337
together. “Okay, guys,” she added. “Spread out. We’ll be better off behind the wall than we are out here in the open. We move forward at the same speed. No one gets too far ahead, and no one drops behind.”
“By the way,” Terry said, “she’s bleeding pretty good.” Joanna looked at the ground in front of her and saw the faint reflection of moonlight off droplets of moisture leading them forward. And Deputy Gregovich was right. It was more than mere droplets.
Weapons drawn, the three officers and the accompanying German shepherd inched forward, crawling on their bellies. They reached the relative shelter of the wall with no additional shots being fired.
“Stella,” Joanna called. “We know you’re in there. We also know you’re hurt. Give yourself up. Throw out your weapon. Let us help you.”
“I don’t want help,” Stella called back.
“Good work, boss,” Ernie muttered. “You’ve made contact and got her talking.”
“Think of your son,” Joanna said. “Think of Nathan. He loves you and needs you.”
“He doesn’t. I’ve wrecked his life. It’s spoiled. Everything I tried to do is gone.
And it’s all Carol’s fault. And Andrea’s. How could they do that-to me and to Nathan?
Why couldn’t they leave well enough alone? And why did Carol have to decide to go and open her big mouth?”
Stella’s voice came from only a few feet away, from the other side of the roofless wall. Joanna thanked God for the thick concrete that separated them.
“Maybe she was tired of keeping secrets, Stella,” Joanna said.
338
“Secrets like that get to be too heavy over the years. They drag you down.”
“I was doing fine. So was Nathan, but now …”
“Pam Davis and Carmen Ortega thought you were Carol, didn’t they?” Joanna called softly. “They came to Carol’s place for their appointment that morning, but Carol was already dead, wasn’t she? You pretended to be her.”
For a few moments, Stella Adams was silent. During the silence Joanna was struck by the peculiar intimacy of their conversation. They might have been girls off on a double date, sharing secrets between locked stalls in a ladies’ rest room. “How did you know that?” Stella asked finally.
Because you all breed true, Joanna felt like saying. Because all of Eddie Mossman’s daughters look like twins. And his son looks just like him.
Far ahead, Joanna caught sight of the winking flash of approaching lights. The additional officers she had summoned were coming toward them from the opposite direction. “Tell Tica we’re talking to the suspect. Tell our backup to stay back until I give the word,” Joanna ordered. Moments later Deputy Gregovich was relaying the information through the radio attached to the shoulder of his uniform.
Meanwhile Joanna turned her attention back to the suspect. Nathan was Stella Adams’s Achilles heel, and that was where Joanna focused her efforts.
“Think about Nathan,” she said. “Turn yourself in.”
“That’s what my father said, too,” Stella returned. ” ‘Think about Nathan.’ But I am thinking about him. Everything I did, I did for him. To protect him.”
“Your father wanted you to turn yourself in?”
Stella erupted in a mirthless chuckle. “Right. That’s what he 339
wanted, but I told him, ‘No way!’ I told him he owed me-he owed us all-but he owed Nathan more than anybody. So, at first, when I asked him, he was willing to help.
He agreed to send the e-mail to try to get Pam and Carmen to back off.”
“You knew they were coming?”
“Sure, I did. Because they wanted to talk to me. After they finished talking to Carol, they were going to interview me, too. But the threat didn’t work. They didn’t back off. Pam and Carmen showed up anyway, so I got rid of them, and Carol, too. Dad was headed back to Mexico from Kingman. When I told him what had happened, he offered to move the bodies for me. He said he’d try to make it look like some pervert had done it.”
That should have been easy for Ed Mossman, Joanna thought.
“So he moved them and stripped them and tied them up,” Stella continued.
“You shot them?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In their car. What a mess! I didn’t think I’d ever get all that blood washed off.
It was everywhere.”
“Where’s the car, Stella?” Joanna asked. “The car you shot them in. Where is it?”
“I ran it off the road, somewhere the other side of Animas. Then I hitchhiked back.
I told the guy who gave me a ride that my husband had beaten me up and that I was going back home to my
