Page 7 of The Girl from Devil’s Lake (Joanna Brady Mysteries #21)

With that settled in her mind, Joanna turned her thoughts to what she’d be encountering at the scene.

She wasn’t sure which of her detectives would be there because Tom Hadlock was now in charge of scheduling.

Dispatch had told her that the body in the duffel bag belonged to a child.

What child? Whose? As far as she knew no missing children had been reported anywhere in her jurisdiction or even in Arizona, so if this wasn’t a currently active case, was it from somewhere else or was it maybe a cold case?

The body had been pulled from the San Pedro.

Obviously, the bridge in St. David wasn’t the crime scene or even the actual dump site.

And since the headwaters of the San Pedro were across the line in Mexico, there was a chance the victim was also from there.

Captain Arturo Pena, the man in charge of the Federales unit based in Naco, Sonora, was someone Joanna knew personally.

He had attended Bisbee High School as a foreign student and had eventually graduated from the University of Arizona with a degree in criminal justice, but now wasn’t the time to call him—not until she knew more about what was going on.

Since the rain was still falling, there was no flash of blue sky as she emerged on the far side of the Mule Mountain Tunnel.

The landscape around her was a dingy gray.

The usually red rocky cliffs looming over the right-hand side of the highway had turned into cascading waterfalls.

Once that water too fed into the Mule Mountain Creek, it would eventually flow into the San Pedro, making things farther downstream that much worse.

Approaching Tombstone, the rain let up a little, so Joanna took the opportunity to call in to Dispatch. “Who all’s working the scene in St. David?” she asked.

“Detective Howell is already there. Detective Raymond is ten minutes out. Highway 80 is coned down to one lane on the bridge. Deputies Creighton and Nunez are directing traffic.”

“What about the ME?”

“Dr. Baldwin just arrived. Where are you?”

Kendra Baldwin’s home was up Tombstone Canyon in Old Bisbee, so it made sense that she’d be fifteen or twenty minutes ahead of Joanna.

“I’m just passing Tombstone Airport Road,” Joanna replied, but glancing out the window, the only evidence of an airport was a dirt runway surrounded by a few metal shacks scattered across a mostly barren landscape.

There wasn’t a single aircraft in sight.

“Let people know I’ll be there as soon as I can. ”

Once she arrived in St. David, due to the traffic backup, Joanna parked on the shoulder of the road, a good half mile from the bridge itself.

She nodded in Deputy Nunez’s direction as she walked past. Nearing the river, Joanna was amazed to see pooling water spread across an adjoining field leaving the cattle grazing there wading in three to four inches of standing water.

Prior to the 7.5 Sonoran Earthquake of 1887, the San Pedro had been deep enough that people had been able to use rafts to carry people and goods up and down the river.

At that time, the area around what was now the small farming community of St. David had been little more than a malarial swamp.

After the quake, however, the river had gone underground.

These days there was seldom more than a trickle of water in the riverbed.

Today, however, it was filled by a roaring flood that overflowed the riverbanks.

Coming closer, Joanna saw a clutch of people gathered in the middle of the bridge’s eastbound lanes where someone was erecting a small metal and canvas canopy.

It wasn’t until Joanna reached the bridge itself that she was able to see the blue cloth bundle sheltering underneath the temporary structure.

Just then a puff of wind blew the distinctive smell of human decomposition into Joanna’s nostrils.

If this was a cold case, it wasn’t nearly cold enough.

Dr. Kendra Baldwin, dressed in a hazmat suit and trailed by both Detectives Howell and Raymond, stepped forward to greet Joanna. “What a way to spend Thanksgiving weekend!” she said.

“I’ll say,” Joanna agreed. “What have we got?”

“Our victim is a little boy,” Kendra answered. “Still has his baby teeth so probably five years. Black hair, so Hispanic maybe, and he appears to be fully clothed.”

“Dead for how long?”

“I’d estimate a week at least, but the body hasn’t been in the water for nearly that long. I’m guessing someone tried to bury him in the riverbed...”

“...and the floodwaters brought the bag to the surface and carried it here?” Joanna finished.

Kendra nodded.

“Cause of death?”

“No obvious gunshot or stab wounds. We’ll have to wait until the autopsy to know for sure, but I’m prepared to call this one a homicide from the get-go.

I say we pack him up and get him back to the morgue.

” With that the ME turned to the two detectives.

“This poor kid’s been dead for a while, so there’s no real rush, and I have out-of-town company. Autopsy Monday morning at nine?”

Detectives Deb Howell and Garth Raymond nodded in unison.

“We’ll be there,” Deb said.

With most homicide cases, this would be the time to start canvassing the neighborhood, looking for witnesses and information.

However, knowing the cows in the field wouldn’t have much of anything to say in that regard, there wasn’t any point in doing one, so Joanna separated herself from the group and went in search of the crew from the Highway Department.

Four guys, using long-handled hooks, were still hauling debris out of the water where it had already formed an eight-foot-tall pile of waterlogged tree branches and junk, which was also stacked in the eastbound lane.

Joanna located Bill Snider, the man in charge of the crew, sitting nearby in a pickup, having a smoke, and talking on his radio.

Joanna tapped on the window. “You guys are the ones who found the body?” she asked as soon as he rolled it down.

Snider nodded. “Soon as John Boy zipped open that bag, he barfed his guts out. Stunk like a son of a bitch.”

Welcome to my world , Joanna thought.

“How are things looking as far as the bridge is concerned?” she asked.

“We’re doing our best to keep the river free of debris so water doesn’t dam up against it.

The guy who owns that field,” he added, pointing toward the wading cattle, “a Mr. Duvall, he came out with a backhoe and dug a diversion ditch. That’s taking some of the pressure off the bridge.

With the rain finally letting up, the old bridge should be okay, but I’m worried about the freshly poured footings on the new one. Some of those may be goners.”

“What about the trash in the middle of the highway?” Joanna asked.

“A dump truck and a front-end loader are coming to haul it away, but that’s going to take another hour at least, so I’ll need your guys directing traffic until then.”

“Fair enough,” Joanna said. “I’ll let my deputies know.”

Back on the bridge, she watched as the body was loaded into the ME’s minivan—Kendra’s so-called body wagon.

Moments later the canopy came down as well.

Once the ME drove away, so did the two detectives.

Next Joanna consulted with her two deputies, letting them know they’d need to continue directing traffic until the debris could be hauled away.

Once that was done, she headed back to her Interceptor, where she discovered she had company.

The vehicle that had been parked directly in front of hers had moved. Joanna quickly recognized the battered RAV4 parked in its place belonged to one of her least favorite people in the world, local newshound Marliss Shackleford.

A few weeks earlier, Marliss and her then boyfriend had had a falling-out.

Afterward he had expressed his anger by smashing her car with a baseball bat, without leaving a single panel of the vehicle undamaged.

The incident itself had occurred inside the Bisbee city limits, so it hadn’t been investigated by the sheriff’s department.

However, after his arrest, the boyfriend had been unable to post bond, and he was currently one of the inmates contributing to Joanna’s overcrowding problem in the Cochise County Jail.

After the incident, the car had been deemed drivable, so while Marliss waited for her turn with a body shop appointment, she was driving a vehicle that appeared to be one short step away from a wrecking yard.

A small part of Joanna Brady’s soul wasn’t sorry that Marliss Shackleford was stuck driving a junker. It was exactly what she deserved.

Previously the woman had been a reporter on the staff of a local newspaper, the Bisbee Bee , where her weekly column “Bisbee Buzzings” had often focused on what the columnist perceived as Joanna’s many shortcomings in her handling of the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department.

Once the newspaper had bitten the dust, however, Marliss had reinvented herself by starting a website called Cochise County Courier, featuring her twice-weekly crime column, where she continued to be a royal pain in Joanna’s butt.

Now the woman herself stood leaning against the hood of Joanna’s Interceptor.

“Hello, Sheriff Brady,” Marliss said. “Dead kid, right?” she added.

“Active investigation,” Joanna muttered through gritted teeth, hoping to put the woman off. “No further comment until after the autopsy, which is scheduled for Monday morning.”

“Come on,” Marliss wheedled. “I already talked to the poor guy who hauled the duffel bag out of the water and zipped it open. I’ll bet he won’t do that again. Any idea who the kid is? Where he came from?”

“I said no comment and I meant it,” Joanna insisted, bypassing Marliss and heading for the Interceptor’s driver’s door, but Marliss trailed after her.

“I’ve been looking online,” Marliss continued, placing one hand on the door to keep Joanna from opening it. “I’m not finding any recent reports of missing kids, so where did this one come from?”

“Where he came from is none of your business.”

“So it’s a boy then?” Marliss crowed. “A missing boy?”

Bodily removing Marliss’s hand from the door, Joanna wrenched it open. “Yes,” she snapped. “Now get the hell away from my car.”

“Any comments about winning the election?” Marliss continued.

“None!” Joanna responded. “No comments at all.”

That’s when Joanna noticed that Marliss was holding a cell phone in her hand. No doubt it was set to record, and everything Joanna had just said would be front and center on Marliss’s next Cochise County Courier crime column post.

So be it , Joanna thought to herself, leaving Marliss standing there watching. I already won, so do your worst.