Want to take a look before they haul her out?”
The last thing Joanna wanted to see was a young girl’s lifeless body. “I’d better,” she said.
Had she tried, Joanna probably could have seen enough without ever leaving the roadway. Rather than taking the easy way out, though, she picked her way down the rocky embankment. At the bottom, standing with her back to the yawning opening of a culvert that ran under the highway, Joanna looked down at the sad, crumpled remains of Dora Matthews.
Totally exposed to the weather, the sun-scorched child lay faceup in the sandy bed of a dry wash. Her lifeless eyes stared into the burning afternoon sun. Her long brown hair formed a dark halo against the golden sand. She wore a pair of shorts and a ragged tank top along with a single tennis shoe and no socks. A knapsack, its contents scattered loose upon the ground, lay just beyond her outstretched fingertips. The ungainly positions of Dora’s limbs sickened Joanna and made her swallow hard to keep from gagging. Her twisted arms and legs lay at odd angles that spoke of multiple broken bones inside a savagely mangled body.
Breathing deeply to steady herself, Joanna turned away and joined Frank Montoya and George Winfield, who stood just inside the opening of the culvert, taking advantage of that small patch of cooling shade. “What do you think?” she asked.
“Looks like a hit-and-run to me,” Frank said. “I’ve had deputies looking up and down the highway in either direction. So far we’ve found no skid marks, no broken grille or headlight debris, and, oddly enough, no tennis shoe. Whoever hit her made no effort to stop. I wouldn’t be surprised to find we’re dealing with a drunk driver who is totally unaware of hitting, much less killing, someone”
Like a drowning victim, Joanna wanted to clutch at the drunk driver theory, one that would mean Dora’s death was an awful accident. That would mean Jenny wasn’t really in danger. But Joanna didn’t dare allow herself that luxury. Instead, she turned to George Winfield.
“What about you?” she asked.
“You know me,” George Winfield said. “Until I have a chance to examine the body, I’m not even going to speculate.” He looked at his watch and sighed impatiently. “Jaime Carbajal drives me crazy. He’s slower than Christmas. Even I could take those damn crime scene pictures faster than he does.”
It was Sunday. Joanna suddenly realized that George’s impatience with Jaime was probably due to the fact that this crime scene call was keeping Eleanor Lathrop’s husband from attending one of his wife’s numerous social engagements. Joanna’s simmering anger toward her mother, held in check for a while, returned at once to a full boil. Rather than lighting into George about it, Joanna simply turned and walked back up to the roadway. Frank Montoya, reading the expression on her face, followed.
“Something wrong, Boss?” he asked.
“My mother’s what’s wrong,” she said heatedly. “That little girl wouldn’t be dead right now if Eleanor Lathrop Winfield hadn’t opened her big mouth and gone blabbing around when she shouldn’t have.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“I don’t
“Don’t be too hard on private citizens,” Frank counseled. “One of them may have just saved our bacon.”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone found Connie Haskell’s car. The call came in from Tucson a few minutes ago.”
“Where was It?”
“At the airport in Tucson. Some little old lady, on her way to Duluth to see her daughter, made a 911 call on Saturday morning. She reported what she thought to be blood on the door of the car parked next to hers in the airport lot. The call got mishandled, and nobody bothered to investigate it until a little while ago. The woman’s right. It is blood, and it’s also Connie Haskell’s Lincoln Town Car. It’s being towed to the City of Tucson impound lot. I tried to get them to bring it down to Bisbee, but that didn’t fly. Casey Ledford is on her way to Tucson to be on hand when they open the trunk. She’ll be processing the vehicle for us. Not that I don’t trust the Tucson crime scene techs,” Frank added. “But they don’t have quite the same vested interest in that Town Car that we do.”
“Well, at least we’re making progress somewhere,” Joanna said. “Is it possible Connie Haskell’s killer could be the carjacker after all?”
