by J. A. Jance
Garth nodded. “That’s right. He had to contain the woman first. He heard Kendall pounding on the window. The mother was determined to race back into the house. He finally had to lock her up in the backseat of his patrol car.”
In the background Joanna heard the distant wail of a siren. No doubt guys from DPS were about to stage a dramatic arrival. Shutting the sound out, Joanna turned back to Garth.
“I wonder if being locked inside the bedroom was a usual occurrence or an unusual one,” she mused.
Garth shrugged. “No idea,” he said. “I didn’t ask.”
“If you have a chance to talk to Casey, ask her to be sure to dust both that table knife and the padlock hasp for prints,” Joanna told him. “I’d like to know exactly who locked those kids inside the bedroom and why.”
Garth looked puzzled. “You want me to ask her?” he asked. “Why don’t you?”
Joanna gazed down the road, studying the progress of an approaching vehicle leaving behind a rooster tail of dust.
“Because I’m not supposed to be here, and I won’t be,” she answered. “For that matter, neither are you. This is an officer-involved shooting, and the DPS cavalry is about to arrive on the scene to take charge of the investigation. Once they’re here, I’m pretty sure I’ll be given my walking papers. In the meantime what’s become of Madison Hogan? Is she still here?”
Garth shook his head. “No, Ms. Hogan was hysterical and hyperventilating. Once the EMTs got Armando loaded onto the helicopter, they determined that she should be transported as well, by ambulance rather than by helicopter. They took her to the ER at Sierra Vista Memorial for observation.”
“Thanks for the briefing, Garth. I appreciate it.”
Joanna turned back to the road just in time to see an unmarked SUV roll to a stop and park next to her Interceptor, effectively blocking her in. Knowing that her presence at the scene would be a bone of contention, Joanna had been careful not to venture any farther into the yard than the far edge of the cattle guard.
Doors on the SUV were flung open, and two suit-clad men, an older one and a younger, stepped out onto the dirt road. They stood there for a moment, glancing around the scene as if getting their bearings. Joanna happened to be close enough to the new arrivals to be able to make out their features. The younger one was a complete stranger to her. Unfortunately, the older one was not. Dave Newton was someone with whom she had crossed paths and swords on a previous occasion. Joanna didn’t like him one bit. From the look of displeasure on his face when he caught sight of her, the feeling was mutual.
“Sheriff Brady,” he said dismissively, sauntering up to her. “What are you doing here? I understand a member of your trigger-happy department has been up to your old tricks.”
Joanna did a slow burn at the words “trigger-happy.” That suggested from the outset that Newton had arrived on the scene already predisposed to find some kind of wrongdoing on Deputy Ruiz’s part. Not only that, but for him to speak to her in such a derogatory fashion in front of one of her own officers was utterly beyond the pale. With some effort she managed to keep a tight rein on her temper and reply in a reasonably civil tone.
“Good afternoon to you, too, Detective Newton,” she said, addressing him with icy politeness. Turning to Newton’s partner, she extended her hand in greeting—a courtesy she hadn’t bestowed on Newton. “And you are?” she asked.
Newton was a grizzled fiftysomething. His partner wasn’t a day over thirty. The younger man responded with a winning smile.
“Name’s Liam Jackson, ma’am,” he replied, “Detective Liam Jackson. Glad to meet you.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” Newton insisted, prying Joanna’s attention away from the younger man. “What are you doing here, Sheriff Brady? My instructions were clear. We may be having to use your CSIs, but this is a DPS investigation from beginning to end. We’re in charge.”
“Understood,” she agreed, “and this is as close as I’ve been to the crime scene, but I wanted to be here in person to hand things over to you. This is Deputy Garth Raymond. He was the first member of my department to respond to Deputy Ruiz’s officer-down call, although officers from Huachuca City PD arrived before he did. Garth will be able to supply you with the names of everyone who’s been here, including the EMTs.”
Looking around the scene, Newton frowned. “You don’t have any investigators here, do you?”
“As requested, Casey Ledford and Dave Hollicker, my CSIs, are here, as is County Attorney Arlee Jones,” Joanna replied. “No one else from my department is on the scene. I've told everyone that we’re handling this by the book. And now that you’re here to take charge, I’ll be on my way.”
“Where to?” Newton asked suspiciously.
Joanna bristled. Where she was going was none of Newton’s business, but she answered the question anyway. “I’m on my way to Tucson,” she replied. “Deputy Ruiz is currently undergoing emergency surgery at Banner Medical. He’s one of my people, Detective Newton, and my place is with his wife in the waiting room outside the OR.”
“Just remember,” Newton cautioned, “under no circumstances are you to speak to him about this case. Do I make myself clear?”
“Perfectly,” Joanna said. “By the way,” she added, “you’ll need to move your vehicle. It looks like yours has me blocked in.”
“Sure thing,” Detective Jackson said cheerfully. “Right away.”
Pulling car keys from his pocket, the younger man headed over to the SUV with Joanna following on his heels. She didn’t need to look back at Newton to confirm that he was sending a superior sneer in her direction. By publicly dissing her and banning her from the scene, he probably thought he’d won, but to Joanna’s way of thinking, this dustup was only the first round. Maybe she couldn’t talk to Armando Ruiz, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t listen in when other people did.
She’d taken Butch’s advice and had seemingly accepted her sidelining with good grace, but if Newton tried pushing Arlee Jones around in the same manner in which he’d treated her, the man was in for a big surprise. The Cochise County attorney happened to be the guy who would have the final say about whether or not Armando Ruiz would be facing charges. Jones was also a stubborn old coot and not the least bit pushable. He could be gotten around, however, and Sheriff Joanna Brady had more than eight years’ worth of practice in doing just that.
Chapter 5
Joanna might have looked calm, cool, and collected as she departed the crime scene, but when she called Butch a few minutes later, she was in full rant mode.
“You’ll never believe who DPS sent out—that asshole Dave Newton!” she fumed. “And like the jerk he is, he lit into me right there in public, dressing me down in front of one of my deputies and sending me packing from the crime scene.”
“Wait,” Butch said. “Who’s Dave Newton?” Then, after a pause he added, “Now I remember—Mr. Soccer Ball Guy, right?”
Years earlier a fleeing homicide suspect had carjacked a minivan containing two young children from the Texas Canyon Rest Area on I-10 before heading west. Joanna and a very inexperienced deputy had been several exits ahead of the speeding minivan and had given chase. Since there were only two westbound lanes, Joanna’s department had coordinated with a number of eighteen-wheelers to create a moving roadblock that had forced the suspect onto a secondary road that, unknown to the carjacker, came to a dead end several miles away. Finally, with no choice but to stop, the armed bad guy had attempted to use one of the kids as a human shield, an action that had left Joanna with very few options.
Taking cover behind the van, Joanna had hit the ground. Despite the fact that she was exceedingly pregnant with Denny at the time, she’d lain on her protruding belly and had shot under the body of the minivan, nailing the jerk in the foot and smashing his ankle to bits.
Joanna’s father, D. H. Lathrop, had loved those old black-and-white cowboy movies where the good guy shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand. This wasn’t ex
actly the same thing, but it had done the trick. The kids had been rescued and the handcuffed suspect packed off to a hospital. The injury was serious enough that not only was the killer now spending life in prison without parole, he was doing so with an amputated foot—an outcome Joanna didn’t regret in the least.
But because the incident was an officer-involved shooting, DPS had been called in to investigate, with none other than Detective Newton running the show. During an interview with Joanna, an arrogant Newton had taken issue with her version of events, suggesting that it would have been impossible for “someone in her condition” to lie on her belly and shoot well enough to hit the suspect in the ankle and do so on purpose. That’s when Joanna had issued her soccer-ball challenge.
“Okay,” she’d told him. “You lie on a soccer ball. I’ll lie on my belly, and we’ll see which one is the better shot!”
Not surprisingly, Newton had declined to participate, and eventually he’d been forced to exonerate Joanna as well, but that’s how she continued to think of him and refer to him—Soccer Ball Newton.
“Exactly,” Joanna replied finally. “That’s the one.”
“I’m guessing with that kind of history there’s a lot of bad blood on both sides.”
“You could say that,” Joanna agreed, “and I’m afraid some of it is going to get splashed onto Deputy Ruiz. If Newton can come up with a way to claim that Armando is at fault, he will.”
“But you didn’t call him on that, did you?”
“No,” Joanna said. “You’d be proud of me. I managed to keep my mouth shut for a change.”
“So where are you headed now?” Butch asked. “Back to the office?”
“No, I’m on my way to the hospital in Tucson. Frank Montoya is driving Amy Ruiz to the hospital, but someone should be there with her when Armando comes out of the OR, and I’m nominating myself for that duty. Why not? If I can’t be working the homicide, I could just as well make myself useful.”
“How did you rope Frank Montoya into taxi duty?” Butch asked.
“I didn’t,” she said. “He flat-out volunteered. When I left the school after notifying Amy, he was there waiting and offering to give her a ride.”
“He’s a good guy,” Butch said. “I’m sorry your department lost him.”
“Boy howdy,” Joanna returned. “That makes two of us.”
“My last Phoenix appearance is tonight,” Butch said. “The ones in Tucson start tomorrow. With all this going on, do you want me to cancel and come home?”
Butch’s question made Joanna realize that with everything that had been going on, she hadn’t told Carol Sunderson about any of it.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Let me talk it over with Carol and give you a call back.”
Just then call waiting sounded. “It’s Tom Hadlock,” she told Butch. “I’d better go.”
“Updates?” she asked once she’d switched over to the other call.
“Deputy Ruiz is in surgery as of twenty minutes ago,” the chief deputy told her. “It’s expected to take several hours.”
A surgery lasting several hours was not good news, but at least Armando was still alive.
“All right,” she said. “I’m on my way to the hospital and don’t know how long I’ll stay. Frank Montoya is bringing Amy there while her folks look after their kids. And speaking of kids. What’s going on with Kendall and Peter Hogan? If their father is dead and their mother is hospitalized, are there any nearby relatives who can look after them?”
“None that I can find,” Tom answered. “Leon Hogan was in the army and stationed at Fort Huachuca. He’s originally from Cody, Wyoming, and his parents still live there. I’ve organized a next-of-kin notification with Cody PD, but that hasn’t happened yet. I’ll let you know when it’s done. In the meantime I’ve contacted Child Protective Services. They’ll be sending someone to Alice Kidder’s house to take charge of the children until such time as their mother is released from the hospital.”
“From what Garth told me, those kids might have plenty to say. Do we know if DPS is interviewing them?”
“No idea,” Tom answered, “but the word I’m getting from Casey Ledford and Dave Hollicker is that this Newton character is a complete jackass, so we’d best not ask.”
“You’re right there,” Joanna agreed. “He is an ass with a capital A.”
Tom let that pass without comment. “If you’re on your way to Tucson, how long do you plan to stay?”
“Beats me. Probably several hours, but I’ll need to check with my sitter. In the meantime DPS is on the scene and already sent me packing. By now they’ve probably done the same with Deputy Raymond.”
“Okay,” Tom said. “I’ll keep the lights on here.”
Good to her word, Joanna called Carol Sunderson the moment the previous call ended. “It’s handled,” Carol said. “I’ll have the boys come here for dinner, and then they can go home while I stay here with Denny and Sage. It’s not a problem. You do what you need to do and don’t worry about a thing.”
“Butch said that if need be, he can cancel his Tucson appearances and come home.”
“He doesn’t need to do that either,” Carol insisted. “We’ll be just fine on our own.”
As Joanna drove on, for the thousandth time she thanked her lucky stars that Carol Sunderson was in their lives. How many working parents weren’t blessed with that kind of stable child-care arrangement?
Gradually the radio chatter dissolved into road noise, and Joanna found herself thinking about the costs and consequences of domestic violence, not just in terms of loss of life but also in terms of shattered hopes and dreams. According to Records at Sierra Vista PD, Madison Hogan might have been the primary aggressor in those earlier domestic-violence callouts to the Hogan residence, but now Leon, the DV victim, was the one who was dead. How often did that happen?
Starting out in law enforcement—after Joanna’s election but before she’d put herself through the rigors of police-academy training—she’d already known that domestic-violence calls were inherently hazardous for first responders—cops and EMTs alike. For years, though, her knowledge of domestic violence had been more of the textbook variety. She’d had no personal experience with that kind of behavior—not with her first husband, Andrew Brady, nor with her father, and certainly not with Butch. But her hand-to-hand battle with Jeremy Stock had taught her that people who commit domestic violence can often look like the guy next door. In fact, they might just be the guy next door.
Joanna couldn’t help but wonder if having that kind of traumatic experience in her own background made her a more effective leader or a less effective one? If today’s events were any indication, the jury on that was still up for grabs.
These days whenever Joanna’s officers were being summoned to domestic-violence calls, she had to fight to remain calm and in command when what she really wanted to do was give way to panic, get far from the conflict, and bury her head under the covers.
That morning she’d been unaware Deputy Ruiz had been dispatched to deliver Madison Hogan’s protection order. That had somehow slipped under her radar, but even if it hadn’t, would she have insisted on sending a backup officer along with him? The truth is, probably not, because she didn’t have the manpower.
And then there was the situation with body cameras. A year earlier Joanna’s request for funds to purchase bodycams had been x-ed out of her budget. According to Tom Hadlock, once the shooting ended, Madison Hogan had promptly started pointing the finger at Deputy Ruiz. Had he been wearing a body camera, most likely the video footage would have exonerated him completely, but now should the incident in Whetstone devolve into a he said/she said situation, Soccer Ball Guy would probably take Madison’s word as the gospel.
But it was the word “gospel” in her mental meanderings that brought Joanna up short. She immediately redialed Tom’s number.
“Does Reverend Maculyea know about any of this?” Joanna asked.
Marianne Maculy
ea and Joanna Brady had been best friends from junior high on. Not only was Reverend Maculyea Joanna’s pastor at Tombstone Canyon United Methodist Church, she was also chaplain to local law-enforcement agencies as well as to the Bisbee Fire Department.
“She does,” Tom answered. “I called her first thing. She has a pre-wedding counseling session scheduled this afternoon at four. Since the wedding’s this weekend, she can’t postpone, but she’ll be heading to Tucson as soon as the appointment is over.”
When Joanna had plucked Tom Hadlock out of his jail-commander slot and installed him as her chief deputy, she’d despaired of his ever making the grade, but now, nearly two years in, he appeared to be firing on all cylinders. The idea that he’d thought to notify Marianne Maculyea without having to be specifically asked to do so was a big checkmark in his favor. If Marianne was coming to the hospital, Joanna would be there to serve as backup for Amy Ruiz and Marianne would be backup for Joanna. That made for a win-win.
As Joanna approached the hospital grounds on Campbell, she barely recognized the place. It seemed to have doubled in size from when she’d been here with Andy all those years ago. The main entrance was different. The parking structure was different. Even so, as soon as she stepped inside the building itself, it seemed all too oppressively familiar. Andy had been shot elsewhere, but it was here in this hospital where she’d finally lost him. And she knew that in coming here Marianne would suffer a similar flashback.
Years earlier, after being childless for years, Marianne and her husband, Jeff, had brought twin baby girls—Ruth and Esther—home from an orphanage in China. Esther’s health had been precarious from the start, and when surgeons at the then University Medical Center had attempted a heart transplant, Esther hadn’t survived. Ruth, healthy and sassy, now happily spent her spare time out in the garage with her dad, learning to be a wrench-wielding gearhead. Jeffy, the surprise bundle of joy who had arrived long after Jeff and Marianne had given up hope of ever having biological children, was a quiet kid who loved books and drawing.