J. Jance - Left for Dead

“You’re saying you and she were at odds?” Sister Anselm suggested.

“I was a lifelong bachelor who had never been married when Connie and her girls came into my life,” James Fox said. “Rose and Lily were already in their teens. I had never been a father, but I was an engineer. When I see something that’s wrong, I want to fix it.”

“What was wrong with Rose?” Sister Anselm asked.

“Nothing, really. Rose was smart. She had huge amounts of potential, but she couldn’t see it; she seemed determined to squander it. I tried to push her too hard in one direction-toward doing better in school, getting her education. She wasn’t interested. I thought all I was doing was trying to create a little order in their lives by giving them a better place to live, more opportunities. But I can see now that she must have thought I was bossing everybody around. I got smarter after she left. I’ve done a lot better with her sisters, don’t you think?” he asked Connie.

Connie reached out, took his hand, and nodded. The younger girl, Jasmine, sidled up to him and gave him a hug.

“When that young man Al Gutierrez showed up at the house last night, he said he was with the Border Patrol, but he wasn’t in uniform, and I thought he was trying to scam us,” Fox continued. “That’s happened before. I’ve seen Connie put through the wringer enough times by people claiming to know what happened to Rose when all they really wanted was Connie’s money. When the detective from Phoenix called this morning, I figured out that Gutierrez must have been telling the truth-that Rose really was alive. And now that we know she may be involved in a homicide-” His voice broke. He stopped speaking abruptly.

“Did they say whose homicide?” Sister Anselm asked.

James Fox nodded. “The guy’s name was Hernandez-Chico Hernandez. Rose evidently worked for him as a …” He paused, looked at Jasmine, and added, “A call girl. He was murdered late last week, and Rose’s fingerprints were found in his vehicle. That’s why Detective Rush called us this morning.”

“Does that make any difference?” Sister Anselm asked. She didn’t say “call girl” aloud, but that was what she meant.

“Damn right it makes a difference!” James Fox declared.

Sister Anselm’s heart fell. Rose is right, she thought. If they figure out she’s been working as a prostitute, the family will disown her.

“Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said?” he demanded. “Rose is a person of interest in a homicide. I don’t care if she wants to see us. That doesn’t matter, but if she’s mixed up in a murder, she probably needs our help. That’s why we’re here. Tell her that, please.”

Which was not at all what Sister Anselm had expected. She stood up. “Wait here,” she said. “Let me go talk to her. I’ll see what I can do.”

11:00 A.M., Monday, April 12

Vail, Arizona

By the time Detective Ariel Rush showed up on Al Gutierrez’s doorstep in Vail, he had printed out the crime scene photos, the ones Dobbs had told him not to bother keeping. His printer wasn’t the best, so neither was the resolution.

“I took these on Friday,” he said, handing them over. “They’re not very good.”

“You’d be surprised,” she said. “I’ll go get my computer and copy what’s on the memory stick so the lab can take a look at it.”

By the time she returned with her laptop, he had taken the memory stick out of his camera.

“Any thing else on here besides your crime scene photos?” she asked.

“My graduation picture,” he said. “From the academy.”

“We don’t want anything to happen to that,” Rush said with a smile. “Have you been on the job long?”

“Awhile,” Al admitted. “I just don’t take that many pictures.”

In a way, Detective Rush reminded him of his old junior high principal from back in Wenatchee. Mrs. Baxter had looked scary but wasn’t. Al suspected Detective Rush was pretty much the same.

“Ready to saddle up?” she asked, closing her computer and returning the memory stick.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Want me to bring my camera along?”

“Don’t bother,” she said. “I’ve got my own.”

On the forty-five-minute drive from Vail to King’s Anvil Ranch, south of Three Points, Al told Detective Rush everything he could remember about the incident on Friday afternoon and everything he had learned about the victim.

On Friday, he had carefully recorded the location of the crime scene from his GPS so he’d be able to find it again later. Now, as they headed toward the crime scene in Detective Rush’s vehicle, that notation proved to be invaluable; without it, they would have been flying blind through the mesquite-dotted landscape. His note helped him make sense of the countless tracks that meandered here and there across the desert. Eventually, he spotted something familiar.

“Stop here,” he ordered. “It’s on the far side of that clump of mesquite.”

Before they got out of the car, Detective Rush slipped off her black low-heeled pumps in favor of tennis shoes. Stepping from the vehicle, she brought along Al’s crime scene photos as well as her own camera. Out on the desert floor, Al helped her down the bank and then led her to the spot where the roiled sand indicated a lot of activity. It was April. All weekend long the wind had blown in from the west, shifting sand into what might have been usable tracks. Comparing the photos to the landscape, Detective Rush combed the wash for twenty yards in either direction. Then she examined the part of the bank where Al suspected something had been rolled down the steep incline, taking photos of bits of broken grass, horse nettles, Tucson burr ragweed.

“Look here,” she said, pointing toward a plant with a bit of fabric tangled in one of the spiky burrs. She held up both the burr and the thread before dropping them into an evidence bag.

“It’s not from the victim’s clothing,” Al said. “She wasn’t wearing any.”

When it came time to exit the arroyo, Al climbed up the steep wash. Then he reached down and helped Detective Rush up and out.

“I thought this was where the attack took place, since this is where I found the blood spatters,” he told her. “They were tiny, though, and it looks like they’re pretty much gone.”

He was right. Whatever spatters might have been there on Friday afternoon had been blown away over the weekend by a scouring windstorm.

“This seems like the back of beyond,” Detective Rush said. “So why bring her here? If the incident began somewhere in the Phoenix area, they had to go to some trouble to get her this far.”

“Because it is the back of beyond,” Al said. “It was lucky for her that I turned up when I did. There are thousands of acres of empty desert out here. She might’ve lay dead in the wash for weeks or even months before someone found her. Illegals come through here all the time, and some of them die. As Sergeant Dobbs demonstrated, no one worries about it all that much. One dead illegal is pretty much like another. Whoever did this put her here because they thought nobody would pay attention. Turns out they were almost right.”

“You never saw the vehicle?”

“No, I heard it start up. It sounded like a truck of some kind or maybe an SUV. I’m pretty sure they heard me coming and took off.”

“On foot?”

“Yes. This track dead-ends at a barbed-wire fence about half a mile north of here. It’s a private road, but it’s better than the one we’re on. Made for a faster getaway. I tried calling it in at the time, but if anyone saw the vehicle, it didn’t seem worth stopping. Or else they missed it altogether. There’s a security checkpoint just west of Three Points.”