“And she hasn’t given any of it back.”
“Fraud has filed for Stegener’s financial records and Stegener’s lawyer is claiming retaliation. For what I have no idea. Meg Cozynski has that one. She says, ‘Honey, you ain’t seen nothing yet.’ She’s really hyped about the case. In fact, pretty much all the fraud division is. She says the abuses are mighty darn flagrant and she’s going after their real estate dealings next, especially the ones around Picacho.”
“Picacho?! What’s in Picacho? It’s nowhere. Even the ranching has pretty much dried up.”
Hugh nodded. “Stegener is part of a coalition of some sort that wants to build a firing range down there. A gun club. I’d love to look at that a little closer, but I just don’t have time, and besides, it’s outside our jurisdiction and not directly homicide related. At least not yet. Missing Persons is supposed to be looking for the assistant, but they’re swamped with cases the same as we are. It’s frustrating.”
“Speaking of frustration, I expected that Lunt guy to be hanging around in the Roost yet.”
“Naa, he finished up his project with us, well, not finished but got us caught up. Now he’s bugging Robbery.”
Joe thought about this as he finished up his ale. It was approaching midnight. Thanks to jet lag, he was just waking up. He sincerely hoped Bridgid was waking up likewise. “Your case load without Stegeners in it seems manageable. I’m sure Tommy and I can clear it up with one hand tied behind our backs.”
“In other words my feeble efforts at investigation are going to look like shit.”
“The efforts of a simply lackey, at best. How about Tommy and I work with Missing Persons on that personal assistant problem, since her disappearance could be due to any number of things, not just Stegeners. And I can do a little sniffing around Picacho. I don’t know that area real well, but I can look it over. Understand, any errors we make we’ll attribute to you. Any glory, of course, we’ll keep for ourselves.”
“Sounds like a deal.”
How silly of her to get lost yesterday! Bridgid still smarted, even though Joe had not only praised her spunk and fearlessness, he had told her she did exactly the right thing, calling him. She was virtually a stranger here and he knew his way around; always, always call. Sweet Joe.
In retrospect she did not think she had done the right thing. She should have worked the problem out herself. She should have made her way south on Central until she was back on the map, and proceeded from there. What seemed impossibly, terrifyingly difficult yesterday was actually quite straightforward today. But she had been so frightened, and then the panic had set in. She couldn’t think.
What if she experienced one of these panic attacks on the job? Quite possibly her supervisors would take a dim view of such nonsense and she would find herself unemployed. Unfortunately, she had no idea how to quell a panic reaction. Neither had Mum, who still experienced them frequently.
She had just put a pork roast and potatoes in the oven on low to slow cook, and the soda bread and tea brack were cooling on the counter. The grocery store near the apartment here was amazing—so many foods!—and it was less than half a mile away! She had had to make two trips, so laden was she, but the pantry was now stocked with supplies familiar to her. Apparently neither Joe nor Fel did any baking, for there had been no baking powder, yeast, or cream of tartar, and hardly any flour. She bought ten pounds. She also bought a ten-pound bag of sugar; perhaps she would bake a cake tomorrow. She had just purchased dark chocolate cocoa.
What to do until Joe came home from work? She brought out her knitting and sat down in the snug little parlour, or as called here in the US, the living room, as if one did not live in all the other rooms as well. She was hauling the jumper out of her bag when the door opened and a happy smile hopped onto her face unbidden. “Ye’re home from work early.”
“To make up for working until midnight last night.” Joe leaned over and steadied himself on the back of her chair, the better to kiss her well. “You baked bread. It smells wonderful.”
“I discovered our grocery store downstreet. Basha’s. What a wonderland, and so inexpensive. They have everything except blood pudding.”
“Nuts.” He stood erect as the phone rang and crossed the room to answer it. “Rodriguez.”
Bridgid was going to have to remember that she too was Rodriguez now and answer the phone accordingly.
“Hey.” Pause. “Absolutely. Six?” Pause. “Good.” He hung up. “The newlyweds are back home, and Tommy invited themselves to our house for dinner.”
Bridgid giggled. “Wonderful! I’ll put on more potatoes. We’ll have plenty.”
“Do it later, okay?” To her utter delight, he took her by the hand and led her down the hall to the bedroom.
Joe sat back to give her room as Bridgid poured his coffee. How fortunate that Bridgid enjoyed dining out on the deck as much as did Joe. She poured Tommy’s and Gretchen’s and took the pot back inside. The sun had set, so he got up and flicked on the deck light.
Tommy inhaled deeply. “Ah, tis a lovely homecoming. Methanks for dinner.”
“Glad to have you both. Drop by anytime. Your cousin just discovered Basha’s down the street, and we’re stocked up with enough food to feed a football team.” Joe looked out across the greenbelt behind their apartment building. Eating outside on the deck was so peaceful just now, and the temperature, high 80s probably, was perfect.
Gretchen spooned sugar into her cup. “So if you’re under subpoena and can’t work on the Stegener case, what can you work on?”
“Everything else. I suppose that missing persons case could be considered to be a Stegener situation, but we’re going to pretend it isn’t. Hugh is swamped. Incidentally, his supplementals are fun to read, as usual.”
Tommy sipped decaf a few moments. “So. Y’re to avoid working on the Stegener case. Does that mean y’r investigative partner cannot as well, or might I go out and investigate whatever I damn please?”
“No one mentioned you. But if you can’t, does that include Gretchen, since you two are now extensively attached?”
Gretchen snorted. “It better not. I might be Tommy’s bride, but I’m Janet James’s partner, and if we can’t work together the whole division will collapse of its own weight. We’re the key.”
Tommy made a derisive snort.
Bridgid plopped back into her seat and sipped her tea.
Gretchen asked, “Bridge, when do you start work? You’re going to be a paramedic, right?”
“Aye, at the station just down the street, in fact. The arrangement is, if they need a paramedic in a hurry and I am not on duty, I can get there quickly to fill in. I be perfectly amenable to that; I’ve quite a liking for overtime pay. I start the seventeenth, the beginning of their next pay period. But first, Joe and I will take the other half of our honeymoon. The Grand Canyon, ye know.”
“So I hear.” Tommy grinned lasciviously. “Hiking boots, sweat, a vertical mile to struggle up, rattlesnakes, scorpions and the like…Sure and it can’t get any more romantic than that.”
“And where will y’rself be honeymooning?”
“After examining our finances, methinks, per’aps, Tempe.”
Joe grinned. “Motel Six, traffic tie-ups twice a day, and twenty thousand incoming college students. For sure it can’t get any more romantic than that. Don’t know if you heard, the division is throwing a reception for Bridgid and me Friday. Ten am. No gifts.”
“Lovely!” Tommy studied his coffee a moment. “Did ye get y’r wedding pictures back yet?”
“Aye, the photographer did what he calls a rush job, since we were emigrating in a week.”
“Give them to me.”
Joe didn’t dare ask. Now what?
“It looks new.” Joe slipped his free-parking pass under the windshield and surveyed the apartment house before them.
“Aye, less than five years. This end of the block used to be that extension to Tower Plaza. That be a thing of the past now.”
They entered the building and climbed to the second floor. “You dabble a lot in real estate, Tommy. Later I’d like to go down to Picacho and ask you to evaluate land down there.”
“Picacho. We will be stepping on Stegener’s toes, will we not?”
“Quite possibly.”
“Look forward to it.”
They crossed the POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, opened the police lock, and entered the apartment.
Joe looked around, gaping. “Hugh’s supplemental said it was in disarray.”
“Hugh is much given to understatement.”
Was he ever. This was where the missing girl, Alicia Bowerman, was living, and “disarray” barely scratched the surface. Drawers here and there hung open. Clothes, papers, and a few books were strewn and scattered everywhere. The sink in the kitchenette hadn’t seen dish soap in days, maybe weeks, and the bathroom, its door yawning open, was a cluttered mess. Joe added superfluously, “And Missing Persons said they didn’t disturb anything. It was like this when they entered.”
“I cannae imagine anyone living in a mare’s nest such as this. Per’aps someone tossed it before the police entered the picture.”
“Quite possibly, but she was a slob in any case. Dirty dishes in the sink, a bath towel tossed over a chair out here in the living area, and that pair of sneakers: one is out here and the other’s just inside the bedroom door there.”
“Good obs. Ah well. Here we go.” Tommy pulled on a pair of latex gloves and started to the left, so Joe went right. The easy chair immediately by the door had a separate seat cushion, so Joe lifted it. A couple Bik pens had slipped down the sides. He left them there and replaced the cushion. The end table beside it had blistered rings where more than one wet glass had been set on it.
Miss Bowerman’s desk, such as it was, cowered here in a corner of the room. It was simply a table large enough to hold a computer monitor and presumably the computer. He had read the Missing Persons supplementals; they had taken the computer with them but could find nothing helpful on it. They had turned it over to Fraud. A two-drawer filing cabinet shoved against the table completed her office. Missing Persons had gone through the drawers and reported nothing useful there either. They were quite right. The bottom drawer was empty. The top drawer held scissors and a T shirt. There was no writing stationery, no business cards for the girl or anyone else, no address book. Who were her friends, enemies, medical practitioners? If her desk was any reflection, she had none.
The woman seemed to treat mail like a non-issue. A stack of mail on the desk included, besides an overdue utility bill, sales flyers for furniture and automobiles and other flotsam and jetsam from the world of junk mail. It had not been sorted in any way. Another little wad of mail lay on the sofa. Mail was scattered across a glass coffee table and jammed against the back of a chair. Here was a pile on the floor.
Joe copied off the return address of what looked like an actual first class letter. The letter itself was gone, and this envelope had been cast aside. The overfull wastebasket held two more. He paused. “Whoa! I know this guy.”
Tommy joined him and craned his neck to see. “Wilson J. Cooper.”
“Missing Persons said she had a boyfriend, an older man, name not known. This could be he. Called himself Wilson, never Will. I was never at his home. When I was a kid I hung out at the raceway a lot and so did he. Bombastic fellow, always has to be right, but one of the loneliest people I’ve ever met. He’s a pain in the ass, but the other guys sort of take pity on him and humour him. They taught me tolerance.”
He handed Tommy the envelope and put the address in his notebook.
Tommy turned it over. “The postmark is a month ago. Ah, and see here.” Someone had jotted notes on the back.
38 400
50 2000
44 1000
They went back to sifting. Joe collected two additional return addresses in his turn through half of the room, and Tommy came up with one. Slim pickings for nearly three hours of hard work.
Tommy sprawled in one of two chairs in the little dining area. Joe plopped down in the other.
“Be ye certain we should be doing this now?” Tommy stretched. “I trow we’re both asleep.”
“You’re right. There’s probably an elephant in the room that we haven’t noticed.” He tried to think and his brain kept shutting down. “Her phone bill was due yesterday. And the electric bill is a week overdue.”
“And yet on the payroll Meg found and showed us, she’s lavishly remunerated.”
They did not sit staring at each other; they sat with their heads turned toward each other and their eyes were open, but that’s about as far as seeing went.
Joe stood up. “Lunchtime. Maybe a Pepsi or two will wake me up.”
They flipped a coin and heads won, The Don’s Pizzeria on Osborn. Pizzerias as a class smell good, but from The Don’s wafted a heady aroma of oregano that went well beyond ordinary. Normally it perked Joe right up, but today he remained half asleep, slouched in the corner of their booth.
Tommy slouched as much. “In her refrigerator are two unopened bottles of Rex Goliath and a Fairbanks port. What does that tell us?”
“She doesn’t realize you’re supposed to drink red wines at room temperature, she prefers cheap wine, and she consumes alcohol despite that she’s underage.”
“Her boyfriend is over twenty-one and also a cheap creep.”
Joe’s mobile phone rang. He rolled his eyes ceilingward as he hauled it out of its holster. Tommy sniggered, the poop.
“Hey, Pop?”
“Hey, Rico. How’s it going?”
“I need new pants and sneakers for school and Aunt Fel is threatening to take me shopping. Would you take me? It’s a lot less painful when you do it.”
Joe laughed out loud. “Yeah, I’ll take you. We’re going down to Picacho this afternoon on business, so how about tomorrow morning?”
“That’d be great! Thanks, Pop. I owe you one.”
“And you were a great groomsman, so I owe you one, too.”
“Then we’re even. Bye.”
“Bye.” Joe thumbed his phone closed, smiling. “I get to go shopping tomorrow. Let’s go down to Picacho today.”
Chapter 4 Johnny Paredes
They took Joe’s MG down to Picacho even though the temperature was close to a hundred because, well, cruising the freeway in a Midget was just too much fun to resist. Besides, Tommy’s Kelly green VW Bug was at the dealership getting new shocks, and checking out a trip car in motor pool was like pulling teeth on a frog. The purpose of the trip was investigation. How did you know what you were going to find before you got there? But they asked exactly that on line 19 of the trip form.
Joe got off the freeway on the ranchers’ exit north of the volcanic plug called Picacho Peak. They would just have to explore, for there were no directional signs at all. Here was a rough, unpaved track that had seen a lot of use lately. Joe followed it back into the low hills beyond the peak.
“I be muckle happy that I’m not driving this extended rut with me new shocks,” Tommy observed.
“It’d be good for them. Break them in.” Joe swerved to avoid a rock and almost hit another one.
“Break them up, ye mean.”
They followed the track out around a sandy wash past some granite boulders and stumbled into a bustling encampment. Five ratty-looking house trailers had formed a sort of circle-the-wagons ring with the remains of a bonfire in the middle. Bonfires in early September? Half a dozen men, no women, wandered about, presumably on purpose. They were all dressed in desert camo cargo pants and olive drab T shirts.
As one, Joe and Tommy got the same idea. They unclipped their ties and stuffed them under the seats. Joe picked a trailer at random, parked in front of it, and got out.
A fellow who didn’t look the least bit welcoming came out of the trailer scowling. “You pretty boys lost?”
“Shopping.” Joe extended a hand. “Joe Rodriguez.”
Tommy stepped in beside him. “And Thomas Flaherty. We’re looking at land and heard rumors about this area.”
Mr. Smiles offered no handshake. “Nothing here. Go out the way you came in.”
“Ah,” Tommy cooed. “Then if ye feel y’ve the right to order us off Cross Creek land, ye must have put a pretty solid bid in, for I know tis not sold yet. Me partner and I think per’aps to bid on it ourselves.”
Joe added, “But I don’t want to lay my money down until I’ve seen the place.” He stepped out near the firepit and did a three-sixty. “Not bad, Tommy. It has water. See those mesquites? You only have to drill a couple dozen feet over there and you’ll hit the water table. The bedrock’s basalt over granite, so we should be able to put in a six-storey building without worrying about settling.” He waved an arm. “And the view is good, if you’re an Easterner.”
“Aye, and pitch the temporary casino tent on that rise, so the scenery smacks ‘em right in the face as they put their money in the slot machines.”
Joe nodded. “Plenty of space for parking and mostly out of the way, so you can enjoy the scenery without a sea of cars messing it up. And with this bedrock right near the surface, if we scrape off the caliche, the asphalt won’t have to be thick or reinforced. I think you and your realtor have a pretty good idea going here.”
Tommy pointed. “The preliminary drawings show covered parking. That would work quite well in that area over there. Inconspicuous.”
“They’re cops!” A strident, gravelly voice Joe had come to know well bellowed. Miriam Stegener’s husband Charlie was standing beside a house trailer on the other side of the ring with an automatic rifle pointed right at them. “They’re cops, Walt!”
Smiles barked, “Charlie, you idiot, point that thing up! You’re aiming right at me!”
Joe kept his voice light. “Sure we’re cops. Gotta make money somehow, and being a cop can bring in a nice little side income.”
Pony Up Page 4