What the hell have I let myself in for? Joanna asked herself. Obviously Junior didn’t belong in jail, not even in protective custody-as if that would be protection enough from some of the casually abusive thugs populating the Cochise County jail. The county hospital down in Douglas contained a mental ward, but Joanna was sure Junior wouldn’t qualify as a mental patient, either. He may not have been in possession of all his faculties, but he certainly wasn’t crazy. He was lost. Abandoned. And, as Joanna could see, terribly, terribly sad.
So if jail and the hospital are both out of the question, what do 1 do with him? she asked herself. In the past she would have gone straight to Marianne Maculyea with that kind of thorny problem. Marianne had the unerring knack of knowing just where to turn for help in sticky situations, but at this point in Mari’s life, she was at such a low ebb that she couldn’t even help herself. How on earth, then, could she be expected to help someone else?
That was as far as Joanna had managed to noodle the problem by the time she reached Tombstone. Once there, she had to call in to Dispatch to get directions to Alice Rogers’ home. It was on the far northern outskirts of town, past the dusty pioneer cemetery, and off on a dirt track called Scheiffelin Monument Road. At the far end of that road was a rocky cairn containing the worldly remains of Ed Scheiffelin. Scheiffelin was a hardy prospector whose silver strike had been the original foundation of Tombstone’s fabulous if short-lived mineral wealth.
Joanna’s father, D. H. Lathrop, had venerated the cussed independence of Ed Scheiffelin and others like him. With the Sonora Desert alive with marauding Apaches, Scheiffelin had left Tucson alone and on foot with little more than a mule, a chaw of tobacco, and a dream of achieving impossible wealth. And when that dream came true-when the silver claims other people had scoffed at came to fruition-Scheiffelin had gone on to wealth, fame, and high living without ever forgetting his humble roots. Years later, before he died in Oregon, he had asked to be returned to Arizona and buried near the site of that initial mining claim.
For D. H. Lathrop, people like Ed Scheiffelin epitomized the heroes of the Old West in a way the good guys and had guys-the Earps and the Clantons-did not. Lathrop had filled his daughter’s head with stories about Ed’s greedy partners who had done their best to cheat him out of what was rightfully his. Her mother had disparaged everything about Tombstone-the clapboard buildings, the phony gunfights, and the tacky tourist souvenirs. For Eleanor Lathrop the place was little more than a vulgar tourist trap-something to be despised and certainly not patronized.
Joanna had grown up with her father’s love of legends on the one hand and with her mother’s unflinching disapproval on the other. Thinking about Alice Rogers, it made Joanna sad that as far as she knew Alice and her father had never met. She sensed that D. H. Lathrop would have had much in common with a woman whose whole life seemed to be tied in with Tombstone’s fabled mineral wealth. In fact, Joanna wondered now: Did Alice’s mining claim at Outlaw Mountain have anything to do with her death?
Joanna pulled up to the group of cars parked on both sides of the road. Alice’s house was completely surrounded by the thick six-foot-tall adobe-and-stucco fence Susan Jenkins had told her about. Stopping for a moment outside the arched wrought-iron gate, Joanna considered the workmanship. Regardless of how much Farley Adams had been paid for building the fence, it was clear the construction project had been a labor of love. On either side of the gate and set at ten-foot intervals were beautifully wrought sconces made of turquoise-shaded stained glass and powered by carefully concealed wiring.
Having seen the fence, Joanna expected the house to be a luxurious hacienda-style affair. Instead, she found herself looking through the gateway toward a modest slump-block building that looked as though it had been thrown up on the cheap sometime in the fifties. With Junior tagging along, Joanna couldn’t risk venturing inside for fear evidence might be disturbed or destroyed. Instead, she flagged down a deputy and sent her into the house to locate Detective Carbajal and send him hack to the gate.
In the deepening twilight, Joanna noticed that lights showed at every window in Alice Rogers’ house. An ordinary passer-by, seeing those lights and all the extra vehicles, might have assumed there was a party going on inside. It’s a party, all right, Joanna thought grimly. Your ordinary crime scene fiesta.
A harried-looking Jaime Carbajal hustled down the walk. “Hello, Sheriff Brady,” he said. “What’s up?”
“I wanted to check on how things are going.”
“Okay, I guess,” he replied. “We’re working the problem. Looks like a straight-out burglary-no TV, no radios, no jewelry. We’re finding lots of prints, and we’re collecting them all. Between this house and the other one, that’s a lot of ground to cover. It’s going to take time.”
The detective paused and glanced questioningly toward Junior, who clutched his arms and gazed skyward, saying nothing. “Who’s this?” Jaime asked.
“I’ve run into a little complication,” Joanna explained quickly. “Junior here got separated from his family, and we’re trying to help find them. Which means, by the way, that I’m not going to be able to go out to Gleeson to check on your other crew.”
“That’s no problem. They’re about to close up for the night anyway. Besides, you’re driving one of the Civvys today, aren’t you?”
Joanna nodded. “Be advised,” Jaime Carbajal said. “The road to Outlaw Mountain is a mess. Strictly four-wheel-drive. We’re having to ferry the crime scene guys in and out in one of the Broncos.”
“What all are you finding?” Joanna asked.
He nodded toward Alice Rogers’ glowing house. “It’s just like the daughter said. This place has been ransacked. No way to tell exactly how much is missing, since we don’t have any idea whit was in the house to begin with. Well have to get relatives to help us with an inventory. The mobile home over in Gleeson looks like somebody did a fast job of packing rather than tearing the place apart. If you’re asking for my best guess, I’d say whoever left there did so in one hell of a hurry.”
“As in on the run?”
Carbajal nodded. “Maybe.”
Joanna thought about that. Farley Adams taking off in a hurry didn’t square with Pima County’s kids-as-killers pro-gram, but it was something to check out. If Farley Adams had nothing to hide, why had he run away?
“Do we have any idea what kind of vehicle he’d be driving?” Joanna asked.
“We do have that. A vintage Jeep, a post-World War II Willys model. It belongs to Alice Rogers.”
“Why is everybody so intent on stealing Alice Rogers’ cars? And how did you find that out, Department of Transportation?”
“No,” Jaime said. “I talked to Nadine Harvey, Farley Adams’ neighbor. She runs that junkyard in Gleeson right at the turnoff to the mine. As near as I can tell, she spends most of her life standing out in her yard sweeping chinaberries out of the dirt and watching everything that goes on.”
“Did she have any idea when Farley took off?”
“She knew exactly. Said it was yesterday afternoon. She claims Adams came hauling ass down the road about an hour or so after Frank Montoya left.”
“Yesterday afternoon,” Joanna mused. “That means he has a long head start on us, over twenty-four hours. Have you done anything about finding him?”
“Not yet. I’ve had my hands full, but I will. What do you think, an APB?” he added.
“No. I think that would be premature. Besides, a Jeep that old isn’t going to be hard to find. He may have headed for the border, where he can still buy leaded gas. For now, let’s post the Jeep as a stolen vehicle and wait for somebody to spot it for us. That way, by the time we locate Farley Adams, we may know more about what we’re up against.”