“Well, give me your cigarette, then. Don’t let it go to waste.”
Jenny handed over the burning cigarette. Embarrassed, she stumbled away from where Dora sat, heaving as she went. Twenty yards farther on, she bent over a bush and let go. In the process she lost the contents of her sack lunch along with the popcorn and Orange Crush from the campfire. Finally, when there was nothing left in her system, Jenny lurched over to a nearby tree and stood there, leaning against the trunk, gasping and shivering and wishing she had some water so she could get the awful taste out of her mouth.
“Are you all right?” Dora asked from behind her. She was still smoking one of the two cigarettes. The smell of the smoke was enough to make Jenny heave again, but she managed to stave off the urge.
“I’m all right,” she said shakily.
“You’ll be okay,” Dora told her. “The same thing happened to me the first time I tried it. You want an Altoid? I always keep some around so my mom can’t smell the smoke on my breath.”
With shaking hands, Jenny gratefully accepted the proffered breath mint. “Thanks,” she said and meant it.
The two girls stood there together for some time, while Jenny sucked on the breath mint and Dora finished smoking the rest of the remaining cigarette. When it was gone, Dora carefully ground out the butt with the sole of her shoe. “I wouldn’t want to start a fire,” she said with a laugh. “Somebody might notice. Then we would be in trouble.”
They were quiet for a time. The only sound was the distant yip of a coyote, answered by another from even farther away. Then, for the first time that evening, a slight breeze stirred around them, blowing up into their faces from the valley floor below. As the small gust blew away the last of the dissipating cigarette smoke, Jenny noticed that another odor had taken its place.
“There’s something dead out there,” she announced.
“Dead,” Dora repeated. “How do you know?”
Jennifer Ann Brady had lived on a ranch all her life. She recognized the distinctively ugly odor of carrion.
“Because I can smell it, that’s how,” Jenny returned.
The slight softening in Dora’s voice when she had offered the Altoid disappeared at once. “You’re just saying that to scare me, Jennifer Brady!” Dora declared. “You think that because they were saying all that stuff about Apaches killing people and all, that you can spook me or something.”
“No, I’m not,” Jenny insisted. “Don’t you smell it?”
“Smell what?” Dora shot back. “I don’t smell anything.”
Jennifer Brady had seen enough animal carcasses along the road and out on the ranch that she wasn’t the least bit scared of them, but she could tell from Dora’s voice that the other girl was. It was a way of evening the score for the cigarettes--a way of reclaiming a little of her own lost dignity.
“Come on,” Jenny said. “I’ll show you.”
Without waiting to see whether or not Dora would follow, Jenny set off. The breeze was still blowing uphill, and Jenny walked directly into it. After watching for a moment or two, Dora Matthews reluctantly followed. With each step, the odor grew stronger and stronger.
“Ugh,” Dora protested at last. “Now I smell it, too. It’s awful.”
Their path had taken them up and over the ridge that formed one side of the basin where the troop had set up camp. Now the girls walked downhill until they were almost back at the road that had brought them up into the basin. And there, visible in the moonlight and at the bottom of the embankment that fell down from the graded road, lay the body of a naked woman.
“Oh, my God,” Dora groaned. “Is she dead?”
Jenny’s neck prickled as the hair on the back of it stood on end. “Of course she’s dead,” she said, wheeling around. “Now come on. We have to go tell Mrs. Lambert.”
“We can’t do that,” Dora wailed. “What if she finds out about the cigarettes? We’ll both be in trouble then.”
Jenny was worried about the same thing, but the threat of getting in trouble wasn’t enough to stop her. Neither was Dora Matthews.
“Too bad,” Jenny called over her shoulder. “I’m going to tell anyway. Somebody’s going to have to call my mom.”
CHAPTER THREE
It was after eleven when the vibrating of Dr. George Winfield’s tiny pager jarred him awake. Next to him in bed his wife, Eleanor, let loose a very unladylike snore. The Cochise County Medical Examiner tiptoed across the room and silently pulled the door shut behind him before he switched on the light and checked the number on the digital readout. He was used to being rousted out of bed by middle-of-the-night calls from various law enforcement agencies, but the number showing on the screen wasn’t one he instantly recognized.
To make sure the sound of conversation wouldn’t awaken Eleanor, he went all the way to the kitchen and used that phone to return the call. “Chief Deputy Montoya,” a voice answered after less than half a ring. “Doc Winfield?”
“That’s right,” George answered, rubbing his eyes. He hadn’t been asleep for long, but his eyes were gritty, and he was having a hard time pulling himself out of the fog. “What’ve you got, Frank?”
“A problem,” Frank replied.
“Someone’s dead, I assume,” George said, tuning up with a hint of sarcasm. “If that weren’t the case, you wouldn’t be calling me. What’s the deal?”
“White female,” Frank Montoya answered. “A Jane Doe. From the looks of her, I’d say she’s been dead for a day or two. On the other hand, it’s been so hot lately that maybe it’s less than that.”
“Where was she found?”
“On the road to Apache Pass. Looks like someone threw her out of a vehicle and let her roll down an embankment. She’s naked. No identification that we’ve been able to find so far, but we’ll have to wait until morning to do a more thorough search.”
Something about Apache Pass niggled in the back of George Winfield’s consciousness, but right then he couldn’t quite sort it out. Still, there was no denying the underlying urgency in Frank Montoya’s voice. Even half asleep, George noticed that and assumed Frank had found something deeply disturbing about the condition of the body. Maybe the woman had been mutilated in some unusually gruesome way.
“I’ll get dressed and be there as soon as I can,” George Winfield said. He was relatively new to the area, a transplant from Minnesota, so his grasp of southeastern Arizona geography was still somewhat hazy, forcing him to make copious use of his detailed topo guide to get wherever he needed to go. “How far is Apache Pass from here and where is it exactly?”
“Off Highway 186. From Bisbee it’s about an hour’s drive,” Frank answered, his native-son knowledge apparent in the casual ease of his answer. “Depending on how fast you drive, of course.” Deputies around the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department didn’t call the new county medical examiner “Doc Lead Foot” for nothing.
“Good,” George replied. “I’ll be there as close to that as I can manage. See you then ...”
“Wait,” Frank interrupted. “Before you come, there’s something else you should know. Jennifer Brady is the one who found the body—she and one of her friends, a girl named Dora Matthews.”
By virtue of having married Eleanor Lathrop, Dr. George Winfield was stepfather to Sheriff Joanna Brady and stepgrandfather to Joanna’s daughter, Jenny. It came to him then that the something that had been niggling at the back of his mind throughout his conversation with Frank Montoya was something Eleanor had mentioned in passing: Jenny and her Girl Scout troop would b camping on a ranch in the Apache Pass area over Memorial Day Weekend.
“How did they manage that?” he asked.
“According to Jenny, after lights out, she and Dora took off on an unauthorized hike. They were going off by themselves to have a cigarette—”
“Jenny was smoking cigarettes?” a disbelieving George Winfeld demanded. “She’s twelve years old, for cripes’ sake! How the hell did she get hold of cigarettes?”