Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(12)

“Any witnesses?” Joanna asked.

“Other than the wife, probably not,” Tom replied. “A woman who lives up the street heard the shots and called 911, but she didn’t actually see anything. When officers from Huachuca City arrived, they found Madison Hogan kneeling over her husband’s body. She was covered with blood, screaming like a banshee and naked as a jaybird.”

“Naked?” Joanna asked.

“Stark naked,” Tom returned. “She kept trying to run into the house, saying she needed to go get her kids, but Officer Larry Dunn from Huachuca City PD wouldn’t let her. He gave her a blanket and put her in the back of his patrol car. Sometime later a neighbor—the same one who called 911—showed up and brought Ms. Hogan a robe to wear. By the way, the neighbor’s name is Alice Kidder.”

“No, wait,” Joanna interrupted. “Go back. Did you say kids?”

“Yes, the Hogans’ two kids were there. A girl named Kendall, age seven, and a boy named Peter, age five.”

Joanna caught her breath. Kendall Hogan and Denny Dixon were exactly the same age. This was a weekday. If Kendall was in second grade, why wasn’t she in school?

“Did they see what happened?”

“Can’t tell,” Tom said. “Officer Dunn, one of the first responders from Huachuca City, found them locked in the trailer’s back bedroom.”

“Locked inside?” Joanna echoed.

“Yup,” Tom said. “Dunn told me that the property’s previous renter was a known drug dealer. There was a padlock-and-hasp arrangement on the doorframe outside the second bedroom. Maybe that’s where he kept his excess inventory. Dunn said that today the padlock was nowhere to be found, but someone had stuck a table knife through the hasp in order to keep the kids contained.”

“Where are they now?”

“The kids? Officer Dunn took them out through the trailer’s back door and handed them over to the neighbor. With their father’s body still out front. . . .”

“Understood,” Joanna replied. “I’m glad they weren’t subjected to seeing him like that, and keeping the kids separated from their mother at the moment is the right thing to do.”

“Speaking of the mother, I just listened to the 911 tape,” Tom continued. “That part about her being a screaming banshee was on the money. That’s all you can hear—her carrying on something fierce, but it’s possible to make out a few of her words here and there. ‘You killed him! You didn’t have to do that. How could you?’”

“So the husband came out of the house with guns blazing, and the wife, who’s supposedly divorcing the guy, now decides this is all Deputy Ruiz’s fault?”

“Exactly,” Tom muttered grimly. “That’s just the way DV calls go.”

Joanna knew her chief deputy was right about that. All too often in domestic-violence situations, the people involved stop fighting each other long enough to turn on anyone who tries to intervene—law-enforcement officers included. Unfortunately, Joanna herself had recently had an up-close-and-personal experience with a domestic-violence perpetrator.

“So about this Hogan character,” Tom resumed. “He evidently moved into the trailer just a couple of months ago. His driver’s license still lists a Sierra Vista address. I did a quick check with Records at Sierra Vista PD. They report there’ve been several contacts at the Hogan residence over the past year or so.”

“All domestic-violence calls?” Joanna asked.

“You got it.”

“It sounds as though the late Mr. Hogan was your basic wife-beater,” Joanna concluded.

“Not so fast,” Tom replied. “According to reports on each of those incidents, Madison Hogan appeared to be the aggressor while Leon was the one with visible injuries—cuts, bruises, and scratches mostly, and on one occasion a very black eye after she lit into him with the business end of a hairbrush.”

“The wife was the one taken into custody?”

“That’s about the size of it,” Tom agreed, “but guess what else? Each and every time, Leon refused to press charges.”

“No surprises there either,” Joanna muttered.

That was another hard-earned law-enforcement lesson—domestic-violence victims are often reluctant to press charges against their abusers, either out of fear of retaliation or else out of misplaced love. All too often, the bad guy comes to the victim after the incident swearing his or her eternal love and vowing that it will never, ever happen again, and the victim always falls for it. That was just the way things were. As for male victims? They almost never came forward.

“Hang on a minute,” Tom said. “I’ve got another call.” Joanna waited on hold for the better part of five minutes, thinking about how easy it had been to jump to the conclusion that the husband had perpetrated those earlier incidents, including the one with the hairbrush. Unfortunately, today he’d been armed with a handgun.

Finally Tom Hadlock came back on the line. “Okay,” he said, “here’s an update. Deputy Raymond just arrived on the scene. With Garth on the other side of the county, I’ve asked Deputy Creighton to take up a position near Willcox so he’ll be able to cover all of the Sulphur Springs Valley as well as the I-10 corridor.”