Exit Wounds (26 page)

“What does your mother have to say about all this?” Eva Lou asked.

“She’s not exactly thrilled,” Joanna allowed.

Eva Lou laughed. “No, I don’t suppose she is, but what about you?”

“I’m thrilled, and so is Butch.”

“That’s all that matters then, isn’t it?” Eva Lou asked. “I learned a long time ago that if you spend your whole life worrying about what other people think, you’re not going to get anywhere.”

Just like Eleanor,
Joanna thought.
Worrying about other people’s opinions and not doing anything on her own.

“How come I can’t have you for a mother?” she asked.

Eva Lou looked at her and smiled. “Well, you do,” she said. “I’m just another mother. Now when exactly is this baby due? You and Butch aren’t the only ones with plans to make. Jim Bob and I have some things we want to do, too.”

That afternoon, Eva Lou’s down-home cooking hit the spot—meat loaf, mashed potatoes, fried okra, and freshly made biscuits, followed by fresh peach pie. As soon as dinner was over, Jenny retreated to the spare bedroom which was her special domain at the Brady household. As Butch, Eva Lou, and Jim Bob sipped their coffee, conversation turned to work.

Before Andy’s death, Jim Bob Brady had always expressed more than a passing interest in whatever cases his son, the deputy sheriff, had been involved in. Now that same curiosity was focused on Joanna’s cases, and she was happy to oblige. She had found that sometimes, in the process of explaining a case to a law enforcement outsider, she was able to gain a new perspective on it herself.

With regard to the Mossman/Ortega/Davis murders, Jim Bob homed in on the ammunition. “The casings all come with the same stamp?” he asked.

Joanna nodded. “Initial
S
for Springfield, Massachusetts, and ‘seventeen’ for 1917. So we know where it came from, and obviously it still works. The question is, where has it been all this time?”

Jim Bob frowned. A faraway look came into his eyes. “I wonder,” he said.

“Wonder what?”

“You know what was going on around here in 1917, don’t you?”

“World War One?” Joanna offered tentatively.

Jim Bob shook his head. “No, that was over in Europe. Around here, the big news that year was the Bisbee Deportation.”

“I remember now,” Joanna said. “Something about union activists being run out of town on a rail.”

“In boxcars, actually,” Jim Bob corrected. “A bunch of company-organized vigilantes rousted over a thousand men out of bed at gunpoint, marched them down to the Warren Ballpark, and then loaded them into boxcars that left the men standing for hours ankle-deep in manure. After some back-and-forthing, they finally dropped them off in the desert near Columbus, New Mexico, before the U.S. Cavalry finally showed up to take charge of them. Some came back eventually, but others never did.”

“You seem to know a lot about this,” Butch observed.

“Sure thing,” Jim Bob said, nodding sagely. “When I went to work in the mines after the Korean War, the Deportation was still big news around here. Back then, considering whatever company you were keeping, if you came down on the wrong side of the Deportation, you were likely to get your ass kicked.”

“Jim Bob,” Eva Lou admonished, “watch your language. Jenny might hear.”

Joanna could picture Jenny lying on the floor, with her eyes closed and the earphones to her Walkman clapped to her ears.

There’s a good chance the language on the CD is a lot worse than that,
Joanna thought.

Joanna had heard pieces of the story all her life. Butch, hearing about the Bisbee Deportation for the first time, listened with avid interest. “So if the vigilantes were company men…”

“Deputized by Sheriff Wheeler,” Jim Bob interjected.

“…who were the deportees?”

“Where’s that book of mine?” Jim Bob asked. “
Bisbee Seventeen,
it’s called. That tells the whole thing.”

“It’s out in the garage,” Eva Lou replied. “Along with all the other books you boxed up because you were going to build a new bookshelf, remember?”

Jim Bob grimaced. “Wobblies,” he said, in answer to Butch’s question. “The IWW. International Workers of the World. They called a strike in July of 1917. According to the company honchos, they were undermining the war effort. The real problem was, the IWW recruited minority members. Back then, Mexicans weren’t allowed to work underground, and they received less pay. Same goes for the European immigrants. They were allowed to work underground, but they were limited to lower-paying jobs. Now it sounds like the IWW had the right idea, but back then what they were proposing must have been pretty outrageous.”

He stopped then and slammed his open palm on the table with enough force to make the cups and saucers rattle. “That’s it!” he exclaimed. “I’m sure it is.”

“What’s it?” Joanna asked.

“The ammunition. The weapons. All of the vigilantes were armed with guns the company bought and paid for. In fact, a couple of people were actually shot and killed in the process of the roundup, but afterward everybody turned their weapons back in, and most of ’em ended up stored in a safe up in the old General Office in Bisbee.”

“The ammunition, too?” Joanna asked.

“I think so,” Jim Bob replied.

“So where’s that arms cache now? Is it still there?”

“No. Somebody opened the safe and found them when Phelps Dodge was shutting down its Bisbee operation in the mid-seventies. They just divvied the stuff up among the people who worked there. Whoever wanted some, gathered up a gun or two and took them home.”

Joanna’s mind was already blazing on ahead. She had spent part of the night thinking about what Diego Ortega had said about the bigamy-practicing group called The Brethren, the same group Edith Mossman had mentioned several days earlier with regard to her estranged son, Eddie. It was also the group Pam Davis and Carmen Ortega had been investigating. Was it possible Eddie Mossman had murdered his own daughter in order to keep her from telling her story, whatever it was, in front of a camera?

Joanna put down her napkin. “Excuse me,” she said. “But I need to go make a phone call.” And she went outside on the Bradys’ front porch to do it.

At three o’clock in the afternoon, tall columns of cumulus clouds were rising over the hill with its distinctively heart-shaped top that generations of Bisbee kids had called Geronimo. With any luck, there would be another late-afternoon thunderstorm today, and the summer rainy season would be well under way. But right that minute, Joanna’s mind wasn’t on the weather.

She reached Frank Montoya at his newly purchased home in Old Bisbee. “What’s up, boss?” he asked when he heard Joanna’s voice.

Briefly she summarized what she had learned from her trip to Lordsburg the day before as well as what she’d just discovered about the Bisbee Deportation from Jim Bob Brady.

“What do you want me to do?” Frank asked.

“We need to know whether or not Eddie Mossman had access to any of those weapons. If he worked in PD’s General Office, it’s possible he was given some of them.”

“That was a long time ago,” Frank said dubiously.

“Twenty-five years, at least,” Joanna agreed.

“So finding out could be tough. The people who worked there are likely to be in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. It doesn’t sound likely that some old coot in a nursing home would let himself out and then start plugging people with a weapon that’s older than he is.”

“What about a son or a son-in-law?” Joanna suggested. “Or maybe even a grandson?”

Frank thought about that. “Still,” he said, “I’d say the odds aren’t good.”

“How many people would have been working there?” Joanna asked. “Thirty-five? Forty? Once we have the names, we’ll at least have a place to start, and it could be, when we start talking to them, one of them might be able to tell us something we need to know.”

“All right,” Frank agreed finally. “I’ll contact PD headquarters in Phoenix first thing tomorrow morning to see if I can track any of this down, but don’t hold your breath.”

“Do we know if the cops in Obregón had any luck contacting Mr. Mossman about his daughter’s death?”

“I’ll check on that, too,” Frank said.

“How did the interviews go in Tucson?” Joanna asked.

“All right, I guess,” Frank replied. “At least we have some. Whether what we have will be enough to put the squeeze on the driver, I don’t know.”

“And the little boy’s mother?” Joanna asked.

“We never had a chance to talk to her,” he said. “She had undergone surgery for a ruptured spleen and other internal injuries. The doctor says that it’s going to be touch-and-go for her for the next several days. She may not make it.”

“With her baby dead, she may not
want
to make it,” Joanna observed.

“That, too,” Frank agreed. “If that’s all, I’ll get on the horn and see who I should call in the morning when offices open up. It’ll be easier if I know where to start.”

Jenny popped her head out the door. “Mom, can’t we go home soon?”

“In a while,” Joanna replied. “But first I want to help Grandma Brady with the dishes. What’s the hurry?”

Joanna made a face. “It’s boring here,” she said. “Besides, Cassie and I want to go riding.”

At thirteen, Jenny was taller than her mother, although her fast-growing string-bean limbs had yet to fill out. It seemed only days ago when nothing had made Jenny happier than spending a long summer afternoon in the company of her paternal grandparents. Those days were gone.

Joanna glanced at the sky, where the threatening clouds had grown even darker while she had been on the phone.

“You can’t go riding, Jenny. It’s going to rain.”

Jenny sighed, made another face, and flounced back into the house. When Joanna returned to the kitchen, she discovered that Butch had beaten her to the punch as far as doing dishes was concerned. The dishwasher was loaded and he was cleaning the last of the pots and pans by hand.

“Looks like I dodged KP,” she said.

“Again,” Butch said.

They went home shortly after that. Jenny, still in a huff, closeted herself in her room. Butch and Joanna spent the remainder of Sunday afternoon in relative quiet. They were halfway through
60 Minutes
when the phone rang.

“Here we go again,” Butch said as he rose to answer it. “I knew this was too good to last. Oh, hi there, George,” he said into the phone. “No, hang on. She’s right here.”

“What’s going on?” Joanna said to Doc Winfield.

“We’ve got a problem with Ed Mossman.”

“Ed Mossman?” Joanna said. “Carol’s father? I thought he was in Mexico. As far as I know, he hasn’t even been notified.”

“He’s been notified, all right,” George Winfield observed. “And he’s on the warpath.”

“What about?”

“According to the grandmother, she was Carol’s next of kin. At her direction, I had made arrangements for the body to be released to Higgins Funeral Chapel in the morning. Edith wants Carol to be buried here in Bisbee. Ed Mossman claims he’s making arrangements to ship the body back down to Mexico. Not only that, when he called here to the house, he was rude to your mother and downright abusive to me. He even threatened his own mother.”

“He threatened Edith?”

“That’s right. He said she’s already caused enough trouble between him and his daughters and he’s not going to stand for her keeping him away from Carol now that she’s dead. He wants her buried next to her mother in the family plot in Obregón.”

“Wanting to bury his daughter next to her mother is fine,” Joanna said. “Threatening Edith Mossman isn’t. What did you tell him?”

“To come by the office tomorrow morning. He said he’d be there at nine.”

“I will be, too,” Joanna said.

“There is one other thing,” George Winfield added.

“What’s that?”

“Speaking of next of kin, has anyone done anything to locate Carol Mossman’s child?”

“What child?” Joanna asked.

“I take it you haven’t read my autopsy report?”

“I’ve been a little pressed for time,” Joanna returned. “What child?”

“Carol Mossman bore at least one child,” George said. “It was delivered by C-section. She also had a complete hysterectomy. From the scarring, I’d say both the C-section and hysterectomy were done at the same time by a surgeon who wasn’t exactly the head of his class.”

“It was bad?”

“Let’s just say it was unskilled,” George said. “And as bad as the hysterectomy was, it’s likely that the child didn’t survive, but we should clarify the situation just to be on the safe side. If you want me to, I can call Edith Mossman and ask her.”

“No,” Joanna said. “She’s been through enough. I’ll ask Eddie Mossman about it myself in the morning.”

She put down the phone. Butch had muted the television set. Andy Rooney’s mouth was moving, but no words could be heard.

“A looming funeral battle?” Butch asked.

Joanna nodded.

Butch shook his head. “I hate it when that happens. Funeral fights are the worst. My grandparents both wanted to be buried in Sun City. Gramps hated Chicago. He told me once that the last thing he wanted was to spend eternity buried under drifts of Chicago snow and ice. He asked me, over and over, to make sure that didn’t happen, and I promised him I would.

“He and Grandma died within weeks of each other. The minute Gramps was gone, my mother and aunts and uncles came riding into town on their broomsticks. They had Grandma’s casket dug up and then they shipped both Grandma and Grandpa back home to bury them. It’s years later, Joey, and I’m still pissed about it. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t gone back home to visit. I’d as soon punch my aunts’ and uncles’ lights out as look at them.”

“I never knew any of that,” Joanna said quietly.

“No,” Butch agreed. “I don’t suppose you did. I’m still ashamed of myself for letting him down—for not putting up more of a fight. But I was only the grandson. No one was interested in listening to me.”

Joanna reached over and put a comforting hand on Butch’s leg. “I’m sure you did the best you could,” she said quietly.

“Right,” he said bitterly. “Sure I did, but it wasn’t good enough.”