Exit Wounds - J. A. Jance [65]
“Joanna?” Frank Montoya asked. “Are you all right?”
She wiped her mouth on her shirttail. “Not really,” she managed. “You wouldn’t happen to have any water on you, would you? Mine’s all gone.”
Her chief deputy disappeared and returned a moment later with a bottle of water.
“The blood on your arm looks pretty bad,” he said. “Are you hurt?”
Joanna looked down at her bloodied arm and thought about Suzanne Blake. “My heart’s hurt,” she said softly. “There was a two-year-old baby in that car, Frank. A baby whose mother was willing to risk death for both of them to bring him here. They came on the Fourth of July, for God’s sake! I’m sure she thought she was giving her son a chance at a better life. Instead, she’s hurt and he’s dead.”
Frank nodded. “Somebody told me there were five dead.”
“Six,” Joanna corrected. “Counting the baby.”
Frank studied her face for a long moment. “Look, Joanna,” he said at last, “my car’s right over there. Maybe you’d better come sit down for a couple of minutes.”
Any other time, Joanna Brady might have argued the point. With a docility that surprised them both, she allowed herself to be guided to Frank’s Crown Victoria and placed in the rider’s seat while he stood outside.
“I talked to Officer O’Dea of DPS a couple of minutes ago,” Frank told her. “I met up with him on my way here. He said to tell you that so far there’s no sign of the driver.”
“That figures, but we’ll find him,” Joanna declared. “Terry and Spike are out combing the desert for him right this minute.”
Frank nodded in agreement. “Jaime and Ernie just pulled up,” he added. “I’ll go see if they have what they need.”
“I’ll come, too,” Joanna said.
“I don’t think so,” Frank said. “Not right now. Sit tight for a couple of minutes.”
“But…”
“Nobody’s keeping score, boss,” Frank told her. “Lighten up. Give yourself a break.”
Joanna nodded. “All right,” she agreed.
She sat in the car and leaned her head against the seat back, but when she closed her eyes, all she could see was the little boy lying in the dirt with his shattered skull oozing blood. Minutes later, and against Frank’s advice, she was down in the dry bed of Silver Creek watching Jaime Carbajal shoot crime scene photos. The bodies of five of the victims remained where they had fallen. The sixth one was missing, but Joanna refused to feel any sense of guilt about that. When the time came, she led Jaime and Ernie Carpenter to the clump of mesquite where she had found the dead child.
“Was the boy alive when you found him?” Ernie Carpenter asked, his pen poised over his own notebook.
Joanna looked her investigator straight in the eye. “Would I have moved him if he hadn’t been?”
Ernie’s thick eyebrows knotted into a frown, but he said nothing. Joanna was grateful he was willing to let it go at that. It helped that George Winfield came scrambling down the bank into the creek bed just then. His timely arrival provided Joanna with a welcome change of focus.
He glanced around the scene and shook his head. “Hell of a way to get out of Ellie’s annual fireworks party,” he said. “Where do we start?”
Joanna was still at the crime scene forty-five minutes later, when Deputy Howell came to announce that the K-9 unit had just radioed in for assistance. Deputy Gregovich and Spike had located the driver, who, in a futile effort to escape the dog, had fallen down a cliff and injured his ankle.
“Too bad he didn’t break his neck and save us all a hell of a lot of trouble,” Joanna told Debbie Howell. “Take a team of EMTs and go get him, but don’t bring him back here. If he comes too close, I’m as likely to shoot him as look at him.”
Five more hours passed before Joanna finally crawled back into her Civvie and headed home, having missed her evening appearance in Willcox. She was drained and tired and, surprisingly, hungry. She let herself into the darkened house and stopped