Joanna shook her head. The rain was still falling. The coroner’s office up in Tombstone Canyon was housed in a former funeral home that came complete with a covered portico. “I’ll take her the rest of the way to your office,” Joanna told him. “That way she won’t get wet, and neither will your satchel.”
“‘Thanks, Joanna,” George told her, climbing out. “See you there.”
The usually dry creek in Mule Gulch was running bank to hank where it crossed the highway, and there were fallen rocks anti muddy debris on the roadway in the high cuts between there and Bisbee. Wanting to report the hazard and summon someone to clean it up, Joanna reached for her radio. For the dozenth time that day, it wasn’t there. Her ability to communicate with Dispatch was at home in the Crown Victoria, parked in the yard of High Lonesome Ranch.
It was almost four in the afternoon as Joanna made her way up Tombstone Canyon. That wasn’t easy, either. The deluge had washed what looked like at least one vehicle down Brewery Gulch. It was stuck in the subway, a massive storm drain designed for just such occasions. Driving past emergency vehicles and personnel out in the downpour trying to pull whatever it was out, Joanna couldn’t help being grateful that this latest incident, whatever it might be, was inside the Bisbee city limits rather than outside. That made it someone else’s problem, not hers.
She realized then that she was hungry. Not just hungry-starving. She’d had nothing to eat all day long. She had missed Eva Lou Brady’s Sunday dinner, which had probably been something wonderful like a pork roast or fried chicken. Health-conscious badgering might have persuaded the Colonel to change a few things at KFC, but there had been no change in Eva Lou’s philosophy of what was appropriate fare for Sunday dinner.
Fantasizing about that missed meal, Joanna failed to notice the black Lexus parked by the curb just down the street from the coroner’s office. Joanna was sitting in the Eagle under the portico and waiting for George to pull in behind her when someone tapped on the window beside her head. She looked outside to see the grief-ravaged face of Katherine O’Brien.
Joanna opened the door. In the more than two hours she had been in the car with the body, Joanna’s olfactory senses had somehow become deadened to the stench. Only when she opened the door and moved into the fresh air could she tell the difference. The evil cloud that came out of the Eagle with her sent Katherine reeling backward, gagging and holding her mouth.
“That’s not…” she wailed, shuddering and pointing at the mud-encrusted back gate of Joanna’s wagon. “It can’t be…”
“Mrs. O’Brien,” Joanna said quickly. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“I had to come and see for myself,” Katherine said. “Miss Stoddard told us that it didn’t look good, but I had to know for sure. I had to know what really happened.”
Seeing the Lexus now, Joanna squinted through the rain. “Where’s your husband, Mrs. O’Brien? Is he waiting in the car?”
Katherine shook her head. “I came by myself. I told him I was going up to St. Dominick’s to light a candle and pray. He doesn’t know I’m here.”
“And you shouldn’t be,” Joanna admonished. “Dr. Winfield wasn’t planning to try to ID the body until after it’s been properly taken care of for evidence reasons.”
“It?” Katherine said, her voice rising until it verged on hysterics. “You’re calling my daughter an ‘it’? And what’s she doing stuffed in the back of a station wagon like that?”
Just then Doc Winfield pulled in behind the Eagle. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“‘This is Katherine O’Brien,” Joanna explained. “She came to find out what’s happened to her daughter.”
George Winfield’s clothing was still plastered to his body. The man was a mess. Still, with a look of total and grave concern, he reached out and took Katherine O’Brien’s hand, grasping it firmly. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. O’Brien,” he said, his voice softened by genuine warmth and dignity both. “It will lake some time for me to prepare things so you can actually view your daughter. If you wouldn’t mind going inside to wait, I’ll come get you as soon as possible.”
Taking Katherine by the arm, he escorted her to the door while Joanna stood there waiting. She knew George Winfield had been a doctor once, an oncologist, before he had left that field to study forensic pathology. As she watched Katherine O’Brien lean against him, taking comfort from whatever he was saying to her, Joanna realized she was seeing a demonstration of bedside manner in action-an impressive demonstration at that.
Joanna knew the body was far too heavy for her to manage on her own. During the next few minutes, she occupied herself with hauling George Winfield’s equipment case out of the back of her Eagle. In less than five minutes, the coroner reappeared. He was dressed in clean, dry scrubs and wearing a lab coat. He was also pushing a gurney.
“If you can help me load her onto this,” he said, “I’ll be able to handle things from here.”
“What about Mrs. O’Brien?” Joanna asked. “Do you want me to have her go home and come back later?”
Winfield frowned. “I’m not used to having family members waiting outside quite this soon,” he said. “But you could just as well let her stay. The face is so badly mangled from being squashed flat by the falling truck that there isn’t that much that will soften the blow. Not only that, if the mother can’t positively identify her by sight, then we’re better off knowing now that we’ll have to get the dental records.”
Joanna nodded. “Do you want me to wait with her?”
“If you don’t mind,” George Winfield said, “that would be a big help.”
Painfully aware of her own scruffy appearance-of her dirty clothes and dusty hiking boots-Joanna Brady ventured inside. The Cochise County Coroner’s Office was housed in quarters once occupied by Dearest Departures, a bankrupted discount funeral home. George Winfield had stowed Katherine O’Brien in a small, darkened room that had probably been intended to function as a private chapel. Katherine sat on one end of an upholstered love seat, weeping quietly into a hanky. Joanna walked over and sat down beside her.
“You probably shouldn’t do this alone,” Joanna said tentatively. “Would you like to have someone go out to Sombra-” She slopped and corrected herself. “-to Green Brush Ranch and bring your husband here to he with you’?”
Katherine O’Brien shook her head. “I’m a trained nurse,” she said. “It’s better if I do it.”
Joanna nodded. “All right, then,” she said.
Katherine blew her nose. “Tell me about Ignacio Ybarra,” she said.
“I didn’t think you knew anything about your daughter’s boyfriend,” Joanna returned. “That’s what you told us yesterday.”
“I didn’t,” Katherine said. “Not then. Frankie Stoddard picked up the name earlier by listening to radio transmissions on her police scanner. As soon as she mentioned the name, I recognized it. He’s the football player from Douglas-the one who was injured in the Bisbee-Douglas game.”
“The one your daughter quit the cheerleading squad over’?” Katherine nodded.
“That’s him,” she said.
“My mother is a liar.” Unbidden, the words from the last entry in Brianna’s journal came back to Joanna in a rush.
There were lots of ways to lie, Joanna realized. Eleanor Lathrop had lied, not by spinning some outrageous fib but by keeping silent. By marrying George Winfield on the sly and then by not mentioning it to anyone, not even to her own daughter. That was what Ogden Nash and the Catholic church would have called a sin of omission rather than a sin of commission. So what kind of untruth on Katherine’s part had so offended her own daughter that Brianna had retaliated by weaving her own web of lies?
“Are you aware that two of your daughter’s journal volumes are missing from her room?”
“No,” Katherine replied. “I had no idea.”
“One was found at the crash site. The second-the current one-wasn’t there.”
“So it is her, then, isn’t it,” Katherine said doggedly, her tears starting anew. “I kept hoping and praying it might be some other truck. There are lots of those around, you know. I saw one just like it on my way uptown. But the journal…” She shook her head. “That pretty well settles it. How did it happen? The accident, I mean. Tell me. I need to know.”
