Partner In Crime

Eighteen

AFTER DROPPING OFF JOANNA’S BLAZER, I took the Kia and headed for the hotel. It was early Sunday evening. With the weekend over, parking was a little less scarce than it had been the day before. I walked down the hill and up the steps in early evening twilight.

Entering the Copper Queen, I was intent on going straight to my room and calling Ross Connors, but Cornelia Lester was in the lobby. She caught my eye and flagged me down before I could make it to the elevator. She sat on one of the deep leather couches before a cup-and-saucer-laden coffee table. Walking toward her, I realized she wasn’t alone. A grim-faced Bobo Jenkins was there, with her, along with a blond-haired woman in a business suit. The blonde appeared to be crying.

“You know Mr. Jenkins, don’t you?” Connie asked.

“Yes, I do.”

Bobo Jenkins and I shook hands.

“And this is Serenity Granger,” Connie continued. “She’s Deidre Canfield’s daughter. Serenity, this is Mr. J.P. Beaumont. He’s a special investigator for the Washington State Attorney General’s Office.”

The other murder victim’s daughter, I realized. No wonder she’s in tears.

Serenity Granger pulled herself together. “Hello,” she said.

“I’m so sorry about your mother,” I said.

She nodded. “Thank you,” she murmured.

“Won’t you sit down?” Cornelia Lester asked.

What I wanted to say was, No, thanks. I have to go up to my room and make some phone calls. But I didn’t want to be rude. Here were three grieving people, two black and one white – all of them bound together by tragedy and loss – who had found the strength of character to offer comfort to one another in a time of trouble.

I understood the kind of limbo they were in. They were stuck between knowing their loved one was gone and being able to deal with it. Their lives had been put on hold by officialdom. There would have to be questions and interviews and autopsies before bodies could be released. Only then would they be free to observe the familiar rituals of funerals and memorial services that precede any kind of return to normalcy.

Under those circumstances, it was impossible for me to walk away no matter how much I might have wanted to. I sat.

Cornelia Lester was clearly in charge. “Can we get you something?” she asked. “Coffee, tea, a drink? The waitstaff has been kind enough to serve us out here. It was far too noisy in the bar, and we weren’t interested in food.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Nothing for me.”

“Have you heard if they’re finished with Mr. Jenkins’s house yet?” Cornelia asked. “Sheriff Brady said someone would let him know when it’s safe for him to return home. So far he’s heard nothing.”

That was hardly surprising. Once the second call came in summoning Joanna to the new Haz-Mat site, the sheriff had a readily understandable excuse for not getting back to Bobo Jenkins. I also knew that, although the Haz-Mat guys were gone, Casey Ledford, the fingerprint tech, probably hadn’t had a chance to go through Bobo’s house yet, either.

“She’s pretty busy,” I said. “Another call came in.”

Bobo’s eye drilled into mine. “You mean I can’t go home yet?”

“I don’t think so. You’d probably be better off renting a room. Maybe you should bunk in here with the rest of us.”

There was plenty I could have told them, but not without raising Joanna Brady’s considerable ire. I sat for a while making appropriately meaningless small talk. When a waitress from the dining room came out to refill coffee cups, she asked me if I wanted something. I took that as a sign I had done my bit and was free to escape.

“If you’ll excuse me,” I said. “I need to make some phone calls.”

As soon as I shut the door to my room, I hurried over to the desk. I dragged the raggedy list of Ross Connors’s telephone numbers out of my wallet and dialed his home number first. I recognized Francine Connors’s voice as soon as she answered the phone.

“Is Ross there?” I asked.

“Yes, he is,” she replied. “May I tell him who’s calling, please?”

“Sure,” I said. “Tell him it’s Beau.”

I hate waiting on phones even when it’s on somebody else’s nickel. It seemed like a long time before Ross Connors came on the line, but then again, the AG and I aren’t exactly pals. I had never been invited to his residence down in Olympia, but I assumed from the considerable delay that it had to be a fairly large place with lots of distance between phone jacks. Eventually, Ross’s hearty baritone boomed into my ear.

“Beaumont!” he exclaimed. “What’s the news?”

“Not good, I’m afraid,” I told him. “It’s looking more and more like whoever did this went to great effort to frame Latisha Wall’s boyfriend.”

“Damn!” Ross Connors said.

“But wait,” I added, “there’s more.” I must have sounded for all the world like an agitated announcer hawking television’s latest 1-800 fruitcake invention. “You remember that second homicide I told you about, the one I said could be related?”

“The one Sheriff Brady threw you off?” Connors asked.

“Right. It turns out the second victim was a good friend of Latisha Wall’s. Her name was Deidre Canfield. The prime suspect in that case is a guy named Jack Brampton. Ever heard of him?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Bisbee’s a small town,” I explained. “A snoopy neighbor let on that this Brampton character routinely used a pay phone down near the post office. Our informant was under the impression that Brampton had a girlfriend on the side.”

“Do people do that in small towns?” Connors demanded with a chuckle. “Are they so bored that they have to report on pay phone use, for Crissake? What about cell phones? Do they call in if someone uses one of those, too?”

Right that minute I didn’t feel like explaining the difficulties of cell-phone usage in Bisbee, Arizona. Instead, I forged on. “We suspect that Brampton used one of those phones three times on Thursday, once in the morning and twice in the afternoon, the second time was within minutes of his learning that Cochise County investigators were going to fingerprint him as part of the Latisha Wall investigation.”

“Get to the point,” Connors urged.

“The calls went to someone in Winnetka, Illinois, at a law firm called Maddern, Maddern, and Peek. One of Maddern, Maddern, and Peek’s big-deal clients happens to be UPPI, and Brampton did time in a UPPI facility when he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.”

There was stark silence on the other end of the phone, a silence so complete that I wondered if maybe I’d been disconnected. Finally, Connors said quietly, “There really is a leak, then.”

“No shit,” I agreed.

“I’ll have to bring the feds in,” he added.

It was a statement, not a question. My response should have been an unequivocal and resounding yes, but I said nothing, letting Ross Connors draw his own conclusions. There was another long pause. Finally, he took a deep breath.

“All right, Beau, here’s what we’re going to do. I know how this must look to you, but I’m going to let sleeping dogs lie for another day or so. I don’t want to do anything prematurely. So far this all sounds pretty circumstantial. You keep right on doing whatever it is you’re doing, and keep me posted on anything else that comes up. I’m not going to make my move until after we have rock-solid evidence.”

What more do you want? I wondered.

Thinking about it, I figured Connors needed the extra time to come to terms with his changing reality. It also occurred to me that he might be looking for a way to cover his own butt. Still, the man was my boss, and he was calling the shots. If he wanted to wait for more damning information before nailing his own people, that was entirely up to him.

“Sure,” I said coldly, “I’ll be in touch,” And we signed off.

I put down the phone and gave myself the benefit of a long, hot shower. Then I lay down on the bed with every intention of watching television. I saw a few minutes of 60 Minutes. It wasn’t even dark yet before I was sound asleep.

Anne Corley stopped by to visit and woke me up around three. In the wee small hours of the morning I was once again wide awake and sleepless in Bisbee, Arizona. But I wasn’t mulling over the increasingly complicated aspects of the Latisha Wall and Deidre Canfield cases. No, I was thinking about something else. Someone else. I was thinking about a little girl named Anne, growing up in a house with a developmentally disabled sister she was unable to protect from their pedophile father and with a mother who didn’t believe – who wouldn’t believe – anything of the kind could happen under her own roof.

No wonder the Anne I had known had been so terribly damaged and hurt. She had been an incredibly beautiful but broken bird. No wonder I had loved her.

IT WAS TEN O’CLOCK THAT NIGHT when Joanna Brady finally dragged herself into the house at High Lonesome Ranch. Jenny was already in bed. Joanna was rummaging through the refrigerator for leftovers when she spotted a bottle of champagne and two glasses sitting on the table in the breakfast nook.

A broadly grinning Butch Dixon appeared in the kitchen doorway. “What’s this?” she asked, nodding toward the bottle.

“Nothing much,” he said casually, but Joanna knew at once that wasn’t true. The man looked so pleased with himself she thought he was going to burst.

“What nothing much?” Joanna asked.

“I had a call from an agent today,” he beamed. “Her name is Drew Mabrey, and she wants to represent me. She says she thinks she knows an editor who’s looking for something just like Serve and Protect.”

Joanna slammed the refrigerator door shut, hurried over, and planted a congratulatory kiss on her husband’s lips. “That’s great!” she exclaimed. “Wonderful! What else did he say?”

“She,” Butch corrected. “The agent’s a woman.”

“Did she tell you how good it was?” Joanna continued. “I told you it was good, didn’t I?”

“Yes.” He smiled, heading for the champagne. “I think you did say something to that effect. That it was all right, anyway.”

Joanna glared at him in mock exasperation. “I never said anything of the kind and you know it. Now tell me. What did she say?”

“Like I said before,” he told her, carefully loosening the cork. “Drew loves it and wants to handle it, but there’s a problem.”

“What? Tell me.”

“It’s my name.”

“Your name?” Joanna asked, mystified. “What’s wrong with your name?”

“Drew said she almost didn’t bother to read it because it came under the name F. W. Dixon.”

“So what? Those are your initials. It is your name.”

“But it’s also the pseudonym of the author who wrote the Hardy Boy books, remember?”

“So?”

“Drew said that while she was growing up, she had to go visit her grandmother in Connecticut every summer. Her grandmother kept trying to get her to read her old Hardy Boy mysteries. Drew ended up hating them.”

“So drop the initials then,” Joanna advised Butch. “Write under the name of Frederick Dixon. What’s wrong with that?”

“There’s a difficulty there, too,” Butch said. With a practiced hand he poured champagne into the glasses, doing it slowly enough that no liquid bubbled over the sides. “Drew says that with all the humor in the story it’s really more of a cozy than a police procedural. She says male readers don’t buy cozies; women do, and most cozies are written by women.”

“What are you supposed to do, then?” Joanna asked.

“She wants me to change my name to something ‘less gender-specific’ were the words she used. Something like Kendall Dixon or Dale Dixon or Gayle Dixon.”

“The agent wants you to pretend to be a woman to fool your readers?”

“And the editor, too,” Butch said. “She wants me to pick a name before she submits the manuscript to anyone.”

“What do you do when it comes time for an author photo?” Joanna asked.

Giving her the champagne, Butch shrugged. “I give up. I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

Joanna raised her glass in a toast. “Well, here’s to you, then,” she said with a smile “Or to whoever you turn out to be.”

“So tell me about your day,” Butch said as they settled into the breakfast nook to sip their champagne. “I knew you’d never make it to church.”

WHEN JOANNA ARRIVED AT WORK the next morning, Kristin Gregovich was nowhere to be seen, but the conference room down the hall was already crowded. Frank Montoya, Ernie Carpenter, and Jaime Carbajal were seated around the table. J.P. Beaumont, however, was among the missing.

“Welcome home, Ernie,” Joanna said, making her way to her usual chair. “Turns out we need you.”

“So I hear,” he said.

For the next forty-five minutes they each briefed Detective Carpenter on everything that had happened. Then, when Jaime left for the medical examiner’s office and Ernie went to handle the interviews with Eddie and Marcus Verdugo, Joanna retreated to her own office. She was surprised Kristin hadn’t called in to say she would be late. Nevertheless, having worked all weekend long, Joanna appreciated the absence of that first load of morning mail. It meant her clean desk could stay that way awhile longer.

Reaching for her briefcase, she withdrew the first thing that came to hand – the envelope containing the Anne Rowland Corley materials. The first article she removed from the envelope was the one from the Denver Post titled:

THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES

CAN BE DEADLIER THAN THE MALE

Conventional wisdom holds that serial killers are usually disaffected white males. But what happens when women turn deadly? How do they differ from their male counterparts, and how are they treated by the criminal-justice system?

In this series of six articles, award-winning Denver Post staff writer Susan DePew focuses on six notorious female killers, each of whom escaped detection far longer than she should have due to the fact that law-enforcement agents weren’t looking for murderers from the second sex.

Today’s installment deals with Arizona copper heiress Anne Rowland Corley, whose jet-set lifestyle underpinned a decades-long pursuit of misguided vigilante justice, which ultimately ended in her own death as well as in the deaths of at least two innocent people.

On a sunny May morning six years ago when Anne Rowland Corley married her second husband, Jonas Piedmont Beaumont, the groom was a homicide detective with the Seattle Police Department. The bride told the presiding minister that she intended to continue using the name of her first husband, Milton Corley, a Phoenix-area psychologist who had died several years earlier.

Hours after the wedding ceremony in one of Seattle’s waterfront public parks, Anne Rowland Corley was dead of a gunshot wound received during a fatal shoot-out with her new husband. Her death was subsequently ruled self-defense. It was only afterward that the truth about Anne Rowland Corley’s life of homicidal vengeance began to surface.

Serial killers often manifest their murderous tendencies early on. Stories abound of how an adolescent history of torturing and killing small animals is an early indicator of a troubled youth who may well end up becoming a serial killer. But Anne Rowland Corley skipped that intermediate step. At age twelve, she went straight for the gusto and allegedly murdered her father. Not that she was ever convicted or even tried for that offense.

Roger Rowland was the well-heeled heir to a pioneering Arizona copper-mining fortune who carried on a family tradition of hands-on involvement in the mining industry by moving his young family – a wife, Anita, and two daughters, Patricia and Anne – to Bisbee, Arizona, where he oversaw one of the family holdings.

Patty, the older of the two and developmentally disabled, died at age thirteen in what the Cochise County coroner’s report declared “an accidental fall” in the family home. A few days later, Roger Rowland was dead as well, as a result of what was officially termed “a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

That double family tragedy was made worse when, prior to her father’s funeral, Rowland’s younger daughter, Anne, rocked the official boat by insisting that she had shot her father because he had been molesting her sister. The molestation allegations were never substantiated. Instead, twelve-year-old Anne Rowland was shipped off to a private mental institution in Phoenix, Arizona, where she remained for more than a decade.

While hospitalized, Anne Rowland came under the care of Dr. Milton Corley. She was released shortly after her mother’s death, and, at age twenty-four, she married Dr. Corley. She remained with him until his death seven years later. Corley suffered from colon cancer but he, like Anne Rowland Corley’s father, died of what was subsequently ruled to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Dr. Myra Collins, a longtime friend and colleague of Milton Corley, says that even at the time she doubted Corley would have taken his own life, but no one was interested in hearing what she had to say. They still aren’t.

”By that time Anne was the sole heir to her father’s fortune,” Dr. Collins stated. “She also picked up a nice piece of change when Milton died. She had the financial resources to hire high-powered attorneys and to get away with murder, which I continue to believe to this day is exactly what she did.”

When asked if she thought Anne Rowland Corley was responsible for her father’s death years earlier, Dr. Collins replied, “Anne always claimed she was the one who killed him. No amount of so-called treatment ever made her retract that statement. She was a smart, beautiful, and utterly ruthless young woman. I never had any reason to doubt what she said.”

After Milton Corley’s death, his widow lived a shadowy, vagabond lifestyle, never staying long in any one place. Her bills were sent to Scottsdale-area attorney Ralph Ames, who handled her finances and paid the bills as they came in, leaving her free to come and go as she wished.

People who had dealings with her during the next ten years said she looked like a movie star, drove a series of bright red Porsches, and stayed only in first-class hotels. It is also thought that she left behind a trail of murder.

Her victims were most likely people free on bail and awaiting trial in cases of suspected child abuse. Local law enforcement agencies, freed of the necessity of trying, convicting, and incarcerating yet another pedophile, were usually happy to close the books on those cases after only cursory investigations.

After Anne Rowland Corley’s death, there is some sketchy evidence that her widowed husband and her longtime attorney contacted several jurisdictions around the country, quietly closing several of those far-flung cases.

In one of them, Jake Morris, a forty-six-year-old drifter suspected of kidnapping and raping a six-year-old girl, was shot dead in Bangor, Maine. In another, twenty-three-year-old Lawrence Kenneth Addison, suspected of luring and molesting numerous children who lived near his parents’ home in Red Bluff, California, disappeared on a sunny Friday afternoon. His body was found two days later at a deserted I-5 rest area.

In both of those cases, witnesses mentioned something about a stranger – a good-looking woman – who was seen talking to both victims shortly before their deaths, but no one ever bothered to track her down. She was never thought to be a viable subject. Since there was no communication between the two affected jurisdictions, no one ever made the connection or noticed the similarities.

”That doesn’t surprise me,” Dr. Collins says. “There are plenty of male chauvinist homicide detectives out there who don’t believe women are smart enough or tough enough to be killers.”

Both Anne Rowland Corley’s widower and her long-term attorney refused to respond to repeated requests for interviews in conjunction with this story. Perhaps the possibility of a series of wrongful-death suits contributed to their reticence.

Anne Rowland Corley usually dispatched her victims with a single bullet to the head. She believed in being up close and personal with her victims. Once her identity was established, some local police investigators in those far-flung cases admitted that she had befriended officers in both locations as a way of gaining information and access to her intended victims. She did so by claiming to be writing a book on convicted child molesters, although no such manuscript has ever surfaced.

Her use of subterfuge may well account for the ongoing conspiracy of silence on the part of many police agencies involved. Although there are no doubt other cases to which Anne Rowland Corley was connected, it has been impossible to track down any additional ones in which she was directly involved. Only a diligent search of public records finally uncovered the list of acknowledged victims that accompanies this story. It’s likely there are other victims whose cases remain unsolved.

Six years ago, as a homicide detective for Seattle PD, J.P. Beaumont was investigating the abuse and death of a five-year-old child, Angela Barstogi. Suspects in that case included the child’s mother, Suzanne Barstogi, and the mother’s spiritual adviser, Michael Brodie, a dictatorial, self-styled religious leader whose followers in a sect called Faith Tabernacle did whatever he required of them.

Like his counterparts in Bangor, Maine, and Red Bluff, California, Detective Beaumont found himself befriended by a disturbingly beautiful woman who expressed an interest in the case. Shortly thereafter, the two prime suspects were found shot to death in a Seattle-area church. A day later, a man who turned out to be the real killer in the Angela Barstogi homicide investigation was also found murdered. Hours later, Anne Rowland Corley herself was shot dead.

”This was clearly a woman who felt violated and betrayed by the very people who should have protected her,” says August Benson, professor of criminal psychology at the University of Colorado. “When the people who should have offered protection failed her, Anne Rowland Corley took matters into her own hands.”

Joanna paused in her reading and glanced at the accompanying photo and the sidebar. The Anne Rowland Corley pictured in a posed black-and-white portrait was a lovely young woman with long dark hair and a reserved smile.

No wonder cops talked to her, Joanna thought. And no wonder J.P. Beaumont fell so hard.

Joanna was about to return to her reading when the phone rang. “Sheriff Brady?” Tica Romero, the day-shift dispatcher, asked.

“Yes. What’s up?”

“We’ve got a situation unfolding just west of Miracle Valley, out by Palominas. An unidentified intruder walked up to what he thought was an unoccupied house. He broke in and stole some food from the kitchen of Paul and Billyann Lozier’s place on River Trail Road. Then he went out to a corral, saddled up one of their horses, and took off. Billyann’s mother, Alma Wingate, was in an upstairs bedroom and saw the whole thing. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a phone with her at the time and couldn’t call 911 until after he left.”

“Undocumented alien?” Joanna asked.

“I don’t think so,” Tica replied. “For one thing, the guy on the horse seemed to be headed south, not north. For another, from the description Mrs. Wingate gave me, the suspect might very well be the guy on our APB. She said he was tall and skinny, with a single gray braid hanging down the middle of his back.”

“You’re right,” Joanna breathed. “Sounds like Jack Brampton.”

“I’ve got units on their way,” Tica continued, “but they’re clear over by Benson. It’ll take time for them to reach the scene. The problem is, the border fence is only four miles away, and it looks like that’s where the perp is headed. As of now, he’s got a ten-minute head start.”

Joanna Brady was already on her feet. “Give me the address,” she urged. “We’ll get on this right away. I’m a lot closer than Benson. I’ll take a couple of cars and a squad of officers along with me. Thanks for letting me know, Tica. And how about calling out Terry Gregovich and Spike? If we lose him, Spike may be able to track him down.”

“Will do,” Tica said.

Pulling on her Kevlar vest, Joanna raced to the conference room. “Okay, guys,” she announced. “On the double. Somebody who looks like Jack Brampton just stole a horse from a corral between Palominas and Miracle Valley. According to an eyewitness, the guy who did it is headed for the Mexican border. Let’s get rolling.”

I CAME DRAGGING IN LATE, feeling like hell and ashamed to think that I had overslept – again. By the time I showed up, I had already missed the morning briefing. Frank Montoya introduced me to a guy named Ernie Carpenter, Detective Carbajal’s homicide counterpart, who had evidently just finished interviewing the two little boys who had found Dee Canfield’s body.

Ernie Carpenter was around my age, which made him by far the oldest officer I had met in the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department. He was a big bear of a man with a pair of bushy eyebrows and a knuckle-crushing handshake. In other words, Ernie was my kind of guy. After introductions were out of the way, Frank Montoya passed both Ernie and me two tall stacks of computer-generated printouts.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Background on your friends at UPPI,” Frank told me. “I downloaded it from the Internet and thought you might find it interesting. They’re even more litigious than I thought they were when we found out about that law firm in Illinois yesterday.”

As I settled in to read, I realized this was information I should and could have had from the beginning. If Ross Connors had wanted to keep a lid on things, he couldn’t have chosen better when he entrusted the problem to Harry I. Ball and me. Of the two of us, I’d be hard-pressed to decide which one was less likely to go surfing the Internet.

But, as Frank Montoya said, the material was interesting. UPPI had ventured into prison construction and management when the field was booming, but whoever drew up their business plan had failed to predict the sudden drop in crime at the end of the nineties that would leave them holding thousands of unoccupied and shoddily built prison beds.

To make up for their own bad planning, they had tried to staunch the flow of red ink by filing breach-of-contract suits in twelve different states, all of them still pending. Although one article hinted that at least one UPPI executive was suspected of having links to organized crime, no firm connections had ever been established.

Lost in the material, I paid no attention as people came and went from the conference room. Ernie Carpenter and I were the only ones left when Joanna Brady burst in a while later to tell us that something was going down at a place called Palominas. When she first mentioned a stolen horse, I thought she was joking. But as soon as she said the suspected horse thief was most likely Jack Brampton, Ernie and I dropped what we were doing and headed for the door.

I was two steps down the hallway when she stopped me. “Wait a minute, Beau,” she said. “Where’s your vest?”

“Not on me.”

“You’d better go see Frank Montoya then,” she said. “You’re sure as hell not riding along without one.”

“But…” I began.

“No buts,” she said. “My way or the highway.”

With that, she turned and sprinted away, leaving me with a whole mouthful of unspoken arguments still superglued to my tongue.