Partner In Crime

Twenty-one

ONCE BACK IN HER OFFICE, Joanna immediately tried reaching Governor Wallace Hickman, only to be told that he wasn’t in, who was calling, and he would call her back. Not likely, Joanna thought. She’d had previous dealings with Wally Hickman in a case that had reflected badly on one of the governor’s former partners. With that in mind, she doubted the governor would be eager to return her phone call – no matter how urgent.

The surface of Joanna’s desk was still unnaturally clean. While she waited, Joanna took messages off the machine. One was from Terry Gregovich. “Sheriff Brady, sorry I didn’t call in earlier. Kristin went into labor and there was too much happening. Kristin is fine. We think Shaundra is, too, but she had some breathing problems. Dr. Lee is having her airlifted to the neonatal unit at University Medical Center in Tucson. Kristin went with her in the medevac helicopter. Spike and I are going along, too, but we’re driving, not flying. I’ll let you know how things are as soon as I know anything.”

As she erased that message, Joanna said a small prayer for the whole Gregovich family.

Next came a call from Joanna’s mother. “Hi,” Eleanor Lathrop Winfield said airily. “George and I are planning a little dinner get-together for Friday evening. We wanted to know if you and Butch could come.”

The fact that Eleanor had finally unbent enough to call her son-in-law Butch rather than insisting on using the more formal given name of Frederick still gave Joanna pause.

“He said there wasn’t anything on his calendar, but that I should check with you,” Eleanor’s message continued. “Grown-ups only this time, but Jenny won’t mind. She’d probably rather be with Jim Bob and Eva Lou anyway. Let me know. We’ll get together around six and eat at seven or so.”

Joanna groaned inwardly. This would be one of her mother’s command performances. Since Butch had already said they were free, Joanna probably wouldn’t be able to dodge it. She made a note in her calendar, then called Eleanor back and left a message that she and Butch would indeed attend.

The next voice she heard was Marliss Shackleford’s. “I understand you’ll be speaking to a high school career assembly later this week,” she said. “I wanted to put an item in my column about that. I was also wondering if you have any comment on the fact that Deputy Galloway has officially declared that he’s running for sheriff.”

With a decisive poke of her dialing finger, Joanna erased that message without bothering to jot down the number. She had suspected it was coming. Still, now that Ken Junior’s candidacy was evidently official, Joanna felt a sudden flash of anger toward Deputy Galloway. She had allowed him to continue with the department when others might have manufactured reasons to let him go. He had repaid Joanna’s kindness by undermining her administration in secret. Now his opposition had gone public.

If he had made a public announcement, it was probably in that day’s edition of The Bisbee Bee. Under normal circumstances, Kristin would have placed the paper on Joanna’s desk with any pertinent articles marked with Hi-Liter. But Kristin wasn’t here. Wanting to know exactly what candidate Galloway had to say, Joanna called the mail room and spoke to the clerk, Sylvia Roark.

“Kristin Gregovich is out today,” Joanna said into the phone. “Would you please bring the admin mail down to my office?”

Minutes later Sylvia Roark appeared in the office doorway, wheeling a large metal cart that was filled to the brim with a mass of papers. Joanna was surprised when she saw it. She had often objected to the piles of paper Kristin Gregovich routinely brought into Joanna’s office and stacked on her desk, but she had no idea that the relatively small piles that actually appeared had been culled from this kind of daunting heap.

“What should I do with it?” Sylvia asked.

Sylvia was a mousy, painfully shy young woman with bad teeth and ill-fitting clothing who came and went from the mail room on a daily basis without exchanging a word with anyone. She spent most of her work hours closeted in the mail room. When not actively dealing with mail, she hunkered over a computer and transferred cold-case information from microfiche into files that could be accessed via computer.

“I’m going to need you to sort it for me,” Joanna said.

Sylvia’s face turned crimson. “But I don’t know how!” she objected.

“Then you’ll have to learn,” Joanna told her firmly. “Make five stacks. One for junk mail, one for magazines, newspapers, and newsletters, one for Chief Deputy Montoya, one for me, and one for don’t know. I’ll help you sort through the don’t-know stack later.”

“But doesn’t Kristin do that?”

“Kristin just had a baby,” Joanna said. “Until she’s back on the job, we’ll be counting on you.”

“All right,” Sylvia said, backing up and scuttling toward the hallway. “I’ll take it back to the mail room and sort it there.”

“No,” Joanna said. “That won’t do. Use Kristin’s desk. And if the phone rings while you’re there, you’ll have to answer it.”

“But…” Sylvia began.

“Please,” Joanna insisted. “I need your help.”

Nodding, Sylvia pushed the cart closer to Kristin’s desk. Joanna didn’t want to spook the young woman further by looking over her shoulder as she set about doing an unfamiliar task. Spying a copy of The Bisbee Bee near the top of the pile, Joanna grabbed it, then retreated to her office and closed the door.

WITH THE NEW UNIDENTIFIED number in hand, I left the conference room and went looking for Frank Montoya. The desk outside Sheriff Brady’s office was almost buried under stacks of paper. Seated there was a young woman I hadn’t seen before. When I asked if Chief Deputy Montoya was in, she didn’t answer. Instead, she ducked her head and pointed.

When I entered the chief deputy’s office, Frank was on the phone patiently explaining to an out-of-town reporter that, until the dead suspect’s relatives had been contacted, he was unable to release any further information.

“How’s it going?” he asked, when the call finally ended.

I handed him a sheet of paper on which I had written the unidentified number, the next cog in my telephone Tinkertoy trail. “Can you find out whose phone number this is?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “It may take a few minutes.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll be in the conference room.”

THE HEADLINE JOANNA SOUGHT was in the right-hand bottom corner of the Bee’s front page:

DEPUTY KENNETH GALLOWAY

OPPOSES SHERIFF BRADY

“Crime rates may be down in the rest of the country,” Cochise County Deputy Sheriff Kenneth Galloway declared yesterday while throwing his hat into the ring in the race for sheriff. “But here, on Sheriff Joanna Brady’s watch, it seems to be going in the opposite direction.”

Citing increased numbers of undocumented aliens who are flooding into the county, Galloway says sheriff’s deputies are often outgunned and outnumbered. “We don’t have the manpower to deal with UDAs and with our regular law enforcement responsibilities as well. Sheriff Brady hasn’t done enough to increase staffing to deal with this ever-growing problem.”

That was as far as Joanna could bear to read. Increased staffing simply wasn’t possible in the face of lower tax receipts and across-the-board budget cuts. It was easy for someone outside the process to point a finger and call her incompetent, but Ken Junior wasn’t the one who had to face up to the board of supervisors and try to balance the budget. She tossed the paper aside.

She had already decided she would run again. With the next election still more than a year away, she hadn’t wanted to start campaigning quite so early. But if Kenneth Galloway was already out on the stump, she would be forced to follow suit. That meant organizing a committee, raising funds, and doing appearances, all while doing her job.

For several minutes she sat brooding, wondering where she’d find the time and energy to do both. Gradually, though, her thoughts shifted. She was mentally back at Chico’s and analyzing the conversation she and Beau had shared there. She recalled the man’s painful admission about how Anne Rowland Corley had conned him and others; about how the real miscarriage of justice hadn’t been in confining a twelve-year-old to a mental institution but in releasing her years later.

Joanna had dropped the offending copy of The Bisbee Bee on top of the serial-killer piece from the Denver Post. Now she unearthed the article and scanned the timeline sidebar that had accompanied the feature article. It showed when the child Anne Rowland had been shipped off to Phoenix and when she had been released.

With a growing sense of purpose, Joanna picked up the phone and dialed Frank Montoya’s office. When he didn’t answer, she tried Dispatch. “Where’s the chief deputy?” she asked. “Is he still out at Palominas?”

“No,” Tica Romero said. “I think he’s out in the lobby talking to some reporters. Want me to interrupt?”

“Never mind,” Joanna said. Her next call was to Ernie Carpenter. “When did Bill Woodruff disappear?” she asked when he answered.

“Who?”

“Bill Woodruff. You remember him. He used to be the Cochise County Coroner.”

“Oh, that Bill Woodruff,” Ernie said. “Sure, I remember him. That’s a long time ago. I was a brand-new detective back then. Woodruff went fishing down at Guyamas and never came back.”

“That’s what I remember, too, because Dad was sheriff,” Joanna said. “But wasn’t there something about Woodruff having a ‘side dish’ somewhere down across the line in Old Mexico?”

“Sounds familiar,” Ernie allowed.

“Do you remember any of the details?”

“Like I said, it’s been a long time,” Ernie said.

“Yes,” Joanna said. “It has. Thanks.”

She hurried to the office door. Sylvia Roark was still pulling envelopes out of the cart. “How are you doing?” Joanna asked.

“Okay,” Sylvia mumbled.

“Not on the mail,” Joanna corrected. “I mean, how are you doing on the microfiche project?”

“I can’t do anything on it if I’m here,” Sylvia sputtered. “I thought you said I should-”

“Not right now,” Joanna said quickly. “I don’t mean today. I mean in general. How far have you gotten?”

“Only the mid-eighties, I guess,” Sylvia said. “I’m working backward, and it takes time, you know. I can work on it only an hour or two a day, but I’m doing the best-”

Without waiting for Sylvia to finish, Joanna headed for the mail room. Tucked into a far corner sat the clumsy old microfiche machine next to its multiple-drawered file. Pulling out the one marked “1979 – 1981,” Joanna settled herself in front of the screen and went to work.

I SAT IN THE CONFERENCE room twiddling my thumbs for the next twenty minutes. Finally Frank Montoya showed up. Wordlessly he handed me back the piece of paper on which I had scribbled the unknown telephone number. “Who’s Francine Connors?” he asked.

“The Washington State Attorney General’s wife,” I told him. “Why?”

“I’d say the man has a problem then,” Frank Montoya replied. “The cell phone in question is registered to her.”

Frank exited the room, leaving me feeling as though he had poured a bucket of cold water down my back. Ross Connors had been looking for a leak in his department and among his trusted advisers. It was clear to me now that the problem had been far closer to him – in his own home! Francine Connors had been carrying on a long-distance relationship with the husband of one of her friends. In the process, she had not simply betrayed her husband, she had also helped murder Latisha Wall.

I popped my head back out of the conference room. Chief Deputy Montoya had not yet made it to his office. “Hey, Frank,” I called. “One more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m going to need a log on that one, too.”

“No kidding,” he replied. “I’ve already ordered it. I’ll bring it to you as soon as I can.”

While waiting, I struggled with my conscience, wondering what to do. Under the circumstances, nothing seemed clear-cut. Was my first responsibility to my boss? Did I have an obligation to call Ross Connors and tell him my as yet unproved suspicions? But if I did that, wasn’t I dodging my responsibilities to Latisha Wall? Most of my adult life has been spent tracking killers. If Francine Connors had betrayed a protected witness’s whereabouts, then she was as guilty of Latisha Wall’s murder as the man who had poisoned her.

Francine Connors was the dishonorable wife of a man sworn to uphold the laws of Washington State. How would Ross Connors react? Would he listen to what I had to say and do what had to be done, or would he try to save his wife? In a tiny corner of my mind, I wondered if that was why I was here. Was it possible Ross Connors already had his own suspicions about Francine’s possible involvement? Had he sent me to Arizona hoping against hope that I wouldn’t discover the truth about what had gone on? Was that why, when I first brought up Maddern’s name, Ross had said so little?

Finally, I picked up the phone in the conference room. Pulling a battered ticket folder out of my pocket, I dialed the toll-free number for Alaska Airlines.

“When’s the next flight from Tucson to Seattle?” I asked.

“There’s one this afternoon at three-thirty,” I was told. The conference room clock said it was already ten past two. I was a good hundred miles away from the airport and without a vehicle. “That one won’t work,” I said. “When’s the next flight?”

“Tomorrow morning at seven.”

I reserved a seat on that flight. I had finished and was putting the phone down when Joanna Brady appeared at the conference room door. She stepped inside, flipped up the occupied sign and pulled the door shut behind her. Her face was set; her eyes chips of dark green slate. Something was up.

“Did Frank tell you?” I asked.

“Tell me what?”

“He’s waiting for the next set of telephone-toll logs, but it looks as though my boss’s wife has been carrying on a clandestine affair with one of UPPI’s big-name attorneys back East. I’m guessing that’s how they learned of Latisha Wall’s whereabouts. As soon as they knew, they must have sent Jack Brampton here to rub her out.”

Joanna relaxed a little. “You’ve caught them then,” she breathed, but she didn’t sound nearly as pleased about it as I would have expected.

“Frank’s the one who did it,” I said. “I’ve never seen anybody who can work with the phone company the way he does.”

Joanna nodded absently, as though she wasn’t really paying attention. She had taken a seat at the conference table. Sitting directly across from her, I noticed a long, jagged scar on her cheek for the first time. She probably usually covered it with makeup, but now her face was pale. The scar stood out vividly against her white skin, making me wonder what had caused it.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Joanna put a slim file folder down on the table, but she made no move to hand it to me. “You said earlier that you and Anne Rowland Corley’s attorney…”

I wished she wouldn’t keep using Anne’s maiden name. I hated having Anne’s name linked to her father’s.

“Ralph Ames,” I supplied. “The attorney’s name is Ralph Ames.”

“That the two of you cleared all the cases,” she continued.

“That’s right.”

“But you didn’t come here,” she said. “You didn’t clear any cases here.”

It was a statement more than a question. My heart gave a lurch.

“As far as we knew there weren’t any cases here,” I said, “other than Anne’s father, that is. With the whole family dead by then…”

“You said she kept a written record?”

“Yes, in the form of a manuscript. Why?”

“Was Bill Woodruff’s name in it?” Joanna asked.

“Bill Woodruff? Not that I remember. Who’s he?”

“You mean who was he,” Joanna corrected. “Years ago he used to be the Cochise County Coroner – before he disappeared, that is. He wasn’t declared officially dead until three years later, but I’m sure now that he died much earlier than that. He was also the man who ruled Patty Rowland’s death an accident and Roger Rowland’s a suicide.”

She spun the file folder across the table to me then. “Check the dates yourself,” she added. “Bill Woodruff disappeared within three weeks of Anne Rowland Corley’s release from the hospital in Phoenix.”

Joanna left the room, leaving me to pick up the pieces of my heart. In the file I found several pages copied from a missing persons report. From the bare bones of what was written there I learned that Bill Woodruff had gone on a fishing trip to a town in Mexico, where he was reportedly seen in several bars in the company of a young woman – a strikingly beautiful young woman – after which neither of them were ever seen again.

I’m always accusing Maxwell Cole of editorializing. Since he writes a newspaper column, I suppose he’s entitled to put his opinions right there in print for all to see. But the truth is, cops editorialize, too. Couched in the supposedly nonemotional declaration of fact and allegation that passes for cop-talk and cop-write, I recognized what the long-ago investigator had obviously concluded. A few terse but nevertheless disparaging remarks about Bill Woodruff’s wife, Belinda, revealed the investigator’s opinion that the missing man might well have had good reason to walk away from a shrewish, carping wife – walk away and simply disappear.

Unlike that original investigator, I saw Anne Corley’s troubled face leap toward me out of the telling words in the report: “strikingly beautiful.” That was Anne, all right – strikingly beautiful. And ultimately dangerous. Bill Woodruff must have thought he was about to get lucky and have himself a harmless little fling. I’m sure he had no idea he was dealing with the now-grown and incredibly vengeful little girl his official reports had once betrayed.

That much Anne had told me herself. Her written manuscript had alleged that her sister Patty hadn’t really died as a result of an accidental fall. She had been tortured and abused and finally savagely beaten. And both of Anne’s parents, along with her father’s cronies – the police chief and the local coroner – had conspired together to cover it up, just as Anita Rowland and Woodruff had concealed Anne’s role in her father’s supposed suicide.

It’s hard to be angry with someone who’s been dead for years. But I was. A riot of fury boiled up in my heart because Anne had done it to me again, damn her! She had left me a manuscript that, according to her, told me the whole truth. Clearly she had left out a few things – a few important things – and had suckered me one more time. And that brought me back to the central question I have about Anne Corley: Did she ever really love me, or did I just make it all up? Because, if she had loved me, wouldn’t she have told me everything?

There was a discreet tap on the door. I looked up from staring at a paper I was no longer seeing as Joanna Brady came into the room, once again closing the door behind her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I assumed you knew, but I can see from your face – you had no idea.”

I shook my head. “It happened within weeks of her being released from the hospital, just prior to her marriage to Milton Corley,” I said. “How do you suppose she did it? How did she pull it off?”

Joanna shrugged. “I have no idea,” she said kindly. “But remember, we could both be wrong. We don’t have any actual proof. It might have been someone else.”

I wasn’t prepared to give either Anne or me that kind of break. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“Then you’re right,” Joanna said finally. “The real miscarriage of justice happened when they released her. And you were right about something else, too,” she added. “Look.”

She’d been holding something in her hand, but I had been too preoccupied to notice. Now she passed me a new set of phone logs. Putting on my reading glasses, I scanned through the listings. They included literally dozens of phone calls from Francine Connors’s cell phone to Winnetka, Illinois. Some I recognized as going to Louis Maddern’s office number, while a few of the others went to his residence. Most of them, however, had been placed to a third number I didn’t recognize.

“Maddern’s cell phone?” I asked.

Joanna nodded. “You’ve got it,” she said. “Frank just checked.”

The last call had been placed on Sunday night. Looking at the time, I realized it had been placed within minutes of my call to the Connors’s home. That one, lasting over an hour, originated from Francine’s cell phone. After that there was nothing.

I closed my eyes and tried to remember exactly what had gone on during that critical call. I was sure Francine Connors had answered the phone and had asked who was calling. Had I told her who I was? I couldn’t remember, but I wondered now if she had somehow stayed on the line and listened in on my conversation with her husband. I tried to recall exactly what Ross had said. The only thing that stuck in my head was that he had planned on calling in the FBI to track down the leak.

Bearing all that in mind, there could be no question about what I had to do next. “May I use this phone?” I asked, although I had already used it once without having asked for Sheriff Brady’s permission.

“Sure,” Joanna said. “Go right ahead. Do you want me to leave?”

“No,” I told her. “That’s not necessary.”

I searched through my wallet until I once again located the list of Ross Connors’s telephone numbers. By then I should have known them by heart, but I didn’t. I dialed his office number first.

“Attorney General Connors’s Office,” a crisp voice replied. “May I help you?”

“Mr. Connors, please.”

“I’m sorry, he’s not in. May I take a message?”

“No,” I said. “That’s all right.”

I dialed his cell-phone number. After ringing several times, the call went to voice mail. Hanging up, I tried the home number last. A woman answered. I wasn’t sure, but the voice didn’t sound like Francine Connors’s voice.

“Ross, please,” I said easily, hoping to pass for an acquaintance if not a friend.

“He’s not here,” the woman said, her voice quavering slightly. “He’s at the hospital. I’m Christine Connors, Ross’s mother. Is there a message?”

“Hospital?” I asked. “Has something happened to him? Is he ill?”

“Oh,” she said. “You must not have heard then. It’s not Ross. He’s fine. At least he’s okay. No, it’s Francine.”

“What about her?”

“She’s dead. She and Ross went to lunch together. He had a wonderful time, and he thought Francine did, too. But then, when she came home, and, without even changing her clothes, she went out in the backyard and just… just…” Christine Connors stifled a tiny sob. “The gardener was working out front. He heard the shot and came running. He called an ambulance and they took her to the hospital, but they couldn’t save her. I can’t imagine why she’d do such a thing. I just can’t.”

I was stunned. I remembered the sound of tinkling glassware in the background – the sounds of fine dining at a luncheon meeting. I hadn’t thought that Francine might be there, but she must have been. And from that and the call on Sunday night, she must have known the jig was up.

“I’m sorry,” I murmured into the phone. “I’m so very sorry.”

“Well, if you’ll leave your name, I’ll be sure to let Ross know you called.”

“No,” I told her. “Don’t bother. I’ll be in touch.”

When I put down the phone, Joanna Brady was staring at my face. “She’s gone, isn’t she?” she said.

IN NO MORE THAN TEN MINUTES, J.P. Beaumont looked as though he had aged ten years.

“Is there anything I can do?” Joanna asked.

Beaumont shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “No, wait. There is something. I’m going to need a ride. First I have to go to the hotel and check out. Then I need a lift as far as Tucson. My plane’s first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Come on,” Joanna said. “We’ll take my Civvie.”

Beaumont followed her through the building and out the office door without exchanging a word with anyone. Only when he was fastening the seat belt in Joanna’s Crown Victoria did he have second thoughts.

“That was rude,” he said. “I should go back in and tell Frank how much I appreciated his help.”

“Don’t worry,” Joanna told him. “I’ll pass it along.”

“He’s a good man to have on your team.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “I know.”

When they reached the entrance to the Justice Center, Joanna sat there, hesitating, even though there was no traffic coming in either direction. Finally, making up her mind, she turned left.

“Wait a minute,” Beau objected. “Where are we going? I thought the Copper Queen was the other direction. I need to check out.”

“We’re taking a detour,” Joanna told him. “There’s something I want to show you.”

After heading east for a mile or so, she turned right onto a road labeled warren cutoff.

“What’s Warren?” he asked.

“It’s another Bisbee neighborhood,” she explained. “Until the 1950s, when Bisbee was incorporated, Warren and all these other places were separate towns.”

“Oh,” he said and lapsed into silence.

Coming into town, Joanna turned right at the first intersection and then gunned the Civvie up and over two short but relatively steep hills. At the top of the second one the road curved, first to the left and then back to the right. Beyond the curve, Joanna pulled over onto the shoulder, stopped the car, and got out. Beaumont followed.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Joanna pointed to a massive brown stucco mansion lurking behind a curtain of twenty-foot-high oleander. The house stood at the top end of what had once been the lush green of Vista Park. Now the park was little more than a desert wasteland – a long, desolate expanse of dry grass and boulders with houses facing it on either side.

“I thought you’d want to see this,” Joanna told him quietly. “This was Roger Rowland’s house. It’s where Anne Rowland Corley grew up.”

She saw him swallow hard. Tears welled in his eyes. A sob caught in his throat. There was nothing for her to do but try to comfort the man. As she wrapped her arms around him, hot tears dribbled down his cheeks and ran through her hair. His arms closed around her as well. As they stood there holding each other, it seemed to Joanna like the most natural thing in the world.