J. Jance - Left for Dead

Fox set his empty beer bottle down on a nearby table. Then he stood up and stepped closer to Al, invading his space. “And you know all this how?”

Al stood his ground. “Because I’m the one who found her,” he said. “I was out on patrol and found her.”

“If this is supposed to be some kind of official notification, why aren’t you in uniform? Why didn’t you show me your badge?”

“This isn’t an official notification. As I said, I found an injured woman out in the desert-beaten, burned, cut. It looked like she had been through hell. Everyone thought she was an illegal immigrant, but she spoke English, not Spanish. I called for a chopper and had her airlifted into town.”

“If this isn’t an official notification, why are you here? What do you want?”

Al thought about that for a minute-about Kevin Dobbs and the apparently buried “official” report. “Because someone needed to do it,” he answered. “And because no one else seemed to give a damn.”

“Our Rose has been gone for three years. What makes you think this woman you found in the desert is her?”

“I saw the tattoo, Mr. Fox. A rose tattoo that’s right here.” He pointed to a spot on his chest. “This morning I sat down with my computer and started looking for missing persons with rose tattoos. That’s how I found you. When I saw the picture of the tattoo on the Internet and the part about her being from Buckeye, Arizona, it hit me that the girl I found might be her.”

The man’s anger dissipated some. At least he was listening, and he no longer looked as though he were ready to punch Al’s lights out. He seemed to want to believe what Al was telling him, but he wasn’t quite there.

“And you came all this way to tell me?”

Al nodded.

“If you’ve seen the information on the various sites, did you look at the photos? Does the woman you found look like the girl in any of those photos?”

Al thought about the assault victim’s bruised and battered face; her missing teeth; her misshapen features. “No,” he said at last. “The way she looks right now, it would take dental records or fingerprints or DNA to tell for sure. She was messed up pretty bad. Whoever did it meant for her to be dead. She was supposed to be dead. If I hadn’t come along when I did and chased them off, she probably would be dead.”

“And she may still die?”

Al nodded.

“So you expect me to tell my wife that you may have found our long-lost daughter, but she may be dying. In fact, by the time you got here to the house, she might have already been dead. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Fox said. “Maybe you’re not like the other guys. Since you’re not demanding money, maybe your heart’s in the right place, but I’m not going to jump in the car and head for Tucson. Tomorrow I’ll get in touch with the Buckeye Police Department and have someone look into this.”

“Don’t you want to tell your wife?” Al asked.

“No, I don’t. Haven’t you been listening? Every time somebody shows up saying they knew where Rose is, Connie gets her hopes up. And every time, when it turns out that they’re lying or deluded or just plain wrong, it breaks her heart all over again. If and when the cops can verify this, I’ll tell her. Not before. Even if the girl you’re talking about is Rose, what would be the point of finding her and having her die anyway? Now get the hell out of here before my wife gets home. Please.”

Clearly, the conversation was over. Al turned and started away.

“You got a business card on you?” Fox asked. “I’ll pass your name along to the local guys.”

The business cards in Al Gutierrez’s wallet were all Border Patrol cards. At that point, however, it didn’t seem to make much difference. Al took one of them out, walked back to Fox, and handed it over.

“Thanks,” James Fox said, slipping it into his shirt pocket.

“You’re welcome,” Al told him.

As he drove away, Fox was standing in front of the house, watching him go. Al was surprised by the man’s lack of urgency. If it had been his kid or his wife’s kid, he was sure he would already have been in the car and on his way to Tucson.

The two-and-a-half-hour return trip seemed to take less time because Al now knew the way. He spent the whole trip beating himself up for being a fool and for not minding his own business. He had tried to do the right thing. It had blown up in his face. He had expected that Rose’s parents would be thrilled to hear the news and they would come rushing to see their daughter. Instead, he had gotten the brush-off. The stepfather had said he’d contact the Buckeye Police Department. Somehow Al doubted it, but that wasn’t his problem. If Rose Ventana’s family didn’t care whether she was alive or dead, why should he? What Al Gutierrez needed to do was go back to work on Tuesday and forget all about it.

But he couldn’t. He had saved her life, and as he’d said, nobody else seemed to give a damn. Not her family. Not Kevin Dobbs. No one.

When Al reached the intersection of Grant and the freeway, he had a decision to make. Keep going east and go home, or turn off and go to the hospital. He turned off.

3:00 P.M., Sunday, April 11

Tubac, Arizona

It was while he was eating his lonely Sunday-night dinner when Manuel Renteria missed Midge the most-Midge and her tamales. Theirs had been a mixed marriage. They were still newlyweds when Manuel’s mother had taken her Anglo daughter-in-law in hand and taught her how to make tortillas and tamales. When Midge was alive, that was what they usually had on Sunday nights-Midge’s homemade tamales.

Now Sheriff Renteria pushed aside the leavings of his Hungry-Man microwave dinner and sat at his kitchen table, surveying a stack of documents he never should have had in his possession.

Santa Cruz County was too small and too poor to have a crime lab of its own. As a consequence, any forensic work the county needed done was sent to the state crime lab in Tucson on a contract basis. Sheriff Renteria had been in the law enforcement business in Santa Cruz County for a very long time. He knew most of the people who worked in the crime lab, not just the scientists in the labs but their bosses and their bosses’ bosses. He also knew their wives and their kids-who played soccer; who was going to ASU; who had signed up for the marines.

In other words, Sheriff Renteria was connected. And when he called in his markers, the people at the crime lab delivered. In this instance, he had run up the flag on the Reyes shooting, even though it was not his case to investigate. Duane Lattimore’s evidence was not Manuel Renteria’s evidence, but he had it anyway.

Naturally, the reports from the crime lab went first to the DPS investigator, but after that and on an “unofficial basis,” most of that same information turned up on Manuel Renteria’s private fax machine at his home in Tubac. With any luck, Lattimore would never be the wiser.

Manuel Renteria knew, for instance about the results from the search of Jose and Teresa Reyes’s mobile home in Patagonia. Several plastic containers of grass, each in the neighborhood of three kilos and conveniently packaged for flat-rate USPS shipping, had been found on the floor at the back of the entryway closet. These were amounts that would automatically trigger charges that included the words “intent to distribute.” The sheriff studied that notation for a long time, trying to come to terms with the very idea that either Jose Reyes or his wife, Teresa, could be involved in the drug trade.

Manuel had known both these people for years. He had seen the couple out in public with Teresa’s two girls in tow on more than one occasion. They struck him as good parents-caring parents-and the idea that they would leave that much grass in a place that was so easily accessible to the girls didn’t fit.