J. Jance - Skeleton Canyon

“What’s the matter with you this morning, Pepito?” Hector asked with that slow, lazy smile of his. “Did that little blond bruja of yours cut you off?”

Nacio looked at him. He couldn’t afford to make any denials. Half sick, he realized that if Hector knew about Bree, most likely so did Uncle Frank and Aunt Yoli.

“Shut up and get to work,” he said. “We’re too far behind this morning to stand around arguing.”

Without another word, Hector headed for the Buick in the far bay and disappeared under the opened hood. An hour later, with things pretty much back under control, Nacio went in search of Ron Torres.

“Hector’s here now. Uncle Frank should be in later on. Will you be all right until then?”

Ron grinned and gave him a thumbs-up. “No problem,” he said, as a car pulled up to the full-service pumps. “We can handle it.”

“Good, then,” Nacio said. “because I’m going.”

With a hard lump blocking her throat and almost cutting off her ability to breathe, Joanna watched Jenny walk away until she disappeared behind the dining hall with Lisa following twenty or thirty paces behind. It took every bit of effort Joanna could muster to restrain herself from jogging after them. Finally, sighing, she plucked her purse out of the Eagle and went off in search of the camp director’s office. Joanna paused in the doorway of the dining hall.

Years before, when Joanna had attended this same camp, she had eaten meals at long narrow tables in this very room. The wood-and-stone building that had once seemed wonderfully spacious and comfortable now appeared cramped and surprisingly shabby. It was packed full of noisy, disheveled girls downing an uninspired-looking lunch. They sat on benches at drearily functional Formica-topped cafeteria tables. Seen through adult eyes, the place reminded Joanna of a few prison dining rooms she had seen. Still, the high-spirited girls who were wolfing down sandwiches at those tables seemed absolutely delighted by both the food and their surroundings,

“May I help you?” someone asked.

“I’m looking for the camp director,” Joanna said.

“‘That’s me. My name’s Andrea Petty.”

The smiling speaker was a young, nut-brown, shorts-clad African-American woman with a scatter of freckles sprinkled across an upturned nose. She wore a headful of shiny, beaded braids. She didn’t look a day over sixteen.

“What can I do for you?” Andrea continued.

“My name’s Joanna Brady. Lisa met my daughter and me at the car and said there was a message for me. She also said that if I needed to, I could use the phone in your office.”

Andrea gave Joanna an appraising once-over. “All the message said was for you to call your office, but you don’t look old enough to be a sheriff.”

That makes us even, Joanna thought. You don’t look old enough to be a camp director, either. “Thanks,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Andrea smiled back. “The phone’s in here,” she said, leading the way into a small Spartan office that opened off the south end of the dining hall. “It’s behind the door. There’s not much privacy. If you need me to leave…”

“No, that’s all right,” Joanna said. “I’m sure this will be fine.”

Fumbling through her purse, she found her departmental telephone credit card and began punching numbers into the phone while a tearful girl about Jenny’s age came edging her way past the partially opened door. With a badly scraped knee, she was in need of both sympathy and a little first aid.

“Sheriff Brady here,” Joanna said when someone picked up the phone at the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department, more than a hundred miles away. “I had a message to call in. What’s happening?”

“Dick Voland said if you called to put you straight through to him,” the desk clerk said. “Hang on.”

With a severe budget crunch looming, Chief Deputy Richard Voland wasn’t supposed to be in the office on Saturday. “What are you doing going to work on your day off, lobbying for comp-time?” she asked as soon as Voland came on the phone. “You haven’t moved out of your apartment and back into your office, have you?”

“I got called in,” he said, ignoring the jibe. “We’ve got a problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

“A missing person.”

“A missing person?” Joanna echoed. “You’ve gone in to work on Saturday and you’re calling all over God’s creation looking for me on account of a missing person?”

“Wait until I tell you which one is missing,” Voland replied.

The seriousness in his tone was unmistakably convincing. “Go ahead, then,” Joanna said impatiently. “Who is it?”

“Roxanne O’Brien,” Dick Voland answered. “David and

“Katherine O’Brien’s daughter.”

“Bree O’Brien? You’re kidding.”

Joanna’s response was as reflexive as it was illogical. Of course, Dick Voland wasn’t kidding. The possible disappearance of the only daughter of one of the county’s most prominent couples was hardly a joking matter.

“When?” Joanna asked, not giving her chief deputy time to take offense. “And how? What happened?”

“She left home yesterday afternoon to drive to Playas, New Mexico. She was supposed to spend the weekend with a friend of hers, Crystal Phillips,” Dick Voland said. “The problem is, she never made it. Katherine O’Brien called over there this morning to verify what time she’d be home tomorrow after-noon, but according to Ed Phillips, Crystal ’s daddy, Bree never showed up there. Not only that, she wasn’t expected.”

“Not expected? That sounds bad.”

“Just wait,” Voland continued. “You haven’t heard anything yet. It gets worse. According to Katherine O’Brien, Bree has made three weekend trips to visit Crystal Phillips in the last three months-this one included. Crystal and Bree plan to be roommates at the University of Arizona this fall. As far as the O’Briens are concerned, the two girls have been getting together on weekends to make plans about that-about dorms and clothes and curtains and whatever else girls have to sort out before they can live together. But Ed Phillips and his wife, Lorraine, claim they’ve never laid eyes on her these last three months. They both say that the last time they saw Bree O’Brien was before they left Bisbee to move to Playas over a year ago.”

As sheriff of Cochise County, Joanna Lathrop Brady had learned to make the necessarily swift and sometimes painful shifts from being a mother to being a law enforcement officer. AI first those instant role changes had given her the mental equivalent of the bends. Now she was more accustomed to them.

“What are we doing about it, Dick? Have you been in touch with Randy Trotter over in New Mexico?”

“I tried,” Voland returned. “Sheriff Trotter is on vacation. He’s camping up in the White Mountains and isn’t due back until a week from tomorrow. I have been in touch with the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Department, however. The under-sheriff there has deputies looking for Bree O’Brien on his side of the state line. I’ve got cars looking for her on this side as well, ours and Department of Public Safety both.”

“On Highway 80 and on Geronimo Trail?”

“Right,” Dick Voland replied. “Deputy Hollicker took the initial call from the O’Briens. I sent Detective Carbajal out to see them, but that didn’t work.”

“What do you mean, it didn’t work?”

“Old man O’Brien wouldn’t talk to him. In fact, he ordered Jaime off the place and then called in here raising hell and asking what were we thinking of sending a kid out to investigate his daughter’s disappearance. A kid and a Mexican to boot.”