Exit Wounds (19 page)

“What’s going on, gentlemen?” she asked.

She was answered by Officer Bill O’Dea of the Arizona Department of Public Safety. “Oh, hello, Sheriff Brady,” he said. “We’re discussing who pays.”

“Who pays?” Joanna repeated.

“For the medical care,” O’Dea answered. “For the dispatched ambulances, the air ambulance, everything. Ed Coffer here of the Border Patrol was first on the scene.”

Ed Coffer nodded in agreement but said nothing.

“UDAs are a Border Patrol problem,” O’Dea continued. “I talked to my captain on the radio. He says Border Patrol needs to step up and take responsibility for this situation.”

The momentary anger Joanna had felt toward the missing SUV driver now coalesced and focused in laserlike fashion on that invisible captain who, far removed from the bloodied and broken bodies, was interested only in protecting his department’s bottom line.

“This is everybody’s problem,” Joanna snapped. “People are hurt. How about if we take care of the victims first and worry about the medical bills afterward? Since the driver took off, I’ve got a K-9 unit on the way. Does anyone know which way he went?”

More than happy to let Joanna take charge, the other officers breathed a collective sigh of relief.

“Somebody said he took off in that direction,” O’Dea told her, pointing to the left of the roadway.

“I want that man caught,” Joanna declared. “Bill, how about driving up the road a mile or so to look for him. My guess is that sooner or later he’ll be back on the highway trying to hitch a ride.”

“Yes, ma’am,” O’Dea responded. “Will do.” He set off for his waiting patrol car at a fast trot.

Behind her, a woman screamed out in a torrent desperate Spanish.
“¿Dónde está mi niño? Mi niño…mi niño…¿Dónde está mi niño?”

Joanna turned toward the EMT, who was fitting the woman with a back and neck brace. “Did she say something about a baby?”

The medic nodded grimly. “That’s right. She’s looking for her baby.”

Joanna turned at once to the three remaining Border Patrol officers. “Has anyone seen a baby around here?”

The three officers looked blankly from one to another, shrugging and shaking their heads. “Not so far,” Ed Coffer said.

“If she says there’s a baby, there’s a baby,” Joanna growled at them. “How about if you three go look for him?”

As the Border Patrol agents set off, Joanna once again scanned the scene in time to see the man with the broken leg and flayed face being strapped to a stretcher and then carried up the steep embankment. Then, for the first time, Joanna noticed a middle-aged Anglo woman in shorts and sandals sitting on a nearby rock. With her face buried in bloodied hands, she was sobbing uncontrollably.

Joanna hurried up to her. “Excuse me,” Joanna said. “Are you hurt?”

When the woman removed her hands, her face, too, was stained with blood, but it was the vacant expression in her eyes that provided an answer all its own.

“Who, me?” the woman replied dazedly. “No, I’m not hurt. I’m fine, but I’ve never seen someone die before. I was holding him—that man over there.” She pointed at the still and bloodied form of yet another man.

Little more than a boy, really,
Joanna thought.
A teenager.

“I asked him if he was okay.” Her body shook as though she had just emerged from a pool of icy water. “But just then he stopped breathing,” the woman continued. “I learned about giving mouth-to-mouth years ago. I tried to help him. I did my best, really I did, but there was so much blood coming out of his mouth…You’ve gotta believe me, I tried, but…but he died anyway. I’ve never felt so…useless.” She broke off into another fit of sobs.

Joanna crouched down next to the woman and put an arm around her shoulders. “You did what you could,” she said. “Nobody can fault you for that.”

The woman nodded vaguely, but she didn’t stop crying. Or shaking.

“Would you like a drink?” Joanna asked, offering her the water. While the woman stopped weeping long enough to gulp some water, Joanna realized that although this innocent passerby wasn’t physically injured, she, too, was wounded.

“You should probably use some of the water to wash off,” she suggested as the woman finished drinking.

The woman looked down in amazement at her bloodied clothing and hands. Using the remaining water, she began to sluice off. “Your face, too,” Joanna added.

As the woman doused herself with water, Joanna pulled the notebook and pencil out of her pocket. “You saw the accident?” she asked gently.

The woman shook her head. “No,” she said. “But I was right behind it, by only a minute or so. When I came around the curve and saw it, the dust was still flying. I couldn’t believe it. That idiot had passed me a mile or so back, out while we were still on the flat. I was doing seventy. He came tearing up behind me like I was standing still and almost ran me off the road. He must have been doing ninety when he went flying past. Then when he hit the first set of curves, I don’t think he even slowed down. At least I never saw any brake lights.”

Finished with the water, the woman looked questioningly at Joanna’s notebook. “Who are you?” she asked.

“Sorry I didn’t introduce myself,” Joanna said. “My name’s Brady. Sheriff Joanna Brady of Cochise County. When the call came in, I was at a rodeo waiting to see my daughter’s first barrel race. Who are you?”

“Suzanne Blake,” the woman answered.

“Are you from around here?”

Suzanne shook her head. “From Douglas originally, but I live in Las Cruces now,” she said. “My folks still live in Douglas. I come down once a month to check on them.”

“You’ll need to be interviewed,” Joanna told her. “So if you could give me your parents’ names and numbers…”

For the next several minutes Joanna gathered Suzanne Blake’s pertinent information, including the exact time of the accident and where and when she had been passed by the speeding Suburban. “If you want to continue on your way,” Joanna said as she returned her notebook to her pocket, “one of my investigators will be in touch with you tomorrow.”

“Fine,” Suzanne said. “And you’re right, I should go. I called my parents when I left Cruces. My father knows exactly how long it takes to drive from my house to his. He timed it with a stopwatch once. He’ll be worried sick.”

As a still shaken Suzanne Blake tottered off, Joanna glanced around at what were now several teams of EMTs from various jurisdictions who were busy carting loaded stretchers back up to the roadway. An Air-Evac helicopter, returning after its first run, hovered overhead, looking for a place to land and receive the next load of injured patients.

Joanna had no idea how much time had passed since her own arrival on the scene, but now the sun was definitely setting. It was still hot, but in the increasingly dark shadow of the mountains it was already noticeably cooler.

The K-9 unit arrived and sought Joanna out. “We’re here, Sheriff Brady,” Terry Gregovich announced. “Now what can Spike and I do to help?”

“Find the asshole driver who caused this mess,” Joanna ordered. “According to witnesses, he was wearing a seat belt, so he wasn’t ejected along with everyone else. I’m told he took off into the desert, and I want him found.”

Nodding, Terry headed for the wrecked Suburban with Spike. Not wanting to interfere with their work, Joanna let them go. Instead, she walked to the far end of the debris field, hoping that, by looking at the trajectory the vehicle had followed through the Jersey barriers, she would gain a better understanding of exactly how and why the accident had occurred.

As she turned around to examine the scene, her eye was drawn to a splotch of white barely visible beneath a nearby mesquite tree. She hurried over and was appalled to see a child lying there—the wounded woman’s missing baby. Pushing her way through the mesquite, Joanna saw that the toddler wore a diaper and nothing else. One look at the unnaturally still body and at the blood pooled around the back of his dark-haired head was enough to tell Joanna that he was probably beyond help. Dropping to her knees, she felt for a pulse, but there was nothing—not even the smallest flutter.

For a few moments, Joanna wavered in a maelstrom of indecision. The boy was dead. In terms of crime scene investigation procedure, dead victims are to be left where they’re found until the scene can be properly documented—measured, photographed, and recorded—before being packed off to the icy chill of a morgue.

But the desperate cries of the injured woman as she had called for her missing child still echoed in Joanna’s heart. Dead or alive, that mother wanted her child—needed her child—to be with her. As a police officer, Joanna was obliged to leave the dead baby where he was. As a woman and mother, she wanted to return him to his mother. A fierce skirmish shook Joanna’s very soul. In the end, motherhood won out.

Gently, Joanna lifted the limp child. With one arm supporting the boy’s bloodied head, she carried his still body through the rocky underbrush and stumbled with him up the steep embankment.

“Where’s the woman with the baby?” she demanded of the first EMT she saw. He gave her a blank shrug and a dismissive look that made Joanna wish she were still wearing her uniform. And her badge. She went on to the next EMT and to the next and to the one after that. Finally she found a medic she had never seen before but who at least knew what she meant.

“Oh, her,” the medic said. “I think she took off in that last helicopter. They’re taking her to Bisbee.”

“Call them back,” Joanna said.

“But, lady…”

“My name’s Brady,” Joanna snarled back at him. “Sheriff Joanna Brady, and I said call them back! Do it
now!
”

The EMT backed warily away from her and reached for his radio. After his summons, the helicopter was back within minutes. By then Joanna’s shoulders ached from the strain of holding the lifeless form, but she was unwilling to relinquish her burden to anyone else. When the door of the helicopter flew open, she alone carried the little boy through the sand and grit raised by the whirling blades. With muddied tears streaming down her own face, she handed her precious burden over to his mother’s outstretched arms and then fled from the helicopter. She didn’t want to be within earshot when the mother learned her baby was dead.

But at least,
Joanna thought as she darted once more through the whirling sea of dirt and grit,
at least she can hold him one last time. At least she can say good-bye.

Moments later Joanna found herself leaning heavily against the front fender of the nearest ambulance, barfing into a clump of sun-dried verbena that had grown up along the edge of the pavement. Somehow she knew that this wave of sour banana nausea had nothing at all to do with her own baby. She was still heaving when someone laid a sympathetic hand on her shoulder.

“Joanna?” Frank Montoya asked. “Are you all right?”

She wiped her mouth on her shirttail. “Not really,” she managed. “You wouldn’t happen to have any water on you, would you? Mine’s all gone.”

Her chief deputy disappeared and returned a moment later with a bottle of water.

“The blood on your arm looks pretty bad,” he said. “Are you hurt?”

Joanna looked down at her bloodied arm and thought about Suzanne Blake. “My heart’s hurt,” she said softly. “There was a two-year-old baby in that car, Frank. A baby whose mother was willing to risk death for both of them to bring him here. They came on the Fourth of July, for God’s sake! I’m sure she thought she was giving her son a chance at a better life. Instead, she’s hurt and he’s dead.”

Frank nodded. “Somebody told me there were five dead.”

“Six,” Joanna corrected. “Counting the baby.”

Frank studied her face for a long moment. “Look, Joanna,” he said at last, “my car’s right over there. Maybe you’d better come sit down for a couple of minutes.”

Any other time, Joanna Brady might have argued the point. With a docility that surprised them both, she allowed herself to be guided to Frank’s Crown Victoria and placed in the rider’s seat while he stood outside.

“I talked to Officer O’Dea of DPS a couple of minutes ago,” Frank told her. “I met up with him on my way here. He said to tell you that so far there’s no sign of the driver.”

“That figures, but we’ll find him,” Joanna declared. “Terry and Spike are out combing the desert for him right this minute.”

Frank nodded in agreement. “Jaime and Ernie just pulled up,” he added. “I’ll go see if they have what they need.”

“I’ll come, too,” Joanna said.

“I don’t think so,” Frank said. “Not right now. Sit tight for a couple of minutes.”

“But…”

“Nobody’s keeping score, boss,” Frank told her. “Lighten up. Give yourself a break.”

Joanna nodded. “All right,” she agreed.

She sat in the car and leaned her head against the seat back, but when she closed her eyes, all she could see was the little boy lying in the dirt with his shattered skull oozing blood. Minutes later, and against Frank’s advice, she was down in the dry bed of Silver Creek watching Jaime Carbajal shoot crime scene photos. The bodies of five of the victims remained where they had fallen. The sixth one was missing, but Joanna refused to feel any sense of guilt about that. When the time came, she led Jaime and Ernie Carpenter to the clump of mesquite where she had found the dead child.

“Was the boy alive when you found him?” Ernie Carpenter asked, his pen poised over his own notebook.

Joanna looked her investigator straight in the eye. “Would I have moved him if he hadn’t been?”

Ernie’s thick eyebrows knotted into a frown, but he said nothing. Joanna was grateful he was willing to let it go at that. It helped that George Winfield came scrambling down the bank into the creek bed just then. His timely arrival provided Joanna with a welcome change of focus.

He glanced around the scene and shook his head. “Hell of a way to get out of Ellie’s annual fireworks party,” he said. “Where do we start?”

Joanna was still at the crime scene forty-five minutes later, when Deputy Howell came to announce that the K-9 unit had just radioed in for assistance. Deputy Gregovich and Spike had located the driver, who, in a futile effort to escape the dog, had fallen down a cliff and injured his ankle.