J. Jance - Devil’s Claw

“Is that where she met her husband?”

“No. They met later. By then, Sandra had given up demonstrating and had gone to work at Fort Huachuca. That’s where she and Tom Ridder met-working on post. She was civil service, and he was career army-a staff sergeant.”

“Was Tom Ridder a Native American?”

“Evidently not. When Tom got pushed out of the service, Sandra stayed on working at the fort. They rented a house in Tucson. She carpooled back and forth to Fort Huachuca, and Tom started a Tucson-based landscaping business.”

“That’s what he was doing at the time he was killed, running a landscaping business?” Joanna asked.

“That’s right.”

“But didn’t you say just a few minutes ago that he was a staff sergeant in the army?”

“Right again,” Jaime said.

“Going from staff sergeant to running a landscaping outfit is a pretty big step down,” Joanna observed.

“That’s what I thought, too. According to what Catherine Yates told us, one way or another, Tom Ridder got himself crosswise of his commanding officer. He left the army with a general discharge. I would expect that having one of those on your record puts a damper on potential career opportunities.”

“Did Catherine give you any details on that, on what caused Tom Ridder to be booted out of the service?”

“No. We asked. If she knew, she wasn’t talking.”

“We should probably find out.”

“Right. Ernie Carpenter has some fairly good connections out at Fort Huachuca. He’ll take a crack at finding out those details; if not today, then first thing tomorrow for sure.”

“Good work, Jaime,” Joanna told him. “You two keep after it.”

Once across the divide and out in the wide valley between the Mule Mountains and Tombstone, Joanna tried calling Kristin. It was only fair to let her secretary know that her lunch date in Bisbee had turned into an afternoon drive to Tucson. Unfortunately, Kristin was away from her desk. Several minutes later, Joanna’s phone chirped its distinctive rooster-crow ring. The cell phone’s caller ID readout told her Frank Montoya was on the line.

“Hello,” she said. “What’s up?”

“I traced that phone number for you,” he said. “The U.S. West phone logs say it’s a pay phone, all right, but not at a truck stop. The calls were made from that I-Ten rest area in Texas Canyon east of Benson.”

“As the crow flies, that’s only about fifteen miles or so from Catherine Yates’ place,” Joanna observed. “Less than that from Cochise Stronghold. But did I hear you to say calls? As in plural?”

“That’s right,” Frank said. “There are three different calls on that phone, all made within a few minutes of three a.m. Saturday morning. All of them went to different numbers in the Tucson area. The first one, at three straight up and down, is the one placed to your friend Mrs. Quick. That one lasted about six minutes. You’ll never guess where the next one went.”

“Where?”

“At three ten the log shows a call to one M. Goodson out on Old Spanish Trail.”

“That has to be Melanie Goodson,” Joanna repeated. “Sandra Ridder’s old defense attorney, and the place where Sandra was supposed to be spending the night Saturday night. Is there a chance Lucy was calling there looking for her mother?”

“Could be. Or maybe she had reason to believe that she would soon be in need of a capable defense attorney, although Melanie Goodson hasn’t worked as a public defender in years. Whatever the reason for the call, my guess is Lucy didn’t connect with anyone in person. The call lasted for just over thirty seconds.”

“Long enough to be picked up by an answering machine?” Joanna asked.

“Sounds like. The last call was placed at three-fifteen. That one went to a Catholic convent at Santa Theresa School in the twenty-four hundred block of South Sixth Avenue in South Tucson. Somebody took that one because the call lasted a full fifteen minutes.”

“So there, at least, Lucy must have made contact with whoever it was she was looking for. What’s that address again?”

Frank gave it to her, and Joanna jotted it on her dash-mounted message pad.

“It just so happens that I’m on my way to Tucson right now to see Jay Quick,” Joanna told Frank. “If I finish up with him in time, I may stop by the convent and see if I can find out who it was Lucy was calling so early in the morning.”

“Anything else you want me to do on this end?” Frank asked.

“Jaime and Ernie think they’ve located Melanie Goodson’s missing Lexus. It was found abandoned out east of Douglas. They’re on their way to the scene right now. Ernie was going to look into this tomorrow, but as long as you’re in a bureaucracy-busting mood, how about if you call out to personnel at Fort Huachuca? See what you can find out about Tom Ridder and why he was run out of the army back in the early nineties. He was a staff sergeant when they booted him out, so my guess is the infraction was something more serious than an unauthorized walk in the park.

“When you finish up with that, call Terry Gregovich and tell him comp time’s over for the day. I want our canine unit to get their butts up to that rest-area telephone in Texas Canyon and see if they can pick up Lucy Ridder’s trail from there. Between Saturday night and now, lots of different people may have used that particular pay phone, but it won’t be nearly as many as those hundred-plus Volksmarchers who went meandering through the crime scene out at Cochise Stronghold. We also need to schedule deputies to stop through the rest area overnight for the next several days to see if there are any regular three a.m. users of the rest area who might have seen Lucy Ridder and her sidekick red-tailed hawk.”

“Anything else?” Frank asked.

“One. Have you seen Kristin?”

“She wasn’t at her desk when I got back to the department.”

“I wonder where she went. She didn’t say she was going to lunch. Well, anyway, when you see her, let her know I’m on my way to Tucson. I probably won’t be back until fairly late, but if you have any more good ideas, give me a call back.”

As Joanna continued driving north toward Tucson, she puzzled over what it all meant. Why on Saturday night had Lucy Ridder succumbed to a sudden urge to reconnect with people from her distant past? For a fifteen-year-old, reaching back eight years was going back more than half her life. So the question was: Had she stayed in touch with these folks through all the intervening years, or was this series of phone calls a bolt out of the blue to all three recipients?

The fact that Evelyn Quick had died years earlier without Lucy’s knowing about it made Joanna think the lightning-bolt option was actually the correct one. And if that was true, that meant the phone calls had to do with Sandra Ridder’s sudden and-as far as her daughter Lucy was concerned-unwelcome release from prison.

Joanna also mulled what Jaime Carbajal had told her about Lucy Ridder being a loner. That wasn’t much of a surprise. Anyone who would prefer the company of a red-tailed hawk to the company of people couldn’t be called outgoing or even normal-whatever that might be. Joanna thought back to her own high school days in the years after her father died. She had grieved over D. H. Lathrop’s death and blamed herself for it, too, since her father had been bringing Joanna and members of her Girl Scout troop home from a weekend camp-out when he was struck and killed by a drunk driver while changing a tire. Eleanor Lathrop may have been annoying at times and downright wrongheaded on occasion; still, Joanna had had the benefit of her mother’s love and guidance during those years when she had felt her father’s loss most keenly. Nonetheless, even with her mother’s help, Joanna had felt like the odd man out at school. Kids her age might have had parents who were divorced, but when you were a sophomore or junior or senior in high school, hardly anybody else had a parent who was dead.