Judgment Call

by J. A. Jance

  Joanna didn’t know Maggie Oliphant well, but she’d clearly been able to rope Eleanor into the process and make her feel personally responsible for a successful outcome. That meant Maggie had to be some kind of organizing genius.

  “I can see why Maggie’s worn out,” Eleanor said. “Dealing with this particular group of artistic types has been especially challenging—a lot like herding cats. It’s almost impossible to get them to move from place to place and show up on time. They had a guest speaker for this afternoon’s workshop session, and they were all late getting back from lunch. Maggie was frantic.”

  Joanna knew that Junior Dowdle’s meltdown had a lot to do with the Plein Air group’s late lunch, but she didn’t tell Eleanor that. For as long as Junior had worked at Daisy’s, Eleanor had sniffed her disapproval on more than one occasion. Her opinions about the developmentally disabled were similar to her opinions about small children—they should be seen but not heard, and not seen too much, either. And there was no way Joanna was going to pass along what Daisy had said about Junior’s possible Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

  Having accomplished her goal, Eleanor stood up to leave. “Marliss was just telling me about the situation with Mrs. Highsmith.”

  Joanna knew that the word “Ms.” had never made its way into her mother’s vocabulary, but Eleanor’s comment reminded Joanna that no one knew Debra Highsmith’s exact marital status, either. Single? Married? Divorced? Who knew?

  “Yes,” Joanna said. “It’s terribly unfortunate, but we haven’t released her name yet.” She glanced at her watch. It was almost time.

  Eleanor frowned. “Oddly enough, Marliss seemed to think I knew all about it. Surely she doesn’t think you would blab sheriff’s department business to me, does she? Why would she jump to that kind of conclusion?”

  Joanna understood all too well. Marliss didn’t suspect Joanna of being the leak. The reporter was convinced Jenny would have confided in her grandmother, except Eleanor and Jenny didn’t have that kind of relationship.

  “Maybe I should talk to Marliss about it,” Joanna suggested.

  “I didn’t mean to get her in any kind of trouble.”

  “Of course not,” Joanna said confidently, “but leaking information about a homicide victim before the family has been notified can cause difficulties later on.”

  Kristin tapped on the door. “Detective Carbajal is back from the autopsy,” she said.

  “Mom,” Joanna said. “I’m going to have to chase you out of here. I need to meet with Jaime before the press conference.”

  “I’m going, I’m going,” Eleanor said. She walked as far as the office door and then turned to look back at Joanna. “It’s days like this when I’m really grateful George is retired. Whenever there was a homicide to worry about, it seemed like that was all he could think about.”

  Joanna knew that feeling from the inside out.

  “You won’t let this get in the way of your coming tomorrow night, now will you?” Eleanor asked.

  “No,” Joanna told her mother. “I gave you my word. I said Butch and I will be there, and we will.”

  Eleanor marched out of Joanna’s office, and Jaime Carbajal sidled inside. “What’s the news?” Joanna asked.

  “What we already knew. Machett says she was shot four times with a thirty-eight,” Jaime said. “She didn’t die instantly. Probably bled out over fifteen minutes or so.”

  “Time of death?”

  “Somewhere between one A.M. and three A.M. There was no undigested food in her stomach.”

  “So she probably hadn’t eaten since noon?” Joanna asked.

  Jaime nodded. “So that would be consistent with what the Bisbee cops told us. That the killer surprised her when she came home from work, where she was taken down before she had time to take off her ID badge or change clothes. From the injuries to her arms and legs, it appears she was restrained for some time prior to the murder. She evidently struggled against the restraints, but they were removed either before or after she was shot. She also has a single puncture wound in her right shoulder. It’ll be a while to get the tox screen back, but Machett thinks she may have been hit with some kind of tranquilizer.”

  “Sexual assault?” Joanna asked.

  Jaime shook his head. “No sign of that, but Dr. Machett says she’s had at least one child, probably carried to term, and delivered by C-section.”

  Abby Holder hadn’t mentioned Debra Highsmith’s having a child, a spouse, or a former spouse. Neither had William Farraday. Joanna suspected that Mr. Farraday would draw the line when it came to hiring an unwed mother to serve as a school principal in a town where people expected their educators to double as role models.

  Kristin knocked on the door. “Tom Hadlock is wondering if you’re ready. The reporters are getting impatient out there.”

  Joanna nodded and then looked back at Jaime. “Anything else I should know?”

  “There was some bruising on her upper arms, like somebody grabbed her from behind. There’s also some bruising to her forehead, like maybe she fell to the floor. The head injury happened several hours before she died.”

  Joanna paused long enough to open her purse, take out her compact, and check her hair and makeup. Eleanor Lathrop Winfield probably didn’t approve of her daughter’s line of work, but her years of exhortations that Joanna “always look your best” hadn’t fallen on deaf ears. Joanna had no idea what she was going to say in her press conference, but nobody would be able to say that she hadn’t dressed for the part.

  CHAPTER 10

  JOANNA HAD LEARNED OVER THE YEARS THAT PRESS conferences are a kind of stylized form of performance art, not unlike Kabuki. The idea is to be there, to act as though you’re fully prepared to tell all, while at the same time divulging as little as possible. A certain amount of earnestness was always helpful. During the conference a few nuggets of information would be parceled out, but only enough to leave the attendees wanting more. That way, when the reporters went back to their respective computers to write their articles, they would do so with only the barest outline of what had happened.

  Joanna went outside and back to the same shaded breezeway where she had stood side by side with Arlee Jones the previous day. Tom Hadlock still wasn’t up to Frank Montoya standards, and neither was she, but she made it through this one with no difficulty.

  She started by making a series of remarks before opening up to questions. The body found earlier that morning on High Lonesome Road had been identified as Debra Jean Highsmith, Bisbee High School’s principal, who had been reported missing on Thursday morning. She had died as the result of multiple gunshot wounds. The incident was being investigated as a suspected homicide.

  Joanna had to resist the urge to smile slightly when she said that. Suicides hardly ever die of multiple gunshots, and multiple gunshot wounds generally ruled out death by natural causes. However, declaring death by multiple gunshot wounds as a definite homicide went beyond the stylized dance of accepted press conference protocol.

  Toward the end of her remarks she delivered what she considered the red meat of her presentation. “As of this time, my officers have been unable to locate any of Ms. Highsmith’s next of kin. If anyone hearing this announcement can offer any assistance in this regard, you are urged to contact the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department.”

  When she finished and called for questions, most of them turned out to be questions she had already answered, but she answered them again anyway. That was another part of the press conference process.

  During the Q and A, Joanna noticed that Marliss, prominently positioned in the first row, was busily taking notes, but she didn’t raise her head or her hand. When one of the other reporters asked about the source of that unauthorized crime scene photo that was reportedly making its way around the Internet, Joanna replied with a firm “No comment.” At that point Joanna more than half expected Marliss to jump in with a related question or to at least mention Jenny’s possible involvement in the crime photo
flap, but she did not. That seemed odd. It wasn’t like Marliss to exercise that kind of restraint. Not at all.

  It seemed to take forever. When the news conference finally ended, however, Joanna’s phone rang before she could leave for home.

  “I’ve got your dog,” Jeannine Philips announced.

  Jeannine was head of Joanna’s Animal Control division. Animal Control had landed in Joanna’s department several years earlier, on a supposedly temporary basis that was now regarded as permanent by all concerned.

  “My dog,” Joanna repeated. She was mystified. Lady was generally a quiet, stay-at-home kind of dog, and Lucky was deaf. Joanna found it difficult to believe that either of them had wandered away from High Lonesome Ranch.

  “Which one?” Joanna asked. “Lady or Lucky?”

  “Not your dog,” Jeannine said. “Your murder victim’s dog. His name is Giles. He’s properly licensed and chipped and up to date on all his shots. A woman who lives just outside Huachuca City and works at the PX on Fort Huachuca came home this afternoon and found the dog cowering on her back porch. She’s scared of dogs. Terrified of dogs. She dialed 911 and refused to get out of her vehicle until an ACO could be dispatched to the scene. Fortunately, one of my officers was already over in the Huachuca City area picking up a batch of kittens that had been abandoned beside the road. She ended up getting both the kittens and the dog.”

  “Is he okay?” Joanna asked.

  “Giles? Not really. He has a snootful of porcupine quills and is badly dehydrated. I had my ACO transport him directly to Millie’s. She put him on IV fluids, and she’s removing the quills even as we speak. She says she thinks she needs to keep him overnight.”

  Millie was Dr. Millicent Ross, the same vet Jenny worked for. She and Jeannine were partners. As a consequence, Dr. Ross provided an astonishing amount of pro bono vet work for the animals who happened to come to the attention of Cochise County Animal Control.

  “Did you say porcupine quills?”

  “Yes, indeed.” Jeannine chuckled. “Millie calls dogs like that carpet dogs or yard dogs. They get out in the wild and have no idea what’s what. Giles probably got hungry and thought the porcupine was something good to eat. Small error on his part. Believe me, the porcupine got the better end of that deal.”

  Joanna had thought the Doberman was a goner, right along with Debra Highsmith. Who would kill the dog’s owner and let the dog go? Giles had been found in Huachuca City—a good thirty miles from home. How had he gotten there? If he was from Fort Huachuca, maybe he had been trying to get back to his original owner, so had he walked there on his own or had someone given him a ride? Maybe Debra Highsmith herself had taken the dog there.

  “If that poor woman thought she was getting herself a first line of defense by acquiring a guard dog, she didn’t get much of a bargain,” Joanna said.

  “Now wait,” Jeannine said. “Don’t jump to any conclusions, and don’t be so hard on the dog. It’s not his fault. Millie says the dog has a seeping puncture wound on his right shoulder that didn’t come from a porcupine quill. She says it’s consistent with a wound from the kind of dart gun they use to tranquilize bears and cougars who happen to wander into suburban neighborhoods. She thinks someone took the dog out of the equation early in the game by tranquilizing him. Then the perp transported Giles and dumped him while he was still unconscious.”

  The moment Jeannine mentioned the tranquilizing gun, Joanna made a possible mental connection between what had happened to Giles and to Debra Highsmith as well.

  “Can she do a tox screen and find out if there’s any residue of the tranquilizer in the dog’s blood?”

  “Why would you need that?”

  “Because the killer may have used the same tranquilizer to incapacitate both the dog and the dog’s owner. If we know what the exact compound is, we may be able to trace it.”

  “I’ll ask her, but it might turn out to be expensive. I don’t want her to end up having to do it for free.”

  “My department will pay for the tox screen,” Joanna said.

  “What about next of kin?” Jeannine asked. “Any sign of them?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’m going to need to find someone to foster Giles until we can locate one of the victim’s friends or family members who would be willing to take him,” Jeannine said. “It’s not fair to bring a dog that’s been through this much trauma into the pound.”

  That was one of the difficult aspects of homicide. Unexpected deaths usually left grieving family members behind; some were human, some were not. It was no accident that the first people to come in contact with the bereaved animals—animal control officers dispatched to crime scenes—often ended up taking bereaved pets into their own homes on a permanent basis. After all, that was how Lucky had come into their lives—as the only surviving dog of a murdered animal hoarder.

  “Good luck with that,” Joanna said. “Let me know how it goes.”

  She grabbed her purse and had made it as far as her parking space when Deb Howell pulled into the parking lot with Matt Keller’s unmarked city patrol car on her six. Joanna dropped her purse on the front seat of the Yukon and then waited for the detectives to park and come to her.

  “How’d the Pembroke deal go?” she asked.

  “About how you’d expect,” Deb said. “We’d had about five minutes with Marty when Daddy Pembroke came flying into the driveway, jumped out of his car, and came inside to … let’s just say encourage … his son to lawyer up.”

  “So you didn’t get anywhere before that happened?”

  “Not completely,” Matt said. “Marty claimed he was with somebody last night. If his father hadn’t come screaming to the rescue, I think Marty would have given us his alibi, which we could have verified or not.”

  “Check with the other kids,” Joanna suggested. “Starting with the kids whose names I gave you earlier. With all this social networking going on, I think everybody probably knows what everybody else is doing at any given time, but don’t worry about following up on that tonight. We’ve all had a long day, and tomorrow isn’t going to be any better.” She turned to Detective Keller. “Did Chief Bernard authorize overtime?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Even so, let’s go home,” she suggested. “We’ll get a good night’s sleep, and hit it again in the morning. I want to have a task force meeting at eight sharp in the conference room. We’ll have Dave and Casey give us an update on what they’ve found. By then we should have access to Dr. Machett’s preliminary report.”

  “I’m hoping we’ll have the phone records by then, too,” Keller said.

  “All right,” Joanna said. “Let’s see what the morning brings. We’ll go from there.”

  “You want me to call everybody?” Deb offered.

  “No. You go home. I’ll have Dispatch give people a heads-up.”

  With that the two detectives headed home, and so did Joanna. Usually she looked forward to going home and settling in for a quiet evening with her family. This wasn’t one of those times. All afternoon, in the background of whatever she was doing, she had continued to noodle away about how best to deal with Jenny and the crime scene photo. Caught in the cross fire between being a mother and being a cop, she dreaded the coming confrontation.

  Due to the late-afternoon press conference and the subsequent meeting with the two detectives, Joanna had already missed eating with the family when she pulled into her garage at High Lonesome Ranch. Lady was the one who greeted her at the door, so she went looking for everyone else. Butch was closeted in the bathroom overseeing Dennis’s bath. Jenny’s bedroom door was shut. Not unusual, but given what had gone on that day, not a good sign, either. Joanna started to knock but then thought better of it. She and Butch would have to deal with the Jenny situation together, after Dennis was in bed.

  Back in the kitchen, Joanna found her dinner plated and on the kitchen counter, ready to pop into the microwave. She was in the process of reheating it when Butch and D
ennis showed up. Dennis threw himself at Joanna with a joyful exuberance that made her smile. She grabbed him up in a bear hug, sniffing his damp hair, fresh with the unmistakable odor of Johnson’s baby shampoo.

  “So how’s my boy today?” she asked.

  Without answering, he slipped from his mother’s grasp and darted over to Lady, who accepted his effusive greeting with a modest thump of her tail.

  Joanna looked at Butch. “I guess that puts me in my place.”

  He grinned back at her. “It could be worse,” he said. “At least you’re ahead of the dog in Denny’s estimation. Care for a glass of wine with dinner?”

  “I’d like that, but shouldn’t we deal with Jenny first?”

  “That’s already handled,” Butch said. He pulled a bottle of wine from the rack and set two glasses down on the counter.

  “Handled?” Joanna asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Look,” Butch said, peeling the foil off the cork. “With you and Jenny both calling me ‘Dad,’ I figured I’d better step up my game. I spent my whole childhood with a mother who was forever pulling the whole ‘wait till your father comes home’ routine. The last thing I want to do is be a clone of my parents.”

  Having spent some time with Butch’s parents, especially his mother, Joanna had no argument on that score.

  “So I took care of it myself,” Butch said, expertly removing the cork. “You and I don’t use texting. I called the cell phone people and asked how much we were paying for texting. Then I told Jenny she had a choice. If she wants to be able to text, she has to pay that part of the bill. She chose no texting, so that part of the service is gone as of this afternoon.”

  Joanna was impressed. “That’s called making the punishment suit the crime.”

  Butch handed Joanna a glass of merlot, passed her the plate of food, and then sat down across the table from her with his own glass.

  “What’s she doing now?” Joanna asked. “Sulking in her room?”