J. Jance - Skeleton Canyon

“Where’s the spatter?” Joanna asked.

“Precisely,” Ernie returned. “You’re definitely starting to get the hang of this.”

Joanna appreciated her investigator’s unsolicited compliment, but there was no time to savor it. “So what?” she asked. “You ’re saying Brianna was already dead when the pickup went over the edge?”

“It’s a possibility,” Ernie said. “A distinct possibility.”

Joanna felt yet another emotional hole open up and swallow her. On Saturday afternoon David O’Brien had expressed his fear-no, his firm belief-that something terrible had happened to his daughter. He had wanted Joanna to call in the FBI immediately. Had she done so? No. Instead, Sheriff Joanna Brady had taken refuge in the twenty-four-hour missing persons cop-out. She had done nothing. She wondered now if the outcome would have been any less fatal had she made a different decision.

“What about the other journal?” Joanna asked. “It’s not out on the hill. We’ve searched every inch of it. I thought maybe it might be inside here, under the seat or behind it.”

Ernie shook his head. “Believe Inc, this cab is clean as a whistle. So maybe whoever killed her took the book with him. Maybe she had written something in it that was incriminating.”

Joanna nodded, remembering the last entry in the other journal. “My mother is a liar.”

While Ernie went off to confer with the tow truck driver, Joanna returned to the spot at the bottom of the cliff where Doc Winfield had just finished zipping the body bag closed. As the two deputies loaded it into a basket, George turned to Joanna.

“I’m worried about trying to maneuver the body up that trail. Looks to me as though it’s going to be next to impossible. Do you think Mr. Hacker would mind if we used his block and tackle?”

Joanna wasn’t much interested in what Dennis Hacker would or wouldn’t mind. “He left it here,” she said. “He must have meant for us to use it.”

While Winfield attached the come-along to the basket, one of the deputies took the rest of the block and tackle back up the cliff. Even with Detective Carbajal and the two deputies to apply muscle, pulling the body up was still a tricky process. The face of the ridge wasn’t smooth. More than once the basket got hung up, once on a clump of mesquite and another time it wedged in underneath a jagged outcropping of rock. The second stall was far more serious than the first. With Doc Winfield on his hands and knees at the edge of the cliff shouting instructions, Joanna had to work her way out onto a narrow ledge far enough to pry the basket loose. The storm was almost on them by then. Sand and grit flew in her eyes, and the force necessary to set the basket free also threatened to knock Joanna off her precarious perch. It took half a dozen tries before the basket swung free and disappeared overhead.

“Good work,” Ernie said, stretching out a hand to pull Joanna back to the relative safety of a newly made path. “It’s a wonder you didn’t break your neck.”

Joanna was standing there catching her breath when she heard Doc Winfield’s shout. “Hey, Ernie. Come on up. There’s something here you need to see. Quick, before the wind blows it away.”

Grumbling, Ernie did as he was told, with Joanna close on his heels. When Joanna reached the top and could see, George Winfield was still on his hands and knees, staring intently into a scraggly clump of yellowed grass. “What’s this look like to you?” he asked.

Wedging his way between Jaime and one of the deputies, Ernie Carpenter dropped to the ground beside Winfield. The detective, too, stared into the grass. “I’ll be damned!” he exclaimed a moment later.

Joanna, coming up behind the group, was almost run over by Jaime, who was heading for the van at a gallop. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“Ernie’ll need a set of hemostats,” he said. “I’m going to get them, along with the evidence log and the tape measure.”

“And evidence bags,” Ernie called after him. “I’m all out of the small ones.”

Catching up with the others, Joanna peered over Ernie’s shoulder and saw nothing. “What did you find?” she asked.

“A hair,” Ernie answered. “A single strand of long blond hair.”

“You’re thinking the same thing I am, aren’t you?” George Winfield said, “‘That she was dead long before she hit the ground. ”

Ernie nodded. “I’m afraid so, ”he said.

Angie knew the storm was brewing. She was out on the flat now and traveling at an angle toward the road, but behind her in the mountains and to the east of them, she could see a block torrent of rain falling from the sky. She had always been afraid of thunderstorms. One of the girls in her first grade class in Battle Creek had been hit and killed by lightning at an outdoor barbecue. There was nothing for it, though, but to keep walking.

A chill wind shrieked through the three-foot-tall grass. Lightning forked across the sky and thunder rumbled all around her. Angie wore jeans and boots and a long-sleeved shirt, but nothing waterproof. She hadn’t expected to be out in the rain on foot. She hadn’t expected to be in the desert alone.

The wilderness was still a frightening and alien place to her. Watching the desert birds was wonderful, but there were other desert dwellers that weren’t nearly so pleasant. She had heard, for example, that snakes and Gila monsters came out in advance of rain storms. Archie McBride had told her that, and Willy had backed him up. They both claimed that a Gila monster bite could kill you within a matter of minutes. A lot of what Archie and Willy said was so much bullshit. It was possible they had just been teasing her with more of their tall tales. Still, out there all by herself, with the wind whistling and the glass bent almost double, it seemed likely that they had told the truth.

In the course of hours of waiting and walking, Angie Kellogg had moved beyond being hurt. Now she was simply mad. “Damn you anyway, Dennis Hacker,” she shouted into the screeching wind. “Go ahead and laugh. See if I care.”

“You think it’s hers, then?” Joanna asked, watching Ernie fight the windblown hair into an equally windblown glassine bag.

“Who else’s would it be?” he asked. “As soon as we can get the body transported, we’ll have to search the rest of the area up here, just in case. And we’re going to have to hurry. The storm’s almost here. Get her loaded into that truck on the double.”

“Truck?” Joanna asked.

Ernie nodded. “Deputy Raymond brought along his pickup. He can take her back to Bisbee in that.”

Joanna looked at Matt Raymond’s Ford F-100 parked four vehicles down the hill. Then she looked back at the basket and the body bag. “No,” she said.

“What do you mean, no?” Ernie countered.

“Just what I said. We’re not going to haul Brianna O’Brien’s body back to town in the bed of a pickup truck like she was a sack of potatoes or a bale of hay. Put her in my Eagle.”

That announcement stunned the little group gathered around the body basket into total silence. Joanna caught the questioning look George Winfield leveled in her direction. “Are you sure?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” she said. “Load her up.”

As Deputies Raymond and Lindsey hurried to comply, Joanna turned back to the others, “Doc Winfield and I will go on ahead. The rest of you, don’t spend too much lime looking, for evidence. It looks like this storm’s going to be a doozy, It’s the first one of the season, so most of the water should soak in, hut I don’t want anybody taking any chances with that wash.” She aimed the last sentence directly at Jaime Carbajal, who grinned apologetically.

“Don’t worry, Sheriff Brady,” he said. “I’ve learned my lesson. Besides, if we get into any trouble, the wrecker’s already here.”