is a poor bedfellow,” he said. “I didn’t sleep all night. Feel like company?”
“Think they’ll let you stay?”
“Sheriff owes me.”
The doctor sat in the second rocker and tossed Eric a newspaper. “Thought you’d find this interesting.”
Eric settled back into his chair and cringed. Friday’s Gila City Gazette’s front-page headline screamed Mafia Hit! The first few paragraphs focused on Lucille Damaris Straus, the pink-clad woman.
Ricky the reporter had gotten it right. Lucy had first come to the nation’s attention last year when the truth about Cliff Handley, a Gila City native and a beloved police officer who lived a double life, was made public. Lucy, a homeless woman, had assisted in his arrest rather unwittingly. She’d loaned, for a price, her identity to Rosa. Using Lucy’s name and social-security number, Rosa made a place for herself in Gila City and hunted down every person, every place, every move from Cliff’s past. Her goal: to prove Eric innocent. She’d ferreted out details about Cliff Handley that not even he realized. Then Rosa had been arrested and her true identity revealed. She was a mere civilian determined to see justice done. But her arrest exposed the truth about both Cliff and Eric.
Cliff was a murderer; Eric was not.
Unfortunately, Lucy hadn’t been around last year for Rosa to ceremoniously return her identification. And even more unfortunate was the general consensus that Rosa, who claimed not to have seen Lucy in all that time, most likely was the last person to see Lucy alive. Add to that the fact that Rosa’s fingerprints were on some of Lucy’s belongings and, for the authorities and press, the consensus easily turned into the questions Did Rosa kill Lucy? And if so, why?
Dustin Atkins got equal coverage. Pictures of his deserted squad car, found just a mile from Eric’s cabin, looked sinister. A family photo of Dustin, Ruth and a little girl looked prime-time perfect. The piece on Dustin began with his dedication to keeping Gila City’s youth off drugs; it ended with Ruth’s new position on the police force and her dedication to not only ridding the streets of killers but also keeping her husband’s case open.
Finally Eric turned the page and was treated to his own history—that of the Santellis crime family. He didn’t need to read a word. They dealt drugs. Most had the word Killer tattooed on their forearms.
In Eric’s opinion, the press needed to spend more time on the verifiable truth. Rosa was a cop, married to a cop and about to have a little cop. Nowadays, everything she did was by the book. Eric was a Santellis trying to start a new life. It didn’t seem to matter to the press that innocents were intruded upon. It didn’t matter to curious locals, either. Like the minivan of retirees who were slowly driving past his cabin. The couples, families and even the occasional single female who slowed down for a look felt like paparazzi. And every hour it got worse. Eric, and everyone else trying to keep the crime site intact, watched as a little-traveled road on Prospector’s Way turned into a traffic jam. Only Doc seemed able to handle the deluge of people. He knew most of them. He returned greetings, asked one driver about the year of his BMW, claimed not to know anything about the bodies, yet, and advised the drivers to leave the policing to the police and go home.
A few brave souls yelled for Eric to sign their newspaper, which pretty much acted like a road map to the stars. Eric’s home was becoming one of Arizona’s seven wonders, a landmark destination ranked right up there with the Grand Canyon.
Sheriff Mallery growled every time the curious slowed down for a stare. Of course, Mallery had more than a passing interest in the traffic. His family owned the land adjacent to Eric’s and had for as long as the Santellises had owned theirs. No doubt, until now, most of the town was unaware of the pitiful condition of the sheriff’s younger brother’s cabin. Old cars, trash, broken-down campers, you name it, littered the Mallery land. It looked much like the Santellis property—only now Eric intended to change that, clean up his land, make it livable.
After the first hour and with no slowdown of the deluge of cars, Mallery sent a deputy to ascertain the names of those who “belonged” on Prospector’s Way. There were five cabins, two ranches and one permanent gold camp with a population of just over a hundred. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was necessary to identify locals. That same deputy was now busy setting up road barriers. By late afternoon the traffic should return to normal.
Normal?
Nothing was normal for a Santellis.
Or maybe what Eric was witnessing now was normal for his family. In the last hour, he’d heard that Rosa’s lawyer wanted her to have nothing to do with him; he’d heard that Dustin Atkins had been positively identified; and he’d heard that the only good Santellis was a dead Santellis.
He doubted the sheriff cared that he’d been overheard.
SIX
“I’m so sorry about your loss.” It was the same woman who, in a grating voice, had tallied the death toll at Jose’s funeral. It made sense she’d attend Dustin’s funeral, too.
Some cop Ruth was. If a sketch artist were to ask what the speaker looked like, Ruth wouldn’t be able to assist. Her blinding tears made it impossible to do anything but nod.
“Technically,” the woman continued, “Dustin Atkins cannot be considered as the seventh to die in the line of duty but the third. He died well before Jose.”
Died? It still sounded like a foreign word. Ruth had spent two years carefully saying missing. Now, thanks to dental records, Dustin had been positively identified on Saturday, and Ruth officially became a widow. They released his body on Monday. And here it was Thursday, just one week after Jose’s service, and the Gila City police were once again saying goodbye to one of their own.
“Thank you for coming,” Ruth said. She’d said the same thing to at least a hundred people.
“I wouldn’t miss it,” the woman said. “But I just can’t believe the gall of some people.” She looked at the back row of the church where Sam and Rosa sat. Without missing a beat, she continued, “That woman is bad news. How she became a police officer, I’ll never know.”
Ruth almost said Two months at the police academy in Phoenix learning how to fight, shoot and handle dead bodies, that’s how. Same as me. But the woman didn’t need to hear the words, wouldn’t have heard them if Ruth had uttered them. No, the busybody prattled on, fascinated with her own theories, theories that were being bandied about by almost all the people who knew Rosa had been taken in for questioning.
Did Rosa kill Lucille Straus? And, if so, why?
What did the authorities know that they were keeping back even from her? Surely there had to be something more than fingerprints.
Guilt and suspicion wrapped their hands around Ruth’s already broken heart. Rosa was her best friend, so much so that Ruth had planned to throw Rosa a baby shower in just a few months.
Who knew what would happen in the next few weeks? The suspicion and guilt didn’t feel natural. It didn’t feel right. Yet, the events of that morning replayed at the most inopportune times—like at funerals.
Ruth blinked away the tears. She had to regain control of herself. She couldn’t lose it, couldn’t keep reliving the day she’d been forced to accept his death.
Looking around the church,
