by J. A. Jance
Ms. Hogan admitted that the couple was having marital difficulties and living separately. “But we were working on our issues and trying to make things better. Now my poor kids are fatherless.”
Armando Ruiz, originally from Las Cruces, New Mexico, has been a deputy with the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department for the past seven years, where, according to Chief Deputy Thomas Hadlock, he has served with distinction.
So far the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department has refrained from making any statements regarding the officer-involved shooting, and Sheriff Joanna Brady herself has been unavailable for comment.
Joanna was livid. I wasn’t unavailable for comment when you stuck your head in my window! she thought savagely. I said “No comment” right out loud, remember? Unsurprisingly, Marliss Shackleford didn’t respond to that query.
Deputy Ruiz and his wife, Amy, a teacher at Carmichael Elementary, along with their three children reside in Sierra Vista.
Mr. Hogan, born in Cody, Wyoming, served in the U.S. Army and did two tours of duty in the Middle East. He was honorably discharged in 2012 while stationed at Fort Huachuca.
The couple had resided in Sierra Vista until Mr. Hogan moved to a separate residence in Whetstone three months ago. For the past three years, he’s been the manager and head mechanic at the local Lube&Oil Tek franchise on Fry Boulevard.
Funeral services for Mr. Hogan are pending. Ms. Hogan has created a GoFundMe account to help pay for her husband’s final expenses.
At that point Joanna wadded up the paper and heaved it across the room in exasperation. Count on Marliss to do a hit job. Yes, Leon Hogan was dead, but Armando Ruiz was in the hospital fighting for his life. Who was going to set up a GoFundMe account for him? And if someone did, would Marliss Shackleford be willing to give that effort a little free publicity as well?
There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” Joanna called.
Detective Deb Howell entered, pausing long enough to pick up the discarded newspaper on the way. “I read this, too,” she said. "I’m assuming it belongs in the trash?”
Joanna nodded, and Deb dropped the offending item into a wastebasket situated next to Joanna’s desk.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Leon Hogan was definitely the focus of the piece,” Deb said. “Armando? Not so much.”
Joanna was glad to hear she wasn’t the only one who’d reacted to the article in that fashion. “What’s up?” she asked.
“Jaime just got called to investigate a fatality traffic accident north of Elfrida. Since there are only two of us on duty, we drew straws, and he got the short one. He and Dave Hollicker are working that. In the meantime I’ve been in touch with Casey.”
Joanna held up a cautioning hand. “Is that a good idea?” she asked.
“I’m not here to discuss any details of the Whetstone shooting,” Deb assured. “I’ve been given to understand by any number of people that discussing that case is completely verboten. This is about the kids.”
“And?” Joanna prodded.
“Casey has identified two separate sets of fingerprints on the table knife.”
“Whose are they?”
“One set belongs to Officer Larry Dunn of Huachuca City PD. The other belongs to Madison Hogan. Sierra Vista had her prints on file because of those previous domestic-violence arrests.”
“According to what Kendall Hogan told Garth, the bedroom door got shut and locked between the time the doorbell rang and the moment the shots rang out,” Joanna asserted quietly. “That would suggest that Madison might have expected some kind of trouble once the protection order was delivered and she wanted to keep the kids out of it.”
Deb nodded. “That’s my take on it, too.”
“What about the handgun?” Joanna asked. “Any prints on that?”
Deb nodded. “Two sets of prints there, too, only this time they belong to Leon and Madison Hogan, with his prints overlaying hers. But what’s really interesting about the Glock is the guy who owns it.”
“Who?”
“Casey checked the registration and traced it back to a guy named Randall J. Williams.”
“Never heard of him,” Joanna said. “Who’s he?”
“Mr. Williams is a relative newcomer to the area who bills himself as some kind of cowboy artist. He lives in a trailer out near Miracle Valley.”
“What’s his connection to all this?”
“Once you brought up the domestic-violence issue yesterday afternoon, I got my rear in gear. I went straight out to Sierra Vista and started chatting up folks who live in the Hogans’ neighborhood. Everyone figured I was there because of the shooting, and I didn’t exactly disabuse them of that notion. The Hogans’ up-the-street neighbor, Lois Watson, was especially helpful, and let’s just say I’m glad Lois is Madison’s neighbor and not mine.”
“Why?”
“According to Lois, once Leon moved out, Madison started partying almost every night, with people drinking and carousing until all hours. They parked their cars up and down the street, blocking driveways right and left, including Lois’s. She tried talking to Madison about it, but nothing happened. Lois has a security camera, but she also started keeping track of the plate numbers in a little notebook. She was able to give me a complete, day-by-day list.”
“You ran them?”
“I certainly did. A 4Runner that shows up almost every night belongs to none other than our Mr. Williams of Miracle Valley fame.”
“That’s a very interesting connection,” Joanna said.
“I think so, too,” Deb agreed. “And it leads me to believe that maybe he’s Madison’s boyfriend.”
“Which tells us that Madison is probably the one who brought the murder weapon to the crime scene, because it seems unlikely Williams would have willingly handed a weapon over to his girlfriend’s estranged husband.”
“Yup,” Deb replied. “Not unless he had a death wish.”
A long pause followed. From her first view of the crime scene, Joanna had assumed that she was looking at a case of suicide by cop. Now something else occurred to her.
“Maybe Madison came to see Leon intending to take him out. Maybe that’s why, despite the protection order, she brought the kids and went on that overnight with her ex in the first place, but when it came time to do the job, he wrested the weapon from her. She ran out of the house, trying to get away . . .”
“. . . and Armando was collateral damage,” Deb concluded.
Joanna nodded. “At first I thought this was suicide by cop. Now maybe it’s more like homicide by cop. So it seems to me we need to know more about Randall Williams and a hell of a lot more about Madison Hogan.”
“I have one more item of interest about her,” Deb volunteered. “After hearing back from Records at Sierra Vista PD, just for the hell of it, I ran both Leon’s and Madison’s names through our Records department.”
“And?”
“I came up with one hit—with Animal Control.”
Deb’s answer left Joanna totally mystified. “Animal Control?” she echoed.
“Three months ago, which is probably only days after Leon moved to Whetstone, Madison turned up at Animal Control prepared to relinquish ownership of a two-year-old bluetick hound named Coon. When someone is giving up an animal like that, the paperwork asks for a reason. Madison claimed that she and her husband were getting a divorce. She said her husband had left the dog with her, and she couldn’t afford to care for it. Which reminds me, so far I’ve been unable to find any trace of ongoing divorce proceedings between Leon and Madison Hogan.”
“So she lied about that, too,” Joanna concluded. “There’s a difference between being separated and being divorced. What happened to the dog?”
“Jeannine placed it with an old codger down near Double Adobe who has a real soft spot in his heart for rescuing hounds of all kinds. He had two blueticks and three redticks. Now it’s three and three.”
Jeannine Phillips was Joanna’s Animal Control of
ficer. Since taking over that position, she’d transformed what had once been a “mostly kill” shelter into a “mostly adopt” one.
“Okay,” Joanna said. “I’ll give Madison Hogan a few points on that score. She might have had a gun, but at least she didn’t shoot the damned dog. Keep digging into Madison Hogan, though, and see what else you can find.”
“Trust me,” Detective Howell said, rising to her feet. “I’m on it. I’ll keep you posted.”
As soon as Deb left the office, Joanna picked up her phone and dialed Casey Ledford.
“Deb was just here,” Joanna said. “Thanks for running the prints on that knife.”
“You’re welcome,” Casey said.
“Did you mention the knife to Dave Newton?”
“I had to,” Casey answered. “With clear signs that a confrontation of some kind had occurred in the living room, it seemed likely that the whole residence would be regarded as a crime scene. I have to say, however, that when I told him about the knife situation, he didn’t seem especially interested.”
“I’m not surprised,” Joanna said. “The man has twenty-twenty tunnel vision. He’s only concerned about getting the goods on Armando. Any prints on the shell casings you found?”
“Yes,” Casey answered. “I’ve run them. No hits so far. They don’t match Madison Hogan’s prints, and they don’t match Leon’s either.”
“Which means that a third party is most likely involved one way or another,” Joanna said. “What about gunshot residue? Did you run any GSR tests?”
“For sure on Leon Hogan,” Casey replied, “and GSR was definitely present on both his hands and clothing. I contacted the hospital in Tucson, and they collected samples from Deputy Ruiz’s hands as well. I also asked them to collect Armando’s clothing as evidence so it could be tested later.”
“Good,” Joanna said. “What about Madison? Did anyone run GSR tests on her?”
“Not so far as I know,” Casey answered. “If so, they would have been placed in evidence and I would have been the one doing the analyzing. But I’m not sure why you’re looking into Madison.”
“I’m not quite sure of that myself,” Joanna said. “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know. In the meantime thanks for the info. Now I’ll let you go. If Newton finds out you’ve been speaking to me, there’ll be hell to pay. I don’t want to put you in his crosshairs, too.”
Joanna hung up and sat there for a time thinking. From everything she’d been told, Madison Hogan had emerged from the house naked as a jaybird. If she had fired that first gunshot, the one inside the house, there would have been GSR on her hands and body at the time of the shooting, not that that would necessarily have proved anything. Whatever had been there the day before would certainly no longer be present more than twenty-four hours later. Had Dave Newton been half the investigator he thought himself to be, he would have ordered GSRs from everyone on the scene—Madison Hogan included. The problem was, this was Newton’s ball game, not Joanna’s. When it came to the Whetstone shooting incident itself, Joanna needed to stay out of it.
But Madison was the suspect in multiple domestic-violence incidents. If she’d had access to one deadly weapon, she could probably lay hands on another with the greatest of ease. Did that pose a danger for her children—for Kendall and Peter? In Joanna’s mind the answer to that question was an unqualified yes, and she wouldn’t be backing off until she was sure those two kids were no longer in jeopardy.
Not ever.
Chapter 9
For the first time all semester, Jennifer Ann Brady was pissed at her roommate. She also had a headache and was pretty sure she’d blown her first final, organic chemistry. It was an upper-division course. She might have been a first-semester sophomore on campus, but due to a collection of advanced-placement classes she had enough credits to qualify as a junior.
What she’d learned in biology and chemistry classes at Bisbee High School had been good enough to enable her to pass advanced-placement exams on both those subjects, but passing tests didn’t necessarily give you the same kind of foundation as that to be gained by doing actual classwork. At NAU organic chemistry was designed to function as a first sort, separating promising students from unpromising ones and sending the latter into degree programs less demanding than those called for in, say, premed or prevet programs. And that’s what Jenny wanted do more than anything else in life—she wanted to become a veterinarian.
So she’d spent the whole semester struggling with the classwork. When finals came around, she’d needed to burn the midnight oil, last night being a case in point. She had long since adjusted to the fact that her roommate was a night owl who seemed to stay up until all hours every single night. Earplugs and a sleeping mask helped with that most of the time. It was also annoying that Beth was pretty close to brilliant and had spent her whole first semester breezing through classes without so much as cracking a book.
When Jenny had finally called it quits the previous night and was ready to go to bed just before one o’clock in the morning, Beth had been in the bathroom. Jenny hadn’t been paying that much attention. She didn’t know how long Beth had been there. Wanting to respect her roommate’s privacy, she’d waited ten minutes. Finally, desperately needing to get some sleep, she knocked on the door.
“I need to go to bed.”
“Just a minute,” Beth had said.
The shower hadn’t been on before, but it came on then. Five minutes later a wet-haired Beth had finally emerged, tying the belt on her robe.
“Sorry,” she added. “I was taking a shower.”
Which turned out to be a lie. The vented fan in the bathroom was a joke. When somebody took a hot shower, the place steamed up like crazy. Jenny entered the room to find there wasn’t a trace of steam in the air or even on the mirror. If Beth had really been taking a shower, it would have been a cold one, and no one in his or her right mind would take a cold shower in the middle of the night in mid-December.
For some time now, Jenny had wondered about the inordinate amount of time Beth spent in the bathroom. Conover Hall was supposedly a nonsmoking facility, which should have included being a nonvaping building as well. But if that’s what Beth was doing, wouldn’t there at least have been a hint of smoke or flavor of some kind left behind? As far as Jenny could tell, there was none.
When the two girls met, back at the beginning of the school year, Jenny had taken the younger girl to be astonishingly innocent and naïve, and maybe she was. But in her bed that night, Jenny had wondered about that for the first time. What if Beth Rankin was really a capable liar? What if the stories she’d told about her unreasonable and domineering mother weren’t true? What if the difficulties Beth claimed to have with her parents were actually her fault rather than theirs? And what if the person Jenny had just invited to come home with her for Christmas wasn’t at all who Jenny thought she was?
She’d lain awake in bed worrying about that. Then she slept through her alarm. She’d come within minutes of being late for her test. She was sure that at least some of the answers she’d given were wrong, but she didn’t have the heart to look them up. Thankfully, this was the only final she had today. If she’d had to face another, she might just have given up altogether.
She went back to the dorm. She took an Aleve and lay on her bed, nursing her headache right along with her wounded pride. When the headache finally let up a little, Jenny stacked some pillows behind her, sat up, and reached for her iPad.
She had been nine going on ten when her father died. She didn’t remember that much about it, but of course she’d known that he was a deputy sheriff at the time he was murdered. Jenny didn’t remember any specific conversations, but she suspected that first her father and later her mother had both understated the life-or-death risks that went along with being in law enforcement.
Yet gradually Jenny had figured it out all the same. She didn’t really remember much about her father’s funeral, but when one of her mother’s deputies had been gunned
down, it was almost as though the whole town had come to a complete stop. And seeing her mother standing next to a black-clad but very pregnant Sunny Sloan at her husband’s funeral was an image that was now engraved on Jenny’s heart.
And then there was Jeremy Stock, one of her mother’s own deputies, who had lost his marbles and very nearly killed his boss. The remembered terror of that night—of not knowing whether her mother would live or die—had made the dangers all too real.Jenny had also come to understand that politics and public relations had a lot to do with what was going on in her mother’s life. As a result, even when she was away at school, she tried to keep up with what was going on in her hometown, because more often than not something about her mother’s department would be mentioned in the news.
The day before, Jenny had been focused on studying, so it wasn’t until Friday afternoon that she found out about what had happened to Deputy Ruiz. She immediately dialed her mother’s number.
“I just now saw Marliss Shackleford’s article,” Jenny said when her mother answered. “Is Deputy Ruiz going to be all right?”
“He seems to be recovering,” her mother said after a pause. “That was the word I had earlier this morning, but I haven’t been in touch this afternoon. I should probably give Amy a call once we’re off the phone. I was going to go up today, but we decided it was Tom Hadlock’s turn to represent the department. I need to get home and finish working on the Christmas cards, although I have to say that seems incredibly unimportant right now.
“How are things with you?”
Jenny sighed. “I had my organic chemistry final today, and I may have blown it.”
“I doubt that,” her mother said. “When it comes to taking tests, you’re right up there with the best of them.”
Jenny didn’t want to go into any detail about how Beth Rankin had upset her test-taking applecart that day. Instead she changed the subject.
“Marliss Shackleford’s article said that the incident is being investigated by the Department of Public Safety. How come?”