Partner In Crime

Fifteen

DRIVING UP TO THE HOUSE at High Lonesome Ranch, Joanna was vividly aware that with Sadie gone, neither of the dogs came bounding down the road to greet her. When she pulled into the yard, she noticed a light still burning in the window of Jenny’s corner bedroom.

Butch was in bed reading when she went in to undress. “Did Jenny ever come out of her room?” Joanna asked, kissing him hello.

“Once,” he said. “To feed Tigger and let him out. Other than that, I haven’t seen her.”

“Did she eat dinner?”

“Nope.”

“Her light’s still on,” Joanna said. “Maybe I should go talk to her.”

“Good idea,” Butch said. “You can try, anyway.”

Hoping Jenny might be asleep, Joanna opened the door without knocking. Inside the room, Jenny lay on the bottom bunk, one arm wrapped tightly around Tigger, who was curled up next to her. Tigger thumped his tail when Joanna first entered the room, but he didn’t try to slink off the bed, where, under normal circumstances, he wasn’t allowed.

“You awake?” Joanna asked, sinking into the creaking rocker next to the bed.

“I fell asleep this afternoon,” Jenny said. “Now I can’t sleep. I’m lying here, thinking.”

“About Sadie?”

Jenny nodded. “She was just always here, Mom. I never thought she’d go away. She never seemed sick. She never acted sick.”

“That’s the good thing about dogs,” Joanna said. “They don’t complain. The bad thing is, they can’t tell us what’s wrong with them, either. And they don’t live forever, Jen. What’s important is what you said this afternoon. We loved Sadie and took care of her while she was here with us. Now we have to let her go. And you were wonderful with her, sweetie. No one could have done more.”

“Really?” Jenny asked.

“Really.”

There was a long pause. When Jenny said nothing, Joanna finally asked, “Are you hungry? Would you like me to fix you something?”

Jenny shook her head. “No, thanks,” she said.

For a time after that the only sound in the room was the creaking of Butch’s grandmother’s rocking chair. Jenny broke the long silence.

“I think Tigger knows what happened – that Sadie’s gone and she isn’t coming back. Somebody told me that dogs don’t have feelings like we do – that they don’t grieve or feel sorry for themselves or anything. Do you think that’s true?”

Joanna studied Tigger, who had yet to move anything other than his tail and his dark, soulful eyes. The usually lively dog was mysteriously still, as quiet as Joanna had ever seen him. If he wasn’t grieving, he was doing a good imitation.

“I’m sure he does know something’s wrong,” Joanna said. “Maybe he’s simply responding to your unhappiness, but I believe he understands.”

“I think so, too,” Jenny said. “He doesn’t usually like to cuddle.”

Neither do you, Joanna thought.

That was followed by yet another silence. At last Joanna sighed and checked her watch. It was after midnight. “All right, then,” she said. “If you’re not hungry, I guess I’ll go to bed.”

She got as far as the door before Jenny stopped her. “Mom?”

“What?”

“I think I know what I want to be when I grow up.”

Joanna’s heart lurched, grateful for this small connection with her grieving daughter. “What?” she asked, turning back.

“A veterinarian,” Jenny replied. “Just like Dr. Ross. She couldn’t fix Sadie – she couldn’t make her better – but she was really nice to Sadie and to me, too. It was like, well, she really cared. Know what I mean?”

“Yes.” Joanna returned to the bed and perched on the edge of it, close enough that she could rub Tigger’s ears. “I know exactly what you mean, Jen,” she said. “The way you love animals, I’m sure you’ll be a terrific vet.”

“Is it hard?” Jenny asked.

“Every job has hard things and good things about it,” Joanna said. “I’d hate to have to put a sick animal down and then try to comfort the owner.”

“How long do you have to go to school?”

“To be a vet? A long time. First you have to graduate from college, then it’s just like going to medical school. To get in, you have to earn top grades in math and science, chemistry especially.”

“Do you think I can do it?”

“You’re a very smart girl, sweetie. If you set your mind to it, you can do anything you want.”

AT A QUARTER TO TEN the next morning, as Butch, Jenny, and Joanna were ready to walk out the door for church, the telephone rang. “Here we go again,” Butch grumbled, handing Joanna the receiver. “It’s Lupe Alvarez,” he said. “According to her, it’s urgent.”

“What is it?” Joanna asked.

“There’s a lady here in the lobby,” Lupe replied. “Her name is Serenity Granger. She’s Deidre Canfield’s daughter. The ME’s office had the Cheyenne Police Department contact her last night. She wants to talk to you right away.”

“All right,” Joanna agreed. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.” When she turned to Butch, he was shaking his head. “Sorry,” she told him. “You and Jenny go on without me. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

“I won’t hold my breath,” he said.

While Butch and Jenny drove away in the Subaru, Joanna opted for her Civvie. Ten minutes later she entered her office through the back door. Once at her desk, she called out to the lobby. “Okay, Lupe,” she said. “I’m here. You can bring Ms. Granger back now.”

Knowing Dee Canfield, Joanna was surprised by her first glimpse of Serenity Granger. She was the exact antithesis of her mother’s tie-dyed, let-it-all-hang-out splendor. Serenity, perhaps a few years older than Joanna, was tall and pencil-thin. She wore a business suit – the kind of smart, above-the-knee tailored model favored by the current crop of television heroines. The charcoal pin-striped outfit was complemented by matching two-inch gray sling-back pumps with an elegant Italian pedigree.

Joanna realized that Serenity Granger must have traveled most of the night in order to make it from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to Bisbee, Arizona, by ten o’clock in the morning. The woman should have looked wrinkled and travel-worn, but she didn’t. The suit showed no trace of unwanted creases. The mass of bleached-blond curls that framed a somber face was in perfect order. Only her makeup, which had no doubt started out as perfection itself, was beginning to show a few ill effects. Her gray eye shadow was slightly smudged, and a speck of unruly mascara had dribbled down one cheek.

“I’m Sheriff Brady,” Joanna said at once, standing up and offering her hand. “I’m so sorry about the loss of your mother. Please, have a seat.”

“Thank you,” Serenity returned.

Removing a small long-strapped purse from her shoulder, she eased herself into one of the captain’s chairs and folded her well-manicured hands in her lap. “I know this is Sunday,” Serenity began. “I’m sorry to interrupt your day off, but this is too important to let go until Monday.”

“What’s too important?” Joanna asked.

Serenity chewed her lower lip. “Please understand,” she said. “This is all very difficult.”

“I’m sure it is. Take your time, Ms. Granger. Can I offer you something to drink – coffee, water?”

“Water would be nice.”

Without Kristin in the outside office, Joanna had no one to fetch it. “Hang on,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

When she returned a few minutes later, Serenity Granger sat in the same position. Now, though, under her still-folded hands Joanna spied a single piece of paper that hadn’t been there before.

“I suppose I don’t have to tell you my mother and I weren’t close,” Serenity began again with a regretful half-smile. “We didn’t have much in common.”

“There’s a lot of that going around these days,” Joanna offered encouragingly. After all, when it came to mother-daughter relationships, she and Eleanor Lathrop weren’t exactly shining examples.

“We were at loggerheads as long as I can remember,” Serenity continued. “Whatever came up, we fought about it. My mother tuned in during the sixties, dropped out, and stayed that way. I couldn’t wait to join the establishment. My mother never completed high school. I did four years of college and finished law school with honors in a year and a half. Mother never voted in her life. According to her, the Democrats are too conservative. Naturally, I’m a card-carrying Republican.” She shrugged. “What else could I do?”

Joanna nodded.

“Anyway, for years we weren’t in touch at all. In fact, for a time I didn’t know if she was dead or alive. Then, about a year ago and out of the clear blue sky, Mother sent me an e-mail. She had come into a bit of money, from my grandfather, I guess. She said she was moving to Bisbee and getting ready to open an art gallery.

“I wasn’t necessarily overjoyed to hear from her. For a while I didn’t bother to respond, but my husband’s a psychologist. Mel finally convinced me that the best thing I could do for Mother and for me, too, was to figure out a way to forgive her. Eventually I wrote back. We started by sending little notes back and forth. To my amazement, e-mail ended up bringing us closer than ever.

“I’m not sure how it happened, but for the first time I can remember we weren’t at each other’s throats. Maybe part of it was not being in the same household and having some distance between us. We’d talk about what was going on in our day-to-day lives. Even though I had been married for seven years, Mother had never met Mel. I told her about him, about our house and garden, and about both our jobs. Mel has a private practice in Cheyenne. I’m a corporate attorney for an oil-exploration company. I thought hearing that would freak her out, but it didn’t. She never said a word.

“She told me about what it was like to live in Bisbee, about the little house she had bought – the first one ever – and about the new man in her life, a guy named Warren Gibson. As a kid, that was one of the reasons I despised my mother. There was always a new man in her life. They came and went with astonishing regularity. But I could tell from the way she talked about Warren, this time things were different. She really liked the guy; really cared about him. I think she was finally ready to settle down to something permanent, and she believed Warren Gibson was it.

“She told me about the work they did together on the gallery, getting it ready to open. She also told me about the upcoming showing of Rochelle Baxter’s stuff. Mother was really excited about it and proud of having discovered someone she fully expected to turn into one of this country’s up-and-coming African-American artists.”

Serenity stopped long enough to sip her water before continuing. “She sent me this e-mail on Thursday afternoon. Unfortunately, I was out of town and didn’t read it until yesterday.”

Unfolding the single piece of paper that had been lying in her lap, Serenity Granger handed Joanna the printed copy of an e-mail.

Dear Serenity,

Something terrible has happened. Rochelle Baxter is dead, murdered. She died last night sometime. The grand opening of her show is tonight. The caterer will be here in a little less than two hours. I found out about Shelley too late to cancel the food. Since I have to pay for it anyway, I decided to go ahead with the party.

The problem is Warren. He and I were among the last people to see Shelley before she died. The cops wanted to talk to both of us. Detective Carbajal is with the sheriff’s department. He told me this afternoon that they’ll also need to fingerprint us since we’d both been at Shelley’s place earlier in the day. We went there to collect the pieces from her studio to hang them here in the gallery.

When I told Warren about the fingerprint thing, he went nuts. We ended up having a huge fight. In all the months I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him so upset. He’s off doing some errands right now. I’ve been sitting here thinking about all this – thinking and wondering.

Is it possible Warren could have had something to do with what happened to Shelley? I mean, we were both there in her house. I can’t think of any other reason why the very mention of fingerprints would

The e-mail ended in midsentence. “Where’s the rest of it?” Joanna asked.

“That’s just it,” Serenity returned. “There isn’t any more. It’s like Mother had to hit the ‘Send’ button in a hurry. Warren may have come into the gallery right then, and she didn’t want him to know about her suspicions or about her sending them along to me.

“As soon as I accessed my e-mail yesterday evening, I started trying to call. I called both the gallery and the house several times and left messages. Naturally, there wasn’t any answer. Then, an hour or so later, when a Cheyenne PD patrol car stopped in front of our house, I knew what was up. The officer didn’t have to tell me Mother was dead. I already knew.

“So where’s Warren Gibson, Sheriff Brady? I am convinced he killed my mother, and he must have murdered that other woman as well. I want him caught.”

“I can assure you, Ms. Granger, so do we. Now, please excuse me for a moment while I make a phone call.”

Joanna picked up her phone. It was Sunday, after all. Frank Montoya could have been home or at church. On a hunch, though, she dialed her chief deputy’s office number. He answered after half a ring.

“You’d better come into my office, Frank,” she told him. “Dee Canfield’s daughter is here. I’m sure you and Detective Carbajal will both be interested in what she has to say. Is Jaime in, by the way?”

“No,” Frank Montoya said. “But he will be as soon as I can reach him.”

It took only half an hour for both Frank and Jaime to converge on Joanna’s office. For the next hour or so, they pumped Serenity for information.

“Did your mother tell you anything in particular about Warren Gibson?” Jaime Carbajal asked.

“Just that he was good with his hands. He could put up drywall, plaster, install wiring, and do any number of things she would have had to spend money on otherwise.”

“She didn’t say where he came from?”

“Not that I remember. At the beginning, I think she maybe hired him to do a couple of days’ worth of odd jobs. Before very long, though, he had moved in with her. As far as Mother was concerned, that’s typical. It also goes a long way to explain why I was a twenty-six-year-old virgin when I got married.”

The sardonic self-deprecation in that sentence lodged like a sharp-edged pebble in Joanna Brady’s heart. Dee Canfield and her daughter had spent a lifetime locked in almost mortal combat. Serenity Granger’s strategy had been to look at what her mother did and then do the opposite. The same was true for Joanna and Eleanor Lathrop.

What will happen with Jenny? Joanna wondered. Since I’m a cop, does that mean she’s destined to end up a crook? Or will she really turn into a veterinarian?

Joanna was drawn out of her reverie, not by the continuing questions and answers, but by a sudden urgent knocking on her office door. Why was it that just when she had something important going on – just when she needed a little peace and quiet – her office turned into Grand Central Station?

Not wanting to disrupt Jaime’s interview with Serenity Granger, Joanna hurried to the door. Casey Ledford stood outside holding several pieces of computer-generated printouts.

“What is it, Casey? We’ve got an important interview going on in here.”

“Yes, I know.” Casey nodded. “Lupe told me, but this is important, too. I got a hit from one of the prints I took off a hammer I found in a drawer up at Castle Rock Gallery. Everything else was pretty clean, but whoever wiped the place down must have forgotten about the hammer or maybe didn’t see it. Anyway, here’s the guy’s rap sheet. I thought you’d want to check it out.”

Joanna took the paper and looked at the mug shot. The name said Jack Brampton, but the photo was clearly Dee Canfield’s boyfriend, the man known around Bisbee as Warren Gibson. Joanna’s memory flashed back to when she had last seen him, standing in Castle Rock Gallery, glaring threateningly at Bobo Jenkins and tapping the head of a hammer – perhaps the very same one – in the open palm of his hand. Brampton had served twenty-one months in a medium-security Illinois prison for involuntary manslaughter committed while driving drunk. He had previously worked as a pharmaceutical salesman.

That might be enough for him to know something about sodium azide, Joanna thought. Enough to make him very dangerous.

“Good work, Casey,” she said. “Can I keep this?”

Casey nodded. “Sure. I’m making copies for everyone who’ll be coming to the one-o’clock meeting.”

“Terrific. Drop one off with Dispatch as you go. I want an APB out on this guy ASAP. He’s got a good head start on us, so we may have a tough time catching up. We’ll assume, for right now, that he’s still driving Deidre Canfield’s Pinto. It’s distinctive enough that it shouldn’t be hard to find.”

While Casey hurried away, Joanna turned back into her office. The interview was coming to an end. Serenity Granger, purse in hand, stood just inside the door. “So you think it’s going to be several days before Mother’s body can be released?”

“Several for sure,” Jaime Carbajal said. “First there’ll have to be an autopsy. The medical examiner won’t release the body until well after that. If I were you, I’d find a hotel room where you can settle in and wait.”

“Any suggestions?”

“Probably the Copper Queen back uptown in Old Bisbee,” he told her. “But regardless of where you stay, please let us know where you’ll be.”

Serenity Granger nodded. “Of course,” she said.

Joanna wished Jaime Carbajal hadn’t suggested the Copper Queen. Pretty soon everyone staying at the old hotel would be connected to this case, one way or the other. But she didn’t voice her objection aloud. After all, the only thing Joanna wanted was for Serenity Granger to leave her office. The information about Warren Gibson’s criminal past was far too important to blurt out with a civilian present, even if that civilian was vitally concerned with finding the person under investigation.

“I’ll walk you to the lobby,” Frank Montoya offered.

“Don’t bother,” Serenity said, turning him down. “I can find my way.”

As soon as the door closed behind her, both Frank and Jaime turned to Joanna expectantly. “All right,” Frank said. “Give.”

Joanna handed him the paper. “Warren Gibson’s real name is Jack Brampton,” she said. “He’s an ex – pharmaceutical salesman who’s done time for DWI and involuntary manslaughter. Casey’s made copies of the rap sheet so we’ll have them available for the task force meeting at one. I want everybody there. I also want copies available of everything we have so far, including a written report of what we’ve just learned from Serenity Granger. By the way, Beaumont will be here for the meeting.”

Both men looked at Joanna. “Since when?” Jaime asked.

“Since last night when I invited him,” Joanna said.

Jaime shook his head. “Great,” he muttered. “Guess I’d better get started typing my report, then.”

Jaime stalked from the room. Joanna glanced at Frank to see if he shared Jaime’s opinion about including Beaumont in the task force. If the chief deputy disapproved, it didn’t show. He walked over to Joanna’s desk and retrieved a pile of papers he’d brought along with him into her office.

“What are those?” she asked.

“Copies of everything we had up to this morning. Even with Beaumont included, there’ll be enough to go around. I thought you might want to go over them yourself before the meeting.”

“Thanks, Frank. You’re good at keeping me on track. I really appreciate it.”

“And then there’s this.” He removed a fat manila envelope from the bottom of the stack and passed it over as well.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A present,” he said. “It’s the information you asked me to track down on Anne Rowland Corley,” Frank told her. “There’s quite a bit of it – probably too much to read between now and one o’clock, but you might want to skim through some of it. If what I’m picking up is anything close to accurate, whoever sent Special Investigator Beaumont to Bisbee wasn’t doing the poor guy any favors.”

Joanna pulled out the topmost clipping and glanced at it. The article, dated several years earlier, was taken from the Seattle Times. It reported that a special internal investigation conducted by the Seattle Police Department had concluded that a deranged Anne Corley had died three weeks earlier as a result of a single gunshot wound, fired by her husband of one day, Seattle Homicide Detective J.P. Beaumont. The fatal shooting had occurred at a place called Snoqualmie Falls State Park. Anne Corley’s death had now been officially ruled as self-defense, and Detective Beaumont had been recalled from administrative leave.

Putting the paper down, Joanna stared at her chief deputy. “It sounds to me like cop-assisted suicide,” she said.

Frank Montoya shrugged his shoulders. “Or husband-assisted suicide,” he said. “Take your pick. Now I’d better get going, too. I’m working on the telephone information you asked me to get, but weekends aren’t the best time to do that.”

He went out then, closing the door behind him. Meanwhile, Joanna shuffled through the contents of the envelope. Looking at the dates, she realized that at the time Anne Rowland Corley died, Joanna had been a working wife with a husband, a young child, and a ranch to look after. In addition to her full-time job as office manager for the Davis Insurance Agency in Bisbee, she had been making a two-hundred-mile commute back and forth to Tucson twice a week while she finished up her bachelor’s degree at the University of Arizona. No wonder Anne Rowland Corley’s death hadn’t made a noticeable blip on Joanna’s mental radar.

As Frank had suggested, Joanna scanned several more articles from Seattle-area papers. Most of them were from immediately before and after the fatal shooting. One piece was a blatantly snide commentary from a columnist named Maxwell Cole connecting Detective Beaumont with a “mysterious lady in red.” Finally, Joanna came to a much longer, denser article from the Denver Post. This one, running several pages in length, was an in-depth piece that had been part of an investigative series dealing with female serial killers.

A look at the clock told Joanna she was running out of time. Intriguing as the article might be, her first responsibility was to be properly prepared for the upcoming task force meeting. Thoughtfully, Joanna shoved the collection of papers back into the envelope, which she dropped into her briefcase.

From the moment Joanna had met J.P. Beaumont, she had thought of him as a smart-mouthed jerk. Last night, at the Copper Queen, when he had been straight with her and told her about his interview with Marliss Shackleford, she had glimpsed something else about him – that he was probably a good cop, a straight and trustworthy one.

Now, though, she realized there had been something else there as well, a certain indefinable something she had recognized without being able to put her finger on it, a sort of common denominator between the two of them that she couldn’t quite grasp. Now she knew what it was. Beaumont’s wife had died tragically; so had Joanna Brady’s husband. Having survived that kind of event didn’t excuse the man’s smart-mouthed attitude, but it made it a hell of a lot easier to understand.

For the next while Joanna concentrated on reading the material Frank Montoya had brought her. Lost in her work, she jumped when her phone rang and was astonished to see that her clock said it was already twenty minutes to one.

“I’m guessing you won’t be coming home for Sunday dinner, is that right?” Butch asked.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “The time got away from me. I’m due to be in a meeting at one. Save some for me, will you?”

“I already did.”

WITH LARS JENSSEN’S TIMELY INTERVENTION I managed to avoid that first drink. When I finally went to bed around one, I fell right to sleep. The problem is, the dream started almost as soon as I closed my eyes. It’s a dream I’ve had over and over for years. Even in my sleep, it makes me angry. I want to wake up. I don’t want to see it again, and yet there’s always the faint hope that somehow this time it will be different. That it won’t end with the same awful carnage.

I know from interviewing crime scene witnesses that human memory is flawed. Dreams, which are memory once removed, are even more so. The events of the few jewel-like spring days I spent with Anne are jumbled in my dreams, sometimes out of sequence and often out of sync with the way things really played out. The words we said to each other are hazy; the scenes slightly out of focus. Still, they always leave me wrestling with an overriding guilt and with the same unanswered questions: When did I fall in love with her? How did it happen? What else could I have done?

In the dream I usually relive feelings rather than what actually happened: The joy I felt when I asked her to marry me and she said yes. The amazement as I slipped my mother’s treasured engagement ring on her waiting finger and saw how perfectly it fit. There’s the fun of the surprise wedding shower the guys from Seattle PD threw for us down at F. X. McRory’s and the blue-sky perfection of our early-morning wedding.

But then a cloud moves between us and the sun. The scene darkens. Sometimes I manage to wake myself up here, but it doesn’t matter. When I fall back asleep, the dream will be there again, cued up and waiting at the exact same place.

I’m in the interview room on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building, listening to that poor, terrified phone company service rep. “I left a message,” he tells me hopelessly. “I left a message with your wife. Didn’t you get it?” But, of course, I didn’t get it. I didn’t have a wife then – not until that very morning in Myrtle Edwards Park.

The scene goes darker still. I’m driving toward North Bend, toward Snoqualmie Falls, squinting through a daytime blackness no headlights can penetrate. I try to fight off the yawning chasm of despair that threatens to engulf me, because I know by then – know beyond a reasonable doubt – that Anne Corley is a killer. A murderer. People are dead, and it’s all because of me. My fault. My responsibility.

And then I walk into the restaurant. She’s seated across a crowded room from the door. Sometimes she’s wearing her vibrant turquoise wedding dress. Sometimes she’s in a jogging suit. Sometimes she’s swathed all in black. This time it’s the bright blue dress. Our eyes meet over the heads of the other carefree, unsuspecting diners. The look she gives me is electric, chilling.

This is another point in the dream where I sometimes manage to wake myself up. I used to have a drink – make that another drink. Now I go to the bathroom and have a glass of plain water. But it’s no use. Whatever I do, I’m trapped in the dream’s inevitability. When I close my eyes again, she’s there waiting for me, beckoning to me from across the room.

The dream usually skips that last conversation. And I know why. Even when I’m awake, I can’t remember it exactly, and I consider that a blessing. It would be too painful to remember. She simply stands up and leaves. As she maneuvers through the tables, I see the gun in her hand – a gun no one else can see – and know it as my own.

Next we’re racing down the path toward the pool at the bottom of the falls. She’s ahead of me. There are people in my way – gimpy, slow-moving tourists going up, coming down. I thrust past them, push them out of my way. And then we’re at the bottom. She turns to face me. I see her raising the gun and feel the bullet smash into my shoulder. I fall – fall forever. And then, once I land, I fire, too.

I’m a good shot. An excellent shot. I shoot to disarm, not to kill. But she’s standing on wet, moss-covered rocks. As I pull the trigger, she somehow loses her footing. She slips, and the motion moves her ever so slightly. My bullet misses her arm and slams into her breast. As she falls, a crimson stain blossoms across the fabric of whatever she’s wearing.

In the Copper Queen Hotel that night, that’s when I woke up – sweaty, shaken, and filled with remorse. I stayed awake for hours after that, fearing that the dream would come again the moment I closed my eyes. The sun was just rising when I finally went back to sleep. Thankfully, the dream did not return.

WHEN I FINALLY STAGGERED DOWNSTAIRS late that Sunday morning, I was as bleary-eyed and hungover as in my worst drinking and stinking days. I barely made it into the dining room before they stopped serving breakfast at eleven. As soon as I finished eating, I headed for the Cochise County Justice Center. It was just twelve-thirty when I arrived there for the one o’clock meeting. Still not sure of what my reception would be, I opted for being prompt. After all, Sheriff Brady may have relented enough to allow me inside the investigation, but I didn’t want to do anything that would screw things up.

The same lady I had met the day before, Lupe Alvarez, manned the front desk. She greeted me with a smile. “Good afternoon, Mr. Beaumont. Sheriff Brady asked me to give you this to use while you’re here.”

She handed me a badge that had my name on it, along with the initials MJF. The other side contained a magnetic strip.

“What’s MJF?” I asked.

“The Multi-Jurisdiction Force,” Lupe explained. “When members of the MJF work joint-ops out of our building, it’s easier to give them badges so they can come and go as they please without our having to buzz them in and out. The card works on all the lobby security doors. Also the rest rooms,” she added.

If I was being given my own rest-room key, I had evidently arrived. “Thanks,” I told her. “Now, where do I go?”

“The conference room,” she said. “It’s through that door and three doors down the hall on the left.”

Since it wasn’t yet twelve forty-five, I figured I’d be the first to arrive, but I was wrong. Sheriff Brady was already in the conference room. She sat at the head of a long table with several stacks of paper lined up in front of her. She looked up at me curiously as I entered the room. Her appraisal was so thorough that I wondered for a moment if my fly was unzipped.

“Good afternoon, Special Investigator Beaumont,” she said, motioning me into a chair. “You’re early.”

I took the seat she indicated. She slid one of the stacks in my direction.

“What you have there are copies of everything we’ve come up with so far,” she told me. “You’ll find crime scene reports, preliminary autopsy results, transcripts of interviews, an Internet treatise on poisons in general and sodium azide in particular. If we’re going to be working together, you need to know everything we do.”

“Thanks,” I said, and meant it.

It hurt to have to haul my reading glasses out of my pocket, but I swallowed my pride and did so. The topmost report was the crime scene report from the Latisha Wall murder in Naco. I started to read, but stopped a couple of sentences into it.

“There is one thing,” I said.

Sheriff Brady looked up from her own reading. Under her questioning brow, I caught a glimpse of the banked fire in those vivid green eyes. “What’s that?” she asked.

“Since we’re going to be working together, how about ditching the ‘Special Investigator’ crap? Most people call me Beau. Either that or J.P.”

She studied me for a long time before she answered. “All right,” she said finally. “Beau it is, and I’m Joanna.”