Partner In Crime

Two

DRIVING PAST THE Cochise County Justice Center on her way to the Naco, Arizona, crime scene, Joanna wondered about her own motives. Had she opted to go to the crime scene in order to avoid the members of her department who had boycotted the funeral reception? She had anticipated that countywide politics was a necessary part of being elected to the office of sheriff. What she hadn’t expected were the political machinations within the department itself.

She had managed to dodge the obstacles her former chief deputy Dick Voland had rolled into her path. Once he resigned from the department, Joanna had thought her troubles were over. She knew now that had simply been wishful thinking. Politics was everywhere – inside the department and out. She had to accept that reality and learn to work around it.

Fifteen minutes after leaving High Lonesome Ranch, Joanna pulled in behind a fleet of departmental cars parked at the corner of South Tower and West Valenzuela in the tiny hamlet of Naco. The front door of an aging stucco building stood ajar. When Joanna knocked, Detective Carbajal appeared in the doorway.

“Morning, boss,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “I thought you were with the ME.”

Jaime nodded. “I thought so, too. Then Doc Winfield called to say there would be a slight delay. I had an extra forty minutes, so I thought I’d come see what’s what.” He moved aside and allowed Joanna to enter. “We left the door open in hopes of airing the place out,” he added, handing her the crime scene log. “You may not want to come in.”

As Joanna stepped into the large open room, she understood at once what Jaime meant. The all-pervading stench of stale vomit assailed her nostrils. When she finished signing the log, Jaime passed her a mask and a small jar of Vicks VapoRub.

“Thanks,” she said, dabbing some on her upper lip. “Now where?”

“Dave Hollicker is over there in what passes for a bedroom,” Jaime Carbajal said, pointing. “That’s where the EMTs found the victim. She’d been sick as a dog all over her bed and most of the room as well. Casey’s in the kitchen lifting prints.”

“What’s the victim’s name again?”

Jaime checked his notebook. “Rochelle Ida Baxter. Age thirty-five. The EMTs found a purse with a driver’s license and gave the information to Doc Winfield.”

“Any sign of robbery?”

Jaime shook his head. “Negative on that. They found eighty dollars and some change in her purse, along with a full contingent of credit cards. She was wearing two rings when she was taken to the hospital, and nothing around here looks disturbed. No broken glass. It’s not looking good for a robbery motive.”

“Forced entry?” Joanna asked.

“That’s a little harder to tell, but I don’t think so,” Jaime said. “Both front and back doors were locked when the ambulance arrived, so the EMTs had to break in. If the lock on the front door was damaged prior to that, there’d be no way to separate EMT damage from any that might have occurred previously. There’s an alarm system that went off like a banshee while the medics were here. I’ve already checked with the alarm company. Their monitoring system shows no disturbance prior to the arrival of the emergency personnel.”

Following Jaime’s directions, and with the smell of vomit no longer actively engaging her gag reflexes, Joanna moved to the bedroom area. The bed had been stripped down to bare mattress, and Dave Hollicker was in the process of rolling up a soiled bedside rug. The place didn’t resemble a crime scene so much as it did a hospital room, emptied of one desperately ill patient and awaiting the arrival of another. Joanna was relieved to see that most of the mess had been cleaned up prior to her arrival.

“How’s it going, Dave?”

He finished bagging the rug and placed it in a stack of similarly full and tightly closed bags before answering. “I’ve taken photographs and bagged everything I could. Once I load this stuff into the van, I’ll come back and start looking for hair and fibers.”

“How’s the print work coming?”

Dave Hollicker shrugged. “Beats me. You’ll have to ask Casey. I’ve been in here most of the time.”

“I’ll go see,” Joanna said, heading for the screens she assumed walled off the kitchen. The great room glowed with natural morning light that streamed in through an overhead skylight. Off to one side stood a large wooden easel. On it hung a starkly empty canvas. Joanna paused in front of it, struck by the fact that the person who had placed the canvas there was no longer alive to color it. Whatever scene Rochelle Ida Baxter had intended to paint there would never materialize. Next to the easel squatted a paint-blotched taboret. The top drawer sat slightly open, revealing neat rows of paint tubes. On the back of the taboret was a collection of oddly sized jars. In them brushes of various sizes stood with their bristles up, waiting to be taken up and used once more.

“Our victim’s an artist then?” Joanna asked, turning back to Jaime Carbajal.

The detective nodded. “Evidently,” he said, “although you couldn’t prove it by what’s here. So far I haven’t found anything but a few sketchbooks and more empty canvases just like the one on the easel. Maybe she was an artist who hadn’t quite gotten around to actually doing any painting.”

Joanna looked at the floor underneath the easel, where more daubs of paint stained the white planks of the floor. “She’d been painting, all right,” Joanna observed. “There must be finished canvases around here somewhere. Keep looking.”

When Joanna poked her head into the kitchen area, Casey Ledford was carefully brushing fine black powder onto the smooth gray surface of an old-fashioned Formica-topped table.

“How’s it going?” Joanna asked.

Pursing her lips in concentration, Casey smoothed a strip of clear tape onto the powder before she answered. “All right,” she said. “Good morning, Sheriff,” she added.

Carefully peeling it back, Casey smoothed the black-smudged clear tape onto a stiff manila card. After holding the card up and examining it, she put it back down. On the top of the card she jotted a series of notations about where and when the prints had been found. Then she tossed the tagged card into an open briefcase that already held many others just like it.

“From what I’m seeing here,” Casey said, “I’d say our victim had company last night. We found an almost empty glass and a partially emptied beer bottle sitting on the table. Dave bottled up the remaining contents from the glass. He’ll take that back to the lab. I picked up two distinctly different sets of prints from both the bottle and the glass, and from the table, too. Assuming one set belongs to the victim, it’s possible the other one could belong to the perp. We’ll take the glass, the bottle, and whatever else is in the trash back to the department. Together Dave and I will go through it all. I’ll look for prints; he’ll look for anything else. Oh, and at Doc Winfield’s suggestion, we’ll be taking all the foodstuffs from here in the kitchen as well.”

Joanna nodded. As she often did these days, she had chosen to wear a uniform. Not wanting to disturb evidence, she stood in the middle of the kitchen area with her hands in her pockets. The room was tiny, but orderly. The cupboards were the kind that come, ready to be hung, from discount lumber stores. The table, a fridge, and a small apartment-size stove made for a kitchen that was functional enough, but one that had been put together by someone focused on neither cooking nor eating.

“Have you collected water samples?” Joanna asked.

“Dave did that first thing.”

Just then Joanna heard the sound of a woman’s voice, raised in anger, coming from the other side of the screen. “What do you mean, I can’t come in? What’s going on here? What’s happened?”

Back in the studio, Joanna found Detective Carbajal standing in the doorway and barring the entry of a solidly built woman who kept trying to dodge past him.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Jaime was saying. “This is a crime scene. No one is allowed inside.”

“Crime scene!” the woman repeated. “Crime scene? What kind of crime? What’s happened? Where’s Rochelle?”

Removing her mask, Joanna walked up behind her detective, close enough to glimpse a heavyset woman whose long gray hair was caught in a single braid that fell over one shoulder and dangled as far as her waist. She was swathed from head to toe in a loose-flowing, tie-dyed smock.

“I’m Sheriff Joanna Brady,” Joanna explained, stepping into view. “We’re investigating a suspicious death here. Who are you?”

“Death?” the woman repeated, wide-eyed. “Somebody died here? But what about Rochelle? Where’s she? Certainly Shelley isn’t-”

Suddenly the woman broke off. She blanched. One hand went to her mouth, and she wavered unsteadily on her feet. Up to then, Jaime Carbajal had been steadfastly trying to keep her outside. Now, as she swayed in front of him, he stepped forward and grasped her by one elbow. Then he led her into the great room and eased her onto a nearby stool. For a moment, no one spoke.

“I take it Rochelle Baxter is a friend of yours?” Joanna asked softly.

The woman glanced wordlessly from Joanna’s face to Jaime’s. Finally she nodded.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, then,” Joanna continued. “Rochelle Baxter fell gravely ill last night. She called 911, but by the time emergency personnel reached her, she was unresponsive. She was declared dead on arrival at the hospital.”

The woman began to shake her head, wagging it desperately back and forth, as though by simply denying what she’d been told she could keep it from being true. “That can’t be,” she moaned. “It’s not possible.”

By now Jaime had his spiral notebook out of his pocket. “Your name, please, ma’am?”

“Canfield,” the woman answered in a cracked whisper. “Deidre Canfield. Most people call me Dee.”

“And your relationship to Miss Baxter?”

“We were friends. I own an art gallery up in Old Bisbee – the Castle Rock Gallery. It’s where Shelley was going to have her first-ever show tonight…” Dee Canfield’s voice faltered, and she burst into tears. “Oh, no,” she wailed. “This can’t be. It’s so awful, so… unfair. It isn’t happening.”

For several long moments, Joanna and Jaime Carbajal simply looked on, waiting for Dee Canfield to master her emotions. Finally, pulling a man’s hanky out from under a bra strap, she blew her nose. “Has anyone told Bobo yet?”

Joanna knew of only one person in the Bisbee area with that distinctive name. “You mean Bobo Jenkins?” Joanna asked quickly. “The former owner of the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge?”

Dee nodded. “That’s the one.”

“What’s his relationship to Miss Baxter?” Jaime asked.

Dee shrugged in a manner that suggested she thought Bobo Jenkins’s relationship with Rochelle Baxter was nobody else’s business. Jaime, however, insisted. “Would you say they were friends?” he asked.

Dee paused for several moments before answering. “More than friends, I suppose,” she conceded.

“They were going together?” Joanna suggested.

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know exactly. Several months now. Bobo is the one who introduced Shelley to me.”

“Had there been any trouble between them?” Jaime asked. “Any disagreements?”

“No!” Dee Canfield declared staunchly. “Not at all. Nothing like that.”

“You mentioned Rochelle’s show is scheduled to open at your gallery tonight,” Joanna said quietly. “Is that why you stopped by this morning?”

“No,” Dee replied. “Thursday mornings are when I come down to get gas. I have a Pinto, you see,” she explained. “It still uses leaded. Once a week I come down here, go across the line to Old Mexico, and fill up in Naco, Sonora. I usually stop by to see Shelley, coming or going. We have a cup of coffee and indulge in girl talk. When Shelley worked, she’d isolate herself completely. A little chitchat is what I used to drag her back into the real world.”

“If Rochelle Baxter is an artist, why don’t we see any paintings here?” Jaime Carbajal asked.

“Because everything’s up at the show. Oh my God!” Deidre Canfield wailed. “What am I going to do about that? Should I cancel it? Have the opening anyway? And who’s going to tell Bobo?”

“My department will notify Mr. Jenkins,” Joanna reassured her. “We’ll need to talk to him anyway. But when it comes to deciding whether or not to cancel the show, you’re on your own.”

Dee nodded and swallowed hard. “Rochelle was such a talented young woman,” she said, dabbing at her tears. “This was her very first show, you see, and she was so excited about it – excited and nervous, too.”

“Did she complain to you about feeling ill?”

“ Ill? You mean was she sick? Absolutely not. We worked together all day long yesterday – Shelley, Warren, and I. She certainly would have told me if she wasn’t feeling well.”

“Who’s Warren?” Jaime asked.

“Warren Gibson. My boyfriend. He helps out around the gallery. I’m the brains of the outfit. He’s the brawn.”

Just outside Dee Canfield’s line of vision, Jaime caught Joanna’s eye and motioned toward his watch, indicating he needed to head for his autopsy appointment at Doc Winfield’s office.

“Detective Carbajal has to leave now,” Joanna explained. “But if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a few more questions.”

“Okay,” Dee said. “I’m happy to tell you whatever you need to know. I want to help, but I’ll have to leave soon, too, so I can make arrangements about the show.”

As Jaime hurried out the front door, Dave Hollicker appeared from behind one of the screens lugging two heavy bags. Joanna took Dee ’s elbow, helped her off the stool, and escorted her outside.

“It might be better if we talk out here,” Joanna said, taking her own notebook out of her purse. “Now tell me, Ms. Canfield, how long have you known Rochelle Baxter?”

“Five months or so,” Dee answered. “As I said, Bobo Jenkins met her first – I’m not sure how – and he introduced us. He knew I was getting ready to open the gallery. He thought Shelley and I would hit it off. Which we did, of course. She was such a nice person, for an ex-Marine, that is. I’m more into peace and love,” Dee added with a self-deprecating smile. “But then, by the time Shelley made it to Bisbee, so was she – into peace and love, I mean.”

“Where did she come from?”

Dee Canfield frowned. “This may sound strange, but I’m not sure. The way she talked about being glad to be out of the rain, it could have been somewhere in the Northwest, but she never did say for certain. I asked her once or twice, but she didn’t like to talk about it, so I just let it be. I had the feeling that she had walked away from some kind of bad news – probably a creep of an ex-husband – but I didn’t press her. I figured she’d get around to telling me one of these days, if she wanted to, that is.” Dee frowned. “Now that I think about it, maybe she has,” she added thoughtfully.

“What do you mean?”

Dee countered with a question of her own. “What do you know about art?”

“Not much,” Joanna admitted. “I had to take the humanities course at the university, but that’s about all.”

“Remember that old saw about writers writing about what they know?”

Joanna nodded.

“The same thing goes for artists,” Dee continued. “They paint what they know. Shelley painted portraits. Her subjects glow with the kind of intensity that only comes from the inside out – from the inside of the subject and of the painter as well. The titles are all perfectly innocuous – The Carver, The Pastor and the Lamb, Homecoming – and yet they’re all painted with the kind of longing that puts a lump in your throat. Shelley was painting far more than what she saw. She was also painting what she wanted – a time and place and people she wanted to go back to, but couldn’t. Does that make any sense?”

Joanna nodded. “She never talked to you about any of the people in her paintings?”

Dee shook her head. “Not really. ‘Somebody I knew back home,’ she’d tell me without ever bothering saying where ‘back home’ was. But I did notice that there’s no rain in any of her pictures. Wherever home was, it must not rain very often, or else she just didn’t like to paint rain.”

“Maybe Rochelle Baxter didn’t tell you where she came from because she had something to hide,” Joanna suggested.

“Like maybe she had done something wrong? Something illegal?” Dee demanded.

“Possibly.”

“No!” Dee replied hotly. “Nothing like that. I’m sure of it. I’m an excellent judge of character, Sheriff Brady. Psychic, even. Shelley was as honest as the day is long. If she had done something bad, I would have known it.”

“You said she was an ex-Marine. Did Rochelle mention anything to you about where she served and when?”

“She’d been in the Gulf War,” Dee answered. “I remember something about her being an MP, but again, she wasn’t big on details.”

“Do you have any idea about the people in the paintings?” Joanna asked. “Who they might be?”

“Maybe you should come up to the gallery and see for yourself,” Dee suggested. “I assume they’re people from Shelley’s past. They’re all painted in a wonderful sort of summer light, but not the light we have here in the desert. The shadows don’t have the same hard edges that desert shadows do. This is much softer. And speaking of soft, that’s how she spoke, too – with a soft drawl that makes me think she must have come originally from somewhere down south, but then she’d say something about being glad her bones were finally warming up, so I really don’t know.

“If that’s all you need, I’d better go,” Dee added, extracting a car key from the fringed leather purse that hung from her shoulder. She edged away from Joanna toward a wildly colored, custom-painted Pinto station wagon.

“I still need to go get gas,” she said, “but I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to go through with the show’s grand opening tonight after all. For one thing, it’s too late to call off the caterer. Even if I canceled, I’d still have to pay for the food. So we’ll have an event anyway, even if it’s more like a wake than anything else – a wake with paintings instead of a body. But before it opens, I’m going to redo all the prices.”

“Redo them?” Joanna asked. “What do you mean?”

“I’m going to raise them,” Dee Canfield returned decisively. “Those fifteen pieces are all I have to sell of Shelley’s work. With her gone, that’s all there’s ever going to be, which makes a big difference to collectors. It means the paintings are more valuable.”

“There aren’t any others?”

“Only one,” Dee replied. “But that one’s already sold.”

“But I would have thought there’d be others, either here in her studio or in storage…” Joanna began.

Dee shook her head. “Shelley was something of a perfectionist, you see. She’d paint one canvas over and over until she got it right and moved on to the next one. Maybe she was just cheap, but she didn’t believe in letting canvases go to waste.”

“How do art galleries work?” Joanna asked innocently. “Do you get a set fee and the artist receives all the rest?”

“Of course not,” Dee said. “Shelley’s and my agreement works on a percentage basis, fifty-fifty.”

“So, if you raise the prices on Rochelle Baxter’s work, her heirs will receive more, but so will you.”

“Believe me,” Dee said, “I’ll see to it that Shelley’s heirs receive the additional proceeds, if that’s what you mean.” She paused, and her eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. Are you suggesting that I may have had something to do with Shelley’s death – that I killed her so I could make more money off her paintings?”

“I wasn’t implying anything of the kind,” Joanna replied evenly. “But whenever we encounter a suspicious death like this, we question everyone. It’s the only way to find out what really happened.”

Joanna’s response did nothing to calm Dee Canfield’s sudden anger. “You can take your questions and your not-so-subtle hints and go straight to hell!” she fumed.

With that, Dee got in her car and slammed the door behind her. On the second turn of the key, the old engine coughed fitfully to life. Jerking and half-stalling, the Pinto lurched away from the curb and bounced through an axle-bending pothole.

As the Pinto shuddered out of sight, Joanna Brady jotted into her notebook: Who is Deidre Canfield and where did she come from?