Dead Wrong (9 page)

“No,” Joanna said. “Leave it as
is again tonight. Maybe Sunday is when the O’Dwyers do their
thing.”

“Maybe,” Frank agreed grudgingly.
“But I doubt it. I can’t help wondering if Jeannine has
her facts straight.”

“Let’s give it another day,”
Joanna said. “And pray the rest of the county doesn’t
go haywire in the meantime. That’s not too much to ask, is
it?”

“We’ll see,” Frank said
ominously. “We’ll know more about that come tomorrow,
when the reports are in and it’s time for the morning
briefing.”

O
n her
way out the door on Monday morning, Joanna was surprised to find a
stack of boxes sitting against the wall of her garage. The stack
created a barrier that made it impossible for Jenny to climb into
the passenger’s seat of the Crown Victoria without having to
go all the way around the back of the vehicle.

“What’s all this?” Joanna asked
Butch, who had just come in from feeding the animals.

“I have no idea,” he replied.
“George dropped them off yesterday afternoon when he and your
mother came to dinner. According to him, they’re getting
ready for a big churchwide garage sale. Eleanor sent over some
boxes of things she thought you should have.”

“Great,” Joanna muttered. “How
like her. That way she doesn’t have to get rid of it and we
do.”

“Want me to attempt a first sort?”
Butch asked.

“Good morning,” Margaret Dixon
called.

The rammed-earth house Butch had designed and
helped build consisted of two wings, each with its own separate
garage. Margaret, who had entered through Butch’s garage, had
wandered through the whole house before finding them.

“Anybody home?” she asked. “I
sure hope there’s coffee. I could have made it out in the RV,
but I decided to come inside instead. Have you already
eaten?”

Joanna nodded. “Jenny and I have,” she
said. “I’m on my way to work. I promised to drop her
off at school on the way.”

Grumbling under his breath, Butch walked Joanna to
her car. “I wish I was going to work,” he said.

Joanna smiled sympathetically. “Don’t
bother doing any sorting,” she said, giving Butch a good-bye
peck on the cheek. “I think you’re going to have your
hands full as it is.”

“So do I,” he agreed.

“Some people are a real pain,” Jenny
said, settling into the corner of the Crown Victoria.

“Margaret Dixon isn’t a very happy
person,” Joanna said.

“But why does she think we should have put
Lucky to sleep?”

Joanna sighed. “I have no idea,” she
said.

“How long are they gonna stay?”

“Probably until the baby is born,”
Joanna said.

“Well, could you please hurry up and have it
then?” Jenny demanded. “I want them to take their RV
and go home.”

“Believe me,” Joanna assured her.
“I’ll do my best.”

A
t the
morning briefing, Frank Montoya wasn’t any happier than Jenny
had been, but his ill humor had nothing to do with an irksome
stepgrandmother.

“Last night was the wrong time to have three
cars in San Si
mon, especially since our people
didn’t spot anything out of line,” he grumbled.
“In the meantime, Border Patrol came up with at least a
hundred and fifty UDAs who were all on foot and making a run for it
east of Douglas. They called us for backup. Unfortunately, we
didn’t have anybody to send.”

Joanna shook her head. The unending stream of
undocumented aliens spilling across the international border was
one of Arizona’s—and especially Cochise
County’s—most intractable law enforcement problems.
Each year at least half a million UDAs were being apprehended just
in the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector. Of that number, at
least 25,000 a month were picked up after crossing into the United
States along Cochise County’s eighty-mile-long border with
Mexico. Border Patrol employment numbers were way up, but there
were never enough officers to stem the tide.

“How many did they catch?”

“Most,” Frank said. “But
there’s no way to know how many got away.”

“With those kinds of numbers, an additional
three deputies probably wouldn’t have made much
difference,” Joanna said.

“It would have helped,” Frank
replied.

But Joanna could see her chief deputy had a point.
“It stands to reason that the O’Dwyers would be
operating on weekends rather than during the week,” she
said.

“So I can pull the extra patrols for
tonight?”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “We’ll
revisit this later in the week. Now, what about the Bradley Evans
homicide? Have we made any progress on that?”

Frank shuffled through the briefing papers.
“Not much. Casey Ledford is down in Douglas.”

“Dusting Evans’s apartment?”
Joanna asked.

Frank nodded.

“Still no sign of the vehicle?”

“Nope,” Frank answered. “If I was
the perpetrator, I’d probably take it up to Tucson and leave
it parked in plain sight somewhere where no one is going to pay any
attention.”

“You’ve alerted Tucson PD to be on the
lookout?” Joanna asked.

“You bet.”

There was a knock on the conference-room door, and
Deputy Debra Howell entered the room. “Sarge told me you
wanted to see me?” she asked.

“That’s right,” Joanna said.
“Have a seat.”

“Is something wrong?” Debbie asked.

“Nothing at all,” Joanna assured her.
“But we’re thinking about making some changes. I
understand you’ve been studying for the detective
exam?”

“Yes,” Debbie said. “I
have.”

“Chief Deputy Montoya and I were wondering if
you’d like to spend some time working as a detective for the
next week or two with the understanding that the promotion is
provisional until such time as you take and pass the
exam?”

Debbie Howell flushed with apparent pleasure.
“That would be great,” she said. “But how come?
What’s going on?”

Joanna had hoped that Ernie might have mentioned
his medical situation to his protégée, but clearly that
wasn’t the case. Since he hadn’t confided in Debbie,
Joanna didn’t tell her, either.

“It won’t come as any surprise that
we’re chronically shorthanded, and we need to add some depth
to our investigation team. We’re dealing with an unsolved
homicide at a time when one of our homicide guys may be having to
take some time off. You’re the one we want to tap—if
you’re interested, that is. But
homicide
investigators don’t punch time clocks the same way deputies
do, Debbie,” Joanna warned. “They work long hours and
can be called out anytime, day or night. Will that be a
problem?”

“Because of Bennie, you mean?” Debbie
asked.

Benjamin was Debbie’s five-year-old son.
Joanna nodded, and Debbie grinned.

“If you’d asked me that question two
weeks ago, it would have been a big problem,” she admitted.
“But last week my sister’s jerk of a husband decided he
didn’t want to be married anymore. He took off and left Katy
and the two kids high and dry. Rather than staying in Phoenix and
paying rent she couldn’t afford, Katy decided to come back
home to Bisbee. She and the kids are staying with me right now
until the dust settles and until she can find a job. In other
words, working late won’t be a problem as long as
Bennie’s aunt and cousins are here. When do you want me to
start?”

“Today,” Joanna said.
“You’ll be working plainclothes, so you’d better
go home and change. Then track down Jaime and Ernie so they can
bring you up to speed.”

Joanna and Frank went on with their meeting. The
last of the briefing papers was a single-page report from Animal
Control. Eighteen dogs, twenty-one cats, and an eight-foot-long
python were currently in the Cochise County Pound.

“A python?” Joanna repeated.
“Where did that come from?”

“Sunrise Apartments in Sierra Vista,”
Frank replied. “A cleaning crew went into a recently vacated
apartment and found the snake hiding in a closet. Sierra Vista
Animal Control refused to have anything to do with it. They called
us, so Jeannine Phillips and Manny Ruiz went out and collected
it.”

“Great,” Joanna said. “So now
we’re stuck with a python?”

“For the time being,” Frank said.
“They’re trying to locate the former owner.
They’re also trying to find someplace that will take him
in.”

“I know about Greyhound Rescue and Golden
Retriever Rescue,” Joanna said. “There’s even
that wiener-dog rescue up in Phoenix, but I’ve never heard of
Python Rescue, have you?”

“Actually, I have,” Frank said.
“I was checking on the Internet just before I came in here.
There are several python rescues listed. The problem is, there are
more pythons looking to be rescued than there are people willing to
take them in, so I’m guessing we could be stuck with this guy
for a very long time.”

“What do pythons eat?” Joanna
asked.

“Mice, I think,” Frank answered.
“Live mice.”

Joanna groaned. “Great. That’s just
what I wanted to hear.”

After another tap on the conference-room door,
Kristin Gregovich entered the room. “What’s up?”
Joanna asked.

“Sergeant Winston Brown from Huachuca City PD
is on the line,” Kristin said. She picked up the
conference-room phone and handed it to Joanna. “They think
they’ve found our missing pickup truck.”

“This is Sheriff Brady,” Joanna said.
“You think you’ve found Bradley Evans’s missing
vehicle? How and where?”

“Where is right on Huachuca City’s main
drag,” Winnie Brown told her. “The last couple of years
we’ve been making a concerted effort to get rid of all our
local eyesores. Periodically we go around and ticket all the
‘For Sale by Owner’ cars that are left on vacant lots
inside the city limits. We had your APB for a red F-100. Since this
one was gray—primer gray—nobody really gave it a second
thought. But the bed of the truck is red, and when our officer ran
the plates, they belonged to a ’96 VW Passat. That’s
when we knew we had a problem. We tried calling the
number listed on the For Sale sign on the dash.
It’s not a valid number. No surprises there.”

“Where is it again?” Joanna asked.

“Corner of Highway 90 and Pershing,” he
said.

“Has anyone been inside it?”

“It’s locked,” Winnie Brown told
her. “If you want me to, I’m sure someone could get
inside…”

“No,” Joanna said quickly. “It
may be a crime scene. No one is to handle it inside or out.
Understand?”

“Gotcha,” Winnie Brown said.

“As soon as I can make arrangements,”
Joanna continued, “I’ll dispatch a tow truck to
retrieve it.”

“Okay,” Brown responded.
“I’ll tell the officers on the scene that the sheriff
is sending someone to pick it up.”

Joanna looked at Frank, who was already in motion,
gathering his papers and heading for the door. “I’ll
make arrangements for the tow,” he said. “I’ll
also track down Jaime and Ernie and let them know. Maybe Debbie can
meet up with them out in Huachuca City and hit the ground
running.”

With a crew of perfectly competent people
collecting the homicide victim’s vehicle, there was no need
for Joanna to go traipsing off to Huachuca City to bird-dog the
process. Instead, she went into her office, where she found the
morning’s mail stacked high on her desk. Just looking at it
made her sigh. According to the latest figures from the FBI,
national violent crime figures were down. Paperwork, on the other
hand, seemed to be way, way up.

Twenty minutes later, when her phone rang, a
truculent Jeannine Phillips was on the phone. “Well?”
she said. “What did they find?”

“In San Simon?” Joanna asked.
“Nothing. We had three cars
stationed in
and around there both Saturday and Sunday nights. There
wasn’t a sign of trouble or suspicious activities.
Unfortunately, with everything else that’s going on,
we’re just not going to be able to maintain that level of
surveillance.”

“So that’s it, then?” Jeannine
responded curtly. “We’re just going to give the
O’Dwyers a pass and let things go until the next dead dog
shows up?”

“The next one?” Joanna said. “Did
the one at the vet’s office die, then?”

“No,” Jeannine replied. “No,
thanks to Mil—to Dr. Ross, he’s going to pull
through.”

“And how about Monty Python?” Joanna
joked.

“He’s all right, too,” Jeannine
said. “Manny and I had to rig up special accommodations for
him. We lined the inside of one of the kennels with Plexiglas and
then hooked up lights so the damned thing wouldn’t be too
cold. Since the owner went off and left both the snake and no
forwarding address, I’m working on locating a snake rescue
organization of some kind.”

So’s Frank
Montoya,
Joanna thought.

“The problem is, they’re mostly out of
state. I’m concerned about transportation issues.”

“Keep looking,” Joanna advised.

All in all, it was a quiet day at the Cochise
County Justice Center. Food deliveries had resumed and everything
in the jail seemed to be running smoothly for a change. At noon she
met Butch and his parents at Daisy’s Café for lunch.
Margaret’s attitude toward Junior Dowdle was not unlike her
attitude toward Lucky. Maybe he didn’t need to be put out of
his misery, but people had no business letting him out in public
like that. Didn’t they know that seeing him might upset some
of their customers?

Toying with her food, Joanna wondered how the
Dixons would react if this grandchild of theirs—the rowdy
baby on the verge of entering the world—turned out to be less
than perfect. Nothing in Joanna’s medical chart had indicated
anything of the kind, but still…What if she ended up with a
baby who suffered from some kind of birth defect? Would Margaret
and Don Dixon reject the child and think that it should be put out
of its misery?

“What’s wrong?” Butch asked as he
walked Joanna to her car after lunch. “You look
upset.”

“It’s nothing,” she said.

“I know my mother’s a handful,”
he said. “The way she talked about Junior! I wanted to wring
her neck. Try not to let her get you down.”

“I won’t if you won’t,”
Joanna returned.

“That’s a lot harder,” Butch
said.

Joanna arrived back at the department in time to
see Bradley Evans’s freshly primer-coated pickup truck
deposited inside the garage at the near end of the impound yard.
When Casey Ledford, Cochise County’s latent fingerprint
expert, emerged from her lab to begin dusting the outside of the
truck, Joanna walked over to join her. First she looked in through
the window and was disappointed to see nothing out of line. They
might have found Bradley Evans’s truck, but the interior of
that was no more a crime scene than his apartment had been.