Page 34 of The Girl from Devil's Lake
“I suppose that’s it,” Becky agreed. “I never can keep all those letters straight. They’re giving her blood thinners to try to dissolve it, but if they can’t, there’s a chance it might break loose and go to her lungs.”
Steve was aware of the likely outcome from that.
“Are you planning on going to the hospital today?” he asked.
“Yes,” Becky answered. “I’m heading there as soon as we get off the phone.”
“Does she have a phone in her room?”
“Not in the ICU.”
Steve took a breath. “Okay,” he said. “I’m in Arizona right now. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to get home, but I’ll head that way as soon as I check out of my hotel. Tell her I’ll be in touch with the hospital and see if I can call while I’m in transit.”
“Do you need the number of the hospital?”
“No,” he said. “I’ll be able to get it from information.”
He was underway within the hour. After consulting the bloodstained page of his atlas, he decided to head straight east from Flagstaff and turn north at Albuquerque. As he crossed the state line into New Mexico, Steve Roper knew one thing for sure. Arizona was the place where he wanted to be. Not Phoenix for sure and probably not Tucson, either. He’d want to live somewhere cooler, but he would be back. What he didn’t know at the time was that it would take several years before that could happen.
Unlike his outgoing trip, the return drive wasn’tleisurely. He arrived back in Fertile exhausted after two and a half days of forced-march driving. His mother was out of intensive care by then, but she was still in the hospital. While being treated for the DVT, her doctors had discovered a spot on her breast and they were now treating her for breast cancer—starting with a double mastectomy.
Once in the privacy of his own home, Steve went down to his basement, opened the safe, and made two additions to his cigar box—the turquoise necklace, a squash blossom necklace as he later learned, and the bloodied map of New Mexico which he’d tornfrom hisRoad Atlasand folded into a square small enough to fit inside the box.
Fortunately the wound on the back of Steve’s hand didn’t become infected, but the scar tissue it left behind began to look exactly like what it was—a bite mark. Eventually he made up a story about spending a couple of days volunteering at an Arts and Crafts fair in Taos, New Mexico, where one of the artists had accidentally dropped an overheated piece of metal on the back of his hand.
Cynthia Hawkins Roper survived the blood clot but died of breast cancer four years later in the spring of 1976. And who cared for her all that time? Her son, that’s who. Steve wasn’t an empathetic individual and didn’t take naturally to caregiving, but he forced himself to do it—not because he necessarily cared about his mother, but because the appearance of being a good and loving son made for an excellent disguise. Around Fertile his unwavering caregiving made him look downright heroic.
While handling his mother’s affairs, Steve discovered that Gramps had been a canny investor and had left his daughter with plenty of money, which probably wouldn’t have been the case had Freddy the Freeloader managed to lay his hands on it. Thanks to Steve’s timely intervention, that hadn’t happened. In actual fact, Cynthia Roper could have retired years earlier if she’d wanted. Since she hadn’t, everything that was left over—the remains of Gramps’s estate and the proceeds from selling the Country Inn and the house—would come straight to Steve.
That’s when the voices in his head tuned up and started suggesting that maybe he should speed up his mother’s passing, but he told them absolutely not in no uncertain terms. Reading Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie had taught him one thing for sure—killers get caught because they murder people they know or else they target victims where the killers themselves have something to gain financially. Caring for his mother for those four years was tedious as hell, but making sure his mother died of indisputablynatural causes was the price Steve Roper had to pay for him to be able to go on killing people he actually wanted to kill.
At his mother’s funeral, when people told him what a wonderful person he was to have looked after her so lovingly, he nodded and smiled and told them thank you very much. At the cemetery, he saw to it that her grave site was just where she wanted it to be—right next to Fred Chalmers’s. But when he got home that evening, after everything was said and done, he settled down in his easy chair, closed his eyes, and told the voices aloud what they really wanted to hear.
“It’s finally over,” he said, “and good riddance.”
Chapter 17
Bisbee, Arizona
Thursday, November 30, 2023
Joanna arrived at her office the next morning tothe noisy but welcome sound of jackhammers. That meant Dave Ruiz’s crew was cutting through the jail’s concrete floor to create trenches to install plumbing in the redesigned solitary unit.
She dropped her purse on her desk and then peeked into the reception area. “Any trouble in lunch land this morning?” she asked.
Kristin laughed. “So far so good,” she said.
“Okay, then,” Joanna replied.
At her desk she busied herself with writing the report she would need to present to the Board of Supervisors at their Friday morning meeting. No doubt they would require a full update from her on the construction process and the seemingly unnecessary expense of the prisoner transfer, to say nothing of the credit card charge covering the lost-lunch fiasco. As soon as Marliss Shackleford caught wind of that, Joanna knew she’d be only too happy to spread the word near and far.
Joanna was deep into the process when a call came in from Arturo Peña. “Good morning,” she said.
“What are you up to?” he asked.
“My job,” she replied. “And no, it’s not solving crimes. I’m dealing with endless paperwork. Why do you ask?”
“Because I’d like you to come for a visit today, and not in my office—at my house.”
