J. Jance - Devil’s Claw

“And Lucy?”

“No sign of her. She had been there, but she’s evidently not there any longer, and there’s no sign of that damned hawk of hers, either. But that’s not why I called you. The real news is about Melanie Goodson.”

“What about her?”

“She’s dead,” Frank said.

Joanna’s jaw dropped. “She’s what?”

“You heard me. Dead.”

“When? What did she die of?”

“No way to tell. The Pima County ME’s office says they saw some signs of needle tracks, so maybe she overdosed. At any rate, she didn’t turn up for work today. Nobody was really all that concerned because her first appointment wasn’t until after one, when she was supposed to meet with Ernie and Jaime. According to her secretary, if she had worked late the day before, she sometimes didn’t come in at all in the morning. By the time somebody started to worry and called Pima County to go out to her place on Old Spanish Trail to check on her, she’d been dead for some time.”

Joanna shook her head. “This feels bad to me, Frank. This isn’t some accidental overdose. She didn’t look like even a recreational drug user to me. This has to be connected to Sandra Ridder and what happened to her. Did Ernie and Jaime go out to Melanie Goodson’s house?”

“The last I heard, they were on their way, but it’s Pima County’s deal, Joanna. As you know, our relationship with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department hasn’t been exactly cordial of late, so don’t hold your breath as far as interdepartmental cooperation goes. It isn’t gonna happen.”

“Can we get either Jaime or Ernie on the horn?” Joanna asked.

“I don’t know. We can try. The last time I talked to Ernie, his cell phone was cutting in and out. The coverage may be pretty spotty out in that neck of the woods.” Nonetheless, Frank picked up his phone and began dialing.

“How can the cell phone coverage be that bad?” Joanna asked. “Old Spanish Trail is in Tucson, for God’s sake.”

“Not South Old Spanish Trail,” Frank told her. “From what Ernie told me, Melanie Goodson’s house is out in the middle of nowhere, almost to Vail.” He listened intently for several seconds, then shook his head. “Says he’s left the service area.”

“What’s the phone company thinking?” Joanna asked. “Angie Kellogg’s boyfriend can make cell-phone calls from Skeleton Canyon-which is the godforsaken middle of nowhere-back home to England, but we can’t call from here to Vail?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Frank told her. “The phone company doesn’t have to think, and our two-way car radios don’t stretch over the mountains that far, either. We’ll just have to wait for one of them to report in.”

“Waiting isn’t something I’m very good at,” Joanna said.

Frank Montoya grinned at her. “Really,” he said. “I never would have guessed.”

Joanna did a few more pacing-style turns around the office and checked on the progress of Jenny’s homework. Finally, at five-thirty, she went back to Frank’s office. “All right,” she told him, “I’m leaving. Somebody has to go home and feed the animals. Leave word with Dispatch that as soon as either Ernie or Jaime comes within hailing distance, I want a call to me on my cell phone. Even if Jenny and I are out doing chores; I’ll have the phone with me at all times.”

After that Joanna cleared her desk of everything she’d left undone during the course of the day by stuffing a pile of untouched paperwork into a much-used briefcase. Taking work home was something she did by force of habit almost every night these days. Often she never even got around to opening the briefcase between leaving the office and returning the next morning. Still, it made her feel better somehow that her desk usually looked more or less cleared when she left work at the end of the day.

She and Jenny were home, had fed all the animals, and were on their way back into the house to fix dinner when the cell phone rang in Joanna’s shirt pocket. Hoping the caller would be one of her two detectives, Joanna answered hurriedly.

“Congratulate me,” Butch Dixon said. “It worked.”

“What worked?”

“Butch Dixon Tour Guide,” he said. “I’ve worn my parents out. I offered to take them out to dinner, but they said they’d had enough. All they wanted to do was go back out to the RV park and hit the hay. And all I want to do is come see you.”

“Butch, really,” Joanna began. “I’ve brought a briefcaseful of work home. If I’m going to be gone for the better part of next week, there’s a lot I need to get caught up on before we leave town.”

“Please,” he said. “Have pity on me. I’ve spent the whole day trying to dodge one of my mother’s negative comments after another. ”Wherever did you get the odd idea that you could write a book?“ is my personal favorite. As far as I’m concerned, that was the topper on the cake. What my ego needs now is a little dose of positive feedback from my two favorite people in the world. I promise, I won’t try to talk. I’ll sit in the corner quiet as a mouse and watch you work-make you work-if need be. And I won’t even hint about spending the night.”

By the time Butch finished his sad lament, Joanna was laughing at him. “All right,” she relented. “But no more whining, either. I can’t stand it when you whine.”

“I don’t like it either,” Butch agreed. “I’m afraid my folks bring out the worst in me.”

He was out at the High Lonesome within fifteen short minutes. By then Joanna had thawed out some ground beef and was frying corn tortillas for tacos. Jenny had chopped up tomatoes and onions and was busy grating cheese when Butch walked in the door.

“Boy,” he said. “Are you two a sight for sore eyes! I’ve had about all of Maggie Dixon I can stand, and she’s been in town for barely twenty-four hours.”

Jenny wrinkled her nose. “You mean you don’t like her either, even though she’s your own mother?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Butch said.

Joanna’s phone rang just then. When she dragged it out of her shirt pocket, Butch relieved her of the tongs. “I’ll finish frying the tortillas,” he said. “You talk on the phone.”

“Where are you?” Joanna asked when she heard Jaime Carbajal’s voice.

“Benson,” he said. “We’ve given up for the day, and we’re on our way home. Dispatch said you wanted us to call.”

“I did-do,” Joanna said. “How’s it going?”

“Not too bad, considering. I guess Frank told you that we missed the boat when it came to talking to Melanie Goodson. And the nun you wanted us to talk to, the one who’s the principal at Santa Theresa’s…”

“Sister Celeste,” Joanna supplied.

“Right. We didn’t see her, either. She was out sick today, but we did have one bit of luck.”

“What’s that?”

“Not surprisingly, the Pima County homicide detectives weren’t too thrilled when we showed up hot on their heels. Since they wouldn’t let us anywhere near their crime scene, Ernie and I were stuck just sort of milling around down on Old Spanish Trail at Melanie Goodson’s turnoff, which, by the way, seems to be paved from there all the way to her house. That had to have cost a fortune. Anyway, we were left cooling our heels there, and since people are just naturally curious when they see a couple of stopped police vehicles, we did manage to talk to some of Melanie’s neighbors.”

“Jaime, could you stop stringing me along and try getting to the good part?”

“We ended up talking to a lady named Karen Gustafson who lives just up the street, if you could call it that. It’s a road, really. Anyway, she told us that she and her husband were coming home from Webb’s Steak House on Friday night about ten when they saw Melanie Goodson’s Lexus coming down the road. Karen said she was sitting in the car while her husband went over to the mailbox to pick up their mail. She said that when the car came by, she saw there were two people in it-Melanie Goodson and some other woman. The thing is, until we started asking her questions, she didn’t even know Melanie’s car had been stolen.”