Outlaw Mountain

Turning off the freeway in Benson, Joa

“Father Thomas Mulligan here.”

“It’s Sheriff Brady,” she told him. “I’m returning your call. What can I do for you?”

Joa

“We’ve got a little problem here.”

“What kind of problem?” Joa

“Well, we had our a

“Yes, I know,” Joa

“That’s right. Of course I remember. And there was absolutely no difficulty with that. Your officers were terrific.”

“So what’s the trouble then?”

“It’s a lost-and-found problem.”

Joa

“What happened?” she asked. “Did somebody wander off and forget they left a Bounder parked in your RV-park?”

Father Mulligan didn’t laugh. “Actually,” he said seriously, “it’s a bit worse than that. And since I know you personally, I thought you’d be the right person to call to discuss it.”

“So what is it?” Joa

The priest took a deep breath. “Someone left their son here,” he said. “His name is Junior. I found him in the church this morning before mass. He must have slept there over night.”

“You need to call CPS,” Joa

“He’s not a child,” Father Mulligan interrupted. “I can’t tell you exactly how old he is. He could be fifty or so, maybe even older. He told me his name-his first name-and that’s about it. He couldn’t give us his parents’ names or the name of the town where he lives. I checked to see if he was carrying any kind of identification, but he wasn’t. And then I thought maybe there’d be some identifying mark sewn into his clothing, maybe on the labels. But there aren’t any labels on his clothing, Sheriff Brady. They’ve all been removed. I think someone cut them out on purpose, so we’d have no way of following a trail and finding out where they and he came from.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” Joa

“You might have to,” Father Mulligan said. “He was all right at breakfast this morning, probably because he was famished. But at lunchtime he was agitated. As near as we could tell, he wanted his mother. He wanted to know where she was and when she was coming for him. I had a meeting right after lunch. I left one of the sisters in charge of Junior. I thought he could sit quietly in the library and look at books. He got rest-less, though, and wanted to go outside. When Sister Ambrose told him he couldn’t do that, he knocked her down and went outside anyway. I found him wading in the reflecting pond, chasing the fish. So you see, we can’t keep him here. It’s not that we’re uncharitable or unchristian, but some of the brothers and sisters are quite elderly. They can’t be expected to handle someone like that-someone that unpredictable.”

“No,” Joa

She ended the call and immediately radioed into the department and spoke to Dispatch. “Do we have any missing persons reports on a developmentally disabled male named Junior, forty-five to fifty-five years old, and last seen at the Saint David Arts and Crafts Fair yesterday afternoon?”

“Nothing like that,” Larry Kendrick, Cochise County’s lead dispatcher, told her. “Why?”

Joa

“I don’t know yet.”

“It sounds like it could be iffy for you to handle this alone. Do you want me to send out a deputy?”

“Who’s available?” Joa

“Nobody right this minute,” Larry replied. “We’ve had a bit of a problem out at Sierra Vista. Those environmental activists showed up on the Oak Vista construction site right at quitting time. They came armed with sledgehammers and spikes and sugar to put in gas tanks. In other words, they came prepared to make trouble and to do as much damage to the contractor’s equipment as possible. It was quite a do

“I’m the sheriff,” Joa

“I’ve been trying to page you ever since it happened, but your pager must be off line and your cell phone’s been busy. I figured if you were in your car you would have heard the radio traffic and would have known something was up.”

Guiltily, Joa

“No. Chief Deputy Voland was on his way to Tombstone, but now he’s going to Sierra Vista instead. He said if you called in, you’d better go check on the two teams working in Tombstone. Detective Carbajal is there, but other than that, the crime scene investigators are on their own.”

Joa

“All right,” she said. “Radio Chief Deputy Voland and le him know I’ll take care of Tombstone. And Saint David,” she added under her breath.

After all, someone has to do it.

When Anglos first showed up in southern Arizona, the area along the San Pedro River, a few miles south of what is now Benson, was a mosquito-infested, swampy wasteland. Despite the hardships, a few hardy souls had settled there. When a severe earthquake rocked the Sonora Desert on May 3, 1887, no one in the Saint David area was injured, nor was there much structural damage, primarily due to the fact that so few people lived there. The non-killer quake left lasting evidence of its handiwork by instantly draining the swamp and forcing much of the San Pedro watershed underground. The former swamp turned into a fertile farmland oasis studded by ancient cottonwoods.

It was late afternoon when Joa

Nestled under the San Pedro’s towering cottonwoods, the monastery contained a small, jewel-like church-Our Lady of Guadalupe-a bird sanctuary, a pecan orchard, an RV park, and a library/museum, as well as a used-clothing thrift store. Living quarters for monks, sisters, and resident lay workers consisted of a collection of mobile homes clustered about the property in a haphazard ma