Sheriff’s Runaway Witness

Chapter 2

She woke up, struggled to sit up in the cramped confines of the car. Her heart was hammering, her body stiff and aching in the early morning chill. For a moment she was unable to grasp where she was. The light outside the car windows was the cold gray light of dawn, not the glaring, pulsing hellish kaleidoscope of colors, of nighttime and police lights and spotlights. The vista beyond the windows was barren, empty, a landscape of pastels dotted with dark splotches and freckles of lava rock, not a canyon of steel and concrete and oily black pavement glistening with rain and blood.

The only thing left from her nightmare was the fear. The sense of danger and doom.

The baby stirred beneath her ribs. And she remembered.

Izzy. Izzy came in her habit. This is Izzy’s car. I’m driving Izzy’s car, and I’m free of the Delacortes at last. Free!

Yes, she was free, but alone out in the middle of nowhere. She still had to get to someone who could help her, someone she could trust. She had to find a safe place, which meant a place where Carlos would never find her. If there is such a place.

She ran her hand under her belly, and the letter she’d taped there crackled faintly. Sam Malone’s letter. Would the grandfather she’d never known, the grandfather who had never acknowledged her or lifted a finger or spent a dime to help her or her grandmother, would such a man be able to help her now? Was he even alive? If he was, as distasteful as it was to her to have to ask for help, it seemed her only choice. She would go to the place, this place called June Canyon Ranch, and after that…well, she would have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, the pressure on her bladder was intense, and she was a long way from any public restroom. She climbed stiffly out of the car and relieved herself, as awkward and embarrassing as that process was, then stretched her legs by walking gingerly around the car several times. Her back ached terribly, but she supposed that was to be expected after spending a night in the backseat of a Toyota, nine months pregnant.

After a breakfast of bottled water and a package of bite-sized chocolate chip cookies that did little to calm her hunger pangs, Rachel consulted her map once more, then eased herself behind the wheel. She started up the car, managed to get it turned around without getting stuck in the soft sand and headed back to the interstate. Backtracking toward Barstow, she found the exit she wanted, the one for the numbered state route that ran north toward Death Valley. Exhilaration filled her as she made the turn, and saw the ribbon of asphalt stretching out into the lava-rock-studded hills. As the sun rose she saw that the hills weren’t barren at all, but tinged a lovely shade of green and splashed here and there with the vibrant yellows and purples and oranges of desert spring wildflowers.

Oh, but it felt good, so good to be free.

She drove fast-maybe too fast-and met a few cars at first, probably coming from one of the tiny dots she’d seen on the map, settlements too small to be called towns. At this hour they’d be heading into Barstow to school or work, she guessed. Then the sun rose and there were fewer cars. The miles sped by and the mountains seemed no closer. She hadn’t expected such distances between signs of civilization.

Though the desert seemed endless, it wasn’t empty and parched as she’d expected. The landscape alternated between plains where wildflowers made a solid yellow carpet between clumps of sagebrush and those greenish rock-strew hills. The road ran straight across the plains and wound through some hills, then seemed to follow a dry wash, or ravine. There were no other cars now. Rachel was alone, just her and the empty ribbon of highway stretching out to where the pale blue sky met the pastel-colored earth.

She hadn’t expected it to be so beautiful. There-was that a patch of poppies blooming over on the hillside?

She glanced back at the road ahead-which suddenly wasn’t empty anymore. Incredibly, there was a dog-or, good Lord, could it be a coyote?-smack in the middle of the road. Trotting down the road as if he had the right-of-way-which, Rachel supposed, he did, really.

She had already jerked the wheel to the right, reflexively. Now, realizing she was about to drive into the sand and sagebrush, she overcorrected to the left. The next thing she knew, the little Toyota was careening wildly through the brush and cactus, and she was hanging on to the steering wheel, frozen in fear.

The brake! Step on the brake!

She did, but too late. The Toyota had enough momentum to continue up an embankment before toppling slowly down…down…to rest with a crunch, nose-first in the soft sand at the bottom of the dry wash.

For a few moments Rachel sat absolutely still. Stunned. Then the first coherent thought came: My baby!

Terrified, she held her breath and took stock. Okay. Nothing hurts. Besides my back, anyway.

Nothing seemed amiss. In fact, thanks to that last-minute stomp on the brake pedal, she’d evidently landed in the wash with so little impact the air bag hadn’t even deployed. And her seat belt had kept her belly from hitting the steering wheel. Still, she was pressed up against it. Which couldn’t be good.

She opened the door-which required little effort, thanks to the angle of the car-released the seat belt and half slid, half fell onto the steeply sloping bank of the ravine. She pulled up her feet and sat there braced and hugging herself, waiting until she felt her legs were steady enough to hold her.

Stupid. How could I have been so careless? Stupid, stupid!

What now?

She’d never be able to get the car out of the ravine without a tow truck. But of course she had no cell phone, no way to call for help. Hopefully, a car would come along, but then…what if… In her vulnerable state, the paranoia of the night before returned.

Oh, God, what if Carlos is out looking for me? What if he’s somehow managed to track me here?

No, she didn’t dare flag down a passing stranger. She had to get to some sort of settlement-one of those tiny dots on the map. Surely there would be someone there with a telephone. She could walk-it couldn’t be that far. She’d been driving for what seemed like forever. She had to have already covered most of the distance to the next one.

Holding on to the open door, she pulled herself to her feet. Though it was a tight squeeze, she managed to stretch across the seat and retrieve the map and what remained of her water and snacks from where they’d slid onto the floor during her wild ride and final descent into the ravine.

So far, so good. But now she became aware of the sun beating down on her unprotected head, and any idiot knew about the dangers of walking in the desert without proper protection.

Then she remembered the habit. Izzy’s habit, that she’d tossed so casually into the trunk after she’d made her escape from the Delacorte estate. It would be rather like the robes desert Arabs wore, wouldn’t it? Perfect.

She pulled the trunk release-gratified to discover it still worked-then managed make her way back up the dirt bank, pulling herself along the side of the car, until she could reach the trunk. She lifted the trunk lid and gathered up the pile of fabric that was Izzy’s habit, then had to bend over with it clutched to her chest as pain unlike anything she’d ever known before gripped her back and pelvis like a giant vise.

For a moment she bore it in stoic silence, before she remembered there was no one to hear her, so what did it matter. She let out a primal roar that surprised her almost as much as the fact that it actually seemed to help.

There. It’s going away now. Yes. Thank God.

But then, as the pain diminished panic rushed in to take its place.

Oh, my God. That was a contraction. A real one. Not Braxton Hicks. Oh, my God. I’m in labor.

First order of business: Rachel, do not panic!

She leaned against the back of the car and took deep breaths to calm herself. She’d had enough medical training to know that, for the moment, at least, she was in no real danger. This was her first baby. Labor could, and probably would, go on for hours and hours. Plenty of time. Her original plan-to walk to the nearest site of human habitation-would still appear to be the best option. And if she kept reasonably close to the road, she could still flag down someone if it came to that.

If worse came to worst. If she absolutely had to take the chance.

But she wasn’t there yet. So far, just that one contraction, and as long as the contractions stayed far apart she’d be okay. No need to panic. She had water, and protection from the sun. She’d be fine.

Determinedly putting all the terrible thoughts and possibilities out of her mind, Rachel stood on the edge of the wash, gazing at the endless panorama of desert and mountains stretching away to cloudless blue skies. My God, she thought, I truly am alone. Utterly and completely alone!

As if in contradiction of the thought, a little breeze came skirling along through the brush and picked up the wings of her long black hair, tugging it gently at first, then with more urgency. Hurry up! it seemed to say. Come along, you’re wasting time!

Oddly enough, the knowledge that she was indeed on her own, and completely dependent on her own devices, made her feel stronger. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, opened them again and began to methodically sort out the folds of the habit.

A few minutes later, Rachel set out across the desert, with Izzy’s rosary beads clutched in one hand and her last bottle of water in the other.

Sheriff’s Deputy J. J. Fox did not take lightly the 911 dispatcher’s report of someone walking alone in the desert-nun or otherwise. Fact was, the desert killed people. All the time. Maybe not as often as before cell phones and GPS, but it still happened. Maybe less likely now when the weather was relatively benign as compared to the coming heat of summer, which would be just plain suicidal.

“Some people are too damn stupid to live,” he said to his passenger, who was sitting upright on her haunches in the middle of the backseat of the sheriff’s department patrol vehicle, drooling on J.J.’s right shoulder. “Too bad we can’t just let nature take its course…Darwin’s Law, you know? Weed out some of these idiots.” Getting only panting sounds in reply, and considerably more dog drool, he gave a gusty sigh. “Yeah…s’pose not. But just between you and me, Moonshine…”

He hoped it was a false alarm, a mirage or…maybe wind-blown clothing hung up on a cactus. But he had a feeling it wouldn’t be; the notion of a woman-a nun!-walking alone in the desert was just nutty enough to be true.

“Really,” he said to the drooler, “you couldn’t make this stuff up.”

As he approached the mile marker the dispatcher had given as the approximate location of the nun sightings, he slowed down and turned on his lights. Crawling along the shoulder at walking speed, he scanned the terrain on both sides of the highway. Nothing he could see, except for the usual scrubby bushes-he was no botanist, so as far as he was concerned they all came under the heading “sagebrush”-now afloat in a sea of golden flowers, with here and there a clump of cholla cacti or Joshua trees to break the monotony. If there had been anybody walking out there, he couldn’t see her now, and that wasn’t good news.

Swearing to himself, he pulled to a stop on the sandy shoulder. In the backseat, the hound dog of undetermined pedigree licked her chops lustily and wriggled in anticipation while J.J. unhooked his seat belt. He spoke briefly to his shoulder mic, then opened the door of the vehicle and stepped out onto hot white sand. “Okay, Moonshine, how about you and me go and do what they pay us for?”

Rachel dreamed of Nicholas again. They were together at the beach, a rare hot day in Malibu. She was hot, unpleasantly so. She wanted to get up and run down to the waves to cool off, but for some reason she felt heavy…so heavy she couldn’t get up. Then she saw that Nicky was laughing, laughing because he’d buried her up to her neck in the sand. He thought it was all in fun, but she began to be frightened and she begged him to dig her out of the sand and let her up. But he just kept adding more sand, and it was heavy, and the pressure was weighing her down, and then a wave came and splashed her in the face and she woke up, gasping.

Except she thought she must still be dreaming, maybe that twilight dreaming where you are almost awake but not quite enough to make the dreaming stop. Because now, instead of a mountain of sand weighing her down, there was something big and heavy and warm-and alive!-sitting on her chest. And instead of cold saltwater bathing her face, it was something slobbery and raspy and odd-smelling. And whatever it was, it was making horrifying snuffling, whimpering sounds.

Terrified, she tried to lift her arms to fend off whatever it was, but found she couldn’t move because it was sitting on her arms, too.

“Moonshine! That’s enough-come ’ere, girl. What are you trying to do, drown her or smother her?”

Moonshine?

But the slobbery, snuffly, smelly something stopped bathing her face, and the weight lifted abruptly from her chest.

Rachel drew breath in a gasp and opened her eyes. She looked up…and up at a long, tall silhouette against a blue-white sky-but for only an instant, because almost at once the silhouette folded up and came down on one knee beside her in the sandy shade of a clump of Joshua trees. Now she wondered if she could still be dreaming, because she found herself gazing at a face that seemed to have come straight out of a Western movie. Steely blue-green eyes stared down at her from the shadows cast by the broad brim of a cowboy hat, eyes that were squinting in apparent concern, causing a fan of lines to radiate from their corners. Sandy blond hair straggled from beneath the hat’s brim to feather over a khaki shirt collar, and a thick growth of reddish-brown whiskers failed to hide a mouth that stretched in a thin, unsmiling line.

Once again, she struggled to sit up, but now it was a hand planted firmly on her shoulder that kept her where she was.

“Take it easy, miss…uh, Sister. We’re gonna get you some help, okay?” The voice spoke with unmistakable authority. It was deep and scratchy, and matched the weathered and rough-hewn face perfectly. There were traces of an accent, too. Southern, she thought.

The face came closer, bending over her, and fingers touched her face with unexpected gentleness. “Can you tell me who did this to you?” And the voice was at the same time softer and more dangerous. “Are you hurt, uh, anywhere else?”

Two things occurred to Rachel then. One, that she was wearing a nun’s habit, which explained her Good Samaritan’s reticence-even embarrassment-regarding her person. And two, he’d obviously noticed the bruises on her face.

And following close on the heels of those two realizations came a third: She was probably due for another contraction. Any second.

How was she going to explain that?

She pushed at the hand holding her down and managed to prop herself on one elbow. “I’m not hurt,” she said, trying not to hold her breath or clench her teeth. Trying to breathe. Normally. Trying not to give away the fact that she hurt everywhere. “I was just-I got a little tired, and thirsty and I thought I’d rest a few minutes in the shade. I guess I must have dozed off. I’m okay-really.”

The truth was, she’d gotten scared when she’d noticed several cars slowing down as they passed on the highway. That was when she’d hidden behind the grove of spiky Joshua trees. And there’d been a couple of contractions-bad ones-and after that, she’d curled up on her side to rest…just for a minute. She couldn’t have been asleep for very long.

The man put his hand under her elbow and helped her to sit up, while at the same time he unhooked a canteen from his belt. He had a lot of other things attached to his belt, she observed as he unscrewed the lid to the canteen and offered it to her. One of which was a gun. And there was a metal star pinned to his shirt. Which she supposed explained a lot of things. And did not reassure her.

Now that he seemed satisfied her circumstances weren’t dire, his eyes regarded her more with suspicion than compassion. They narrowed again as he watched her drink. “You want to tell me what you’re doing out here in the middle of the desert? Alone?” His voice was a typical lawman’s voice: hard and without much expression. “And how you came to have those bruises on your face?”

“Bruises?” The innocent and slightly puzzled frown came easily to her; distrust of law enforcement was automatic now. Awareness of that fact drifted like cloud shadows through her consciousness, along with a sense of sadness and guilt. I’m sorry, Grandmother. I know you didn’t raise me to be like this.

But the shadows weren’t dark enough to stop reflexive responses of caution and cover. “Oh,” she said, feigning sudden enlightenment as she wiped water from her lips with the back of her hand. She touched one still-tender cheekbone. “I guess that must have happened when I…”

“When you…” her Good Samaritan prompted when she paused.

Rachel closed her eyes and exhaled. “I feel so stupid. You see, I swerved to miss a-I guess it must have been a coyote-well, I’d never seen one, and I was distracted, and the next thing I knew, I was careening across the desert, and, um, I wound up in a ditch. Thank God for air bags!” She crossed herself and cast her gaze prayerfully skyward-a rather nice touch, she thought, considering what she was wearing.

I wonder if he bought it.

In his long and not always illustrious career as a homicide detective with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, J. J. Fox had been lied to many times. Although never before, he was fairly certain, by a nun. He knew what bruises left by human fists looked like. Plus, now that he’d had a chance to examine these more closely, he was pretty sure they were at least a couple of days old.

But who in the hell would beat up a nun?

“When did this happen? This…accident?”

A frown etched delicate pleats between her eyes. Dark eyes, almost black, so dark he could see himself reflected in them. Eyes fringed with thick black lashes, and with a slightly Asian cast, he noted. Probably mixed blood, and if he’d had to guess, given her size, he’d have said maybe Cambodian or Vietnamese.

“This morning…I guess it must be afternoon now, right? I’ve kind of lost track of time…”

J.J. fingered the radio mic on his shoulder. “We’ll get someone out here to take care of your car, ma’am-uh, Sister. Can you tell me whereabouts this happened?”

Again the frown. And this time she nibbled delicately on her lower lip. A very soft and full lower lip, he noted, and immediately felt ashamed of himself. The woman was a nun, for God’s sake. No disrespect intended.

“Oh-I don’t know! I think it was…back that way-no, wait…I’m so confused. I’ve been wandering around…maybe I’ve been going in circles, do you think so?” Her gaze lifted to his with helpless appeal.

Which might have had more effect on him if he hadn’t seen something else in her eyes, something he’d seen all too often, in his line of work, in the eyes of suspects and witnesses alike: a mixture of calculation and fear. This woman really did not trust him. And plainly, she did not want him to find her car. He wondered why.

It didn’t bother him too much that she wouldn’t give him the location of her vehicle; there had to be evidence of where she’d left the road, which should make it easy enough to locate. But no doubt about it, something about this woman and her situation was off-way off. Here was a nun, fairly young-judging from her flawless and unlined skin-of Eurasian ancestry and tiny in stature, out in the middle of the desert, miles from any outposts of civilization, on foot and sporting bruises that had almost certainly come from a beating. Small wonder his cop-radar was pinging like crazy.

He stood up and pivoted away from the woman while he got Katie on his radio and instructed her to send a tow truck out south on Death Valley Road. “Tell Bucky he’ll have to hunt for the tire tracks-don’t have the exact location, but I’m guessing it’s gonna be south of my location a couple miles, at least.”

“Got it,” Katie said. And after a pause: “So…is she?”

“Is she what?” Although he knew.

“A nun?”

“Remains to be seen,” J.J. said, and signed off.

When he turned back to the woman, she was on her hands and knees trying to get up and not being graceful about it. Evidently the lady had gotten herself tangled up in her habit, which seemed to him a little strange. He’d have thought someone used to wearing one of those things would have figured out how to manage it by now. Mentally rolling his eyes, he bent down and got a hand under her elbow and hoisted her to her feet.

No sooner had he done that, than she gave out with a groan, uttered a very un-nunlike word and folded right back up again, while hanging on to his arm with the desperation grip of someone in immediate danger of drowning.

Damn woman might have mentioned she was hurt! Swearing both aloud and mentally, J.J. scooped her up in his arms and hollered for Moonshine, who was panting in the Joshua tree’s shade a little way off. He set out with long strides across the sand, and about halfway to his car it occurred to him that, for a little bitty thing, this woman was a whole lot heavier than she looked. Then he looked down at what he was carrying.

What the hell?

What he saw gave him one of the biggest shocks of his life, which was probably why he burst out with the question before he thought how ridiculous it was going to sound. “Sister, are you pregnant?”

She didn’t even open her eyes. Just went on sort of panting and groaning at the same time, and she had one hand on the huge belly now plainly visible beneath the draping of the habit.

Just holding her against him, he could feel how stiff and seized up she was.

Great. Just great. Not only pregnant, but in labor.

He kept walking, making for his vehicle, until he felt the woman in his arms relax and start breathing somewhat normally again. Then, without slowing his steps, he gritted his teeth and said, “Please tell me you’re not really a nun.”

She opened one eye and glared up at him. “Is that relevant?”

Relevant? He snorted and walked while he considered that. Probably it wasn’t, in her present circumstances. He tried to think whether it bothered him, the thought of a nun being pregnant, and decided against all reason that it did. He couldn’t have said why; he wasn’t even Catholic, having been raised more or less Baptist, growing up, like most everybody else he’d known back then. But some things were just, well…sacred.

“How far apart are your contractions?” He thought he said it pretty calmly, considering.

“I don’t know, I don’t have a watch. But I’ve been counting. I think…about two or three minutes.”

J.J. wasn’t a doctor, and it had been a long time since those first aid and emergency childbirth classes way back in his training days, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t good news. This just keeps getting better and better, J.J. thought. He didn’t say anything, though, because they’d arrived back at his patrol vehicle, where Moonshine was waiting impatiently for him to open the door, doing a little dance as she tried to keep her feet off the hot sand.

“You’re riding shotgun,” he said to the dog, and then, without much sympathy, to his burden, “You gonna be okay if I set you down?”

“I’m fine,” she said. But he noticed she was looking paler than she ought to, considering the heat and the sheen of sweat he could see on her forehead and the bridge of her nose.

“Okay, then, easy does it…” And he wondered why he couldn’t seem to make his voice sound nicer. At least gentler. Sure, he didn’t like being lied to, and he wasn’t used to being distrusted, at least not by supposedly innocent law-abiding citizens. But this probably wasn’t any of her fault; he doubted any woman in her condition would be out here in the middle of the desert by choice. And there were those bruises.

Again with the glare-both eyes, this time. “I’m not made of glass. Just put me down.”

So he did. And the minute her feet touched the ground she sort of gasped and clutched at her belly, then whispered, “Oh, God.” It wasn’t a prayer.

Moonshine whimpered and moved off a little ways, looking perturbed.

J.J.’s stomach lurched. “What?”

Half doubled over, not looking at him, she said tensely, “I think my water just broke.”