Damage Control (11 page)

“Joanna,” she said with a delighted smile. “I heard that the Beasley girls ended up in the slammer last night. Any truth to that?”

“Since no one’s been charged with a crime at this point, it wouldn’t be fair for me to comment one way or the other,” Joanna told her.

“But there were plenty of witnesses,” Marianne said. “One of my friends was having dinner in the dining room at the Branding Iron when the fight first broke out. She saw the whole thing.”

“And you’re welcome to write it up that way if you want, Marliss,” Joanna said. “I certainly can’t tell you what you should or shouldn’t publish. All I can control is what I will or won’t comment on. Without formal charges, this is a definite won’t. Once charges are filed, you’re welcome to ask again.”

“You don’t have to be snippy about it,” Marliss said.

“I’m not being snippy,” Joanna returned. “I’m being firm.”

Joanna was relieved when, moments later, Butch gave her the high sign. He had collected Dennis from the nursery and was headed for the door. Joanna hurried after him.

“Thanks for rescuing me from Marliss,” she said.

Butch smiled. “I could see you needed it.”

While he stowed the diaper bag, Joanna buckled Dennis into his car seat.

“You’re sure you don’t have time to stop by and grab some lunch with the Gs before you head off to work? I know Jim Bob and Eva Lou won’t mind if you eat and run.”

It pleased Joanna that Butch had taken to calling her former in-laws by Jenny’s pet name for her grandparents—the Gs. She glanced at her watch and shook her head. “Better not,” she said. “Have fun.”

Even though Joanna drove straight to the Justice Center from church, Lucinda Mappin was already there. Jaime Carbajal and Dave Hollicker were ushering her into the conference room as Joanna arrived.

“Sorry to be late,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m Sheriff Joanna Brady. And I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Lucinda Mappin was a heavyset woman in her late fifties or early sixties. Her shoulders drooped; the features of her broad jowly face were distorted by sorrow; her red-rimmed eyes looked bleary and haunted.

She nodded numbly. “Thank you,” she murmured. “Wanda’s been gone for months now. It shouldn’t be that much of a shock, but it is. It’s hitting me pretty hard.”

Joanna nodded.

“I guess I always hoped she was alive and well somewhere,” Lucinda continued. “She was developmentally disabled, you see—functioned at a three-or four-year-old level. I hoped and prayed that she was with someone who was being good to her and that she just wasn’t able to communicate well enough to tell them where she belonged. Unrealistic, I know. But that’s what I told myself. Otherwise I would have gone crazy. This is all my fault, you see,” Lucinda added. “If I hadn’t had to put her in that place to begin with—in that group home—none of this would have happened, but my husband, my Bill, was so terribly sick at the end. He was bedridden and required round-the-clock nursing care. What with working and looking after him, I just couldn’t take care of Wanda, too. It was too much, and now I’ve lost them both. What happened to her? Did my baby suffer?”

“The medical examiner says she most likely died from a blow to the head,” Jaime said quietly.

“So maybe it was quick, then?” Lucinda asked hopefully.

Jaime nodded. Joanna appreciated his understated answer. That was what murder victims’ survivors always wanted to know and always hoped—that their loved ones had died quickly and painlessly. That they hadn’t been forced to endure incredible suffering. Joanna was grateful that Dave Hollicker had the good sense to keep quiet about the bloodstains he had found inside the bag.

Lucinda swallowed a sob. In order to give her some space, Jaime offered the grieving woman a bottle of water. She picked up the bottle, looked at it blankly, and then set it back down without drinking any of it.

“Will I be able to see her?”

“As I told you on the phone,” Jaime continued, “there’s not
much point, although you can if you wish. The remains we found are primarily skeletal, and they’ve been moved to the morgue. The Cochise County medical examiner, Dr. George Winfield, is the one who entered your daughter’s dental information into a Missing Persons database. That’s how we tentatively identified her. But there are a few items that we found among her personal effects that you might recognize.”

Jaime nodded to Dave, who opened an evidence box that had been sitting beside his chair. He reached inside, removed a pair of Keds, and set them on the conference table. They were stained a muddy reddish brown and were still shedding sand, but some of the original color, a vivid shade of pink, still showed through. Lucinda picked one of them up and examined the bottom.

“They look like hers,” Lucinda said with a nod. “They’re the right size, and Wanda loved pink. It was her favorite color. She also loved Keds.”

Next Dave handed the woman a see-through glassine envelope. Lucinda held it up to the light, nodded, and handed it back. “That’s one of her earrings,” she said. “Rose zircon. Her birthstone. Also pink. Do you know anything about people who are developmentally disabled?”

Her question was directed at Joanna, who nodded, thinking of Junior Dowdle at Daisy’s Café.

“The only one I know personally,” she said, “is the adopted son of people who own a restaurant in town. He helps out there, busing tables, handing out menus, and washing dishes.”

Lucinda nodded. “He must function at a higher level than Wanda. She was never quite potty-trained, which made things complicated.”

Joanna vividly remembered the night she had picked Junior
up after his supposed caregivers had abandoned him at an arts and crafts fair in Saint David. He had said, “Go. Go. Go,” over and over. Joanna had thought he was telling her to drive when in actual fact he’d been talking about another kind of going altogether—one that came with disastrous consequences for the interior of Joanna’s vehicle.

“Believe me, Junior has his difficult moments, too,” she said.

Lucinda nodded. “Anyway, Wanda loved sparkly things. When she wanted something badly enough, she had a way of making her feelings known. When she was about twenty or so, she met someone who had pierced ears, and she decided she wanted hers pierced, too. At first her father was absolutely dead set against it, but finally Bill relented. Not only did Wanda have her ears pierced, we bought her a pair of birthstone earrings—rose zircon—because they’re not that expensive, and they’re pink, too. Eventually, Wanda lost one of the first pair we gave her, and she was devastated. So we bought several sets that were all just alike. That way if she lost one, we’d be able to replace it without any fuss. I still have two and a half pairs of these left,” Lucinda added as she handed the glassine bag back to Dave. “All of them are just alike and just like this one. This is hers. I’m sure of it.”

“And this?” Dave asked, passing over yet another bag.

Lucinda held it up to the light. “What is it?”

“A heart-shaped locket,” Dave said. “There’s a place for two tiny photos, but there weren’t any photos inside it.”

Lucinda shook her head. “I have no idea where Wanda would have gotten something like this. I certainly never gave it to her. Maybe one of her friends at the group home gave it to her. Are those rhinestones?”

“No,” Dave said. “They may be small, but I believe they’re
actual diamonds that have been designed and set so they spell out two separate sets of initials. HRC and KML.”

“These are all real diamonds?” Lucinda asked. “That many? Something like that would be expensive, wouldn’t it?”

Dave nodded, and Lucinda shook her head. “I can’t imagine where it would have come from—not from her dad and me. We didn’t give it to her.”

“And the initials aren’t ones you recognize?” Jaime asked.

“Not at all.”

“Tell us about the group home,” Joanna said.

“It was the best I could do at the time,” Lucinda answered. “It’s on East Copper in Tucson. It’s run by a company called the Flannigan Foundation.”

“Does the home have a specific name?” Joanna asked.

Lucinda nodded. “It’s called Holbrook House, I don’t know why. Flannigan Foundation operates group homes for the mentally impaired, and for other kinds of people as well, all over Arizona. Maybe not all over. Mostly in Phoenix and Tucson. If there had been one in Eloy when I needed it, I would have put Wanda there—somewhere closer to home. The foundation buys up four- and five-bedroom places, mostly ones that are in less than wonderful neighborhoods. They fix them up and assign clients to them, complete with resident supervisors and caregivers. Living in a place like that with three or four other clients is supposed to be more like living at home, but of course it’s nothing like home.”

“How long was Wanda there?” Joanna asked.

Some detectives might have objected to having Joanna join in the questioning process. Jaime Carbajal seemed to welcome it. It was clear to all of them that Lucinda’s own mental state was so
fragile at that point that a womanly touch was a help rather than a hindrance.

“She lived there a little over two years,” Lucinda answered.

“And she was happy there?”

“Not at first, but she adjusted all right. Eventually. By the time Bill died, she was settled enough that bringing her back home would have required another huge adjustment. Besides, I needed to work all the hours I could.”

“And when she disappeared?” Joanna asked.

“That would be on Monday, the twenty-first of March. They called me at home at nine that morning. I was asleep because I had just come home from working a double shift at the Trucker’s Café in Eloy. Whoever called me said Wanda had been missing at her midnight bed check. They had reported her missing to Tucson PD right away—at twelve forty-five that morning. They said they didn’t call me until several hours later because they were hoping that maybe she’d just wandered off somewhere and that she’d turn back up.”

“But she didn’t.”

“No.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Saturday of that week. That’s when I always drove down to see her—on Saturdays. If it wasn’t too cold or too hot, I’d take her to visit the Reid Park Zoo. That’s really close by, and she loved going there. Or, if the weather didn’t cooperate, I’d take her to Park Mall or to a movie. She didn’t like movies all that much, though. She had a hard time sitting still long enough to watch them.”

“And was everything all right when you saw her that last time?” Joanna asked.

“She was upset. She said her friend had gone away. His name was Wayne, and she was sad that he was gone. Wanda didn’t have many friends, you see.”

“What happened to him?” Jaime asked. “Where did he go?”

Lucinda shrugged. “I asked, but I never found out. At first I thought that he might have had something to do with it—that wherever Wanda was, Wayne was there, too. But the people I talked to at the group home said they didn’t know anyone named Wayne—that Wanda must have made him up. That wasn’t true, though.”

“What do you mean, it wasn’t true?”

“Wanda had Down’s syndrome. People like that deal with the world in a very simple way—things are either black or white; real or not; yes or no. They don’t think in abstracts. They don’t imagine things. They don’t make things up.”

“So you think Wayne was a real person, then.”

“Yes, I do.”

“But the Flannigan Foundation wouldn’t provide you with any information about him?”

“They said they have a responsibility to protect patient privacy, but that no one named Wayne had been involved with Wanda’s particular group home. Ever.”

“And you just let it go at that?” Joanna asked.

For the first time Lucinda Mappin bristled. “What else could I do?” she demanded. “If I had gone to the police, what would I have told them? Without Wayne’s last name, they wouldn’t give me the time of day. And I couldn’t hire a private detective because I couldn’t afford one. I’m a waitress, Sheriff Brady. I work for minimum wages plus tips. If I ever get around to retiring, I’ll be living on whatever comes in from Social Security and that’s it.
There was some life insurance that came to me when Bill died, but I ran through most of that just paying his final expenses. And I used the rest of it to pay Wanda’s way at the group home because by then she liked it there. Flannigan Foundation may be a charity, but the care they provide in their facilities isn’t free. Not even close.”

Having the woman’s whole financial situation laid bare in those few sentences left Joanna feeling as though she’d somehow overstepped. With a glance in Jaime’s direction, Joanna handed the process off to him.

“So, other than the fact that Wayne had disappeared, there was nothing else out of the ordinary in your daughter’s life in the days before she went missing?” Jaime asked.

“Nothing that I know of,” Lucinda said.

“And she didn’t mention having any kind of difficulties with her caregivers or with any of the other residents.”

“No, but then she wouldn’t have. Wanda was a sweet child,” Lucinda responded. “A sweet, loving person. She wasn’t the kind who would get mad at someone or carry a grudge. That didn’t make it easy to care for her, though. She would get into things she wasn’t supposed to occasionally. That meant she had to be looked after all the time—like a toddler almost. After she disappeared, one of my friends—someone who used to be a friend—said to me, ‘Well, Lucinda, maybe it’s all for the best.’ But it isn’t for the best. Wanda was my baby, and I loved her, and now she’s dead.”

With that Lucinda Mappin lowered her head onto her arms and then sobbed into them as though her heart was broken, and Joanna Brady had no doubt in the world that was true.

“I’m so sorry,” Joanna said to her again. “And I promise you
that my people and I will do our best to see that whoever did this is brought to justice.”

Joanna looked around the room and saw both Jaime Carbajal and Dave Hollicker nodding in solemn assent. Joanna meant it, and so did they.

“Thank you,” Lucinda said, straightening up and wiping the tears from her face. “That’s the best I can hope for and the best Wanda can hope for—that you’ll find whoever did this and put him away.”