Partner In Crime (17 page)

“Mr. Beaumont?” she asked, holding out her hand and straining to sound more cordial than she felt. She wasn’t especially interested in making him feel welcome, since he was anything but. As he turned toward her, she realized he stood well over six feet. Naturally, at five feet four, she felt dwarfed beside him. She held herself erect, hoping to appear taller.

“I’m Sheriff Brady,” she said.

As he returned her handshake, Joanna realized J.P. Beaumont wasn’t a particularly handsome man. Despite herself, though, she was drawn to the pattern of smile lines that crinkled around his eyes.
At least smiling isn’t an entirely foreign activity,
she thought.

“Glad to meet you,” he said, pumping her small hand with his much larger one. “I’m Beaumont—Special Investigator J.P. Beaumont. Most people call me Beau.”

“What can I do for you?” she asked.

“I believe we need to talk,” he replied.

“In that case,” she said, “we’d better go to my office.”

I
HAD BEEN WAITING
for Sheriff Brady for several minutes, but she surprised me when she walked up behind me without making a sound. Her bright red hair was cut short. The emerald-green eyes that studied me could have sparked fire. She wore a dark olive-green uniform, which looked exceptionally good on her since she filled it out in all the right places. If it hadn’t been for the forbidding frown on her face, she might have been pretty. Instead, she looked as if she had just bitten into an apple and discovered half a worm. In other words, she wasn’t glad to see me.

I followed Sheriff Brady from the public lobby into her private office, realizing as I did so that I hadn’t expected her to be so short, in every sense of the word. She waited until she had closed the door behind us before she really turned on me. “What exactly do you want?” she demanded.

I know how, as a detective, I used to hate having outside interference in one of my cases, so I didn’t expect her to welcome me with open arms. But I hadn’t foreseen outright hostility, either.

“We have a case to solve,” I began.

“We?” she returned sarcastically. “
I
have a case to solve. My
department
has a case to solve. There’s no
we
about it.”

“The Washington State Attorney General’s Office has a vested interest in your solving this case,” I said.

“So I’ve heard,” she responded, crossing her arms and drilling into me with those amazingly green eyes.

In that moment Sheriff Joanna Brady reminded me eerily of Miss Edith Heard, a young, fearsomely outspoken geometry teacher from my days at Seattle’s Ballard High School. At the time I was in her class, Miss Heard must have been only a few years older than her students, but she brooked no nonsense. After suffering through two semesters of geometry that I barely managed to pass, I had fled in terror from any further ventures into higher math.

Like Joanna Brady, Miss Heard had been short, red-haired, and green-eyed, and she had scared the hell out of me. But a lot of time had passed since then. I wasn’t nearly as terrified by Joanna Brady as I was annoyed. And it wasn’t lost on me that she hadn’t offered me a chair.

“Look,” I said impatiently, “today happens to be my birthday. There are any number of ways I’d rather be spending it than being hassled by you. So how about if we cut the crap and get our jobs done so I can go back home.”

She never even blinked. “Your going home sounds good,” she said. “Now, if the Washington State Attorney General is so vitally interested in this case—”

“The AG’s name is Connors,” I interjected. “Mr. Ross Connors. He’s my boss.”

“If Mr. Connors is so vitally interested in this case, why can’t I get any information about Latisha Wall out of his office?”

I set my briefcase down on a nearby conference table and flicked open the lid. “You can,” I said, extracting Latisha Wall’s file from my briefcase. “That’s why I’m here.” I handed it over to her. She took it. Then, without opening the file or even glancing at it, she walked over to her desk and put it down.

“I’m delighted to know that Mr. Connors’s office has the financial wherewithal to have files hand-delivered by personally authorized couriers. It seems to me it would have made more sense for him to fax it. All we needed were straight answers to a few questions. Instead, we got stonewalled, Mr. Beaumont. And now we have you,” she added. “When you get around to it, you might let Mr. Connors know that the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department doesn’t require the assistance of one of his personal emissaries.”

The lady was getting under my skin. I pulled out a business card and handed it to her.

“I’m not an emissary,” I said. “As you can see, I’m an investigator—a special investigator—working for the attorney general. Latisha Wall was in our witness protection program. Mr. Connors needs to know whether or not her death is related to her being in that program. If not, fine. What happened is on your turf. It’s your problem and not ours. But if it
is
related,” I added, “if Latisha Wall died because someone wanted to keep her from giving potentially damaging testimony in a court of law, then it’s our problem as much as it is yours. Whoever killed her should never have been able to find her in the first place.”

“In other words, your witness protection program has a leak, and you’re the plumber sent here to plug it,” Sheriff Brady returned.

“Exactly,” I said.

She recrossed her arms. “Tell me about Latisha Wall,” she said.

I had read through the file several times by then. I didn’t need to consult it as I related the story. “After graduating from high school, Latisha Wall did two stints in the Marines where she worked primarily as an MP. Once she got out of the service, she went to work for an outfit from Chicago called UPPI. Ever heard of them?”

“I know all of that,” Sheriff Brady said.

“You do?”

She smiled. “We only look like we live in the sticks, Mr. Beaumont. Have you ever heard of the Internet? My chief deputy, Frank Montoya, was able to glean that much information from newspaper articles. What else?”

Score one for Joanna Brady.

“Mind if I sit down?”

“Please do,” she said. She motioned me into a chair and then sat behind a huge desk that was so impossibly clean it was frightening. I worry about people with oppressively clean desks.

“So in the nineties,” I continued, “United Private Prisons, Incorporated, saw coming what they thought was a long-term prisoner-incarceration boom. They set out to corner themselves a piece of that market. The state of Washington went for them in a big way, and when it came to picking up one of those lucrative state contracts, it didn’t hurt to have an African-American female on board to help deal with all those pesky EEOC considerations.

“UPPI won the bid to build and run a boot-camp juvenile facility near the town of Aberdeen in southwestern Washington. Once the Aberdeen Juvenile Detention Center opened, UPPI appointed Latisha Wall to be its first director. On the surface of it, I’m sure putting an African-American female who was also an ex-Marine MP in charge of a place like that must have seemed like a good choice all around.”

“What went wrong?” Joanna asked.

“According to subsequent investigations, UPPI had cut some serious corners in order to get costs low enough to win the contract. Some of those cut corners were in basic building materials. Only the cheapest and shoddiest materials were used during the construction phase. Subsequent investigations show that basics like insulation and wiring didn’t even meet code, but they somehow had passed all required building inspections. Consequently, the deficiencies came to light only after the building was occupied, at which point they were passed off as the fledgling director’s fault.”

“We had a few jail-construction problems of our own,” Sheriff Brady said thoughtfully. “So they turned her into a fall guy.”

“Or girl,” I suggested.

Sheriff Brady didn’t return my smile. “Whatever,” she said.

“UPPI’s corner-cutting at the facility didn’t stop with construction of the physical plant. UPPI budgets expected to provide for food, medical care, bedding, and personnel were too low to sustain a livable environment. Even with a boot-camp-style existence, the available monies and feeding the inmates nutrition loaf three meals a day, seven days a week, wouldn’t have stretched far enough.

“The state had situated the facility in an economically depressed part of southwestern Washington in hopes of creating living-wage jobs for people after the lumber industry pretty much disappeared. Only UPPI didn’t budget for living wages, either. Nor did they make any effort to turn new employees into trained correction officers. As a result, people who ended up working there weren’t necessarily the best or the brightest. That caused real problems, too, in terms of lack of discipline, inappropriate sexual interactions, gang activity, drug and alcohol abuse—all the things a boot-camp environment is supposed to prevent.

“Aberdeen Juvenile Detention Center opened in the spring three years ago and was operating at full capacity within three months. By the time fall came along and the rains started, the walls began weeping moisture and forming mold. Latisha Wall immediately reported the facility’s shortcomings to her supervisor. When inmates complained that the food they were given was full of bugs and wasn’t fit to eat, she passed that information along as well. Nothing happened. No corrective measures were taken, and no additional expenditures were allowed. Finally, Latisha was told that dealing with the ongoing difficulties was her problem. At that point, she went to her supervisor’s supervisor, with the same result.

“The final straw came when Ms. Wall discovered that her assistant—her second in command—had been routinely covering up prisoner complaints of misconduct on the part of a number of guards. The inmates were troubled kids who had been put in her charge in hopes of straightening them out. Rather than getting help, they were being abused both sexually and physically. When Latisha tried to fire the guards involved, along with the guy responsible for the cover-up, UPPI cut her off at the knees. They told her she wasn’t allowed to fire anybody. That’s when she finally figured out that not only had she been suckered but so had the state of Washington.

“Latisha Wall was underqualified for the position she held and was being very well paid to do it. UPPI expected her to take her money, go with the flow, and keep her mouth shut. Instead, Ms. Wall went to Ross Connors’s office and told her story there. She resigned. The facility was shut down completely a few months later.”

“She was a whistle-blower, then.”

“Right,” I answered. “What wasn’t in the papers—what Ross Connors did his best to keep out of the media—was that once the scandal went public, Latisha Wall was subjected to numerous death threats. None of them could be traced back to UPPI Headquarters in Chicago, but that’s where the AG theorized they came from. Latisha Wall thought so, too.”

“So your boss put her in a witness protection program and shipped her here, to Bisbee, under the name of Rochelle Baxter.”

“Right,” I told her.

“And you think someone from UPPI came here to kill her?”

“That’s certainly a possibility,” I said.

“Why’s that?” she asked.

“Because there’s a civil trial coming up in Olympia in a little more than a month. Based on lack of performance at the Aberdeen facility, Washington State has terminated all contracts with UPPI, and they’re suing for breach of contract. Latisha Wall was scheduled to be the state’s star witness. Without her, UPPI may walk away with a bundle.”

Finished with my recitation, I paused. “So what’s the deal, then?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What have your guys found out?” I asked. “We need to know—the attorney general’s office needs to know—what’s going on.”

“My ‘guys,’ as you call them—my investigations unit,” she corrected stiffly, “which isn’t all male, by the way—has been working the problem. As far as your need to know or your boss’s need to know, Mr. Beaumont, that’s up to me.”

I could see that I had stepped in it big time without really knowing how. Sheriff Brady had been chilly when she had first escorted me into her office. Now she was downright frosty.

“Please, Sheriff Brady, I don’t want you to think I’m taking anything away from your people—”

“Oh?” she said, cutting me off. “Is that so? You could have fooled me. I thought that’s
exactly
what this is about. What you’ve told me just now is what your office could and should have told me two days ago. Right this moment, Special Investigator Beaumont, I can’t think of a single compelling reason to tell you any of what my people have learned so far. Not until that information is in some kind of reasonable order. Give me a day or two to think it over.”

She smiled coolly, then added, “Actually, two days sounds just about right. Let me know where you’ll be staying. I’ll give you a call, say Monday or Tuesday, and let you know what’s happening. After all, that’s how long it took you to get to us. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m somewhat busy.”