Paradise Lost (23 page)

Joanna stood up and went forward to meet him. “My name is Joanna Brady,” she said. “I’m sheriff of Cochise County. Frank Montoya is my chief deputy.”

Joanna held out her hand, but Amos Parker didn’t extend his.

Instead, he addressed his daughter. “What are they doing here, Caroline?” he demanded. You know nay position when it comes to police officers.”

“I’m the one who let them Caroline said. “‘They came to tell Ron Haskell that his wifeisdead—that she’s been murdered. That’s why those two officers were here yesterday.”

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“You know very well that Ron Haskell broke the rules and that he’s in isolation. Until his isolation period is over, he’s not to see anyone, including you, Miss Brady.”

“It’s Mrs.,” Joanna corrected.

“So you’re married, are you?” Amos Parker asked, easing himself into a chair that was off to the side from where the others had been sitting. “I should have thought a woman who would take on a man’s job and become sheriff wouldn’t have much use for men. I’d expect her to be one of those fire-breathing, cigar-smoking feminists who insists on wearing the pants in her family.”

“She’s wearing a dress, Daddy,” Caroline put in.

The fact that Caroline Parker felt constrained to defend Joanna’s manner of dress to this unpleasantly rude man was disturbing. Even so, whatever Sheriff Joanna Brady was or wasn’t wearing had nothing to do with the business at hand.

“The only part of my wardrobe that should matter to you, Mr. Parker, is the sheriff’s badge pinned to my jacket. Is Mr. Haskell still here?”

Amos Parker crossed his arms. “I have nothing to say,” he said.

“Oh, Daddy,” Caroline interceded. “Don’t be ridiculous. The man’s wife has been murdered.

He needs to be told.”

Parker shook his shaggy head. “You know the rules,” he said. “Ron Haskell broke his contract.

He’s in isolation until I say he’s ready to come out.”

“And I think you’re wrong.” Caroline blurted out the words and then looked stricken—as though she wished she could take them back.

Amos Parker turned his sightless eyes toward his daughter’s voice. “Caroline, are you questioning my authority?”

There was a moment of stark silence. As the brooding quiet lengthened, Joanna fully expected Caroline to cave. She didn’t.

“In this instance, yes,” Caroline said softly. “I believe you’re wrong.”

Another long silence followed. Finally, Amos Parker was the one who blinked. “Very well,” he conceded. “We’ll probably lose him now anyway. You could just as well bring him down.”

“From where?” Joanna asked.

“The isolation cabin is about a mile away,” Caroline said. “I’ll go get him and bring him here.”

Interviewing Ron Haskell in a room where Amos Parker sat enthroned as an interested observer seemed like a bad idea. Joanna glanced at Frank Montoya, who nodded in unspoken agreement.

“Why don’t we go with you?” Joanna suggested.

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Caroline looked to her father for direction, but he sat with his arms folded saying nothing. “All right,” Caroline said, plucking her hat off a table near the door. “Come on then. Someone will have to ride in the back.”

“I will,” Frank volunteered.

Once they had piled into the Jeep, Caroline started it and drove through a haphazard collection of several buildings all of whose blinds were still closed. No one stirred, inside or out. Beyond the buildings, Caroline turned onto a rocky track that wound up and over an adjoining hillside.

“How did Ron Haskell break his contract?” Joanna asked.

“He was seen making an unauthorized phone call,” Caroline replied. “Clients aren’t allowed to contact their families until their treatment has progressed far enough for them to he able to handle it.”

“When was this phone call?” Joanna prodded.

“Thursday morning,” Caroline answered. “One of the kitchen help had gone to the store to pick up something. She saw him there and reported it to my father. Since Ron hadn’t asked for a pass, that meant two breaches of contract rather than one: leaving without permission and making an unauthorized phone call.”

The Jeep topped a steep rise. Halfway down the slope a tiny cabin sat tucked in among the scrub oak. “That’s it?” Joanna asked. Caroline Parker nodded. “And how long has he been here?”

“Since Thursday afternoon. When people are in isolation, we bring them up here and drop them off along with plenty of food and water. It’s our form of sending someone into the wilderness to commune with God. Even at Pathway, there’s so much going on that it’s hard for someone to find enough quiet in which to concentrate and listen.”

“No one has seen Ron Haskell since he was brought here last Thursday?”

“That’s what isolation is all about,” Caroline said. “You’re left completely alone—you and God.”

As the Jeep rumbled down the hill, Joanna fully expected that they would find the cabin empty, but she was wrong. As the Jeep rounded the side of the cabin, the door flew open and a stocky man hurried out, buttoning his shirt as he came. Ron Haskell was any-thing but the handsome Lothario that Maggie MacFerson’s acid descriptions had led Joanna to expect. He waited until the Jeep stopped, then he rushed around to the passenger side of the vehicle. As he flung open the door, his face was alight with anticipation. As soon as his eyes came to rest on Joanna’s face, the eager expression disappeared.

“Sorry,” he muttered, backing away. “I was hoping you were my wife.”

It was long after dark when Joanna finally rolled back into the yard at High Lonesome Ranch to the sound of raucous greet-ings from Sadie and Tigger. She was relieved to find that Jim Bob and Eva Lou’s Honda was no longer there. Lights behind curtains glowed invitingly from all the windows.

Weary beyond bearing, Joanna was frustrated as well. The meeting with Ron Haskell had left her doubting that he had been involved in his wife’s death. And if that was true, they were no closer to finding out who had killed either Connie Haskell or Dora Matthews, which meant that Jenny, too, was possibly still in grave danger.

As she got out of the car, Joanna heard the back door slam. Butch came walking toward her.

“How’s Jenny?” she asked over an aching catch in her throat. Butch shook his head. “About how you’d expect,” he said. Not good?”

Not good. She’s barely ventured out of her room since you left this afternoon. I tried cajoling her into coining out for dinner. No dice. Said she wasn’t hungry Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

Remembering that last difficult conversation with her daugh-ter, Joanna shook her head. “Don’t count on it,” she said.

“Hungry?” he said. Joanna nodded. “I don’t think Eva Lou trusts my cooking abilities,” Butch continued. “She left the refrig-erator full of leftovers and the freezer stocked with a bunch of Ziploc containers loaded with precooked, heat-and-serve meals. What’s your pleasure?”

“How about a Butch Dixon omelette?”

“Good choice.”

Inside the kitchen, Joanna noticed that the table was covered with blueprints for the new house they were planning to build on the property left to Joanna by her former handyman, Clayton Rhodes. “Don’t forget,” Butch said as he began rolling up the plans and securing them with rubber bands, “tomorrow night we have a mandatory meeting scheduled with the contractor.”

“I’ll do my best,” she said. “Right now, I’m going to change clothes and see if Jenny’s awake. I just talked to Ernie Carpenter. Jenny will have to come to the department with me tomorrow morning so the Double Cs can interview her.” Since both detec-tives had last names beginning with the letter C, that’s how people in the department often referred to Joanna’s homicide detective division.

“Because of Connie Haskell, because of Dora, or because Jenny herself may be in danger?”

Butch asked.

Joanna sighed. “All of the above,” she said.

She went into the bedroom, removed her weapons, and locked them away. Thinking about the threat to Jenny, she briefly consid-ered keeping one of the Glocks in the drawer of her nightstand, but in the end she didn’t. As she stripped offher panty hose, she was amazed to
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discover that they had survived her crime scene foray.That hardly ever happens, she thought, tossing them into, the dirty clothes hamper.

Dressed in a nightgown and robe, she went to Jenny’s bedroom and knocked on the door. Her questioning knock was answered by a muffled “Go away.”

“I can’t,” Joanna said, opening the door anyway. “I need to talk to you.”

The room was dark, with the curtains drawn and the shades pulled down. Even the night-light had been extinguished. Joanna walked over and switched on the bedside lamp. At her approach, Jenny turned her face to the wall in her cavelike bottom hunk and pulled a pillow over her head.

“Why?” Jenny demanded. “Dora’s dead. What good will talk-ing do?”

“We’re not going to talk about that,” Joanna told her daughter. “We can’t. You’re a witness in this case. Tomorrow morning you’ll have to go to work with me so Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal can talk to you. They’ll want to go over everything that happened this weekend, from the time you went camping on Friday. They’ll question you in order to see if you can help them learn what happened to Dora and who’s responsible.”

“Grandma Lathrop is responsible,” Jenny insisted bitterly. “Why couldn’t she just mind her own business?”

“I’m sure Grandma Lathrop thought she was doing the right thing—what she thought was best for Dora.”

“It wasn’t,” Jenny said.

They sat in silence for a few moments. “I didn’t really like Dora very much,” Jenny admitted finally in a small voice. “I mean, we weren’t Friends or anything. I didn’t even want to sleep in the same tent with her. I was only with her because Mrs. Lambert said I had to be. But then, after Dora was here at the ranch that day with Grandpa and Grandma, she acted different—not as smart-alecky. I could see Dora just wanted to be a regular kid, like anybody else.”

Just like you,Joanna thought.

“Dora cried like crazy when that woman came to take her away, Morn,” Jenny continued. “She cried and cried and didn’t want to go. Is that why she’s dead, because Grandma and Grandpa Brady let that woman take her away?”

“Grandpa and Grandma didn’t have a choice about that, Jenny,” Joanna said gently. “When somebody from CPS shows up to take charge of a child, that’s the way it is. It’s the law, and the child goes.

“You mean if Grandpa and Grandma had tried to keep her they would have been breaking the law?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I wish they had,” Jenny said quietly.

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“So do I,” Joanna told her. “God knows, so do I.”

There was another long silence. Again Jenny was the first to speak. “But even if I didn’tlike Dora Matthews, I didn’t want her dead. And why do there have to be so many dead people, Mom?”

Jenny asked, turning at last to face her mother. “How come? First Dad, then Esther Daniels, then Clayton Rhodes, and now Dora. Are we a curse or something? All people have to do is know us, and that means they’re going to die.”

Jenny lay on her back on the bottom bunk, absently tracing the outlines of the upper bunk’s springs with her finger. Meanwhile Joanna searched her heart, hoping to find the connection that had existed only two nights earlier between herself and her daughter, when Joanna had been the one lying on the bottom bunk and Jenny had been the one on top. The problem was that connection had been forged before Dora was dead; before Sheriff Joanna Brady—who had sworn to serve and protect people like Dora Matthews—had failed to do either one.

“It seems like that to me sometimes, too.” With her heart breaking, that was the best Joanna could manage. “But dying’s part of living, Jen,” she added. “It’s something that happens to everyone sooner or later.”

“Thirteen’s too young to die,” Jenny objected. “That’s all Dora was, thirteen—a year older than me.”

A momentary chill passed through Joanna’s body as she saw in her mind’s eye the still and crumpled figure of a child lying lifeless in a sandy wash out along Highway 90. “You’re right,”

she agreed. “Thirteen is much too young. That’s why we have to do everything in our power to find out who killed her.”

“You said she was hit by a car and that maybe it was just an accident,” Jenny said. “Was it?”

“That’s how it looks so far,” Joanna said, although that answer wasn’t entirely truthful. Hours of searching the highway had filled to turn up any sign of where the collision might have occurred as well as any trace of Dora Matthews’s missing tennis shoe.

“When’s the autopsy?” Jenny asked.

Jennifer Ann Brady had lived in a house centered on law enforcement from the day she was born. As in most homes, dinner time conversation had revolved around what was happening in those two vitally important areas of their lives—school and work. In the Brady household, those work-related conversations had featured confrontations with real-life criminals and killers. There were discussions of prosecutions won and lost, of had guys put away or sometimes let go.

Young as she was, Jenny knew far too much about crime and punishment. And, with Eleanor’s fairly recent marriage to George Winfield, discussions of autopsies were now equally commonplace. In that moment, Joanna wished it were otherwise.

“I believe he’s doing it tonight.”

Jenny absorbed that information without comment. “What about Dora’s mother?” she asked after a pause. “Does she know yet?”

Every question as well as every answer drove home Joanna’s sense of failure. “No,” she said.

“And I can’t imagine having to tell her any more than I can imagine what I’d do if something
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terrible happened to you.”

“Will Mrs. Matthews have to go to jail even if Dora is dead?”

“If she’s convicted of running a meth lab,” Joanna conceded.

Heaving a sigh, Jenny flopped back over on her side, signaling that the conversation was over.

“Come on, Jenny. We probably shouldn’t talk about this anymore tonight. Let’s go out to the kitchen. Butch is making omelettes.”