Damage Control Read online

  Alfred Beasley had pretty much of a death grip on the steering wheel of the decrepit old Buick as he nursed it up the steep winding mountain road toward Montezuma Pass. He and Martha had bought the Buick new, fifteen years earlier. At the time they made the purchase, they had also discussed the very real possibility that this would be their last new vehicle—that this final Regal would be their “toes-up” Buick. Back then they hadn’t expected it would last nearly as long as it had. Of course, they hadn’t really thought they’d make it this far, either. Martha had just turned ninety-one and Alfred himself was eighty-eight. She’d outlived her parents by forty years; Alfred had surpassed his by almost as many.

  Throughout their long marriage, they had always loved road trips, and this one was no exception. Martha had insisted that they do Montezuma Pass at the bottom of the Huachuca Mountains “one last time,” as she said, and they were doing it, come hell or high water—and not necessarily in that order. The rains had come two days late—on the sixth of July rather than the fourth. Once they were off the paved road and onto gravel, there were places where there were already washouts. In one spot a small boulder had fallen onto the road. Afraid the Buick would high-center if Alfred tried going over it, he carefully steered around it, praying that no one would come barreling downhill toward them when their left rear tire—far more worn than it should have been—was within mere inches of going over the edge. Alfred breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief once they were back on the right-hand side of the narrow road. No matter what else was going on with him, at least he could still drive.

  By the time they were around the boulder and the tight hairpin curve that followed, Alfred looked in the rearview mirror and counted at least four cars lined up behind him. A hot little sports car of some kind was right on his bumper. Behind that was a Jeep Cherokee, followed by a pair of behemoth pickups. No doubt the last two were four-wheel-drive numbers—Tundras or Dakotas or some other tough-sounding name.

  Too bad, Alfred thought. You’re not going up this damned mountain any faster than we are, so take an old cold tater and wait.

  Martha sat beside him, quiet and unperturbed. That was the way she’d ridden with him for all these sixty-nine years—seventy next month. She seemed to be keeping watch on the passing scenery out the window—the scrubby pines, the red-hued dirt, the ragged burned-dry grass—but he didn’t know how much she was actually seeing. Macular degeneration had robbed her of much of her sight, but certainly not all of it. There was enough vision left to her that she still read Alfred the riot act whenever he tried clearing the table without first cleaning his plate.

  “That’s what I like about this spot,” Martha said at last. “The sky’s always so blue up here.”

  And that was true. Far off to the east, somewhere over New Mexico, stood a tiny fringe of white cumulus clouds. No doubt those would build up during the day, rising higher and higher. By late afternoon they’d tower overhead and would probably grow into another fierce monsoon storm, but for now the sky above the Huachuca Mountains was a vast expanse of brilliant blue.

  “Yes,” Alfred agreed.

  They both knew that Alfred was totally color-blind. He wouldn’t have known blue from green if it had come up and slapped him in the face. But Alfred Beasley was no dummy, either. After all these years he was smart enough to know that if Martha said something was blue, he agreed completely, no questions asked.

  The sign back at the highway had said it was three miles from the turnoff to the viewpoint. To Alfred’s way of thinking, today this seemed like a very long three miles. By the time they turned into the parking lot and stopped in the first handicapped space, the needle on the Buick’s temperature gauge was hovering right at the H. Alfred let go of the steering wheel and turned off the key. “Well, Buttercup,” he said. “Here we are.”

  It took several minutes for him to wrestle her wheelchair out of the backseat. At home Martha could get around on a walker for short distances, but outside the house they used the chair. There were times Alfred could have used a walker himself. Pushing Martha’s chair gave him the benefit of a walker without having to admit to his wife that he maybe needed one.

  Alfred was relieved to see that the nearest picnic table—only a matter of a few feet from the parking lot—was still unoccupied. Once he had Martha in her chair and the picnic hamper on her lap, he made straight for that. The path was steeper than he would have thought, but he made it, wondering as he went if, when it came time to leave, he would be strong enough to push her back up the hill to the car.

  He parked Martha’s chair at the end of the table, set the brake, and then settled down on the end of the bench to watch while she took charge of setting out forenoon coffee. First came the red-and-white-checked oilcloth tablecloth. It was old and almost frayed through in spots, but it still worked. Then came the stainless-steel thermos they’d bought for three bucks at a Kiwanis rummage sale. After that came the paper napkins and the school cast-off cups and plates.

  Martha had spent twenty years cooking and dishing out food in the high school cafeteria. When the school had unloaded its old, indestructible plastic dishes, Martha had dragged a set home. By then, years of hot water and detergent had scrubbed away the shiny surface. Now they boasted a matte finish. Martha claimed they were pink. As far as Alfred was concerned, they were no particular color at all.

  Once the dishes were set out, it was time for their midmorning treat. Once a week, at Safeway, they bought a package of eight sweet rolls which Martha would put into individual Tupperware containers so she could dole them out one at a time, one day at a time, with an extra half apiece on Sunday. She did so now, bringing out the roll she’d brought along in the hamper. Placing it on one of the two plates, she felt with her fingers and then carefully divided the roll in half with the paring knife she kept in the hamper for just that purpose. Then, after placing one half of the roll on the other plate, she set that one in front of Alfred and turned her attention to pouring coffee.

  Watching Martha as she concentrated somewhat shakily on her self-appointed tasks, Alfred couldn’t help being struck by how much he still loved her and by how lucky they were to be still together. Most of their couple friends were gone now. Only a few widows remained. Alfred was pretty much the last of the Mohicans when it came to the men. When he had met Martha working in that diner in Omaha back in 1934, he was a cocky seventeen-year-old and she a dark-eyed beauty of twenty. At the time those three years had seemed like an insurmountable obstacle. Now those critical three years were just a drop in the bucket. They didn’t mean anything.

  “Are you just going to sit there daydreaming and let your coffee get cold?” Martha demanded.

  The coffee was cooling rapidly because, compared with the hot valley floor, the mountain was downright chilly. At sixty-five hundred feet, the midmorning sun wasn’t nearly as warm on this July day as one would have thought, and Alfred was glad they both had sweaters. Once they finished their roll and coffee, Martha reached into the hamper again and pulled out a tattered brown book and handed it over to him. The Treasury of the Familiar, its frayed cover now held together with duct tape, had been the one book, other than the Bible, that Martha had owned when they married. And they still read from both volumes on a daily basis, in the mornings though. Not in the afternoons. These days Alfred wasn’t good for much in the afternoons.

  “What would you like me to read today, Buttercup?” Alfred asked.

  “The Song of Hiawatha,” she said. That was the one he turned to, although the book opened to that page pretty much on its own. The poem was Martha’s particular favorite. She had learned it when she was in sixth grade in Kearney, Nebraska, and could still recite most of it by heart. Alfred had read it to her so often that he almost had it memorized as well. Eventually, though, Albert noticed that Martha’s mind had wandered. She was no longer repeating the familiar words along with him.

  Alfred closed the book. “What is it?” he asked.

  “We’ve been really lucky,”
Martha said, pouring second cups of coffee. He marveled that she could still see well enough to do that without spilling any.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “I was thinking that very thing a few minutes ago.”

  “What about the girls?” she asked. “Will they ever be friends?”

  Their two daughters had had a falling-out in high school when they’d both been interested in the same boy—a Bisbee High School bad boy who hadn’t married either one of them. But the bad blood between the two sisters, Sandra Louise and Samantha Ann, had stuck. They still didn’t speak—couldn’t come to the same holiday celebrations. Their estrangement was going on forty years now. Alfred knew that no matter how hard Martha tried to fix it, their daughters’ continuing feud was the one stark failure in his wife’s life—the one intractable problem that no amount of prayer or effort or hard work had been able to solve.

  Alfred could have said, “Of course. They’ll grow out of it.” But it was too late for that kind of empty-headed crap. “I doubt it,” he said. “They’re both too set in their ways.”

  “Is it time?” Martha asked a little later.

  Alfred straightened and nodded. “Pretty much,” he said.

  Just then a young woman in hiking attire approached the table. “Excuse me,” she said in heavily accented English. “I am watching you. You remind me of my grandparents in Germany—Bernkastel. Would you mind so much if I took your picture?”

  “Why on earth would you want to do that?” Martha asked.

  “To help me remember them,” the young woman said.

  “Come on, Buttercup,” Alfred urged, smiling and putting his large hand over Martha’s small one. “Let’s do it.”

  Martha sighed and arranged her face in the tight grimace that passed for a smile. She had always been ashamed of her crooked, misshapen teeth. Even though the false teeth she had worn for the past twenty-five years were as straight as could be, she had never managed to change her lifelong habit of not smiling when faced with a camera.

  Once the picture was taken, the young woman stayed on, chatting gaily with Alfred while Martha repacked the hamper and folded the tablecloth. Alfred had always been the gregarious one in the family—someone who made friends easily wherever he went. And when it came time to push Martha’s chair back to the Buick, the young woman—whose name was Trudy—helped out by carrying the hamper. In her younger days, Martha might have been a little jealous.

  “Trudy and her friends are here to spend two weeks hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” Alfred explained as he helped Martha into the car.

  “What a bunch of foolishness,” Martha said. “Why walk when you could ride?”

  Alfred didn’t have an answer for that one, so he said nothing.

  Once in the car, Martha automatically reached for her seat belt, then thought better of it. “I don’t suppose we need those this time,” she said.

  “No,” Alfred agreed. “I suppose not.”

  With a fond glance in his wife’s direction, Alfred put the car in reverse and backed out of the parking space. There were more cars in the lot now, but there was still a single empty spot in the line of cars parked so they looked out over the San Pedro Valley far below. There was a low rock wall positioned as a guardrail in front of the cars, but Alfred knew if he picked up enough speed before he got there, the Buick would either smash through the wall or jump over it.

  Keeping the emergency brake on, Alfred pressed his foot on the gas pedal. The Buick’s old V-6 came to life. Only when the engine was a full throttle did Alfred shove it into gear and release the hand brake. Once he was sure they’d make it through the space between the other two cars, he let go of the steering wheel and sought Martha’s hand, squeezing it hard enough that the thin bones ground together.

  And that’s what Alfred and Martha Beasley were doing when their Buick went screaming over the wall and plunged down the steep mountainside—they were holding hands. They were still holding hands when the Buick came to earth the first time in an explosion of metal and glass and dust. The car hit once and then turned end over end. The force of that first blow drove them apart. Alfred tried to hold on, but he couldn’t.

  The last thing Alfred Beasley knew, Martha’s hand was lost to him, but strangely enough, he felt like he was flying.

  And he was.

  The 911 calls reporting the horrific accident started coming in just after eleven that morning. Several witnesses dialed in almost simultaneously, all of them calling to report seeing the same thing—a vehicle at the Montezuma Pass Overlook in the Coronado National Forest had gone racing through the parking lot with an elderly man at the wheel and with an equally elderly woman in the passenger seat. The speeding Buick had plowed through a retaining wall and then plunged off the side of the mountain, ejecting both passengers in the process.

  One of the frantic witnesses, a German national, took it upon herself to clamber down the steep mountainside to check on the two victims. When she finally managed to reach them—at some considerable risk to her own life and limb—she called back up to her hiking companions and reported that neither of the two victims had survived.

  When the calls first came in, Joanna was at her desk and was just starting to wade through the morning’s mail. Knowing that the appropriate departmental assets had been dispatched to the scene, Joanna’s initial reaction was to stay where she was and keep her nose to the grindstone. An hour or so later, however, Ernie Carpenter, her chief homicide detective, called in for reinforcements.

  “Sorry to bother you, boss,” he said, “but we need some help out here.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “We’ve got two bodies lying on rocks halfway down the mountain in terribly difficult terrain,” he said. “Deb was able to drag her butt down there to take a look at the situation. I didn’t even try.”

  Deb was Debra Howell, Joanna’s recently promoted newbie homicide detective.

  “She says it’s dangerous as hell down there,” Ernie continued. “One false step and the rescuers will be done for, too. Not only that, it looks like there’s a serious storm blowing in. If you want those bodies picked up before they get washed down the mountain and end up floating away to who knows where, it’s going to take a miracle to get them hauled out of here. That or a helicopter.”

  Of course, the perpetually strapped Cochise County Sheriff’s Department didn’t have a helicopter of its own. Fort Huachuca, a U.S. Army military installation located entirely inside Joanna’s jurisdiction, did have helicopters available—more than one, in fact. They also boasted a well-trained search-and-rescue team, but getting folks from the fort to cooperate with their nonmilitary neighbors was never an easy sell. They weren’t what you could call big on providing mutual aid.

  First Joanna took herself out to the scene so she could assess the situation with her own eyes. Herding her Crown Victoria up the narrow winding road was challenging. Then, once she got to the viewpoint, one look was enough to put her in total agreement with Detective Carpenter’s opinion. Having deputies use stretchers to hand-carry broken bodies up the steep mountainside was utterly out of the question. The idea of risking fully half a dozen workers’ comp claims at the same time would have sent her budget-conscious chief deputy Frank Montoya into a fiscal spasm.

  “I guess I’ll put on my best poker face and go to Fort Huachuca to talk to whoever’s in charge,” she said.

  “Want me to call Doc Winfield?”

  Dr. George Winfield was the Cochise County medical examiner. Now married to Joanna’s mother, Eleanor, he also happened to be Sheriff Brady’s stepfather.

  “Not yet,” Joanna said. “He can’t climb down there either, and there’s no sense having George standing around with nothing to do until we’re somewhere near ready to hand over the bodies.”

  Once on post, it took two hours of going through channels and across desks before Joanna finally made her way to Colonel Donald Drake, someone with enough brass on his uniform to make a decision to bypass any number of prohibitive
rules and regs.

  “That’s very rugged terrain out there, Sheriff Brady,” he observed somewhat patronizingly. “Even setting aside the problems of using military equipment and personnel for an essentially civilian purpose, I’m not sure you understand some of the extensive technical difficulties involved in that kind of operation.”

  Donald Drake wasn’t a large man, but he was stern-faced, hawk-nosed, and imposing. Joanna half expected that, at some point in the conversation, he’d look at her over his reading glasses and call her a “little lady.”

  Running the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department had given Joanna Brady considerable experience in dealing with the cool macho dudes of this world. Many of them could be brought into compliance with a smile along with a short-enough skirt and a well-displayed bit of leg. She recognized at once, however, that none of that would work with Colonel Drake. Here her uniform and badge helped level the playing field. So did not backing down.

  “I just came from the scene,” she told him. “I’m well aware of the difficulties posed not only by the terrain itself but also by the severe crosswinds that will most likely accompany the storm that’s currently blowing in from the southeast. According to the weather service, we should start seeing the first serious gusts from that at around sixteen hundred hours. I was hoping we could have the situation wrapped up before then.”

  Drake gave her a piercing look. “We’d have to use our own personnel,” he said. “I wouldn’t want some untrained yahoo on the ground who wouldn’t have the foggiest idea of how to use our slings. If they’re not fastened properly, we could end up dropping one of those bodies instead of hauling it out.”

  This sounded like a major concession. “Absolutely,” Joanna agreed quickly. “That would be dreadful.”

  “From what you’re saying, I assume this is strictly a recovery operation. My guys go in, pick up the bodies, drop them off at a prespecified point, and then we’re out of there. Correct?”