J P Beaumont 16 - Joanna Brady 10 - Partner In Crime (v5.0)

by J. A. Jance

  Sighing, she turned away. Dee had been absolutely right when she said selling the paintings must be like saying good-bye to a group of old friends, but for Rochelle it went far beyond that. In painting the portraits, she had recalled those loved ones from the past and remembered why she had loved them. Now, knowing she would never see any of them again, it seemed as though she was letting go of them forever at the same time she was letting go of their portraits. Hail and farewell.

  Finally, it was all too much. Walking through the empty gallery, a half-sob escaped Rochelle’s lips and she knew she was about to lose it. That shook her. If it could happen to her when she was all alone in the gallery, how would she manage to maintain her composure tomorrow night at the opening-night party, when the place would be crowded with people, all of them—according to Dee—potential buyers? What would she do if some nice lady asked the artist who that little boy was, sitting on the porch with his dog? And what if someone else wanted to know about that nice old lady napping so peacefully in her rocking chair?

  Feeling the first subtle heart-pounding, breath-robbing symptoms of an oncoming panic attack, Rochelle bolted out of Castle Rock Gallery, slamming the door shut behind her. Anxiously she scanned the parking lot, afraid Dee and Warren might return before she could make good her escape. Her closed Camry had been sitting in full afternoon sunlight. Shivering and sweating at the same time, she sank, gasping for breath, into the cloth seat and welcomed the comforting warmth that surrounded her. She grasped the steering wheel and held on, hoping the heated plastic would help still her quaking hands. After a few long minutes, the panic attack subsided enough to allow her to start the car and drive away.

  Leaving Old Bisbee behind, she drove past the remains of Lavender Pit, around the traffic circle, and then southwest out of town toward Naco. When her case manager had asked her where she wanted to go—where she would care to settle—Rochelle had chosen the Bisbee area for two reasons: It was known as a place where artists were welcome. It was also surprisingly affordable.

  After only a day or two of prowling around, she had stumbled on the tiny border community of Naco, seven miles south of Bisbee proper. She had spotted the for sale sign on a crumbling but thick-walled adobe building that had, in previous incarnations, served as a customhouse, a whorehouse, and—most recently—a nightclub. She had purchased the place and had then remodeled it into part studio, part living quarters. That’s where Rochelle headed now—home to Naco.

  Mexico’s towering San José Mountain loomed in solitary majesty over the valley floor below. Behind it arched a cloudless blue sky. The summer rains had barely materialized that year, leaving all of Arizona brittle and dry. Naco was no exception. Turning off the short and poorly paved main drag, Rochelle entered a dusty dirt alleyway that ran parallel to the paved street. She parked in the makeshift carport that had been tacked on to the back of the building. Bullet holes from the Mexican Revolution still scored some of the adobe bricks that passing time had denuded of countless layers of stucco.

  Once out of the car, she hurried to the studio’s back entrance. Unlocking the dead bolt, she hurried inside and punched in the code on her alarm keypad. The system had been installed by the previous tenant. In the interest of saving money, she had kept the existing equipment, merely reactivating it and changing the code. Having a security system made her feel safe and allowed her to sleep easier at night.

  The interior of the building consisted of two rooms—a bathroom dominated by an old-fashioned claw-footed tub and a large open space that Rochelle had divided into work, sleep, and eating areas by the strategic placement of a series of rustic used-wood screens. Eating, sleeping, and working in that one huge, high-ceilinged room suited her simple needs. In the months since she had moved here from Washington State, while waiting for the other shoe to drop, she had buried herself in her work, toiling at her easel almost around the clock, stopping only when exhaustion finally overwhelmed her now-chronic insomnia. Eating, too, had taken a backseat to feverish work.

  A skylight in the middle of the ceiling suffused the white walls and the broad planks of the wooden floor with the soft pink glow of late-afternoon light, but with all the paintings hauled off to Castle Rock Gallery, the studio seemed strangely empty.

  Ignoring the loneliness that threatened to engulf her, Rochelle stripped off her clothes and hurried into the bathroom, where she spent the better part of an hour soaking in the long, narrow tub. She had climbed out and was wrapping her hair in a turban when she heard a persistent knocking on the front door. It was times like this when living and working in the same place had its disadvantages. Pulling on a robe and leaving her hair wrapped, she hurried to the door and used the peephole to check on the identity of her visitor. She was dismayed to find LaMar Jenkins standing outside on the makeshift sidewalk. With his hands stuffed deep in his pockets, he rocked back and forth on his heels and looked distinctly unhappy. Sighing, Rochelle unlatched the dead bolt and let him in.

  “We were supposed to have dinner tonight,” he reminded her in an aggrieved tone as he stepped inside. “You left a message on my machine saying that you couldn’t come. What happened? Did somebody make you a better offer?”

  “Dee and I hung the show today,” Rochelle said lamely. “I knew I’d be tired and probably not very good company.”

  “I would have been happy to help with the hanging,” LaMar said. “Why didn’t you ask me?”

  Rochelle shrugged and didn’t answer. They were standing only inches apart. LaMar Jenkins was a tall man, but his eyes and Rochelle’s were almost on the same level. Feeling guilty and embarrassed, Rochelle was the first to look away.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” she offered. “Iced tea? A beer?”

  “No fair changing the subject,” he said. “But a beer would be fine.”

  Rochelle walked away from him and disappeared behind the wooden screen that marked the line of demarcation between studio and kitchen. He followed her and took a seat at the old-fashioned Formica-topped table she had purchased from a nearby consignment store. She set a bottle of Bud in front of him, then went to the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of iced tea.

  Without being asked, LaMar opened two packages of sweetener and poured them into her glass. It was exactly that kind of unasked courtesy and thoughtfulness that was driving Rochelle away from the man.

  It disturbed her to realize that in the few months they had known each other, LaMar Jenkins had learned far too much about her. He knew, for instance, that she took two packets of sweetener in her iced tea, but none at all in her coffee. He knew that she preferred root beer to Coke and smooth peanut butter to any flavor of jelly. He knew she wanted her eggs fried hard and hated refried beans. Those were all little secret things she hadn’t wanted anyone to learn about her ever again. That had never been part of her game plan.

  “How about a sandwich?” she offered. “Bologna, BLT, tuna. I’ve got the makings for any or all.”

  Shaking his head, LaMar reached out, caught her by the wrist, and drew her toward him. “I’m not hungry,” he said, pulling her down onto the chair next to his. “And I sure as hell don’t want a sandwich. Talk to me, Shelley. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’m just nervous—about the show, I guess.”

  LaMar studied her, his hooded eyes searching her face. “It’s not about the show, is it?” he said accusingly. “You and I have a good thing going, but now you’re pulling away from me, shutting me out. I want to know what’s going on, and how come?”

  “I need some time for myself,” she said.

  LaMar had been holding her hand. Now he released it and she let it fall limply into her lap. “That’s bullshit, and you know it,” he growled back at her. “But even if it’s true, you still haven’t told me why.”

  Because knowing me is dangerous, Rochelle wanted to say. Because when they come looking for me, they might come looking for you, too.

  “You’re too intense,” she sai
d instead. “And I’m not ready for that.” Even as she said the words, her body, in absolute betrayal, longed for nothing so much as to have LaMar Jenkins take her into his strong, capable arms and hold her tightly against his chest. Afraid she might yield to that temptation, she added quickly, “You’d better go.”

  “Why? Don’t you trust me?”

  I don’t trust myself, she thought. “Something like that.”

  Taking a long drink from his beer, LaMar Jenkins showed no sign of leaving. “You never talk about the past,” he said. “Why is that?”

  “The past doesn’t matter,” she said flatly. “There’s nothing to talk about.” She tried to sound cold—as though she didn’t care—but, like her body, her voice betrayed her. The past mattered far too much.

  “Somebody hurt you, Shelley.” LaMar’s voice was suddenly kind, concerned. “Whoever it was and whatever they did to you, it wasn’t me. Let me help fix it. Talk to me.”

  “You can’t fix it,” Rochelle said, shaking her head and fighting back tears. “Just go, please.”

  Without another word, LaMar Jenkins carefully put down his beer bottle and stood up. He walked as far as the first wooden screen before he turned back to her. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “At the show. And afterward, we’re having dinner. No excuses.”

  She capitulated. “All right,” she said. “We’ll have dinner.”

  “Promise?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  He left then. She followed him as far as the door, made sure the dead bolt was locked, and double-checked the alarm system. Then she returned to the kitchen table. For the next half hour, Rochelle Baxter sat at the gray Formica tabletop and thoughtfully sipped her iced tea while rehashing every word that had been said. She didn’t bother making herself a sandwich. She wasn’t hungry. Instead, she sat and wondered whether or not she would really go to dinner with LaMar after the show. Maybe by then she’d be able to find the resolve to tell him once and for all that she had to break it off.

  When her tea was almost gone, Rochelle left the nearly empty glass and half-finished beer bottle sitting on the kitchen table and returned to her eerily denuded studio.

  To combat the loneliness left by all the bare walls, Rochelle wrestled a new canvas out of storage and put it on her easel. It sat there staring back at her, waiting for her hands to fill it with color and give it life. Turning away from the empty canvas, she settled down at her drafting table and went through her sketchbooks trying to decide what she would paint next. Finally, around nine or so, she went to bed.

  In her dream, she was back in Desert Storm. Oil-well fires, burning all around her, filled the air with evil-smelling smoke. She couldn’t breathe. She felt as if she were choking; her eyes were tearing. What woke her up, though, wasn’t the dream. It was a terrible cramping in her gut. Writhing in pain, Rochelle attempted to get out of bed, but before her feet touched the floor, her body heaved. The involuntary spasm hurled a spray of vomit halfway across the room. Falling back onto the bed, she grasped blindly for the phone. Somehow she reached it. Her stabbing fingers seemed numb and out of control, almost as though they belonged to someone else. Struggling desperately to manage her limbs, she finally succeeded in dialing.

  “Nine one one,” the calm voice of an emergency dispatcher responded. “What is the nature of your emergency?”

  By then Rochelle Baxter was beyond answering. Another wild spasm of vomiting hit her and sent her reeling back onto the bed. As she lay there, retching helplessly and unable to move, the phone clattered uselessly to the floor.

  “Ma’am?” the operator said more urgently. “Can you hear me? Is there anyone there to help you? Can you tell me your location?”

  There was no answer. By then Rochelle Baxter was beyond hearing as well. A few minutes later, medics dispatched by the Cochise County emergency operator arrived at the scene. When no one responded to their repeated knocking, they finally splintered the sturdy front door to gain entry. While a noisy burglar alarm squawked its insistent warning in the background, a young EMT located Rochelle in her vomit-splattered bed. Gingerly, he felt for a pulse, then looked at his supervisor and shook his head.

  “We may have already lost her,” he said.

  One

  AS SHERIFF JOANNA BRADY DROVE through the last thicket of mesquite, the house at High Lonesome Ranch lay dark and still under a rising moon. Usually her daughter Jenny’s two dogs—Sadie, a bluetick hound, and Tigger, a half golden retriever/half pit-bull mutt—would have bounded through the undergrowth to meet her. This time, Joanna surmised, they had chosen to accompany Butch on his appointment with the contractor at the site of the new house they were planning to build a mile or so away.

  Butch had bugged out of St. Dominick’s immediately after the service, while he and Joanna waited for the sanctuary to empty. “I’ll stay if you want,” he had whispered. “But I really need to go.”

  “Right,” she had told him. “You do what you have to. I’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll stop by the house and do the chores first,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.”

  Joanna had simply nodded. “Thanks,” she said.

  By then Yolanda Ortiz Cañedo’s grieving husband, her two young sons, her parents, brothers, and sister were walking out of the church through two lines of saluting officers made up of both police and fire department personnel. Joanna could barely stand to watch. It was all too familiar, too close to her own experience. As her green eyes filled with tears, Joanna glanced away, only to catch sight of the prisoners. That forlorn group—eleven county prisoners, freshly barbered and dressed in civilian clothes—stood in respectful silence under the watchful eyes of two jail guards and Ted Chapman, the executive director of the Cochise County Jail Ministry.

  Ted had come to Joanna’s office the day after the young jail matron had died of cervical cancer at a hospice facility in Tucson. “Some of the inmates would like to go to the services,” Chapman had said. “Yolanda Cañedo did a lot of good around here. She really cared about the guys she worked with, and it showed. She helped me get the jail literacy program going, and she came in during off-hours to give individual help to prisoners who were going after GEDs. Some of the people she helped—inmates who have already been released—will be there on their own, but the ones who are still in lockup wanted me to ask if they could go, too. The newer prisoners, the ones who came in after Yolanda got sick, aren’t included, of course. They have no idea who she was or what she did.”

  “What about security?” Sheriff Brady had asked. “Who’s going to stand guard?”

  “I already have two volunteers who will come in on their day off,” Chapman answered. “You have my word of honor, along with that of the prisoners, that there won’t be any trouble.”

  Joanna thought about how good some of the jail inmates’ words of honor might be. But then she also had to consider the notebook full of greetings—handmade by jail inmates—that Reverend Chapman had brought to Yolanda and her family as the young woman had lain gravely ill in the Intensive Care Unit at University Medical Center in Tucson. Sheriff Brady had been touched by the heartfelt sincerity in all those clumsily pasted-together cards. Several of them had been made by men able to sign their own names at the bottom of a greeting card for the very first time. Other cards had names printed by someone else under scrawled Xs. Their good wishes had seemed genuine enough back then. Now, so did the Reverend Chapman’s somewhat unorthodox request.

  “How many inmates are we talking about?” Joanna had asked.

  “Fourteen.”

  “Any of them high-risk?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Give me the list,” Joanna had conceded at last. “I’m not making any promises, but I’ll run the proposition by the jail commander and see what he has to say.”

  In the end, eleven of the proposed inmates had been allowed to attend the service. In his eulogy, Father Morris had spoken of Yolanda Cañedo as a remarkable young woman. Certainly
the presence of that solemn collection of inmates bore witness to that. And, as far as Joanna could tell, the prisoners’ behavior had been nothing short of exemplary.

  They stood now in a single straight row. With feet splayed apart and hands clasped behind their backs, they might have been a troop of soldiers standing at ease. Seeing them there, dignified and silent in the warm afternoon sun, Joanna was glad she had vetoed the jail commander’s suggestion that they attend the funeral wearing handcuffs and shackles.

  Chief Deputy Frank Montoya came up behind her then. “Hey, boss,” he whispered in her ear. “They’re putting the casket into the hearse. Since we’re supposed to be directly behind the family cars, we’d better mount up.”

  Nodding, Joanna left the inmates to the care of the two guards and Ted Chapman and walked back toward Frank’s waiting Crown Victoria. Even in heels, the five-foot-four sheriff felt dwarfed as she made her way through the crush of uniformed officers. A light breeze riffled her short red hair.

  “Looks like the members of Reverend Chapman’s flock are behaving themselves,” her chief deputy observed, as he started the Civvie’s engine.

  “So far so good,” Joanna agreed.

  “But they’re not coming to the cemetery?”

  Joanna shook her head. “No. Having them at the church is one thing, but going to the cemetery is something else. If there’s any confusion, I was afraid one or more of them might slip away.”

  “You’ve got that right,” Frank agreed. “We don’t need to give your friend Ken Junior anything else to piss and moan about.”

  “Since when does he need a reason?” Joanna returned.

  Ken Junior, otherwise known as Deputy Kenneth Galloway, was Sheriff Brady’s current problem child. He was the nephew and namesake of another Deputy Galloway, one who had been part of a network of corrupt police officers in the administration that had immediately preceded Joanna’s. The elder Galloway had died as a result of wounds received during an armed confrontation with Joanna Brady. Although Joanna had been cleared of any wrongdoing in that incident, the dead man’s relatives continued to hold her responsible for Galloway’s death.