Jude Devine Mystery Series (46 page)

“What have we got on him?” Pratt asked.

“It’s all circumstantial so far.”

“I don’t want him lawyering up.”

“Then we’ll have to send him home some time soon, and we need for Perkins to play ball. I want her to wear a wire.”

Pratt looked startled. “Can we do that?”

“He’s a suspect in a child abduction and possible homicide. If he’s going to confess anything to his girlfriend, it’s probably going to happen as soon as they’re back together alone.”

“Think you can talk her into it?”

“Let’s give it twenty-four hours,” Jude said. “He’s told enough lies for us to hold him a while longer.”

“He’s going to ask for a lawyer,” Pratt warned.

“I’m not so sure.” Jude was still trying to get a fix on Miller’s psychology. “I think he’s holding off so he can paint himself as a poor dumb schmuck caught up in events outside his control. He’s arrogant enough to believe he can pull off an act like that. Maybe he thinks a lawyer might make him look smart. And guilty.”

Pratt barked a hoarse laugh. “Like he isn’t.”

Chapter Five

“Are you going to join the search?” Debbie Basher asked the woman at the opposite end of her sofa.

Lonewolf, whose real name was Sandy Lane, took a break from cleaning her twelve gauge to reply, “I thought about it.”

“I’ll come, too, if you want.”

“I’m not sure what the point is. My money says the kid’s dead.” Lonewolf set the shotgun aside and returned her attention to the evening news. “Check out the boyfriend. That’s one guilty sonofabitch.”

Debbie tried to imagine how she would feel in his shoes. “He must be a wreck. I mean, he was supposed to be looking after the baby and now this.”

“My point exactly. Two-year-olds don’t just up and wander off in the middle of the night,” Lone said. “And when something like this happens it’s almost always the stepfather or the boyfriend.”

“He doesn’t seem very bright.”

Lone’s eyes came to rest on Debbie, and her expression softened. “Do you always think the best of people?”

“I try to.”

“That must get pretty disappointing.”

“Sometimes.” Debbie looked away, wanting to hide the emotion she knew was written on her face. Lonewolf could read her with disturbing accuracy. It had been that way since they first met.

Debbie liked to think about that early fall day because it reminded her that life could deliver gifts as unexpectedly as blows. She had been hiking in the LaSal Creek Canyon, on the Utah side of the state line, stopping every so often to take photos of the astonishing red rock formations. When she first heard the terrible screams, she panicked, running this way and that, trying to fathom their direction. She wanted to persuade herself she’d only heard the shrill delight of a young woman cavorting with friends along the trail, but another more bloodcurdling shriek pierced the still mountain air, and this time the woman was screaming for help.

Debbie threw off her backpack and started running. The sound was close, just past a rock formation and down into a gully off the track. Terrified, her mind swapping one scenario for the next—a bad fall from the rocks, a rape in progress—Debbie almost tumbled over a mountain bike lying across the track. At the same exact moment she saw a sight she would never forget as long as she lived. A mountain lion was dragging a woman by one foot up toward a rocky overhang.

Debbie had been warned about wilderness hazards like this before she’d moved to the Southwest, but she’d never expected one to happen to her.

The woman saw her, too, and they shared one frozen instant of horror before she sobbed, “Help me! For God’s sake, help me. Oh, Jesus.”

Debbie grabbed the bike and plunged down the slope, yelling at the top of her lungs, “Get off her, you monster. Go!”

She struck the big cat a clumsy blow across the head with the front wheel of the bike. It growled at her from deep in its chest, but kept hold of the woman’s foot. Debbie hit it again as hard as she could and started yelling for help in case anyone could hear her.

The woman was sobbing and begging her not to leave. The lion’s mouth was red with blood.

Debbie threw the bike down and was looking frantically around for something that would make a better weapon, when a low, emphatic voice commanded, “Stand where you are and don’t move.”

Adrenalin and terror made it almost impossible for Debbie to do as she was told, yet the sight of a figure in army fatigues, standing atop the outcrop, a rifle trained on the lion, rooted her to the spot.

“Now back away,” she was ordered. “One step at a time and keep looking at the cat, dead in the eye.”

Debbie hadn’t taken two steps when the soldier opened fire. Several shots in rapid succession echoed across the red wilderness, and the mountain lion slumped over the woman.

Telling Debbie to stay back, the soldier quickly descended. It was only then that Debbie realized the rescuer was a woman. She was not as tall as she’d seemed, standing high above with the rifle braced against her shoulder, but she was strongly built and radiated the kind of controlled power and confidence Debbie couldn’t imagine ever possessing.

She probed the lion with her foot as she kept her rifle trained towards its head. “It’s dead.”

Debbie didn’t know what to say. She felt frozen with shock. She bent down and touched the lion’s flank, horrified, yet sad for the creature. Humans had intruded so far on its habitat that it had lost most of its usual prey. Now it had been killed for doing what its nature dictated.

“Stay calm.” A firm hand landed on Debbie’s shoulder. “I need your help.”

Debbie’s teeth were chattering but she managed a timid smile. “What do you want me to do?”

A pair of glittering Windex-blue eyes locked with hers. “Take off your T-shirt. We need to see to her leg so she doesn’t lose any more blood. ”

Debbie didn’t think twice. She pulled her top over her head and handed it to the woman, who tore it effortlessly into strips. The lion’s victim was unconscious, which was a blessing, Debbie thought, as they extracted her mangled leg.

“Oh, my God,” she said, gazing down at the hamburger mess of blood and bone. “How are we going to get her out of here?”

But the soldier was already on her cell phone, calling for a search-and-rescue chopper. She even gave coordinates. Squatting down, she removed her camouflage shirt, folded it, and placed it beneath the injured woman’s head. Underneath, she was wearing a close-fitting khaki tank that revealed powerful, deeply tanned arms and muscular breasts that barely gave contour to the cotton fabric. Several chains loosely encircled her neck with various medallions suspended from them. Debbie recognized a St. Christopher, a gold wedding ring, and what looked like dog tags.

“It’s the shock that’ll kill her,” she told Debbie. “I think they can save the foot.”

Debbie promptly burst into tears and blabbed out her thanks. She was shaking all over, and her teeth chattered so badly she couldn’t even finish a sentence. The soldier took her firmly by the shoulders and shook her once. “Listen to me.” The voice was laced with authority. “We have a job to do until the medics get here. This woman is counting on us. Do you understand?”

Debbie wasn’t sure if she was just too terrified to do anything but obey, or if she had some steely inner core she’d never known about. Squeaking, “Yes,” she pulled herself together and asked, “What do you want me to do?”

Ten minutes later, the woman was still alive and Debbie had learned that the soldier was not National Guard as she’d assumed, but a veteran who’d recently been honorably discharged after her second tour of duty in Iraq. By sheer good luck she happened to be in the vicinity keeping herself combat-ready when the attack happened. Her name was Sandy Lane.

She said, “You can call me Lone. All my buddies do.”

“Lone?”

“Short for Lonewolf.” The terse line of her mouth relaxed a little. This was, Debbie guessed, her version of a smile. “I got the nick because I’m the one always living on the edge.”

“Do you miss it?” Debbie asked. “The army?”

“I miss my buddies.”

“When did you leave?”

“A year ago.”

Debbie wanted to ask why, but she sensed a contained emotion in this woman that she couldn’t interpret and guessed the subject was sensitive. She asked, instead, “What’s it really like over there in Iraq?”

“Well, let’s see. You don’t know who’s a friend and who’s an enemy. You see your best friend blown to pieces in front of you when he’s trying to carry a child to safety. Nothing makes any sense. Not to them and not to us.” Her face registered a flicker of surprise, as if her emphatic response had taken her aback. She fell silent.

“I think you’re very brave,” Debbie whispered. “I could never do what you did.”

Lone gave her a long hard look. “Yes you could. You proved it when you were whacking that lion over the head with your bike. You were defenseless, yet you took on an enemy twice your size. You risked your life for a complete stranger. If that isn’t courage, what is?”

Heat rushed to Debbie’s cheeks. “I guess no one knows what they’re really capable of until something like that happens.”

The intensity left Lone’s gaze and she seemed to be looking straight through Debbie. In a tone that was flat and detached, she said, “People are capable of almost anything. Good, and bad.”

It struck Debbie then that Lone was damaged. Over the six months they’d been friends since then, she’d glimpsed the same injured spirit a few times in sharper focus and realized that she didn’t know Lone at all; she only knew the part of her she chose to show the world.

Theirs was a strange friendship. Debbie thought it probably filled a gap for both of them. When she’d moved to the Four Corners region from Denver two years earlier, she’d assumed some of her city friendships wouldn’t survive the distance. But as it turned out, the breakup of her relationship was the factor that changed everything. Her friends were really Meg’s, she’d learned, and when they’d had to choose, they chose Meg.

In a way, it made sense. Meg had a new partner to share in the couples outings they’d always enjoyed. Whereas Debbie was single and lived in the middle of nowhere. Paradox Valley. Who could even find it? No one from her former life had bothered to try.

Meg was still living in their house in Park Hill; Debbie had walked out when she discovered Meg was cheating on her. They’d had a couple of conversations about Meg buying her out, but so far nothing had happened. Whenever Debbie mentioned it, Meg said she needed time to get in a position to pay the higher mortgage. Debbie knew her excuse was weak, but she didn’t have the money or the stomach to go to a lawyer and fight. She was depressed, and that sapped her energy and confidence. She’d promised herself that when she felt better she would do something about her financial situation. But time had passed and she had drifted along, feeling kind of lost.

How did you get to be thirty-five and suddenly find you were friendless? For a time, Debbie had determinedly kept up the phone calls and emails, but then she embarked on one of those experiments that reveal more than you want to know. She stopped writing and phoning and waited to see who would contact her. After a year, when the silence got truly deafening, she gave up making excuses for everyone and faced reality. Nobody cared. She was more alone than she’d ever realized.

Her mother would call it poetic justice. Debbie had let her former friends drift away in her midtwenties when she left her job and apartment in Greenville to move to Denver and be with Meg. Now, a decade later, she had no lover, and, apart from her parents, no one gave a damn if she was dead or alive. Only Lonewolf.

They spoke almost every day and Lone often showed up unannounced, sometimes in the middle of the night. She would always have some plausible reason for stopping by—there was a bear in the area, or the snow was going to be extra heavy, and she would stay over and help Debbie shovel the driveway the next morning. That had been her pretext tonight.

Debbie thought the real reason for most of her visits was that she liked home cooking and wasn’t gifted in the kitchen herself. Tonight she had slapped a couple of packs of meat on the counter as she came in the door, premium fillets, the kind Debbie’s budget didn’t stretch to. Debbie worried about accepting these gifts, but she appreciated the gesture and didn’t want to insult Lone by turning her down. Besides, Lone ate at her table often enough that it was only fair she contributed. Debbie would have done the same.

With a quick sideways glance at her guest, she asked, “Is that a new sweater? It looks homemade.”

“Yeah. My mom sent it. She bought it from an old lady she knows who knits for extra income.”

“You should invite her out here in the spring.” Lone was an only child with divorced parents. She seemed close to both of them.

Debbie envied that. Her own mother lived for her grandchildren and regarded Debbie as a failure for her lackluster breeding performance. Maternal phone calls revolved around Debbie’s older brother, Adam, and his ever-expanding family. Not only was he heterosexual and fertile, he was also a pastor at the Harvest of Hope Evangelical Church in Greenville. It just didn’t get any better than that, and Debbie’s mom needed to remind her of this fact at every opportunity.