Page 41 of The Girl from Devil’s Lake (Joanna Brady Mysteries #21)

Bisbee, Arizona

On Friday morning, when Joanna staggered out of bed and into the bathroom to shower, she’d had less than four hours of sleep.

She had lain awake for hours, with her mind running a mile a minute.

This was fast turning into the biggest case of her law enforcement career, but how the hell was she going to pull it off?

In her years as sheriff, she had never felt the weight of that office as much as she did right now because this case involved so many people and carried so much heartbreak.

How was it possible that Stephen Roper had spent decades masquerading as a normal human being while he was actually a murderous monster?

And how could she and her department make sure that his reign of terror ended here and now without anyone else being hurt?

By the time she got to the kitchen, Sage and Dennis had already left to catch the school bus.

“I didn’t sleep very well last night,” she admitted as Butch handed her a cup of coffee.

“Oh really?” he returned. “Just so you know, neither did I. You tossed and turned so much that I was tempted to go sleep on the couch.”

“Sorry,” she murmured.

“Was it the case?”

Joanna nodded. The evening before and well out of the kids’ earshot, Joanna had told Butch everything that was going on, so at least he knew what she was up against.

“One way or another, the whole thing is going to come to a head today,” she told him. “Since Stephen Roper is someone who puts zero value on human life, I’m worried someone besides him will end up being hurt.”

“You may be worried about everyone else,” Butch said. “I’m worried about you.”

He offered to cook breakfast for her, but she declined. “I’ll stick to coffee and toast,” she said. “I’m not sure anything else would stay down.”

Finally, as she headed out the door, and just when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, they did.

In the garage, the right front tire on her Interceptor was flat as a pancake.

Where she had managed to pick up that offending roofing nail was anybody’s guess.

Naturally, Butch dropped everything and came out to change the tire for her, but by the time she left the house, she should already have been at the office.

Then, when she reached the Justice Center, she had to drop the Interceptor off at the motor pool garage to have the flat fixed.

The shortest way to her office from the garage was through the public entrance, one she seldom used.

One wall of the lobby was decorated with black-and-white photographs of Cochise County’s current and previous sheriffs.

With a single exception, the others were male.

In their official portraitlike photos, they all wore white Stetsons, and their facial expressions varied from serious to somber.

Joanna’s photograph, on the other hand, and one her mother had begged her to change, featured a towheaded little girl with her hair in braids.

She was wearing a Brownie uniform, beaming a toothless ear-to-ear grin, and dragging a wagon loaded with Girl Scout cookies.

Most of the time when Joanna saw that photo, standing in stark contrast to all the serious ones, she found it amusing.

That Friday morning it wasn’t funny. Today that little girl is up against a deadly killer , Joanna thought to herself.

Having a load of Thin Mints along for the ride isn’t going to do a bit of good.

Entering the building through the public entrance meant Joanna had to pass Kristin’s desk to reach her own.

As she stepped into that secondary waiting room, Joanna was well aware that she was more than forty minutes late.

Kristin had a phone to her ear. When she caught sight of Joanna, she gave her boss a scathing look and held up her hand in a traffic-stop gesture while saying into the phone, “She’s here now.

If you don’t mind holding, Sheriff Brady will be right with you.

” After pressing the hold button, she slammed the receiver back into its cradle.

“Who is it?” Joanna asked.

Instead of answering, Kristin went on the offensive.

“What the hell did you do?” she demanded, holding up a handful of yellow message slips and passing them along to Joanna.

“The phone has been ringing off the hook, and nobody’s bothering to go through the switchboard.

Everyone in the universe seems to have your direct number. ”

Joanna glanced at the topmost message. That call had come from someone named Ed Cox, in Fulton, Missouri. “Who’s this?” Joanna asked.

“Beats me,” Kristin replied tartly. “I guess you’ll have to call him back to find out.”

“And who’s on hold?”

“His name is Dan Hogan. I hadn’t gotten around to writing down his details when you came in. You’ll have to talk to him yourself if you want to find out.”

Once seated at her desk, Joanna paused long enough to put her purse in the bottom drawer before picking up the telephone receiver. “Sheriff Joanna Brady here,” she said. “To whom am I speaking?”

“Glad to meet you, Sheriff Brady. My name’s Daniel Hogan, but most people call me Dan.

I’m a retired sheriff from Polk County, Minnesota.

I started out there as a deputy, ran the investigations team for a while, and then served three terms as sheriff.

Polk County’s pretty much off the beaten path.

Not many homicides happen here, and the ones that do are usually cut-and-dried and end up being solved in short order.

But we’ve got one unsolved on the books that happened just after I moved to investigations—a little kid named Brian Olson who disappeared from the Polk County Fair on August 19, 1961.

His body was found three days later, floating in Arthur Lake. He’d been strangled.”

Joanna was taken aback to realize that the detective assigned to the case remembered the exact date of the crime more than sixty years later.

And hearing him mention the commonalities with the cases Joanna already knew about was enough to take her breath away.

A moment passed before she could respond. “Was he fully clothed?” she asked.

“Yes, he was still dressed in his Cub Scout uniform. Paulette Hansen, his den mother, had taken her troop of boys to the fair. Somehow Brian got separated from the group and simply vanished. Poor Paulette never got over it. She blamed herself for his death. When she committed suicide a number of years later, she left a note that was primarily a letter of apology to Brian’s folks.

“The thing is, as lead detective on that case, I never got over it, either. Even now that I’m retired, I make it a point to drop by the department each year on the first day of the fair to take a look at the file, although my eyes are getting so bad I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep that up.

Anyway, I’m enough of a pest about it that, as soon as your BOLO came in last night, Elmer Pollock, the current sheriff, gave me a call. He also gave me your phone number.”

“Was anything missing from the body?” Joanna asked.

“Yes,” Hogan replied without hesitation.

“As a matter of fact, his Wolf pin. It was brand-new. His den leader, Mrs. Hansen, had just awarded it to him a week or so before he disappeared. It was one of those little clasp things that you have to squeeze like hell to get it on or off. So who’s your guy, Sheriff Brady, and to your knowledge has he ever been anywhere near Fertile, Minnesota? ”

“His name is Stephen Roper,” Joanna answered quietly. “I believe he was born in Fertile.”

There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line, followed by a fit of coughing, as though someone had swallowed wrong. “Not him,” Dan Hogan croaked at last, once he could speak again. “Are you frigging kidding me?”

“Wait,” Joanna said. “You actually knew him?”

“Hell yes, I knew him,” Dan replied. “I knew the moment I laid eyes on that kid that there was something wrong with him. I tried to tell the detectives on the case that I thought he had something to do with it, but I was a newbie deputy at the time, and no one gave my opinion the time of day.”

Joanna was confused. “What case?” she asked. “I thought you just told me you were the lead detective.”

“Not Brian Olson’s death, Stephen Roper’s grandmother’s—his step-grandmother, actually.

Lucille Johansen Hawkins was Orson Hawkins’s second wife.

Fell down the front steps of her house and busted open her head on a concrete walkway.

Steve, that’s what we all called him back then, was the one who called it in, and I was the first officer to arrive on the scene.

There was just something off about him. When he ran into the house to call for help, he splashed right through her blood and left a trail of bloody footprints from the front door to the wall phone in the kitchen.

Most kids wouldn’t have stepped in a pool of blood like that for all the tea in China. ”

“So his grandmother was murdered?” Joanna asked.

“I thought so, but Henry Fransen, the detective on the case, along with a lot of other people thought Orson Hawkins, Lucille’s husband and Steve’s grandfather, had knocked her off in order to lay hands on her life insurance.

Lucille’s daddy, Mitch Johansen, was the insurance agent here in town.

When his three daughters were born he bought a $100,000 twenty-pay life policy on each of them.

Two of the daughters took off for parts unknown as soon as they turned eighteen. Lucille hung around.

“She was an odd duck. All she wanted to be was a farmer. She wore work boots and overalls when most of the other women in town wouldn’t have set foot out of the house in a pair of pants.

When she and Orson got hitched, a few rumors flew here and there that he had married her for her money, and once she was dead, that sprinkle of rumors turned into a downpour.

After all, back then, $100,000 wasn’t something to sneeze at.

But Orson had an airtight alibi for the whole day she died.

Eventually the coroner ruled her death as accidental, and that was it. ”

Joanna was listening, but she was also thinking of her list of possible similarities. “Was anything missing from Lucille’s body?” she asked when Dan Hogan paused to take a breath.

“You damned well better bet there was,” he replied heatedly.

“Her gold band wedding ring. When Orson Hawkins found out it was missing, he came down to the sheriff’s office and raised all kinds of hell.

Came right out and accused me of taking it off her finger before the ambulance ever got there, but I didn’t, I swear. I never even saw the damned thing.”

Joanna took a breath as well. “I believe, Mr. Hogan,” she said at last, “after all these years it may be time to change Lucille’s manner of death from accidental to homicide.

You’ve just described Stephen Roper’s signature.

He kills his victims and then takes something from them.

He stole Lucille’s wedding ring the same way he took Brian Olson’s Wolf pin. ”

“Really?” Dan asked, as though he still couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.

“Really.”

“But he couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven at the time. That’s why Detective Fransen laughed at me when I suggested Steve might have had something to do it. ‘Impossible,’ he told me. ‘Why, Steve’s nothing but a snot-nosed kid.’”

“He may well have been a snot-nosed kid,” Joanna agreed, “but I’m willing to bet he was also a snot-nosed killer.”

“But how did he do it?”

“Who knows,” Joanna replied. “The only way we’ll ever find out for sure is if he gives us a full confession, and I’m not counting on that. In the meantime, if you could get back in touch with your current sheriff...” She paused, embarrassed that the name had fallen out of her head.

“Sheriff Pollock,” Dan Hogan supplied. “Claude Pollock.”

“Thank you. If you’d get back to Sheriff Pollock and ask him to send me whatever he can copy from those two files, I’ll be incredibly grateful. I’m pretty sure our email and/or fax information is on the BOLO.”

“Ya, sure, you betcha,” Dan Hogan said. “I’ll be on it like flies on crap the minute we’re off the phone.”

When the call ended, Joanna retrieved her purse, grabbed up the fistful of missed call messages, and headed for Kristin’s desk. The secretary tried to add three more messages to Joanna’s mix on her way past, but Joanna shook her head.

“Take all these straight to the bullpen,” Joanna told her, handing over the others.

“Every one of them needs to be returned ASAP. They’re about cases that may or may not be related to Xavier Delgado’s homicide.

I want the investigations team returning those calls, but I’m also going to need boots on the ground—lots of them.

Call in all the deputies. If they’re off duty or if it’s somebody’s day off?

Too bad. Call them in anyway. Tell them to drop what they’re doing and get their butts to Bisbee. ”

“Where are you going?” Kristin asked.

“To have a chat with the county attorney.”

“When will you be back?”

“No idea.”

Joanna left the building the same way she’d entered, only this time she didn’t give the little girl with her wagonload of Girl Scout Cookies a second glance, because the older version of that little girl was on a mission now, and Stephen Roper was about to go down.