Partner In Crime (5 page)

D
R
. G
EORGE
W
INFIELD DIDN’T LIKE
making next-of-kin notifications over the phone, but hours of fruitless searching for Rochelle Baxter’s relatives had left him little choice. DMV records had yielded a bogus address with a working phone number.

“Washington State Attorney General’s Office,” a businesslike voice responded.

Hearing that, Doc Winfield was convinced the phone number was wrong as well. “I’m looking for someone named Lawrence Baxter,” he said.

There was a long pause. “One moment, please,” the woman said. “Let me connect you with Mr. Todd’s office.”

“Did you say Mr. Todd?” Doc managed before she cut him off.

“Yes.” She was gone before he could ask anything more. After an interminable wait, a man’s voice came on the line. “O.H. Todd,” he said brusquely. “To whom am I speaking?”

“My name’s Winfield. Dr. George Winfield. There’s probably been a mistake. I’m looking for someone named Lawrence Baxter, but they connected me to you instead.”

“Baxter!” O.H. Todd exclaimed. “What do you want with him?”

“You know him then?” George asked hopefully.

“Why do you need him?” Todd demanded. “Who are you again?”

“Dr. George Winfield,” he explained patiently. “I’m the medical examiner in Cochise County, Arizona. I’m calling about Mr. Baxter’s daughter, Rochelle. If you could simply tell me how to reach him—”

“Something’s the matter with her?” the man interrupted. “Why? What’s happened?”

George Winfield sighed. This was all wrong. “I’m sorry to have to deliver the news in this fashion,” he said finally. “Over the phone, I mean. But Ms. Baxter is dead. She died last night.”

For a long moment, all George heard was stark silence. Just as the ME was beginning to think he’d been disconnected, O.H. Todd breathed a single word.

“Damn!” he muttered, sounding for all the world like he meant it.

D
RIVING PAST THE
Cochise County Justice Center on her way to the Naco, Arizona, crime scene, Joanna wondered about her own motives. Had she opted to go to the crime scene in order to avoid the members of her department who had boycotted the funeral reception? She had anticipated that countywide politics was a necessary part of being elected to the office of sheriff. What she hadn’t expected were the political machinations within the department itself.

She had managed to dodge the obstacles her former chief deputy Dick Voland had rolled into her path. Once he resigned from the department, Joanna had thought her troubles were over. She knew now that had simply been wishful thinking. Politics was everywhere—inside the department and out. She had to accept that reality and learn to work around it.

Fifteen minutes after leaving High Lonesome Ranch, Joanna pulled in behind a fleet of departmental cars parked at the corner of South Tower and West Valenzuela in the tiny hamlet of Naco. The front door of an aging stucco building stood ajar. When Joanna knocked, Detective Carbajal appeared in the doorway.

“Morning, boss,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “I thought you were with the ME.”

Jaime nodded. “I thought so, too. Then Doc Winfield called to say there would be a slight delay. I had an extra forty minutes, so I thought I’d come see what’s what.” He moved aside and allowed Joanna to enter. “We left the door open in hopes of airing the place out,” he added, handing her the crime scene log. “You may not want to come in.”

As Joanna stepped into the large open room, she understood at once what Jaime meant. The all-pervading stench of stale vomit assailed her nostrils. When she finished signing the log, Jaime passed her a mask and a small jar of Vicks VapoRub.

“Thanks,” she said, dabbing some on her upper lip. “Now where?”

“Dave Hollicker is over there in what passes for a bedroom,” Jaime Carbajal said, pointing. “That’s where the EMTs found the victim. She’d been sick as a dog all over her bed and most of the room as well. Casey’s in the kitchen lifting prints.”

“What’s the victim’s name again?”

Jaime checked his notebook. “Rochelle Ida Baxter. Age thirty-five. The EMTs found a purse with a driver’s license and gave the information to Doc Winfield.”

“Any sign of robbery?”

Jaime shook his head. “Negative on that. They found eighty dollars and some change in her purse, along with a full contingent of credit cards. She was wearing two rings when she was taken to the hospital, and nothing around here looks disturbed. No broken glass. It’s not looking good for a robbery motive.”

“Forced entry?” Joanna asked.

“That’s a little harder to tell, but I don’t think so,” Jaime said. “Both front and back doors were locked when the ambulance arrived, so the EMTs had to break in. If the lock on the front door was damaged prior to that, there’d be no way to separate EMT damage from any that might have occurred previously. There’s an alarm system that went off like a banshee while the medics were here. I’ve already checked with the alarm company. Their monitoring system shows no disturbance prior to the arrival of the emergency personnel.”

Following Jaime’s directions, and with the smell of vomit no longer actively engaging her gag reflexes, Joanna moved to the bedroom area. The bed had been stripped down to bare mattress, and Dave Hollicker was in the process of rolling up a soiled bedside rug. The place didn’t resemble a crime scene so much as it did a hospital room, emptied of one desperately ill patient and awaiting the arrival of another. Joanna was relieved to see that most of the mess had been cleaned up prior to her arrival.

“How’s it going, Dave?”

He finished bagging the rug and placed it in a stack of similarly full and tightly closed bags before answering. “I’ve taken photographs and bagged everything I could. Once I load this stuff into the van, I’ll come back and start looking for hair and fibers.”

“How’s the print work coming?”

Dave Hollicker shrugged. “Beats me. You’ll have to ask Casey. I’ve been in here most of the time.”

“I’ll go see,” Joanna said, heading for the screens she assumed walled off the kitchen. The great room glowed with natural morning light that streamed in through an overhead skylight. Off to one side stood a large wooden easel. On it hung a starkly empty canvas. Joanna paused in front of it, struck by the fact that the person who had placed the canvas there was no longer alive to color it. Whatever scene Rochelle Ida Baxter had intended to paint there would never materialize. Next to the easel squatted a paint-blotched taboret. The top drawer sat slightly open, revealing neat rows of paint tubes. On the back of the taboret was a collection of oddly sized jars. In them brushes of various sizes stood with their bristles up, waiting to be taken up and used once more.

“Our victim’s an artist then?” Joanna asked, turning back to Jaime Carbajal.

The detective nodded. “Evidently,” he said, “although you couldn’t prove it by what’s here. So far I haven’t found anything but a few sketchbooks and more empty canvases just like the one on the easel. Maybe she was an artist who hadn’t quite gotten around to actually doing any painting.”

Joanna looked at the floor underneath the easel, where more daubs of paint stained the white planks of the floor. “She’d been painting, all right,” Joanna observed. “There must be finished canvases around here somewhere. Keep looking.”

When Joanna poked her head into the kitchen area, Casey Ledford was carefully brushing fine black powder onto the smooth gray surface of an old-fashioned Formica-topped table.

“How’s it going?” Joanna asked.

Pursing her lips in concentration, Casey smoothed a strip of clear tape onto the powder before she answered. “All right,” she said. “Good morning, Sheriff,” she added.

Carefully peeling it back, Casey smoothed the black-smudged clear tape onto a stiff manila card. After holding the card up and examining it, she put it back down. On the top of the card she jotted a series of notations about where and when the prints had been found. Then she tossed the tagged card into an open briefcase that already held many others just like it.

“From what I’m seeing here,” Casey said, “I’d say our victim had company last night. We found an almost empty glass and a partially emptied beer bottle sitting on the table. Dave bottled up the remaining contents from the glass. He’ll take that back to the lab. I picked up two distinctly different sets of prints from both the bottle and the glass, and from the table, too. Assuming one set belongs to the victim, it’s possible the other one could belong to the perp. We’ll take the glass, the bottle, and whatever else is in the trash back to the department. Together Dave and I will go through it all. I’ll look for prints; he’ll look for anything else. Oh, and at Doc Winfield’s suggestion, we’ll be taking all the foodstuffs from here in the kitchen as well.”

Joanna nodded. As she often did these days, she had chosen to wear a uniform. Not wanting to disturb evidence, she stood in the middle of the kitchen area with her hands in her pockets. The room was tiny, but orderly. The cupboards were the kind that come, ready to be hung, from discount lumber stores. The table, a fridge, and a small apartment-size stove made for a kitchen that was functional enough, but one that had been put together by someone focused on neither cooking nor eating.

“Have you collected water samples?” Joanna asked.

“Dave did that first thing.”

Just then Joanna heard the sound of a woman’s voice, raised in anger, coming from the other side of the screen. “What do you mean, I can’t come in? What’s going on here? What’s happened?”

Back in the studio, Joanna found Detective Carbajal standing in the doorway and barring the entry of a solidly built woman who kept trying to dodge past him.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Jaime was saying. “This is a crime scene. No one is allowed inside.”

“Crime scene!” the woman repeated. “Crime scene? What kind of crime? What’s happened? Where’s Rochelle?”

Removing her mask, Joanna walked up behind her detective, close enough to glimpse a heavyset woman whose long gray hair was caught in a single braid that fell over one shoulder and dangled as far as her waist. She was swathed from head to toe in a loose-flowing, tie-dyed smock.

“I’m Sheriff Joanna Brady,” Joanna explained, stepping into view. “We’re investigating a suspicious death here. Who are you?”

“Death?” the woman repeated, wide-eyed. “Somebody died here? But what about Rochelle? Where’s she? Certainly Shelley isn’t—”

Suddenly the woman broke off. She blanched. One hand went to her mouth, and she wavered unsteadily on her feet. Up to then, Jaime Carbajal had been steadfastly trying to keep her outside. Now, as she swayed in front of him, he stepped forward and grasped her by one elbow. Then he led her into the great room and eased her onto a nearby stool. For a moment, no one spoke.

“I take it Rochelle Baxter is a friend of yours?” Joanna asked softly.

The woman glanced wordlessly from Joanna’s face to Jaime’s. Finally she nodded.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, then,” Joanna continued. “Rochelle Baxter fell gravely ill last night. She called 911, but by the time emergency personnel reached her, she was unresponsive. She was declared dead on arrival at the hospital.”

The woman began to shake her head, wagging it desperately back and forth, as though by simply denying what she’d been told she could keep it from being true. “That can’t be,” she moaned. “It’s not possible.”

By now Jaime had his spiral notebook out of his pocket. “Your name, please, ma’am?”

“Canfield,” the woman answered in a cracked whisper. “Deidre Canfield. Most people call me Dee.”

“And your relationship to Miss Baxter?”

“We were friends. I own an art gallery up in Old Bisbee—the Castle Rock Gallery. It’s where Shelley was going to have her first-ever show tonight . . .” Dee Canfield’s voice faltered, and she burst into tears. “Oh, no,” she wailed. “This can’t be. It’s so awful, so . . . unfair. It isn’t happening.”

For several long moments, Joanna and Jaime Carbajal simply looked on, waiting for Dee Canfield to master her emotions. Finally, pulling a man’s hanky out from under a bra strap, she blew her nose. “Has anyone told Bobo yet?”

Joanna knew of only one person in the Bisbee area with that distinctive name. “You mean Bobo Jenkins?” Joanna asked quickly. “The former owner of the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge?”

Dee nodded. “That’s the one.”

“What’s his relationship to Miss Baxter?” Jaime asked.

Dee shrugged in a manner that suggested she thought Bobo Jenkins’s relationship with Rochelle Baxter was nobody else’s business. Jaime, however, insisted. “Would you say they were friends?” he asked.

Dee paused for several moments before answering. “More than friends, I suppose,” she conceded.

“They were going together?” Joanna suggested.

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know exactly. Several months now. Bobo is the one who introduced Shelley to me.”

“Had there been any trouble between them?” Jaime asked. “Any disagreements?”

“No!” Dee Canfield declared staunchly. “Not at all. Nothing like that.”

“You mentioned Rochelle’s show is scheduled to open at your gallery tonight,” Joanna said quietly. “Is that why you stopped by this morning?”

“No,” Dee replied. “Thursday mornings are when I come down to get gas. I have a Pinto, you see,” she explained. “It still uses leaded. Once a week I come down here, go across the line to Old Mexico, and fill up in Naco, Sonora. I usually stop by to see Shelley, coming or going. We have a cup of coffee and indulge in girl talk. When Shelley worked, she’d isolate herself completely. A little chitchat is what I used to drag her back into the real world.”

“If Rochelle Baxter is an artist, why don’t we see any paintings here?” Jaime Carbajal asked.

“Because everything’s up at the show. Oh my God!” Deidre Canfield wailed. “What am I going to do about that? Should I cancel it? Have the opening anyway? And who’s going to tell Bobo?”

“My department will notify Mr. Jenkins,” Joanna reassured her. “We’ll need to talk to him anyway. But when it comes to deciding whether or not to cancel the show, you’re on your own.”