tonight, or I’ll doze off at the wheel.”

Folding down the covers on what she still considered to be her side of the bed, Joanna crawled in and pulled the comforter up around her chin. Climbing into the double bed was when the now familiar ache of Andy’s absence hit her anew with soul-wrenching reality.

Instead of taking the hint and heading for her own bed, Jenny simply snuggled closer. “Do you have to go to Phoenix?” she asked.

“Peoria,” Joanna corrected, fighting her way through her pain and back into the conversation. “It’s north of Phoenix, remember?” Jenny said nothing and Joanna shook her head in exasperation, “Jennifer Ann Brady, you know I have to go. We’ve been over this a million times.”

“But since you’re already elected sheriff, how come you have to take classes? If you didn’t go to the academy, they wouldn’t diselect you, would they?”

“Diselect isn’t a word,” Joanna pointed out. “But you’re right. Even if I flunked this course—which I won’t—no one is going to take my badge away.”

“Then why go? Why couldn’t you just stay home instead of going all the way up there? I want you here.”

Joanna tried to be patient. “I may have been elected sheriff,” she explained, “but I’ve never been a real police officer—a trained police officer—before. I know something about it because of Grandpa Lathrop and Daddy, but the bottom line is I know a whole lot more about selling insurance than I do about being a cop. The most important job the sheriff does is to be the department’s leader. You know what a leader is, don’t you?”

Jenny considered for a moment before she nodded. “Mrs. Mosley’s my Brownie leader.”

“Right. And what does she do?”

“She takes us on camp-outs. She shows us how to make things, like sit-upons and buddy-burners and stuff. Last week she started teaching us how to tie knots.”

“But she couldn’t teach you how to do any of those things if she didn’t already know them herself, could she?”

Jennifer shrugged. “I guess not,” she said.

“Being sheriff is just like being a troop leader,” Joanna explained. “In order to lead the department, I have to be able to show the people who work under me that I know what’s going on—that I know what I’m doing. I have to know what to do and how to do it before I can tell my officers what I expect of them. And the only way to learn all those things in a hurry is to take a crash course like the one they offer at the Arizona Police Officers Academy.”

“But why does it have to start the week before Thanksgiving?” Jenny objected. “Couldn’t it start afterward? You won’t even be back home until two days before Christmas. When will we go Christmas shopping?”

Andrew Roy Brady, Joanna’s husband and Jenny’s father, had been gunned down in mid-September and had died a day later. After ten years of marriage, this was the first holiday season Joanna would spend without him. She couldn’t very well tell Jenny how much she dreaded what was coming, starting with Thanksgiving later that week.

After all, with Andy dead, what did Joanna have to be thankful for? How could she explain to her daughter that the little house the family had lived in on Lonesome Ranch—the only home Jenny had ever known—was the very last place Joanna Brady wanted to be when it came time for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner? How would she be able to eat a celebratory dinner with an empty place in Andy’s spot at the head of the table? How could make Jenny understand how much Joanna dreaded the prospect of hauling the holiday decorations down from the tiny attic or of putting up a tree? Some words simply couldn’t be spoken.

“Thanksgiving is already under control,” Joanna said firmly. “Grandma and Grandpa Brady will bring you up to see me right after school on Wednesday afternoon. We’ll have a nice Thanksgiving dinner in the restaurant at the hotel. I won’t have to be in class again until Monday. We’ll have the whole weekend together up until Sunday afternoon. Maybe we can do some of our Christmas shopping then. We might even try visiting the Phoenix Zoo. Would you like that?”

“I guess,” Jenny answered without enthusiasm. “Why isn’t Grandma Lathrop coming along? Didn’t you ask her?”

Good question, Joanna thought. Why isn’t my mother coming along? Eleanor Lathrop had been invited to join the Thanksgiving expedition not just once, but three separate times—by Joanna and by both Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady. Eleanor had turned down each separate invitation. She claimed she had some pressing social engagement that would keep her from spending even one night away from home, to say nothing of three. Joanna had no doubt that Eleanor would have been more enthusiastic about the trip had the idea been hers originally rather than Jim Bob and Eva Lou’s. That was something else Joanna couldn’t explain to Jenny.

“I asked her, but I guess she’s just too busy,” Joanna answered lamely. With a firm but loving shove, Joanna finally booted her daughter out of bed. “Go on, now. It’s time to get in your own bed.”

Reluctantly, Jenny made her way across the room. She stopped beside the three packed and zippered suitcases. She glowered at them as if they were cause rather than result. “I liked it better when Daddy was here,” she said.

Joanna knew part of the reason Jenny didn’t want to go to her own room—part of the reason she didn’t want her mother to be away from home—stemmed from a totally understandable sense of loss. The child was still grieving, and rightfully so. And although Jenny’s blurted words weren’t meant to be hurtful to her mother, they hurt nonetheless.

Joanna winced. “So did I,” she answered.

Jenny made it as far as the bedroom door before she paused again. “Come on, you dogs,” she ordered. “Time for bed.”

Slowly Sadie and Tigger, Jenny’s two dogs, rose from their sprawled sleeping positions on the bedside rug. They both stretched languorously, then followed Jenny out of the room. When the door closed, Joanna switched off her light and then lay there in the dark, wrestling with her own feelings of loneliness and grief.

She had been agonizingly honest when she told Jenny that she too had liked things better the way they were before Andy’s death. It was two months now since Joanna had found Andy lying wounded and bleeding in the sand beside his pickup. There were still times when she couldn’t believe he was gone, when she wanted to call him up at work to tell him about something Jenny had said or done. Times Joanna longed to have him sitting across from her in the breakfast nook, drinking coffee and talking over the day’s scheduling logistics. Times she wanted desperately to have him back beside her in the bed so she could cuddle up next to his back and draw Andy’s radiating warmth into her own body. Even now her feet were so distressingly cold that she wondered if she’d ever be able to get to sleep.

Minutes later, despite her cold feet, Joanna was starting to drift off when the telephone rang. She snapped on the light before picking up the receiver. It was almost eleven. “Hello?”

“Damn,” Chief Deputy for Administration Frank Montoya said, hearing her sleep-fogged voice. “It’s late, isn’t it? I just got home a few minutes ago, but I should have checked the time before I called. I woke you up, didn’t I?”_

“It’s okay, Frank,” Joanna mumbled as graciously as she could manage. “I wasn’t really asleep. What’s up?”

Frank Montoya, the former Willcox city marshal, had been one of Joanna’s two opponents in her race for he office of sheriff. In joint appearances on the campaign trail, they had each confronted the loud-mouthed third candidate, Al Freeman. Those appearances had resulted in the formation of an unlikely friendship. Once elected and trying to handle the department’s entrenched and none-too-subtle opposition to her new administration, Joanna had drafted fellow outsider Frank Montoya to serve as her chief deputy for administration.