Partner In Crime (8 page)

“You need my fingerprints? Why? I thought you said Shelley was sick.”

“She
was
sick,” Joanna agreed. “But the medical examiner has labeled her death as suspicious.”

“You’re saying someone killed her?” Bobo asked incredulously. “Who would have done such a thing? And why?”

“I can’t answer those questions, either,” Joanna said. “Not yet. We’re working on it, but it’s very early in the process. Investigations take time.”

“But you want my prints. Am I a suspect?”

“Not at all. Yours will be elimination prints. We print everyone who was known to have been at the crime scene prior to the event. That way we can sort prints that belong from those that don’t. From what you’ve told me, you may have been the last person to see Shelley alive.”

Bobo Jenkins nodded morosely. “I see,” he said. “Do I need to do that right away—the fingerprinting?”

“As soon as possible,” Joanna told him. “Time is always important, but you’ll need to call the department before you come by and make sure Casey Ledford is there. She’s our latent fingerprint tech. The last I heard, she was still at the crime scene. And Detective Carbajal is busy at the moment, too. I’m sure he’ll contact you once he’s free.”

“Crime scene.” Bobo repeated the words and then took a deep breath. “Detectives. I can’t believe all this is happening. I can’t believe Shelley was murdered.”

“Bobo, we don’t know that for sure, either,” Joanna reminded him patiently. “At this time, her death is regarded as suspicious. For all I know, it could have been a suicide.”

“No,” Bobo Jenkins declared. “Absolutely not! Whatever killed Shelley, it sure as hell wasn’t suicide!”

With that, he opened the car door, got out, and slammed it shut again. Joanna unlocked the back door. Then she exited the car, too, and helped him retrieve his painting.

“It’s a very good likeness,” she said, once he was holding it upright so she could see it clearly. “Your Shelley must have been a very talented woman, and very special, too.”

As Bobo Jenkins looked down at the painting, his eyes filled with tears. He wiped them away with one end of the grubby towel that still dangled, unheeded, around his neck.

“Thank you for telling me about this, Joanna,” he said quietly. “For coming in person, I mean,” he added. “You’re the boss. It would have been easy to send someone else instead of doing it yourself.”

Joanna nodded. “You’re welcome,” she said.

“And thanks for following me down to the gallery, too,” he continued. “I was so pissed off when I went down there that I might have done something stupid. I could have hurt somebody.”

Joanna looked up at him and smiled reassuringly. “No, Bobo,” she said. “I don’t think you would have. But for whatever it’s worth, I think you’re right about the paintings. There’s no question—they shouldn’t be sold. They should all go to Shelley’s family. Deidre Canfield is dead wrong on this one.”

“Thanks for that, too,” he said.

Carefully holding the painting in front of him, he angled his way through the gate and started up the stairs. Behind Joanna a horn honked impatiently. She jumped back into the Civvie and hurriedly moved it out of the way of the vehicle she’d been blocking.

It was a tough way to start the day, considering she still hadn’t had her morning briefing or a second cup of coffee.

S
TANDING IN THE WARM LATE-MORNING SUN
with the heavy pay phone receiver held to one ear, the man waited impatiently for his call to be put through. The receptionist had accepted the charges, so it wasn’t a matter of money. Still, he didn’t have all day.

Finally someone picked up at the other end. “Good,” he said when he heard the voice. “It’s you. You’ll be happy to know it’s done. She’s dead. All you have to do now is send money.”

B
Y THE TIME
J
OANNA ARRIVED
at the Justice Center and let herself in through her private back-door entrance, it was almost eleven o’clock. As usual, her office was a mess. The wooden surface of her desk was barely visible under stacks of neglected files and paper.

Organizing the Fallen Officer portion of Yolanda Cañedo’s funeral had taken far more of Joanna’s personal time and effort than she had expected. She and Frank Montoya had shared the responsibilities. All essential law enforcement work had been handled, but some of the more routine matters had been allowed to slide. Now, though, as Joanna dug into the paperwork on her desk, she discovered items that had been routine on Monday. By Thursday they had moved to the “urgent” column.

Wanting to have some quiet time to attack the daunting backlog of paper, Joanna set to work without bothering to announce her presence to anyone, not even to Kristin Gregovich, her secretary in the outside office. Twenty minutes later, as Joanna whaled away at the mess, Kristin came into her office to deliver yet another batch of paperwork. Startled to find Joanna seated at her desk, Kristin almost dropped what she was carrying.

“You scared me to death!” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t you tell me you were here?”

“Because my phone would have been ringing off the hook,” Joanna answered. “The only way I’m going to make any progress with this mess is to work on it without interruptions.”

Kristin nodded and placed a neatly arranged stack of papers on the one part of the desk Joanna had finally managed to clear. Then, instead of taking the hint and returning to her own office, Kristin sighed and sank, uninvited, into one of the two captain’s chairs facing Joanna’s desk.

In the past two months, Kristin Gregovich had gone from being slightly pregnant to being profoundly pregnant. Her once showgirl-worthy ankles were now severely swollen by the end of each workday. The baby, a girl, wasn’t due for another three weeks, but Kristin, rubbing her aching back, was vocal about hoping to deliver sooner than that. On the other hand, money concerns made her want to stay on the job as long as possible.

Hearing Kristin’s sigh, Joanna looked at her secretary with concern. She worried that there might be some third-trimester complication brewing. “Are you all right?” she asked.

Kristin nodded, but she didn’t look all right.

“Weren’t you supposed to see the doctor yesterday?” Joanna asked.

Kristin nodded again. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Sheriff Brady. We did go, Terry and I both.”

Terry Gregovich, Kristin’s husband, and Spike, his German shepherd, comprised the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department’s K-9 Unit.

Joanna stood up and came around to the front of the desk. “You look upset, Kristin,” she said. “What is it? Is there something the matter with the baby?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” the young woman answered hurriedly. “Shaundra’s fine. The thing is, the only time we could get in for the ultrasound was late yesterday afternoon. We went right after the church service ended. By the time we finished up at the hospital, it was too late to go to the graveside service. I was too beat to go to the reception, so Terry and I just stayed home. But I didn’t want you to think we didn’t come because . . .” Kristin’s voice trailed off uneasily.

When Joanna had first taken over the job of sheriff, she and her young secretary had needed to sort out some issues between them. For a time after Joanna’s election, Kristin’s loyalties had remained with members of the previous administration. With the passage of time, however, the two women had developed a comfortable working relationship. Months earlier, Joanna was the person to whom Kristin had first confided the news of her unexpected pregnancy. And it was Joanna who had helped Kristin and Terry arrange their nice but hurried shotgun wedding.

In the months since, Joanna Brady had taken a kind of proprietary interest in the young couple’s situation. She had been more than a little disappointed the day before when she’d been forced to assume that they, too, had boycotted the funeral reception. It had hurt her to think that both Kristin and Terry had aligned themselves with Ken Galloway’s malcontents in Local 83. That, of course, had been the other reason Joanna had avoided announcing her presence to Kristin.

“You didn’t want me to think you missed the reception because of what?” Joanna asked.

“You know,” Kristin said with an uneasy shrug. “Because of what’s going on around here.”

“You mean because of Deputy Galloway?”

Kristin nodded. “That’s right. Neither Terry nor I wanted to have anything to do with him and his buddies,” she said quickly. “But four forty-five was the only time we could schedule the ultrasound, and the doctor was later than that. I just wanted you to know, Sheriff Brady—whatever those guys in the union are trying to pull, Terry and I aren’t involved. If we had known what was going to happen—that everybody else was going to stay away like they did—we would have come no matter what!”

A wave of relief washed over Joanna. She eased herself into the chair next to Kristin. Maybe things inside her department weren’t quite as universally one-sided as she had supposed.

“The baby’s welfare has to be your first priority,” Joanna said kindly. “Thanks for telling me, though.” She paused, then added, “But what exactly do you think Ken Junior and his pals are up to? Any ideas?”

“I don’t know,” Kristin said, shaking her head. “Not really. I asked Terry the same thing this morning on the way to work. He thinks most of the guys are just messing around and that we shouldn’t pay any attention to them. But how could they do something like that—ditch the cemetery and the reception, I mean? And what about Leon Cañedo? How do those jerks think their staying away made
him
feel?” Kristin demanded, her voice quivering with suppressed emotion. “What would they think if somebody did something like that to their wives or kids?”

Joanna leaned back in the chair and thought for a moment before she answered. She didn’t want whatever she said to Kristin to add to her department’s inner turmoil if it happened to be repeated to anyone else.

“Some people are simply incapable of putting themselves in anybody else’s shoes, Kristin,” she said finally. “Empathy won’t ever be one of Deputy Galloway’s long suits. But if it will put your mind at ease, I think Leon Cañedo was so overwhelmed by everything that was going on yesterday, he probably didn’t notice who was there and who wasn’t. Ken Junior may have drained off everyone he could bamboozle into not showing up, but it was still standing room only in the parish hall up at St. Dominick’s for most of the evening.”

Kristin heaved another sigh, this one of relief. “Good. I’m really glad.” Saying that, she pushed her unwieldy body upright. “Now that I know you’re here,” she said, “I’ll go get your messages.”

Joanna felt like saying,
Do you have to
? She didn’t. Instead, she watched Kristin waddle out of the room before returning to her own desk. Moments later, Kristin was back with a fanfold of telephone message slips in her hand. “Chief Deputy Montoya wants to know if you’re ready for the briefing yet.”

“Not yet. Give me a while.”

Nodding, Kristin went out, closing the door behind her. Joanna took the messages and shuffled through them. One was from her mother, one from the county attorney’s office, and two were from people in the community whose names she recognized but who had somehow failed to mention exactly why they were calling. Pulling all pertinent information from reticent phone callers was one of the essential secretarial skills Kristin Gregovich had yet to master. The bottom message was from Butch. “Daisy’s,” it said. “Twelve o’clock. don’t forget!”

With an air of impatience she pushed that one aside. After all, it wasn’t anywhere near twelve yet. What would make him think she’d forget? She glanced at her watch. It was only twenty past eleven—plenty of time.

When it came to returning phone calls, Joanna was a believer in doing the tough things first. She dialed her mother’s number immediately.

“Why, there you are,” Eleanor Lathrop Winfield said. “I’m so glad you called back. I just had the strangest conversation with Marliss Shackleford.”

The fact that her mother was a longtime bosom buddy of
The Bisbee Bee
’s featured columnist was one of the crosses Sheriff Joanna Brady had learned to bear. Anytime there was a question Marliss didn’t want to pose through official channels—like going through the media relations officer, Chief Deputy Montoya—she had no compunction about asking Eleanor instead. Joanna’s first thought was that Marliss was on the trail of something to do with the Rochelle Baxter case. That assumption proved wrong.

“Marliss asked me why there were so few Cochise County deputies in attendance at the funeral reception yesterday evening,” Eleanor was saying. “I told her she had to be mistaken. I was there myself. It seemed to me there were plenty of people in uniform, all of them plowing through that buffet like they hadn’t eaten in days.”

Hardly any of those starving uniforms belonged to me,
Joanna thought despairingly. It bugged her to realize that, as usual, Marliss Shackleford had focused in on the one critical issue Sheriff Brady had been trying to dodge. Rather than issuing a denial Marliss could easily refute, Joanna played coy.

“Really,” she said, feigning as much innocence as she could muster. “Marliss says my deputies weren’t there? That’s strange. I could have sworn they were all over the place, but I could be wrong. I had a few other details to worry about. There wasn’t time for an official roll call.”

“See there?” Eleanor responded, sounding relieved. “I tried to tell Marliss that very thing—that she had to be mistaken, but you know her. Sometimes you have to hit that woman over the head with a baseball bat to get through to her.”

Hitting Marliss Shackleford over the head with anything sounded like an excellent idea to Sheriff Joanna Brady about then, but she fought down a biting comment that could have turned into additional ammunition. “I’ve noticed,” she agreed.

“I’d best be going,” Eleanor went on briskly. “I just spoke to George. He’s finished up with whatever it was he had to do this morning. He’s coming home for lunch. I should get it on the table. The egg salad is ready, but I haven’t made sandwiches yet.”