Judgment Call

by J. A. Jance

  “Breakfast to go then?” Butch asked. “I can do you a homemade McButch BELT.”

  When it came to breakfasts to go, Butch’s special concoction—bacon, egg, and tomato sandwiched between two slices of lettuce and two slices of whole wheat buttered toast—was Joanna’s all-time favorite.

  “Sounds good.” She brushed his cheek with a kiss on her way to the bathroom. “There are real advantages to marrying a short-order cook.”

  Joanna stood for a time in the hot shower, letting the water pound some of the weariness out of her body and thinking about her conversation with Isadora Creswell.

  The CIA? she wondered. Why would someone from the CIA target a harmless high school principal in Bisbee, Arizona?

  That made no sense—none at all. Did that mean Isadora was a paranoid nutcase and completely delusional? Possibly, although during the rest of the conversation, given the kind of bad news she’d just gotten, the woman had seemed to have her wits about her and a good grasp on reality. Joanna had no intention of bringing any outside agencies—most especially the CIA—into her investigation until she had to, and that wouldn’t happen until she had a better idea of Isadora’s state of mind.

  Meanwhile, there was something else about the conversation with Debra Highsmith’s grandmother that Joanna found disturbing. Debra had left home, presumably in Pennsylvania or somewhere else back east, a good twenty-seven years earlier. Joanna’s brief scan through the train case of letters had shown no indication of a visit—of Isadora coming to visit Debra in Albuquerque or Tucson or Bisbee or of Debra going home for a holiday visit, either. So why, now that her beloved granddaughter was dead, was Isadora suddenly ready to hop the first available plane and come to Bisbee? Why now? Why come to oversee funeral arrangements instead of coming to visit a living, breathing, and apparently well-loved granddaughter? Why honor the dead more than the living?

  That makes no sense, either, Joanna told herself as she stepped out of the shower and began to towel herself dry.

  By the time Joanna was dressed and ready to leave, the rest of the family was gathered in the kitchen. Jenny was at the table, poring over her driver’s training manual. Denny was on the floor, attempting to teach Lucky to hold a Cheerio on his nose. It wasn’t working. Butch was loading the dishwasher.

  “Here you go,” Butch said, handing her a lunch bag with the still-warm breakfast sandwich sitting at the bottom.

  “What’s on the agenda for you guys?” Joanna asked.

  “Dad is taking me out for a driving lesson this morning.”

  “Yes,” Butch agreed, beaming just a little. “If I had hair, I could count on it turning white by the end of the day. I’m sure my knuckles will be, too.”

  His natural hairline was sparse enough that he had worn his head shaved for as long as Joanna had known him, but she was eternally grateful that he was the one giving Jenny her manual-transmission driving lesson.

  “Carol’s going to come over and look after Dennis while Jenny and I go out for our ride. What about you?”

  Joanna glanced at her watch. “Murder and mayhem starting in about ten minutes. I’d better go.”

  “Yes,” Butch said, “but remember. I don’t care how many people croak out in Cochise County today. When it’s six thirty P.M. and time for us to make our appearance at the Plein Air gala, I expect you to be at the Rob Roy Links, properly dressed and in my Outback rather than arriving in uniform in your Yukon. Got it? This is a social occasion, and we’re going to treat it as such.”

  Joanna looked at him and laughed. “You’re just worried about what my mother will do if I turn up late.”

  “Or don’t turn up at all,” Butch said, “which you and I both know has happened before. I don’t want tonight to be one of those times when I’m left holding the bag while Eleanor Lathrop Winfield goes on the warpath.”

  Joanna held up the lunch bag. “I won’t stand you up,” she said. “Why would I? Aren’t you the same guy who just made me this sandwich?”

  “That’s me,” Butch said with a grin. “Now get going, or you’ll be late.”

  CHAPTER 13

  THAT SATURDAY MORNING, JOANNA LEFT THE REGULAR MORNING shift-change briefing to Tom Hadlock while she huddled in her office with the investigators and CSIs working the Debra Highsmith homicide. Dave Hollicker and Casey Ledford had finished up their crime scene investigation of the victim’s San Jose Estates home about the same time Joanna had gone back to bed. They were at the meeting on time, but they were also swilling coffee and looking every bit as bedraggled as their boss.

  Usually in those kinds of briefings, Joanna functioned more as an observer and moderator than as an active participant. This time, however, she was the one with news to impart, including the identity of the homicide victim’s grandmother as well as the unanticipated existence of Debra Highsmith’s biological son.

  The meeting started with the assembled officers settling in to watch the Sue Ellen Hirales interview. When that ended, Joanna went on to tell them about tracking down Isadora Creswell and asking to have officers from the Altoona Police Department do the actual next-of-kin notification.

  Jaime raised his hand. “Does the M.E. know about the next of kin? Machett is real touchy about who knows what when.”

  “I’ll call him when the meeting is over,” Joanna said. “He fancies himself a Monday-to-Friday kind of guy. He won’t be happy being called at what he probably thinks of as the crack of dawn on Saturday.”

  She then recounted a brief summary of her early-morning conversation with Isadora Creswell.

  “She really said that?” Deb Howell asked when Joanna ended her presentation. “That she thought the CIA was responsible for Debra’s death?”

  “Yes,” Joanna said. “She also said that she thought whoever killed Debra might have people eavesdropping on her phone calls. My assumption would be that’s why she’s coming to Bisbee to talk to us in person. She’s afraid her phones are bugged.”

  “Sounds like paranoia on the hoof,” Jaime Carbajal observed, and everyone else nodded in agreement. “What about the situation with the son? Is it possible that the father finally got wind that he was a father and came here demanding some kind of parental rights?”

  “It’s a little late for that,” Joanna said. “According to Sue Ellen Hirales, the kid is twenty-six years old now and a first-year law student at the University of New Mexico. That makes him an adult. If the biological father wanted to have a relationship with his son, he could do so without having to ask for permission, and certainly without knocking someone off.”

  “Still, it sounds like there was bad blood there,” Deb said. “Why else would Sue Ellen have dragged the guy out of the bar and beaten the crap out of him? Logical or not, we need to check this out and see if we can identify the guy. Even date rapes get reported.”

  “Good luck with that,” Joanna replied. “Date rapes still don’t get the kind of reporting they deserve, and all this happened more than two decades ago. Times have changed, but I’m guessing that back then a senior at Good Shepherd Academy wouldn’t have been caught dead telling the cops she had been having sex, especially consensual sex. Dealing with the cops would have been one thing. Dealing with the nuns would have been a nightmare.”

  As they talked, the train case—brought over from the evidence room for the meeting—had been making the rounds, with the investigators plucking out one or another of Isadora’s notes and briefly scanning through them.

  “Hey,” Jaime said. “I’ve got an idea. If the grandmother thinks the CIA was after Debra, maybe this is all written in code. When she’s writing about the garden club or the Friends of the Library, maybe she’s talking about something else.”

  Deb looked at him and shook her head disparagingly. “You thought Isadora Creswell was paranoia on the hoof  ? What about you?”

  “Leave the letters with me,” Joanna said. “There’s no sense in taking the time to read through them since we’ll be able to talk to Isadora in person tomorrow
. In the meantime, what’s happening with Debra Highsmith’s dog?”

  “I checked with Dr. Ross just before you got here,” Deb said. “She says Giles is going to be fine.”

  “What kind of name is that for a dog?” Dave Hollicker said.

  “It’s what he answers to, which is surprising considering how long Debra had him,” Deb replied. “Dr. Ross says she’ll be ready to release him later today, but she’d rather not send him to the pound while he’s still recovering from all the porcupine damage. She’s worried about him picking up an infection or maybe passing one along to the other dogs. Since the puncture wound is infected, he’s on antibiotics. She’s taken a blood draw for the tox screen, but after this much time has passed, it’s not likely that anything will show up on that.”

  “What puncture wound?” Dave asked.

  That’s the reason we all need to be in the same room, Joanna thought. So we all have the same pieces of the puzzle.

  “From a bear-tranquilizing dart,” Joanna answered. “Dr. Ross thinks that’s what knocked the dog out.”

  “Who would have access to something like that?” Dave wanted to know. “And why use it?”

  “Depending on how it’s deployed, it could be lots quieter,” Jaime said. “Some of them are fired out of pistols or shotguns, but I’ve also seen blowguns that can bring down small game. If the guy had a dog in his face, taking him down with a dart could be a lot less obvious than using a gun in a residential neighborhood. What I think is most interesting here—and more than a little odd—is that whoever killed Debra Highsmith went to considerable effort to neutralize her dog without killing him.”

  “What color is the dog?” Dave asked.

  “Mostly black,” Deb answered at once. “It’s a Doberman. Why?”

  “What about the victim’s hair color?”

  “Brown,” Jaime answered. “With some lighter streaks.”

  “Women call those streaks highlights,” Deb said. “We pay good money for them.”

  “Okay,” Dave said, ignoring the hair-color byplay. “I collected several hairs that were caught on the metal frame of the doggie door at Debra Highsmith’s house. Under the microscope, it’s easy to see that the black ones belong to the dog. Then there’s a slightly longer light brown or even auburn one that’s definitely human.”

  “So maybe that’s how the perpetrator gained access to the house—through the doggie door?”

  “Maybe,” Dave agreed. “With any luck the guys in the crime lab will be able to develop a DNA profile. The truth is, it could also belong to the victim.”

  “Why would Debra Highsmith be crawling through her own doggie door?” Deb wanted to know.

  Dave shrugged. “Maybe she forgot her keys and had to let herself in that way. Not that it’s ever happened to me,” he added with a sheepish grin.

  “By all means, get that sample to the crime lab,” Joanna said, stepping into the discussion. “In the meantime, what about the victim’s phone records?”

  “Got ’em right here,” Deb said, tapping her finger on a stack of faxes sitting in front of her that she had been shuffling through during the meeting. “They came in overnight from Debra Highsmith’s cell phone provider. Turns out she didn’t have a landline at home, which probably explains why she didn’t have an alarm system. Besides, it’s tough to find security alarms that can differentiate between the family dog and an intruder.

  “While we’ve been sitting here, I’ve been scanning the phone records. If what Sue Ellen Hirales told you about being close friends with Debra Highsmith is true, why aren’t I seeing a single phone call from Debra’s phone to New Mexico or from New Mexico back to her? I’m not seeing any calls to Altoona, Pennsylvania, either. So she saves all her grandmother’s letters, for years and years, but she doesn’t pick up the phone and call her? Not ever? At least not in the last year’s worth of phone records.”

  “What about e-mail records?”

  “I’m looking into those. The school district isn’t eager to let us into their computer system, but so far I don’t have any kind of personal e-mail account for Debra Highsmith, only the one at work.”

  “Did you ask Abby Holder about that?”

  Deb nodded. “I asked her that specifically. She said that as far as she knew, Debra Highsmith didn’t have an e-mail address other than the one at school. So we’re going to need to get access to that.”

  “I’ll tackle Farraday,” Joanna said. “I’ll try to get him to cooperate. If he won’t, then we’ll have no choice but to get the warrant.”

  Next Joanna turned to Casey Ledford. “Okay. Where do we stand on fingerprints?”

  “Nowhere,” Casey said. “I took elimination prints from the people who work at the school who would most likely have been in and out of Ms. Highsmith’s office. Thanks to Dr. Machett, I have the victim’s prints as well. So far I can’t find any prints that shouldn’t be there—not in her house, her office, or her vehicle. That tells me the guy was wearing gloves the whole time. If he went to the trouble of obtaining bear tranquilizer, this shows a whole lot of premeditation. The killer is organized. He planned this well in advance.”

  “I’d have to agree with that,” Dave said. “We’re seeing premeditation, but also plenty of rage. The guy was careful about going through the house, but demolished everything in sight once he got to the victim’s office. What changed? Presumably he went to the house first. Then he killed the victim. I believe it was only after she was dead that he went to her office, because he wouldn’t have had the office keys before that.”

  “Maybe he couldn’t find what he was looking for and that made him mad as hell,” Matt Keller suggested. All through the meeting, the Bisbee investigator had been sitting there, taking it all in, but not saying a word. “So far, the only things we know for sure that are missing are those calendars and the two computers.”

  “We also still don’t know where the perp went after he left High Lonesome Road,” Joanna said. “I understand from Terry that he and Spike lost the trail up by Grace’s Corner. Terry’s theory is that someone picked the guy up from there and took him to his vehicle, which would have to have been parked in an unobtrusive place.”

  “If you don’t know the make or model of the vehicle you’re looking for, any parking place is unobtrusive,” Jaime said. “What do we do now?”

  “I’d like everybody to spend the morning out in San Jose Estates. The neighborhood canvass that was done is just like the earlier crime scene investigation that was conducted at Debra Highsmith’s house. When the City of Bisbee officers were questioning the neighbors, they were asking about a possible missing person. A homicide is a lot more serious. Talk to everybody. Maybe someone was missed, or maybe one of them will have remembered something important that he forgot to mention the first time around.”

  Joanna looked around the room as her investigators nodded in agreement. “What about the Pembrokes?” she asked. “Do they have alibis?”

  “Unfortunately, Dr. Pembroke’s is rock solid,” Matt Keller said. “The M.E. puts the time of death between one and three A.M. From midnight to four, Dr. Pembroke was in the ER dealing with multiple injuries from that DUI down by Naco.”

  Joanna vaguely remembered seeing something about that incident during her middle-of-the-night scan of the previous day’s paperwork. The accident victim’s bad luck turned out to be good luck for Dr. Pembroke.

  “What about his son?”

  “Marty Pembroke is a snarky kind of kid, but I don’t see him as a killer,” Matt replied. “Posting something derogatory online is a lot more his style than hauling out a gun and shooting someone.”

  “If he has a verifiable alibi, why won’t he talk to us?” Deb asked. “Why lawyer up instead of coming straight out and telling us where he was and what he was doing?”

  “What about the other kids?” Joanna asked. “They all seem to be wired into this social networking business. If Marty won’t talk to us, maybe someone else will, or maybe what we need to k
now is posted online.”

  “I tried questioning a couple of the kids and got nowhere,” Matt said. “You’re right. What we need may be online, but getting inside those groups isn’t as easy as you’d think.”

  “Maybe we should talk to Marliss Shackleford,” Joanna suggested.

  Every person in the room, including Matt Keller, looked at her in utter amazement.

  “She must have some kind of access,” Joanna continued. “She knew about Jenny’s photo being on the Internet before I knew about it because she was the one who told me. Let’s ask her.”

  “Wait,” Jaime said. “You’re saying you want one of us to go out of our way to speak to that woman?”

  Matt Keller came to Joanna’s defense. “Sheriff Brady could be right,” he said. “One of the guys in the department, a friend of mine, was getting a divorce. Somehow or other Marliss Shackleford knew about it before he and his wife had even signed any paperwork. He jumped all over Marliss and asked her where she was getting her information. She claimed it was from his daughter’s Facebook posting.”

  Joanna regarded Marliss as her own personal cross to bear. “I’ll handle talking to Marliss,” she said.

  “She’s likely to hide behind the ‘confidential sources’ bit,” Deb said. “I doubt she’ll tell you anything.”

  What Deb didn’t understand was that Joanna had a secret weapon in that regard—her mother. Eleanor and Marliss had always maintained a special kind of bond. Through the years and more than once Marliss had used that personal relationship to wage a PR war against Joanna. For the first time ever, Joanna was prepared to return the favor.

  Joanna’s phone rang. It was Lisa Howard, the weekend desk clerk from out in the public lobby. “Sorry to interrupt,” the clerk said. “Someone named Sue Ellen Hirales just showed up here at the window. She claims she’s a friend of Debra Highsmith and she wants to speak to you before she heads back to New Mexico.”