by J. A. Jance
I shuffled through my paperwork until I located Deidre Canfield’s unfinished missive to her daughter.
“If you check the time,” Joanna Brady was saying, “it’s listed as 4:10:26 P.M. Mountain Standard. Now look at the transcript of Jaime’s interview with Dee Canfield. Look at the last two sentences right at the end.”
After a little more paper shuffling, I located the right passages.
Detective Carbajal: Since both you and Mr. Gibson were in Latisha Wall’s house yesterday, we’ll need fingerprints from both of you.
Ms. Canfield: Yes, yes, of course. I understand. We’ll take care of it right away, tomorrow probably, but not right now. The show’s tonight. I really do have to get back up to the gallery now so I can be ready to meet the caterer and let her in.
That was the last entry. The transcript indicated that the interview terminated at 3:08 P.M. An hour and two minutes later, Dee had sent her daughter an incomplete e-mail voicing her concern that perhaps Warren Gibson had been involved in Latisha Wall’s murder. I could see where Sheriff Brady was going with all this.
“Casey and Deputy Galloway spent a great deal of time last night and early this morning processing Castle Rock Gallery. A while ago, Casey got an AFIS hit on one of the prints she found there. The man everyone in Bisbee knows as Warren Gibson turns out to be a convicted felon named Jack Brampton. How about passing around copies of that rap sheet, Casey?”
As we say in the trade, “Bingo!”
Joanna Brady was totally in her groove by then. While the fingerprint tech slid pieces of paper out across the smooth surface of the conference table, Sheriff Brady continued without pause. “So we’ve put out an APB on Jack Brampton, aka Warren Gibson.” She stopped long enough to give her chief deputy a searching look. “It did go out, didn’t it, Frank?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Montoya replied. “And I added that the suspect is most likely driving a 1970 red Pinto wagon.”
Joanna frowned. “Red,” she repeated. “Where did you get that information?”
Montoya bristled slightly at the impatient way she posed the question. I would have, too.
“Where else?” he returned. “From the DMV. That’s the vehicle they show as being registered to one Deidre Canfield, 114 Cochise Drive, Bisbee, Arizona.”
“The DMV maybe thinks it’s red,” Joanna told him. “But they’re wrong. The last time I saw Dee Canfield’s Pinto, it looked like somebody had used it for a drop cloth.”
“What color is it then?” Montoya asked.
“All colors,” she answered.
The chief deputy sighed. “All right, then,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’ll go amend that APB.”
Frank Montoya stood to leave the room as Joanna continued. “The good news is, there aren’t that many 1970 Pintos of any kind or color still on the road. If someone spots one moving under its own power, they’re likely to let us know.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, opening my mouth for only the second time in the course of the meeting. “A 1970 Pinto? What kind of fuel does it run on?”
“Leaded,” Joanna said.
“I didn’t know you could still buy leaded,” I objected.
“You can,” she replied, “but only across the line in Old Mexico.”
Frank Montoya was still lingering by the conference room door. “That’s something then,” he said. “If Brampton is using the Pinto as his getaway car, it’s a pretty good bet he’ll be headed south. I’ll get on the horn to Border Patrol here about him, and I’ll let the federales in Mexico know about this as well.”
“Good idea,” Joanna said. “Do it.”
Meanwhile, I busied myself studying Jack Brampton’s rap sheet. What stuck in my head was the fact that he’d served his time at a medium-security facility in Illinois. UPPI’s corporate headquarters was based in Illinois. I wondered if there was a connection. I circled the name of the prison. When I came back to the discussion, Frank had returned and Joanna had moved on to another topic.
“For someone who claims he doesn’t gossip, Harve Dowd from Treasure Trove is full of information,” she was saying. “He told me last night he thought Warren Gibson was pulling a fast one on Dee Canfield. Harve is of the opinion that Dee wasn’t Gibson’s only romantic interest. He claims to have seen Gibson using the pay phones down by the post office on numerous occasions. Frank is currently in the process of checking phone records, but since his special phone company pal doesn’t work weekends, it’s taking more time than usual.”
“Wait a minute,” Jaime Carbajal said. “Does this mean we’re dropping Bobo Jenkins as a possible suspect?”
“Okay,” Joanna said. “Let’s talk about him for the moment. What do we know?”
“That he was at Latisha Wall’s home the night she died,” Jaime Carbajal began. “We also know, by his own admission, that he and the woman he calls Rochelle Baxter had quarreled or at least had a disagreement earlier in the day. We also have his fingerprints on those sweetener packets from the kitchen.”
Casey Ledford raised her hand. “May I speak to that? To the sweetener packets?”
Joanna nodded and all eyes went to the fingerprint tech. “Dave and I examined the crime scene evidence from Latisha Wall’s kitchen. It’s true Mr. Jenkins’s fingerprints are on the sweetener packets. They are. But the physical evidence—the way the fingerprints are layered on the glass and bottle—would indicate that Ms. Wall drank iced tea and Mr. Jenkins had the beer.”
“See there?” Jaime said. “What did I tell you? He poured the sweetener in her tea and then sat right there and watched her drink it. What a hell of a nice guy! And then, on the Dee Canfield part of the equation, we know Bobo was adamantly opposed to her plan to go through with the show despite Latisha Wall’s death. Sheriff Brady, you witnessed some of that yourself on Thursday morning at the gallery.”
“You’re right about that,” Joanna conceded. “Bobo Jenkins was at the gallery, and he was very upset. Do we have any idea where he was or what he was doing between three and five on Thursday afternoon?”
“He claims he was at home and alone the entire afternoon,” Jaime answered. “That’s in the transcript of the interview Frank and I did with him on Saturday morning. He told us he stayed home all day, trying to come to grips with what had happened. Of course,” the detective added, “at the time we spoke to him, we were only aware of the Latisha Wall incident. We had no idea Dee Canfield was also dead, so there was no reason to check on his whereabouts or movements the day after what we assumed to be a single homicide.”
“Did he come right out and actually say he was home alone?” Joanna asked.
Jaime scanned through the transcript. “Here it is, right here. Yes, that’s what he said, but I’ll go uptown a little later. I’ll talk to Bobo’s neighbors and see what they have to say.”
“All right,” Joanna said. “You do that.” Then she turned to Chief Deputy Montoya. “In the meantime, Frank, while you’re dealing with the phone factory, have a go at Bobo’s phone records as well. If he happened to be on the phone making calls between three and four o’clock Thursday afternoon, that would tend to corroborate his story even if no one was there with him at the time.”
That intrigued me. Just because Bobo Jenkins was a suspect in one homicide, Joanna Brady wasn’t giving her people carte blanche to turn him automatically into prime-suspect material in the second death as well. In other words, rather than looking for the quickest way to clear cases, Sheriff Brady was prepared to take the time and make the effort to find out what had really happened. I liked that about her. Respected it.
As Joanna Brady fired off one question after another, I felt as though I had been transported back to the fishbowl at Seattle PD with Captain Larry Powell popping questions left and right to see if his detectives were making any progress or doing something to earn their keep.
I sat up straighter and paid closer attention because I was beginning to suspect that perhaps Sheriff Joanna Brady was my kind
of cop after all.
JOANNA LOOKED DOWN AT THE CHECKLIST she had scribbled off in advance of the meeting. “So,” she said, crossing off another item. “With the next-of-kin notification out of the way, what does Doc Winfield say about scheduling the autopsy?”
“He’ll do it first thing tomorrow, and he’ll give me a call beforehand,” Jaime Carbajal replied. “The good news is that Ernie will be back on duty tomorrow morning. Once he’s back on board, maybe I can have him handle the Verdugo boys’ interviews. At least I’ll have some help covering the bases.”
“Or Mr. Beaumont could help out,” Joanna suggested quietly. With Jaime looking mutinous, she moved to lessen the tension. “Hey, Frank,” she added. “Next time Ernie asks for a whole week off, let him know he’s not allowed to leave town until after he checks with our upcoming homicide scheduler.”
They all laughed at that, even Jaime. The atmosphere in the room relaxed noticeably.
“All right,” she said. “Now for our chemistry lesson.”
WE SPENT THE NEXT HALF hour hearing all about something called sodium azide. Joanna had mentioned it prior to the meeting. Rather than show my ignorance, I had said nothing. It turns out that as far as sodium azide is concerned, ignorance is bliss. Just hearing about the stuff was enough to scare the crap out of me.
Frank Montoya had tracked down an Internet article that explained how various poisons, sodium azide included, present. An ingested poison often exhibits a delayed reaction. The victim isn’t affected until the substance is absorbed into the bloodstream. Inhaled sodium azide goes into the lungs and directly into the blood, where its molecules bond with oxygen molecules and render the oxygen unusable.
The information in Frank’s article was already more than I wanted to know, but it did explain the time lag between when Latisha Wall drank her tea and her death sometime later. What Dave Hollicker had to say about sodium azide’s ready availability was horrifying.
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted, minutes into his lecture. “You’re saying this stuff—this incredibly dangerous stuff that isn’t even illegal—can be found in damned near every two-car garage in America?”
“That’s right,” Hollicker agreed blandly. “Those canisters are in every car with air bags.”
“So the next kid who gets pissed off at his English teacher in Podunk, USA, can slip some of it into her coffee and knock her off just like that? This is nuts, totally nuts! And nobody’s doing anything about it?”
“Not so far,” Dave Hollicker said. “According to what I’ve learned, there’s currently no plan to regulate sodium azide in any way or even to add a marker substance.”
About that time there was a knock on the conference room door. “Come in,” Joanna called.
Lupe Alvarez stuck her head inside. “Rick Orting, the dispatcher for the city of Bisbee just called, Sheriff Brady. Someone from Phelps Dodge is reporting finding an abandoned multicolored Pinto.”
A charge of excitement surged around the room. “Where is it?” Joanna demanded.
“Between the end of Wood Canyon and Old Bisbee,” Lupe replied. “It’s on one of those company roads, the ones that go out to PD’s new drilling sites north of Lavender Pit. The Pinto’s rear axle is broken. A day-shift watchman found it a little while ago when he was out doing his rounds.”
“Thanks, Lupe,” Joanna said, then turned back to her team of investigators. “Okay, Jaime. You, Casey, and Dave get on this right away.” Without another word, the three of them hustled out of the room.
“What about me, boss?” Frank Montoya asked.
“Even if you’re dealing with second-stringers, you stay here and keep after the phone stuff. We need that information.”
“And me?” I asked. “What am I supposed to do?”
“You’re with me.”
“Why?”
“So I can keep an eye on you. You’re part of this investigation, but I don’t want to spend the entire afternoon giving you directions and guiding you from one place to another.”
“I have a map . . .” I began.
“Forget it. Just go get in the car.”
“Yours or mine?”
The disparaging look she gave me told me the question was unworthy of being dignified with an answer. “Come on,” she said.
Rather than going out through the public lobby, Joanna hustled me first to her private office and then out a door that led directly into the parking lot. I started toward the Crown Victoria I knew to be hers.
“Not that one,” she said, stopping me. “We’ll take the Blazer.”
We walked two rows into the parking lot, where she climbed into the driver’s seat of an SUV that had definitely seen better days—from a physical-beauty point of view. However, a powerful engine sprang to life the moment she turned the key in the ignition. The term “ugly but honest!” came to mind.
We drove into town and back toward Old Bisbee. At the far end of the huge layered hole in the ground she explained was Lavender Pit we came to a spot where a group of cop cars, lights flashing, had converged alongside the road. Some of the vehicles were marked city of bisbee; others, sheriff’s department. They were grouped around the entrance to a freshly graded dirt road that led off between the red-rock hills.
We were pulling over to check things out when a call came in over the radio. “Sheriff Brady?”
“Yes, Tica,” she responded. “What is it?”
“I have Burton Kimball on the phone. He needs to talk to you right away.”
Joanna sighed. “Look, Tica. I’m really busy at the moment. . . .”
“He says it’s urgent,” Tica insisted. “Is it all right if I patch him through?”
“I suppose so,” Joanna agreed grudgingly. “Go ahead.”
“Sheriff Brady?” A male voice roared through the radio. Despite having been filtered through both a telephone receiver and the radio, his words buzzed angrily in the air.
“What in the world are you and your people trying to pull now?” he demanded. “I can’t believe you’d stoop so low that you’d go to such incredible lengths. Really, Joanna, I always thought you were above this kind of stunt.”
Whoever Burton Kimball was, he was pissed as hell. In the course of the previous twenty-four hours, I’d seen some pretty strong indications that Sheriff Brady has a temper. I fully expected her to cut loose and give the guy as good as she got. She surprised me.
“Slow down a minute, Burton,” she returned mildly. “What are you talking about?”
“Someone has broken into my client’s house and planted what looks like a cache of drugs here,” he replied. “If you think you can get away with that kind of nonsense . . .” He paused as if searching for words. “I tell you, Joanna, I’m outraged about this—absolutely outraged!”
She and I hit on the word “drugs” at the same time, and we both jumped to the same conclusion. Why wouldn’t we? Drug or not, sodium azide was the topic of the moment. A few minutes earlier we’d been sitting in a conference room learning all about it.
It was interesting to realize once again that when Joanna Brady was upset, her voice went down instead of up. “What drugs?” she asked urgently but softly. Sitting right next to her, I could barely hear her, but Burton Kimball heard.
“How would I know?” he snapped back. “I didn’t taste it, if that’s what you mean. I wouldn’t know what cocaine tastes like if it walked up and hit me in the face, but since this is a white powder, cocaine is my first assumption.”
I watched while every trace of color drained from Joanna Brady’s face. Her voice didn’t change or falter. “This white powder,” she said calmly, “where exactly is it?”
“In my client’s laundry room,” Burton Kimball replied. “Bobo went out there this afternoon to do some laundry and found it sitting there, right in plain sight on the dryer. It’s in a box that’s been wrapped in duct tape and hooked up to the dryer vent. When he called to tell me about it, I advised him to leave it alone. I tell you, Joanna . . .”
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“Where are you right now?” Joanna interrupted.
“Where am I?” Burton Kimball returned. “Where do you think? I’m at my client’s house, and you can bet I’m staying here until someone comes to collect this stuff and take it away.”
“Whereabouts are you in the house?” Joanna prodded.
I had to give the lady credit for staying cool. By then she had put the idling Blazer in gear. We were back on the road, speeding toward Old Bisbee.
“In the kitchen,” he said. “Talking to you on the phone.”
“What about Bobo?” she asked. “Where’s he?”
“Right here with me. Why?”
“Good,” she said. “Now listen to me, Burton. Listen very carefully. Whatever’s in that box in Bobo’s laundry room wasn’t planted by anyone from my department. But I suspect that it is dangerous, probably even deadly.”
“What is it, then, some kind of bomb? Is it going to explode?”
“No, nothing like that. But don’t interrupt. I want you both to leave the house, Burton. Immediately. Go outside and stay out. I’ll be there in a few minutes. In the meantime, don’t go near the laundry room, and whatever you do, don’t touch that box.”
“I hope you’re not trying to pull a fast one here, Joanna,” Burton Kimball warned, but his tone of voice had changed slightly. The naked urgency in her orders had commanded his attention.
“All right,” he relented, backing down. “But if you even so much as try using this as evidence against my client without having a properly drawn search warrant . . .”
Joanna started to lose it. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about evidence,” she interrupted. “I’m trying to save lives here. Now get the hell out of that house, Burton, and take Bobo Jenkins with you.”