Free Outlaw Mountain by J. A. Jance Page A

away, Joanna started to follow them. She went as far as the ditch and then stopped. Fran was dressed in proper crime scene attire—a long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and snakeskin cowboy boots. Joanna was in high heels, a silk blouse, and a cotton-knit blazer and skirt. One glance at the thick grove of spiny cactus convinced her that what she had worn into the office that morning—clothing that would have been entirely appropriate for an appearance at a board of supervisors meeting—wasn’t going to cut it at a cholla-studded crime scene.
    Remembering her mother’s old adage about an ounce of prevention, Joanna retreated to the trunk of the Crown Victoria and dug into the small suitcase of “just-in-case” clothes she kept packed at all times.
    She extracted jeans and a worn pair of tennis shoes as well as an ankle-length cotton duster straight out of a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western. After changing, she was just starting to cross the ditch when a battered Ford F-100 pickup pulled up beside her. It screeched to a halt with Clete Rogers at the wheel. Parking half-on and half-off the road, he rammed the pickup into neutral and jumped out.
    “All right, Sheriff Brady,” he demanded. “Where is she? Over there? In that stand of cactus somewhere?”
    Joanna had hoped Clete Rogers wouldn’t arrive until after Sergeant Mallory had returned from leading Fran Daly to the crime scene. That way, someone from Pima County could have taken the flak for sending the mayor of Tombstone on his way. Unfortunately, Sergeant Mallory had dodged the bullet.
    “You can’t go there, Mayor Rogers,” Joanna said, stepping into the path and barring his way. “As I told you earlier, crime scenes are off limits to civilians.”
    “You can’t tell me what to do,” Rogers objected. “This isn’t Cochise County. You’ve got no authority here.”
    “Yes, I do,” Joanna told him. “I’ve spoken to Dr. Fran Daly of the Pima County Medical Examiner’s office about this. She made it clear she doesn’t want you here. You’re to go to the Pima County morgue in Tucson to make an official identification. If you’d like, you can go there and wait.”
    “How long will that be?”
    “No telling.”
    “Is it hours, then? Days?” Clete Rogers demanded. “What are we talking about here?”
    “As I said, there’s no way to know.”
    Another car pulled up and stopped. This one was a cherry-red Chrysler Sebring convertible with an auburn-haired woman at the wheel. She, too, parked without first bothering to move her vehicle entirely out of the path of traffic. She jumped out of the car. Leaving her door ajar, she came striding up to where Joanna and Clete Rogers stood.
    “What’s going on here?” she asked.
    Clete turned to Joanna. “If I’m not supposed to be here, why is she?” he demanded. “Who told her?”
    An angry woman marched up until she stood within inches of Clete Rogers’ face. Belligerently she stared up at him. “She’s my mother, too,” she stormed. “And it happened just the way I said it would. 1 tried to tell you the guy was bad news—that he was trouble. But you’re always so much smarter than anyone else. You knew all about this long before I did, but you didn’t bother to lift a finger. If you had told me what was really going on, I might have prevented this from happening, but oh no. Not you. And now Mother’s dead because of you, because you’re such a closed-mouthed son of a bitch. I hope you’re happy.”
    “Wait just a damned minute here!” Clete railed back at his sister. “You’re saying what happened is all my fault? No way!”
    “You should have made her break up with him.”
    Clete hooted with laughter. “Sure,” he said. “Me make her. When did anybody ever make Mother do anything she didn’t want to do?”
    Joanna remembered what Frank Montoya had said about the previous day’s incident in the Grubsteak, about the two-sided fight between Susan Jenkins and her brother, and the scuffle