“Cold-cocked her with a beer bottle,” Dick Voland said gruffly. “You say guy. Did you see your attacker?”
“No.”
“How do you know it was a guy?”
“Because of the way the door hit me. There was real power behind it. Not only that, whoever did it must have lugged me out to the car.”
Voland nodded. “I see what you mean,” he said. “What about the suicide note?” he added.
Morgan looked puzzled. “Suicide note? What suicide note?”
“We one we found on the computer screen in your room.”
Hal Morgan shook his head. “I never wrote anything of the kind,” he said.
Joanna turned to Dick Voland. “Who does our composites?”
“We never do composites.”
“We’re doing one now,” Joanna said. “Call up to Tucson and check with both Tucson P.D. and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Find out who does theirs and see what it would cost to have him or her come down tomorrow. We’ll have him go to the hospital and get one from Deputy Long, and then we’ll take him out to Elfrida and get one from the clerk in the gas station and from anyone else who may have seen the man.”
“You want to do that on Saturday?” Voland objected. “That’ll cost a fortune. I thought there was a budget crunch.”
“There is,” Joanna said. “Since it’s a kidnapping, we could always call in the Feds…”
“No, no,” Voland agreed quickly. “I’ll do it.”
For a moment, the three people shut inside Joanna’s idling Blazer were quiet.
“It’s a frame, isn’t it,” Hal Morgan said at last. “Whoever killed Bucky Buckwalter figured you’d blame me. When it didn’t work the first time because that girl dragged me out of the barn, the killer decided to try again. This time with a phony suicide note. The only thing that saved me is the fact that the Buick burned oil like it was going out of style.” He looked questioningly at Joanna. “Would you have fallen for it?”
“I’d like to think my people are better investigators than that,” she said. “Unfortunately, there’s always a chance it might have worked.”
“Will he try again?”
Dick Voland was the one who answered that question. “I’d give that one a definite yes. Obviously we can’t take you back to the Rest Inn. Does anyone have a better idea?”
After some discussion, they finally decided to call on Father McCrady. One of his friends from seminary was the priest at Saint Dominick’s in Old Bisbee. That’s where Father McCrady was staying. One phone call was all it took to make arrangements for Hal Morgan to stay there as well. A few minutes after Dick Voland left to deliver Morgan to the church rectory, Ernie Carpenter parked behind Joanna’s Blazer.
“So much for my weekend off,” he said. “What’s happening?”
With that, Joanna launched off into a detailed recitation of the evening’s events.
The rest of the night, spent mostly in waiting, passed slowly. For the second time in two days, Joanna Brady found herself stamping around in the cold and the dark while the Cochise County departmental canine unit did its stuff-to no avail. It was almost midnight when the search for the missing driver of Hal Morgan’s Buick was finally called off for the night. Rusty, a muscle-bound German shepherd, had led his partner, Mike Cordell, on a trail that went from the charred remains of the Buick to a deserted public campground half a mile back downhill. That was where the scent disappeared.
“Whoever it was must have had a car parked here to begin with,” Cordell explained later to Joanna. “Or else there was an accomplice waiting there the whole time.”
“But wouldn’t Tom Givens have seen them if they came hack down the mountain after we were here?”
Cordell shook his head. “Not necessarily. If whoever was driving was familiar enough with the lay of the land, he might have known that there are a couple of private roads-ranch roads-that he could have taken. Following those, he could have made it all the way back to Elfrida without once touching the highway.”
“Damn!” Joanna exclaimed. “We had him and I let him get away. Why didn’t I think about checking out the picnic area earlier? I must have driven right past it.”
Ernie Carpenter was philosophical about the oversight. “I expect you had one or two other things on your mind right about then,” he said. “I know I would have.”
It was one-thirty when Joanna finally turned onto the road to High Lonesome Ranch. She had been so focused on what was happening with Hal Morgan that, until she drove back into the yard, she hadn’t given Butch Dixon’s presence there a single thought. She was surprised, though, to drive up and find the whole house ablaze with lights.
When she walked into the house, though, the place was dead quiet. Even the dogs, locked in the bedroom with Jenny, didn’t raise a racket. In the living room, Joanna discovered Butch Dixon sound asleep on her couch. His shirt was on the back of the easy chair. His boots and socks were on the floor beside the couch. One of Eva Lou Brady’s afghans covered him from chest to toe. There didn’t seem to be much point in waking the poor guy up just to send him back to his hotel.
Afraid that turning off the lights might disturb him, Joanna left him as he was while she disappeared into her own room. She set the alarm for seven and then tumbled into bed. Not surprisingly, she was asleep within seconds of putting her head on the pillow.
She awakened minutes before the alarm to the smell of brewing coffee and the sounds of Jenny laughing. For a moment she thought Andy was back. Ile had always been up early on weekends to make coffee and cook waffles and to share what he called “Daddy time” with his daughter. But then Joanna heard the unfamiliar cadence of a male voice and she remembered that Butch Dixon was there. He had spent the night on the living room couch.
Pulling on a robe and taking a stab at flattening her sleep-bent hair, Joanna hurried out of the bedroom. She found Jenny and Butch in the kitchen, where pieces of her vacuum cleaner were spread all over the breakfast nook. Frowning in concentration, Butch was pulling something out of the guts of the machine while Jenny, fascinated, watched over his shoulder.
“What in the world are you doing?” she asked.
Butch looked up at her and grinned. “Making myself useful,” he said. “Unless I’m sadly mistaken, once I get all the pieces put back together, this little hummer is going to work better than it has in years. By the way, I’ve fixed the broken handle on your silverware drawer and repaired the living room lamp that was falling apart. Later on today, if you’ll show me where you keep your washers, I’ll tackle that leaky kitchen faucet.”
Joanna was stunned. How dare he come in here and start fixing things? “Just what exactly…?” she began indignantly.
“Now, now,” he soothed. “What did you expect nee to do, sit around and twiddle my thumbs? You don’t even have decent TV reception. I was bored. How about breakfast? Jenny tells me that on Saturdays, waffles are the order of the day. I make a mean waffle.”
Jenny appeared at Joanna’s elbow with a freshly poured cup of coffee in her hand. She passed the mug along to her mother. “I told Butch that if he isn’t done with the vacuum cleaner, we can eat in the dining room. I’ll even set the table.”
“Butch?” Joanna asked.
“I said it was all right for her to call me that,” Butch said quickly. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Shaking her head and knowing she was licked, Joanna took the coffee and sank down onto the bench. “What’s wrong with the vacuum?” she asked.
“Part of the problem was all the dog hair hung up on a paper clip in the middle of the hose. I’ve been tinkering with the motor, though, too. You’re going to be amazed when I put it back together.”