Shoot Don't Shoot

by J. A. Jance

  Two weeks ago Ms. Weismann obtained a no-contact order on Ms. Norton’s behalf. The court document ordered her estranged husband to have no further dealings with his wife, either in person or by telephone.

  Reached at his Tempe residence, Professor Norton refused comment other than saying he was deeply shocked and saddened by news of his wife’s death.

  The investigation is continuing, but according to usually reliable sources inside the Tempe Police Department, Professor Norton is being considered a person of interest…. see Missing, pg. B-4.

  Instead of finishing the article, Joanna looked up at Leann Jessup’s pained face.

  “I took the missing person call,” Leann explained. “Afterward, I checked the professor’s address for priors. Bingo. Guess what? Three domestics reported within the last three months. The son of a bitch killed her. He probably figures since he’s a middle-aged white guy with a nice home and a good job, that the cops’ll let him off. And the thing that pisses the hell out of me is that he’s probably right.”

  “Three separate priors?” Joanna asked. “When the officers responded each of those other times, was he ever arrested?”

  “Not once.”

  “Why not?” Joanna asked.

  Leann Jessup’s attractive lips curled into a disdainful and decidedly unattractive sneer. “Are you kidding? You read what he does for a living.”

  Joanna consulted the article to be sure. “He’s a professor at ASU,” she returned. “What difference does that make?”

  “The university is Tempe’s bread and butter. The professors who work and live there can do no wrong.”

  “Surely that doesn’t include getting away with murder.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it if I were you,” Leann answered bitterly. As she spoke, she thumbed through the pages until she located the continuation of the article. “Do you want me to read it aloud?” she asked.

  Joanna nodded. “Sure,” she said.

  Lael Weaver Gastone, mother of the slain woman, was in seclusion at her home in Sedona, but her husband, Jean Paul Gastone, told reporters that women like his stepdaughter—women married to violent men—need more than court documents to protect them.

  “Our daughter would have been better off if she had ignored the lawyers and judges in the court system and spent the same amount of money on a .357 Magnum,” he said from the porch of his mountaintop home.

  Much the same sentiment was echoed hours later by Matilda Hirales-Steinowitz, spokeswoman for a group called MAVEN, the Maricopa Anti-Violence Empowerment Network, an umbrella organization comprising several different battered women’s advocacy groups.

  “Handing a woman something called a protective order and telling her that will fix things is a bad joke, almost as bad as the giving the emperor his nonexistent new clothes and telling him to wear them in public. If a man doesn’t respect his wife—a living, breathing human being—why would he respect a piece of paper?”

  Ms. Hirales-Steinowitz stated that crimes against women, particularly domestic-partner homicides, have increased dramatically in Arizona in recent years. According to her, MAVEN has scheduled a candlelight vigil to be held starting at eight tonight on the steps of the Arizona State Capitol building in downtown Phoenix.

  MAVEN hopes the vigil will draw public attention not only to what happened to Rhonda Norton but also to the other sixteen women who have died as a result of suspected domestic violence in the Phoenix metropolitan area in the course of this year.

  Michelle Greer Dobson, a friend and former classmate of the slain woman, attended Wickenburg High School with Rhonda Weaver Norton. According to Dobson, the victim, class valedictorian in 1983, was exceptionally bright during her teenage years.

  “Rhonda was always the smartest girl—the smartest person—in our class when it came to cracking the books. She went to Arizona State University on a full-ride scholarship. As soon as she ran into that professor down there at the university, she was hooked. I don’t think she ever looked at another boy our age.”

  According to Ms. Dobson, Rhonda Weaver met Professor Norton when she took his class in microeconomics as an ASU undergraduate student nine years ago. Norton divorced his first wife the following summer. He married Rhonda Weaver a short time later. It was his third marriage and her first. They have no children.

  Leann Jessup finished reading and put the paper down on the table. “This crap makes me sick. We should have been able to do more. I agree with what the man in the article said. The system let her down, although I guess it’s not fair to second-guess the guys who took those other calls. After all, we weren’t there. If I had been, maybe I would have done something differently.”

  “Maybe,” Joanna said. “And maybe not. In that shoot/don’t shoot scenario yesterday, I evidently pulled the same boner the responding officer did. If that had been a real life situation, I would have plugged that poor little kid, sure as hell.”

  Folding the paper, Leann shoved it into her purse and then stood up. “It’s almost time for class,” she said. “We’d better get going.”

  Joanna glanced around the room and was surprised to find it nearly empty. Only one student remained in the room, a guy from Flagstaff who was still talking on the telephone. He and his wife were having a heated argument over what she should do about a broken washing machine while he was away at school. The public nature of the lounge telephone made no allowances for domestic privacy.

  Joanna and Leann cleared their table and headed for class. Determinedly, Leann Jessup changed the subject. “It’s going to be a long day,” she said. “I’ve been up since four. The train woke me.”

  “What train?” Joanna asked. “I didn’t hear any train.”

  “You must have been sleeping the sleep of the dead,” Leann said. “It was so loud that I thought we were having an earthquake.”

  Outside the classroom a small group of smokers clustered around a single, stand-alone ashtray. Grinding out his own cigarette butt, Dave Thompson began urging the others to come inside. Other than the guy from Flagstaff, Joanna and Leann were the last people to enter.

  Something about the searching look Dave gave her made Joanna feel distinctly uneasy. Leann evidently noticed it as well.

  “Oops,” she whispered, as they ducked between other students’ chairs and tables to reach their own. “The head honcho looks a little surly today. We’d better be on our best behavior.”

  Moments later, Dave Thompson closed the door behind the last straggler and marched forward to the podium. “I hope you’ve all read last night’s assignment, boys and girls,” he said. “We’re going to spend the morning discussing some of the material on the worldwide history of law enforcement as well as some additional material on law enforcement here in the great state of Arizona. I’m a great believer in the idea that you can’t tell where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.”

  During the course of Dave Thompson’s long lecture, Joanna almost succeeded in staying awake by forcing herself to take detailed notes. As the mid-morning break neared, she once again found herself counting down the minutes like a restless school kid longing for recess.

  When the break finally came, Joanna raced out of the classroom and managed to beat everyone to the student lounge. She poured herself a cup of terrible coffee from the communal urn and then made for the pay phone and dialed her own office number first. Kristin Marsten, her nubile young secretary, answered the phone sounding perky and cheerful. “Sheriff Brady’s office.”

  “Hello, Kristin,” Joanna said. “How are things?”

  Kristin’s tone of voice changed abruptly as the cheeriness disappeared. “All right, I guess,” she answered.

  Kristin’s tenure as secretary to the Cochise County sheriff preceded Joanna’s arrival on the scene by only a matter of months. Kristin had started out the previous summer in the lowly position of temporary clerk/intern. Through a series of unlikely promotions, she had somehow landed the secretarial job. Joanna credited Kristin’s swi
ft rise far more to good looks than ability. No doubt, in the pervasively all-male atmosphere that had existed under the previous administrations, blond good looks and blatant sex appeal had worked wonders.

  By the time Joanna arrived on the scene, Kristin had carved out some fairly cushy working conditions. Because Joanna’s reforms threatened the status quo, the new sheriff understood why Kristin might view her new female boss with undisguised resentment. Given time, Joanna thought she might actually effect a beneficial change in the young woman’s troublesome attitude. The problem was, between the election and now there had been no time—at least not enough. Kristin’s brusque, stilted replies bordered on rudeness, but Joanna waded into her questions as though nothing was out of line.

  “Is anything happening?” she asked.

  “Nothing much,” Kristin returned.

  “No messages?”

  Nothing happening. No messages. Joanna recognized the symptoms at once. Kristin was enjoying the fact that her boss was temporarily out of the loop. The secretary no doubt planned to keep Joanna that way for as long as possible.

  “Something must be happening,” Joanna pressed. “It is a county sheriff’s office.”

  “Not really,” Kristin responded easily. “I’ve been passing things along to Dick…I mean, to Chief Deputy Voland, or else to Chief Deputy for Administration Montoya.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Just routine,” Kristin answered.

  Joanna had to work at keeping the growing annoyance out of her own voice. She knew there was no possibility of effecting a miraculous adjustment in Kristin’s attitude over long-distance telephone lines. But if Kristin wanted to play the old I-know-and-you-don’t game, it was certainly possible to call her bluff.

  “Oh,” Joanna offered casually. “You mean like the prisoner petitions asking me to fire the cook or the domestic assault out at the Sunset Inn?”

  “Well…yes,” Kristin stammered. “I guess so. How did you know about those?”

  Hearing the surprise in Kristin’s voice, Joanna allowed herself a smile of grim satisfaction. She resented being drawn into playing useless power-trip games, but it was nice to know she could deliver a telling blow when called upon to do so. After all, Joanna had been schooled at her mother’s knee, and Eleanor Lathrop was an expert manipulator. The sooner Kristin Marsten figured that out, the better it would be for all concerned.

  “A little bird told me,” Joanna answered, “but I shouldn’t have to check with him. Calling you ought to be enough.”

  Bristling at the reprimand, Kristin did at last cough up some useful information. “Adam York called,” she said curtly.

  Adam York was the agent in charge of the Tucson office of the Drug Enforcement Agency. Joanna had met him months earlier when, at the time of Andy’s death, she herself had come under suspicion as a possible drug smuggler. It was due to Adam York’s firm suggestion that she had enrolled in the APOA program in the first place.

  “Did he say what he wanted?” Joanna asked. “Did he want me to call him back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where was he calling from?” Joanna asked. “Did he leave a number?”

  “He said you had it,” Kristin replied. “He said for you to call his home number. He has some fancy kind of thingamajig on his phone that tracks him down automatically.”

  Not taking down telephone numbers was another part of Kristin’s game. Joanna had Adam York’s number back in the room, but not with her. Not here at the phone where and when she needed it. Her level of annoyance rose another notch, but she held it inside.

  “What else?” Joanna asked.

  “Well, there was a call from someone named Grijalva.”

  “Someone who?” Joanna asked impatiently. “A man? Woman?”

  “A woman,” Kristin said. “Juanita was her name. She wouldn’t tell me what it was all about. She just said to tell you thank you.”

  Joanna drew a long breath. There was very little point in lighting into Kristin over the telephone. What was needed was a way to make things work for the time being.

  “I’ll tell you what, Kristin,” Joanna said. “From now on I’d like you to bag up all my correspondence and copies of all phone calls that come into my office. My in-laws are coming up here tomorrow for Thanksgiving. Bundle the stuff up in a single envelope. I’ll have my father-in-law stop by the office to pick it up tomorrow the last thing before they leave town.”

  “You want everything?”

  “That’s right. Even if you’ve passed a call along to someone else to handle, I still want to see a copy of the original message. That way I’ll know who called and why and where the problem went from there.”

  “But that’s a lot of trouble—”

  Pushed beyond bearing, Joanna cut off Kristin’s objection. “No buts,” she said. “You’re being paid to be my secretary, remember? To do my work. For as long as I’m gone, this is the way we’re going to handle things. After tomorrow’s batch, you can FedEx me the next one Monday morning. After that, I want packets from you twice a week for as long as I’m here. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Now, is Frank Montoya around?”

  “He’s not in his office. He’s over in the jail talking to the cook. Want me to see if I can put you through to the kitchen?”

  “No, thanks. What about Dick Voland?”

  “Yes.” Joanna could almost see Kristin’s tight-lipped acquiescence in the single word of her answer. Moments later, Dick Voland came on the phone.

  “Hello,” he said. “How are you, Sheriff Brady, and what’s the matter with Kristin?”

  “I’m fine,” Joanna answered. “Kristin, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be having a very good day.”

  “I’ll say,” Dick returned. “I thought she was going to bite my head off when she buzzed me about your call. What can I do for you?”

  Joanna listened between the words, trying to tell if anything was wrong, but Voland sounded cordial enough. “How are things?” she asked.

  “Everything’s fine. Let’s say pretty much everything. The prisoners are all pissed off about the quality of their grub, but Frank tells me he’s working on that. We’ve had a few things happening, but nothing out of the ordinary. How are your classes going?”

  “All right so far,” Joanna answered.

  “Is my ol’ buddy, Dave Thompson, still doing the bulk of the teaching up there?”

  “You know him?”

  “Sure. Dave and I go way back. I’m talking years, now. We’ve been to a couple national conferences together, served on a few statewide committees. He fell on a little bit of hard times after his wife divorced him. Ended up getting himself remoted.”

  “Remoted?” Joanna repeated, wondering if she’d heard the strange word correctly. “What’s that?”

  Voland chuckled. “You never heard of a remotion? Well, Dave Thompson was always a good cop. Spent almost his whole adult life working for the city of Chandler. But about the time he got divorced, while he was all screwed up from that, he worked himself into a situation where he was a problem. Or at least he was perceived as a problem. So they got rid of him.”

  “You mean the city fired him?”

  “Not exactly,” Dick answered. “The way it works is this. If the brass reaches a point where they can’t promote a guy, and if they don’t want to demote him, they find a way to get him out of their hair. They send him somewhere else. The more remote, the better.”

  “The gutless approach,” Joanna said, and Dick Voland laughed.

  “Most people would call it taking the line of least resistance.”

  Once she understood the process, Joanna’s first thought was whether or not remoting would work with Kristin Marsten. Where could she possibly send her? Out to the little town of Elfrida, maybe? Or up to the Wonderland of Rocks?

  Dick Voland went right on talking. “Believe me, you can’t go wrong listening to Thompson. He knows what it’s all about. Of all the in
structors the APOA has up there, I think he’s probably tops. You say your classes are going all right?”

  Joanna took a deep breath. No wonder listening to Dave was just like listening to Dick Voland. They were two peas in a pod and old buddies besides. Bearing that in mind, it didn’t seem wise to mention that she was bored out of her tree, especially not now when the lounge was filled with most of her fellow students.

  “The classes are great,” she answered after a pause. “As a matter of fact, they couldn’t be better.”

  For the next few moments and in a very businesslike fashion, Dick Voland briefed the sheriff on the all latest Cochise County law-and-order issues, including the Sunset Inn domestic assault. Try as she might, Joanna couldn’t hear any ominous subtext in what Chief Deputy Voland was telling her. He seemed surprisingly upbeat and positive.

  Joanna waited until he was finished before broaching the question she’d been toying with off and on since leaving Jorge Grijalva and the Maricopa County Jail the night before. And when she did it, she tried to be as offhand as possible.

  “By the way,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to ask. I can’t remember exactly when it was, back in early to mid-October, you helped a couple of out-of-town officers make an arrest down at the Paul Spur lime plant. Remember that?”

  “Sure. That guy from Pirtleville—I believe his name was Grijalva. Killed his ex-wife somewhere up around Phoenix. What about it?”

  “What can you tell me about the detectives who were working the case?”

  “I only remember one of them,” Dick Voland answered. “The woman. Her name was Carol Strong.”

  “What about her?”

  “I can only remember one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m not sure you want to know.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Legs,” Dick Voland answered. “That woman had great legs.”

  12

  When Joanna hung up the phone, she saw Leann Jessup heading for the door on her way back to class.

  “Wait up,” Joanna called after her. “I’ll walk with you.”