by J. A. Jance
“What about the shooter?” Joanna asked.
“Down and unresponsive at this point,” Tom replied. “He may be deceased.”
Joanna let out her breath. Not only an officer-involved shooting but a fatal one at that! “Do we have any idea how this happened?”
“Details are sketchy right now. The only witness is the shooter’s estranged wife. She’s the one who dialed 911, screaming that a cop had just shot her husband.”
“That would be the woman who swore out the no-contact order?” Joanna asked.
“Evidently.”
Joanna’s temper soared. “If she didn’t want any contact with the man, what the hell was she doing there?” she demanded. “Why not just stay away and leave him alone?”
“Who knows?” Tom asked. “Who the hell knows?”
Joanna grabbed her purse and started for the door. “Okay,” she said, “are any of our patrol units nearby?”
“The closest one right now is Garth Raymond. He was investigating an abandoned vehicle on Davis Road east of Tombstone. He’s been notified and is headed to the scene.”
“I’m headed there, too,” Joanna said grimly, “and I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I’ve already lost one deputy. I don’t want to lose another.” It was years now since Deputy Dan Sloan had been fatally shot, and his loss remained an open wound not only in the department but also in Joanna’s heart.
Joanna made it to the door before turning back to her chief deputy. “Okay, Tom, please keep me posted. I’ll need the names of everyone involved as well as the exact location—a physical address—of the crime scene. You’ll need to alert both the Department of Public Safety and the county attorney’s office. DPS will be handling the actual investigation, but if Arlee Jones isn’t in on the ground floor on something like this, he’ll make our lives hell on earth.”
Arlee Jones had served as the county attorney for as long as Joanna could remember. Well into his seventies, he should have been past his pull-by date, but he was also a political animal through and through. He was the proverbial “good old boy,” someone who won reelection time after time, seemingly without having to lift a finger. He and Joanna had crossed swords on more than one occasion. It was his job to determine whether an officer-involved shooting was justifiable, and she didn’t want Arlee Jones looking into the Whetstone situation with a chip on his shoulder.
As for Joanna? In the car with her seat belt fastened and the transmission in reverse, she was confident about how this situation would sort itself out. Armando Ruiz was an experienced officer, one who didn’t take shortcuts. She felt sure he must have had good reason to utilize deadly force. She also had a complete understanding of the bare seconds cops have to make those life-or-death, shoot/don’t-shoot decisions. Other people—especially folks in the media—would no doubt buzz around, second-guessing the man’s choice to their hearts’ content, but it was a decision Deputy Ruiz himself would have to live with for the rest of his life.
Soon Joanna was speeding westbound on Highway 80, her flashing lights ablaze and siren screeching. With a dead civilian and a gravely wounded officer, what had started out as a normal morning was now infinitely more complicated. Driving through Bisbee’s Lowell neighborhood and past Lavender Pit, she listened in on the urgent radio chatter going back and forth between Dispatch and personnel in the field. That was how she heard, for the first time, that EMTs at the scene were calling for an air ambulance to transport Armando to the trauma unit at Banner–University Medical Center in Tucson. Gravely wounded indeed!
When Andy had been shot and left to die, no one had knocked on Joanna’s door to deliver the devastating news because she was the one who’d found him. That wasn’t the case with Armando. Officers from other jurisdictions were currently on the scene, but it was Joanna’s sacred duty to be the one to let Amy Ruiz know what had happened. So although Joanna originally set out to go directly to the crime scene, she soon changed her mind.
Mentally, she ticked off everything she knew about Armando Ruiz. He was in his thirties and had been a deputy for the past seven years. He and his wife, Amy, lived in Sierra Vista along with their three school-age kids—all of them boys. Joanna was relatively certain Amy Ruiz was a schoolteacher, but she didn’t know which school or what grade level. After a moment’s thought, however, she realized that there was someone at her disposal who might be able to fill in a few of those blanks.
“Siri,” she ordered, “call Frank Montoya at work.”
During Joanna’s first run for office, she had faced two formidable opponents, both of them Cochise County deputies—Dick Voland and Frank Montoya. Her victory had been met with a good deal of bad-mouthing, to the effect that her running for office had been little more than a bid for sympathy. In addition, there was concern about having an amateur—someone whose knowledge of law enforcement was secondhand at best—heading up the department.
In order to defuse the situation and stifle the criticism, Joanna had baffled supporters and critics alike by naming her two former opponents to serve jointly as co–chief deputies.
It had been an instinctive but inspired choice. While Joanna went to work learning the ins and outs of law enforcement, Montoya and Voland had been on hand to supply the necessary professional expertise. Dick Voland had left a couple years later to start his own private-investigation firm. At about the same time, he’d hooked up with Joanna’s least favorite reporter, Marliss Shackleford, a match-not-made-in-heaven that had eventually come to grief. Frank had stayed on with Joanna's department until fairly recently, when the lucrative offer of becoming chief of police in Sierra Vista had lured him away.
At the time Armando Ruiz was hired, Frank had been in charge of doing the initial interviews, and Joanna seemed to remember that Frank and Armando had some shared Sierra Vista connections.
“Hey,” Frank said when he came on the line. “I hear you’ve got some excitement out Whetstone way. How bad is it?”
“Pretty bad,” Joanna replied. “Deputy Ruiz was serving a no-contact order and ended up in a shoot-out with the recipient. The protection-order guy is dead at the scene. Armando is being airlifted to a trauma unit in Tucson.”
“Whoa,” Frank murmured.
“You can say that again, but Armando is the reason I’m calling. I’m on my way to Sierra Vista right now, and I need to let Amy know what’s going on. We have emergency numbers for her, but this isn’t the kind of news that should be delivered by telephone. The thing is, I have no idea where she works. . . .”
“She teaches second grade at Carmichael Elementary,” Frank supplied. “Do you want me to go talk to her?”
A call was coming in from Tom Hadlock.
“Thanks, Frank,” Joanna said, “but this is my responsibility. I should be the one to do that, but right now I need to take another call.”
“If there’s anything else I can do, let me know,” he said.
“Will do,” she responded before switching over. “Okay, Tom,” she told him, “brief me. What have we got?”
“The address for the crime scene is 2101 North Sheila Street, Whetstone. I know you’re driving, so I just texted it to you. The no-contact order was sworn out yesterday by Madison Hogan, the estranged wife of one Leon Hogan. At this point I don’t know if Deputy Ruiz even got a chance to deliver it, because it’s still not clear why or how the situation devolved into a shoot-out. According to the EMTs, they found Armando lying on the ground next to the driver’s door of his vehicle, and there was no visible sign of any court order at the scene. What we do know for sure is that several shots were fired.”
“Any witnesses?” Joanna asked.
“Other than the wife, probably not,” Tom replied. “A woman who lives up the street heard the shots and called 911, but she didn’t actually see anything. When officers from Huachuca City arrived, they found Madison Hogan kneeling over her husband’s body. She was covered with blood, screaming like a banshee and naked as a jaybird.”
“Naked?” Joanna as
ked.
“Stark naked,” Tom returned. “She kept trying to run into the house, saying she needed to go get her kids, but Officer Larry Dunn from Huachuca City PD wouldn’t let her. He gave her a blanket and put her in the back of his patrol car. Sometime later a neighbor—the same one who called 911—showed up and brought Ms. Hogan a robe to wear. By the way, the neighbor’s name is Alice Kidder.”
“No, wait,” Joanna interrupted. “Go back. Did you say kids?”
“Yes, the Hogans’ two kids were there. A girl named Kendall, age seven, and a boy named Peter, age five.”
Joanna caught her breath. Kendall Hogan and Denny Dixon were exactly the same age. This was a weekday. If Kendall was in second grade, why wasn’t she in school?
“Did they see what happened?”
“Can’t tell,” Tom said. “Officer Dunn, one of the first responders from Huachuca City, found them locked in the trailer’s back bedroom.”
“Locked inside?” Joanna echoed.
“Yup,” Tom said. “Dunn told me that the property’s previous renter was a known drug dealer. There was a padlock-and-hasp arrangement on the doorframe outside the second bedroom. Maybe that’s where he kept his excess inventory. Dunn said that today the padlock was nowhere to be found, but someone had stuck a table knife through the hasp in order to keep the kids contained.”
“Where are they now?”
“The kids? Officer Dunn took them out through the trailer’s back door and handed them over to the neighbor. With their father’s body still out front. . . .”
“Understood,” Joanna replied. “I’m glad they weren’t subjected to seeing him like that, and keeping the kids separated from their mother at the moment is the right thing to do.”
“Speaking of the mother, I just listened to the 911 tape,” Tom continued. “That part about her being a screaming banshee was on the money. That’s all you can hear—her carrying on something fierce, but it’s possible to make out a few of her words here and there. ‘You killed him! You didn’t have to do that. How could you?’”
“So the husband came out of the house with guns blazing, and the wife, who’s supposedly divorcing the guy, now decides this is all Deputy Ruiz’s fault?”
“Exactly,” Tom muttered grimly. “That’s just the way DV calls go.”
Joanna knew her chief deputy was right about that. All too often in domestic-violence situations, the people involved stop fighting each other long enough to turn on anyone who tries to intervene—law-enforcement officers included. Unfortunately, Joanna herself had recently had an up-close-and-personal experience with a domestic-violence perpetrator.
“So about this Hogan character,” Tom resumed. “He evidently moved into the trailer just a couple of months ago. His driver’s license still lists a Sierra Vista address. I did a quick check with Records at Sierra Vista PD. They report there’ve been several contacts at the Hogan residence over the past year or so.”
“All domestic-violence calls?” Joanna asked.
“You got it.”
“It sounds as though the late Mr. Hogan was your basic wife-beater,” Joanna concluded.
“Not so fast,” Tom replied. “According to reports on each of those incidents, Madison Hogan appeared to be the aggressor while Leon was the one with visible injuries—cuts, bruises, and scratches mostly, and on one occasion a very black eye after she lit into him with the business end of a hairbrush.”
“The wife was the one taken into custody?”
“That’s about the size of it,” Tom agreed, “but guess what else? Each and every time, Leon refused to press charges.”
“No surprises there either,” Joanna muttered.
That was another hard-earned law-enforcement lesson—domestic-violence victims are often reluctant to press charges against their abusers, either out of fear of retaliation or else out of misplaced love. All too often, the bad guy comes to the victim after the incident swearing his or her eternal love and vowing that it will never, ever happen again, and the victim always falls for it. That was just the way things were. As for male victims? They almost never came forward.
“Hang on a minute,” Tom said. “I’ve got another call.” Joanna waited on hold for the better part of five minutes, thinking about how easy it had been to jump to the conclusion that the husband had perpetrated those earlier incidents, including the one with the hairbrush. Unfortunately, today he’d been armed with a handgun.
Finally Tom Hadlock came back on the line. “Okay,” he said, “here’s an update. Deputy Raymond just arrived on the scene. With Garth on the other side of the county, I’ve asked Deputy Creighton to take up a position near Willcox so he’ll be able to cover all of the Sulphur Springs Valley as well as the I-10 corridor.”
Cochise County, Joanna’s jurisdiction, was eighty miles wide and eighty miles tall. With only a bare minimum of sworn officers on duty at any given time, an emergency like this required moving assets around like pieces on a gigantic desertscape chessboard.
“Good decision,” Joanna told him. “Now, what about DPS? When are they due?”
“The Tucson sector has advised us that one of their investigators is having to come from Casa Grande. The other is from Tucson. They’re expected to show up together eventually, but we don’t have an ETA. At this time I’d say they’re still an hour or more out. In addition, DPS is shorthanded on CSIs at the moment, so they’re requesting that our CSIs respond to the scene.”
Joanna knew that the DPS investigators involved wouldn’t be happy at this turn of events, but it wasn’t her problem. Since their own department had made the call, they could either like it or lump it.
“Are Dave and Casey on their way then?” she asked.
“They are,” Tom answered, “and so is Doc Baldwin.”
Joanna’s trusted two-person CSI team was made up of Dave Hollicker and Casey Ledford. Dr. Kendra Baldwin was the Cochise County medical examiner.
“What about Detectives Carbajal and Howell?” Tom asked. “Should I send them along as well?”
Joanna thought about that for a moment. If the DPS resented having to use another department’s CSIs, having her detectives show up at the crime scene would make things that much worse.
“Nope,” she said. “The DPS guys will most likely already have their noses out of joint at having to work with our CSIs, so let’s leave Deb and Jaime out of the mix. In the meantime I’m coming up on Sierra Vista and need to get off the phone. I’ve got a lead on a current location for Deputy Ruiz’s wife. I’m planning on stopping by to tell her what’s happened before heading over to Whetstone. I’ll call you back when I’m done with the notification. And be sure to tell Deputy Raymond to keep those two kids separate from their mother until someone has a chance to interview them. If it turns out they did witness the shooting, we’ll need statements from both of them.”
“Roger that,” Tom said.
Joanna ended the call and then summoned Siri. “Please give me driving directions to Carmichael Elementary School in Sierra Vista, Arizona.”
Eight minutes later Joanna pulled in to a visitor space in the school’s parking lot. When she walked into the office, a sour-faced woman glared at her from the far side of a chest-high counter.
“We don’t allow guns in here,” she snarled. “Didn’t you see the sign?” she added, pointing to the no-guns-allowed notice stenciled on the office door.
When Joanna was first elected, she had worn civilian clothing. Too many wrecked sets of pantyhose and damaged pantsuits and skirts had sent her in search of more durable choices in attire. These days she usually wore the same uniform her officers did, with both her name and her badge displayed front and center and with a holstered weapon on her hip. The total illogic of forbidding an armed and fully trained police officer to set foot on the school grounds carrying his or her weapons was enough to set Joanna’s teeth on edge.
“I’m Sheriff Joanna Brady,” she announced. “I have zero intention of relinquishing my weapon. If you’d
like to take it away from me, you're welcome to try. In the meantime I need to speak to the principal about an urgent matter.”
The woman hesitated, looking as though she were prepared to argue the point. The slight delay sent Joanna’s quick temper up another notch. “Now!” she added forcefully.
Shaking her head, the woman shuffled over to an open door and spoke into it. “Ms. Hayes, there’s someone here to see you—the sheriff. She says it’s urgent, but you need to know she’s got a gun.”
“Did you tell her this is a gun-free zone?”
“Why don’t you try telling her that yourself? Or maybe we should call the school resource officer.”
“I’ll handle it,” another female voice said in the background.
The woman who emerged from the office was probably ten years Joanna’s senior. Surprisingly enough, she approached with a tight-lipped smile on her face.
“Welcome to Carmichael Elementary, Sheriff Brady. I’m Wanda Hayes, the principal. What can we do for you today?” she asked, staring pointedly at Joanna’s holstered weapon.
“I need to speak to Amy Ruiz.”
“Ms. Ruiz is in class right now, and I can’t allow you to go wandering the halls. Lunchtime will start in about twenty minutes and—”
Joanna stopped her short. “Amy’s husband, Deputy Armando Ruiz, has been seriously wounded and is currently being airlifted to a trauma unit in Tucson. I’m here to deliver that news in person. And you might want to think about arranging for a substitute teacher. I have a feeling Amy’s going to be off work for the next several days.”
As Joanna spoke, the supercilious smile faded from the principal’s face. “Call Ms. Ruiz and ask her to come to the office,” she said over her shoulder to the woman still lingering in the background. “When you do, tell her I’m coming down to cover her class.” Then, to Joanna, she added, “When she gets here, you’ll need privacy. You’re welcome to use my office.”