by J. A. Jance
“That’s fine,” Joanna said. “The warrant can wait.”
Once again she tackled the endless stream of paperwork. At ten o’clock she was studying the latest vacation schedule and shift rotations when she saw Frank Montoya and Jaime Carbajal escort Bobo Jenkins and Burton Kimball into the conference room down the hall.
Dressed in a jacket and tie, Bobo didn’t look nearly as intimidating as he had in the Castle Rock Gallery two days earlier. At the time, Joanna had thought she had derailed his anger and that he no longer posed any kind of threat to Dee Canfield. Now Joanna wasn’t so sure about that. Both the gallery owner and her boyfriend were presumed missing, and Bobo Jenkins had come to a routine interview with a defense lawyer in tow.
When I’m wrong, I do it up brown, Joanna told herself.
Shaking her head, she returned to the rotation schedule. A few minutes later, Dave Hollicker knocked on the casing of her open office door. “May I come in?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, looking up. “Have a seat. What’s going on? And why are you at work on a Saturday morning?”
After the previous day’s budget-cutting ordeal with the board of supervisors, Joanna knew that, from now on, she would have to curtail overtime wages.
Dave seemed to read her mind. “I know Casey and I weren’t scheduled to work today,” he said, “but there’s so much crime scene evidence to process, we thought you’d want us to get on it as soon as possible.”
I may, Joanna thought. Charles Neighbors may have other ideas.
“Next time, you’d better have the overtime authorized beforehand,” she said. “But I can see from your face that you’ve found something, and I’m guessing it’s not good news.”
Dave sighed. “You know Bobo Jenkins came by the department on Thursday afternoon to see Casey.”
Joanna nodded. “Right. I’m the one who told him we’d need his prints. Why?”
“Casey’s found Mr. Jenkins’s prints on the empty sweetener packets we pulled out of the trash at Latisha Wall’s place.”
“Of course they are,” Joanna agreed. “He told me he’d been to see her Wednesday evening. He also said he’d had a drink. If he had tea or coffee, it’s to be expected that his prints would show up on some of the sweetener packets.”
“The problem is,” Dave said, “they may be sweetener packets, but what’s in them isn’t sweetener.”
Joanna felt a familiar clutch in her gut. If the sweetener packets had been tampered with, it was likely Doc Winfield was right.
“You’re saying Latisha Wall really was poisoned?”
“All I’m saying right now, Sheriff Brady, is that some of the packets appear to have been tampered with,” Dave replied. “They were slit open and then carefully resealed. When Casey was straightening one of them so she could lift prints off the outside, she noticed white powder clinging to something tacky inside. You know how those little packets work. Usually the paper isn’t sticky at all. So we checked the other packets, including several of the supposedly unopened ones we took from the crime scene. Most of them are fine. Three of them aren’t.”
“Do you have the contents from those three unopened packets?”
Dave nodded.
“Any idea what it is?”
“None. I tried taking just a little whiff to see if there was any odor. I started feeling woozy. Whatever it is, it’s powerful stuff. I’ve put the remaining packets in stainless-steel containers.”
“Good,” Joanna said. “You’d better hustle whatever you’ve got up to the DPS satellite crime lab in Tucson. Get them working on it ASAP. If they give you any grief, have them call me personally, understand?”
Taking that for a dismissal, Dave Hollicker stood. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll get on it right away.”
“Wait,” Joanna added, holding up her hand. “One more thing. Does Jaime Carbajal know about this?”
Dave shook his head. “As I was coming over from the lab, he was already in the conference room with the occupied sign showing. A clerk told me he and Chief Deputy Montoya are conducting an interview. Rather than interrupt, I came to you instead.”
“Thanks, Dave,” she said. “I’ll take it from here. You get that stuff to the crime lab.”
Joanna sat at her desk for a few moments after Dave left her office. Naturally, a mere deputy would have been wary about interrupting an ongoing homicide interview. Under most circumstances, interrupting detectives at work didn’t seem like a good idea to Sheriff Joanna Brady, either. However, she was in possession of vital information that Jaime Carbajal needed to have now, while he was still interviewing Bobo Jenkins, rather than later, when it no longer mattered.
Hustling to the conference room door, Joanna ignored the occupied sign and let herself in. As she entered, she was greeted by the sound of raised voices.
“Don’t keep calling her Latisha Wall, Detective Carbajal,” Bobo Jenkins growled. “I’m telling you, I don’t know anyone by that name. The woman I knew was Rochelle Baxter. Shelley. She’s the one I came here to talk about.”
Joanna heard the overwrought man’s voice falter on the word “Shelley.” She winced at the audible hurt in that word. Bobo Jenkins was angry and grieving both. He sat still, his powerful arms folded across a massive chest. His jaws were clenched so tightly that the muscles in his cheeks twitched. Burton Kimball, seated next to his client, reached over and touched Bobo’s shoulder. The attorney was the first person in the room to notice Joanna’s arrival.
He stood and held out his hand. “Good morning, Sheriff Brady,” he said politely. “So glad you could join us.”
Joanna ignored Jaime’s impatient scowl and returned the greeting. Then she turned to her detective. “Could I speak to you for a moment, please, Detective Carbajal?” she asked, beckoning him toward the door.
Jaime rose at once and followed Joanna out into the lobby. “What’s going on in there?” she asked.
Jaime shrugged. “You heard some of it. Bobo insists he knows nothing about Rochelle Baxter’s other life. As you can see, he’s more than a little upset about it.”
“Why wouldn’t he be?” Joanna returned. “Someone he cared about is dead. It must seem to him as though we’re treating him more like a suspect than a witness. No wonder he’s upset. But that’s not why I called you out here, Jaime. Dave Hollicker and Casey Ledford have come up with something important.”
“What?”
“Several of the sweetener packets they removed from the crime scene appear to have been tampered with. They contain an unknown substance Dave is taking to the DPS crime lab in Tucson for analysis and identification. Not only that, Casey found Bobo Jenkins’s fingerprints on some of the tampered packets that were empty. When I talked to Bobo right after we found Latisha Wall’s body, Bobo told me he had been to her place the evening she died to have a drink.”
“In other words, if his prints are on the sweetener packets, why isn’t he dead, too?”
“Exactly,” Joanna said. “I thought you’d want to know about this as you go forward with the interview.”
Jaime nodded. “Thanks,” he said. With that, he turned and let himself back into the conference room.
Joanna stared at the closed door and thought about what kind of person would knowingly place a fatal dose of poison in someone else’s glass, especially when the unsuspecting victim was someone close—a lover, a friend. Joanna had thought Bobo Jenkins capable of striking out in anger, but that was vastly different from committing cold, premeditated murder.
Just thinking about it was enough to leave Joanna feeling chilled and sick at heart.
Nine
FOR THE NEXT TWO AND A HALF HOURS, Joanna waited impatiently for the Bobo Jenkins interview to come to an end. During that time, she would have welcomed Kristin’s waddling into her office to pile another load of correspondence onto her desk. Unfortunately, an hour into the process, her jungle of paperwork was entirely cleared away. All e-mails had been answered, all memos duly signed off on. D
esperate to keep herself occupied, Joanna rummaged through a stack of previously unread issues of Law Enforcement Digest and the Arizona Sheriffs’ Association Newsletter, where she actually scanned several of the articles. By twelve-thirty she had been reduced to the rarely performed task of cleaning her desk.
When someone knocked on the doorjamb a while later, Joanna looked up eagerly, hoping for Jaime Carbajal or Frank Montoya. Instead, Lupe Alvarez, one of the public lobby receptionists, stood in the doorway.
“Yes?” Joanna said.
“There’s someone to see you, Sheriff Brady. Do you want me to bring him back?”
“Who is it?”
“He gave his name and showed me a badge. He’s Special Investigator Beaumont, J.P. Beaumont, from Seattle, Washington.”
So, she thought, Mr. J.P. Bird Dog has arrived.
No doubt the big-city cop who was here to screw up her investigation and look down his nose at her department would expect to find a small-town sheriff in a squalid office with her shirtsleeves rolled up and her feet planted on her desk. She was glad to be in uniform that day and grateful that her office was, for a change, in pristine order.
“Thanks, Lupe,” she said. “I’ll come out and get him myself.”
Lupe disappeared. Joanna checked her makeup and hair in the mirror before venturing into the lobby. As she stepped through the secured door, she glanced around the room. The only visible visitor was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a gray crew cut and a loose-fitting sport coat. He stood at the far end of the room, examining a glass case that contained a display of black-and-white photos of the current sheriff of Cochise County along with all of her male predecessors.
The photos of the men were all formal portraits. Most of them had posed in Western garb that included visible weaponry. Their faces were set in serious, unapproachable expressions. Joanna’s picture stood in stark contrast to the rest. The informal snapshot, taken by her father, showed her as a grinning Brownie Scout pulling a Radio Flyer wagon loaded front-to-back with stacked boxes of Girl Scout cookies.
As Joanna’s uninvited visitor lingered in front of the display case, Joanna wished for the first time that she had knuckled under to one of Eleanor Lathrop Winfield’s never-ending bits of motherly advice. Eleanor had tried to convince Joanna that she should do what the previous sheriffs had done and use her official, professionally done campaign photo in the display. She realized now that it wouldn’t be easy for her to be taken seriously by this unwelcome emissary from the Washington State Attorney General’s Office if his first impression of Sheriff Joanna Brady was as a carefree eight-year-old out selling Girl Scout cookies.
“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 sa
id.
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.”
