“Right.”
“See?” he said. “Like mother, like daughter. Eleanor Winfield isn’t known for taking easy positions, either. Has either one of you thought about asking Jenny for her opinion?”
“Butch, she’s only eleven. What does she know?”
“You might be surprised,” he said. “Now if we’re not having lunch, why are you calling?”
“Is Jenny there?”
Lowell, the school Jenny attended, was only three blocks from Butch’s newly refurbished house in Bisbee’s Saginaw neighborhood. On days when she didn’t have after-school activities, she usually went to Butch’s house to have a snack, do her homework, and hang out until Joanna got off work and could come pick her up.
“She’s up the street riding her bike. Do you want me to go find her, or do you want to leave a message?”
“A message will be fine. Tell her I’m on my way to Tombstone to check on a crime scene investigation, and I’ll probably have to stop off in Saint David on the way. It may be late before I get there to pick her up.”
“Don’t worry,” Butch said. “She can stay as long as she likes. I’m making a pot of beef-and-cabbage soup. Soup and freshly baked bread are always a winning combination on a cold winter’s evening. There’ll be plenty for you, too, when you get here.”
“Thanks, Butch,” Joanna said. “By then I’m sure I’ll be hungry. I have to hang up now. I need to make another call.”
“Take care,” Butch said.
“I will.”
Joanna drove down Interstate-10 all the while rehashing both conversations. Butch had slipped that four-letter word into the conversation so unobtrusively that she might well have missed it altogether. Still, he had said it-had admitted aloud that he loved her. Now the ball was in Joanna’s court. Was she going to let their affair grow into something more? Did she love him back or not? And if so, how long before she’d be ready to admit it to herself, to say nothing of anyone else, including her own mother?
Turning off the freeway in Benson, Joanna belatedly realized that she still hadn’t called Father Mulligan. She used the pause at one of Benson’s two red lights to key his number into her phone. He must have been waiting beside the phone. Joanna’s call was answered after only one ring.
“Father Thomas Mulligan here.”
“It’s Sheriff Brady,” she told him. “I’m returning your call. What can I do for you?”
Joanna had met Father Mulligan when she had come to Saint David for a Drug Awareness Resistance Education meeting, along with her department’s DARE officer, earlier in the fall. Joanna had been surprised to encounter the man at an evening PTA meeting in the local public elementary school, since he was prior of a Catholic monastery in a largely Mormon community. She had also been surprised to learn that the priest himself had been instrumental in raising money to fund that year’s worth of DARE activities and prizes in the community.
“We’ve got a little problem here.”
“What kind of problem?” Joanna asked.
“Well, we had our annual autumn arts and crafts fair here over the weekend.”
“Yes, I know,” Joanna said. “My department helped out with traffic control, remember?”
“That’s right. Of course I remember. And there was absolutely no difficulty with that. Your officers were terrific.”
“So what’s the trouble then?”
“It’s a lost-and-found problem.”
Joanna knew that in the aftermath of local festivals, rodeos, and fairs, lost-and-found items could include everything from livestock to motor homes.
“What happened?” she asked. “Did somebody wander off and forget they left a Bounder parked in your RV-park?”
Father Mulligan didn’t laugh. “Actually,” he said seriously, “it’s a bit worse than that. And since I know you personally, I thought you’d be the right person to call to discuss it.”
“So what is it?” Joanna asked.
The priest took a deep breath. “Someone left their son here,” he said. “His name is Junior. I found him in the church this morning before mass. He must have slept there over night.”
“You need to call CPS,” Joanna said at once. “Child Protective Services has case workers who are trained to take charge of abandoned children. They get them into foster care, locate their parents, that kind of thing. The sheriff’s department just isn’t equipped-”
“He’s not a child,” Father Mulligan interrupted. “I can’t tell you exactly how old he is. He could be fifty or so, maybe even older. He told me his name-his first name-and that’s about it. He couldn’t give us his parents’ names or the name of the town where he lives. I checked to see if he was carrying any kind of identification, but he wasn’t. And then I thought maybe there’d be some identifying mark sewn into his clothing, maybe on the labels. But there aren’t any labels on his clothing, Sheriff Brady. They’ve all been removed. I think someone cut them out on purpose, so we’d have no way of following a trail and finding out where they and he came from.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” Joanna asked. “I can’t very well put him in jail.”
“You might have to,” Father Mulligan said. “He was all right at breakfast this morning, probably because he was famished. But at lunchtime he was agitated. As near as we could tell, he wanted his mother. He wanted to know where she was and when she was coming for him. I had a meeting right after lunch. I left one of the sisters in charge of Junior. I thought he could sit quietly in the library and look at books. He got rest-less, though, and wanted to go outside. When Sister Ambrose told him he couldn’t do that, he knocked her down and went outside anyway. I found him wading in the reflecting pond, chasing the fish. So you see, we can’t keep him here. It’s not that we’re uncharitable or unchristian, but some of the brothers and sisters are quite elderly. They can’t be expected to handle someone like that-someone that unpredictable.”
“No,” Joanna agreed, “I suppose not. I’m on my way, Father Mulligan. I’ll be there in a few minutes. I’m just now crossing the San Pedro River on the far side of Saint David.”
She ended the call and immediately radioed into the department and spoke to Dispatch. “Do we have any missing persons reports on a developmentally disabled male named Junior, forty-five to fifty-five years old, and last seen at the Saint David Arts and Crafts Fair yesterday afternoon?”
“Nothing like that,” Larry Kendrick, Cochise County’s lead dispatcher, told her. “Why?”
Joanna gave Larry a brief summary of everything Father Mulligan had told her. “What are you going to do with him?” Larry asked when Joanna finished.
“I don’t know yet.”
“It sounds like it could be iffy for you to handle this alone. Do you want me to send out a deputy?”
“Who’s available?” Joanna asked.
“Nobody right this minute,” Larry replied. “We’ve had a bit of a problem out at Sierra Vista. Those environmental activists showed up on the Oak Vista construction site right at quitting time. They came armed with sledgehammers and spikes and sugar to put in gas tanks. In other words, they came prepared to make trouble and to do as much damage to the contractor’s equipment as possible. It was quite a donnybrook. Terry Gregovich had to call for reinforcements. Dick Voland ordered every available deputy out there on the double.”
“I’m the sheriff,” Joanna said brusquely. “Why wasn’t I notified?”
“I’ve been trying to page you ever since it happened, but your pager must be off line and your cell phone’s been busy. I figured if you were in your car you would have heard the radio traffic and would have known something was up.”
Guiltily, Joanna glared at her radio. She had turned down the volume while she was making her phone calls. And the pager, back in her purse, must have somehow turned itself off. “Sorry, Larry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be incommunicado. Should I forget about Saint David and head out to Sierra Vista?”