Partner In Crime

Sixteen

WHEN I WAS IN the eighth grade at Seattle’s Loyal Heights Junior High, my homeroom and social studies teacher, Miss Bond, encouraged me to run for student council. Unfortunately, I won. That year of attending regular and utterly pointless meetings doomed me to a lifetime of hating same. In my twenty-plus years at Seattle PD I had a reputation for dodging meetings – this very kind of meeting – whenever possible.

This particular task force gathering, however, was one I had actually wanted to attend. Since Joanna and I seemed to have a few more minutes before the others were due to arrive, I settled in and read as much of the handout material as I could. I wanted to be prepared. Before, Sheriff Brady’s department had given me no information at all. Now, with someone obviously burning the midnight-copier ink, I’d been given far too much.

One by one, people wandered into the room and were introduced: Casey Ledford, the latent fingerprint tech; Deputy Dave Hollicker, crime scene investigator; and homicide detective Jaime Carbajal. The last to arrive was Chief Deputy Frank Montoya, but I already knew him. As they showed up, I was struck by how young they all were. I could just as well have wandered into a Junior Chamber of Commerce meeting. My understanding about Jaycees is that once a member hits the ripe old age of thirty-five, he’s out on his tush. Self-consciously, I stroked my chin, making sure I had shaved closely enough that morning to erase the stubborn patch of gray whiskers that has lately started sprouting there.

I’m not sure what Joanna’s team of investigators had been told previously about my presence in their midst. None of them went out of his or her way to make me feel welcome. I was grateful when Joanna Brady tackled that issue head-on.

“You’ve all been introduced to Special Investigator Beaumont,” Sheriff Brady said when she stood up at the stroke of 1 P.M. “He’s here as a representative of the Washington State Attorney General’s Office, which has a vested interest in seeing that whoever killed Latisha Wall is brought to justice. Since it seems inconceivable that Latisha’s murder and Deidre Canfield’s death are unrelated, this is Mr. Beaumont’s deal as much as it is ours. From here on, he’s to be treated as a full member of this investigation. Any information you give me, you should also give him. Is that clear?”

Sheriff Brady’s crew may have been young, but they were unarguably professional. Uneasy nods of assent passed around the table. None of them were thrilled to have an interloper among them, but no one raised an audible objection.

“Good, then,” Joanna concluded. “Let’s get started.”

Clearly I wasn’t the only one who had put in a relatively sleepless night. Deputy Hollicker looked especially bedraggled, with dark circles under bloodshot eyes. He had spent most of the night processing the Canfield crime scene down in Naco. Scanning through my pile of papers, I noticed that it didn’t contain a written report from him about that. Bearing that in mind, I wasn’t the least surprised when Joanna Brady put him in the hot seat first.

“I’m working on the paper,” he said when she called on him. “I’m sorry my report isn’t ready-”

“Never mind the report,” Joanna Brady said, waving aside his apology. “Just tell us. Did you find anything useful?”

The CSI shook his head miserably. “Not really. Local kids have been messing around in those old cavalry barracks for years. I found all kinds of junk in there – trash, beer bottles, cigarette butts, and gum wrappers. It’s tough to tell what, if anything, might be related.”

“You did say cavalry,” I confirmed. “As in horses?”

“That’s right. The building where the body was found is on the site of an old U.S. Cavalry post that dates from the 1880s,” Joanna Brady explained. “The crime scene is actually one of the old officers’ quarters. What about the stables, Dave? Did you search them, too?”

If I had stumbled into a case where the crime scene turned out to be a cavalry post, maybe I was Rip Van Winkle in reverse.

Hollicker nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Every inch. Detective Carbajal thought we might find another body there – the boyfriend’s, presumably. We didn’t, though.”

“No, I’m sure you didn’t,” Joanna said grimly. “There’ll be more about Warren Gibson later. Go on.”

“Deputy Howell and I brought back as much stuff to the lab as we thought might be relevant. Again, it’ll take time to go through it all. I’ll work on it as time allows.”

“Did you talk to Doc Winfield?” Joanna asked.

Dave nodded. “Detective Carbajal and I both did. It was right after the ME arrived on the scene, so he didn’t know much at that point. He did tell us, though, that he’s reasonably certain Dee Canfield died somewhere else. The body was dumped there afterward.”

“What about Dee’s house out in Huachuca Terraces? Did either you or Casey get around to checking it out?”

Casey Ledford and Dave Hollicker shook their heads in unison. “Ran out of time,” Dave explained. “I had a deputy put up crime scene tape. I’ll go there later today, right after the meeting.”

“Good,” Joanna said. “Moving right along. Let’s talk about Warren Gibson for a minute. Dave, you and Mr. Beaumont probably haven’t heard about this yet, but Ms. Canfield’s daughter from Cheyenne, Wyoming – a woman named Serenity Granger – came to my office this morning. She brought along a copy of an unfinished e-mail that her mother sent her Thursday afternoon. Ms. Granger didn’t actually read the message until yesterday. You should have a copy of that along with your other handouts.”

I shuffled through my paperwork until I located Deidre Canfield’s unfinished missive to her daughter.

“If you check the time,” Joanna Brady was saying, “it’s listed as 4:10:26 P.M. Mountain Standard. Now look at the transcript of Jaime’s interview with Dee Canfield. Look at the last two sentences right at the end.”

After a little more paper shuffling, I located the right passages.

Detective Carbajal: Since both you and Mr. Gibson were in Latisha Wall’s house yesterday, we’ll need fingerprints from both of you.

Ms. Canfield: Yes, yes, of course. I understand. We’ll take care of it right away, tomorrow probably, but not right now. The show’s tonight. I really do have to get back up to the gallery now so I can be ready to meet the caterer and let her in.

That was the last entry. The transcript indicated that the interview terminated at 3:08 P.M. An hour and two minutes later, Dee had sent her daughter an incomplete e-mail voicing her concern that perhaps Warren Gibson had been involved in Latisha Wall’s murder. I could see where Sheriff Brady was going with all this.

“Casey and Deputy Galloway spent a great deal of time last night and early this morning processing Castle Rock Gallery. A while ago, Casey got an AFIS hit on one of the prints she found there. The man everyone in Bisbee knows as Warren Gibson turns out to be a convicted felon named Jack Brampton. How about passing around copies of that rap sheet, Casey?”

As we say in the trade, “Bingo!”

Joanna Brady was totally in her groove by then. While the fingerprint tech slid pieces of paper out across the smooth surface of the conference table, Sheriff Brady continued without pause. “So we’ve put out an APB on Jack Brampton, aka Warren Gibson.” She stopped long enough to give her chief deputy a searching look. “It did go out, didn’t it, Frank?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Montoya replied. “And I added that the suspect is most likely driving a 1970 red Pinto wagon.”

Joanna frowned. “Red,” she repeated. “Where did you get that information?”

Montoya bristled slightly at the impatient way she posed the question. I would have, too.

“Where else?” he returned. “From the DMV. That’s the vehicle they show as being registered to one Deidre Canfield, 114 Cochise Drive, Bisbee, Arizona.”

“The DMV maybe thinks it’s red,” Joanna told him. “But they’re wrong. The last time I saw Dee Canfield’s Pinto, it looked like somebody had used it for a drop cloth.”

“What color is it then?” Montoya asked.

“All colors,” she answered.

The chief deputy sighed. “All right, then,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’ll go amend that APB.”

Frank Montoya stood to leave the room as Joanna continued. “The good news is, there aren’t that many 1970 Pintos of any kind or color still on the road. If someone spots one moving under its own power, they’re likely to let us know.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, opening my mouth for only the second time in the course of the meeting. “A 1970 Pinto? What kind of fuel does it run on?”

“Leaded,” Joanna said.

“I didn’t know you could still buy leaded,” I objected.

“You can,” she replied, “but only across the line in Old Mexico.”

Frank Montoya was still lingering by the conference room door. “That’s something then,” he said. “If Brampton is using the Pinto as his getaway car, it’s a pretty good bet he’ll be headed south. I’ll get on the horn to Border Patrol here about him, and I’ll let the federales in Mexico know about this as well.”

“Good idea,” Joanna said. “Do it.”

Meanwhile, I busied myself studying Jack Brampton’s rap sheet. What stuck in my head was the fact that he’d served his time at a medium-security facility in Illinois. UPPI’s corporate headquarters was based in Illinois. I wondered if there was a connection. I circled the name of the prison. When I came back to the discussion, Frank had returned and Joanna had moved on to another topic.

“For someone who claims he doesn’t gossip, Harve Dowd from Treasure Trove is full of information,” she was saying. “He told me last night he thought Warren Gibson was pulling a fast one on Dee Canfield. Harve is of the opinion that Dee wasn’t Gibson’s only romantic interest. He claims to have seen Gibson using the pay phones down by the post office on numerous occasions. Frank is currently in the process of checking phone records, but since his special phone company pal doesn’t work weekends, it’s taking more time than usual.”

“Wait a minute,” Jaime Carbajal said. “Does this mean we’re dropping Bobo Jenkins as a possible suspect?”

“Okay,” Joanna said. “Let’s talk about him for the moment. What do we know?”

“That he was at Latisha Wall’s home the night she died,” Jaime Carbajal began. “We also know, by his own admission, that he and the woman he calls Rochelle Baxter had quarreled or at least had a disagreement earlier in the day. We also have his fingerprints on those sweetener packets from the kitchen.”

Casey Ledford raised her hand. “May I speak to that? To the sweetener packets?”

Joanna nodded and all eyes went to the fingerprint tech. “Dave and I examined the crime scene evidence from Latisha Wall’s kitchen. It’s true Mr. Jenkins’s fingerprints are on the sweetener packets. They are. But the physical evidence – the way the fingerprints are layered on the glass and bottle – would indicate that Ms. Wall drank iced tea and Mr. Jenkins had the beer.”

“See there?” Jaime said. “What did I tell you? He poured the sweetener in her tea and then sat right there and watched her drink it. What a hell of a nice guy! And then, on the Dee Canfield part of the equation, we know Bobo was adamantly opposed to her plan to go through with the show despite Latisha Wall’s death. Sheriff Brady, you witnessed some of that yourself on Thursday morning at the gallery.”

“You’re right about that,” Joanna conceded. “Bobo Jenkins was at the gallery, and he was very upset. Do we have any idea where he was or what he was doing between three and five on Thursday afternoon?”

“He claims he was at home and alone the entire afternoon,” Jaime answered. “That’s in the transcript of the interview Frank and I did with him on Saturday morning. He told us he stayed home all day, trying to come to grips with what had happened. Of course,” the detective added, “at the time we spoke to him, we were only aware of the Latisha Wall incident. We had no idea Dee Canfield was also dead, so there was no reason to check on his whereabouts or movements the day after what we assumed to be a single homicide.”

“Did he come right out and actually say he was home alone?” Joanna asked.

Jaime scanned through the transcript. “Here it is, right here. Yes, that’s what he said, but I’ll go uptown a little later. I’ll talk to Bobo’s neighbors and see what they have to say.”

“All right,” Joanna said. “You do that.” Then she turned to Chief Deputy Montoya. “In the meantime, Frank, while you’re dealing with the phone factory, have a go at Bobo’s phone records as well. If he happened to be on the phone making calls between three and four o’clock Thursday afternoon, that would tend to corroborate his story even if no one was there with him at the time.”

That intrigued me. Just because Bobo Jenkins was a suspect in one homicide, Joanna Brady wasn’t giving her people carte blanche to turn him automatically into prime-suspect material in the second death as well. In other words, rather than looking for the quickest way to clear cases, Sheriff Brady was prepared to take the time and make the effort to find out what had really happened. I liked that about her. Respected it.

As Joanna Brady fired off one question after another, I felt as though I had been transported back to the fishbowl at Seattle PD with Captain Larry Powell popping questions left and right to see if his detectives were making any progress or doing something to earn their keep.

I sat up straighter and paid closer attention because I was beginning to suspect that perhaps Sheriff Joanna Brady was my kind of cop after all.

JOANNA LOOKED DOWN AT THE CHECKLIST she had scribbled off in advance of the meeting. “So,” she said, crossing off another item. “With the next-of-kin notification out of the way, what does Doc Winfield say about scheduling the autopsy?”

“He’ll do it first thing tomorrow, and he’ll give me a call beforehand,” Jaime Carbajal replied. “The good news is that Ernie will be back on duty tomorrow morning. Once he’s back on board, maybe I can have him handle the Verdugo boys’ interviews. At least I’ll have some help covering the bases.”

“Or Mr. Beaumont could help out,” Joanna suggested quietly. With Jaime looking mutinous, she moved to lessen the tension. “Hey, Frank,” she added. “Next time Ernie asks for a whole week off, let him know he’s not allowed to leave town until after he checks with our upcoming homicide scheduler.”

They all laughed at that, even Jaime. The atmosphere in the room relaxed noticeably.

“All right,” she said. “Now for our chemistry lesson.”

WE SPENT THE NEXT HALF hour hearing all about something called sodium azide. Joanna had mentioned it prior to the meeting. Rather than show my ignorance, I had said nothing. It turns out that as far as sodium azide is concerned, ignorance is bliss. Just hearing about the stuff was enough to scare the crap out of me.

Frank Montoya had tracked down an Internet article that explained how various poisons, sodium azide included, present. An ingested poison often exhibits a delayed reaction. The victim isn’t affected until the substance is absorbed into the bloodstream. Inhaled sodium azide goes into the lungs and directly into the blood, where its molecules bond with oxygen molecules and render the oxygen unusable.

The information in Frank’s article was already more than I wanted to know, but it did explain the time lag between when Latisha Wall drank her tea and her death sometime later. What Dave Hollicker had to say about sodium azide’s ready availability was horrifying.

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted, minutes into his lecture. “You’re saying this stuff – this incredibly dangerous stuff that isn’t even illegal – can be found in damned near every two-car garage in America?”

“That’s right,” Hollicker agreed blandly. “Those canisters are in every car with air bags.”

“So the next kid who gets pissed off at his English teacher in Podunk, USA, can slip some of it into her coffee and knock her off just like that? This is nuts, totally nuts! And nobody’s doing anything about it?”

“Not so far,” Dave Hollicker said. “According to what I’ve learned, there’s currently no plan to regulate sodium azide in any way or even to add a marker substance.”

About that time there was a knock on the conference room door. “Come in,” Joanna called.

Lupe Alvarez stuck her head inside. “Rick Orting, the dispatcher for the city of Bisbee just called, Sheriff Brady. Someone from Phelps Dodge is reporting finding an abandoned multicolored Pinto.”

A charge of excitement surged around the room. “Where is it?” Joanna demanded.

“Between the end of Wood Canyon and Old Bisbee,” Lupe replied. “It’s on one of those company roads, the ones that go out to PD’s new drilling sites north of Lavender Pit. The Pinto’s rear axle is broken. A day-shift watchman found it a little while ago when he was out doing his rounds.”

“Thanks, Lupe,” Joanna said, then turned back to her team of investigators. “Okay, Jaime. You, Casey, and Dave get on this right away.” Without another word, the three of them hustled out of the room.

“What about me, boss?” Frank Montoya asked.

“Even if you’re dealing with second-stringers, you stay here and keep after the phone stuff. We need that information.”

“And me?” I asked. “What am I supposed to do?”

“You’re with me.”

“Why?”

“So I can keep an eye on you. You’re part of this investigation, but I don’t want to spend the entire afternoon giving you directions and guiding you from one place to another.”

“I have a map…” I began.

“Forget it. Just go get in the car.”

“Yours or mine?”

The disparaging look she gave me told me the question was unworthy of being dignified with an answer. “Come on,” she said.

Rather than going out through the public lobby, Joanna hustled me first to her private office and then out a door that led directly into the parking lot. I started toward the Crown Victoria I knew to be hers.

“Not that one,” she said, stopping me. “We’ll take the Blazer.”

We walked two rows into the parking lot, where she climbed into the driver’s seat of an SUV that had definitely seen better days – from a physical-beauty point of view. However, a powerful engine sprang to life the moment she turned the key in the ignition. The term “ugly but honest!” came to mind.

We drove into town and back toward Old Bisbee. At the far end of the huge layered hole in the ground she explained was Lavender Pit we came to a spot where a group of cop cars, lights flashing, had converged alongside the road. Some of the vehicles were marked city of bisbee; others, sheriff’s department. They were grouped around the entrance to a freshly graded dirt road that led off between the red-rock hills.

We were pulling over to check things out when a call came in over the radio. “Sheriff Brady?”

“Yes, Tica,” she responded. “What is it?”

“I have Burton Kimball on the phone. He needs to talk to you right away.”

Joanna sighed. “Look, Tica. I’m really busy at the moment…”

“He says it’s urgent,” Tica insisted. “Is it all right if I patch him through?”

“I suppose so,” Joanna agreed grudgingly. “Go ahead.”

“Sheriff Brady?” A male voice roared through the radio. Despite having been filtered through both a telephone receiver and the radio, his words buzzed angrily in the air.

“What in the world are you and your people trying to pull now?” he demanded. “I can’t believe you’d stoop so low that you’d go to such incredible lengths. Really, Joanna, I always thought you were above this kind of stunt.”

Whoever Burton Kimball was, he was pissed as hell. In the course of the previous twenty-four hours, I’d seen some pretty strong indications that Sheriff Brady has a temper. I fully expected her to cut loose and give the guy as good as she got. She surprised me.

“Slow down a minute, Burton,” she returned mildly. “What are you talking about?”

“Someone has broken into my client’s house and planted what looks like a cache of drugs here,” he replied. “If you think you can get away with that kind of nonsense…” He paused as if searching for words. “I tell you, Joanna, I’m outraged about this – absolutely outraged!”

She and I hit on the word “drugs” at the same time, and we both jumped to the same conclusion. Why wouldn’t we? Drug or not, sodium azide was the topic of the moment. A few minutes earlier we’d been sitting in a conference room learning all about it.

It was interesting to realize once again that when Joanna Brady was upset, her voice went down instead of up. “What drugs?” she asked urgently but softly. Sitting right next to her, I could barely hear her, but Burton Kimball heard.

“How would I know?” he snapped back. “I didn’t taste it, if that’s what you mean. I wouldn’t know what cocaine tastes like if it walked up and hit me in the face, but since this is a white powder, cocaine is my first assumption.”

I watched while every trace of color drained from Joanna Brady’s face. Her voice didn’t change or falter. “This white powder,” she said calmly, “where exactly is it?”

“In my client’s laundry room,” Burton Kimball replied. “Bobo went out there this afternoon to do some laundry and found it sitting there, right in plain sight on the dryer. It’s in a box that’s been wrapped in duct tape and hooked up to the dryer vent. When he called to tell me about it, I advised him to leave it alone. I tell you, Joanna…”

“Where are you right now?” Joanna interrupted.

“Where am I?” Burton Kimball returned. “Where do you think? I’m at my client’s house, and you can bet I’m staying here until someone comes to collect this stuff and take it away.”

“Whereabouts are you in the house?” Joanna prodded.

I had to give the lady credit for staying cool. By then she had put the idling Blazer in gear. We were back on the road, speeding toward Old Bisbee.

“In the kitchen,” he said. “Talking to you on the phone.”

“What about Bobo?” she asked. “Where’s he?”

“Right here with me. Why?”

“Good,” she said. “Now listen to me, Burton. Listen very carefully. Whatever’s in that box in Bobo’s laundry room wasn’t planted by anyone from my department. But I suspect that it is dangerous, probably even deadly.”

“What is it, then, some kind of bomb? Is it going to explode?”

“No, nothing like that. But don’t interrupt. I want you both to leave the house, Burton. Immediately. Go outside and stay out. I’ll be there in a few minutes. In the meantime, don’t go near the laundry room, and whatever you do, don’t touch that box.”

“I hope you’re not trying to pull a fast one here, Joanna,” Burton Kimball warned, but his tone of voice had changed slightly. The naked urgency in her orders had commanded his attention.

“All right,” he relented, backing down. “But if you even so much as try using this as evidence against my client without having a properly drawn search warrant…”

Joanna started to lose it. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about evidence,” she interrupted. “I’m trying to save lives here. Now get the hell out of that house, Burton, and take Bobo Jenkins with you.”

She ended the call and tossed me the microphone.

“What?” I said.

“Call Dispatch back,” she ordered, switching on both lights and siren. The calm voice she had used to address Burton Kimball was replaced by that of a drill sergeant barking orders. “Tell them we need the state Haz-Mat team at Bobo Jenkins’s place on Youngblood Hill. Tell them you and I are on our way to secure the scene.”

“Which is where?”

“On Youngblood Hill.”

“I know that. What’s the address?”

Joanna Brady shook her head in disgust. “For crying out loud!” she exclaimed. “I have no idea, but since it’ll take the Haz-Mat team a good hour and a half to get here from Tucson, we should be able to figure out the address between now and then. Maybe somebody with half a brain can look his address up in the phone book!”

I punched the “Talk” button on the microphone. As I gave Tica the necessary information, it occurred to me that I wasn’t the only person in that speeding Blazer who should have invested a few hundred bucks in a Dale Carnegie course.

With lights flashing and siren blaring, we screamed into the old part of town and turned right up a narrow, one-lane strip of steep pavement. The sign said “O.K. Street,” but there was nothing okay about it. Calling it a goat path would have been closer to the mark than calling it a street. Then, about the time I was sure the Blazer was going to scrape off both its mirrors, we met a vehicle coming down. A silver-haired lady, driving a Pontiac Grand Prix with Nebraska plates, backed out of a parking lot beside what was evidently a small hotel and started in our direction.

She looked a bit surprised when she realized a cop car with flashing lights and a blaring siren was aimed right at her, but instead of stopping or returning to the parking lot, she kept right on coming, motioning for us to move over and get out of her way. Somehow Joanna managed to do exactly that, tucking the Blazer into an almost nonexistent wide spot.

“For God’s sake!” I demanded. “Isn’t this a one-way street?”

“For everyone but the tourists!” Joanna muttered. The woman in the Pontiac edged past us, waving cheerfully and smiling as she went. “Lights and sirens must not mean the same thing in Nebraska.”

“Sheriff Brady,” the dispatcher called, interrupting Joanna in midgripe.

Not wanting her to take her eyes off the road, I picked up the mike. “Beaumont here. What is it?”

“City of Bisbee wants to know what’s going on, so I told them. They’re sending backup for you. And I have that address on Youngblood Hill for you now.”

Joanna Brady didn’t look as though she needed to be told where she was going, and right that minute I was too busy hanging on for dear life to take notes.

“As long as the Haz-Mat guys have it,” I said. “I think we’re fine.”

We came to a real wide spot in the road where several cars were parked at haphazard angles around the perimeter. Joanna threw the Blazer into “Park” and jammed on the emergency brake. She paused long enough to retrieve a pair of worn tennis shoes from the floor of the backseat. After changing shoes, she leaped out of the car and started down a winding street that was even steeper than the one we’d been on before. The posted sign here said “Youngblood Hill.” Glad to be ignorant of the street name’s origin, I tagged after her.

The pockmarked, broken pavement was scattered with loose gravel. The surface was an open invitation for broken legs. Or ankles. It was all I could do to keep from falling ass over teakettle.

Halfway down the hill was a blind curve. I expected Youngblood Hill to be a one-way street. No such luck. Rounding the curve, we came face-to-face with a city of Bisbee patrol car nosing its way uphill. About that time Joanna Brady turned left, darted under an archway, through a wrought-iron gate, and up an impossibly narrow concrete stairway. I went after her. Taking both age and altitude into consideration, I didn’t even try to keep up. The best I hoped for was not to die in the process.

Hearing footsteps behind me, I looked back. Right on my heels came a beefy young man in a blue uniform. The Bisbee City cop had left his idling patrol car sitting in the middle of the street and charged after us. He outweighed me by forty pounds, but by the time we reached a small terrace of a yard, he was only a step or two behind me. My chest was about to burst open. He hadn’t broken a sweat.

The new arrival was Officer Frank Rojas. I stood aside long enough to let him hurtle past me and catch up with Sheriff Brady. Since we were obviously inside city boundaries, I expected an immediate outbreak of jurisdictional warfare. I’ve seen it happen often enough. I know of numerous occasions in the Seattle area where bad guys have gotten away because cops from neighboring suburbs weren’t necessarily on speaking terms. In Bisbee, Arizona, that was evidently not the case.

“What do you need, Sheriff Brady?” Rojas asked.

“To secure the residence,” she gasped. That made me feel a little better. At least I wasn’t the only one having trouble breathing.

“Anyone inside?”

Joanna glanced at two men who stood together in the far corner of the tiny front yard – a rangy African-American in a T-shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes, and a white man in full Sunday go-to-meeting attire – gray suit, white shirt, and tie. His once highly polished shoes now sported a layer of red dust. I assumed the guy in the suit to be the attorney, Burton Kimball. That meant the other one was Bobo Jenkins, Latisha Wall’s boyfriend.

The man was big and tough, and I wondered how he felt about being called Bobo. Someone tried to pin that handle on me once when I was in fifth grade. I creamed the guy. I hoped Mr. Jenkins didn’t mind. Despite Archie’s description of Bobo as a sort of gentle giant, Mr. Jenkins looked as though he was more than capable of taking care of himself when it came to physical combat.

“No,” Joanna told Rojas. “As far as I know, no one’s inside.”

“What seems to be the problem?”

“Dangerous chemicals,” she answered. “We’ve called for the Haz-Mat team from Tucson. You take the back of the house, Frankie. Make sure no one enters. And whatever you do, don’t go near the dryer vent.”

Frank Rojas didn’t question her orders. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. Without another word, off he went.