“I’m scared to death something awful has happened to him. I thought about breaking the window in the door and letting myself in to see. But the thing is, if nothing’s wrong, he’ll be furious. He hates it when i fuss over him or when I do something he calls fussing. But what if he’s passed out, or even worse? What if he forgot to take his medicine?”
“His insulin?” Joanna asked, innocently.
“Yes. His insulin. Ever since that business with his mother, he’s been so upset that his whole system has been out of whack. He hasn’t been able to stabilize his blood sugar. What if he forgot to give himself an injection and he’s gone into diabetic coma or something? Or maybe he got mixed up and gave himself too much. Either way, it could be bad for him real bad. I know he’ll be all bent out of shape with me for telling on him like this, especially if it turns out to be a false alarm. He hates it when people treat him like an invalid. But you people are all cops, aren’t you? If you break into his house to check on him, it’ll be all right. It’s not like you’d be going in to steal something. I just want to know that he’s okay.”
When Nancy finally stopped talking long enough to draw a breath, Joanna and Ernie exchanged discreet glances. The last thing they needed was to enter a prime suspect’s home with-out the benefit of a search warrant. Here in the restaurant, with a tearful Nancy begging them to go check on her boss’s well-being, the idea of breaking and entering seemed perfectly reasonable-necessary, even. But Joanna knew that if Clete Rogers was ever brought to trial for his mother’s death, even the most dim-witted of defense attorneys would be able to make hay out of what would then be considered an illegal search.
“What do you think?” Ernie asked.
It was a tough call. On the one hand, a man’s life might be at stake. On the other, a conviction. “We’d better go check,” Joanna said. “In and out. In the meantime, Jaime, how about if you streak back to Bisbee and pick up a search warrant. Just in case.”
Ten minutes later they were standing in front of Clete Rogers’ modest tin-roofed house. It was a white clapboard affair that clearly dated from Tombstone’s mining heyday. On three sides the house was surrounded by a thicket of agave. Some of the cacti had done their century plant performance, leaving behind long skeletal stalks that still held shriveled and blackened seed pods while all around a new generation of tiny plants sprouted from the hardened earth.
Seeing the dying cacti gave Joanna a weird feeling, as did spotting Clete Rogers’ much-dented F-100 Ford. The pickup, parked almost out of sight in a narrow-faced, one-car detached garage, had a forlorn, abandoned air about it.
Joanna and Ernie stepped up onto the porch and Ernie knocked on the front door. It was an old-fashioned piece of antique craftsmanship with a glass window at the top. Etched into the window was a magnificent stag, standing on a promontory in the middle of a forested glade.
Joanna and Ernie waited for several long moments before Ernie knocked a second time. This time, the old door shuddered under the force of his blows. Still no one answered.
“I guess we’d better break it,” Ernie said.
“Let’s try the back door,” Joanna suggested. “This one looks too much like a valuable antique for my taste.”
The back of the house contained a shaky but fully enclosed utility porch. The door with its horizontal panels dated from the same era as the one at the front of the house, but here the etched glass had long since been replaced by a single pane of ordinary window glass.
“Break away,” she told Ernie. “At least this one won’t cost as much when it comes time to replace it.”
Seconds after shattering the glass, Ernie unfastened the inside latch, opened the door, and let Joanna into the house. “Hello,” she called. “Anybody home?” But there was no answer.
With Joanna leading the way, they walked through the makeshift laundry room that had once been a back porch and on into the kitchen and living room. The whole house couldn’t have been more than eight hundred square feet. The tiny rooms all had the enormously high ceilings of houses built before the age of air-conditioning. The furnishings were threadbare, but everything about the place-from the worn linoleum to the brass push-button light socket-was spotlessly clean. Joanna had expected typical bachelor-pad debris-with clothing and trash littering the floor and with dirty dishes stacked on the counters and attracting bugs in the sink. She had visited several pits like that during her tenure as sheriff. It surprised her a little to see that Cletus Rogers didn’t play to type.
While Joanna stood in the middle of the living room peering around, Ernie disappeared into what was evidently a bed-room. “Hey, boss,” he called. “I think you’d better come take a look at this.”
The bedroom was crammed with furniture. Not only did it contain a bed, a huge mirrored dresser, and a nightstand, it also held a frail cherry-wood dining room table that evidently functioned as a desk. Here there were papers-neatly stacked and/or assigned to folders. In the middle of the desk sat a computer, an old desktop model that looked old-fashioned and clunky even to Joanna.
“What?” she asked.
“Come around here and look. The screen’s so bad that you’ll have to stand directly in front of it before you’ll be able to read it.”
Joanna squeezed her way between the table and the foot of the bed until she was standing beside Ernie. From that vantage point she could read the only two words printed on the sickly-green screen. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” Joanna asked.
“Doesn’t say.”
“What does that sound like to you?” Joanna asked.
“Well,” Ernie said. “Taken with our suspicions about what happened to Alice Rogers, my guess would be it’s the beginning of a suicide note. Or else it’s a complete suicide note.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Joanna agreed. “And since his car is here, he didn’t go far. Let’s go check the garage.”
The pickup was not only unlocked, it was also empty. The single-car garage, most likely built in the era of the Model Ts, was too small for the whole of the truck to fit inside. Only the front hood and fender nosed into the garage’s darkened interior. At the front of the garage the two officers found a series of wooden shelves, sagging under burdens of neatly labeled boxes and paint cans. Paint and boxes, but no sign of the missing Cletus Rogers.
Back out in the yard, Joanna and Ernie made their way around the whole of the agave hedge, but there was no sign of a body there and no hint that anything had been disturbed. Once back in the front yard, Joanna stopped and looked back. “I think it’s time to call in Search and Rescue,” she said.
“Good,” Ernie replied. “That makes two of us.”
From the moment Joanna called Dispatch and summoned Mike Wilson and his Search and Rescue team, she knew it would be at least an hour, maybe even an hour and a hall, before the team could rendezvous at Clete Rogers’ house. Forced to wait outside lest they be accused of doing anything improper, Joanna found herself frustrated with the idea of just standing around. Finally she opened the small suitcase she kept in the back of the Blazer. From her selection of “just-in-case” crime scene clothing, she removed a pair of tennis shoes, put them on, and laced them up.
“I’m going to walk around a little,” she told Ernie. “You don’t need a search warrant for that.”
Tombstone may have been the Town Too Tough to Die, but the same couldn’t be said for municipal infrastructure. Within three blocks on either side of the main drag, thin layers of long-ago-laid asphalt had now reverted to potholed gravel trails. As Joanna set out walking, she had to keep her eyes glued to the disintegrating pavement in order to avoid falling in one of the holes and twisting her ankle. The necessity of watching her feet meant she didn’t necessarily notice where she was going. Two blocks from the house, a large shadow intersected with hers. Glancing up, she saw a huge buzzard riding the updrafts.