all afternoon, and I can be at the hospital in under ten minutes.”
20
9:00 A.M., Sunday, April 11
Vail, Arizona
The fact that one of Al Gutierrez’s regular days off was Sunday was a bone of contention with his roommates. He didn’t venture out of his room until everyone else had either gone to bed or gone on duty. Someone had dragged the Sunday paper inside and rifled through it. The sports page had suffered a severe coffee spill. Fortunately, his roommates never bothered with the rest of the paper.
Once again, Al read through it carefully, looking for some reference to the assault incident. Despite his morning paper, he was far from a Luddite, so he logged on to the Internet. The whole time Al had been at work the day before, he had considered his options. Just because Dobbs was going to sit on this didn't mean that Al had to.
He put the words “rose tattoo” into the search engine. Google came up with over three million hits, many of them having to do with a rock-and-roll band named Rose Tattoo. Then he tried “missing women with rose tattoos.” That gave him 305,000 hits. Disturbed and disheartened to think there could be that many missing women with rose tattoos on their bodies, he began scrolling through them. It was slow, painstaking work, and it took him the better part of the morning.
One of his searches led him to the website of
He read everything he could about Rose Ventana—about her family’s long search for their missing daughter and sister. He read the interviews they gave every year in February on the day Rose disappeared. Al wanted to pick up the phone and call them right then, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to give them the wonderful news that he might have found their missing daughter and that she might be alive only for them to discover that she wasn’t.
Al’s victim—Rose, he was sure—had been alive when the Air Evac helicopter lifted off to take her to Physicians Medical Center. Considering the extent of her injuries, he was convinced she was still there, if she hadn’t died in the meantime.
That was when he hit on the idea of going to the hospital and taking some flowers to the injured woman. If the patient was dead, the hospital most likely wouldn’t accept the flowers, would they? That was about the time he reconsidered the idea of making a phone call to Rose Ventana’s family. With the help of a people-finding website, he was able to track down a Buckeye street address for Connie and James Fox.
Whenever there was a death, cops always made every effort to notify the next of kin in person. Was it out of respect for the dead, or was it to have someone there if emergency medical care were required? What about if the notification were about someone who wasn’t dead? What, if after being thought dead for years, that person suddenly turned up alive? Wouldn’t that good news be just as mind-numbingly shocking to the grieving family members as bad news?
Al dressed in a U of A sweatshirt that he’d picked up during that year’s March Madness celebration. He put on his Mariners baseball cap and pulled it down over his eyes. Looking at himself in the mirror, he had to laugh. He looked like any one of a number of would-be bank robbers. It wasn’t much of a disguise, but he hoped it was good enough to keep Sergeant Dobbs off his back.
With that, Al headed for Costco. The one closest to the hospital was on Grant, near Wilmot. Wandering through the flower section, he saw the foil-wrapped Easter lilies and knew they were just right.
After all, Easter was about the resurrection. Wasn’t this the same thing?
21
10:00 A.M., Sunday, April 11
Tucson, Arizona
Teresa Reyes awakened when her daughters came racing through the waiting room, squealing, “Mommy. Mommy. Mommy.”
“Look what Donnatelle got us,” Lucy said gleefully. “A new dress. From Target.”
It turned out to be two matching dresses, actually—one for Lucy and one for Carinda.
“Very pretty,” Teresa said, peeling the girls off her and struggling to sit up. “Did you tell her thank you?”
Both girls nodded.
“Can we go show Daddy?” Lucy wanted to know.
“No,” Teresa answered.
She looked at the clock on the wall and was astonished to see that she had slept for almost six hours. Just then Sister Anselm, the nun who might as well have been Teresa’s guardian angel, emerged from one of the rooms on the other side of the unit.
“So you’re awake,” Sister Anselm said with a smile. “You must have been exhausted, to be able to sleep that peacefully on a lumpy couch with people coming and going all around you.”
“How’s Jose?” Teresa asked. “I should probably go check on him.”
“He’s doing well,” Sister Anselm said. “I checked on him about half an hour ago. Everything was fine. He’s stable. No changes in his condition.”
“When can we see Daddy” Lucy asked. “I want to see him. Now.”
“Not until he moves out of this room and into another one,” Teresa explained.
“Tell your mommy that we got some sticker books, too,” Donnatelle said, taking charge of the girls once again. “Let’s go play with those and give your mom a chance to wake up.”
Teresa stripped off the blanket and sat up. Her shoes were on the floor, but when she tried to put them on, they felt like they were at least one size too small, maybe even two. “What about having some breakfast?” she asked the girls.
“We already ate,” Lucy told her. “At the hotel.”
“Thank you,” Teresa said to Donnatelle. “For everything.”
“No problem,” Donnatelle said. “They were very good girls. We had breakfast first, and then we went to Target to look for dresses.”
Looking from Sister Anselm to Donnatelle, Teresa couldn’t help but be astonished by their kindness. Donnatelle had dropped everything and driven halfway across the state to help out. Sister Anselm had volunteered to look out for Jose so Teresa could grab a few hours of sleep. She would have to revise her thinking—two guardian angels, not just one.
With the girls happily occupied at a table in the corner of the room, Teresa limped into the restroom. Revived by sleep and refreshed by splashing cold water on her face and smoothing down her hair, she made her way into Jose’s room. Sister Anselm was right. He was sleeping. She stood by his bed for some time. Was it possible that he had done what Sheriff Renteria had said? If so, Jose had succeeded in showing one face to her and his colleagues and another to the criminal world. Was it possible for the man she loved to be everything he had claimed to despise?
When Teresa was nervous or upset, she often twisted her wedding band, moving it around on her finger. This time, when she attempted to do that, the ring wouldn’t budge. She looked at her hands. Her fingers looked swollen, but that was probably due to the way she had slept, lying flat on the couch with her hands beside her. She was sure that if she waited awhile, she’d be fine.
