Partner In Crime (32 page)

“And me?” I asked. “What am I supposed to do?”

“You’re with me.”

“Why?”

“So I can keep an eye on you. You’re part of this investigation, but I don’t want to spend the entire afternoon giving you directions and guiding you from one place to another.”

“I have a map . . .” I began.

“Forget it. Just go get in the car.”

“Yours or mine?”

The disparaging look she gave me told me the question was unworthy of being dignified with an answer. “Come on,” she said.

Rather than going out through the public lobby, Joanna hustled me first to her private office and then out a door that led directly into the parking lot. I started toward the Crown Victoria I knew to be hers.

“Not that one,” she said, stopping me. “We’ll take the Blazer.”

We walked two rows into the parking lot, where she climbed into the driver’s seat of an SUV that had definitely seen better days—from a physical-beauty point of view. However, a powerful engine sprang to life the moment she turned the key in the ignition. The term “ugly but honest!” came to mind.

We drove into town and back toward Old Bisbee. At the far end of the huge layered hole in the ground she explained was Lavender Pit we came to a spot where a group of cop cars, lights flashing, had converged alongside the road. Some of the vehicles were marked city of bisbee; others, sheriff’s department. They were grouped around the entrance to a freshly graded dirt road that led off between the red-rock hills.

We were pulling over to check things out when a call came in over the radio. “Sheriff Brady?”

“Yes, Tica,” she responded. “What is it?”

“I have Burton Kimball on the phone. He needs to talk to you right away.”

Joanna sighed. “Look, Tica. I’m really busy at the moment. . . .”

“He says it’s urgent,” Tica insisted. “Is it all right if I patch him through?”

“I suppose so,” Joanna agreed grudgingly. “Go ahead.”

“Sheriff Brady?” A male voice roared through the radio. Despite having been filtered through both a telephone receiver and the radio, his words buzzed angrily in the air.

“What in the world are you and your people trying to pull now?” he demanded. “I can’t believe you’d stoop so low that you’d go to such incredible lengths. Really, Joanna, I always thought you were above this kind of stunt.”

Whoever Burton Kimball was, he was pissed as hell. In the course of the previous twenty-four hours, I’d seen some pretty strong indications that Sheriff Brady has a temper. I fully expected her to cut loose and give the guy as good as she got. She surprised me.

“Slow down a minute, Burton,” she returned mildly. “What are you talking about?”

“Someone has broken into my client’s house and planted what looks like a cache of drugs here,” he replied. “If you think you can get away with that kind of nonsense . . .” He paused as if searching for words. “I tell you, Joanna, I’m outraged about this—absolutely outraged!”

She and I hit on the word “drugs” at the same time, and we both jumped to the same conclusion. Why wouldn’t we? Drug or not, sodium azide was the topic of the moment. A few minutes earlier we’d been sitting in a conference room learning all about it.

It was interesting to realize once again that when Joanna Brady was upset, her voice went down instead of up. “What drugs?” she asked urgently but softly. Sitting right next to her, I could barely hear her, but Burton Kimball heard.

“How would I know?” he snapped back. “I didn’t taste it, if that’s what you mean. I wouldn’t know what cocaine tastes like if it walked up and hit me in the face, but since this is a white powder, cocaine is my first assumption.”

I watched while every trace of color drained from Joanna Brady’s face. Her voice didn’t change or falter. “This white powder,” she said calmly, “where exactly is it?”

“In my client’s laundry room,” Burton Kimball replied. “Bobo went out there this afternoon to do some laundry and found it sitting there, right in plain sight on the dryer. It’s in a box that’s been wrapped in duct tape and hooked up to the dryer vent. When he called to tell me about it, I advised him to leave it alone. I tell you, Joanna . . .”

“Where are you right now?” Joanna interrupted.

“Where am I?” Burton Kimball returned. “Where do you think? I’m at my client’s house, and you can bet I’m staying here until someone comes to collect this stuff and take it away.”

“Whereabouts are you in the house?” Joanna prodded.

I had to give the lady credit for staying cool. By then she had put the idling Blazer in gear. We were back on the road, speeding toward Old Bisbee.

“In the kitchen,” he said. “Talking to you on the phone.”

“What about Bobo?” she asked. “Where’s he?”

“Right here with me. Why?”

“Good,” she said. “Now listen to me, Burton. Listen very carefully. Whatever’s in that box in Bobo’s laundry room wasn’t planted by anyone from my department. But I suspect that it is dangerous, probably even deadly.”

“What is it, then, some kind of bomb? Is it going to explode?”

“No, nothing like that. But don’t interrupt. I want you both to leave the house, Burton. Immediately. Go outside and stay out. I’ll be there in a few minutes. In the meantime, don’t go near the laundry room, and whatever you do, don’t touch that box.”

“I hope you’re not trying to pull a fast one here, Joanna,” Burton Kimball warned, but his tone of voice had changed slightly. The naked urgency in her orders had commanded his attention.

“All right,” he relented, backing down. “But if you even so much as try using this as evidence against my client without having a properly drawn search warrant . . .”

Joanna started to lose it. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about evidence,” she interrupted. “I’m trying to save lives here. Now get the hell out of that house, Burton, and take Bobo Jenkins with you.”

She ended the call and tossed me the microphone.

“What?” I said.

“Call Dispatch back,” she ordered, switching on both lights and siren. The calm voice she had used to address Burton Kimball was replaced by that of a drill sergeant barking orders. “Tell them we need the state Haz-Mat team at Bobo Jenkins’s place on Youngblood Hill. Tell them you and I are on our way to secure the scene.”

“Which is where?”

“On Youngblood Hill.”

“I know that. What’s the address?”

Joanna Brady shook her head in disgust. “For crying out loud!” she exclaimed. “I have no idea, but since it’ll take the Haz-Mat team a good hour and a half to get here from Tucson, we should be able to figure out the address between now and then. Maybe somebody with half a brain can look his address up in the phone book!”

I punched the “Talk” button on the microphone. As I gave Tica the necessary information, it occurred to me that I wasn’t the only person in that speeding Blazer who should have invested a few hundred bucks in a Dale Carnegie course.

With lights flashing and siren blaring, we screamed into the old part of town and turned right up a narrow, one-lane strip of steep pavement. The sign said “O.K. Street,” but there was nothing okay about it. Calling it a goat path would have been closer to the mark than calling it a street. Then, about the time I was sure the Blazer was going to scrape off both its mirrors, we met a vehicle coming down. A silver-haired lady, driving a Pontiac Grand Prix with Nebraska plates, backed out of a parking lot beside what was evidently a small hotel and started in our direction.

She looked a bit surprised when she realized a cop car with flashing lights and a blaring siren was aimed right at her, but instead of stopping or returning to the parking lot, she kept right on coming, motioning for us to move over and get out of
her
way. Somehow Joanna managed to do exactly that, tucking the Blazer into an almost nonexistent wide spot.

“For God’s sake!” I demanded. “Isn’t this a one-way street?”

“For everyone but the tourists!” Joanna muttered. The woman in the Pontiac edged past us, waving cheerfully and smiling as she went. “Lights and sirens must not mean the same thing in Nebraska.”

“Sheriff Brady,” the dispatcher called, interrupting Joanna in midgripe.

Not wanting her to take her eyes off the road, I picked up the mike. “Beaumont here. What is it?”

“City of Bisbee wants to know what’s going on, so I told them. They’re sending backup for you. And I have that address on Youngblood Hill for you now.”

Joanna Brady didn’t look as though she needed to be told where she was going, and right that minute I was too busy hanging on for dear life to take notes.

“As long as the Haz-Mat guys have it,” I said. “I think we’re fine.”

We came to a real wide spot in the road where several cars were parked at haphazard angles around the perimeter. Joanna threw the Blazer into “Park” and jammed on the emergency brake. She paused long enough to retrieve a pair of worn tennis shoes from the floor of the backseat. After changing shoes, she leaped out of the car and started down a winding street that was even steeper than the one we’d been on before. The posted sign here said “Youngblood Hill.” Glad to be ignorant of the street name’s origin, I tagged after her.

The pockmarked, broken pavement was scattered with loose gravel. The surface was an open invitation for broken legs. Or ankles. It was all I could do to keep from falling ass over teakettle.

Halfway down the hill was a blind curve. I expected Youngblood Hill to be a one-way street. No such luck. Rounding the curve, we came face-to-face with a city of Bisbee patrol car nosing its way uphill. About that time Joanna Brady turned left, darted under an archway, through a wrought-iron gate, and up an impossibly narrow concrete stairway. I went after her. Taking both age and altitude into consideration, I didn’t even try to keep up. The best I hoped for was not to die in the process.

Hearing footsteps behind me, I looked back. Right on my heels came a beefy young man in a blue uniform. The Bisbee City cop had left his idling patrol car sitting in the middle of the street and charged after us. He outweighed me by forty pounds, but by the time we reached a small terrace of a yard, he was only a step or two behind me. My chest was about to burst open. He hadn’t broken a sweat.

The new arrival was Officer Frank Rojas. I stood aside long enough to let him hurtle past me and catch up with Sheriff Brady. Since we were obviously inside city boundaries, I expected an immediate outbreak of jurisdictional warfare. I’ve seen it happen often enough. I know of numerous occasions in the Seattle area where bad guys have gotten away because cops from neighboring suburbs weren’t necessarily on speaking terms. In Bisbee, Arizona, that was evidently not the case.

“What do you need, Sheriff Brady?” Rojas asked.

“To secure the residence,” she gasped. That made me feel a little better. At least I wasn’t the only one having trouble breathing.

“Anyone inside?”

Joanna glanced at two men who stood together in the far corner of the tiny front yard—a rangy African-American in a T-shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes, and a white man in full Sunday go-to-meeting attire—gray suit, white shirt, and tie. His once highly polished shoes now sported a layer of red dust. I assumed the guy in the suit to be the attorney, Burton Kimball. That meant the other one was Bobo Jenkins, Latisha Wall’s boyfriend.

The man was big and tough, and I wondered how he felt about being called Bobo. Someone tried to pin that handle on me once when I was in fifth grade. I creamed the guy. I hoped Mr. Jenkins didn’t mind. Despite Archie’s description of Bobo as a sort of gentle giant, Mr. Jenkins looked as though he was more than capable of taking care of himself when it came to physical combat.

“No,” Joanna told Rojas. “As far as I know, no one’s inside.”

“What seems to be the problem?”

“Dangerous chemicals,” she answered. “We’ve called for the Haz-Mat team from Tucson. You take the back of the house, Frankie. Make sure no one enters. And whatever you do, don’t go near the dryer vent.”

Frank Rojas didn’t question her orders. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. Without another word, off he went.

A
BOUT THEN THE MAN IN THE SUIT
charged across the yard to meet us. From the irate expression on the attorney’s face I doubted Burton Kimball would be nearly as tractable as Officer Rojas had been.

“All right, Sheriff Brady,” Kimball snapped. “As you can see, we did what you said. We’re out of the house. Now how about telling us what this is about? If the white powder in the box isn’t a drug, what is it?”

Joanna took one more deep breath before she answered. “I’m guessing it’ll turn out to be sodium azide,” she answered. “It’s a deadly poison. We have reason to believe Latisha Wall died as a result of sodium azide poisoning.”

“Never heard of it,” Kimball grunted.

“Not many people have,” Joanna agreed.

“What is it?”

“It’s the propellant used to deploy air bags in vehicles,” she explained. “Sodium azide is more toxic than cyanide. It has no known antidote.”

Bobo Jenkins spoke for the first time. “Did you say Shelley was poisoned?” he croaked. “How’s that possible?”

“We believe the fatal dose was placed in something she drank,” Joanna answered. “Most likely in her iced tea.”

“But how . . .” Bobo began. Then his face changed as he put it together. “The sweetener packets!” he exclaimed.

Joanna gave him a searching look. Finally, she nodded.

As I said, Bobo Jenkins was a big man. His arms and legs bulged with muscles. As the awfulness of the situation sank in, his knees seemed to buckle. He staggered unsteadily over to the porch steps and dropped down onto the topmost one.

“But I’m the one who put the sweetener in her tea,” he blurted out. “Two packets. That’s what Shelley always took in her iced tea. Two packets. Never any more; never any less. Does that mean I’m the one who killed her?”

“Enough, Bobo,” Burton Kimball interjected. “Don’t say anything more. Not another word.”

If Kimball’s stunned client heard his attorney’s objection, he paid no attention.

“And that’s what you think is here in my house right now, in the box in my laundry room?” Jenkins continued. “You think it’s the same thing? The same poison?”