Partner In Crime (11 page)

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. . . .”

A
S
I
PULLED
my Porsche 928 out of the Belltown Terrace parking garage at seven that morning, I wasn’t thinking about traffic or even about work. I was thinking about my mother and about how fortunate it was that she was dead and had been for more than thirty years. I still miss her, of course, but if I had told her about my new job with the Washington State Attorney General’s SHIT squad, she would have been obliged to wash my mouth out with soap no matter how old I was.