Nicaragua. A country, yes, but also a word from the history books. Joanna recalled what had happened earlier, how just talking about the sound of someone being kicked had been enough to cause Ephrain’s tears to flow. No wonder he carried a gun. And knew how to use it. And what about the two young men with him? Where did they come from? What had they seen? Whatever their origins, they trusted Ephrain enough to come here with him, to sit quietly in this restaurant with two police officers and to believe that, whatever was coming, Ephrain Trujillo would see them safely through it.
“Are you all right?” Frank asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Why?”
“You look… I don’t know… sort of uncomfortable. I was afraid…”
I am uncomfortable, she wanted to say. I’m wearing this godawful vest and. I can hardly breathe. “I’m fine,” she said.
“Would you like something to eat?” Frank asked.
I couldn’t squeeze in a bite without popping the Velcro, she thought. What she said was “No, thanks. I just had lunch.”
Forty-five minutes later, they pulled into San Simon, where two more sheriff’s department vehicles joined the caravan for the drive out to Doubtful Canyon Road. Half a mile beyond the locked and gated turnoff to Roostercomb Ranch, Ephrain Trujillo stopped the LUV just short of a low rise. He and his friends as well as Joanna’s team of investigators exited their various vehicles and hiked up the hill behind Ephrain. Once at the top, Ephrain stood in the middle of the dirt roadway and pointed to a small, rock-strewn clearing off to one side.
“There,” he said, pointing. “That’s where it happened.”
While Dave Hollicker and Casey Ledford began their painstaking examination of the crime scene, Jaime Carbajal and Debbie Howell began interviewing Ephrain Trujillo and his two so far nameless passengers. Debbie’s Spanish wasn’t fluent enough to do the questioning, so Jaime took the lead. With no definite jobs to do, Joanna and Frank stood off to one side while she briefed him on everything Ephrain had told her. They were standing there speculating about what Jeannine had been watching through her night-vision goggles when they heard a vehicle churning up the hill behind them.
They barely had time to scramble out of the way before an old open-air jeep, spewing smoke and raising a cloud of dust, charged over the top of the rise.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the driver demanded as he stood on the brakes and brought the speeding vehicle to a skidding stop a few feet shy of where Joanna and Frank had been standing.
Joanna recognized Clarence O’Dwyer at once from the jagged scar that ran down one side of his face, a remnant of a barroom brawl in which younger brother Billy had attacked his older sibling with the business end of a broken Budweiser bottle. Both brothers had been hauled into the county jail. The sutures to stitch Clarence’s face back together-all fifteen of them-had been done at sheriff’s department expense. She also noted the wooden butt of a rifle sticking out of a scabbard next to the man’s knee.
I wonder if this vest would stop a 30-06 slug at close range? she thought as she stepped forward to answer his question.
“Good afternoon, Mr. O’Dwyer,” she said. “We’re here investigating the attempted homicide of one of my officers around midnight last night. She was here investigating a complaint about a possible dogfighting ring. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
“Screw you!” Clarence said.
Somebody already did that, she felt like saying, but this was no time for tasteless jokes. “Do you know anything about it?” Joanna persisted.
“I don’t know nothin‘,” Clarence growled. “Now get off my land!”
“We’re well outside the fence line, which means we’re all in the public right-of-way,” she said. “It also means that we won’t be leaving until we’re good and ready or until we’re done, whichever comes first.”
In reply, Clarence flashed her a one-finger salute. Then he ground his gearshift into reverse and tore off back down the hill.
“Same to you, buddy,” Joanna whispered under her breath. “Have a nice day.”
Chapter 11
Joanna was still at the crime scene when Dr. Waller reached her. “Sheriff Brady,” he began. “I can’t imagine what you were thinking. You put me and the hospital in a terrible position!”
“Me?” Joanna asked innocently, but of course she knew exactly what was coming.
“When a woman claiming to be Jeannine Phillips’s mother showed up late this morning and when she asked that we process a rape kit, I assumed she was legitimate-that you or one of your officers had actually made a next-of-kin notification. Imagine my surprise this afternoon, during rounds, when there was a near brawl in the ICU waiting room between two women, both of whom said Ms. Phillips was her daughter. The one had come all the way from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. She only found out her daughter was hospitalized because a friend from Tucson called to check on her after seeing Ms. Phillips’s name on the local news.”
“How do you suppose such a thing happened?” Joanna returned. As she said the words, though, she was thinking about how the raised voices of two very angry women would have sounded in the hushed gloom of the ICU waiting room. And had the battle escalated to more than voices, Joanna suspected Millicent Ross would have been quite capable of physically defending herself.
“Right,” Dr. Waller said sarcastically. “I’m sure you can’t. And since the rape kit was illegally obtained, I’m not at all sure the results will stand up in court.”
Joanna felt a sudden chill. “So she was raped then?”
“Your name isn’t on the approved notification list.” Dr. Waller’s reply was crisp. “Privacy rules preclude me from giving you any information concerning her condition. Once I realized that we were dealing with an impostor, I would have thrown the woman out altogether, but it happened that Jeannine had regained consciousness enough by then to make her wishes known. So the fake mother is now on the official visitors and notification list. As for the real mother? She bitched me out three ways to Sunday. I finally had to have security escort her out of the building.”
Dr. Waller was pissed, and he was calling to do his own bitching-out. If he expected Joanna to repent her actions, his words failed to have their intended effect. Jeannine Phillips had been raped by her assailants. Knowing that left Joanna sick at heart, but at least Millicent Ross was now cleared to be there with Jeannine rather than the parents who had betrayed her time and again. In the face of Jeannine’s otherwise dire circumstances, at least that one small thing had gone right, but Joanna could hardly blame Dr. Waller for his entirely righteous anger.
“I’m sorry for all the confusion,” Joanna said. It was all the apology she could muster.
“No, you’re not,” Waller returned and slammed the phone down in her ear. Joanna didn’t blame him for needing to have the last word. She deserved it.
Frank had been standing there hanging on every word of the conversation. “She was raped?” he asked when Joanna flipped her cell phone shut.
Joanna nodded grimly.
“If they did a rape kit, we’ll have DNA evidence,” Frank said.
Joanna didn’t respond to that. She didn’t want to acknowledge that evidence from the rape kit might not be admissible, but it would still give them information they could use in the investigation to verify possible evidence they might collect in some other fashion.
“But is she going to make it?” Frank continued.