"What do you mean by that?"
"When whoever it was called me up in Tucson…"
"Dick Voland," Joanna reminded her once more. "He's my chief deputy."
"Right. Mr. Voland told me that the guy in Pomerene, Clyde Philips, was a homicide victim. Where he got that idea, I don't know."
He got it from me, Joanna thought. She said, "You're saying he wasn't murdered?"
Fran blew another cloud of smoke. "I doubt it," she said. "I think he got himself all liquored up, put the bag over his head, cinched it shut with a belt, and then waited for the combination of booze and lack of oxygen to do the trick."
"You're saying he committed suicide. Did you find a note?" Joanna asked.
"Good as," Fran said.
"And what would that be?"
"You saw the body, didn't you?"
Joanna tried to recall the chaotic scene in the bedroom with the dead man lying naked on the bed and Belle Philips shaking him, shaking and shrieking.
"Yes," Joanna replied.
"So you saw the lesions?"
Reminded now, she recalled that one detail, the series of angry red marks on the man's white skin-on his chest, belly, and thigh. She had noticed them only long enough for them to register as some kind of surface wounds, but that was just before Belle had leaped on the body, collapsing both the bed and the floor into the darkened crawl space below. In all the confusion that followed, that single detail had slipped out of Joanna's consciousness.
"I saw something," Joanna admitted. "They looked like wounds of some kind, stab wounds, maybe."
"Not stab wounds," Fran Daly insisted. "Lesions. Whenever I've seen lesions like that before, they've been on AIDS patients. I can't be sure without blood work, of course, but I'm guessing that the autopsy will bear me out on this. Clyde Philips might still have been able to get around on his own, but he wouldn't have been able to for long. He was suffering from AIDS-full-blown AIDS. Instead of hanging around to fight it, he used the bag and his belt and took the short way out. I don't know that I blame him. If I were in his shoes, I might very well do the same thing."
"But without a note," Joanna objected, "how can you be sure? And what about his guns?"
"Guns? What guns?" Fran Daly asked.
"The guns in his shop," Joanna explained. "Clyde Philips was a gun dealer. He had a shop out back, behind his house. It should have been full of guns. But it wasn't. From the way it looks, sometime in the last few days somebody's cleaned the whole place out. Taking an armload of stolen weapons into consideration, would have thought we were dealing with a robbery / murder."
Fran ground out the remains of her half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray and then, before Joanna could stop her, the medical examiner removed the ashtray from the dashboard and tossed the contents out the window. Joanna watched in the rearview mirror, hoping there were no live embers left to start a fire.
"That's what happens when people who don't know what they're doing jump to erroneous conclusions," Fran said as she slammed the ashtray back into place. "From that point on, the accuracy of the whole investigation goes right out the window."
Joanna could see that once Fran Daly herself made an assumption-erroneous or otherwise-there was no changing her mind. Sheriff Brady considered volleying back some smart-mouthed response to that effect or raising hell about her tossing out her smoldering cigarette debris, but after a moment, she decided not to. Save your breath, Joanna told herself. Dr. Fran Daly was the way she was. No amount of crystal-clear argument on the sheriff's part was going to change the woman. Instead, Joanna concentrated on her driving and considered the implications of what Fran had said.
Who knows? Maybe she's right about Clyde Philips. Maybe he really did commit suicide. And if it turns out one of today's two murder victims wasn't murdered, maybe the second one-whoever she is-wasn't, either.
After leaving the river, the three-vehicle caravan traveled up and up through deepening twilight and steep, trackless terrain. Finally, Mike Wilson stopped his Bronco directly behind Eddy Sandoval's. Putting the Blazer in park and switching off the engine, Joanna stepped outside and stood staring at a solid wall of sheer and forbidding cliffs that jutted skyward far above them.
Just then a low rumble of thunder came rolling across the valley behind them. Here we go again, Joanna thought. Here was yet another crime scene where investigation and evidence collection would most likely have to take a back-seat to Mother Nature.
Deputy Eddy Sandoval had been sitting out of the heat in his idling Bronco. Now he came slipping down the steep hillside to meet them as Fran Daly heaved herself out of the Blazer. "Let's get a move on," she said. "Where's this body supposed to be?"
Once again Dr. Daly succeeded in tweaking Joanna. Cochise County was her jurisdiction, not Dr. Daly's. As the ranking officer on the scene, Sheriff Brady should have been the one calling the shots. That detail of line of command wasn't lost on Deputy Sandoval, who, without responding, glanced briefly at Joanna. She was gratified that he checked with her before answering the other woman's question.
"Right, Deputy Sandoval," Joanna said, nodding her okay. "Tell us where we're going."
"It's up there." He pointed toward the cliffs. "There's a narrow rock shelf that runs along the base. Most of the way it seems solid enough, but just beyond the body it breaks off into a gully. From the looks of it, that's the spot where most of the water drains off the upper cliffs. There's been enough runoff the last few weeks that some of the cliff broke away. When it slid down the mountain, it took a big chunk of the shelf right along with it."
"A landslide?" Fran asked, pausing from the task of unloading her equipment from Ernie and Jaime's van.
Deputy Sandoval nodded. "I went down into the wash and checked to see if it looked safe for people to walk out there. I don't think the bank is undermined, but…"
Having just witnessed the collapse of Clyde Philips' floor, Joanna wasn't taking any chances. "Show me," she said.
Obligingly, Eddy turned and started back up the hill, past the two parked Broncos. Joanna followed on his heels. "Wait," Dr. Daly yelped after them. "You can't go rushing over there without me. You're liable to disturb evidence. Let me get my stuff first."
Joanna didn't bother to stop, but she did reply. "It's been raining for weeks now," she called back over her shoulder. "If there ever was any evidence lying around loose up there, it's long gone by now."
Eddy led Joanna to the spot where he had climbed in and out of a sandy creek bed. They slogged through damp sand for some fifty yards. By the time they reached the place where the slide had come down the mountain, Joanna knew they were close to the body. She could smell it. No wonder the dogs focused in on this instead of Trina Berridge, she thought. They could probably smell it for miles. And no wonder, either, why Eddy Sandoval was waiting in his Bronco when we got here.
For the next several minutes she examined the walls of the arroyo. In the end, she agreed with Deputy Sandoval's assessment. As long as another gully-washer of a storm didn't break loose another several-ton hunk of cliff face, the shelf was probably safe enough. After that, they retraced their footsteps out of the wash and then made the steep climb up to the shelf.
Once they were out on the ledge, footing was somewhat more solid than it had been on the hillside, but it was still a long way from foolproof. Here and there, loose rocks and gravel lay along; the surface, wailing to trip the unwary. The shelf was five to six feet wide and not more than three to four feet tall. The problem was that beneath that three-foot sheer drop, the rocky flank of the mountainside fell away at an impossibly steep angle. Anyone tumbling off that first three foot cliff probably wouldn't stop rolling for a long, long, way.