Dead to Rights

by J. A. Jance

  “No idea whatsoever,” Voland answered. “But most likely it’ll be late. You know what Ernie’s like once he gets his nose to the ground. I told the Doc that he probably won’t turn up any time before tomorrow morning.”

  That news disappointed Joanna on two fronts. For one, without Ernie talking to Winfield, the department wouldn’t have access to even the most preliminary autopsy results until noon the next day at the earliest. Not only that, if Hal Morgan’s version of the events leading up to Bucky’s murder was correct, someone besides Morgan had visited the crime scene.

  Joanna needed someone to check that out, to go canvassing the Buckwalters’ Saginaw-area neighbors searching for any kind of corroboration. She had hoped that job would fall to Ernie. But there were time constraints. The questions had to be asked while details were still fresh in people’s minds, before they forgot something they had seen without any comprehension of its potential importance. If Detective Carpenter was otherwise occupied, someone else would have to pick up the slack and do the shoe-leather work—someone from Dick Voland’s Patrol Division. That was bound to blow Joanna’s cover with her chief deputy. But that was what she’d been elected for—to take the flak.

  “Tell you what,” she said. “I’m almost at the traffic circle. Instead of coming straight back to the department, I’ll stop by Doc Winfield’s office and see what he has to say. In the meantime, when you start passing out today’s assignments, I want you to send at least one deputy over to Saginaw to talk to Bucky Buckwalter’s neighbors. I want to know whether or not anyone saw a strange vehicle parked near the house or clinic around noon yesterday.”

  There was a moment of dead air over the radio. When Dick Voland spoke again, all trace of cordiality was gone from his voice.

  “Why on earth would we want to do that?” he demanded.

  “Because we need to,” Joanna replied. “And we need to do it A.S.A.P.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Don’t tell me. I’ll bet Hal Morgan passed along his ‘second man’ pile of crap. He fed me that same line of bull. Don’t fall for it, Joanna. It’s nothing but a sucker ploy designed to throw us off track.”

  We’re off track, all right, Joanna thought, but somebody else put us there. When she spoke, though, she made sure her voice stayed calm and even.

  “Whether or not I fell for something is immaterial, Dick,” she said. “I want Hal Morgan’s story checked out.”

  “But I thought…” Voland sputtered. “…with your leaving him under guard…”

  “We’re keeping a guard on the suspect because you seem to feel it’s necessary,” Joanna said. “But just because you and the county attorney happen to be convinced of Hal Morgan’s guilt doesn’t necessarily make it so. Our department has an obligation to check out all the evidence, to bring it to a court of law, and then let a judge and jury decide. For today, I want one officer from the day shift and one from the night shift working the problem right up until nine o’clock, or until the ends of their respective shifts, whichever comes first.”

  “But, Patrol is already spread so thin—”

  Joanna didn’t give Voland time to finish voicing his objection. “Just do it, Dick,” she interrupted. “That’s an order. I’ll see you as soon as I finish up with Doc Winfield.”

  The Cochise County Coroner’s office was in Old Bisbee, halfway up Tombstone Canyon, beyond the courthouse in what had once been a grocery store. During the mid-eighties and long out of the milk-and-bread business, the derelict but still serviceable old building briefly had been brought back to life to house what was purported to be a low-cost, prepaid funeral service—Dearest Departures.

  Its arrival in town had caused quite a stir. Popular opinion at the time held that the Dearest Departures plan for “discount dying” spelled the end of the line for people like Norm Higgins and other longtime members of family-owned funeral and mortuary businesses. Dearest Departures was supposed to do for the mom-and-pop mortuary business what McDonald’s had done for hamburgers—standardize things and lower costs over all. People predicted that Higgins Funeral Chapel and Mortuary would soon disappear off the face of the earth.

  It turned out, however, that Dearest Departures was far more of a marketing concept than it was a going concern. It was actually a get-rich-quick pyramid scheme couched in terms that sounded far better than the principals were prepared to deliver.

  Franchisees were promised a complete business plan—building, state-of-the-art equipment, and in-depth training for one set fee. A slippery company-hired contractor had come to town with an itinerant crew and a motor-home-based workshop. Almost overnight the crew successfully remodeled the aging storefront into a reasonable facsimile of a mortuary. Unfortunately, corporate training of franchisees and their employees didn’t measure up to the contractor’s ability to transform space. The Dearest Departures “store” in Bisbee, one of the first in the country, had opened with a cadre of people who had barely managed to pass the state licensing requirements and who really didn’t know what they were doing.

  In the Bisbee franchise, trouble showed up almost as soon as the doors opened in the form of several public relations disasters. The first Dearest Departures funeral was that of longtime Bisbeeite Ralph Galloway. Due to an unfortunate employee screw-up during the embalming procedure, Ralph’s send off had a distinctly unpleasant odor. Days later, two bodies were misfiled, with unfortunate and irrevocable results. Miss Maybelle Cashman was mistakenly cremated while Doris Bellweather’s body showed up in the coffin at what was supposed to be the Cashman viewing.

  Dearest Departures had been open for less than two weeks, but the Cashman/Bellweather episode proved to be the local franchise’s undoing. The well-organized business plan called for a considerable cash flow based on relatively low-cost but prepaid services. Once people stopped prepaying and took their business back to Norm Higgins, it was only a matter of time. Norm’s costs may have sounded like the high-priced spread, but at least people had some confidence that Norm and his boys would stick the right body in the right box.

  One month later, Dearest Departures was dead in the water. The owners locked the place up and abandoned town in the middle of the night, leaving behind a bunch of bad debts and a few very unhappy prepaid and unburied customers. Less than a year later, the parent company was out of business as well. When the building in Bisbee, along with all existing equipment, was about to be auctioned off for back taxes, some bright-eyed public servant came up with a better idea. The Dearest Departures facility in Tombstone Canyon was transformed, with a modest capital outlay, to house the offices of the newly appointed Cochise County Coroner, Dr. George Winfield.

  Doc Winfield had come to Bisbee by almost as circuitous a path as the building he now occupied. A trained pathologist specializing in oncology with a practice in Minneapolis, he had lost heart when first his wife and, soon after, his only daughter had succumbed to cervical cancer. No longer willing to fight the good fight, he had given up on cancer and returned to school to study forensic pathology. Winfield had graduated with that specialty at a time when most of his original medical school class was thinking of retirement. Two months later, he had answered a blind ad in the Wall Street Journal. He arrived in Bisbee as a permanent snowbird in time to oversee the remodeling of the new facility.

  As careful with public money as he was with his own, George Winfield had changed only that which was necessary. The walls of his office were still draped with lush burgundy velvet curtains that, as he said, still had several good years of use left in them. That explained why, when Joanna Brady pulled up to his office, she parked her Blazer in a spot once reserved for Dearest Departures hearses.

  “Why, Sheriff Brady,” Winfield said easily, rising in true gentlemanly fashion when Joanna knocked, unannounced, at his open door. “What can I do for you?”

  “Ernie Carpenter’s been called out of town because of…” she began.

  George Winfield nodded knowingly. “Dick Voland already told me. Because of
the Reed Carruthers case,” he finished.

  “Right. I was in the neighborhood, though,” Joanna said. “I thought I’d come by and see if there was anything important enough for me to pass along to Ernie tonight.”

  “Like I told Dick, I don’t have anything in writing yet,” George answered. “At this point I’m limited to one half-time clerk-typist. She only works mornings, regardless of how many bodies turn up in the morgue. I can verbal you some preliminary results, but that’s about it. You can’t have it in black and white officialese until around noon tomorrow.”

  “I’d appreciate anything you could tell us. So would my public information officer,” Joanna told him.

  Winfield leaned back in his chair. “Amos Buckwalter was dead before the fire ever started,” he replied without further preamble. “The lung damage I saw would be consistent with what one would expect from a long term smoker, but not from someone dying of smoke inhalation.”

  “If the fire and smoke didn’t kill him, what did?” Joanna asked.

  “He died of a single puncture wound.”

  “A puncture wound? Where?”

  “Right here,” Winfield said. He turned slightly in his chair and pointed to a spot just over the top of his stiffly starched shirt collar. “It’s in this little indentation. There were also two matching abrasions on the outside of his neck—one on either side. If you’re wondering about a murder weapon, I’d say you’d do well to go looking for a pitchfork.”

  “A pitchfork!” Joanna exclaimed, remembering what Bebe Noonan had said about stumbling over a pitchfork when she found Hal Morgan lying in the burning barn. “You’re sure that’s what it was?”

  Winfield nodded. “My older brother and I spent lots of summers working on our uncle’s farm back in Minnesota,” he said. “We hated each other’s guts. Still do, as a matter of fact. Believe me, I know the receiving end of a pitchfork when I see one. Incidentally, I have the scars to prove it, right here on my upper thigh. I could demonstrate same, if you’d like.”

  George Winfield was sixty if he was a day, and Joanna recognized the remark as nothing more than gentle teasing. “No, thanks,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just take your word for it. Now, if you could give me something a little more official-sounding than that, I’d appreciate it. I need the kind of verbiage I can pass along to Frank Montoya. He’s the guy the reporters are calling for details on this case. In dealing with the media I’m sure he’d benefit from having something more concrete and more anatomically correct than pointing to the back of his head or giving the newsies a lecture on the inherent dangers of pitchforks.”

  “Happy to oblige,” George said.

  A few minutes later, armed with the needed information, Joanna stood up to leave. “By the way,” George said as she started for the doorway. “What do you hear from Ellie?”

  Ellie?

  Joanna stopped in mid-stride. It had been years since she had heard anyone refer to her mother by the pet name only her father had used.

  “Ellie?” she repeated stupidly. “You mean my mother?”

  Winfield looked confused. “I hope I’m not mistaken,” he said. “I understood Ellie to say that you were her daughter.”

  “Eleanor Lathrop is my mother,” Joanna managed.

  Nodding and looking relieved, George Winfield smiled. “And she was going to D.C. to see her son.”

  “Right,” Joanna said.

  “I believe she expected to be home by now.”

  “She is,” Joanna answered stiffly. “She came home last night.”

  George Winfield smiled again. “Good,” he said. “Ellie’s a lovely lady. We met at the Arts and Humanities Council. Mel Torme is doing a show in Vegas over the next three weeks. I told Ellie that as soon as she got back from D.C., I’d try to get us tickets. Now that she’s back in town, I’ll have to give her a call.”

  Joanna attempted a weak smile. “You do that,” she said. And so will I!

  Stunned, Joanna headed back to the department. Mother is dating? Eleanor had a boyfriend? All that seemed unthinkable, yet Winfield’s use of the name “Ellie” confirmed it.

  So what are you so upset about? Joanna chided herself. Why shouldn’t she?

  After all, Big Hank Lathrop had been gone for years. What startled Joanna—what bothered her—was that she was on the outside looking in. Obviously Eleanor had a life of her own, one her daughter knew very little about.

  Once back at the Justice Center, Joanna quickly became so embroiled in what was going on there that her personal concerns were temporarily pushed aside. First she briefed both Frank Montoya and Dick Voland on the Buckwalter autopsy preliminaries. Then, after being briefed herself on how the Sunizona investigation was proceeding, Joanna shut herself away in her corner office to try to retake control of her day.

  There were more than a dozen telephone calls waiting to be returned. As she made her way through them, one by one, she sat with her phone to her ear, staring out the window of her corner office at the employee parking lot and at the desert landscape beyond it.

  She knew the desert was anything but empty. Occasionally jackrabbits and coyotes would show up outside her window. Quail and roadrunners were commonplace. Once she had glimpsed a small herd of foraging javalenas. They had dodged between the cars and trucks on their way to make a scavenging raid on the garbage outside the jail kitchen.

  Today, though, there was nothing visible in the animal kingdom to lighten Joanna’s mood. Even the majestic landscape itself failed to move her.

  To the north stood a jagged wall of rugged gray hills. Each steep hillside wore a jaunty crown of perpendicular limestone cliffs. To the west were the shale-covered foothills of the Mule Mountains. Their deep-reddish flanks hinted that perhaps unmined copper still lingered beneath their rocky, scrub-oak-dotted surfaces.

  Usually, this particular view comforted Joanna. Not today. As the sun went down, sending long grotesque shadows of spiny ocotillo dancing across the gradually emptying parking lot, Joanna felt even more bereft. More wronged.

  How dare Eleanor do that!

  For as long as Joanna could remember, Eleanor had extracted information from her daughter with all the finesse and expertise of a trained inquisitor. She had expected—no, demanded—that her daughter have no secrets. But the reverse wasn’t true—not even close. And why was that? If Joanna was expected to share everything about her own life, why wasn’t Eleanor?

  He called her Ellie! Joanna thought, hurt anew that George Winfield could so casually call her mother by that private and, to Joanna, very precious name. The man had been in town only a matter of months. How was it possible that he and Eleanor had grown so close without Joanna knowing anything about it?

  Lost in reverie, Joanna was shocked when Kristin popped her head in the door. “It’s five o’clock,” she announced. “I’m leaving.”

  When the door closed behind her, Joanna looked down at the untouched mounds of correspondence that still littered her desk. In contemplating a run for the office of sheriff, it had never occurred to her that her days would be devoured by paper. She hadn’t anticipated having to sort through stacks of junk mail in order to find and deal with those few pieces of correspondence that actually contained something of consequence.

  Disgusted as much with the process as with herself, she was stuffing the piles into a briefcase when Dick Voland tapped on her door. When he stepped into her office, he was smiling. “I just picked up a little something I thought you’d like to know about,” he said.

  Joanna finished filling her bulging briefcase and forced it shut. Voland looked so smug, so pleased with himself, that she knew it had to be bad news—for someone.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “I got to thinking about what you told Frank and me earlier, about Doc Winfield saying the murder weapon might possibly be a pitchfork.”

  “Yes,” Joanna said.

  “A little later I remembered Ernie saying something about a pitchfork being
found at the crime scene, so I checked in the evidence room. Sure enough, the pitchfork was there, all right, although no one had gotten around to doing anything with it. I took it on myself to order a set of prints. Guess what?”

  “I hate to think.”

  “Hal Morgan’s prints were on it. How do you like them apples?”

  Voland’s gleeful grin reminded Joanna of an obnoxious, sharpshooting kid from Greenway School who had wiped out everyone else’s collection of marbles without ever learning the art of graceful winning.

  The withering look Joanna leveled at Voland wiped the smile off his face. Had someone held a mirror in front of her right then, Joanna would have been shocked to see a much younger version of the unsmiling, soul-searing gaze that was Eleanor Lathrop’s stock-in-trade. “So what’s the point?” Joanna asked.

  Voland’s face fell. “Isn’t it obvious?” he returned. “Morgan’s prints are on the murder weapon. He’s lying about all of it, including this ‘second-man’ stuff that sounds like it’s straight out of the old ‘Fugitive’ reruns on TV. I’m in favor of turning my deputies loose from the wild-goose chase you’ve got them on.”

  “What other prints were on the pitchfork?” Joanna asked.

  Voland look dismayed. “There weren’t any others.”

  “Why not?” Joanna asked. “Doesn’t that strike you as odd? I happen to have a pitchfork in the barn at my place right now,” she added. “I can assure you that if anyone dusted the handle, there’d be all kinds of prints—ones from every person who’s ever used it. Most people aren’t in the habit of wiping pitchfork handles before they go to work on the business end of it.”

  “What are you saying?” Voland asked.

  “That if there aren’t any other prints on that handle, then the ones that are there were put there deliberately. Planted.”

  “You mean, as in put there to frame Hal Morgan?”

  “Exactly.”

  Dick Voland’s head began to shake. “No way,” he said. “You’re reaching.”