Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(89)
“Your mother’s mother?” Butch asked from his end of the table.
Wiping her tears on her napkin, Beth nodded.
“Why don’t you tell us about your grandmother,” he urged gently. “Grandma Lockhart sounds like a very interesting person.”
Chapter 45
It was much later. The dishes were done, and a weary Butch and Joanna were finally getting ready for bed.
“All I can say is, thank God for grandparents,” Joanna told her husband as she stripped off her uniform. “When Deb and Garth took Madison Hogan in for questioning, her mother, Jackie Puckett, came riding to the rescue. If she hadn’t been there to take charge of the kids, those poor little ones would have ended up spending tonight in foster care. And you should have seen them. As soon as Jackie showed up, Peter’s face lit up like a Christmas tree. He was hoping she’d take them to dinner, and I’m sure she did.”
“What about Madison?” Butch asked.
Joanna shook her head. “A pretty pathetic case, if you ask me. She was still in her pj’s and drunk as a skunk in the middle of the afternoon when we got there. Had to be helped in and out of the patrol car. In the meantime here’s poor seven-year-old Kendall stuck with looking after her little brother. If those kids had breakfast and lunch today, it was because she made it happen. Madison sure as hell didn’t do it.”
“Sounds like Kendall is more of a mother than Madison is,” Butch muttered under his breath. “If you ask me, some people should never have kids to begin with.”
“Funny,” Joanna said, “that’s the same thing Jackie Puckett said to me earlier today—about her own daughter. She told me outright that with Leon Hogan dead, she’s worried about the long-term welfare of the two kids, and so am I.”
“Where are they tonight?”
“When I left, Jackie was getting them packed up to go stay overnight with her at the Windemere Hotel. She said she’d leave Madison a note letting her know they’re with her and that she’ll get them to the funeral on time tomorrow.”
“So Madison is back home tonight?”
Joanna nodded. “Deb sent me a text saying that they had taken her back to Sierra Vista and cut her loose.”
“The detectives let her go just like that?”
“Under the circumstances there’s nothing else they could have done. We have no solid evidence that would allow us to charge Madison with anything. What we do have, however, is three hours’ worth of video with her answering questions. The next step is to bring the boyfriend in to see if their stories match up.”
“And if they don’t, you try turning one against the other?” Butch asked.
Nodding, Joanna crawled into bed. “That’s the way the game is played,” she answered. “Divide and conquer.”
That night there was no tossing and turning for Joanna Brady. She was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, because she was too damned tired to do anything else. She was still sound asleep and dreaming about riding a merry-go-round when the phone awakened her at 6:00 A.M.
“What does a guy have to do to get some sleep around here?” Butch grumbled as Joanna reached for her phone.
When Joanna looked at the window for caller ID, Robin Watkins’s face was the one showing. “Hey, Robin,” Joanna said. “What’s up?”
“An arrest warrant is being issued on a guy named Gerard Wayne Paine, aka Ronald Cameron. I have permission to offer you an engraved invitation to be on hand for the official takedown.”
“A takedown?” Joanna echoed, sitting up in bed and switching the phone to speaker. “Does that mean you’ve found him?”
“It certainly does. He’s in a fifty-five-plus community on Tucson’s far west side near Starr Pass. Our bad boy is a seventy-three-year-old suspected-but-not-convicted pedophile living in supposedly respectable retirement on West Placita del Correcaminos. Correcaminos means ‘roadrunner,’ by the way. I looked it up. According to our tech guys, he’s a regular night owl who generally does most of his work in the deep, dark hours of the night and then sleeps during the days. That’s why we’ve scheduled the raid for nine A.M.”
“This morning?” Joanna asked.
“Affirmative,” Robin said. “It’ll be morning for us, but for him it’ll seem like the middle of the night, and he should be sound asleep.”
“If the raid is at nine,” Joanna said, scrambling out of bed, “what time do we rendezvous and where?”
“At Tucson PD headquarters at eight fifteen.”
“All right,” Joanna said, “but it’s going to take me at least two hours to get there.”
“Then you’d better hit the road pronto,” Robin advised.
With a sigh and a glower over his shoulder, Butch headed for the kitchen and the coffeepot while Joanna dragged clothing into the bathroom to dress.
“I can’t believe you caught him this fast,” Joanna said. Her phone sat on the bathroom counter on speaker as she stripped off her nightgown and struggled to fasten her bra. Showering was out of the question.
“We had a whole lot of luck on our side,” Robin replied. “The fact that we had access to Aaron Morgan’s phone is what made it possible to locate Paine as quickly as we did. And we’re wasting no time now, because we want him in custody before he has a chance to break down all his computer equipment and erase whatever’s stored there. According to the utility people, he’s been using enough electricity to run a grow house. He might’ve dodged prosecution back home in Oklahoma, but we’re dealing with federal charges here, and believe me, this guy is going down.”