Rattlesnake Crossing (8 page)

Fran Daly sighed and rolled her eyes. "All right then," she said. "Just show me where the body is and let me get started. And for God's sake, somebody turn off the damned air-conditioner."

With that she picked up her valise from its spot in the doorway and started into the room.

"I'd be careful if I were you," Joanna warned. "The floor in here collapsed because the whole thing's been rotted out by termites. Underneath the roll flooring, what's left of the wood is little more than powdery cardboard."

Once again the medical examiner swung around to face Joanna. "Excuse me, Sheriff Brady," she snapped. "My boss sent me here to do this job because I happen to be a trained technician, the senior trained technician in our department. I don't know what that means in
your
bailiwick, but in mine it means that I know what I'm doing. It also means that I'm qualified to do my job without any unnecessary supervision from you or anyone else. So if you'll excuse me—"

Reaching the center of the room, she slammed the heavy valise down once more. The thud of the case on the floor was immediately followed by a loud, ominous crack. What had appeared to be flat flooring up to then tilted sharply downward. In slow motion, the valise began to move, sliding down a ski slope of worn linoleum toward the jagged-edged and ever-expanding hole into the crawl space.

As the bag of equipment slid away from her, Fran Daly reached down and made a desperate grab for it, but she missed. Eluding her fingertips, the still upright valise slipped out of reach and then dropped majestically from view. When it landed in the dirt of the darkened crawl space some five feet below, it did so with a distinct splat—one that included the muffled tinkle of breaking glass.

"Shit!" Fran Daly exclaimed.

Joanna had a sudden, vivid remembrance of her father, D. H. Lathrop. "What goes around comes around" had always been one of his favorite expressions. Those words came back to his daughter now with such clarity and meaning that it was all Joanna could do to keep from laughing.

With some difficulty she managed to contain herself. "If this is your idea of crime-scene preservation, Dr. Daly," Joanna said sternly, "then it would appear supervision is very much in order. I'll leave Detective Carbajal here to keep an eye on you. He can give you any assistance you might need."

Glancing at the young detective, Joanna saw that he was having almost as much trouble keeping a straight face as she was. "Is that all right with you, Detective Carbajal?" she asked.

Sobering quickly, he nodded. "Sure thing, Sheriff Brady," he managed. "I was just on my way out to the van to pick up some lights. I've been taking pictures this whole time, but it's really dark down there in the crawl space. If Dr. Daly and I are going to do any kind of meaningful work, we'll need more light. If that's okay with you, that is." He turned deferentially to Dr. Daly.

She waved him aside. "If you say we need lights, we probably do. Go ahead and get them."

"And Sheriff Brady is right about this floor, Dr. Daly," Jaime added. "It's extremely treacherous. In fact, I don't think it would take much for the whole house to cave in to the crawl space. That being the case, on your way over to the ladder, it might be wise if you stick as close as possible to the outside wall. And if you can wait long enough for me to come back with the lights, I'll bring along a couple of hard hats as well. We probably shouldn't be down there without them."

"All right, all right," Fran Daly grumbled reluctantly. "I'll wait right here until you get back."

Smiling to herself, Joanna backed away from the door. "I'll leave and let you two get to it, then," she said sweetly.

"And if you need anything else, Chief Deputy Voland and I will be right outside."

Out on the porch, Jaime Carbajal convulsed with laughter. "What planet did
she
come from?" he demanded when he was finally able to talk.

"Pima County," Joanna replied. "As long as Doc Winfield's out of town, we're stuck with her."

"Let's hope it's for this case only," Detective Carbajal said. "I wouldn't want to make a career of it."

Joanna nodded. "Me, neither."

"Did you see the expression on her face when she finally figured out that you were in charge?"

"I saw it, all right," Joanna said. "Unfortunately, I don't think I handled the situation in the best possible fashion. Dr. Daly got under my skin almost as much as I got under hers. While you're down in the crawl space working with her, Jaime, see what you can do to smooth things out."

"I'll try," Jaime Carbajal replied cheerfully, "but I'm not making any promises. From what I saw of Fran Daly, she doesn't look like the kind of person where smoothing is going to work."

"Sheriff Brady?"

Joanna turned to see who had called. Lance Pakin, the deputy she had seen arrive with Dick Voland, came jogging toward her from the back of Clyde Philips' property.

"Did you get the door open?" Joanna asked.

"Yes, ma'am," Pakin replied. "But Chief Deputy Voland wants you to come there right
away."

The urgency in Pakin 's voice made Joanna’s heart fall.

She had visions of another previously undiscovered victim rotting on the gun-shop floor. "Not another body," she said.

"No," Pakin said. "Nothing like that."

"What, then?"

"They're empty."

“What's empty.”

"The shop out back and the truck, too. If either one of them used to have guns in them, they don't now. Chief Deputy Voland thinks you'd better come take a look."

CHAPTER FIVE

Compared to the harsh August heat outside, the interior of Clyde Philips' fortresslike gun shop was downright cold. Consisting of two rooms, the shop had a large showroom and a back room with a door marked OFFICE. The place was lit by ceiling-mounted shop lights. The outside walls of the showroom area were lined with glass-enclosed, locking gun racks. Now all of those glass-doored cabinets stood wide open, with the slots inside them totally empty. In the middle of the room stood a series of glass-topped display-case counters, also open and empty. In the dust left behind on the glass shelving were the imprints of missing handguns and holsters as well.

Seeing the ghostly shadows of those missing weapons, Joanna felt a wave of gooseflesh spread across her body. That icy reaction owed far more to simple dread than it did to the droning presence of Clyde Philips' air-conditioning unit up on the shop's roof.

Joanna glanced away from the missing guns and caught Dick Voland staring at her with a look of undisguised longing on his face. In the months since the collapse of Dick Voland's marriage, Joanna's working relationship with her chief deputy had become more and more complicated. At this point, she would have welcomed a dose of Voland's early and outspoken opposition, rather than the puppylike (if unspoken) devotion with which he now sometimes regarded her. Clearly, the fifteen years' difference in their ages and the fact that his feelings weren't reciprocated made no difference.

Joanna had no quarrel with the man's professionalism. He had never once said anything out of bounds. In the easy give-and-take of the office, he was fine. In public, in fact, he still tended to be overbearing and patronizing on occasion. But in private, unguarded moments like this one, the man wore his heart on his sleeve. Joanna sympathized with him, but she needed a working, full-fledged chief deputy far more than she did a lovesick schoolboy suffering from an unrequited crush.

Joanna's eyes met his over the top of one of the display cases. Quickly, Dick Voland looked away. "How many guns do you figure walked out of here?" she asked.

Blushing visibly in the sallow light, he shrugged his shoulders. "No way to tell for sure," he said gruffly. "But even if the cases held only one or two guns apiece, it's way too many to have them running around loose. They would still amount to enough guns to supply a small army."

"Peachy," Joanna said. "Any sign of a break-in?"

"None whatsoever," Voland replied in a brisk, business-like fashion. "Whoever did this came in with a key to the front door and with keys to all the individual cabinets as well. None of the locks have been damaged in the slightest. Not only that, whoever did it also knew lie or she had plenty of lime. This place was cleaned out in a methodical and very thorough manner, probably in the middle of the night and probably in dead silence. Any kind of noise or breakage might have aroused suspicion."

"To say nothing of Sarah Holcomb," Joanna added.

Voland frowned. "What was that?"

"Never mind," Joanna told him. "What about paperwork or a computer, maybe? Any kind of customer lists?"

"Not so far."

"What about inventory, sales, or billing information? If we had some of those details, we'd know where to start in order to estimate what's actually missing."

"That could be a problem. Come take a look," Voland said, gesturing toward the office door. "It's a combination office/storeroom, and from the looks of things, there's not much left there, either."

Joanna walked as far as the office doorway and stopped. Inside, the drawers to the file cabinet lay scattered around the room, spilling loose papers on the floor in all directions. Other drawers still sat in place in file cabinets, but they appeared to be completely empty, as though someone had simply dumped the contents into a bag or box and carted them away.

"If there's been a conscious effort to destroy paper trails, we could be dealing with some kind of insurance fraud," Joanna suggested, musing more to herself than to anyone else.

"It could be," Voland agreed.

"We'll need to dust the whole place for prints," she added, glancing at her chief deputy.

"Right," he said. "I've already asked Patrol to send over anyone they can spare to help out with crime-scene investigation. It probably won't do much good, though. I have an idea whoever did this was probably smart enough to wear gloves."

Joanna looked around the room again. "What about letting ATF in on this? Considering the possible number of weapons involved, we probably should,"

As expected, any suggestion of involving another jurisdiction, especially a federal agency like Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, elicited an immediate frown of annoyance from Richard Voland. An old-timer with the department, the chief deputy jealously guarded all possible jurisdictional boundaries.

"Why include them until we have to?" he asked.

Through working with the MJF and with Adam York of the Drug Enforcement Agency, Joanna was coming to understand that in the new world of law enforcement, cooperation was the name of the game.
I wonder if anyone's ever explained that fact of life to the lady from the Pima County Medical Examiner's office,
Joanna wondered wryly.

"Their guys run as much risk of going head to head with whoever took these guns as ours do," she said. "So even though reporting it may not be strictly required, we're going to tell them all the same. Out of courtesy, if nothing else."

"All right, all right," Voland agreed grudgingly. "I'll take care of it once we get back to the office. So tell me, what all's going on back at the house?"

"For one thing, Detective Carbajal is working with that lady buzz saw from Pima County, Dr. Fran Daly," Joanna said. "Incidentally, since Dr. Daly fully expected to report to you, she wasn't at all pleased to have me involved."

"I'm sorry," Voland apologized. "When I was talking to the woman on the phone, I told her as plain as day what the deal was. Where she got the idea that I was in charge, I don't'—"

Joanna cut him off in mid-apology. "II doesn't matter. What Dr. Daly did or didn't think makes no difference. Whatever her misapprehensions, we've worked them out."

Trying to change the subject, Joanna glanced around the room and said:

"It looks to me as though poor old Clyde was a far better shop owner than he was a housekeeper. The house is a pig-sty. You maybe wouldn't want to eat off the floor in here, but it's a whole lot cleaner than the house was. With the added advantage that the shop feels like it's built on a concrete slab."

At once Voland turned solicitous. "You didn't get hurt when the floor collapsed, did you? Even with an injured woman down there, you never should have climbed down there by yourself without waiting for backup."

Cops are always concerned about the well-being of other cops. Had there been someone else present, Voland's comments probably would have passed unnoticed and unremarked. Unfortunately, Joanna knew the man too well. She read the worried look of concern in his eye; heard the undiluted caring in his voice. Not wanting to make things worse, Joanna decided to treat the subject lightly.

"The only thing hurt is my pride," she said, reaching out in another futile attempt to brush some of the grime from her skirt and blazer. "Ernie Carpenter's always on my case about grunging around crime scenes in good clothes. My problem is, I just can't seem to take a hint."

"You'll catch on eventually," Voland said.

Ignoring the slight but unmistakable quaver in the man's voice, Joanna tried to turn the conversation back to business. "Speaking of catching on, how about bringing me up-to-date on what's been happening back in the office? I've been out of the department all afternoon. Anything else interesting going on?"

"We found the trucker," Voland said. "The trucker and his truck, both."

"What trucker?" Joanna asked with a frown.

"Remember that naked hitchhiker from last night, the one we didn't catch?" Joanna nodded. "Well," Voland continued, "she may have been naked, but it turns out she wasn't alone.
A
guy in an eighteen-wheeler picked her up and drove her as far as that rest area east of San Simon. The driver and the girl were up in the over-cab sleeper and just getting it on when the girl's accomplice burst in on them. The two of them held the driver up at gunpoint. They took all his cash and credit cards. Afterward, they hogtied him with duct tape, drove him as far as Portal, and left him there—stark naked, miles from anywhere. Then the two of them drove the poor guy's truck as far as Lordsburg, New Mexico, where they abandoned it at a truck stop."