Shaking her head and stepping out of the way, Joanna couldn’t help laughing at that, which was obviously exactly what Butch had intended.
On her way up to the Canyon Methodist parsonage in Old Bisbee, following behind the motorcycle, Joanna gave herself points. After all, she had let Jenny go. She had overcome her own objections and let her daughter do something daring, rather than holding Jenny too close and trying to protect her from everything, from life itself.
At the parsonage the three newcomers were part of a stream of well-wishers. They stayed for only a few minutes-long enough for introductions. Ruth was a shy but bright-eyed little one who clung fiercely to Jeff Daniels and didn’t want him out of her sight. By comparison, Esther was a pale reflectionof her sister. To Joanna’s way of thinking, Esther Maculyea Daniels looked very ill indeed. She lay, silent and listless, in Marianne’s arms, brightening only when Ruth’s face happened to appear in her line of vision.
“I can see why Jeff couldn’t bear to leave her,” Joanna said quietly.
Marianne nodded while her eyes filled with unshed tears.
“Esther’s going to be just fine.” Joanna spoke the comforting words with far more conviction than she felt. “Do you have everything you need? Is there anything I can get you?”
“Prayers,” Marianne answered. “I think we’re going to need a lot of those.”
As a new batch of visitors descended on the parsonage, Joanna, Butch, and Jenny headed out. Watching Jenny’s halo of golden hair disappear once more into Butch’s spare helmet, Joanna found something to be thankful for-two things especially. Not only was Jenny healthy-she was also a long way out of diapers.
She had barely made it to her desk when Ernie Carpenter shambled into her office. There had been dark circles under his eyes on Friday. If anything, now they were worse-almost black rather than merely purple.
“It’s Saturday,” she pointed out. “I told you to take the weekend off. What are you doing here?”
“These loose ends are killing me,” he said. “I can’t sleep anyway, so I could just as well be working.”
Joanna shook her head. “You look like hell, Detective Carpenter, but we do need you. Next week for sure you’re to take some time off. Understood?”
“Right,” he said.
“In the meantime, I’m on my way over to the hospital to watch Mr. Bly, the composite artist, do his stuff. Care to join me?”
“Sure.”
They were in Joanna’s Blazer, headed for the hospital when Ernie tapped his head. “I almost forgot to tell you. I spent some time late yesterday afternoon with the guy out at the Rob Roy.”
“Peter Wilkes?”
“‘That’s the one. Evidently Terry Buckwalter really is one hell of a golfer. Shoots in the high sixties and low seventies most of the time. As a consequence, there are only a few guys out there, besides the pro, who are willing to golf with her. But he did come up with the name of one guy who has gone out with her several times, even though she’s walked all over him. Larry Matkin. Isn’t he the young mining engineer who works for P.D.?”
Joanna nodded.
“And wasn’t he at the funeral yesterday, too?”
“He was,” Joanna said. “Not only that, he called me on Thursday and left a message for me to call him back. I’ve tried several times, but I’ve never been able to catch him.”
“After this deal at the hospital,” Ernie said thoughtfully, “maybe we ought to interview him.”
“Sounds great,” Joanna said. “Any idea where he lives?”
“No,” Ernie said. “But it won’t take long to find out.”
In Joanna’s head, the words “composite-sketch artist” had evoked the picture of an artist-a properly bereted, goateed and smocked middle-aged man with a sketch pad in of hand and a fistful of charcoal in the other. From that standing point, Matt Bly hardly measured up. He turned out to be tiny-five feet four, and incredibly young-twenty-four or twenty-five at the outside. He wore thick glasses, had a severely receding chin, and used a laptop computer rather than pad and pencil.
Joanna looked in on a recovering Debbie Howell on her way to Deputy Long’s room. When she arrived, the composite creation process was already in full swing. As far as she could the whole thing proved to be exceedingly slow, exacting, and eventually disappointing. It had been evening and Deputy had been too far away from the suspect to pick up the kinds of painstaking details necessary to put together a successful composite. When Matt Bly pronounced the picture finished, there wasn’t anything about it that was the least bit familiar. The artist, however, didn’t seem at all discouraged.
“That’s all right,” he said. “By the time I put this together with the witness we’re going to see in Elfrida, it’ll be better. Just you wait and see.”
While Joanna had been watching the artist in action, Ernie had been out in the corridor using a pay phone to track down Larry Matkin’s address. When Joanna came looking for him, the detective was scribbling something in his notebook.
“Got it, Sheriff Brady,” he announced. “Matkin lives in a rented trailer out by Gold Gulch.”
They took the Rifle Range Road to a trailer parked on the first gentle slopes of Gold Hill. “Why would anyone want to live all the way out here?” Joanna asked, looking up at the steep but knobby mound of rock that Bisbee’s school-aged rock climbers knew as Geronimo.
“Beats me,” Ernie Carpenter said with a laugh, “but it looks like you don’t have much room to talk. The High Lonesome isn’t exactly Grand Central Station. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with this. He’s got phone, electricity, and propane. What more could you want?”
The old-fashioned trailer-a moldering relic from the fifties or sixties was parked on a concrete slab. Out behind the trailer was a long empty corral. There were no vehicles parked anywhere in sight, and when they pounded on the door, no one answered. Drawn curtains made seeing inside the place impossible.
Leaving the door, Ernie sauntered over to the edge of the slab and then squatted down to examine the dusty earth. “Looks to me as though this is where he usually parks,” Ernie said. “But I’d say he hasn’t been home today. These tracks from yesterday at least, maybe even earlier.”
“Do you know his boss?” Joanna asked.
“Skip Lowell, the general manager? Sure,” Ernie said, “I know him.”
“Why don’t we go check with him,” Joanna suggested. “Maybe he’ll know if Larry’s been called out of town. While I drive, maybe you can call in and get Skip Lowell’s address.”
“Don’t have to,” Ernie said. “When he and Mindy came bock to town, they moved into his mother’s old place on the Vista. They’re in the process of fixing it up. God knows it needs it. The renters the last owners had in the place really let it go.”
After years of working for Phelps Dodge all over the world, Armand “Skip” Lowell had returned to his hometown as general manager of P.D.’s Bisbee operation. Mindy and Skip Lowell had been in town only a matter of weeks and were a long way into rehabbing the early-twentieth-century brick home that had once been one of Bisbee’s finest.
Joanna and Ernie found Skip on his front porch. Clad in paint-speckled overalls with a matching sweatshirt, he was carefully using a paint-thinner-saturated cloth to remove several layers of black enamel from the leaded glass panels on either side of the front door.
Skip glanced tip at them as they came up the walk. “Howdy, Sheriff Brady, Ernie,” he said. “Would you please tell me why someone would use this crap to paint over every goddamned-excuse the expression-window in the place?” he grumbled.
“As I recall,” Ernie said, “the last tenants who lived here didn’t want any of their neighbors to see the glow of the grow-lights on their marijuana crop.”