Mallory whistled. “Nice family.”
“Isn’t that the truth!”
While Mallory went to check on Clete Rogers, Ernie walked over to Joanna. His thick, bushy eyebrows were beetled into a frown. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
“As I drove up, I saw what was happening,” Ernie continued. “The woman was coming right at you, Joanna. She’s so much bigger than you are, I thought for sure you were a goner. The next thing I knew, though, she was flying through the air like some kind of rag doll. Nice move. Who showed you that one?”
As relief flooded through Joanna’s body, she remembered those countless summertime sessions out in the yard at High Lonesome Ranch where Andy had taught both his wife and daughter a collection of self-defense moves. He had taught them to use a thumbhold that could bring even the most burly opponent to his knees. Not only that, Andy had shown Joanna and Jenny how an attacker’s own body weight could be used against him. Or her, as the case might be.
On wrestling mats Andy had borrowed from one of his old high school coaches at Bisbee High, they had practiced time and again until they had perfected their technique-until Joanna could throw Andy and until Jenny, in turn, could throw her mother. At the time it had seemed like little more than a game-something inexpensive that the financially strapped family could do together. Back then it had never occurred to Joanna that those very skills might one day mean the difference between life and death-between walking away from a fight as opposed to being carried away on a stretcher.
“It’s a gift,” Joanna told Ernie.
Ernie’s frown deepened. “You mean it’s something you were born knowing?”
Joanna shook her head. “No, I mean it’s something Andy taught me before he died. A gift from him.”
“Well,” Ernie Carpenter said. “It’s pretty damned impressive.”
Frank Montoya came up behind them. In his early thirties, Frank was a tall man with a medium build. In hopes of disguising his receding hairline, he kept his hair barbered in a precision crew cut.
“Ernie!” Frank exclaimed. “You’re already here. Good. Doc Daly sent me to find you. She’s almost ready to start the proceedings, and she was hoping you’d arrived.” Frank stopped and looked around at the collection of haphazardly parked cars. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Was there a fender bender or something?”
Joanna chuckled nervously. “No. Chapter two in the Rogers family feud. I’ve asked Sergeant Mallory to place Susan under arrest. Other than that, everything’s fine.”
“You’re sure?” Frank asked.
The very real concern fellow officers showed one another never failed to touch Joanna. “Really,” she said, “I’m fine, Frank. Lead the way to the crime scene. Let’s not keep Fran Daly waiting.”
“If you expect me to arrest her,” Mallory objected, “what about statements? I’m going to need to talk to both you and your detective here.”
“We won’t go back to Bisbee without talking to you, Sergeant Mallory,” Joanna reassured him. “But right this minute, working with Dr. Daly takes precedence.”
As Joanna followed Frank Montoya and Ernie Carpenter into the cholla grove, she slipped her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed Dick Voland’s number. “I just had a little run-in with Clete Rogers’ sister,” she told him. “She seems to think her mother’s boyfriend may have had something to do with all this. His name’s Farley Adams or Adams Farley. I forget which. Anyway, if Detective Carbajal turns up there, you might have him take a run to the mining claim out on Outlaw Mountain. Regardless of what Susan Jenkins thinks about the guy, we owe him the common courtesy of letting him know what’s happened to Alice. I don’t think anyone else is going to do it. Besides, in the process, between Sunday and now, maybe he’ll have remembered some little detail that might help us.”
“Will do,” Dick replied. “Besides, regardless of whether or not they’re suspects, it never hurts to chat with survivors.”
“Also, you may want to have one of the town marshals over in Tombstone slap some crime scene tape across the entrance to Alice Rogers’ house until we have a chance to process it and make sure whatever happened didn’t happen there.”
“I’m one jump ahead of you there,” Dick Voland told her. “By now, the crime scene tape should already be in place.”
“Thanks, Dick,” she said. “I knew I could count on you.”
Talking as she walked, Joanna had been threading her way into the thick grove of ten-foot-high teddy-bear cholla. Not paying close enough attention, she came too close to one of the monster cacti. A gust of breeze caught the end of her duster and blew it against one of the buds of new growth at the end of a branch. Instantly, a spine-covered ball the size of a baseball came loose from the branch and attached itself to the duster. Before Joanna could disengage it, the next gust of wind whipped the duster, cactus and all, against her shin. Several of the needle-sharp barbed spines sliced through several layers of material and jabbed into her leg. Yipping in pain, Joanna reached for her leg, only to knock into another branch with her elbow.
Alerted by her yelp, Frank turned around just in time to see Joanna pull away from the second cactus with a second spine-covered ball sprouting from one elbow.
“I always thought they called cholla jumping cactus because the cactus jumped,” he observed with a smile. “I see now the cactus stays put. It’s really the people who jump.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass,” she ordered curtly, “Come help me. This hurls like hell.”
Without another word, Frank pulled his Leatherman multi-purpose tool from the pouch on his belt. Flipping it open to the pliers configuration, he used that to remove the two offending cactus segments. Once the spines had been pulled free from her body, Joanna stood alternately massaging first her burning leg and then her arm. Even though the needles were gone, her flesh still hurt. It felt like the aftermath of a bee or wasp sting. Adding insult to injury, under her fingertips she felt a run tear through her brand-new pair of No Nonsense panty hose. When it came to crime scene investigation, panty hose were the most common casualty.
“Thanks,” she said gratefully as Frank restowed his Leatherman. “I couldn’t believe how much those spines hurt.”
Frank shook his head. “If you think this was bad,” he warned, “just wait till you see what happened to Alice Rogers.”
They both moved forward then. Deep in the grove of cacti they came to a small space where the cholla wasn’t as thick. Several of them appeared to have been knocked down. In the middle of the fallen cacti and on top of one-impaled on the three-inch spines-lay a small female form that was covered with ants and surrounded by a cloud of buzzing flies. Hundreds of needles dug deep into the woman’s back and sprouted from her legs and arms. The slightly bloated body was clad in a print dress and a lightweight sweater. There were torn nylons on her legs, but no shoes. Her vacant, empty eyes stared upward. One tightly clenched fist rested on her breast. The other lay outstretched on the rocky ground, as if searching for the pair of wraparound sunglasses that lay in the dirt just out of reach.
Fresh from her own excruciating encounter with the cacti, Joanna had difficulty looking at the cholla needles piercing Alice Rogers’ insect-covered sunbaked flesh. She didn’t want to think about how much the poor woman had suffered. It hurt Joanna to realize that she had died in such a horrific way-alone and in appalling pain.
A stiff breeze, blowing out of the west, swept across the scene and filled Joanna’s nostrils and lungs with the awful stench of death. Once she would have turned and fled from that all-pervasive odor. Now she simply waited, hoping that eventually her gag reflexes would settle and that her nostrils would adjust.