"Will do. Hope this was a help."
"It is and it isn't," Joanna replied. "I feel like I'm climbing up a really tough cliff. Now I've turned over a rock and come face-to-face with a rattlesnake."
"There's one big difference between the guy you're looking for and your everyday, garden-variety rattlesnake," Monty Brainard told her.
"Oh? What's that?"
"As I understand it, a rattlesnake only kills when it's cornered. This guy is looking for kicks. So good luck, Sheriff Brady. You're going to need it."
"Thanks," Joanna said. "I know."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
For several minutes after getting off the phone, Joanna simply sat and stared at the instrument. Her conversation with Monty Brainard had opened a gate, leading her into what seemed like the valley of the shadow of death. It had allowed her a nightmarish glimpse of someone totally evil. What she couldn't reconcile in her mind was Ruben Ramos' view of his son with what she had heard from the FBI agent.
Yes, Ruben and Frankie were estranged. But were they that estranged? And if Frankie had just graduated from high school, that meant he was only eighteen now. That would have made him sixteen at the time Rebecca Flowers was killed. Would a sixteen-year-old "sissy" have done such a thing?
And what about Brainard's claim that between that first killing and the next ones, the killer had most likely been incarcerated somewhere? Surely if Frankie Ramos had already been shipped off to juvie for the better part of two years, Ruben Ramos wouldn't have been so concerned about his being charged with either solicitation or minor in possession.
Then there was the nagging question of ethnicity. Brainard had claimed the killer had to be white. Joanna Brady had never met Frankie Ramos, but she had no doubt he was Hispanic. Maybe when it came to sorting white from Hispanic, the agent was just flat mistaken. After all, nobody ever claimed that criminal profiling was an exact science.
Joanna sat there for some time longer with her door shut and without the phone ringing off the hook for a change. Most of her departmental troops were out in the field doing their respective jobs. It was hardly surprising, then, that the Cochise County Justice Complex seemed unnaturally quiet.
In the brooding silence, letting her mind wander and wool-gather, Joanna Brady remembered something Belle Philips had said the night before: "Clyde liked boys." She hadn't said that he liked a single boy. She had used the plural. More than one. Several.
Joanna's heartbeat quickened in her breast. Maybe that was why Brainard's assessment wasn't adding up. Maybe he wasn't wrong, after all, because there was another boy involved in all this. Maybe Clyde Philips had kept a whole stable of young men around him. If so, Joanna had an idea of someone who might know-Clyde's neighbor, the talkative Sarah Holcomb.
The only question in her mind was whether or not Sarah would talk to her. Joanna's last contact with the woman had gone offtrack so badly that she was half tempted to have one of the two detectives do the honors. After a moment's consideration, however, she realized that both Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal were far too busy. Both of them were probably up to their eyeteeth interviewing the soon-to-be-departing guests from Rattlesnake Crossing.
No, Joanna told herself. This is something I can do. "Kristin," she said after grabbing up the phone, "if anybody needs me, I'm on my way to Pomerene to see how things are going. I'm forwarding my private calls to the cell phone, so you don't have to worry about trying to catch them."
"Any idea when you'll be back?"
Joanna glanced at her watch. It was almost three. "Probably not much later than six," she said.
Once in the Blazer, she turned on her emergency flashers and went streaking up through Bisbee and out the other side of the tunnel. It was another broiling-hot August after-noon. After five days of no rain, the summer monsoon season seemed little more than a distant memory. The desert was a hazy, blazing furnace. At the base of the Mule Mountains, looking out across the flat plain that stretched from Highway 80 all the way to the booming metropolis of Sierra Vista, Joanna spied a troop of dust devils twirling across the desert. They looked like so many reddish-brown soldiers jogging, zigzag-fashion, in the same general direction.
Once on Rimrock in Pomerene, Joanna pulled up into the welcome shade of the two tall cottonwoods that over-flowed Sarah Holcomb's tiny front yard. Next door, parked in front of Clyde Philips' house, sat one of the department's evidence vans. Joanna was relieved to see it. That meant her people were still working. Ongoing progress was being made.
Joanna's knock on Sarah Holcomb's door brought the lady herself. "Oh, it's you again," she said with a disdainful sniff. "I thought you said next time you'd send one of your detectives. What is it you want?"
It wasn't a particularly welcoming or auspicious beginning. "My detectives are all pretty much occupied at the moment," Joanna began.
"I should say so," Sarah Holcomb huffed. "We're havin' a regular crime wave around here lately. Yes, indeed, folks is just droppin' like flies. I don't remember us havin' this kind of a murder problem back when we had a man for a sheriff. Do you?"
"You're absolutely right, Mrs. Holcomb," Joanna said placatingly. "The kind of situation we're dealing with at the moment is absolutely unprecedented. And that's what I wanted to talk to you about."
"Well, come on in, then," Sarah said, tapping her cane impatiently. "No sense standin' here in the doorway and lettin' the cooler work on coolin' down the outside."
Once in the living room, Sarah motioned Joanna back onto the overstuffed and utterly uncomfortable sofa, while she herself perched on the frayed arm of a worn, chintz-covered easy chair. With the cane resting beside her, she peered peevishly at Joanna. "You know, I'd a lot druther be talkin' to a detective. Like one of those guys on the TV. I specially like Colombo, that fellow with the old wrinkled trench coat and the bad eye. To look at him you'd think he's dumb as a stump, but that's what trips people up. They end up tellin' him all kinds of important stuff even though they don't mean to. That's how he catches them.
"So now, then," she continued, "let's get on with it. I don't have all day to sit around jawin'. Why don't you just come out and tell me what it is you want to know."
Please, God, Joanna prayed, let me look dumb enough so Sarah tells me what I need to know, too. She said, "Were you aware that someone was working for Clyde-cleaning his shop, that kind of thing?"
"Sure. Clyde called him Frankie. Don't know his last name. Nice-enough-lookin' little guy, no bigger'n a minute. Came over almost every night. Used to be he'd just show up every now and then, but since the first of the summer, I'd say he's been comin' here most every day."
"But when I was talking to you the other day," Joanna countered, "how come you never mentioned anything about him?"
"As I recall the exact conversation," Sarah pointed out, "you wanted to know if I'd seen anythin' out of line. Anything unusual. Well, sir, Frankie and that little VW of his was here all the time. So that wasn't a bit out of line, then, was it? That's just plain ol' business as usual. I'da thought it was unusual if he didn't show up, which he did."
"He was here Saturday night?"
"Yes."
"What about Sunday?"
"I already told you, Sheriff Brady. I was in Tucson Sunday night. I had a doctor's appointment on Monday morning. So Frankie might've been here Sunday night and then again, he might not. I've got no way of knowin' either way."
"But you haven't seen him since then, right?"
"What makes you say that? I saw Frankie just this morning, as a matter of fact. Me and my cane was out taking our daily constitutional when he come barreling down Pomerene Road like the very devil hisself was after him. I waved, but him and that old van of his went by me in a cloud of smoke and dust. I don't think he even saw me standin' there. Get thinkin' about it, the sun was glarin' off the windshield so bad I'm not sure if it was Frankie driving. Maybe it was that friend of his."