by J. A. Jance
“Where are you?” she asked. “Still in Arizona?”
“I’m on my way home,” I told her.
“Did you hear about what happened to Ross Connors’s wife?” Barbara asked.
“Yes, I did. In fact, that’s why I’m calling,” I told her. “I need his address. I want to send flowers.”
“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “The whole squad is chipping in and sending a single arrangement.”
“I want to do my own,” I said.
“Well, okay, then,” she agreed. “Suit yourself.”
She gave me an address on Water Street. Once I arrived in Olympia, I wasn’t surprised to find the attorney general’s home was within easy walking distance of the capitol complex. The house wasn’t quite as imposing as the one Anne Corley had been raised in, but it came close. Built of red brick and boasting a genuine slate roof, it was a showy kind of place, with a three-story round turret on one side. The expansive yard was surrounded by an ornamental iron fence with a bronze fleur-de-lis topping every post.
Up and down the narrow street, late-model upscale cars—Mercedeses, Jaguars, and an understated Lexus or two—were parked on either side. When I rang the bell, a uniformed maid answered the door. I gave her my card. Minutes later, I was led inside. Hearing voices in the living room, I was a bit miffed at being directed away from the piss-elegant crowd that had come to mingle and comfort Ross Connors in his hour of need. Underlings like J.P. Beaumont, however, were shunted away from other, more important, guests. As I allowed myself to be unceremoniously herded up the staircase that wound through the turret, it irked me that Ross was keeping me out of sight and out of mind.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I reached the small single room at the top of the stairs and discovered that Ross Alan Connors was already there before me, all alone and seated at a battered, old-fashioned teacher’s desk. Windows in the room offered a panoramic view of the water hinted at in the street name. But if you’re used to looking out the window at the majesty of Elliott Bay, the puddle that is Capitol Lake doesn’t count for much.
But just then Ross Connors wasn’t enjoying the view such as it was. In fact, I doubt he even saw it. When he rose to meet me, I was shocked by the haggard look on his face and the dark hollows under his eyes. His normally florid complexion was sallow and gray. There was no trace of the man I knew as a high-flying lawyer and glad-handing politician. Ross Connors was a doubly defeated man, bereft and betrayed. Unfortunately, I knew exactly how he felt because I had been there, too. My heart ached with sympathy.
“Hello, J.P.,” he said somberly. “I didn’t know you were back.”
“I came straight here. I’m so sorry about Francine. . . .”
“I know, I know,” he said impatiently, brushing aside my condolences. “Sit down.” He motioned me toward a sagging, butt-sprung leather recliner that could have been a brother to the re-covered wreck in my own living room. “Who told you about it?”
“Your mother. I talked to her yesterday afternoon.”
“Oh,” he said.
Not knowing what to say next, I waited for him to continue.
“She left me a note,” Ross Connors said finally, his voice brittle with emotion. “She said she listened in the other night when you and I spoke on the phone. She was sure that once the FBI got involved, the whole thing would come out. She said she couldn’t face it.”
He paused. I knew what it was—knew what he couldn’t bring himself to say, so I helped him along.
“I know she was involved with Louis Maddern,” I said quietly. “It’s all in the telephone logs. I can show you. . . .”
“That no-good son of a bitch!” Connors muttered fiercely. “It must have been going on behind my back for years, and I never figured it out. How could I have been so stupid that I never had a clue? But somebody else must have figured it out—someone who works for UPPI. Maddern, Maddern, and Peek didn’t get that big piece of UPPI’s business by random selection, J.P. They figured out that that worm Louis Maddern might be able to deliver something more valuable than legal representation and, God help me, he did!”
“Latisha’s whereabouts,” I supplied.
Ross nodded miserably. “I didn’t even realize I had said anything. It must have slipped out. Francine and I didn’t have any secrets from each other, at least . . .” We both saw heartbreak where that sentence was going. He broke off and didn’t finish.
Half a minute later, he continued. “One way or another, Louis must have weaseled the information out of Francine. Once she put it all together and realized it was her fault that Latisha Wall was dead, Francine couldn’t live with herself. She was Louis Maddern’s lover. She was also his partner in crime, but until Sunday night, I don’t think she had any idea. Then yesterday, at lunch . . .”
Again he broke off and couldn’t go on.
“Ross, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know she was with you at lunch.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t say anything out of line. Francine knew me very well. She must have read it in my face.”
He fell silent. We sat without speaking for more than a minute. “It’s such a shock. I’m still ragged around the edges,” he said at last. “All those nice people downstairs. They want to tell me how sorry they are—how much they care—but it hurts too much to hear it. That’s why I’m hiding out up here, where no one can find me.”
I wondered if changing the subject would help. “There’s something I don’t understand,” I said. “Why did UPPI need Latisha Wall dead? What made her so important? You told me yourself there’s enough evidence available in the form of depositions that even if she weren’t here to testify at the trial . . .”
It turned out I was right. Bracing anger flooded across Ross Connors’s face.
“Latisha Wall was supposedly under our protection!” he growled, sounding more like himself again. “My protection! She was a single protected witness in a single case. Right now UPPI has lots of other cases hanging fire, and there are lots of other witnesses who are expected to testify against them. How many of them will still be tough enough to stand up and speak out if they know they’re in mortal danger? How many other employees or ex-employees will be willing to put their lives on the line and come forward to testify?”
The man’s anger and anguish were both palpable. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He nodded. “So am I.”
I had been told no official report was expected on my trip to Arizona. And Ross Connors had plenty of reasons to bury what I had found out right along with his wife.
“Should I write a formal report?” I asked.
He took a deep breath, straightened his shoulders, and looked me straight in the eye. “You bet,” he said. “Type it up and send it through the regular chain of command. If it gets leaked, too bad. My first instinct was to cover up this whole thing, but I’m not going to. Francine is dead, by God! I want the world to know who did this to her and why.”
And in that moment, I realized I was glad Ross Alan Connors was my boss and proud that my name had been added to the roster of his Special Homicide Investigation Team. He may have been a politician, but he was also a good man who wasn’t afraid to make a tough call when the situation required it.
“There’s something else,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“What do you know about sodium azide?”
He frowned. “Never heard of it. Why, should I have?”
“Yes,” I told him. “And here’s why.”
AS I DROVE TO SEATTLE FROM OLYMPIA, I called Harry I. Ball on my now-working cell phone. He told me to take the rest of the day off.
“That’s big of you,” I said. “Especially considering I’ve been working my butt off almost round the clock for the last three days.”
“Don’t start,” he warned. “I don’t wanna hear it.”
I returned the rental car to the airport and climbed into the Belltown Terrace limo I had summoned to dra
g me home. By 2 P.M. I was in my recliner, thinking.
I had told Ross Connors about the dangers of sodium azide, but what about the dangers of love? Latisha Wall and Bobo Jenkins had fallen in love, and he had unwittingly poisoned her. After years of playing the field, Dee Canfield had gone for a guy she thought was finally the love of her life, and Warren Gibson had snuffed her out of existence. Francine Connors had betrayed her husband for a fling with Louis Maddern, and now a widowed Ross Connors was imprisoned in his turret, nursing a broken heart.
And then there was me. J.P. Beaumont and Anne Corley. J.P. Beaumont and Joanna Brady. Anne had been a case of fatal attraction, and Joanna might have been.
Without realizing it, I drifted off, and all too soon the dream came again.
At first it was the same as it’s always been, and I tried to fight it off. Anne Corley was striding toward me across a grassy hill in Mount Pleasant Cemetery. But then I noticed something different about her. This particular Anne Corley had bright red hair and amazingly green eyes.
Once I realized that, I didn’t bother trying to wake myself up. For the first time ever, I just lay back and enjoyed it.
Afterword
Roots of Mystery: Sodium Azide and Learning
to Believe the Unbelievable
Editor’s note: Be advised all who wish to relish Partner in Crime with its many surprises unspoiled: The text below is, as advertised, an Afterword, and it and the material it introduces should be read following your reading of the novel itself.
~
People often ask writers, “Where do you get your ideas?” It makes me wonder if they think we go to the supermarket, to the Idea section, and look over what’s there, hoping to find something that isn’t past its sell-by date. Some readers I meet hint around that perhaps I “dream up” ideas. I have yet to experience a “dream” that I’d be willing to devote six months of my life to.
The truth is, ideas are out there, but — like wily wild game — they hide out in the forest of everyday life and have to be tracked down and captured before they can be brought back and tamed into being part of a book.
To find ideas, I read. Several newspapers a day and lots of magazines pass through our house on the way to the recycling bins, but one of those magazines has proven to be especially beneficial. Every so often my college alumni magazine, Arizona Alumnus, wends its way into my hands, and on two occasions the cutting-edge information supplied there has proved to be the impetus for one of my books. The first was a story on Freon smuggling that helped inspire the Joanna Brady mystery Skeleton Canyon (1997).
More recently, the magazine featured an article on Eric Betterton, a University of Arizona professor of atmospheric sciences, and his research into the dangers of an uncontrolled substance called sodium azide. Commonly used to inflate automobile air bags, sodium azide is a white powdery substance more deadly than cyanide. It is readily soluble in water and there is no known antidote.
Because it is uncontrolled, it can be purchased by the barrelful by anyone who wants it. Even prior to 9/11, this struck me as dangerous. A barrelful of this stuff dumped into a city’s water supply could prove absolutely catastrophic.
Intrigued, I contacted Professor Betterton. His research into this readily available substance and his efforts to publicize the underlying dangers had already brought him several death threats and the unwelcome attention of the Justice Department. Not surprisingly, he was somewhat wary of meeting with a mystery writer, but he did meet with me, and I’m grateful.
Partner in Crime grew out of that meeting. I hope that, in pointing out the dangers of sodium azide, the novel will raise public awareness and gain the attention of lawmakers and George W. Bush’s new Department of Homeland Security as well. When used to inflate air bags, sodium azide is a useful substance, but in unlawful hands, it poses a real and present danger.
~
As for getting Beaumont and Brady together, I had heard suggestions to that effect from the time the first Brady novel was published. I resisted the idea because I thought it was “unbelievable.” Then, a real-life Cochise County murderer ended up being captured in Tacoma. So much for my unwilling suspension of disbelief. Since something similar had already happened in real life, it couldn’t very well be unbelievable.
The Joanna Brady books are written in an omniscient third-person. Most of the action is revealed through Joanna’s point of view although other points of view occasionally surface. The Beau books are written in a strictly first-person format. The reader (and writer) learn things only as they are revealed to J.P., and we hear about them in Beau’s crusty, curmudgeonly voice.
Partner in Crime is written in that same fashion. Joanna’s parts of the story are revealed in third person narration. Beau tells his parts of the story himself. Joanna isn’t thrilled at the idea of having Beau interfering on her turf and in her case. When they meet for the first time in the lobby of the Cochise County Justice Center, Joanna is mad enough to chew nails. From the moment I heard Beau’s first comment about that initial meeting (“I didn’t think she would be so short — in every sense of the word”), I knew I could make the book work.
It was fun bringing J.P. to Bisbee and watching this dyed-in-the-wool Northwesterner fall headlong into southern Arizona. Will Beau and Joanna meet again? I don’t know. Sparks certainly flew this time, but right this minute it’s far too soon to tell.
— J.A. Jance
June 2002
“It Will Kill
Practically Anything”
Do you drive a 1994 or newer car? If so, you’re sitting just inches away from a deadly poison.
By Dan Huff
Eric Betterton launched an all-out crusade when he read a magazine article announcing the introduction of a new air bag restraint technology. The report stated the active ingredient in air bags would be sodium azide.
“Frankly, I didn’t believe it,” he says. “I thought it was a mistake, a typo. I was shocked.”
Shocked because Betterton, a University of Arizona professor of atmospheric sciences, had learned firsthand just how frightening this stuff can be.
“I was wrapping up my work as a Ph.D. student,” he says. “I’d spent about three years working on cyanide. And then, toward the end, I wanted to compare cyanide’s chemical properties to those of azide. They’re fairly closely related.”
And so he whipped up some azide solution.
“It was in an open beaker, and I got just a whiff of it. My eyes went bloodshot, my face went blotchy and red, and my heart started beating rapidly. I couldn’t breathe. And this all happened instantaneously. I thought I was going to die. It was the first and only time I’ve really been frightened in the lab.”
He rushed to the restroom and splashed his face with cold water. After about an hour or so, things got back to normal.
“There doesn’t seem to be any long-term damage — that I can tell, anyway,” he laughs.
And years later, when he confirmed that sodium azide was about to be widely disseminated in airbags, Betterton figured, “Well these guys must know something that I don’t — it must have a very short lifetime in the environment.”
Morbid curiosity propelled him to the library to find out more about it.
“But there was nothing about the environmental fate of sodium azide, which really surprised me. Nothing. After that, I began tinkering around.”
It’s a hideous poison — ten times more deadly than cyanide. It kills just about every living thing it touches, and for humans unlucky enough to ingest roughly half a teaspoonful, it means certain death.
There is no antidote.
The amount of this dire substance has soared in our environment in recent years. That’s because Congress has mandated that about a pound of it be placed under the dashboard of nearly every American automobile and light truck made since 1994.
Sodium azide is the propellant in airbag restraint systems.
The deadly chemical is compressed into roughly hockey puck-sized �
�grains,” a term from the explosives industry, and sealed inside small canisters roughly the size of tuna cans.
When hit with a spark, the compound, NaN3, doesn’t explode exactly, so much as collapse into utter chaos — a ferocious entropy instantly transforming the highly formal crystal-lattice molecular structure of the salt-like sodium azide into a pulse of hot nitrogen gas, the most common element in Earth’s atmosphere. The nitrogen pulse inflates the airbag in a mere fifty-five milliseconds — less than the blink of an eye.
But it’s the airbags that don’t get deployed — and most of them don’t — that worry Betterton. He strongly urges Congress to revisit the airbag issue before we face some horrendous environmental consequences.
“I’ve estimated there are millions and millions of pounds of sodium azide out on our streets right now,” Betterton says. “And as our newer vehicles start to get junked, we’re going to wind up with millions and millions of pounds of sodium azide in the junkyards.”
That’s extremely worrisome, he points out, because the compound is classified as a “wide-spectrum biocide” in environmental terms. In less formal Hollywood hype, perhaps, it would be known as the Ultimate Terminator.
“It will kill practically anything,” Betterton says.
And according to extensive tests Betterton has performed in his UA laboratory, this deadly compound doesn’t readily decompose in the environment.
“If you take sodium azide and put it in water,” he says, “nothing happens to it for months. No detectable decomposition, implying that dissolved oxygen is ineffective in eliminating this stuff. I’ve tried adding some hydrogen peroxide, which is another naturally occurring oxidant. And that, again, was ineffective over a period of months.”
The nightmare scenario, for Betterton, involves this extreme poison washing into streams and rivers and percolating through the soil to contaminate aquifers, much as salt water easily contaminates fresh water when the two come in contact.