A tow truck dispatched from Benson was the next to arrive. The young driver was eager to get hooked up to the VW so he could tow it out and go on to his next call. "Sorry," Joanna told him, "this is a crime scene. You'll have to wait here until the medical examiner gives you the go-ahead."
"Says who?" the driver asked.
With an acne-covered face and close-set eyes, the tow-truck driver barely looked old enough or smart enough to drive. "I do," Joanna said, flashing her badge. "My name's Brady, Sheriff Joanna Brady."
"Oh," he said, blinking. "All right, then. I'll wait."
Chief Ruben Ramos' dusty Crown Victoria was the next vehicle to arrive on the scene. He jumped out of the driver's seat and was on his way across the hill toward the van before Joanna managed to head him off.
"This is a crime scene, Ruben. We have to wait for the medical examiner," she said, placing a restraining hand on his arm.
Ruben stopped and turned toward her. His face, glistening with sweat and tears, was wild with grief. "But what if Frankie isn't dead?" he demanded. "What if he needs help?"
“It's too late, Ruben. That car's been hire for a long time, hours most likely. Look at the tracks. The wind has all but obliterated them. And all the windows are rolled up. It's probably two hundred degrees inside that vehicle. Frankie may have been alive when he went over the edge, but he isn't now.”
Ruben Ramos' shoulders slumped. Shading his eyes with one hand, he stared at the VW for the better part of a minute, then turned and retreated to the road. There the group stood waiting in uncomfortable silence. To Joanna's surprise, the next arrival was none other than Dr. Fran Daly.
"We've got to stop meeting like this," the medical examiner said, climbing out of her van. "What have we got this time?"
For the next hour or so, a surprisingly agile Fran Daly dared the eroded riverbank to take crime-scene pictures. All the while pictures were being taken, all the while the tow truck was dragging the VW back onto solid ground, Joanna continued to hold tight to the fantasy that it was all over, that her "spree" killer was no more.
That theory began to fall apart as soon as the door to the van was opened wide enough to allow her to catch a glimpse of the person slumped behind the steering wheel. The plastic bag over the head and the belt fastened around the neck were easy enough to recognize. Still, they could have meant something else. They could have meant that Frankie Ramos had taken his own life.
But when Ruben Ramos asked that the bag be removed so he could make a positive ID, all hope for an end of things evaporated.
Once Fran Daly uncovered the bloody mess, Frankie's father uttered an awful groan and then simply crumpled to, the ground. Standing beside him, Joanna reached out and tried to break his fall. So did Heck Tompkins. Between the two of them, they probably helped some.
And then, while Dr. Fran Daly abandoned her forensic duties and rushed over to administer first aid, Joanna sprinted back to her Blazer to radio for help.
Cochise County's spree killer was no longer neglecting to mutilate his male victims.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was only eight o'clock when Joanna stopped at the end of her mile-long driveway on High Lonesome Road. Putting the Blazer in neutral, she climbed out and then trudged across the road to pull that day's worth of personal mail out of the box. Three bills, two catalogs, and a postcard from Jenny. In the bright August starlight, she couldn't quite make out the background on the picture, but the foreground was clear enough. It featured a unicorn-a lovely white unicorn.
Back in the Blazer, Joanna switched on the reading light and studied the picture. Then she read the message:
Dear Mom,
This is the prettiest unicorn I've ever seen. Grandma and I got it at a drugstore in Tulsa.
The G's said to tell you that we'll be home sometime on Sunday. I don't know what time.
I love you and I miss you. And I miss the dogs and Kiddo, too. Don't forget to give him his carrots.
Love,
Jenny
P.S. Guess what? I kicked Rodney in the you-know-what and now he's being nice to me.
Reading the postcard, Joanna didn't know whether to laugh or cry. She ended up doing neither one. Instead, she dropped the mail, postcard included, beside her purse on the seat and headed up the drive toward her house.
In all the time she'd been sheriff, Joanna Brady had never been as discouraged or as beaten down as she felt that night. She had returned from the latest crime scene near Pomerene feeling totally helpless. She had stood on the sidelines and watched while EMTs from the air ambulance service loaded Ruben Ramos on board to airlift him to the cardiac care unit at Tucson Medical Center. And then she had watched the technicians from the Pima County Medical Examiner's office load yet another dead citizen from Cochise County-some other person she, Sheriff Joanna Brady, had failed to serve and protect-into the meat wagon to be hauled off to the Pima County morgue. Once again Fran Daly had scheduled an autopsy for early the following morning.
And all the time this was going on, all the while those necessary and official tasks were being done, Sheriff Joanna Brady had stood apart from the action and wrestled with her own demons and with the grim knowledge that somewhere nearby, a killer waited, coiled and deadly as a rattlesnake, waiting to strike again.
"You'd better go home," Ernie Carpenter had said to her at last. "There's nothing more you can do here."
When he said that, Joanna hadn't even bothered to argue. Without a word, she had simply dragged her weary body into the Blazer and driven away. That late-summer night was devoid of all humidity. Consequently, the desert cooled rapidly. She left the windows open, hoping to cleanse the smell of death from her lungs, and from her soul as well.
Soon, though, she found herself shivering-whether from actual cold, simple exhaustion, or a combination of both, she couldn't tell. When that happened, she rolled up the windows and opened the vent.
Halfway up the dirt track to the house she realized that the dogs hadn't come running to meet her. That was odd. They almost always did. Has something happened to one of them? she wondered. Tigger probably tangled with the porcupine again.
Then she caught a glimpse of the house through the forest of mesquite and saw that the whole place was ablaze with lights. Her first thought was that Jim Bob and Eva Lou must have changed their minds and brought Jenny back home earlier than they had anticipated. Except that when she came into the yard, rather than the Bradys' aging Honda, she spotted Butch Dixon's Subaru parked in front of the gate.
What's he doing here? she wondered irritably.
Once she had accepted that there was no way she'd be getting back to Bisbee in a timely fashion, she had called Kristin and asked her to track down Butch and tell him what was happening. She had wanted to let him know that once again, through no fault of her own, she wouldn't be able to make their early-evening date.
That had been hours ago. She might have been happy to see him at five or six, but she wasn't the least bit thrilled at the prospect of seeing him now. She was sweaty and dirty and tired. The night before, she had washed the clothing from her crime-scene investigation bag, but oversleeping that morning meant she hadn't had time to dry the clothes and repack them. She had ventured out to the Frankie Ramos crime scene dressed in her regular work clothes. In the course of walking the rock-strewn riverbank, she had broken the heel on one shoe. That accounted for what looked like a severe limp. One stocking, the third pair she had put on that morning, had snagged on a mesquite tree branch, leaving it with a three-inch-wide ladder run that went from mid-thigh all the way down to her ankle.