Outlaw Mountain (7 page)

Thirty minutes later and still dreading the task ahead, Sheriff Joanna Brady pulled into the parking lot of Clete Rogers’ Grubsteak Restaurant and Saloon on Allen Street. The clapboard-covered building, complete with phony white shutters, looked more like a refugee from a film set than a genuine product of the Old West. As Joanna stepped up on the sidewalk, she noticed, on closer examination, that the exterior paint was chipped and peeling. And when she pushed open the front door, she noted that the carpeting in the front entryway had been tacked down with a few strategically placed strips of duct tape.

Stationed in front of an old-fashioned cash register stood a well-endowed peroxide blonde holding a stack of menus. “Smoking or nonsmoking?” she asked.

Joanna hauled out her badge and flashed it. “I’m looking for Mr. Rogers.”

The hostess stuck a pair of red-framed reading glasses on her nose long enough to examine the ID. “Mr. Rogers is busy,” she said in a brusque manner designed to forestall any further discussion. “He’s upstairs in his office and on the phone long distance. Monday’s order day around here. He’s not to be interrupted.”

“I’m sure he’ll want to speak to me,” Joanna said. “It’s about his mother.”

The hostess sniffed disdainfully. “Well,” she said. “it’s about time someone started looking into that. We’ve had that useless deputy hanging around here for weeks on end, but as soon as there’s a real problem, he up and disappears.”

“Frank Montoya didn’t disappear,” Joanna corrected, coming to her chief deputy’s defense. “He spent the whole night working on this situation, first down in Nogales and now up in Tucson.”

“Oh,” said the hostess, sounding somewhat mollified. “If you’ll just take a seat, I’ll try to catch Mr. Rogers’ eye the next time he’s between calls. Care for a cup of coffee while you wait?”

Joanna was finishing her second cup of coffee when Clete Rogers finally appeared. He was a large, rawboned man some-where in his mid-to-late fifties. His eyes had the look of some-one dealing with life on too little sleep. As soon as he had settled into the booth across the table from Joanna, the hostess hurried up behind him and set a large tumbler of orange juice on the table in front of him.

“Are you all right?” she asked solicitously. Her double chins waggled when she spoke. So did the ample cleavage that showed over the top of her peasant-style blouse.

“Goddamn it, Nancy!” Clete Rogers grumbled at her. “I know if I’m fine or not! Leave me the hell alone. Don’t hover, and get back to work!”

Behind red-framed glasses, Nancy’s enormous blue eyes filmed with tears. Her lower lip trembled right along with her chins, but after a moment she seemed to pull herself together. “Well, excuuuse me!” she snapped back at him, and flounced off.

Clete Rogers looked after her. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s the owner around here and who’s the employee.”

Even though Frank Montoya had warned Joanna about Clete Rogers’ arrogance and ill temper, she was nonetheless surprised by his shabby treatment of someone who was, as far as Joanna could see, a fiercely loyal employee.

Finished with what appeared to be an unwarranted attack on Nancy, Clete turned his attention back to Joanna. “So what’s the deal here, Sheriff Brady? Have you found my mother or not?”

“We’ve located her car,” Joanna said carefully.

“Where?”

“A group of juveniles were stopped while attempting to take it across the border into Mexico.”

“What about Mother?” Rogers asked. “Where’s she?”

“We don’t know,” Joanna said. “Not for sure. We haven’t found her yet.”

Clete Rogers took a swig of his juice. “What exactly does that mean?”

“Just what I said. It means we’re looking for her. So are authorities from Pima and Santa Cruz counties. According to Frank Montoya, they’ve just received what they regard as an informed tip up in Tucson. There’s a Search and Rescue group heading out there now. They’ll be concentrating their efforts along Houghton Road between I-10 and Old Spanish Trail.”

Clete Rogers raised his hand. Despite having been ordered not to hover, Nancy appeared from nowhere as if she’d been hanging fire to see what, if anything, her lord and master might require.

“I’m leaving,” he announced. “Have Ken put together a care package for me. The usual. I’m driving up to Tucson. I don’t want to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to eat.”

“Excuse me, Mayor Rogers,” Joanna said. “As I said, there is a search, all right. But it’s being conducted by members of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Since it sounds as though that’s where your mother’s car was stolen, officers from Pima County are the ones in charge at this point. I doubt very much that they’ll want any unauthorized onlookers clambering around under hand and foot and possibly disturbing crime scene evidence.”

“And let me remind you, Sheriff Brady, that the person those people are searching for is
my
mother,” Rogers put in. “Like it or not, I’m involved, and I’m going to stay that way.”

Inside her purse, Joanna’s pager buzzed, sending out a warning that sounded for all the world like a rattlesnake. She reached inside and stifled the thing before Clete Rogers seemed to notice what was going on.

“Really, Mr. Rogers,” she said. “I don’t think your showing up there is wise. As I said before, the more people milling around a crime scene, the greater the chance that important information will be overlooked or destroyed. I believe we’d be better off if—”

“I didn’t hear anyone asking for your advice or your permission, Sheriff Brady. Are you coming with me or not?”

It took all of two seconds for Joanna to make up her mind. No way did she want to be trapped into three hours’ worth of car travel with this overbearing jerk, but she also wanted to be on hand to defend her department and her people in case Rogers launched into an all-out attack over how his mother’s case was being handled.

“Not,” she replied. “I’ll head on up to Tucson as well, but I’ll drive my own vehicle. In fact, I think I’ll leave right now. How much for the coffee?”

What Joanna had left unsaid was that while Rogers waited for his “care package,” she would go on ahead and help run interference for whoever was in charge. Hopefully, she’d have enough of a head start to beat him to the crime scene.

“Never mind about the coffee,” Clete Rogers said. “It’s on the house.”

Reaching into her purse, Joanna pulled out two ones and slapped them down on the table beside her empty cup. She wasn’t going to be beholden to Clete Rogers for anything at all, including two cups of unbelievably bad drip coffee.

“I’ll see you there.”

Out in the car, Joanna checked the pager. Not surprisingly, the number listed was Dick Voland’s direct line at the department. She called him on her cell phone. “It’s Joanna, Dick,” she said when he answered. “What’s up?”

“Frank Montoya just called in. They’ve found Alice Rogers.”

“Alive or dead?” Joanna asked.

“Dead, unfortunately. The kid—Morales—showed them where he and his friends found the car. Search and Rescue turned a dog loose, and he went right out and found the body. It’s six miles east of I-10 on Houghton in a big stand of cholla on the south side of the road.”

“They’re sure it’s Alice Rogers?”

“Pretty sure, pending an official identification from a relative. The clothes the dead woman is wearing match the ones Susan Jenkins told Frank her mother was wearing when she came to dinner Saturday night.”

“What did she die of?”

“No way to tell. Not so far. According to Frank, they found her in the middle of a grove of cholla. He says she’s full of spines. She must have fallen down in the stuff. Not a nice way to go. Frank was hoping to give you a heads-up while you were still in Tombstone so you could let Clete Rogers know.”

Glancing in the rearview mirror to check for traffic, Joanna eased her Crown Victoria onto the street. At that point it would have been no trouble at all to return to the restaurant and give Clete Rogers the news. The bottom line was, Joanna didn’t feel like it. The mayor had been quite specific in saying he wanted no part of her advice. No, let him find out for himself.

“Negative on that,” she told Dick Voland. “You’re too late. I’m already on my way to Tucson. So’s Clete Rogers. If you want to give anyone a heads-up, Frank’s the one who’s going to need it. Let him know Rogers is coming so he can pass the information along to whoever’s in charge for Pima County.”

“Clete’s going to the crime scene?” Dick Voland asked. “The boys from Pima County aren’t going to like that at all.”

“No kidding!” Joanna told him. “In terms of inter-agency cooperation, his showing up will probably put us back ten years. They’ll be ecstatic when a whole crowd shows up. Which reminds me, you’d better send Detective Carpenter along as well. If Pima County has homicide detectives on the scene, so should we.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Two miles east of I-10 on Houghton Road, Joanna could a-ready see the flashing lights several miles farther east that indicated the presence of several emergency vehicles parked on either side of the road. She stopped directly behind a van from the Pima County Medical Examiner’s office. As Joanna stepped out of the Crown Victoria, the familiar figure of Dr. Fran Daly emerged from the back of the van.

“Well, if it isn’t Sheriff Brady,” Fran Daly drawled, dropping a man-sized equipment case onto the ground between them. “Long time no see,” she added, wiping her hands on the worn leg of her jeans before proffering one of them in greeting. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

Fran was a tough-talking chain-smoker who had, during the previous summer, worked on a series of homicides with Joanna’s department. When George Winfield, the Cochise County medical examiner, had taken off for Alaska on a honeymoon cruise, the board of supervisors had opted to contract with a neighboring county for whatever forensic services might be necessary in Winfield’s absence. Fran Daly, the assistant medical examiner for Pima County, had been drafted into service. At the time the arrangement was made, no one could possibly have anticipated that during the two weeks Dr. Winfield was out of the county, Joanna’s department would unmask Cochise County’s first-ever serial killer, uncovering the remains of several brutally mutilated victims along the way.

Joanna’s first encounter with the pinch-hitting Dr. Daly had been anything but cordial or smooth. The sheriff and the ME had first butted heads at a crime scene where a termite-infested floor had threatened to collapse beneath them at any time. Gradually, though, as one after another of the Cascabel Kid’s tortured victims came to light, the two women had achieved an uncommon level of mutual respect. In the process Joanna had seen beyond Fran Daly’s gruff and overbearing manner to the consummate professional underneath.

“How’s it going, Fran?”

Dr. Daly grinned. Reaching into the pocket of her Western shirt, Fran pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She shook a Camel loose from the pack and then lit it by striking a match across the huge silver-and-turquoise buckle on her leather belt.

“Can’t complain,” she said, blowing a plume of smoke. “Of course, I’m overworked and underpaid, but then what else is new? By the way, what are you doing here? From what the dispatcher told me on the phone, I was under the impression that the victim was found well within Pima County boundaries. Or has Cochise County annexed this portion of Houghton Road and nobody’s gotten around to telling me?”

“This is Pima County, all right,” Joanna said with a short laugh. “But if the victim turns out to be who we think she is, she disappeared from her home in Tombstone sometime Saturday night. The Border Patrol down in Nogales stopped her vehicle when four juveniles tried to take it across the border Sunday evening. So, depending on where you say death occurred, this may turn out to be our case or yours. If it happens to come to us, I don’t want to be last in line when it comes to information.”

Fran Daly nodded. “Fair enough,” she said. “Do you have detectives here then?”

“Not yet, but they will be. One of my homicide guys, Detective Carpenter, is on his way from Bisbee even as we speak. For the moment Frank Montoya, my chief deputy, and I are the only ones here. Unfortunately the victim’s son, His Honor Mayor Clete Rogers of Tombstone, is also on his way.”

“What for?”

Joanna shrugged. “Who knows? I told him he’s got no business here, but the mayor isn’t big on taking other people’s advice. He’s also an elected official who thinks his office gives him carte blanche to do any damned thing he wants.”

“In other words,” Fran said, “the man’s an arrogant son of a bitch.”

“You could say that.” Joanna grinned in reply. “But please don’t let on that I’m the one who told you so.”

“Your secret’s safe with me,” Fran said.

Just then a uniformed Pima County deputy emerged from a thick stand of cholla, trotted across a shallow dip, and approached Fran Daly. “Howdy, Dr. Daly. Want me to give you a hand with that?” he asked, nodding toward the equipment case.

“No, thanks, Sergeant Mallory. I’m used to lugging this crap around. I can handle it by myself. Do you happen to know Joanna Brady here? She’s the sheriff down in Cochise County.”

Claude Mallory was tall, rangy, square-jawed, and thick-necked. He might have been good-looking had it not been for the fact that his eyes were set far too close together. He favored Joanna with an appraising glance that seemed to imply:
What the hell is she doing here?

“We’re not sure who gets this one,” Fran Daly explained in answer to Mallory’s unasked question. “It could be ours; it could be theirs. In any case, Sheriff Brady and her people will be on the scene, and they’re to be allowed the same access as officers from Pima County.”

Mallory nodded. “It’s gonna be pretty crowded,” he said.

Fran Daly shrugged. “The more the merrier,” she said.

Mallory started away from them. “The body’s over this way. If you’ll both just follow me.”

But Fran Daly was not yet done with her smoke. “How long before that detective of yours gets here, Sheriff Brady?” she asked.