Partner In Crime

Five

JOANNA AND FRANK MONTOYA FINALLY HAD their much-delayed morning briefing right after lunch. Late in the afternoon Joanna was boning up for her Friday-morning appearance before the board of supervisors meeting when Detective Carbajal knocked on her door.

“How’s it going?” Joanna asked.

Jaime shook his head and sank into a chair. “I just finished preliminary interviews with Dee Canfield and Bobo Jenkins. Bobo stopped by so Casey could print him. I caught up with him while he was here.”

“What do you think?” Joanna asked.

“Gut instinct?”

Joanna nodded.

“You may be convinced he’s in the clear on this, but I’m not sure I agree.”

“Fair enough,” Joanna said. “We’ll agree to disagree. Did anything more turn up at the crime scene?”

“No. I canvassed the entire neighborhood. No one saw or heard anything out of line until the EMTs showed up and started breaking down the door. What about you?”

She told him everything she had learned earlier from both Bobo Jenkins and Dee Canfield.

“Since she’s going ahead with the show,” Jaime said, “I guess I should be there. One of the guests may be able to fill in some of our blanks on the victim.”

“Speaking of blanks,” Joanna said. “Have you talked to that guy up in Washington?”

“O.H. Todd?” Jaime replied. “I’ve tried. I’ve called his number three different times. All I get is voice mail. So far he hasn’t bothered to call me back.”

“The man must have a boss,” Joanna said. “What’s his name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Find out, Jaime, and get me his number,” Joanna said. “I’ll give him a call. Maybe the big boss can set a fire under Mr. Todd’s butt.”

Jaime Carbajal grinned. “Works for me,” he said. He left the room. A few minutes later he returned with a slip of paper.

“Good luck,” he said, handing it over.

Joanna glanced at her watch. “It’s already after five. He’s probably gone.”

“Try anyway,” Jaime said.

Picking up her phone, Joanna dialed. “Attorney general’s office,” a woman’s voice answered.

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Ross Alan Connors,” Joanna said. “This is Sheriff Joanna Brady of Cochise County, Arizona.”

“May I say what this is concerning?”

“Latisha Wall.”

There was a noticeable pause. “One moment, please.”

As soon as the operator went away, canned classical music began playing, interrupted periodically by a recorded voice apologizing for the length of the wait and assuring Joanna that her call was very important to them and that someone would be with her as soon as possible. The third time she heard the equally canned apology she was ready to blow.

Five minutes later a live voice finally returned to the line. “I’m sorry. Mr. Connors is in a meeting right now.”

“Any idea what time he’ll be through with it?”

“None at all. Sorry.”

Like hell you’re sorry, Joanna thought. “What about O.H. Todd?” she asked. “Is he available?”

“He’s also in a meeting.”

The same one, no doubt.

“Would you like to be connected to Mr. Connors’s voice mail?” the woman asked.

“No, thank you,” Joanna said. “I’d like you to personally take a message. Tell him Sheriff Joanna Brady needs to speak to him, urgently. Detective Jaime Carbajal, the investigator working Latisha Wall’s death, has so far been unable to reach Mr. Todd. Obviously, time is of the essence.” After leaving her office, home, and cell-phone numbers, Joanna hung up. Across the desk from her Jaime Carbajal scowled.

“You got the same treatment I did,” he said. “Don’t hold your breath waiting for a callback.”

HARRY IGNATIUS BALL HAD TURNED off the light in his office and was about to close the door and head home when his phone rang. Muttering irritably under his breath, he returned to his desk and grabbed up the receiver.

“Special Unit B,” he said. “Ball speaking.”

“Harry, glad I caught you,” O.H. Todd said, sounding relieved. “I just got cut loose from a meeting that lasted all afternoon.”

Harry rattled his car keys, hoping O.H. would get the message. “What’s up?” he asked.

“How’s Beaumont doing?”

“What do you mean, how’s he doing?”

“Is he up to speed?” O.H. asked. “Ready to send out on a case?”

Harry snorted. “He was ready for that the day he got here. Why?”

“We’ve developed a problem down in Arizona. A place called Bisbee. Ross may need to ship someone down to check it out.” Todd paused. “What can you tell me about Beaumont?” he added. “About him personally, I mean. What kind of guy is he?”

“From what I’ve seen so far,” Harry replied, “he isn’t exactly a team player.”

“Maybe that’s okay,” O.H. Todd said thoughtfully. “In fact, for this case, that may be just what the doctor ordered.”

IT WAS ALMOST SEVEN when Joanna finally pulled into the yard at High Lonesome Ranch. The house was dark and locked up tight. Once inside, she discovered that Jenny and Butch had evidently already eaten. A single place setting remained on the table in the breakfast nook. In the middle of the plate was a note from Butch saying he had taken Jenny back into town for a play rehearsal and that there was a green chili casserole waiting for her in the fridge. All she had to do was heat it up.

After locking her weapons away and changing clothes, Joanna dished up a serving of the casserole and put the plate in the microwave. “Looks like I’m in the doghouse, too,” she said to Sadie and Tigger, who sprawled comfortably on the kitchen floor. Other than thumping their tails in unison, the dogs made no further comment.

Joanna picked halfheartedly at the casserole – a dish that was usually one of her favorites. All the while she couldn’t help wondering if Butch was still mad at her about the model train situation. He said he wasn’t, but he still must be, she surmised. After all, he hadn’t bothered calling to remind her about having to eat early due to Jenny’s rehearsal. If he had, she could have come home earlier rather than waiting for Ross Connors to have the common decency to return her call. Now Joanna was home by herself when she didn’t especially want to be alone.

No longer hungry, she divvied the remaining casserole on her plate into two portions and plopped them into the dog dishes. Uncharacteristically, Sadie showed no interest in the proffered treat. She stayed where she was, allowing Tigger to lick both dishes clean.

Joanna leaned down and patted the bluetick hound on her smooth, round forehead. “We’re both a little out of sorts today, aren’t we, girl,” she said.

Joanna spent the evening catching up on reading, watching the clock, and waiting for the telephone to ring. It was after nine before Butch’s Subaru finally pulled into the yard. Joanna and the dogs went out to greet the new arrivals.

“How was rehearsal?” Joanna asked.

“Awful,” Jenny said. “The show’s just two weeks away and most of the boys still don’t know their lines. It’s going to be a gigantic flop, Mom. I wish Miss Stammer would cancel it. We’re all going to be up on stage looking stupid.”

“It’ll be fine, Jen,” Joanna reassured her, tousling Jenny’s blond curls. Behind Jenny’s back, Butch rolled his eyes and shook his head as if to say Jenny’s assessment was far closer to the truth than any motherly platitudes.

Jenny took the dogs and went into the house. Joanna turned to Butch. “Is it really that bad?”

“I’ll say,” Butch said.

Joanna changed the subject. “You should have called and reminded me to come home early.”

Butch reached into the car and removed the roll of blueprints that, these days, seemed to be a natural extension of his arm. When he turned to reply, he wasn’t smiling.

“I had to remind you to come to lunch today,” he said. “I figured you were a big enough girl that you could decide when to come home for dinner on your own.”

Ouch, Joanna thought.

She followed him into the house and locked the back door once she was inside. Butch put the blueprints on the dining room table. Joanna thought he would unroll them and pore over them as he did almost every night. Instead he said, “I think I’ll turn in.”

“You just got home,” Joanna objected. “Don’t you want to talk?”

Butch shook his head. “I’m beat. Quentin and I have a meeting first thing in the morning. Night.”

He gave Joanna a halfhearted peck on the cheek and left her standing in the middle of the dining room. Rebuffed and hurt, Joanna returned to the kitchen. In a bid for sympathy, she had wanted to tell her husband about her day. She had wanted Butch to give her a loving pat and tell her that of course Ross Connors from Washington State was an unmitigated jerk. But Butch Dixon had surprised her. He had given her a cold shoulder rather than one to cry on.

Joanna sulked in the kitchen for a while. Then, wanting to talk and thinking Butch must still be awake, she crept into the bedroom, only to find him snoring softly. So much for that! she thought.

It was midnight before she finally went to bed and much later than that before she fell asleep. And overslept. If it hadn’t been for the telephone ringing at ten after eight the next morning, she might have missed the board of supervisors meeting altogether.

“Hello,” she mumbled into the phone. Staring wide-eyed at the clock, she staggered out of bed. The caller ID box next to the phone said the number was unavailable. Taking the phone with her, she headed for the bathroom.

“Sheriff Brady?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“My name’s Harry Eyeball and-”

“Look, mister,” she said, cutting him off. “If this is some kind of joke-”

“Believe me, Sheriff Brady, it’s no joke. My name is Harry, initial I, Ball. I’m with the Washington State Attorney General’s Special Homicide Investigation Team. I’m returning the call you made to Ross Connors yesterday afternoon.”

“Oh, yes,” Joanna said. “I called about Latisha Wall.”

“Making any progress?”

Joanna bristled. “My call was to Mr. Connors,” Joanna said. “I’m not in the habit of discussing ongoing cases with people I don’t know.”

“I just told you-”

“Yes, yes, I know. Your name is Harry Ball. But I don’t know you from Adam’s Off Ox, Mr. Ball,” she said, resorting to one of her father-in-law’s favorite expressions. “My homicide detective, Jaime Carbajal, has been trying to contact Mr. Connors’s office for information regarding this case. Up to now there’s been no response.”

“So Latisha Wall was murdered, then?”

Joanna ignored the question. “What Detective Carbajal needs, I believe, is for someone to fax Latisha Wall’s information to us so we’ll know where to start. All we have so far is her real name and her family’s address in Georgia.”

“That file isn’t faxable, ma’am,” Harry Ball told her.

“What do you mean, it isn’t faxable?” Joanna returned. “What is it, chiseled in granite?”

“It’s confidential. We have no assurances that it might not fall into unauthorized hands in the process of transmitting it.”

“You’re implying that someone in my department might leak it?” Joanna demanded. “And why is it so damned confidential? Let me remind you, Mr. Ball: Latisha Wall is already dead. If she was in a witness protection program you guys set up, I’d have to say you didn’t do such a great job of it. And I still need the information.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, ma’am. We’re sending it to you.”

“How? By pony express?”

Joanna glared at the clock, whose hands were moving inexorably forward. The board of supervisors meeting would start at nine sharp. Even skipping a shower, it was going to be close.

“One of the members of my team, an investigator named J.P. Beaumont, will be delivering it in person. Once he does so, Mr. Connors would like him to stay on as an observer.”

“A what?”

“An observer. This is an important case with long-term, serious financial implications for the state of Washington,” Harry Ball continued. “We wouldn’t want someone to inadvertently let something slip.”

Joanna was dumbfounded. “Let something slip?” she deman-ded. “Connors thinks my department is so incompetent that he’s sending someone to bird-dog my investigation? I don’t believe this! You can give that boss of yours a message from me. Tell him he has a hell of a lot of nerve!”

Slamming down the phone, she hopped into the shower after all. She was too steamed not to. Her hair was still damp and her makeup haphazardly applied when she slid into a chair next to Frank Montoya at the board of supervisors’ Melody Lane conference room fifty minutes later. Frank glanced at his watch and sighed with relief when he saw her. The board secretary was already reading the minutes of the previous meeting.

“What happened?” he whispered.

“I overslept.”

“Oh,” Frank said. “Is that all? From the look on your face, I thought it was something serious.”

Sheriff Joanna Brady hated having to attend board of supervisors meetings. For routine matters, Frank Montoya usually attended in her stead. This meeting, however, was anything but routine. The general downturn in the national economy had hit hard in Cochise County, requiring budget cuts in every aspect of county government. Today, with the board’s cost-cutting knives aimed at the sheriff’s department, she and Frank had decided they should both appear. Within minutes, Joanna knew they’d made a wise decision.

The newest member of the board, Charles Longworth Neighbors, was a man no one ever referred to as Charley – at least not to his face. He was a full-bird colonel who had retired from the army at Fort Huachuca a year or so earlier. He had now been appointed to fill out another board member’s unexpired term of office.

Since Charles Neighbors was career army, the United States government had seen to it that he had earned a Harvard MBA while in the service. Now in civilian life, he loved to wield his relatively recent degree as a double-edged sword. He had no compunction about inflicting everything he had learned on the unwashed masses in every branch of Cochise County government, one reluctant department at a time. Today he homed in on the sheriff’s department, going over budget items line by line, convinced that there were substantial cuts that could and should be made.

“If it can be done, it should be done,” he told Joanna, with a patronizing smile that made her want to grind her teeth.

Three and a half grueling hours later, she and Frank escaped the boardroom, having taken a 10-percent-across-the-board hit. She waited until they were safely outside the building and out of earshot before she exploded.

“If it can be done, it should be done,” she grumbled, doing a credible job of imitating Charles Longworth’s pedantic, school-principal-like delivery. “If he had said that one more time, I think I would have thrown something! Of course, his should-bes are all one-way streets. Budget items are to be taken out and never put back in.”

“Now, now,” Frank counseled, “give the man a break. He’s new and trying to get a grip on how things work. Supervising county government has to be different from being an officer in the army.”

“Right,” Joanna agreed. “We can’t afford two-hundred-dollar toilet seats. And then there’s Harry I. Ball.”

“What hairy eyeball?” Frank asked. “I don’t remember anyone saying a word about that.”

“Not ‘hairy eyeball,’ “ Joanna returned. “That’s a man’s name,” she said, reading off the scrap of paper she had stuffed in the pocket of her blazer. “First name is Harry, middle initial I, and last name Ball. I made him spell it out for me.”

“Who the hell is he?”

“Some high mucky-muck with the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. He called me at home this morning when I should have been on my way to work.” She didn’t add that Harry Ball’s unwelcome call was the only reason she hadn’t been even later to the board of supervisors meeting.

“What did he want?”

“His office is sending someone to bring us Latisha Wall’s file because the material is too volatile to be sent any other way than in person. Not only that, whoever they send is supposed to hang around and keep an eye on us – an observer to bird-dog us the whole time we’re doing the Latisha Wall investigation. I believe the exact phrase he used is that his boss didn’t want anyone to ‘let something slip.’ The good folks up in Washington are evidently convinced that our department is totally incapable of conducting an adequate homicide investigation. If you ask me, Mr. Ball sounded exactly like some of those high-handed yahoos from the other Washington, and just as screwed up.”

“When does this so-called observer arrive?” Frank asked mildly.

“Who knows?” Joanna shot back. “And who cares? His name’s…” She paused again to consult her note. “J.P. Beaumont. All I can say is, Mr. Beaumont had better stand back and stay out of my way.”

Frank shook his head and unlocked the door to his waiting Civvie. “Want to stop off and grab some lunch before we head back to the office?” he asked. “Something tells me you’re running on empty.”

Joanna gave him a sidelong glance. “What makes you say that? Just because I’m ranting and raving?”

Frank nodded. “The thought crossed my mind.”

“We’ve been working together for too long,” Joanna said, grinning in spite of herself. “And lunch is probably a good idea. Butch left the house early this morning. I ran late and skipped breakfast.”

“I thought so,” Frank said.

Minutes later Frank and Joanna turned their matching Crown Victorias into Chico’s Taco Stand in Bisbee’s Don Luis neighborhood. The building that housed Chico’s had once served as the office of a junkyard. The wrecked cars had all disappeared, and now the building itself had been transformed. The tiny restaurant consisted of a counter where people lined up to place their orders. In addition to the counter’s four stools, there were five booths that consisted of sagging, cigarette-scarred red vinyl benches with matching chrome-and-chipped-Formica tabletops. All of the furnishings had been purchased secondhand from a soon-to-be-demolished diner in Tucson. Several dusty, fading piñatas and a few unframed bullfight posters provided what passed for interior decor.

Fortunately, Chico’s lunchtime clientele was in search of good food rather than trendy surroundings. Customers lined up daily for some of Chico Rodriguez’s signature tacos, made from a recipe passed down from his great-grandmother to his grandmother, then to his mother, all of whom had spent decades cooking in various Bisbee-area Mexican eateries. When the last of the Rodriguez women retired, Chico had followed in their footsteps and opened his own establishment, one where his mother still filled in occasionally so Chico could have a day off.

Joanna and Frank went to the counter and placed their order. Taking their drinks, they retreated to a recently vacated booth, where they were obliged to clear their own table. Minutes later, Chico himself delivered their orders. The food came on paper plates accompanied by paper-napkin-wrapped plastic utensils. The shredded-beef tacos, made from crunchy homemade corn tortillas, were piled high with chopped lettuce. The lettuce was sprinkled with a generous helping of finely grated sharp cheese and topped by a dollop of tomato salsa that was more sweet than hot. It was that special combination of ingredients that made Chico’s tacos taste better than any Joanna had eaten elsewhere.

As she took her first bite, Frank grinned at her. “As soon as you’re no longer a raving maniac, tell me more about your call from the Washington State Attorney General’s Office and this so-called observer they’re sending.”

“I’ve pretty much told you what I know,” Joanna returned. “The guy’s name is Beaumont. That’s about it.”

“When can we expect him?”

“Tomorrow or Sunday, I suppose,” she said.

“And the purpose of his visit?”

“Other than spying on us and getting in the way? Beats the hell out of me. Like I said before, talking with Mr. Eyeball, as you called him, was like dealing with feds from back east. He fully expected me to spill my guts and tell him everything we know. But that isn’t going to happen, at least not until that file gets here.”

“He didn’t go into any details as to why the state of Washington is so concerned about Latisha Wall’s death?”

“No, and the longer they keep us working in the dark, the easier it’ll be for us to make that slip Harry Ball seems to be expecting.”

Frank jotted himself a note. “When we get back to the office, I’ll go on-line and find out what I can about Ms. Latisha Wall. It must be a pretty high-profile case to garner this much attention from the attorney general’s office. There may be newspaper coverage that will tell us some of what we need to know.”

“Good idea,” Joanna said. “We should also check with Casey and Dave to see how they’re doing with processing all the evidence they brought back from the crime scene.”

Frank nodded and made another note as Joanna finished the second of her two tacos. She was scraping the last of the refritos off her plate when the phone in her purse crowed.

“Hello, boss,” Detective Jaime Carbajal announced when she answered. “Sorry to bother you. Kristin said you were at a board of supervisors meeting. Hope I’m not interrupting.”

“The meeting’s over,” Joanna assured him. “Frank and I stopped off at Chico’s to grab some lunch. What’s up?”

“I still haven’t heard a word from anybody in Washington,” Jaime complained.

Joanna’s laughter barked into the phone. “I have,” she told him. “And I can tell you now, you’re not going to like it. Meet us out at the department. I’ll bring you up to date, and you can do the same.”

Jaime Carbajal was waiting in the outside office when Joanna arrived. As predicted, he was irate at the idea of an outsider prowling around on his turf and messing around in his case.

“What about the opening at Castle Rock Gallery?” Joanna asked when she, Frank, and Jaime had exhausted the topic of Ross Connors’s unconscionable interference.

“I didn’t go,” Jaime replied.

“You didn’t go?” Joanna asked. “Why not?”

“It was canceled. When I got there last night, I found a sign on the door saying the opening had been canceled due to the death of the artist. Sorry for any inconvenience, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Dee Canfield canceled the show after all?” Joanna mused. “She must have come to her senses then. The last I heard she was determined to go through with it. I wonder why she changed her mind…”