“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.”
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“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 jaim 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
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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 off in the kitchen long enough to make herself some hot chocolate-not the instant stuff where you add hot water and stir. No, she hauled out a saucepan and made the old-fashioned kind. The recipe, learned at her father’s knee, came complete with canned milk, chocolate syrup, salt, sugar, and vanilla. She was just sprinkling sugar and cinnamon onto a piece of buttered toast when a bathrobe-clad Butch appeared in the kitchen.
“How was it?” he asked, pouring the remaining half cup of cocoa for himself.
“Bad,” Joanna told him. “A speeding Suburban full of UDAs turned over at Silver Creek east of Douglas. The department of public safety investigator estimates the guy was doing at least eighty when he slammed through the Jersey barrier at a construction site. Six dead, including a two-year-old boy. Twenty-some injured, some of them critical.”
“Six dead and twenty-some injuries,” Butch repeated. “How many people were in the car?”
“Thirty.”
Easing himself onto a stool beside her, Butch whistled. “They must have been stacked inside like cordwood.”
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Joanna nodded. “They were,” she said dully. “The driver was wearing a seat belt.
Naturally the son of a bitch walked away unscathed.”
“How are you, Joey?” Butch asked after a pause.
He knew her well enough to ask. Joanna didn’t dodge the question. “Not so good,”
she admitted, biting her lip. “I’m the one who found the baby.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That had to be pretty rough.”
“It was. He couldn’t have been more than two, Butch. And he ended up dead in a clump of mesquite with the back of his head bashed in.”
Joanna’s voice quivered audibly as she spoke. Butch reached over, put an arm around her shoulders and pulled
