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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," Joa
"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," Joa
"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 Joa
"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 Joa
"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, Joa
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, Joa
And then, while Dr. Fran Daly abandoned her forensic duties and rushed over to administer first aid, Joa
Cochise County's spree killer was no longer neglecting to mutilate his male victims.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was only eight o'clock when Joa
Back in the Blazer, Joa
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,
Je
P.S. Guess what? I kicked Rodney in the you-know-what and now he's being nice to me.
Reading the postcard, Joa
In all the time she'd been sheriff, Joa
And all the time this was going on, all the while those necessary and official tasks were being done, Sheriff Joa
"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, Joa
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 ru
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 Je
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.