by J. A. Jance
“One of the members of my team, an investigator named J.P. Beaumont, will be delivering it in person. Once he does so, Mr. Connors would like him to stay on as an observer.”
“A what?”
“An observer. This is an important case with long-term, serious financial implications for the state of Washington,” Harry Ball continued. “We wouldn’t want someone to inadvertently let something slip.”
Joanna was dumbfounded. “Let something slip?” she deman-ded. “Connors thinks my department is so incompetent that he’s sending someone to bird-dog my investigation? I don’t believe this! You can give that boss of yours a message from me. Tell him he has a hell of a lot of nerve!”
Slamming down the phone, she hopped into the shower after all. She was too steamed not to. Her hair was still damp and her makeup haphazardly applied when she slid into a chair next to Frank Montoya at the board of supervisors’ Melody Lane conference room fifty minutes later. Frank glanced at his watch and sighed with relief when he saw her. The board secretary was already reading the minutes of the previous meeting.
“What happened?” he whispered.
“I overslept.”
“Oh,” Frank said. “Is that all? From the look on your face, I thought it was something serious.”
Sheriff Joanna Brady hated having to attend board of supervisors meetings. For routine matters, Frank Montoya usually attended in her stead. This meeting, however, was anything but routine. The general downturn in the national economy had hit hard in Cochise County, requiring budget cuts in every aspect of county government. Today, with the board’s cost-cutting knives aimed at the sheriff’s department, she and Frank had decided they should both appear. Within minutes, Joanna knew they’d made a wise decision.
The newest member of the board, Charles Longworth Neighbors, was a man no one ever referred to as Charley – at least not to his face. He was a full-bird colonel who had retired from the army at Fort Huachuca a year or so earlier. He had now been appointed to fill out another board member’s unexpired term of office.
Since Charles Neighbors was career army, the United States government had seen to it that he had earned a Harvard MBA while in the service. Now in civilian life, he loved to wield his relatively recent degree as a double-edged sword. He had no compunction about inflicting everything he had learned on the unwashed masses in every branch of Cochise County government, one reluctant department at a time. Today he homed in on the sheriff’s department, going over budget items line by line, convinced that there were substantial cuts that could and should be made.
“If it can be done, it should be done,” he told Joanna, with a patronizing smile that made her want to grind her teeth.
Three and a half grueling hours later, she and Frank escaped the boardroom, having taken a 10-percent-across-the-board hit. She waited until they were safely outside the building and out of earshot before she exploded.
“If it can be done, it should be done,” she grumbled, doing a credible job of imitating Charles Longworth’s pedantic, school-principal-like delivery. “If he had said that one more time, I think I would have thrown something! Of course, his should-bes are all one-way streets. Budget items are to be taken out and never put back in.”
“Now, now,” Frank counseled, “give the man a break. He’s new and trying to get a grip on how things work. Supervising county government has to be different from being an officer in the army.”
“Right,” Joanna agreed. “We can’t afford two-hundred-dollar toilet seats. And then there’s Harry I. Ball.”
“What hairy eyeball?” Frank asked. “I don’t remember anyone saying a word about that.”
“Not ‘hairy eyeball,’ “ Joanna returned. “That’s a man’s name,” she said, reading off the scrap of paper she had stuffed in the pocket of her blazer. “First name is Harry, middle initial I, and last name Ball. I made him spell it out for me.”
“Who the hell is he?”
“Some high mucky-muck with the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. He called me at home this morning when I should have been on my way to work.” She didn’t add that Harry Ball’s unwelcome call was the only reason she hadn’t been even later to the board of supervisors meeting.
“What did he want?”
“His office is sending someone to bring us Latisha Wall’s file because the material is too volatile to be sent any other way than in person. Not only that, whoever they send is supposed to hang around and keep an eye on us – an observer to bird-dog us the whole time we’re doing the Latisha Wall investigation. I believe the exact phrase he used is that his boss didn’t want anyone to ‘let something slip.’ The good folks up in Washington are evidently convinced that our department is totally incapable of conducting an adequate homicide investigation. If you ask me, Mr. Ball sounded exactly like some of those high-handed yahoos from the other Washington, and just as screwed up.”
“When does this so-called observer arrive?” Frank asked mildly.
“Who knows?” Joanna shot back. “And who cares? His name’s…” She paused again to consult her note. “J.P. Beaumont. All I can say is, Mr. Beaumont had better stand back and stay out of my way.”
Frank shook his head and unlocked the door to his waiting Civvie. “Want to stop off and grab some lunch before we head back to the office?” he asked. “Something tells me you’re running on empty.”
Joanna gave him a sidelong glance. “What makes you say that? Just because I’m ranting and raving?”
Frank nodded. “The thought crossed my mind.”
“We’ve been working together for too long,” Joanna said, grinning in spite of herself. “And lunch is probably a good idea. Butch left the house early this morning. I ran late and skipped breakfast.”
“I thought so,” Frank said.
Minutes later Frank and Joanna turned their matching Crown Victorias into Chico’s Taco Stand in Bisbee’s Don Luis neighborhood. The building that housed Chico’s had once served as the office of a junkyard. The wrecked cars had all disappeared, and now the building itself had been transformed. The tiny restaurant consisted of a counter where people lined up to place their orders. In addition to the counter’s four stools, there were five booths that consisted of sagging, cigarette-scarred red vinyl benches with matching chrome-and-chipped-Formica tabletops. All of the furnishings had been purchased secondhand from a soon-to-be-demolished diner in Tucson. Several dusty, fading piñatas and a few unframed bullfight posters provided what passed for interior decor.
Fortunately, Chico’s lunchtime clientele was in search of good food rather than trendy surroundings. Customers lined up daily for some of Chico Rodriguez’s signature tacos, made from a recipe passed down from his great-grandmother to his grandmother, then to his mother, all of whom had spent decades cooking in various Bisbee-area Mexican eateries. When the last of the Rodriguez women retired, Chico had followed in their footsteps and opened his own establishment, one where his mother still filled in occasionally so Chico could have a day off.
Joanna and Frank went to the counter and placed their order. Taking their drinks, they retreated to a recently vacated booth, where they were obliged to clear their own table. Minutes later, Chico himself delivered their orders. The food came on paper plates accompanied by paper-napkin-wrapped plastic utensils. The shredded-beef tacos, made from crunchy homemade corn tortillas, were piled high with chopped lettuce. The lettuce was sprinkled with a generous helping of finely grated sharp cheese and topped by a dollop of tomato salsa that was more sweet than hot. It was that special combination of ingredients that made Chico’s tacos taste better than any Joanna had eaten elsewhere.
As she took her first bite, Frank grinned at her. “As soon as you’re no longer a raving maniac, tell me more about your call from the Washington State Attorney General’s Office and this so-called observer they’re sending.”
“I’ve pretty much told you what I know,” Joanna returned. “The guy’s name is Beaumont. That’s about it.”
“When can we expect him?”
“Tomorrow or Sunday, I suppose,” she said.
“And the purpose of his visit?”
“Other than spying on us and getting in the way? Beats the hell out of me. Like I said before, talking with Mr. Eyeball, as you called him, was like dealing with feds from back east. He fully expected me to spill my guts and tell him everything we know. But that isn’t going to happen, at least not until that file gets here.”
“He didn’t go into any details as to why the state of Washington is so concerned about Latisha Wall’s death?”
“No, and the longer they keep us working in the dark, the easier it’ll be for us to make that slip Harry Ball seems to be expecting.”
Frank jotted himself a note. “When we get back to the office, I’ll go on-line and find out what I can about Ms. Latisha Wall. It must be a pretty high-profile case to garner this much attention from the attorney general’s office. There may be newspaper coverage that will tell us some of what we need to know.”
“Good idea,” Joanna said. “We should also check with Casey and Dave to see how they’re doing with processing all the evidence they brought back from the crime scene.”
Frank nodded and made another note as Joanna finished the second of her two tacos. She was scraping the last of the refritos off her plate when the phone in her purse crowed.
“Hello, boss,” Detective Jaime Carbajal announced when she answered. “Sorry to bother you. Kristin said you were at a board of supervisors meeting. Hope I’m not interrupting.”
“The meeting’s over,” Joanna assured him. “Frank and I stopped off at Chico’s to grab some lunch. What’s up?”
“I still haven’t heard a word from anybody in Washington,” Jaime complained.
Joanna’s laughter barked into the phone. “I have,” she told him. “And I can tell you now, you’re not going to like it. Meet us out at the department. I’ll bring you up to date, and you can do the same.”
Jaime Carbajal was waiting in the outside office when Joanna arrived. As predicted, he was irate at the idea of an outsider prowling around on his turf and messing around in his case.
“What about the opening at Castle Rock Gallery?” Joanna asked when she, Frank, and Jaime had exhausted the topic of Ross Connors’s unconscionable interference.
“I didn’t go,” Jaime replied.
“You didn’t go?” Joanna asked. “Why not?”
“It was canceled. When I got there last night, I found a sign on the door saying the opening had been canceled due to the death of the artist. Sorry for any inconvenience, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Dee Canfield canceled the show after all?” Joanna mused. “She must have come to her senses then. The last I heard she was determined to go through with it. I wonder why she changed her mind…”
Six
AS I PULLED my Porsche 928 out of the Belltown Terrace parking garage at seven that morning, I wasn’t thinking about traffic or even about work. I was thinking about my mother and about how fortunate it was that she was dead and had been for more than thirty years. I still miss her, of course, but if I had told her about my new job with the Washington State Attorney General’s SHIT squad, she would have been obliged to wash my mouth out with soap no matter how old I was.
Somewhere in the wilds of the state capitol down in Olympia was the out-of-touch Washington State bureaucrat who had dreamed up the name for the Special Homicide Investigation Team of which former Seattle homicide detective J.P. Beaumont was now the newest member. If you say the name word for word like that – Special Homicide Investigation Team – it sounds fine, dignified, even. The same holds true if you print it out on stationery or business cards. And that’s exactly what that same dim-witted state official did. He went nuts ordering reams of preprinted stationery, forms, envelopes, and business cards.
There was, however, a fly in the ointment. The world we live in is made up of shortcuts and acronyms – the Seattle PD, the U.S. of A., the U Dub, et cetera. The AG’s (see what I mean?) Special Homicide Investigation Team had barely opened its doors for business when people started shortening the name to something a little more manageable. And that’s where the SHIT hit the fan, so to speak. While everyone agrees the name is “regrettable” and “unfortunate,” no one in the state bureaucracy is willing to take the heat for rescinding that previously placed order for preprinted stationery, forms, and business cards. So SHIT it was, and SHIT it remains.
Getting back to my mother. I don’t want you to think Karen Piedmont was some kind of humorless prude. She was, after all, an unwed mother who, in the uptight fifties, raised me without much help from anyone – including her own parents. Her total focus was on turning me into a “good boy.” To that end, “bad language” was not allowed. As far as I know, the word “shit” never escaped my mother’s lips. Her mother, on the other hand, a chirpy eighty-six-year-old named Beverly Piedmont Jenssen, loves to ask me about my job – acronym included. It’s as though, at her advanced age, she’s decided she’s allowed to say anything she damned well pleases. And does.
Woolgathering as I went, I drove straight to what locals call the Mercer Mess – the Mercer Street on-ramp to I-5. I planned to take I-5 south to I-90 and go east across Lake Washington to the business park in Bellevue’s Eastgate area, where the attorney general had seen fit to set his team of investigators up in a glass-walled low-rise building.
But southbound I-5 was where things went dreadfully wrong. I turned onto the on-ramp and stopped cold. Nobody was moving – not on the ramp, and not on the freeway, either.
This was not news from the front. Seattle’s metropolitan area is notorious for gridlock. It’s a tradition. For the last several decades our trusted elected public officials have done everything possible to limit highway construction while allowing unprecedented growth. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this is a recipe for transportation disaster. Now that it’s here, those very same public officials alternately wring their hands and try to blame the problem on somebody else.
I have to confess that while I was both living and working downtown, the increasingly awful traffic situation was easy to ignore. However, now that I had thrown myself into the role of a trans – Lake Washington commuter, I was learning about the problem up close and personal.
So I wasn’t especially surprised to find that I-5 traffic was barely moving. At least, that’s what I thought – that it was barely moving. Then, when I had advanced only three car lengths in the space of fifteen minutes, I finally switched on the radio in time to hear KUOW’s metro traffic reporter, Leslie Larkin, announce that the I-90 bridge was closed in both directions due to “police action.”
The I-90 floating bridge is made up of two entirely separate side-by-side structures with eight lanes of traffic between them. During rush hour, the two center lanes are reversible. If there’s an accident going one way or the other, it would normally shut traffic down in one direction only. But Leslie had clearly stated that it was closed in both directions, which seemed ominous to me. It made me wish I were still part of the Seattle PD. I could have called in and found out what was really going on. Instead, I concentrated on getting far enough onto the freeway so I could get off again – at the first available exit.
To understand the scope of the Seattle area’s traffic woes, you have to imagine a densely populated metropolitan area with a twenty-five-mile-long lake dividing it neatly in half. Now, superimpose a huge pound sign over that body of water, and you can visualize the problem. The two legs are Interstates 5 and 405 running along the western and eastern sides of the lake. Two bridges, I-90 and Highway 520, form the cross-legs. If one of the two lake bridges goes out of commission, all hell breaks loose. Drivers have to choose among three unacceptably inconvenient and time-consuming choices. They can drive around either the top or the bottom of Lake Washington, or else they take a number and get in line to cross whichever bridge is still working.
I chose to
go around. I exited the freeway at Stewart and took surface roads, but by then they were stopped up, too. Finally I called into the office to say I was going to be late.
“Special Unit B,” Harold Ignatius Ball, my new boss, barked into the phone. “Whaddya need?”
I’ve had problems with my name all my life. Jonas Piedmont Beaumont isn’t a handle any right-thinking woman should have laid on a poor defenseless baby, but that’s what my mother did. Once I had a say in the matter, I chose to go by either Beau or by my initials, J.P. But in the troublesome name game, my mother was a piker compared to Harry’s mom. By naming him as she did, Mrs. Ball had sentenced her little son Harold to be designated Harry I. Ball for the rest of his life. The words “Special Homicide Investigation Team” look fine on paper, and so does Harry’s name. The trouble starts when you string the first together or say the second one aloud.
Harry went to work for the Bellingham Police Department right after returning from Vietnam. I suppose he could have nipped the problem in the bud by using his given name, going by Harold at work, and ditching his middle initial altogether. If he’d just used initials alone, it would have still made him an easy target for teasing. Hi-ball isn’t much better. But Harry’s a perverse sort of guy. Harry I. Ball is what his name tag said when he was a uniformed cop in Bellingham, and it’s what’s on his desk right now as Squad B leader of the Special Homicide Investigation Team. Occasionally, someone will look at the name and think it’s some kind of joke, but anyone who underestimates Harry I. Ball is making a serious mistake.
“I’m going to be late,” I said.
“You and everybody else,” he muttered. “Why the hell don’t you move to the right side of the lake?”
Harry lives in North Bend, right up against Mount Si on the west side of the Cascades. His commute is even longer than mine. The only difference is, there are no bridges.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “I understand I-90 is shut down in both directions.”