Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(70)

“Maybe there’s a way to have it both ways,” Joanna suggested. “Leon’s folks are here for the funeral. They drove down from Wyoming. I have no idea if they’d be interested in taking Coon home with them or not, but if they did, at least the kids would know the dog is still alive and maybe they could even see him every once in a while if they had a chance to go visit.”

A long silence followed. “All right,” Jeannine agreed, relenting at last. “That might work. The guy’s name is Rusty Miller—Russell Miller really, but everybody calls him Rusty. Do you want me to check to see if the victim’s parents are willing to take the dog?”

It turned out that Russell Miller, along with his wife, Kathy, were names Joanna remembered from her Christmas-card mailing list. Although she didn’t know the Millers personally, they had evidently donated to her campaign. So maybe . . .

“No,” Joanna said, “I’ll look into it and let you know.”

And that’s what Joanna was sitting there thinking about when a call came in from Jenny.

“I’m so glad to hear your voice,” Joanna said. “How are things?”

“Beth’s sleeping now finally,” Jenny said. “We talked until the wee hours, so I probably should be sleeping now, too, but I’m on my way to the food court to pick up something for breakfast. I know Beth won’t want to go there herself. She doesn’t want to show her face, because she’s sure everyone she meets will know all about her.”

“Even though they probably won’t,” Joanna put in.

“You know that and I know that,” Jenny said. “Beth? Not so much. She thinks her whole life is ruined. I told her that the only way to make something good come out of this is for her and for us to do everything in our power to bring down the guy who invented Ronald Cameron. Beth seems to think she’s the only person this has ever happened to, but that’s not true. I’ve just spent an hour on the Internet coming up with at least a dozen similar cases. I doubt this particular jerk—her so-called Ron—is necessarily involved in any of those other cases, but they’re all surprisingly similar. Perpetrators like this usually have multiple victims, and one of the things that keeps the bad guys from being brought to justice is that none of their victims want to come forward and blow the whistle.”

“That’s where the FBI task force comes in,” Joanna suggested quietly.

“Exactly,” Jenny agreed, “and that’s what I tried to tell Beth, but I’m not sure she’s hearing me. She’s so unbelievably broken, Mom, and I don’t know how to help her.”

Joanna heard the pain and doubt in her daughter’s troubled voice. “You’re listening to her for starters and making sure she eats,” Joanna said. “Both of those things count. What about her folks? Has she talked to them about any of this?”

“No,” Jenny said. “I suggested that, but Beth’s sure that if she tells them about what’s happened, they’ll say it was all her fault. In terms of having people in her corner, it looks like I’m it.”

Shortly after Andy died, Jenny had found an injured rock dove out near the stock tank. Its broken wing was beyond repair, but Jenny had nursed it along for months, providing shelter for it as well as food and water. Eventually the poor creature had disappeared. It seemed likely that it had finally fallen victim to a predator of some kind—probably a coyote. And here she was doing it again, lifting up another broken bird, a human one this time around.

“Just keep doing what you’re doing, Jen,” Joanna advised. “You’re being her friend, and right now that’s what Beth Rankin needs more than anything else.”

Once the phone call ended, Joanna sat for a while longer before arriving at an obvious conclusion and ending up laughing at herself in the process. When it comes to fixing broken birds, like mother like daughter.

Picking up her phone again, she checked her incoming-call list and dialed a number. “Mr. Hogan?” she asked when Lyndell answered.

“Yes.”

“Sheriff Brady here,” she told him. “If I stopped by the hotel, would you be available to visit for a few minutes?”

“Sure,” Lyn said. “Our room isn’t exactly spacious, so can we talk in the lobby?”

“The lobby would be fine,” Joanna said. “See you in a few.”

Ending the call, she left her desk and poked her head out the door. “I’m going uptown for a few minutes,” she told Kristin.

“Any idea when you’ll be back?”

“Nope,” Joanna said. “I’m off on a mission of mercy. No telling when I’ll be done.”

Joanna parked at the bottom of Brewery Gulch and walked up the hill to the hotel entrance. The lobby was an old-fashioned, homey kind of place, with worn leather chairs scattered here and there on an aged hardwood floor. She found Lyndell Hogan seated on a couch tucked in behind the staircase.

“What’s up?” he asked when she sat down next to him. “On the phone it sounded like something serious.”

“It might actually be a bit of good news,” she said.

“What’s that?”

There was no point in beating around the bush. “For starters,” she said, “it turns out Coon is alive.”