J. Jance - Left for Dead

“That’s what I’d like to know, too,” Ali said.

She scrolled through the numbers on her phone and dialed the one listed as Juanita Cisco’s office number. She was astonished when Juanita answered her own phone.

“What’s up now?” the defense attorney asked. “Has Lattimore showed up at the hospital for a return engagement?”

“This is something else,” Ali said. “I’m standing in the middle of Teresa and Jose’s house in Patagonia. It’s a wreck.”

“Maybe Teresa’s not a good housekeeper,” Juanita suggested cheerfully. “After all, if someone came into my house unannounced, they’d say the same thing about me-that my house is a wreck. Give the poor woman a break. She’s got an armload of little kids. What do you expect?”

“You don’t understand,” Ali said. “This isn’t a housekeeping problem. This is a breaking-and-entering problem. Maybe not so much breaking. Teresa told me there was a spare key hidden outside. It wasn’t there when I got here, but someone has torn the place apart.”

“What about the search warrant?” Juanita asked. “Maybe Lattimore’s DPS guys are responsible for what you’re seeing. Do you want me to ask him?”

“You can if you want,” Ali returned, “but I don’t think we can lay this at Lieutenant Lattimore’s door. He’s a cop. He may be a jerk, but from what I could see, he pretty much goes by the book. This looks like a frenzy of absolute destruction with a whole lot of malice thrown in on the side. I’m talking about broken dishes, smashed furniture, sliced mattresses, dumped food. Someone went through this house in a deliberate fashion, systematically destroying everything they could lay hands on.”

“Have you reported it?”

“I tried,” Ali said. “It turns out the local sheriff’s department is totally preoccupied with something else at the moment. Believe me, once I leave here, I’m going directly there and then to Sheriff Renteria himself.”

“If Teresa is released from the hospital tomorrow, will she be able to go home?”

Ali looked around at the ugly mess. “No way. The place looks like what you’d expect in the aftermath of an F5 tornado. Everything is wrecked-food, clothing, furniture.”

Juanita sighed. “All right,” she said. “If you’ll handle the police report, I’ll be responsible for letting Teresa know what’s happened. I’ll try to find out who carries her homeowner’s insurance and see if I can get them to call out an adjuster. I’ll also let Teresa know that she’ll probably need to make other arrangements for a place to stay once she leaves the hospital.”

“Thank you,” Ali said.

“All right,” Juanita said. “Considering the circumstances, I guess this set of phone calls is off the clock. In the meantime, you need to get out of the house so you don’t get accused of messing up the crime scene.”

“Believe me,” Ali told her, “there’s no way I could make this crime scene any worse than it already is. And thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Juanita said. “Just remember, the next time you talk to Victor Angeleri, tell him he owes me.”

Ali stowed her phone and turned to Tomas, who stood in the middle of the shattered room, seemingly unable to move.

“What are we supposed to do now?” he asked. “Should we start trying to clean things up?”

“We can’t even begin that process until after the cops have been here to make an official report,” Ali said. “A police report has to be in place for insurance coverage to come into play.”

“So who did this? A bunch of juvenile delinquents?”

Ali thought of the nail polish spilled on the bed. Nail polish didn’t pour in a hurry. She thought about Teresa’s wrecked cookbooks, with the sodden pages permanently glued together.

“I doubt it,” she said thoughtfully. “Whoever did this devoted a lot of time and energy to the effort. The nail polish on the bedding wasn’t completely dry, so this didn’t happen all that long ago, probably sometime this morning. Today’s a school day. That makes kids’ involvement unlikely.”

“Illegals, then?” Tomas asked.

“Maybe,” Ali said, “but the level of destruction suggests this is a lot more personal.”

“What do we do, then?” Tomas asked. “Just walk away?”

“No,” Ali said. “I have a better idea. I’m going to document as much as I can.”

Disregarding Juanita’s advice, she went back through the house room by room, using her iPhone to snap one photograph after another. There were places on the carpet, especially in the hallway near the wrecked nursery, where a trail of baby-powder shoe prints remained, the white print in stark relief against the gray carpet. Ali did her best to avoid marring the prints in any way. If they were evidence, she wanted them left intact.

She was almost done taking photographs when Tomas came to find her. “I’m heading back to town,” he said, holding up the minivan keys. “I just got off the phone with Teresa. She knows what’s going on, and she’s terribly upset, but I told her that she and the kids and even Jose, if necessary, can stay with me until we can get this place cleaned up and livable again. It’ll be crowded at my place, and I’ll need to move furniture around, but it’ll be better than having them try to come back here.”

Ali and Tomas stepped outside. After he drove away, Ali examined her surroundings. The house was set back from the road with empty lots on either side. The nearest house was three lots away, and the road was far enough that it seemed doubtful anyone driving by would have noticed or paid attention to what cars were parked at which house.

On her way out of the development, Ali stopped and banged on the door of the two neighboring houses, hoping that someone would have noticed something out of the ordinary. At the first house, a dog barked, but no one came to the door. At the second one, Ali was greeted with total silence. No one was home, and from the general air of neglect, it looked as though no one had been in or out of the house in weeks. Most likely, the person who had broken into the Reyes’s household had done so secure in the knowledge that there would be no witnesses.

After Ali left, it took her a little over half an hour to drive to Nogales, the Santa Cruz County seat, where she was hoping to make contact with Sheriff Renteria. He wasn’t there, and the only information his secretary handed out was that the sheriff was “currently unavailable.”

Rebuffed, Ali returned to her vehicle and her iPhone. Logging on to one of the local Tucson television channels, she found a breaking-news alert that the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department was currently investigating a reported homicide in Patagonia.

Ali didn’t try to find out the exact location of the homicide before she headed back to Patagonia. She didn’t need to.

She figured the town was small enough that she’d be able to find a homicide crime scene there on her own.

11:30 A.M., Monday, April 12

Patagonia, Arizona

Aside from the delivery guys, the Patagonia post office itself was a one-woman operation. Patty Patton might have made a pitch to the higher-ups, asking to have some part-time help to cover the windows during lunchtime and breaks, but she didn’t want to rock the boat. There was a lot of talk these days about shutting down “underperforming” post offices, and she didn’t want hers to be one of them.

As a consequence, between eleven and twelve each day, Patty closed the window and then sat at the sorting table to eat her peanut better and jelly sandwich and to down the remains of her thermos of coffee. Once upon a time, she had imagined her life would be different, that she and Roland would travel around the world and dine in all kinds of exotic places. She hadn’t expected to live her whole life without venturing outside the confines of Patagonia. But those were the choices she’d made and the way she’d lived her life, and most of the time she had few regrets.