by J. A. Jance
“That’s all?”
“Isn’t that enough?” Voland replied.
“What about Ernie Carpenter? Any developments there?”
“Nothing new overnight that I know of, except that Ivy Patterson and that Russian of hers did go ahead and tie the knot. I can tell you that one’s raised a few eyebrows around town. Other than that, things are pretty quiet.” Voland headed for the door.
“Wait, Dick,” Joanna said. “There’s one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you have any suggestions about who to get to fill Martin Sanders’ position?”
Voland shook his head. “Not right offhand. It’s a funny situation, neither fish nor fowl. It would be a big promotion for most of the guys out on patrol, but that person essentially functions in a staff capacity, totally cut off from any direct con tact with the public.
“Not only that, it’s a paper-intensive job. The person who takes it is agreeing to serve as point man for every ugly can of worms that walks in the door-from pet cruelty complaints to wrangling with the board of supervisors over budget cuts.”
“You’re saying most of the people currently in the department would take one look at the job description and run like hell in the opposite direction?”
“That’s right.”
“Including you, I presume?” Joanna asked.
“Most definitely,” Voland answered. “I wouldn’t have that job on a bet.”
He left then. For some time afterward, Joanna stared at the closed door, then she went back to the newspaper article. This time she read it all the way through. Going over the story, she realized why it was Sue Rolles had seemed so familiar to her. She didn’t remember her from any kind of meeting at the hospital in Tucson the day Andy died. She could barely remember anything at all about that awful day. But she had seen Sue Rolles here and there as she traveled the campaign trail around the county, attending various civic meetings in advance of the election.
Sue Rolles must have been following every twist and turn of the campaign for months. Reading the article carefully, Joanna could tell that some of the quotes from disgruntled departmental employees were new and legitimate. There were bound to be others besides Kristin Marsten who were actively provoked at having a new female boss. But most of the quotes attributed to Richard Voland were fragments of things she recognized as campaign rhetoric, sound bites taken out of context and written to seem like up-to-the-minute, post-election bitching.
It was easy to see now how the pieces fit together. Joanna realized that the article might have had an entirely different slant and focus if she hadn’t summarily thrown Sue Rolles out of her office. The reporter was plainly pissed, and she was seeing to it that Joanna Brady paid dearly for her little tactical error.
From out of her past, she could almost hear D. H. Lathrop’s New Mexican drawl telling Joanna and her mother, “Newspaper reporters are Just like rattlesnakes. You’re better off keeping them out in the open where you can see what they’re doing.”
Live and learn, Joanna told herself, and don’t make the same mistake twice.
Joanna SPENT the next half hour studying every word of the articles in the Sun that had anything to do with her department, including the one that dealt with the two Cochise County homicides.
That story was primarily a harmless recitation of the facts as they were known and disseminated at the time of Dick Voland’s early-afternoon press conference. News about the tentative identification of Thornton Kimball’s remains hadn’t made it into Tucson prior to press time.
One for them, one for us, Joanna thought.
She turned then to the rest of the mail. There, among that day’s collection of memoranda and bulletins, she found a copy of that morning’s Bisbee Bee. That one did contain news of the Thornton Kimball I.D. Not only that, some enterprising reporter had managed to track down copies of old Bisbee High School yearbooks. Pictures of Harold Patterson and Thornton Kimball, both as much younger men and both dressed formally in white shirts, jackets, and ties, stared out from the front page of the newspaper.
Seeing them together like that, dressed in the outdated attire of an earlier era, it was interesting to note how much Burton Kimball took after his mother’s side of the family. He looked far more like a much younger version of Harold Patterson than he did his own father.
“Miss Kellogg to see you,” an abrupt Kristin announced over the intercom.
When Angie sauntered into Joanna’s office, she headed straight over to the window where she stood looking out. “You need to put a bird feeder in that mesquite tree and a ground feeder for the quail underneath,” she said.
In two short months, Angie’s knowledge of and devotion to Bisbee’s native wild-bird population had become encyclopedic. The yard of her house in Bisbee’s Galena neighborhood had become a bird-feeding emporium and looked to outsiders like an aviary. Armed with her treasured copy of Birds of North America, she spent her time off work happily watching and cataloging her feathered visitors.
“I haven’t exactly had time to think about birds,” Joanna replied with a laugh. “What brings you here?”
Angie turned toward Joanna, her face suddenly somber. “I almost didn’t come at all,” Angie said, “I wanted to, but when I got as far as the parking lot, I almost chickened out and didn’t come inside. My whole body started to shake. I’ve never walked into a place like this on my own before or without having my hands cuffed behind my back. It brought back lots of bad memories.”
“I’m sure it did,” Joanna said.
Angie left the window and stood briefly behind one of the chairs as if still too nervous to sit down.
“The girls in L.A. would never believe it. I can hardly believe it myself.”
The fact that Angie could count a county Sheriff and a Methodist minister among her friends was, in a word, unbelievable. Nothing in Angie’s troubled past as a runaway teenager who survived by her own wits would have pointed toward that possibility.
“I came to show you something,” she said.
Reaching into the back pocket of her pants, she pulled out a credit-card-sized piece of plastic.
“Here,” she said, handing it over. “Look at this.”
The plastic card was an Arizona driver’s license. Angie Kellogg’s first driver’s license ever, complete with one of the best-looking driver’s I.D. photos Joanna had ever seen.
“You passed,” she said. “Congratulations, and it’s a good picture, too. Must be beginner’s luck.”
Angie smiled smugly. “And I passed on the first try, she said. “In fact, I just came from there. I was afraid I might end up having to take the driving part more than once, but the guy who rode with me was great.”
Looking at the lush, blond Angie, Joanna thought it wasn’t surprising to think that a driving examiner might have somehow overlooked a minor miscue or two. An early loss of innocence had robbed Angie of the ability to see her own physical beauty. What was lost on her most likely hadn’t been missed by the male licensing official.
Joanna was often perplexed by Angie’s odd mixture of toughness and naiVete. She was at once both young and old; innocent and jaded. How could someone who had made her living by prostitution be so seemingly unaware of her own beauty and of the physical impact she made on those who met her?
Angie was experiencing some difficulty in making the transition from an economy in which her body had been the sole medium of exchange to one in which her paycheck paid the bills. With help from people like Bobo Jenkins and Jeff Daniels, she was only now learning that it was possible to have male friendships that didn’t automatically lead to sex, and that real freedom existed in the privilege of saying no.
“So would you like to go for a ride? Maybe have lunch?” Angie asked, her face alive with disarming enthusiasm. “Today’s my morning off. I don’t have to be at work until six.”
It was still early. With two homicides hanging over her head, Joanna felt as though there was something she sh
ould be doing besides going to lunch. The only trouble was, right that minute she had no idea what it was. In the end, she went With considerable pride.
Angie escorted Joanna outside to where her cream-colored 1981 Oldsmobile Omega was parked in front of the building. They ate an early lunch at Daisy’s, leaving well before the noontime crowd started arriving. Afterward, Joanna asked Angie to help her ferry the Eagle back home to the ranch so she’d have only one vehicle parked at the office rather than two. Angie was glad to help out. They stopped by the Justice Center long enough to pick up the car.
The trip out to the ranch didn’t take more than twenty minutes in one direction and ten back, although to a white-knuckled passenger, the ride back seemed much longer. Angie might have passed her driving exam with flying colors, but she was still a very inexperienced driver. The Omega tended to first cling to the shoulder of the highway as she met approaching vehicles and then to meander back to ride the centerline as soon as the road ahead was clear.
Joanna gripped the armrest and tried to keep her mouth shut. She remembered all too well how much she had resented Eleanor’s backseat driving, but after years in the insurance business, she also understood why it is that inexperienced drivers have to pay much higher premiums for auto insurance.
“So how’s it going?” Angie asked suddenly. “Is being sheriff what you thought it would be?”
If Angie Kellogg had ever given much thought to possible career choices, a position in law enforcement would never have crossed her mind.
“It’s hard work,” Joanna said. “With two homicides on the books since Tuesday night, I could do with a whole lot less excitement.”
“I heard about those,” Angie said. “The people in the bar hardly talk about anything else.”
“By the way, has Detective Carpenter been by to talk with you about those?” Joanna asked.
Startled, Angie turned to stare at her passenger.
During the momentary lapse of attention, the wheels on the rider’s side of the Olds veered off the road. As a cloud of rock and gravel spewed up behind them, she managed to wrestle the car back onto the pavement.
“About the murders?” she managed, while the color drained from her face. “I don’t like detectives. Why would one of them want to talk to me?”
Clearly Angie’s old life carried some bad experiences into her new one. Joanna hastened to reassure her.
“You haven’t done anything wrong,” Joanna said. “It’s just that a person of interest in one of the murders supposedly spent the better part of Tuesday afternoon in the Blue Moon. I know you were scheduled to work on Tuesday, so I thought you might have seen him.”
“One of my customers is a suspect?” Angie asked, still bewildered. “Which one?”
“I didn’t say that. He’s just someone we need to check on. His name is Burton Kimball,” Joanna went on. “He’s a lawyer.”
“Oh, him,” Angie said suddenly contemptuous as she switched on the turn signal to turn into the Justice Complex. “What about him?”
“His uncle was murdered sometime that after noon or evening. Burton Kimball isn’t known to be that much of a drinker, but he evidently got himself plastered on Tuesday. In a murder case, you always look at people close to the victim and note anything unusual, including uncharacteristic behavior.”
“You’re right,” Angie agreed. “He’s not much of a drinker. That’s why it was so easy to get him drunk. Couldn’t hold his liquor worth a damn.”
“You got him drunk? On purpose?”
“You bet.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted him so smashed that he wouldn’t be able to drag his ass out of bed the next day to go defend that dirty old man of his.”
“Wait a minute here, Angie. How do you know Burton Kimball? For that matter, what makes you think Harold Patterson was a dirty old man? Did you even know him?”
“I know about him,” Angie replied. “I know enough. He was a child molester, wasn’t he? One of those creeps who fucks his own kids. Those guys always find some slick lawyer to get them off!”
Angie’s voice trembled with suppressed rage. “You’re damn right I got him drunk, and I’d do it again in a minute. I wanted the son of a bitch so blind drunk that he wouldn’t be able to hold his head up, but he left too soon. Just got up and walked out.”
“You’re lucky he wasn’t involved in an accident, Angie,” Joanna said. “Bartenders can be held accountable, you know. You could have lost your job.”
“I didn’t think about that,” Angie insisted stubbornly. “Still I’d do it again if I had a chance.”
By then the Omega was parked and idling in the front parking lot of the Justice Center, sitting astraddle a white line, occupying half of two full spaces.
“But why would you do such a thing?” Joanna asked. “Why run that kind of risk?”
Angie sat with her hands gripping the wheel and with her eyes focused on some invisible middle distance. She didn’t answer for such a long time that Joanna wondered if she’d even heard the question.
“How could a man defend someone like that?” Angie asked at last. “How could he try to get him off? As far as I’m concerned, that makes the lawyer as bad as the father. Maybe even worse. The father could be sick or crazy, but the lawyer is just doing it for money, working for the person who has all the cards. The little girls are the ones who have nothing, no one to turn to. They’re the ones who need someone to defend them, to help them.”
As Joanna watched in dismay, Angie Kellogg’s face seemed to splinter into a thousand pieces. The words she had never been able to muster in her own behalf had suddenly erupted in defense of someone she didn’t even know, in defense of Holly Patterson.
While Angie sobbed brokenly beside her, Joanna finally recognized the linchpin of Angie’s past, a piece that had, until that very moment, eluded her.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered, horrified. “The same thing happened to you, didn’t it?”
Angie nodded. “And my mother wouldn’t even help me. Maybe she didn’t know at first, although she must have. But even when I told her, she didn’t lift a finger, didn’t make him stop.”
Since mid-September, Joanna had struggled to pull together the stray pieces of Angie’s history.
There had been a blank spot. She could never understand what had forced Angie out onto the streets from the time she was a child only a few years older than Jenny was now. And now that Joanna knew, now that she understood, she almost wished she hadn’t.
“Are you going to be all right?” she asked, reaching out to touch the distraught young woman’s arm.
Gradually, Angie regained her composure. The sobs diminished to hiccups and sniffles. “I’ll be okay,” she managed.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Angie,” Joanna said awkwardly, “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”
Angie looked at Joanna with a questioning, side line glance.
“You mean you believe me?”
“Well, of course I believe you,” Joanna replied indignantly. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because, Angie said in a hushed, hesitant way. “The only other person I ever told was my mother and she called me a liar. Said I made the whole thing up. But I didn’t, I swear to God. And that woman whose father is dead, she probably didn’t make it up, either. I wanted her to win in court, that’s all. That’s why I got the lawyer drunk. You do understand that, don’t you, Joanna?”
“Yes,” Joanna said quietly, getting out of Angies car. “I believe I do.”
BURTON KIMBALL came to work that morning out of habit, because he had no idea what else to do with himself. He sat numbly in his office with the door closed, staring without comprehension at the stack of routine correspondence Maxine had left on his desk. No matter how long he looked at the top letter on the pile, he was unable to make sense of a single paragraph. It could just as well have been written in a foreign language.
It was as thou
gh the connections in Burton’s brain had been short-circuited by the knowledge that his father was dead, that he had been dead all Burton’s life. The whole time, the forty-odd years Burton had been waiting for his father to show up, longing for him to come home and reclaim his son, Thornton Kimball had been within ten miles of him, lying dead in the bottom of a hole with his skull crushed to pieces by a chunk of smoothed creek-bed rock.
Burton was living through his first morning without the comfort of his cherished childhood illusion. Burton Kimball was an orphan, had always been an orphan, but with the unveiling of that long-skeletonized corpse, his loss and grief was as new as if his father had died yesterday. In Burton Kimball’s heart, that was the truth.
It should have fallen to him, as the closest surviving kin, to plan whatever funeral service Norm Higgins deemed appropriate, but Burton was too emotionally paralyzed. He simply couldn’t cope.
Instead, he turned the whole thorny issue of arrangements over to Linda and fled to his office, where he sat in his chair and hid out.
Other things that should have commanded his attention barely seeped into his consciousness. The fact that Ernie Carpenter had dared question him with regard to Harold Patterson’s murder was driving Linda crazy, but it hardly mattered to Burton.
He was sorry about the death of Harold Patterson, the only “father” he had ever known. But what he was shaken by today was the sudden loss of that second, unknown father. He was amazed by the depth of the grief he felt. How could that old, scarred-over wound hurt so much?
When the phone on his desk rang, Burton jumped as though someone had just lobbed a rock through the window beside his desk. With a suddenly trembling hand, he picked up the receiver.
“Yes?” he said uncertainly, aware of the sudden catch in his throat.
“Sorry to disturb you,” Maxine Smith said softly, “but Rex Rogers is on the phone. He insists on speaking to you personally.”
“Rex Rogers. What does he want?”
“He didn’t say. Do you want me to put him through or take a message?”