J.A. Jance: Dead Wrong

Joanna made short work of her shower and makeup, then crammed herself into her uniform. When she had first purchased the two maternity uniforms, the tops had seemed hilariously big. The first time she put one on she had felt like she was dressing in a clown suit. Now, though, it fit snugly over her bulging middle. Is this damn thing going to hold up until my delivery date? she wondered. Or am I going to end up popping the buttons?

Twenty minutes later, Joanna dropped Jenny off at the end of High Lonesome Road. Then, munching a peanut butter sandwich, she headed for Paul’s Spur, where she turned off the highway and made her way to the dirt track called Border Road. Ten minutes after that she arrived at the end of a long line of parked police vehicles. As she exited her Crown Victoria, she caught sight of a pair of hopeful vultures circling lazily in the air above. Up ahead Dr. George Winfield, Cochise County‘s medical examiner and Joanna’s stepfather, was unloading his crime scene satchel from his van.

“Ugly critters, aren’t they,” he observed, following Joanna’s glance.

She nodded. “They are that,” she agreed.

“So how’s my favorite mother-to-be?” George added as he dragged an unwieldy folded gurney onto the ground. His pleasant, upbeat manner never failed to surprise Joanna, especially since he spent so much time with her mother-a woman who was, in Joanna’s estimation, one of the most difficult people on earth.

“Back hurts,” Joanna replied. “And I’m not getting much sleep.”

“The back part will get better soon,” George observed, “but lack of sleep is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.”

“Thanks,” Joanna said. “That’s exactly what I needed to hear this morning.”

Ernie Carpenter had evidently spotted their arrival. He came marching purposefully down the long line of vehicles parked on the shoulder of the narrow road. Ernie was a stout bear of a man. His broad face included a line of thick black eyebrows that seemed to meet in the middle whenever he frowned.

“What have we got?” Joanna asked.

“Not much,” Ernie grumbled. Effortlessly he picked up George’s gurney and carried it as easily as if it were a kiddie tricycle. “This is a dumping scene, not a crime scene. Most likely the body’s been here for a matter of hours. Looks to me like somebody dropped him out of the back of a vehicle-a minivan or a truck-and then rolled him over the edge of the berm of rocks that runs along the side of the road.”

“In other words, no usable tire tracks or footprints.”

“You’ve got it,” Ernie agreed. “Border Patrol is up and down this road all night long, so any tracks that had been left would have been obliterated long ago. The body’s wrapped in a brown canvas painter’s tarp. It blended in with the rocks well enough overnight that no one actually spotted it until after the sun came up this morning. Dave has been scouring the area, but there’s nothing to see. No cigarette butts, no soda cans, no garbage, nothing.”

“Any sign of what killed him?” George asked.

“Like I said, he’s all wrapped up in that tarp. We can see the top of his head and that’s about it. Some blood seems to have leaked through the tarp. I’m guessing he’s either been shot or stabbed, one or the other. We were waiting for Doc Winfield to get here before we did anything more.”

George stopped walking long enough to remove a thermometer from his kit and check the air temperature. A chill brisk wind was blowing down off the Mule Mountains. “If this isn’t the crime scene, then whatever we find inside that tarp is all we’re going to have to go on. I’ll remove enough of the tarp to check the body temp, but with the wind blowing like this it could easily blow away hair or fiber evidence without us even noticing. Let’s unwrap him at the morgue, inside and out of the wind.”

“You’ve got it, Doc,” Ernie said. “All we needed was for you to give the word.”

Joanna followed the two men as far as the scene itself. The dirt in the roadway showed signs that something heavy had been dropped out of a vehicle and then rolled as far as the edge of the road, where it had been heaved over the rocky bulldozed shoulder. The body had been placed far enough away from any passing traffic so as to be out of sight, but not so far that whoever had put it there would have risked leaving behind detectable traces of hair or fiber evidence.

One of the officers had surrounded the scene with a hopeful border of bright yellow crime scene tape. Inside the tape Joanna spotted the body, rocks, and a few tufts of brittle, closely cropped yellow grass. Outside the tape, a desolate landscape of scrubby mesquite trees stretched for miles in all directions. The thorn-studded, winter-bare branches might well have trapped some critical hair or fiber evidence. Unfortunately, the nearest of the spindly trees stood well outside the taped crime scene boundary.

Joanna stood on the edge of the roadway huddled in the warmth of her long leather coat, while Dave and Jamie helped George wrestle the corpse into a body bag and onto the gurney. It may have been winter and cold as hell, but as they moved the body, a swarm of flies buzzed skyward while the stench of rotting flesh wafted in Joanna’s direction.

Watching the process, she was struck by the total lack of dignity. She was glad none of the unidentified victim’s relatives were present to see him hefted around like a hunk of unwieldy trash. He had been dumped out along the road with no more ceremony than someone would use when discarding a cigarette butt or an empty beer can.

And that very lack of dignity-the awfulness of it-was exactly why Joanna Brady, Ernie, Jaime, and Dave were all here. Redressing what had been done to this poor unknown man was what they did. It was their job to avenge man’s inhumanity to man with justice. It was why Joanna had worked her heart out running for office and why taking a six-week maternity leave was far longer than she wanted to stay away from work.

With the cold wind blowing through her still-damp hair, she realized she had changed. Being sheriff was no longer an empty title she had wanted to achieve. Somehow it had become what she was. Finding out who the victim was and why he was now dead and encased in a body bag was what she had been summoned to do with her life. The good guy/bad guy game she had once discussed with her father had somehow seeped into her blood. Or maybe, as with D. H. Lathrop, the compulsion to be a cop had been there all along.

Oh my God! she thought with a start. / really am turning into my father!

“Are you all right?” George asked, bringing her out of her reverie.

“I’m fine,” she said at once.

“You looked a little funny there.”

“No, really. I’m fine.”

“Nothing much is on my agenda for today,” George continued, “so I’ll try to get this autopsy out of the way first thing. Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal drew straws. Ernie lost, so he’s coming along for the ride. What about you?”

Joanna thought about that peanut butter sandwich she’d gobbled down in the car and about what might happen to it if she ventured into George’s stainless-steel-studded room to observe an autopsy in progress.

“Since Ernie’s going,” she said, “I think I’ll take a pass.”

George Winfield gave her a fond grin. “Good girl,” he agreed. “I thought you might.”

Joanna stayed at the scene long enough to listen as Jaime Carbajal interviewed Wally Rutterman, the Border Patrol officer who had discovered the body. Then she watched for a while as Dave Hollicker did a painstaking inch-by-inch survey of the dump site. Neither effort revealed anything worthwhile. On the drive back to the department, Joanna found herself chilled from the inside out in a way that boosting the output of the Crown Victoria’s heater did nothing to alleviate.