by J. A. Jance
And I’ll go back to the office, Joanna thought, and see how much progress we’re making in catching Carol Mossman’s killer.
Four
Half an hour later, using a bright red disposable leash, Joanna led her new dog out of Jeannine Phillips’s office. The Australian shepherd walked in a demure, ladylike fashion. Clearly someone somewhere had taken the time to give her a bit of obedience training. By the time the dog hopped in through the Civvie’s back door and settled gracefully into the backseat, Joanna was ready to give her a new name.
“Little Blue Eyes doesn’t suit you,” she said aloud. “But we’ll see what Butch and Jenny want to call you.”
On the way back to the Justice Center, Joanna stopped off at Dr. Millicent Ross’s veterinary clinic. Joanna emerged from the clinic half an hour later with a properly vaccinated dog and accompanying documentation that would allow her to license an Australian shepherd still officially known as Blue Eyes. Once inside Joanna’s office, the dog disappeared into the cavelike knee-hole under the desk. Joanna left her there and went looking for a dish and some water. Her search took her to the lab, where her latent fingerprint tech, Casey Ledford, liberated an aluminum pie plate that would work temporarily for dog-drinking purposes.
Joanna peered around the lab. “What are you up to?”
“I’ve processed the prints I took from Carol Mossman’s back door. The ones I have don’t match the victim.”
“Have you run them through AFIS?” Joanna asked, referring to the Automated Fingerprint Identification System.
“Sure did,” Casey replied. “No hits so far.”
“What about Dave?” Joanna asked, peering around the lab shared by Casey and the crime scene investigator. “Is he back out at the scene?”
“No,” Casey said. “I’m pretty sure he’s down the hall on his computer. He’s working on the brass they found yesterday.”
Taking the pie plate with her, Joanna went to the doorway to the crime scene investigator’s cubicle, where she found him staring closely at his CRT. “What’s up?” she asked.
“Take a look at this, Sheriff Brady,” Dave said, moving aside and allowing her access to his computer. “It’s really interesting.”
On his screen was a large circle with a much smaller one inside it. Two straight lines went from the outside of the smaller circle to the edge of the larger circle, dividing the larger one in half. At the top of the larger circle was the initial S. At the bottom, the number 17.
“One of the casings from yesterday’s homicide?” Joanna asked.
Dave nodded.
“Tell me what I’m looking at.”
“An antique, for one thing,” Dave said. “This is a Colt military head stamp. It was used on ammunition manufactured prior to 1921. See that seventeen?” Dave asked, pointing with the tip of his pencil. Joanna nodded. “That’s the year of manufacture—1917. The S on top stands for where it was made—Springfield, Massachusetts.”
Joanna was astonished. “You’re telling me Carol Mossman died after being shot by a bullet that’s eighty-six years old?”
“Two shots were fired,” Dave replied. “The one to her lower body is the one that actually killed her. The other went through her shoulder. I dug most of that slug out of the paneling on the wall behind her.”
Joanna Brady was amazed. “I’m surprised ammunition that old still works.”
“I’m not,” Dave said. “I suppose you could expect a certain degree of unreliability, but if the bullets have been kept dry, there’s no real reason why they shouldn’t work.”
“And they did,” Joanna supplied. “But where did they come from, and where have they been all this time?”
“Who knows?” Dave replied. “That’s what I’m trying to find out right now. I can’t just call up Colt and ask for records from way back then.”
“No,” Joanna agreed. “I suppose not.”
“I’ve sent a copy of the firing fingerprint to the NIBIN,” Dave Hollicker continued. “So far there’s no match.”
Joanna was well aware of the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network. Functioning much the same way AFIS does for fingerprints, NIBIN provides a computerized database of weapons signatures collected from crime scenes nationwide. It allows investigators to know when the same weapon is being used to commit crimes in more than one jurisdiction. It also makes instantaneous connections between solved and unsolved crimes that would otherwise be regarded as unrelated incidents. Following the travels of a particular weapon sometimes makes it possible for detectives to track the movements of an individual perpetrator as well.
“You don’t really expect them to come up with a match, do you?” Joanna said. “How many eighty-six-year-old homicides do you think have been entered in the system? As I recall, computers weren’t even a gleam in engineers’ eyes back in 1917.”
“That’s not true,” Dave said.
“It isn’t?”
“And you of all people should know it,” Hollicker told her. “Have you ever heard of Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess Lovelace?”
“Never. Who’s she?”
“Her daddy was a guy named Lord Byron.”
“As in Shelley and Keats—Lord Byron, the poet?”
“Right. She was born the year her parents were divorced, and her father never saw her after that, but she was one smart little girl whose mother saw to it that she was trained in mathematics. At eighteen she went to hear a lecture by Charles Babbage on what he called his ‘difference engine.’ Ada managed to finagle an introduction to the man. When she saw Babbage’s machine itself, she was one of the few people who immediately grasped how it worked and could visualize its long-term potential. She and Babbage went on to become more than friends,” Dave said. “Not only that, from what I heard, she’s the one who created the first punch cards and invented computer programming.”
“When was all this?” Joanna demanded.
“Sometime in the mid-1800s, I think,” Dave Hollicker answered. He was clearly getting a kick out of their sudden reversal of roles.
“And how come you know about this…What’s her name again?” Joanna asked.
“Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess Lovelace.”
“How come you know about her and I don’t?”
“Because when you sent me to CSI school in Quantico, Virginia, one of my instructors, Agent Amanda Blackner, had a real thing about women doing all of the grunt work and getting none of the credit. You’d better believe it. If you didn’t know about Lady Ada in full, essay-answer detail, you didn’t pass Blackner’s class.”
“I might not have taken that class, but I know about Ada Lovelace now. Thanks,” Joanna said and then changed the subject. “Did you pick up anything else from the crime scene last night?”
“Some tire casts,” Dave answered. “And casts of a footprint or two. Hiking boots. Could be either a small man or a large woman.”
“Or a juvenile,” Joanna suggested.
Dave nodded. “That, too,” he said. “In fact, speaking of juveniles, I need to be on my way. Jaime said that the Explorer troop will be on tap at one to help with the foreign-object search. I want to be there when they do it.”
“Good enough,” Joanna said. “And good luck.”
With that she took the pie plate and retreated to her office, pausing long enough at the hallway water fountain to fill it. Then she continued on toward her office, holding the pie plate carefully in both hands to keep the water from spilling.
“Whose dog?” Kristin asked, nodding toward Joanna’s closed office door.
“Mine,” Joanna said.
Without having to be asked, Kristin got up and opened the door. The Australian shepherd was waiting anxiously just inside. When the animal saw Joanna, her cropped tail wagged furiously. Joanna set the plate of water down and watched while the dog lapped it dry.
“When I took the mail in, I wasn’t expecting to find a dog in your office,” Kristin said. “She scared me so much I almost dropped the
mail. I guess I scared her, too.”
“Sorry,” Joanna said. “I meant to tell you but you weren’t here when I went by and—”
“Is that the dog from last night’s crime scene?” Kristin asked. “Somebody said it was a puppy, but this doesn’t look like a puppy.”
“Different dog,” Joanna said. “This one’s from Animal Control. They were getting ready to put her down, so I decided to take her. You and Terry wouldn’t happen to want another dog, would you?”
“We’ve already got Spike,” Kristin said, shaking her head. “If we brought home another dog, our landlady would have a fit.”
Kristin’s husband, Terry, and his eighty-five-pound German shepherd, Spike, constituted the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department’s K-9 unit.
“Right,” Joanna said. “I’m sure she would.”
The phone rang, and Kristin reached to answer it. “It’s Tom Hadlock,” Kristin told Joanna. “He says the jail AC has gone out again. He’s done his best to restart it but so far no luck. Now he’s asking what you want him to do about it.”
Joanna sighed and looked longingly at her desk, where that day’s worth of correspondence was already laid out and awaiting her attention.
“Tell him I’ll be right there,” Joanna said.
Walking between her office and the jail commander’s, Joanna found herself squinting in the unrelenting sun. She didn’t need a thermometer to tell her that, for the third day in a row, the midday temperature was already over a hundred.
Tom Hadlock sat at his desk with the top two buttons on his uniform unbuttoned and sweat pouring down his face when Joanna entered his office. A small personal fan sat on his desk, facing him and oscillating feebly. The moving fan blades stirred the air slightly, but the resulting breeze did little to take the edge off the heat.
“I’m on hold with the AC company in Tucson,” he said. “The first person I talked to said they could probably have someone here the day after tomorrow at the earliest.”
“That’s not good enough,” Joanna said.
Hadlock nodded. “I told her that. She said she’d see what she could do. That’s what we get for going with the lowest bidder,” he added. “Sammy Cotton here in town handled our AC contract for years. Whenever we called him, he was always Sammy-on-the-spot, but then the board of supervisors decided we needed to put the contract out to bid. This outfit up in Tucson underbid Sammy but…Hello? Who’s this?”
Tom punched the speakerphone button so Joanna could hear what was being said.
“I’m Alexander Blair, the owner of Anchor Air Conditioning.”
“Well, Mr. Blair,” Tom replied, “I’m Tom Hadlock, the jail commander down here in Bisbee. You could say I’m a little hot under the collar at the moment. We’ve got an air-conditioning problem here at the jail—an air-conditioning crisis, actually. The girl who answered your phone told me you wouldn’t be able to have anyone here until the day after tomorrow. That’s totally unacceptable.”
Joanna winced at Tom’s use of the word girl. As it turned out, she wasn’t the only one to take umbrage.
“That ‘girl’ happens to be my mother,” Alex Blair answered stiffly. “She’s been in the business for thirty-some-odd years. If she says that’s the soonest we can get to you, then that’s the way it is. Like she said, we’ll have someone down there first thing the day after tomorrow.”
“But,” Tom Hadlock sputtered, “I have the contract right here. It says we’ll receive ‘priority’ treatment.”
“That is priority treatment,” Blair returned. “In case you haven’t noticed, all of Arizona is in the middle of a heat wave at the moment. Every single one of my technicians is out on calls. We’re doing the best we can.”
Joanna stood up and turned the speakerphone in her direction. “Then it’s not good enough,” she said.
“Who’s this?”
“Sheriff Brady, Mr. Blair,” she replied. “Sheriff Joanna Brady. What day is today?”
“The second,” he replied after a pause.
“And that would make the day after tomorrow July Fourth. Do you really think you’ll have a technician willing to come down here on a national holiday, Mr. Blair? And what if he needs parts? Will any of your suppliers be open that day?”
“Sheriff Brady—” Blair began, but Joanna cut him off.
“The weather reports I’ve seen indicate this weather pattern is going to continue for the next few days, so I’m giving you a choice, Mr. Blair. Either you have someone here to fix our problem prior to five P.M. today, or I’m calling someone else. Once they get us up and running again, they can send their bill to you. We’ll just assume you’ve subcontracted the job out.”
“We can’t do that.”
“Oh?” Joanna asked. “How are you being paid for maintaining our facility, Mr. Blair?” She knew exactly how much Anchor Air Conditioning was being paid on a monthly basis as an ongoing maintenance retainer. When the board had come up with that brilliant idea, she had argued against it—argued and lost.
“Monthly,” Alex Blair returned.
“Right. Because the board of supervisors wanted to have a regular budgetary item they could count on rather than having occasional spikes, right?”
“Yes,” Blair replied. “I believe that’s correct.”
“And how long have you had the contract?”
“Six months or so,” Blair said.
“Seven,” Joanna corrected. “I have it right here. It started in December of last year.”
“Well, seven then,” Blair admitted grudgingly.
“And how much time have you put in at our facility?”
Blair paused again. Through the phone Joanna could hear him shuffling papers. “That would have been two months ago, when we came out to fire up the AC units and get them ready for summer.”
“Seven months,” Joanna said. “And your people have been here exactly once. As I said before, Mr. Blair, you’d better have someone here working on our equipment by five o’clock today. Otherwise, I’m calling in a pinch-hitter repair company and reporting you to the board of supervisors as well.”
She punched the speakerphone button, ending the call, cutting Alex Blair off in mid-excuse.
“Do you think these clowns will actually show up, Sheriff Brady?” Tom Hadlock asked.
“They’d better,” she said. “But if I were you, I’d call Sammy Cotton and give him a heads-up. Tell him if Anchor Air Conditioning isn’t here by five, I want his crew here by five after.”
“What if Sammy does the job and Anchor doesn’t pay him for it?”
“Anchor will pay, all right,” Joanna said grimly. “I’ll see to it. Now tell me, what do we do in the meantime? I don’t want to lose anyone—guards or prisoners—due to heat prostration.”
“We can let the prisoners out in the yard, I suppose,” Tom Hadlock said dubiously. “It’s cooler outside in the shade than it is in here, but I hate to have that many people outside all at once. If there was any trouble…”
“Call Chief Deputy Montoya,” Joanna said. “Have him come over. I need him to give me a hand.”
Frank Montoya arrived at the jail a few minutes later. “What’s up, Sheriff Brady?” he asked.
“What can we do about the prisoners?” Joanna asked. “We’ve got to let them cool off. Can we let them outside?”
Frank thought about it for a minute. “If everyone is loose in the yard at once, we should probably bring in some of the patrol deputies to back up the detention officers just in case there’s trouble.”
Joanna nodded. “Good idea.”
“I’ll get on the horn and see how long it’ll take to get them here.”
Joanna nodded and turned to Hadlock. “Before we let them into the yard, I want water out there—water and ice—plenty of it. Plenty of paper cups, too. Got it?”
“Right,” the jail commander said. “I’ll notify the kitchen right away. Anything else?”
“Yes. How do I make a jailwide announcement?”
<
br /> Tom Hadlock motioned to an old-fashioned-looking microphone that stood on the credenza behind his desk. “Help yourself,” Tom said. “Hold down that button and talk into the mike.”
“What next?” Frank asked.
“I’m going to make an announcement over the jail intercom,” Joanna told him. “And, for the sake of our non-English speakers, you’re going to translate.
“This is Sheriff Brady speaking,” Joanna said. “As you have no doubt noticed, our air-conditioning units have gone out and won’t be repaired until much later this afternoon. We have a choice here. You can spend the afternoon sweltering in your cells, or we can do something about it.”
She passed Frank the microphone and then waited for him to translate before she continued. “At this point it’s probably cooler outside than it is inside. We’re willing to let people outside, but only if we can have some assurances that there won’t be any difficulty.”
Again she waited while Frank translated. “Once we have additional personnel in place, we’ll be moving you out into the recyards where we plan to have ice, water, and towels. We’ll let you out. We’ll do it in an orderly, careful fashion, but let me warn you—if there’s any trouble, and I mean at the first sign of trouble—heat or no heat, you go back inside under full lockdown.”
By the time Tom Hadlock returned to his office, Frank had finished translating the last segment of Joanna’s announcement. “The kitchen will have the water and ice out there within the next fifteen minutes,” Hadlock reported.
“It’ll take more time than that to get our people here,” Frank said. “Okay,” Joanna said. “Wait on the ice, and don’t start emptying the units until we have backup on the scene, Tom. Frank will let you know when they’re here.”
“Fair enough,” Hadlock replied. “You say the word, and we’ll start moving ’em out.”
“Did you call Sammy Cotton?” Joanna asked.
“Yes, ma’am. He says if we need him, he can be here with a crew at five-oh-five.”