Dead Wrong (2 page)

“How long ago did it happen?” she
asked.

“A border patrol officer called it in just a
few minutes ago,” Tica answered. “Detectives Carbajal
and Carpenter are already on their way. So’s Dave
Hollicker.”

Dave was Joanna’s senior crime scene
investigator. Jaime Carbajal and Ernie Carpenter, sometimes known
as the Double Cs, comprised Joanna’s single team of homicide
detectives. All three officers were tremendously overworked. Joanna
had planned on adding another CSI, and she had wanted to promote
two patrol unit deputies to detectives, so Ernie and Jaime could
have worked with the new guys while they learned the ropes.
Unfortunately the War on Terror had intervened. So many of
Joanna’s experienced deputies had been called up for National
Guard duty that she couldn’t afford to deplete the patrol
roster further. Her homicide investigation team was overworked, and
overworked it would remain.

Joanna glanced at her watch. If she showered and
went to the scene with her hair still wet, she could probably be
there within half an hour. “An illegal?” she asked.

It was a reasonable assumption. Border Road was
called that because it ran for miles right along the sagging
remains of a
barbed-wire fence that constituted
the official dividing line between the United States and Mexico.
The unimpeded flood of illegal crossers pouring over that line
posed a constant drain on Joanna’s officers and her
budget.

“The Border Patrol guy says it’s
not,” Tica replied. “The victim is wrapped in a tarp,
but from what the officer could see, he’s male, balding, and
with light-colored hair and fair skin.”

“Which means he’s probably some poor
Anglo dummy who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. A
coyote probably got him.”

Joanna’s coyote reference had nothing to do
with the four-legged fur-bearing kind. In the parlance of Southwest
law enforcement officers, coyotes were smugglers who trafficked in
bringing illegal entrants across the border from Mexico into the
United States. Often operating in stolen vehicles and with zero
concern for the welfare of their human cargo, human coyotes had
become a particularly dangerous category of criminal. Speeding
vehicles, wrecking and spilling their hapless passengers, were
almost everyday occurrences.

On one occasion, fifty-eight men had been crammed
in the back of an eighteen-wheeler when the truck hauling them had
broken down. The driver had abandoned the locked vehicle on the
side of the road at high noon on a hot August afternoon. When
someone finally pried open the locked cargo door, all but one of
the men were dead, and he had perished on his way to the
hospital.

“That would be my first guess,” Tica
agreed.

“All right,” Joanna said.
“It’s going to take a little time for me to get there.
I’m not dressed, but tell the Double Cs I’ll show up as
soon as I can.”

“Show up where?” Jenny asked from the
doorway.

She came into Joanna’s office fully dressed
and sipping coffee from one of the white oversize diner-style mugs
Butch preferred. Jenny was drinking a whole lot more coffee than
Joanna had originally envisioned, but she let it go.

“At a crime scene,” Joanna said as she
shut down her computer and began stowing it into her briefcase.

“Oh,” Jenny said. “I was hoping
you’d give me a ride to school. The bus takes so long, and
it’s so boring!”

As far as Joanna was concerned, when it came to
teenagers, boring was the best of all possible worlds.
“Can’t, sweetie,” she replied. “It’s
in the wrong direction. I can give you a ride to the bus stop, but
that’s about it.”

“I can hardly wait until I’m old enough
to get my driver’s license,” Jenny said.
“It’s just a little over a year and a half before
I’ll be old enough to get my learner’s
permit.”

This wasn’t a fact Joanna enjoyed pondering.
She wasn’t ready for her daughter to be old enough to learn
to drive a car. One of the biggest concerns with the idea of
Jenny’s turning fifteen had to do with its being a mere two
years away from seventeen, which is how old Joanna had been when
she herself got pregnant with Jenny—pregnant and
unmarried.

“Did you feed the dogs?” she asked.

Jenny gave her mother an exasperated look. “I
fed the dogs and Kiddo and the cattle and chickens, too,” she
said. Kiddo was Jenny’s sorrel gelding. “I told Butch
I’d take care of all that while he was gone so you
wouldn’t have to.”

“Thank you,” Joanna said. If Jenny was
old enough to do all that without having to be asked, maybe having
that mugful of coffee wasn’t out of line after all.

“I have to hit the shower,” she said.
“Can you be ready to go in fifteen?”

“I guess,” Jenny said. When she left
her mother’s office this time, Tigger and Lucky followed.
Lady stayed where she was.

Joanna made short work of her shower and makeup,
then crammed herself into her uniform. When she had first purchased
the two maternity uniforms, the tops had seemed hilariously big.
The first time she put one on she had felt like she was dressing in
a clown suit. Now, though, it fit snugly over her bulging middle.
Is this damn thing going to hold up until my
delivery date?
she wondered.
Or am I
going to end up popping the buttons?

Twenty minutes later, Joanna dropped Jenny off at
the end of High Lonesome Road. Then, munching a peanut butter
sandwich, she headed for Paul’s Spur, where she turned off
the highway and made her way to the dirt track called Border Road.
Ten minutes after that she arrived at the end of a long line of
parked police vehicles. As she exited her Crown Victoria, she
caught sight of a pair of hopeful vultures circling lazily in the
air above. Up ahead Dr. George Winfield, Cochise County’s
medical examiner and Joanna’s stepfather, was unloading his
crime scene satchel from his van.

“Ugly critters, aren’t they,” he
observed, following Joanna’s glance.

She nodded. “They are that,” she
agreed.

“So how’s my favorite
mother-to-be?” George added as he dragged an unwieldy folded
gurney onto the ground. His pleasant, upbeat manner never failed to
surprise Joanna, especially since he spent so much time with her
mother—a woman who was, in Joanna’s estimation, one of
the most difficult people on earth.

“Back hurts,” Joanna replied.
“And I’m not getting much sleep.”

“The back part will get better soon,”
George observed, “but lack of sleep is going to get a whole
lot worse before it gets better.”

“Thanks,” Joanna said.
“That’s exactly what I needed to hear this
morning.”

Ernie Carpenter had evidently spotted their
arrival. He came marching purposefully down the long line of
vehicles parked on the shoulder of the narrow road. Ernie was a
stout bear of a man. His broad face included a line of thick black
eyebrows that seemed to meet in the middle whenever he frowned.

“What have we got?” Joanna asked.

“Not much,” Ernie grumbled.
Effortlessly he picked up George’s gurney and carried it as
easily as if it were a kiddie tricycle. “This is a dumping
scene, not a crime scene. Most likely the body’s been here
for a matter of hours. Looks to me like somebody dropped him out of
the back of a vehicle—a minivan or a truck—and then
rolled him over the edge of the berm of rocks that runs along the
side of the road.”

“In other words, no usable tire tracks or
footprints.”

“You’ve got it,” Ernie agreed.
“Border Patrol is up and down this road all night long, so
any tracks that had been left would have been obliterated long ago.
The body’s wrapped in a brown canvas painter’s tarp. It
blended in with the rocks well enough overnight that no one
actually spotted it until after the sun came up this morning. Dave
has been scouring the area, but there’s nothing to see. No
cigarette butts, no soda cans, no garbage, nothing.”

“Any sign of what killed him?” George
asked.

“Like I said, he’s all wrapped up in
that tarp. We can see the
top of his head and
that’s about it. Some blood seems to have leaked through the
tarp. I’m guessing he’s either been shot or stabbed,
one or the other. We were waiting for Doc Winfield to get here
before we did anything more.”

George stopped walking long enough to remove a
thermometer from his kit and check the air temperature. A chill
brisk wind was blowing down off the Mule Mountains. “If this
isn’t the crime scene, then whatever we find inside that tarp
is all we’re going to have to go on. I’ll remove enough
of the tarp to check the body temp, but with the wind blowing like
this it could easily blow away hair or fiber evidence without us
even noticing. Let’s unwrap him at the morgue, inside and out
of the wind.”

“You’ve got it, Doc,” Ernie said.
“All we needed was for you to give the word.”

Joanna followed the two men as far as the scene
itself. The dirt in the roadway showed signs that something heavy
had been dropped out of a vehicle and then rolled as far as the
edge of the road, where it had been heaved over the rocky bulldozed
shoulder. The body had been placed far enough away from any passing
traffic so as to be out of sight, but not so far that whoever had
put it there would have risked leaving behind detectable traces of
hair or fiber evidence.

One of the officers had surrounded the scene with a
hopeful border of bright yellow crime scene tape. Inside the tape
Joanna spotted the body, rocks, and a few tufts of brittle, closely
cropped yellow grass. Outside the tape, a desolate landscape of
scrubby mesquite trees stretched for miles in all directions. The
thorn-studded, winter-bare branches might well have trapped some
critical hair or fiber evidence. Unfortunately, the nearest of the
spindly trees stood well outside the taped crime scene
boundary.

Joanna stood on the edge of the roadway huddled in
the
warmth of her long leather coat, while Dave
and Jamie helped George wrestle the corpse into a body bag and onto
the gurney. It may have been winter and cold as hell, but as they
moved the body, a swarm of flies buzzed skyward while the stench of
rotting flesh wafted in Joanna’s direction.

Watching the process, she was struck by the total
lack of dignity. She was glad none of the unidentified
victim’s relatives were present to see him hefted around like
a hunk of unwieldy trash. He had been dumped out along the road
with no more ceremony than someone would use when discarding a
cigarette butt or an empty beer can.

And that very lack of dignity—the awfulness
of it—was exactly why Joanna Brady, Ernie, Jaime, and Dave
were all here. Redressing what had been done to this poor unknown
man was what they did. It was their job to avenge man’s
inhumanity to man with justice. It was why Joanna had worked her
heart out running for office and why taking a six-week maternity
leave was far longer than she wanted to stay away from work.

With the cold wind blowing through her still-damp
hair, she realized she had changed. Being sheriff was no longer an
empty title she had wanted to achieve. Somehow it had become what
she was. Finding out who the victim was and why he was now dead and
encased in a body bag was what she had been summoned to do with her
life. The good guy/bad guy game she had once discussed with her
father had somehow seeped into her blood. Or maybe, as with D. H.
Lathrop, the compulsion to be a cop had been there all along.

Oh my God!
she thought
with a start.
I really am turning into my
father!

“Are you all right?” George asked,
bringing her out of her reverie.

“I’m fine,” she said at once.

“You looked a little funny there.”

“No, really. I’m fine.”

“Nothing much is on my agenda for
today,” George continued, “so I’ll try to get
this autopsy out of the way first thing. Ernie Carpenter and Jaime
Carbajal drew straws. Ernie lost, so he’s coming along for
the ride. What about you?”

Joanna thought about that peanut butter sandwich
she’d gobbled down in the car and about what might happen to
it if she ventured into George’s stainless-steel-studded room
to observe an autopsy in progress.

“Since Ernie’s going,” she said,
“I think I’ll take a pass.”

George Winfield gave her a fond grin. “Good
girl,” he agreed. “I thought you might.”

J
oanna
stayed at the scene long enough to listen as Jaime Carbajal
interviewed Wally Rutterman, the Border Patrol officer who had
discovered the body. Then she watched for a while as Dave Hollicker
did a painstaking inch-by-inch survey of the dump site. Neither
effort revealed anything worthwhile. On the drive back to the
department, Joanna found herself chilled from the inside out in a
way that boosting the output of the Crown Victoria’s heater
did nothing to alleviate.

She radioed into the office on the way. “Any
missing-persons reports come in this morning?” she asked.

“None so far,” Tica Romero
answered.

“You’ll let me know if there is
one?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tica said.

When Joanna arrived at her reserved parking place,
she was surprised to see that the one next door—Chief Deputy
Frank Montoya’s—was empty. After a moment’s
reflection, she remembered it was Friday morning. That meant Frank
was probably
busy standing in for her at the
weekly board of supervisors meeting.

Better him than me.

Entering the building through her private back
entrance, she dropped her briefcase off on her desk and then poked
her head out into the reception area outside her office. “How
are things?” she asked.

Kristin Gregovich, Joanna’s
secretary/receptionist, was busy sorting through a newly arrived
basket of mail.

“Not so hot,” Kristin said.
“Shaundra’s teething. She didn’t get any sleep
last night, which means I didn’t either.”

“I’m in the same boat,” Joanna
said. “Not getting any sleep, that is. Let’s hope my
baby isn’t teething.”

Kristin laughed. “They say that parents of
new babies lose bunches of IQ points. It’s no wonder. They
never get any sleep. How’d it go down by Paul’s
Spur?”

“Unidentified homicide victim,” Joanna
replied. “Ernie’s on his way to observe the autopsy.
Everybody else is working the problem. In the meantime, how much of
that mail is for me?”

The daunting amount of paper that flowed across her
desk each day made Joanna wonder how any trees remained standing
anywhere. She wasn’t surprised when Kristin picked up the
largest of the several stacks and handed it over. As she headed
into her office, mail in hand, it occurred to Joanna that it might
not have been such a bad idea to tag along to Doc Winfield’s
office and observe that autopsy after all.

She paused just inside her office door. “Any
calls?” she asked.

“Just Reverend Maculyea calling to remind you
about today’s lunch. And speaking of lunch,” Kristin
added, “there’s an errand I need to run at noon today
at the same time you’ll be out. I know you don’t like
to leave the office unattended, so I already
asked if one of the clerks from the public office
could come over and cover for me. I hope you don’t
mind.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,”
Joanna said.

Once at her desk, she forced herself to put this
latest homicide case out of her head and buried herself in dealing
with the stack of correspondence. Her years of running an insurance
office had given her superb typing skills, so she wrote, printed,
and answered as much of the mail as possible without using
Kristin’s help for anything other than printing the
envelopes. By the time Joanna headed out for her lunch date at
eleven-thirty, Kristin was already gone.

Pulling into the parking lot at Daisy’s
Café, Joanna was surprised to see several familiar cars there
as well as Marianne’s antique VW bug. Joanna’s
mother’s blue Buick was parked next to the VW and her former
in-laws’ Camry was parked next to that. She recognized Angie
Hacker’s husband’s Hummer as well. It was only when she
saw Kristin’s little red Geo tucked in behind the Hummer and
the pink and blue balloon bouquets on either side of the door that
Joanna finally tumbled to what was going on. This wasn’t just
her usual weekday lunch with Marianne. It was a baby shower.

Grinning from ear to ear, Junior Dowdle, Daisy and
Moe Maxwell’s adopted developmentally disabled son, greeted
Joanna at the door. “It’s a party,” he said,
pointing at Joanna’s belly. “A party for your baby.
We’ve got flowers and cake and everything.”

And “everything” was exactly what they
had. Half of the restaurant had been cordoned off with strips of
pink and blue crepe paper to accommodate the party. Much to
Joanna’s surprise, Jenny was seated at the makeshift
flower-festooned head table.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in
school?” Joanna asked. “Who sprung you?”

“Grandma,” Jenny said, nodding in Eva
Lou’s direction. Taking that as a signal, Joanna’s
former mother-in-law came over and gave her a hug.

“It’s a big occasion,” Eva Lou
Brady declared. “I didn’t think she should miss it. And
I wouldn’t miss it, either, not for the world.”

Andrew Roy Brady, Joanna’s first husband, had
been gunned down years earlier. Nevertheless, his parents, Jim Bob
and Eva Lou, continued to be unfailingly supportive and loving to
their former daughter-in-law. Joanna didn’t have the
slightest doubt that they would treat this new grandchild, Butch
and Joanna’s baby, with the same love and attention that they
had always lavished on Andy and Joanna’s Jenny.

“Thank you,” Joanna whispered, fighting
back tears of gratitude.

Eleanor stepped in the moment Eva Lou moved away.
“Don’t make a spectacle of yourself,” she warned.
“It’s only a baby shower, for Pete’s sake. No
reason to burst into tears.”

Joanna’s mother’s reaction was in such
stark contrast to Eva Lou’s that it helped Joanna pull
herself back together. “Right,” she said, wiping her
eyes. “No reason at all.”

During lunch, Joanna sat between Marianne Maculyea
and Angie Hacker. Eleanor still managed to look disapproving
whenever Angie was around, but Joanna’s and Marianne’s
unflinching acceptance of Angie had made it easy for most of Bisbee
to forget about the woman’s less-than-stellar past. The fact
that she had once made her living as a prostitute had faded into
the background. She was now recognized as the prime reason one of
Bisbee’s favorite watering holes, Brewery Gulch’s famed
Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge, remained open for business.

Marianne couldn’t help gloating. “So we
really did surprise you?”

“You certainly did,” Joanna agreed.
“Nobody breathed a word.”

The whole thing was great fun and about as
diametrically opposed to the grim way Joanna’s day had
started as humanly possible. When she finally returned to the
Cochise County Justice Center, it was mid-afternoon and much later
than she had anticipated. She drove there with the backseat of her
Crown Victoria loaded down with a collection of baby
gear—most of it in suitably impartial shades of pastel green
and yellow. Eleanor’s gifts, however, were all unabashedly
blue—clearly announcing her preference for a boy. It
surprised Joanna more than a little to realize that for some reason
her mother was openly lobbying for a grandson.

Kristin was already back at her desk by the time
Joanna got there. “Hope you didn’t mind my little fib
about what I was doing at lunch,” she said.

Joanna’s initial dealings with Kristin had
been difficult. Over time, however, they had become much more
cordial. “No,” Joanna said. “I didn’t mind
it at all. It was a fun shower, and I’m glad you were
there.”

Chief Deputy Montoya emerged from his office and
joined the conversation. “Did you pick up a lot of good
loot?” he asked.

“You mean you knew about the shower,
too?”

“Of course I did,” he said. “The
only person who didn’t was you. So how was it?”

“The party was great,” Joanna said.
“How about the board of supervisors meeting?”

“Dull,” Frank said. “Thank God
for small favors. We weren’t
in the hot
seat for a change. Today’s meeting mostly concerned sanitary
landfill issues, so we lucked out.”

“I’ll say,” Joanna agreed.
“Time for the briefing?”

Frank nodded. “Coming right up. Ernie just
got back from that autopsy. We can have the Double Cs sit in on the
briefing as well.”

When Joanna entered the conference room a few
minutes later, Frank and the two detectives were already there.
Ernie, sitting with his arms crossed, looked more somber than
usual.

“Do we have a cause of death?” Joanna
asked.

Ernie nodded. “Blunt-force trauma to the head
from a single blow. But the cause of death isn’t what makes
this such an interesting case, Sheriff Brady. I’ve been in
Homicide a long time, and I’ve never seen anything like
it.”

“Like what?” Joanna asked.

“All ten of the guy’s fingers have been
whacked off,” Ernie said, letting his breath out slowly.
“All ten of ’em! And not with a knife, either. Whoever
did it probably used kitchen shears or maybe garden pruning shears
of some kind. The only good thing about it is at least the guy was
dead when they did that part.”

Ernie’s chilling words washed across Joanna
like a bucket of icy water. It was a mind-bending shock to move
from the carefree atmosphere of the baby shower to a recitation of
murder and mayhem in the space of less than an hour. For a moment
the room was totally silent. Gathering herself, Joanna was the
first to speak.

“What actually killed him, then, and
when?”

“The doc says he’d been dead for a good
twenty-four hours and maybe more before he was found, and that he
was killed somewhere else and brought to the dump site much later.
There are some signs of defensive wounds—bruising and that
kind of thing—that would indicate some kind of
struggle.”

“Any trace evidence from the
perpetrator?”

“Doc Winthrop collected some hair and fiber
from the body. I brought that and the bloody tarp back here to the
lab. Dave is starting to go over it now—looking for prints,
blood smears, and so forth. The bloodstains we saw on the tarp were
due to leakage from the wounds to his fingers.”

“Any ID found on the body?” Joanna
asked.

“None at all,” Ernie said. “Doc
estimates John Doe to be in his mid- to late fifties. Lots of
dental work, done on the cheap, that would help identify him if we
end up having to use dental records. Other than that, the only
distinguishing mark is a tattoo—a homegrown, do-it-yourself
job—that says ‘One day at a time.’”

“What does removal of the fingers tell
us?” Joanna asked.

“My guess would be that the victim’s
prints must be in the system somewhere,” Jaime offered.
“The killer is betting that if we don’t have
fingerprints, we won’t be able to identify him.”

Joanna considered that suggestion. “So
it’s possible we’re talking about a guy who has been in
jail at least once at some time in the past, and he’s also
been involved in AA.”

“Doesn’t narrow the field much,”
Frank said. “Lots of ex-cons have issues with drugs and
alcohol. The big problem with Alcoholics Anonymous is just
that—they’re anonymous. We’re not going to get
any help from them in making our ID.”

“But that’s exactly what we have to
do—figure out who he is,” Joanna said. “Until we
take that first step, there’s no way to trace his movements
leading up to the homicide. Have we checked out missing-persons
reports?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jaime Carbajal
replied. “Already done. I’ve got MP info from Arizona,
New Mexico, California, and Nevada. So far there’s nothing
that’s even close.”

“What are the chances,” Joanna asked,
“that we’re dealing with someone who was locked up for
a long time? Maybe he decided to make trouble for
someone—maybe someone who helped put him away—as soon
as he got out. Let’s check and see if we have any recent
parolees who have suddenly dropped off their probation
officers’ radar.”

“Don’t expect me to work overtime on
this one,” Ernie grumbled sourly.

Joanna studied her detective. Ernie had a tendency
to be grumpy on occasion, but throughout the briefing his attitude
had been one notch under surly.

“What do you mean, Detective
Carpenter?” she asked. “Do you have a problem with this
case?”

“Damn right I’ve got a problem with
it!” Ernie growled. “We’ve got no crime scene. No
suspects. So with nothing to go on, why the hell should we be out
busting our balls to find out who knocked off some drunken
ex-con?”

“I believe it’s called equal
protection,” Joanna said evenly. “Just because
someone’s been in prison doesn’t give someone else the
right to murder them. Somebody killed this man and mutilated his
body. It’s up to us to find out who did it and
why.”

Recrossing his arms, Ernie shut his mouth and
subsided into his chair. Joanna turned her attention to Jaime
Carbajal. “Do you have any ideas?”

“Not right off. In addition to the
missing-persons reports we should also keep an eye out for reports
on any abandoned vehicles. The victim sure as hell didn’t
drive himself out to Border Road. If he left his car somewhere or
if someone else abandoned it for him, chances are it’s parked
somewhere it doesn’t belong. Eventually someone will get
tired of seeing it, pick up a phone, and report it.”

“It’s a thought,” Joanna said,
“but it could take days for someone to turn it in, especially
with the weekend coming up.”

Jaime shrugged. “Best I could do,” he
said.

Joanna turned to Frank. “Any bright ideas
from you?”

“Nothing so far,” he said.

“Well, then,” Joanna said. “You
guys do what you can,” she said to Ernie and Jaime.
“And let me know right away if anything turns up.”

Once the door had closed behind the detectives,
Joanna turned to Frank. “What got into Ernie? I don’t
ever remember seeing him act quite like that.”

“He did seem out of sorts,” Frank
conceded. “I know he’s taken a couple of sick days in
the last couple of weeks, but I don’t know anything more
about it than that. I’ll see if I can find out what
gives.”