Page 64 of The Girl from Devil's Lake
“Two of his four possible escape routes bring him right through the City of Bisbee,” Alvin observed when she finished.
“Not just through Bisbee,” she said. “One way or another, he’s going to have to go around the Traffic Circle. My first choice is to take him into custody at his home on Country Club Drive north of Naco. But if he takes off and comes your way, the Traffic Circle might be a good place to make the arrest. That would be a far less dangerous place to take him into custody than in some populated business or residential area, but we’ll need to block all the entrances and exits.”
“What about Lowell School?” Alvin asked. “That’s directly across the drainage ditch from the Traffic Circle.”
Joanna was well aware of the location of Lowell School. That’s where Dennis was attending sixth grade. As for the drainage ditch in question? It often carried the mineral rich runoff from Lavender Pit just north of Lowell to the mile-long tailings dump that ran alongside Highway 80 on the far side of the Traffic Circle.
Joanna glanced at her watch. The morning had vanished. It was already closing in on noon.
“I suggest you call the superintendent of schools and advise him that Lowell needs an immediate early dismissal today due to expected police activity. Let him know that, if he delays, he might end up having to put the school on lockdown, and that would be a whole lot worse. If you give him a choice, he’ll most likely go for an early dismissal. That’ll cause less backlash than a lockdown.”
“Okay,” Alvin said. “You’re right. Bob Dobbs is bound to opt for an early dismissal, but how soon it can happen will depend on how soon the buses can get there. For argument’s sake, if Roper...” He paused momentarily before continuing, “If the subject ends up coming our way, how much notice will we have?”
“He lives on Country Club Drive, just north of the golf course in Naco,” Joanna answered. “If he leaves there heading northbound, there’s a fifty/fifty chance that he’ll be coming your way. At that point you’ll maybe have six or seven minutes of warning.”
“If he’s coming by way of Highway 92, he’ll have no way of knowing the circle is blocked off until he’s almost inside it,” Alvin replied. “The fire department is right next door. I’ll talk to the chief and see how fast he can deploy fire trucks to function as temporary roadblocks.”
“By the way, make sure you keep every bit of this off the air. As I said, there are people in town who are listening in on everything we say on police scanners.”
“People?” Alvin asked. “Or one person in particular whose initials happen to be MS.”
“Exactly,” Joanna said. “And thank you, Alvin. I really appreciate the help.”
Once that call ended, next up was one to Butch. “FYI,” she said. “There’s a good chance that Lowell school will have an early dismissal today due to possible police activity.”
“Which you’re not going to discuss in any detail.”
“No, I’m not,” Joanna said.
“But you’re going to take him into custody?”
“I sure as hell hope so.”
“Good luck then,” he said, “and be safe.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I will.”
Then taking the first missed call message off the top of the stack, she picked it up and dialed a number in what the message said was Fulton, Missouri.
“Sheriff Ed Cox,” a deep male voice answered.
“And this is Sheriff Joanna Brady from Cochise County, Arizona.”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “The BOLO. I talked to someone about that earlier, Deborah something.”
“Yes,” Joanna said. “That would be Detective Howell. We’ve been really busy around here today, so she didn’t have a chance to tell me what the two of you discussed. I hope you don’t mind going over it again.”
“Callaway County’s a pretty peaceable kind of place,” Sheriff Cox allowed. “Not many murders happen around here, and Lucianne Highsmith’s from 1977 is our only unsolved. I wasn’t even born yet, but here are the high points. Lucianne went missing while riding her bike from her folks’ place to a friend’s farm a couple miles up the road. When she didn’t turn up at the friend’s place or return home, her mother reported her missing. The sheriff’s department initiated a ground search. Both her body and the bike were found four days later in a nearby reservoir a few miles away from where she would have been riding. The details match up with your BOLO—manual strangulation, disposal in a body of water, and something missing.”
“What was missing?”
“When they retrieved the body, she was wearing only one shoe. The sheriff sent in a dive crew, they found both her bike and the missing shoe. The shoelace was MIA.”
“A shoelace,” Joanna uttered aloud.
“Does that mean something to you?” Sheriff Cox asked.
“I’m afraid it does,” Joanna replied. Then she spent the next ten minutes giving Sheriff Cox the details of their current investigations—both Xavier Delgado’s and Amanda Hudson’s.
