Page 21 of The Girl from Devil’s Lake (Joanna Brady Mysteries #21)

Mesa, Arizona

Steve’s throbbing hand kept him awake much of the night. When he awakened the next morning, it was already after ten. He cleaned the wound on his hand, dosed it with more peroxide, and applied a new bandage. By then it was dangerously close to his designated checkout time of eleven a.m.

Stepping out of his room into the parking lot, it felt as if he’d walked into an oven.

People might claim it was “only a dry heat,” but this kind of scorching was ridiculous.

When he stopped by the office to let them know he was leaving, he asked the desk clerk if there were any decent restaurants nearby.

“There’s a Bob’s Big Boy just up the street,” she said. “Will that do?”

“As long as their air-conditioning works.”

Steve located the restaurant, managed to park in a small patch of shade, and bought a newspaper from a machine on his way inside. Thankfully the AC in the restaurant worked just fine.

“How hot is it out there?” he asked his waitress when she came to take his order.

“It’s a hundred and six right now,” she answered, “but it’s supposed to get up to a hundred eleven by later today.”

In other words , Steve thought, I’m not sticking around Mesa or Phoe nix for a minute longer than necessary.

Once Steve opened the newspaper, he went looking for the weather map of Arizona.

Studying it, he was astonished to see the wide disparity in temperatures throughout the state.

While Phoenix was predicted to top out at 111 degrees that day, Tucson, a hundred miles to the south, was expecting 101, while Bisbee, another hundred miles south of Tucson, would clock in at only 92.

North of Phoenix, a place called Sedona was set to hit 90, while Flagstaff wasn’t expected to exceed 85.

Before departing the restaurant, Steve made up his mind that Flagstaff was his next destination.

Using directions from his waitress, Steve made his way to the Black Canyon Freeway.

In addition to providing directions, the waitress had also explained that Flag, as she called it, was only a hundred fifty miles or so from Mesa, and that the road was “pretty good.” Pretty good meant that part of it was four lanes with controlled access, but a lot of it wasn’t.

For one thing, long swaths of what was destined to be Interstate 17 were still under construction.

For another, most of those hundred and fifty miles were entirely uphill.

On this ridiculously hot Friday, even though it was only late morning, it seemed as though everyone in Phoenix was determined to get out of Dodge and head for the mountains.

Trucks passing other trucks didn’t necessarily get the hell out of the way in a hurry, so for much of the time, traffic slowed to a crawl.

Not only that, the shoulder of the road was dotted with overheated stalled vehicles with their hoods open and their radiators steaming.

Luckily, Steve’s Camaro managed the steep grades with no hitches and no overheating.

Once in Flagstaff, Steve had a hell of a time finding a place to stay.

By two o’clock in the afternoon, No Vacancy signs were everywhere.

He finally ended up in a scuzzy downtown hotel that reminded him of that old Roger Miller song about “no phone, no pool, no pets.” It wasn’t especially clean, either, but even without air-conditioning in the room, with the window open and a slight breeze, it was tolerable.

Whenever Steve was on the road, he made it a point to call his mother on Saturday morning, because now he was all she had.

After her divorce from Jackson Roper, she had never remarried.

As far as she was concerned, Frederick Chalmers had been the love of her life, and she had never gotten over losing him.

These days she wasn’t in the best of health, either.

Decades of standing on her feet, first waiting tables and later managing the restaurant, had taken their toll.

Her legs were a mess of varicose veins, and she’d worn compression stockings for years.

In the last six months or so, things had gotten so bad that she’d finally been forced to sell the restaurant.

As the only game in town, the Country Inn had been a going concern, and she’d gotten good money for it.

The proceeds from the sale combined with living mortgage-free in the house Gramps had bought after liquidating his properties meant she was in good financial shape, but her lifelong dreams of traveling the world in retirement were now on hold.

After breakfast the next day, Steve rounded up a fistful of change and located the nearest payphone. Once he placed the call, he was surprised when it was answered not by his mother, but by Becky Thompson, his mother’s next-door neighbor.

“Oh, Stephen,” she said. “I’m so glad you called. Your mother asked me to wait here at the house this morning in case you did.”

“Mom’s not home?” he asked. “Where is she?”

“In the hospital in Bemidji. They took her there by ambulance the day before yesterday. She told me you were traveling and that she had no way to reach you.”

“Took her in by ambulance?” Steve repeated. “How come? What’s wrong?”

“She has a DDT,” Becky said breathlessly.

“You mean a DVT?” Steve asked. “A deep vein thrombosis.”

“I suppose that’s it,” Becky agreed. “I never can keep all those letters straight. They’re giving her blood thinners to try to dissolve it, but if they can’t, there’s a chance it might break loose and go to her lungs.”

Steve was aware of the likely outcome from that.

“Are you planning on going to the hospital today?” he asked.

“Yes,” Becky answered. “I’m heading there as soon as we get off the phone.”

“Does she have a phone in her room?”

“Not in the ICU.”

Steve took a breath. “Okay,” he said. “I’m in Arizona right now. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to get home, but I’ll head that way as soon as I check out of my hotel. Tell her I’ll be in touch with the hospital and see if I can call while I’m in transit.”

“Do you need the number of the hospital?”

“No,” he said. “I’ll be able to get it from information.”

He was underway within the hour. After consulting the bloodstained page of his atlas, he decided to head straight east from Flagstaff and turn north at Albuquerque.

As he crossed the state line into New Mexico, Steve Roper knew one thing for sure.

Arizona was the place where he wanted to be.

Not Phoenix for sure and probably not Tucson, either.

He’d want to live somewhere cooler, but he would be back.

What he didn’t know at the time was that it would take several years before that could happen.

Unlike his outgoing trip, the return drive wasn’t leisurely.

He arrived back in Fertile exhausted after two and a half days of forced-march driving.

His mother was out of intensive care by then, but she was still in the hospital.

While being treated for the DVT, her doctors had discovered a spot on her breast and they were now treating her for breast cancer—starting with a double mastectomy.

Once in the privacy of his own home, Steve went down to his basement, opened the safe, and made two additions to his cigar box—the turquoise necklace, a squash blossom necklace as he later learned, and the bloodied map of New Mexico which he’d torn from his Road Atlas and folded into a square small enough to fit inside the box.

Fortunately the wound on the back of Steve’s hand didn’t become infected, but the scar tissue it left behind began to look exactly like what it was—a bite mark.

Eventually he made up a story about spending a couple of days volunteering at an Arts and Crafts fair in Taos, New Mexico, where one of the artists had accidentally dropped an overheated piece of metal on the back of his hand.

Cynthia Hawkins Roper survived the blood clot but died of breast cancer four years later in the spring of 1976.

And who cared for her all that time? Her son, that’s who.

Steve wasn’t an empathetic individual and didn’t take naturally to caregiving, but he forced himself to do it—not because he necessarily cared about his mother, but because the appearance of being a good and loving son made for an excellent disguise.

Around Fertile his unwavering caregiving made him look downright heroic.

While handling his mother’s affairs, Steve discovered that Gramps had been a canny investor and had left his daughter with plenty of money, which probably wouldn’t have been the case had Freddy the Freeloader managed to lay his hands on it.

Thanks to Steve’s timely intervention, that hadn’t happened.

In actual fact, Cynthia Roper could have retired years earlier if she’d wanted.

Since she hadn’t, everything that was left over—the remains of Gramps’s estate and the proceeds from selling the Country Inn and the house—would come straight to Steve.

That’s when the voices in his head tuned up and started suggesting that maybe he should speed up his mother’s passing, but he told them absolutely not in no uncertain terms. Reading Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie had taught him one thing for sure—killers get caught because they murder people they know or else they target victims where the killers themselves have something to gain financially.

Caring for his mother for those four years was tedious as hell, but making sure his mother died of indisputably natural causes was the price Steve Roper had to pay for him to be able to go on killing people he actually wanted to kill.

At his mother’s funeral, when people told him what a wonderful person he was to have looked after her so lovingly, he nodded and smiled and told them thank you very much.

At the cemetery, he saw to it that her grave site was just where she wanted it to be—right next to Fred Chalmers’s.

But when he got home that evening, after everything was said and done, he settled down in his easy chair, closed his eyes, and told the voices aloud what they really wanted to hear.

“It’s finally over,” he said, “and good riddance.”