Exit Wounds - J. A. Jance [129]
“You took Nathan home?” Joanna asked.
Terry nodded. “His dad was pissed. Denny thought the kid was locked in his room. He had no idea Nathan had let himself out through a window. What’s happening here?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you want me to send Spike in?”
Joanna shook her head. She wasn’t willing to risk Spike’s life either. “Not yet,” she said. “We’ll wait a while longer.”
Finally, just after midnight, she gave the word, and the K-9 unit moved forward. As Terry Gregovich and Spike disappeared from view, time slowed to an even more glacial crawl. Barely daring to breathe, Joanna listened to every sound. Finally Terry shouted out the words she had been waiting to hear.
“It’s all clear,” Deputy Gregovich called. “She’s cut her wrists. She’s dead.”
Joanna gave the order to stand down, then she and Ernie Carpenter helped each other to their feet. They limped stiffly around the protecting wall, guided by the glow of Terry’s flashlight. Stella Adams sat slumped against the wall just inside the empty doorway of a crumbling concrete building. She still wore a single tennis shoe on one foot. The other foot had been scraped raw in her desperate flight across the nighttime desert.
Stella’s hands lay her in her bloodied lap, cradling the Colt .45 and a bloodstained Swiss Army knife. Joanna looked from Stella Adams to Ernie.
“Maybe you’ll be able to keep your promise to Denny Adams after all,” Joanna said softly. “At least Stella had the good sense to spare her son the shame of a trial.”
Nineteen
Joanna was home by two o’clock in the morning. At three she was still sitting on the couch in the family room with Lady cuddled in her lap, considering the mind-numbing series of tragedies that had befallen the entire Mossman clan. The seeds for that human disaster had been planted by Ed Mossman himself, and Joanna Brady had no sympathy for him. A fatal gunshot wound to the chest was actually far better than he deserved. But her heart ached for the others—for the unwilling victims of Ed Mossman’s abuse, his own children—from Carol right on down to Nathan and Cecilia.
Jaime Carbajal had described the film of Cecilia Mossman’s supposed wedding. Joanna had yet to see it, but she could well imagine the frightened and reluctant child bride forced by her father into a situation she could neither handle nor stop.
“Well, I’ll stop it,” she told Lady aloud. “Tomorrow morning I’m calling Sheriff Drake and telling him to go get her. With any kind of luck, Harold Lassiter will go to jail for child rape. If she’s only twelve, that should work. Otherwise, they can nail him for involuntary servitude, if nothing else. Slavery’s illegal in this country, even out on the Arizona Strip.”
Butch, barefoot and clad only in a pair of shorts, came into the family room. “Who are you talking to?” he asked.
“The dog,” Joanna said. “I’m telling Lady all about it.”
“It’s late,” Butch said. “Shouldn’t you come to bed?”
“I can’t sleep.”
He settled down on the couch beside her. Lady opened one eye and looked at him, but made no effort to move away. He put one arm around Joanna’s shoulders and the other on Lady’s hip. “Then maybe you’d better tell me about it, too,” he said.
And so she did.
“Will it come out in public?” Butch asked when she finished. “The part about who Nathan’s father really was?”
“Not if I can help it,” Joanna said. “It’ll be tough enough living down the fact that his mother was a murderer who committed suicide. As far as Nathan is concerned, Denny Adams is his only father. They’ll both be better off if we can leave it that way.”
Butch nodded thoughtfully. “What about the other little girl?”
“Cecilia?”
Butch nodded again.
“I’ve been thinking about her. For one thing, we’ve got Pam Davis and Carmen Ortega’s film. I’m hoping that’ll be enough to get the Mojave County sheriff off the dime. And Andrea Mossman told me she has at least one undercover contact inside the Lassiter compound. One way or another, we’ll get that little girl out of there and pack Harold Lassiter off to the slammer. Cecilia’s