by J. A. Jance
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When Sheriff Joanna Brady’s distinctive rooster ring tone jarred her awake at oh-dark-thirty in the morning, she grabbed the phone off the bedside table and shot a guilty glance at her sleeping husband before she answered. After years of being married to a county sheriff, Butch Dixon had become accustomed to Joanna’s being summoned to some incident or another in the middle of the night. At first he had made it a point to get up with her and make sure that, wherever she was going, she’d at least have a cup of freshly made coffee along for the ride.
Right now, though, the poor guy was fighting a deadline on his next book and had come to bed barely two hours earlier. “Just a minute,” Joanna whispered into the phone.
In the old days, Joanna would have had to scramble across a pitch-dark bedroom while dodging the prone body of her rescued Australian shepherd, Lady, who had formerly slept as close to Joanna’s side of the bed as possible. Now, though, Lady had put herself in charge of Butch and Joanna’s four-year-old son, Dennis. All her instinctive herding proclivities had been turned full bore on keeping track of the boy. Lady spent all her waking and sleeping hours guarding him devotedly—enough so that both Joanna and Butch worried about what the dog would do with herself in the fall when Dennis went off to pre-kindergarten.
Once inside the bathroom with the door closed, Joanna switched on the light and sat down on the closed toilet lid. “Okay,” she said to Tica Romero, the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office’s overnight dispatcher. “What’s up?”
“A Border Patrol officer called in a fatality MVA that may turn out to be a homicide,” Tica replied. “A guy driving a delivery truck tore through the guardrail where Highway 92 crosses the San Pedro and ended up upside down in the riverbed. But the officer who called it in, Agent Bill Cannon, said the truck looked like something straight out of a war zone. He says the cab was riddled with bullet holes that appear to be from automatic weapons fire.”
“Automatic weapons?” Joanna echoed. “Are you kidding me? Sounds like a serious smuggling operation of some kind, probably a couple of the drug cartels duking it out inside my jurisdiction. About the victim: Do we know what killed him? Did he die of a gunshot wound or from the wreck itself?”
“No way to tell at this time,” Tica replied. “I’ve dispatched Detectives Carbajal and Howell as well as Dave Hollicker to the scene.”
Jaime Carbajal and Deb Howell were two of Joanna’s three homicide detectives. Dave Hollicker was part of her two-man—well, one man and one woman—CSI unit.
“Detective Carbajal is already on the scene and he wanted to know if you’re coming, too.”
Years earlier, Joanna’s first husband, Cochise County sheriff’s deputy Andrew Roy Brady, had been running for the office of sheriff when he’d been gunned down by a drug cartel’s hit man. In the aftermath of Andy’s death, Joanna was encouraged to run for sheriff in his place. Most people—including the voters who had elected her—expected Joanna to be sheriff in name only. After all, being the daughter of a sheriff—D. H. Lathrop—and being married to a deputy sheriff didn’t exactly qualify Joanna to be a police officer or sheriff in her own right. But once she was elected, she did her best to get qualified, including sending herself to Phoenix for a course of police academy training. One of the main things that won her the respect of those under her command was that whenever there was a homicide in Cochise County, Sheriff Joanna Brady was on the scene.
“Affirmative on that,” she said. “I’ll get dressed and head out. Let everyone know I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“One other thing before you go,” Tica said hurriedly before Joanna could end the call.
“What?”
“I don’t know if any rental agencies are open about now. Maybe there’s one in Sierra Vista, but you’re going to need a truck.”
“A truck? Why?”
“Because the truck landed so hard that it broke apart on impact, spilling a whole load of LEGO boxes and scattering them everywhere. If the San Pedro had water running in it today, there’d be a flotilla of Star Wars LEGO sets floating upstream.”
“LEGO boxes?” Joanna repeated. “As in toys? As in those little plastic thingamajigs that kids stick together to build things?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tica replied. “Those are the ones. Evidently that truck was chock-full of them.”
“Okay,” Joanna said. “While I’m getting dressed, why don’t you try locating a rental truck. That’s not going to be easy in the middle of the night.”
She ended the call and jumped in the shower. She wore her red hair short on purpose. There was enough natural body to it that, if she combed it out wet, it would dry in some reasonable order without needing a blow-dry. Her mother, Eleanor Lathrop Winfield, thought the whole idea of wash-and-wear hair was too scandalous for words, but Joanna had too many demands on her time and energy to keep up with a complicated hairdo. Ditto for her makeup applications, which her mother regarded as hit-or-miss.
Joanna had her face on and was dressed in her uniform, out of the house, and in the car less than twelve minutes after the phone call. She had taken the time to leave a note for Butch, but she hadn’t waited long enough to make coffee.
The clock on the dashboard of her county-owned Yukon said it was 3:03 as she turned off High Lonesome Road and onto the highway. The night before, she’d been caught up in the first meeting of her reelection committee, and it had kept her up far past her usual bedtime. As she accelerated, Joanna realized how rummy she felt. She needed coffee in the worst way. Luckily for her, the Cochise County Justice Center was on her way to the crime scene.
She dialed up the radio. “Hey, Tica,” she said. “Any luck on that truck?”
“I contacted Frank out in Sierra Vista,” Tica said. “Turns out one of his officers has a brother-in-law who operates the local U-Haul franchise. Frank is seeing if they can roust the guy out of bed and have him come handle the rental. If so, he’ll give us a call.”
Frank was Frank Montoya. Frank had been one of Joanna’s two opponents in her run for the office of sheriff. When he lost out, she was smart enough to appoint him to be one of her two chief deputies. In recent years, however, Frank had been lured away from that job when Sierra Vista offered him the position of chief of police.
“Bless his heart,” Joanna said. “If anyone can make it happen, Frank is the guy. One other thing: What are the chances of getting someone to go down to the break room and make a fresh pot of coffee? If I swing through the front parking lot, maybe they could bring a cup out to me. I’m maybe three minutes away.”
“You bet,” Tica said. “Believe me, you wouldn’t want to drink the crap in the bottom of the pot right now. That stuff is thick enough to kill you.”
Minutes later, as Joanna turned into the Justice Center entrance drive, Sergeant Kevin Crane, her nighttime desk sergeant, was already hobbling down the wheelchair ramp with a covered paper cup of coffee in hand. While still a deputy, Crane’s legs had been severely injured in a line-of-duty accident in which his patrol car had been T-boned by a drunk driver. At the time of the wreck, Kevin was divorced and remarried and had two sets of kids to support. He was supremely grateful when Joanna offered to move him over to a desk job rather than forcing him into early retirement.
“It’s hot,�
�� he said, gingerly handing the thermal cup in through the window.
It was hot. It was all Joanna could do to get it transferred to the cupholder without burning her fingers.
“Thanks, Kev,” she said. “If someone from Sierra Vista comes up with a truck we can rent, give them my departmental Amex card. I know Deputy Stock is off duty tonight, but wake him up and ask him to pick up the truck. He does still live in Sierra Vista, doesn’t he?”
“As far as I know,” Crane said. “Are you going to need additional help?”
“Probably. I’m told the crime scene is littered with a truckload of spilled LEGO boxes. If you can spare a patrol officer or two to come help gather them up, I’d be most appreciative.”
“I’ll see what I can do, but we’re stretched pretty thin tonight.”
With her coffee too hot to drink, Joanna drove through town and west on Highway 92 on the far side of Huachuca Terraces, still puzzling over what she had so far learned about the incident. How could a load of LEGO sets be worth a fatality firefight, especially one with assailants armed with fully loaded automatic weapons? Was that even remotely possible? Had the cartels started using phony toy boxes as a way of transporting drugs?
When she estimated the coffee was cool enough to drink, she tried a sip. It may have been fresh, but it tasted vile. If this was what the new coffee in the break room tasted like, the old stuff would have been far worse. Disgusted, she put the cup back in the cupholder and left it there.
The glow of flashing emergency lights, visible from miles away, guided Joanna to the crime scene. Parking on the shoulder of the highway just behind the ME’s van, she stepped out of her SUV and gazed down at the artificially lit scene. She saw moving beams of flashlights here and there, as well as the occasional brilliant flash from someone shooting crime scene photos.
The high-desert chill of early April bit through the shirt of Joanna’s uniform and ruffled icily through her still-damp hair. Suppressing a shiver, Joanna reached into the Yukon’s backseat and pulled out a brown leather aviator’s jacket bearing an arm patch imprinted with the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office logo. She was shrugging into its welcome warmth as Deputy Armando Ruiz walked up to her with his own blazing Maglite in hand.
“It’s still pretty dark, Sheriff Brady. Are you going to go straight down the embankment from here or would you rather walk around?”
“Are you going down?” she asked.
“My assignment is to stay here,” Deputy Ruiz replied. “I’m in charge of directing traffic, not that there’s much of that at the moment. That’ll change once the sun comes up. In the meantime, I’ve been walking up and down the road, looking for skid marks.”
“And?”
“There aren’t any. Looks to me like he made no effort to stop. He just veered across the centerline and crashed into the guardrail at full speed.”
Joanna reached into the front seat and retrieved her own Maglite. Grateful she had worn a pair of sturdy hiking boots, she nodded toward the spot where the mangled iron guardrail had been ripped apart as the truck crashed through it. “I guess I’ll take the straight down option,” she said.
Maglites, heavy enough to be used as batons in a pinch, were designed to be used by cops much larger than Joanna’s diminutive five-foot-four-inch frame. She appreciated the way the flashlight illuminated the tricky rock-strewn downward path, but the weight of the device made it difficult for her to maintain her balance. The last few feet down the incline were done on her butt in a very unladylike fashion. She was glad Deputy Ruiz hadn’t announced her arrival beforehand. Once she reached the bottom, she needed a moment to brush herself off before anyone else spotted her.
The generator-operated work lights created pockets of bright illumination that alternated with places that were pitch-dark, making it impossible for Joanna’s eyes to adjust. The first figure who emerged out of that unsettling mixture of light and dark turned out to be Detective Deb Howell.
“How are things?” Joanna asked.
“This is one night that makes me happy Maury and I finally got around to tying the knot,” Deb replied with a grin. “Used to be when I’d get a call-out like this, I’d have to jump through hoops to find a middle-of-the-night babysitter for Ben. Having a husband right there and on call makes life a lot simpler.”
Years earlier, Deb had met Maury Robbins, a 911 dispatcher from Tucson who was also an ATV enthusiast, during a homicide investigation at an ATV park near Bowie. They dated for a long time and finally got around to marrying a scant two months earlier. Since the wedding, the newlyweds had simplified their living arrangements by having Maury move into Deb’s house in Old Bisbee. From there he made the hundred-mile-each-way commute back and forth to Tucson three days a week.
“That isn’t exactly what I was asking,” Joanna said with a smile.
Deb gestured toward the scene behind them. “We’re stuck in a holding pattern right now, waiting for the ME to finish her preliminary exam.”
For years a man named George Winfield had served as Cochise County’s medical examiner. He and Joanna had maintained an excellent working relationship right up until George hauled off and married Joanna’s widowed mother, Eleanor. That complicated things immensely, especially since Eleanor wanted a retired husband rather than one who was fully employed. When George resigned the post of ME, his replacement, Dr. Guy Machett, became a royal pain. Then, several months ago, Machett himself was murdered in a horrific attack. The new ME, Machett’s replacement, was a tall, serious-minded black woman named Dr. Kendra Baldwin, who arrived in town the same weekend Deb Howell and Maury Robbins married.
This was only the second homicide Dr. Baldwin had investigated for Joanna’s department, but Joanna had been part of the vetting process for the new ME, and she had every confidence that Kendra Baldwin’s abilities would live up to her five-star credentials. Not only that, Joanna had been delighted when, in the course of their first interactions, Kendra suggested that they drop the formal “ ‘Doctor’ and ‘Sheriff’ BS,” as she put it. “I’m Kendra, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to call you Joanna.”
After years of dealing with Guy Machett’s unyielding objections to being called anything other than a strictly formal “Dr. Machett,” Joanna welcomed Kendra Baldwin’s brand of straightforward informality.
Just then, Kendra herself emerged from the circle of generator-powered artificial illumination. “There you are, Joanna,” she said. “I’ve told my guys to take him back to the morgue. Once he’s gone, the truck is all yours.”
Joanna nodded her thanks, smiling as she did so. Guy Machett had never referred to his morgue assistants by anything other than the formal term, “dieners.” The fact that Dr. Baldwin called them “her guys” was also a mark in her favor.
“What can you tell us?” Joanna asked.
“Driver’s license in his pocket identifies him as Fredrico Arturo Gomez from Bakersfield, California. He signed up to be an organ donor, but that’s not going to happen. I found multiple gunshot wounds in his body, all of which penetrated the victim’s left side. Any one of them could have done the trick. I’d say he was dead long before the truck smashed through the guardrail and hit the ground. From what I could see, a barrage of bullets entered the cab of the truck through the driver’s side with enough force to penetrate both the truck and the victim.”
“We’re talking real firepower, then,” Joanna observed.
“Right,” Kendra agreed. “If the victim was traveling at sixty miles per hour or even sixty-five, we’d have to be talking either a whole troop of shooters or else an automatic weapon of some kind for there to be that many hits.”
“Since the entry wounds are all on the victim’s left side, that means the shooter was either on the left-hand shoulder of the highway, waiting for him,” Deb suggested, “or else in a vehicle that was passing in the left lane.”
“That could be, too,�
� Joanna said. “Shooting from a passing vehicle makes more sense than coming from opposite directions. If each of the two meeting vehicles was doing sixty, that adds up to 120 miles per hour. The split second the two would have been side by side wouldn’t allow enough time for multiple hits, even with an automatic weapon. There’s a posted no-passing zone right there where he went through the guardrail, but if someone was out to kill the guy, a solid yellow line on the pavement wouldn’t count for much. What we know for sure is that, one way or another, this guy was ambushed. Either the shooter was following him, or else he knew the exact time he would be traveling this particular section of roadway. So where’s the brass—still on the pavement or on the shoulder somewhere?”
Joanna pulled out her phone and dialed Sergeant Crane’s number. “We need some manpower out here,” she said when he answered. “The targeted vehicle went off the bridge on Highway 92 at the San Pedro River. From the damage to the guardrail, it looks as though he was headed east, but we don’t know exactly where the shooting took place. That part of the highway is fairly straight. The shooting might have happened as far away as a mile or so, and it took the truck that long to finally veer off the road. We need people out here combing the highway on both sides of the crime scene looking for brass and, if we’re really lucky, maybe some usable tire prints.”
“Is this a situation where we should bring the old duffers into play?” Sergeant Crane asked.
Recently a group of local seniors, several of them still in possession of Eagle Scout badges from long ago, had erased the natural dividing lines between the Kiwanis, Rotary, and Lions Clubs and shown up at Joanna’s office offering to form a group of senior citizen reserve officers. Officially dubbed the SCRs (Senior Citizen Reservists), they had all gone through citizens’ academy training and had done a number of patrol ride-alongs. Some of them helped out with routine filing and clerical procedures at the Justice Center. They had also proved to be invaluable in helping locate several vulnerable adults when the sheriff’s office posted Silver Alerts. This, however, was the first time any of them would be deployed on a search for evidence.
