Dead to Rights

by J. A. Jance

  “What can I do for you, Joanna?” Mavis asked.

  “I’m here to see Hal Morgan.”

  Mavis shook her head. “Dr. Lee says no visitors. He’s over in the clinic, if you want to talk to him about it. Until I get the okay from him, nobody goes in the room.”

  Nodding, Joanna headed toward the clinic wing of the hospital. Dr. Thomas Lee was standing out in the hall, perusing someone’s chart. “Dr. Lee?”

  Lee, a Taiwanese immigrant and a recent medical school graduate, was only an inch or two taller than Joanna’s five-foot-four. He peered at her through the tiny round lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Yes?” he answered.

  Joanna opened her leather wallet that displayed her badge. He frowned. “The officer who was here earlier disturbed my patient. He needs rest.”

  “Another officer was here?” Joanna asked in surprise. “Who?”

  “A big man,” Dr. Lee told her. “Voland, I believe was his name. He, too, carried a badge.”

  “Dick Voland is one of my deputies,” Joanna said.

  Dr. Lee drew himself up to his full height. “I do not care for his bedside manner,” he declared. “You can tell him from me that he is not to enter the rooms of any of my patients without my permission in advance. Is that clear?”

  Joanna nodded. “Perfectly,” she replied. “But would it be possible for me to speak to Mr. Morgan? It’s a matter of some urgency.”

  “Mr. Morgan has had a severe blow to the back of his head,” Dr. Lee replied. “He needs his rest. You promise not to take too long?”

  “I promise,” Joanna said.

  “Very well,” Dr. Lee returned. “I will call Mrs. Embry and let her know.”

  When Joanna returned to the nurses’ station, Mavis Embry waved her on by. “I guess you know which door,” she said.

  Deputy Debbie Howell, stationed directly outside the door to Hal Morgan’s room, was a single mom and a relatively new hire in the department. As a consequence, she was low-man on Dick Voland’s patrol roster. She greeted Joanna with a pleasant smile. “Good afternoon, Sheriff Brady.”

  “Good afternoon, deputy,” Joanna returned. “How’s it going?”

  Deputy Howell shrugged. “B-o-r-i-n-g,” she answered. “The only people who’ve been in or out so far are doctors and nurses. No other visitors at all.”

  In fact, a printed “No Visitors” sign had been affixed to the door frame. “I’ve spoken to Dr. Lee,” Joanna said, pushing the door open. “I won’t be long.”

  Hal Morgan lay on his back on the bed. His head was swathed in bandages. At first Joanna thought he was asleep. He lay with his face turned toward the window, and he didn’t move when the door opened. Walking quietly to the far side of the bed, Joanna was surprised to see that his eyes were open. He was staring out the window. Following his gaze, she looked out through the slight distortion of the green mesh screen that covered the window. Half a mile away, the rusty-red tailings dump reared abruptly into the air, reaching heavenward toward an intensely blue canopy of sky.

  “Mr. Morgan?” Joanna asked.

  Frowning, he turned to look at her. For a moment Joanna wasn’t sure whether or not he recognized her. With head injuries, she knew there was always the possibility of loss of memory. Short term memory, especially of events that occur within hours of the injury incident, can disappear forever.

  “Sheriff…Sheriff…” Morgan struggled.

  “Brady,” Joanna supplied. “Sheriff Joanna Brady.”

  He nodded and then grimaced, as though even that small movement had pained him. But when he spoke, his voice emerged with surprising clarity and force.

  “I don’t care what that Voland character says,” Hal Morgan told her. “I didn’t kill Amos Buckwalter.”

  There was a single chair next to the window. Joanna sank down onto it. “What’s the last thing you remember?” she asked.

  “Wait a minute, Sheriff Brady,” Morgan said with sudden wariness. “I put in my twenty years. Voland already told me I’m a suspect. There’s an armed deputy stationed outside my door. I’m not talking to anyone—you included—without having an attorney present.”

  “Do you have one?” Joanna asked.

  Morgan frowned. “Do I have one what?”

  “An attorney,” Joanna answered. “By the way, the best defense attorney in town is a guy by the name of Burton Kimball.”

  Reaching into her pocket, Joanna pulled out one of her business cards—one of the shiny new ones with the words “Joanna Lee Brady, Sheriff of Cochise County,” printed on the front. Turning the card over, she scrawled Burton Kimball’s name on the back and then handed the card to Hal Morgan. He squinted at it for a moment as though his eyes weren’t quite working properly. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “The name of that defense attorney,” Joanna replied. “You’ll have to call him, though. He’s good, but he’s not likely to show up unless you call him. Ernie Carpenter, my homicide investigator, is bound to be in touch before long. You’ll want to have Burton on tap when that happens.”

  Morgan lowered the card and stared at Joanna. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

  Joanna looked down at her hands. “Maybe because I believe you when you say you didn’t do it.”

  Momentary anger flickered in Hal Morgan’s deep-set eyes. “Look,” he said, “if this is one of those good cop/bad cop deals, forget it. It’s not going to work. I’ve played that game myself a time or two. No matter what you say or do, I still didn’t kill Amos Buckwalter.”

  “I didn’t say you did,” Joanna replied. “In fact, I believe I said the exact opposite.”

  Looking away, Hal Morgan tossed the card onto his bedside table. “What are you here for, then?” he demanded.

  “To ask a few questions.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like what do you remember about yesterday?”

  “Very little from noon on,” he said.

  “But before that?”

  “Pretty much the whole thing,” he replied. “I remember meeting you. I remember standing outside the fence at the animal clinic all morning long. Up until noon.”

  “And then?” Joanna urged.

  “It must have been right around then when Buckwalter’s wife came outside, got in her car, and drove off. I assumed that Buckwalter was alone in the clinic, but a few minutes later he came outside with somebody else—another man. The two of them walked toward the barn.”

  Joanna sat forward on her chair. “What did this other man look like?”

  Morgan looked at her quizzically. “You believe me, then?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “When I told Voland the same thing, he made me out to be a liar. He said I made the other guy up in hopes you’d go looking for someone else to pin it on.”

  “Did you?” Joanna asked.

  Morgan shook his head. “No,” he said. “He was there. I saw him.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “That I can’t tell you,” Morgan answered. “Not really. I was on the far side of the cattle guard, outside the fence. From that distance, I couldn’t see either one of them very well, but I’m fairly certain one of them was Buckwalter. I recognized his shirt. The other one, I never saw before. I do remember wondering how he could have gotten inside the clinic without my seeing him. One thing for sure, he didn’t come in through the gate.”

  “He probably came through the house then,” Joanna supplied. “The Buckwalter house faces another street, but there’s a path that leads back and forth between the house and the back of the clinic.”

  “I see,” Morgan said.

  “So what happened next?” Joanna asked.

  “Both of them, Buckwalter and the other guy, walked into a metal building, a shed that looked like a barn.”

  “And then?”

  Without answering, Hal gave Joanna a shrewdly appraising look. They were both aware that, over his objections, they had slipped into a mode where she was a
sking questions, and he was answering them. For a time, Joanna thought he was going to clam up completely, but after a moment he continued.

  “Pretty soon I heard someone yelling. It sounded like somebody calling for help from inside the barn, so I left the gate and went running that way. The last thing I remember was going in through the door—going from bright sunlight into a sort of dusky gloom. Then something hit me on the back of the head. The next thing I knew, I woke up here with my lungs on fire and with a killer headache that just won’t stop.”

  Joanna nodded. “I see,” she said.

  “Why is that?” he asked. “If Deputy Voland doesn’t believe me, why do you?”

  “It occurred to me this afternoon that maybe someone else—somebody with his or her own reasons for wanting Bucky Buckwalter dead—is using your motivation as camouflage. Whoever the killer is, he’s expecting us to take things at face value—to charge you and let him off the hook.”

  As a sudden expression of comprehension flashed across his face, Hal Morgan raised himself on his elbow. A few minutes earlier, the mere act of nodding his head had pained him. This time, if the pain was there, it didn’t seem to register or show. Suddenly Hal Morgan was transformed into a cop again—a cop on the trail of a killer.

  “Do you know who it is?” he demanded.

  Joanna shook her head. “Not yet,” Joanna said. “But I have a few ideas. Talking to you has given me a few more.”

  Morgan studied her for a minute, then he eased himself back down on the pillow. “You know, I did want to kill him once,” he admitted. “The night Bonnie died, I could have done it with my bare hands. I think I would have, if somebody hadn’t stopped me. And I still felt the same way when I saw that smug little bastard in Phoenix last summer. I went there thinking there was going to be a trial, that I’d have a chance to testify. But Buckwalter’s lawyer had already worked out a plea bargain. When I found out about that deal, I might still have done something drastic if it hadn’t been for Father Mike.”

  “Father Mike?” Joanna put in. “Who’s he?”

  “A friend of mine. Father Michael McCrady. I met him through M.A.D.D.”

  “Is he a counselor for them, or a chaplain maybe?”

  Morgan shook his head. “No. He’s a member, just like everybody else. His sister was a nun in Milwaukee. A drunk ran her down in a crosswalk as she walked from her school back to the convent after a school Christmas pageant. Of all the people I talked to after Bonnie’s death, Father Mike was the first one who got to me, the first one who made sense. Talking to him finally made me see beyond my own hurt, made me see the big picture. He helped me understand that we were all in the same boat and that it’s useless to take your hurt and anger out on a single individual. It’s far more important to get people in general to see that drunk driving is a menace to everyone. Father Mike is the one who convinced me that by working with M.A.D.D., by raising people’s awareness, maybe I can keep what happened to Bonnie and me from happening to someone else.”

  “In other words,” Joanna said, “you’re saying that you didn’t come to Bisbee to kill Bucky Buckwalter?”

  Hal Morgan’s gaze met and held Joanna’s. “That’s right,” he said. “I came to pass out leaflets.”

  Joanna thought for a moment before she spoke again. “Yesterday afternoon, Terry Buckwalter gave me a note, one she claims you gave her up in Phoenix. It was written in pencil and had a reference on it to a Bible verse.”

  Morgan nodded and closed his eyes. “Exodus 21:12,” he said. “‘He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death.’”

  “You did give it to her then?”

  “Yes,” Hal Morgan said. “And at the time, I meant every word of it, but, like I said, that was before I met Father Mike.”

  Another long silence followed. “Am I under arrest then?” Morgan asked at last.

  “No,” Joanna told him. “Not yet.”

  “What’s the point of the deputy, then?”

  “Some people seem to think you’re a flight risk,” Joanna answered.

  “Some people,” Morgan repeated. “Like your friend Voland, for instance? What about you, Sheriff Brady? What do you think?”

  For a moment, Joanna considered how she should answer. What she thought was complicated by what she felt, and what she felt was directly related to her own experience. On one side of the scale there was the far-too-blithe, wedding-ring- and grief-free Terry Buckwalter. On the other was Hal Morgan, a seemingly honorable ex-cop who, almost a year later, was still grieving over the loss of his beloved wife. Terry’s reaction to Bucky’s murder was totally foreign to Joanna Brady, while Hal Morgan’s continuing anguish was achingly familiar. Based on those stark contrasts, it wasn’t too difficult to see where Joanna Brady’s sympathies might fall.

  “Have you ever been in Bisbee before, Mr. Morgan?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Never,” he told her.

  “Even so,” Joanna said quietly, “you may have heard something about me and my husband.” She paused and had to swallow before she could continue. “His name was Andy—Andrew Roy Brady. He was murdered last September seventeenth. He was shot and died the next day—the day after our tenth anniversary.”

  The look on Hal Morgan’s face registered both surprise and pain. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I had no idea.”

  Joanna acknowledged his condolence with a nod and then continued. “His killer was a hired gun—a hit man working for a Colombian drug lord. The killer’s name was Tony Vargas.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Morgan asked.

  The room became deathly silent as Joanna sought the courage to finish her story. “Vargas didn’t go to prison,” she finished at last. “He died. I killed him. I shot him.”

  “You shot him yourself?”

  Joanna nodded. “It was ruled self-defense, so there was never any trial, but if I had needed a defense attorney, Burton Kimball is the one I would have called.”

  Morgan’s eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute; a little while ago you said you believed me.”

  “I do,” Joanna answered. “But just because I do doesn’t mean everyone else will.”

  Hal Morgan reached out and retrieved Joanna’s business card. It was only when he was holding it in his hand, examining it, that she noticed his fingers and saw that Hal Morgan was still wearing his wedding ring. Three weeks under a year after his wife’s death, he had yet to take his off. Terry Buckwalter’s was already history. The contrast was telling.

  Morgan was still looking at the card when he spoke again. “I’m sorry about your husband,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Thank you,” she returned.

  “Is that why you’re helping me?” Hal Morgan asked.

  Joanna shrugged. “Maybe,” she said, standing up. “If nothing else, I know how you feel.”

  “Won’t it cause trouble for you?” he asked. “With your people, I mean?”

  She smiled. “It could. On the face of it, there’s certainly potential for a conflict of interest. That’s why I’m not pulling the deputy, even though I personally don’t believe you need an armed guard.”

  “It’s okay,” Morgan said. “I understand.” Then, after a moment, he added, “Your homicide dick isn’t going to like it when he finds out you’ve referred me to a local defense attorney.”

  “Who’s going to tell him?”

  For the first time there was the slightest hint of a smile lurking under Hal Morgan’s gray-flecked moustache. “Not me,” he said, holding out his hand. “Thanks for everything.”

  Joanna shook hands with him, then walked as far as the door, where she stopped, pausing with one hand on the lever. From a law-enforcement standpoint what she had done made no sense. On a personal level she was incapable of doing anything else.

  “You’re welcome,” she told him. “And good luck with Burton. He’s a good man.”

  NINE

  ONCE BACK in the Blazer, Joanna radioed the department and
asked to be patched through to Dick Voland. “I’ve just come from the hospital,” she told him.

  “You went to see Morgan?”

  “That’s right,” Joanna said. “And I talked to Deputy Howell, too. She’s due to get off at three. Do you have an officer scheduled to relieve her?”

  “Not yet,” the chief deputy returned. “I was waiting for marching orders from you. Now that I know you’re not pulling the guard, I’ll definitely have someone there by three.”

  “Still no overtime, though, Dick,” Joanna cautioned. “I want you to utilize people from the regular patrol roster.”

  “Right,” Voland agreed. “No overtime.” He paused. “I’m really glad you’ve come around to my way of thinking on this one, Joanna. I was afraid Morgan would stage some kind of miraculous recovery and just walk out of the hospital. Ex-cop or not, I don’t want to lose this guy. Neither does the county attorney.”

  Dick Voland’s voice on the radio was surprisingly cordial. No doubt that had something to do with his mistaken belief that Joanna, too, had now joined the others in their conviction that Hal Morgan had murdered Bucky Buckwalter, that the case was as good as closed. It seemed a shame to let him know otherwise.

  “Where’s Ernie?” Joanna asked.

  “He and Jaime Carbajal are still up at Sunizona. Things are hopping up there. Doc Winfield called a few minutes ago wanting to talk to him as well, but Ernie’s come up with some kind of hot lead in the Carruthers case. I just sent Dave Hollicker hightailing it up to Sunizona with a search warrant. It sounds like Ernie’s convinced that the daughter, Hannah Green, did her old man in. The problem is, right this minute no one can find her.”

  Since Ernie already had the Carruthers autopsy results in hand before he left town, Joanna knew that whatever the coroner was calling about had to have something to do with Bucky Buckwalter.

  “Doctor Winfield is done with the Buckwalter autopsy then?” Joanna asked.

  “Sounds like. It’s not typed up or anything. That won’t happen until tomorrow, but Winfield was willing to brief Ernie on the results in the meantime.”

  “What time will Ernie be getting back to town?” Joanna asked.