“I talked to Officer O’Dea of DPS a couple of minutes ago,” Frank told her. “I met up with him on my way here. He said to tell you that so far there’s no sign of the driver.”
“That figures, but we’ll find him,” Joanna declared. “Terry and Spike are out combing the desert for him right this minute.”
Frank nodded in agreement. “Jaime and Ernie just pulled up,” he added. “I’ll go see if they have what they need.”
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“I’ll come, too,” Joanna said.
“I don’t think so,” Frank said. “Not right now. Sit tight for a couple of minutes.”
“But…”
“Nobody’s keeping score, boss,” Frank told her. “Lighten up. Give yourself a break.”
Joanna nodded. “All right,” she agreed.
She sat in the car and leaned her head against the seat back, but when she closed her eyes, all she could see was the little boy lying in the dirt with his shattered skull oozing blood. Minutes later, and against Frank’s advice, she was down in the dry bed of Silver Creek watching Jaime Carbajal shoot crime scene photos. The bodies of five of the victims remained where they had fallen. The sixth one was missing, but Joanna refused to feel any sense of guilt about that. When the time came, she led jaim and Ernie Carpenter to the clump of mesquite where she had found the dead child.
“Was the boy alive when you found him?” Ernie Carpenter asked, his pen poised over his own notebook.
Joanna looked her investigator straight in the eye. “Would I have moved him if he hadn’t been?”
Ernie’s thick eyebrows knotted into a frown, but he said nothing. Joanna was grateful he was willing to let it go at that. It helped that George Winfield came scrambling down the bank into the creek bed just then. His timely arrival provided Joanna with a welcome change of focus.
He glanced around the scene and shook his head. “Hell of a way to get out of Ellie’s annual fireworks party,” he said. “Where do we start?”
Joanna was still at the crime scene forty-five minutes later, when Deputy Howell came to announce that the K-9 unit had
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just radioed in for assistance. Deputy Gregovich and Spike had located the driver, who, in a futile effort to escape the dog, had fallen down a cliff and injured his ankle.
“Too bad he didn’t break his neck and save us all a hell of a lot of trouble,” Joanna told Debbie Howell. “Take a team of EMTs and go get him, but don’t bring him back here. If he comes too close, I’m as likely to shoot him as look at him.”
Five more hours passed before Joanna finally crawled back into her Civvie and headed home, having missed her evening appearance in Willcox. She was drained and tired and, surprisingly, hungry. She let herself into the darkened house and stopped off in the kitchen long enough to make herself some hot chocolate-not the instant stuff where you add hot water and stir. No, she hauled out a saucepan and made the old-fashioned kind. The recipe, learned at her father’s knee, came complete with canned milk, chocolate syrup, salt, sugar, and vanilla. She was just sprinkling sugar and cinnamon onto a piece of buttered toast when a bathrobe-clad Butch appeared in the kitchen.
“How was it?” he asked, pouring the remaining half cup of cocoa for himself.
“Bad,” Joanna told him. “A speeding Suburban full of UDAs turned over at Silver Creek east of Douglas. The department of public safety investigator estimates the guy was doing at least eighty when he slammed through the Jersey barrier at a construction site. Six dead, including a two-year-old boy. Twenty-some injured, some of them critical.”
“Six dead and twenty-some injuries,” Butch repeated. “How many people were in the car?”
“Thirty.”
Easing himself onto a stool beside her, Butch whistled. “They must have been stacked inside like cordwood.”
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Joanna nodded. “They were,” she said dully. “The driver was wearing a seat belt.
Naturally the son of a bitch walked away unscathed.”
“How are you, Joey?” Butch asked after a pause.
He knew her well enough to ask. Joanna didn’t dodge the question. “Not so good,”
she admitted, biting her lip. “I’m the one who found the baby.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That had to be pretty rough.”
“It was. He couldn’t have been more than two, Butch. And he ended up dead in a clump of mesquite with the back of his head bashed in.”
Joanna’s voice quivered audibly as she spoke. Butch reached over, put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her over so she was leaning against his chest.
“That’s not all.”
“What else?”
“I’m a sworn police officer, but I deliberately disturbed evidence at a crime scene.”
Butch’s carefully placed his empty cup on the granite-tiled surface of the counter.
“You did what?” he asked, keeping his voice low.
“The boy was dead when I found him, Butch,” Joanna confessed. “I know I should have left him where he was, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Instead, I picked him up and carried him to his mother. She was in a helicopter on her way to the hospital in Bis-bee, but I called it back. I gave her the boy’s body-so she could hold him one more time, so she could say goodbye. I know I shouldn’t have, Butch, but with all the other bodies lying everywhere, I didn’t think it would hurt …”
Joanna’s voice trailed off into a stifled sob. Butch pulled her close and let her weep into the shoulder of his terry-cloth robe.
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“It’s okay, Joey,” he said soothingly. “It’s okay. It sounds like this was one of those times when you had two choices, both of them right and both of them wrong.
You did what you had to do.”
Butch and Joanna sat that way for several minutes. Finally Butch pushed her away.
“With all this going on,” he said, “I’m sure you’ll have to go into the office tomorrow, right?”
Sniffling, Joanna nodded. “Probably.”
“Well, then, come on. It’s late. We’d better go to bed and try to get some sleep.”
Taking Joanna by the hand, Butch led her into the bedroom. It wasn’t until she was lying in bed next to Butch that she finally thought to question him about the results of Jenny’s barrel-racing performance.
“She did all right,” Butch answered.
‘All right?” Joanna asked.
“Jenny didn’t bring home a ribbon, if that’s what you mean,” Butch said. “But she was out there making the effort. She and Kiddo did a good job, but remember, it was also their first time out. Not only that. Jenny was by far the youngest competitor in the bunch. Don’t worry. She can hold her head up.”
“Was she upset that I wasn’t there?”
“I don’t think so,” Butch said. “Jenny knows you have a job to do, Joey. We both do.”
“I wanted to be there. I meant to be there.”
“I know you did, but allow me to let you in on a little secret. You can’t be in two places at once. Now hush up and go to sleep.”
Within seconds, Butch had turned over onto his side and was snoring softly. With the day’s events taken into consideration, Joanna expected to lie awake, tossing and turning, but she didn’t. Within minutes she, too, was sound asleep.
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In her dream, the SUV driver was on his knees, cowering in front of her. She was holding a gun in her hand. Not one of her little Clocks, but her father’s old .357-magnum.
“Please, lady,” the guy begged. “I didn’t mean for it to happen. It was an accident.
I was just doing my job.”
“Those people didn’t have a chance,” she told him scornfully. ‘And neither do you.”
With that she pulled the trigger and the back of his skull exploded. He fell onto his back. As a pool of blood spread out beneath him, Joanna turned and walked away, still carrying the .357.
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The horror of the nightmare woke her up. Shaken, Joanna reached across the bed, hoping to find Butch Dixon’s comforting presence, but he wasn’t there. His side of the bed was empty. With one hand over her mouth to stave off the retching, she piled out of bed. By then, Lady knew the drill and was smart enough to scramble out of the way as Joanna once again raced for the bathroom to deal with that day’s worth of morning sickness.