It was a tough call. On the one hand, a man’s life might be at stake. On the other, a conviction. “We’d better go check,” Joanna said. “In and out. In the meantime, Jaime, how about if you streak back to Bisbee and pick up a search warrant. Just in case.”
Ten minutes later they were standing in front of Clete Rogers’ modest tin-roofed house. It was a white clapboard affair that clearly dated from Tombstone’s mining heyday. On three sides the house was surrounded by a thicket of agave. Some of the cacti had done their century plant performance, leaving behind long skeletal stalks that still held shriveled and blackened seed pods while all around a new generation of tiny plants sprouted from the hardened earth.
Seeing the dying cacti gave Joanna a weird feeling, as did spotting Clete Rogers’ much-dented F-100 Ford. The pickup, parked almost out of sight in a narrow-faced, one-car detached garage, had a forlorn, abandoned air about it.
Joanna and Ernie stepped up onto the porch and Ernie knocked on the front door. It was an old-fashioned piece of antique craftsmanship with a glass window at the top. Etched into the window was a magnificent stag, standing on a promontory in the middle of a forested glade.
Joanna and Ernie waited for several long moments before Ernie knocked a second time. This time, the old door shuddered under the force of his blows. Still no one answered.
“I guess we’d better break it,” Ernie said.
“Let’s try the back door,” Joanna suggested. “This one looks too much like a valuable antique for my taste.”
The back of the house contained a shaky but fully enclosed utility porch. The door with its horizontal panels dated from the same era as the one at the front of the house, but here the etched glass had long since been replaced by a single pane of ordinary window glass.
“Break away,” she told Ernie. “At least this one won’t cost as much when it comes time to replace it.”
Seconds after shattering the glass, Ernie unfastened the inside latch, opened the door, and let Joanna into the house. “Hello,” she called. “Anybody home?” But there was no answer.
With Joanna leading the way, they walked through the makeshift laundry room that had once been a back porch and on into the kitchen and living room. The whole house couldn’t have been more than eight hundred square feet. The tiny rooms all had the enormously high ceilings of houses built before the age of air-conditioning. The furnishings were threadbare, but everything about the place-from the worn linoleum to the brass push-button light socket-was spotlessly clean. Joanna had expected typical bachelor-pad debris-with clothing and trash littering the floor and with dirty dishes stacked on the counters and attracting bugs in the sink. She had visited several pits like that during her tenure as sheriff. It surprised her a little to see that Cletus Rogers didn’t play to type.
While Joanna stood in the middle of the living room peering around, Ernie disappeared into what was evidently a bed-room. “Hey, boss,” he called. “I think you’d better come take a look at this.”
The bedroom was crammed with furniture. Not only did it contain a bed, a huge mirrored dresser, and a nightstand, it also held a frail cherry-wood dining room table that evidently functioned as a desk. Here there were papers-neatly stacked and/or assigned to folders. In the middle of the desk sat a computer, an old desktop model that looked old-fashioned and clunky even to Joanna.
“What?” she asked.
“Come around here and look. The screen’s so bad that you’ll have to stand directly in front of it before you’ll be able to read it.”
Joanna squeezed her way between the table and the foot of the bed until she was standing beside Ernie. From that vantage point she could read the only two words printed on the sickly-green screen. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” Joanna asked.
“Doesn’t say.”
“What does that sound like to you?” Joanna asked.
“Well,” Ernie said. “Taken with our suspicions about what happened to Alice Rogers, my guess would be it’s the beginning of a suicide note. Or else it’s a complete suicide note.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Joanna agreed. “And since his car is here, he didn’t go far. Let’s go check the garage.”
The pickup was not only unlocked, it was also empty. The single-car garage, most likely built in the era of the Model Ts, was too small for the whole of the truck to fit inside. Only the front hood and fender nosed into the garage’s darkened interior. At the front of the garage the two officers found a series of wooden shelves, sagging under burdens of neatly labeled boxes and paint cans. Paint and boxes, but no sign of the missing Cletus Rogers.
Back out in the yard, Joanna and Ernie made their way around the whole of the agave hedge, but there was no sign of a body there and no hint that anything had been disturbed. Once back in the front yard, Joanna stopped and looked back. “I think it’s time to call in Search and Rescue,” she said.
“Good,” Ernie replied. “That makes two of us.”
From the moment Joanna called Dispatch and summoned Mike Wilson and his Search and Rescue team, she knew it would be at least an hour, maybe even an hour and a hall, before the team could rendezvous at Clete Rogers’ house. Forced to wait outside lest they be accused of doing anything improper, Joanna found herself frustrated with the idea of just standing around. Finally she opened the small suitcase she kept in the back of the Blazer. From her selection of “just-in-case” crime scene clothing, she removed a pair of tennis shoes, put them on, and laced them up.
“I’m going to walk around a little,” she told Ernie. “You don’t need a search warrant for that.”
Tombstone may have been the Town Too Tough to Die, but the same couldn’t be said for municipal infrastructure. Within three blocks on either side of the main drag, thin layers of long-ago-laid asphalt had now reverted to potholed gravel trails. As Joanna set out walking, she had to keep her eyes glued to the disintegrating pavement in order to avoid falling in one of the holes and twisting her ankle. The necessity of watching her feet meant she didn’t necessarily notice where she was going. Two blocks from the house, a large shadow intersected with hers. Glancing up, she saw a huge buzzard riding the updrafts.
In the desert, a circling buzzard carries its own ominous message of death and dying. Sighting in on the bottom of the bird’s lazy circle, Joanna found herself staring at a small concrete complex carrying an identifying sign that said, TOMBSTONE MUNICIPAL SWIMMING POOL. Joanna made her way toward the pool, suspecting in advance what she might find there.
The fully clothed body of a man lay sprawled face-down on the bottom of the deep end of an empty swimming pool. There was no question about whether or not he was dead. Joanna could tell from the rag-doll way his head canted off to one side that his neck had been broken.
“Ernie,” Joanna yelled over her shoulder. “Come here. Quick!”
Moments later, the detective came huffing down the hill. “What is it?” he demanded as he caught up with her. “What’s going on?”
“Call Dispatch and cancel Search and Rescue. I’m pretty sure we’ve found Clete Rogers.”
For Joanna, the next part of the scenario was achingly familiar. George Winfield had to be summoned. The crime scene investigation team had to be called out once more. As curious onlookers gathered around and as the screen of crime scene tape went up, Joanna sat in her Blazer and waited for the wheels of bureaucracy to grind. Watching all the activity, she felt terribly sad.
Alice Rogers was dead and now so was her son. What does it take, Joanna wondered, for a son to kill his mother? How much money could stimulate that much greed? And after the deed was done, how much regret would cause a remorseful killer to take his own life?