Judgment Call

by J. A. Jance

  Even as Joanna spoke, she understood what was happening. Having a discussion about the scenery was an effective way for both of them to avoid talking about the real reason for Isadora’s visit. For her part, Joanna was happy to carry on with that little charade. It delayed the moment when, for good or ill, she would have to find a way to tell this already grieving woman that she had a great-grandson she had never met.

  Joanna dreaded that part of the conversation. It promised to be an emotional minefield. If Isadora didn’t already know about Mikey Hirales’s existence, how would she take the news? She would either be thrilled or be devastated. This was a situation where there was likely to be very little middle ground.

  “How much did you know about Debra’s life out here?” Joanna asked.

  “I know she loved it,” Isadora said. “She loved the wide-open spaces and the blue skies, but most of all, I think she loved the kids.”

  “What did she talk to you about?”

  “We didn’t talk,” Isadora corrected. “We wrote letters. I wrote to her. She wrote to me, but never directly. That was too dangerous.”

  Not wanting to spook the woman, Joanna backed off. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll meet with my people first, then I’ll come collect you from the lobby.”

  Joanna parked in her reserved spot, let herself in the back door, and went straight to the conference room where her team was already assembled and waiting.

  “Bring me up-to-date,” she said, taking her place behind the lectern. “What are the results from yesterday, and what’s on the agenda for today?”

  “Yesterday we reinterviewed all the neighbors, as well as Richard Reed, one of the Plein Air guys who’s been in the neighborhood painting all week long. Nobody saw anything out of the ordinary. For today I’ve got the autopsy at the top of my to-do list,” Jaime Carbajal said. “Doc Machett is pissed that he’s having to work on Sunday. Too bad. If we have to work on Sunday, he has to work on Sunday.”

  “I’ve faxed a copy of Judge Moore’s warrant to Maggie’s telephone provider,” Deb Howell said. “Once I get the records and can start going over her calls, that should tell us a lot.”

  “I’d be interested to know if the phone records show that Debra Highsmith was somehow involved with Maggie Oliphant or the art league,” Joanna said thoughtfully.

  “Why do you ask?” Deb replied.

  “This is a small community. We’ve had two homicides in as many days. On the surface it looks as though we’re dealing with two separate cases, and until we know better that’s how we’ll continue to treat them, but let’s keep our eyes and ears open. There’s always a chance that there’s some connection between the two that’s eluding us.”

  “I’ll check,” Deb said, “but if she made calls to Maggie from her office phone, we won’t have a record of that without obtaining another warrant. We got one from Judge Moore last night because he and his wife were at the function when Maggie was murdered.”

  “Do what you can,” Joanna said. “If there’s a link between those two women, we need to find it.”

  With that, Joanna turned to Casey Ledford. “What about fingerprints?”

  “There are literally dozens of fingerprints in Maggie’s car, but that’s not surprising. She’s been running a taxi service all week long for the people involved in the conference, carting them here and there. We’d need a whole bunch of elimination prints to even begin figuring out who all was in her vehicle, and it would probably be a huge waste of time and effort since the bloody smear on the door handle didn’t have any prints in it.”

  “Which suggests the killer probably wore gloves?” Joanna asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “Let’s do this, then,” Joanna said. “For right now, don’t worry about getting elimination prints, but go ahead and enter the ones you find into the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. If we end up getting an AFIS hit on one of them, it might be a big step up, especially if our killer turns out to be some small-time repeat offender who was simply prowling the cars in the parking lot looking for easy pickings.”

  She turned to Dave Hollicker. “What are you up to?”

  “Once Casey finishes collecting prints, I’ll be processing the vehicle. After that, I’ll run that bloody sample from the passenger door up to the crime lab in Tucson to get them started on DNA testing.”

  Nodding her approval, Joanna turned to Deb. “What about you?”

  “When the phone records come in, I’m planning to take them home with me so I can work on them there. Maury’s been here all weekend. He’s been great about hanging out with Ben, but I’ve barely seen either one of them. Maury’s a good man, and I feel like I’m taking advantage.”

  “By all means work at home,” Joanna said, “but first, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to come sit in on the interview with Debra Highsmith’s grandmother. She’s waiting out in the lobby.”

  Joanna looked around the room. “All right, people,” she said. “It sounds like everybody’s on track. If no one has anything else …” Seeing no indication of any further pending business, Joanna nodded in Deb’s direction. “How about if you bring her to one of the interview rooms so we can video her statement.”

  “Wait,” Jaime said. “Isn’t this the same woman who claimed Debra Highsmith was killed by someone from the CIA?”

  Joanna nodded.

  “That’s one interview I’ll be sorry to miss,” Jaime said with a grin. “It would be fun to see you and Deb here all decked out in tinfoil hats.”

  “Get out of here and go watch your autopsy,” Deb told him with an annoyed glare. “Go bother Dr. Machett with your lame jokes instead of bothering us.”

  Deb Howell left the conference room, slamming the door behind her as she left. Jaime Carbajal was still chuckling under his breath as he exited the room. Left on her own, Joanna couldn’t help but think that Jaime just might be right. The idea of a CIA hit man showing up in Bisbee didn’t seem at all likely.

  CHAPTER 20

  JOANNA WAS WAITING IN THE HALLWAY OUTSIDE THE INTERVIEW room when Deb led Isadora Creswell through the door from the public lobby. Isadora was a tall, spare, and stiffly upright woman who walked with a slight limp and with the aid of a metal cane with a multicolored shaft. The slight tremor that had first manifested itself in her handwriting seemed to have turned into a slight but visible shaking that affected her whole body.

  She wore a double-breasted charcoal-colored suit over a crisp white blouse. On her feet were a pair of what Eleanor referred to as “sensible shoes,” sturdy heels of the lace-up variety. There was no doubt that these were all designer duds, well maintained but several decades out of date.

  Looking at the woman as she came down the hall, Joanna estimated that she must be well into her eighties. Artfully applied makeup effectively shed years off a face that must once have been stunningly beautiful. Her thinning silver hair was pulled back into a French twist and fastened with a stylish jeweled comb. Suspecting that the blue jewels in question were real sapphires as opposed to the fake variety, Joanna upped the ante on what she had previously thought to be Isadora’s net worth.

  A faded beauty, Joanna thought, but someone with the air of assurance—the savoir faire—that comes from having lived a life that included some degree of both wealth and position.

  Isadora stopped short when she reached Joanna. “You must be Sheriff Brady,” she said, smiling and holding out a trembling, bony hand whose thin fingers were gnarled by arthritis. “They didn’t allow lady sheriffs back in my day, or even lady detectives, but I’m glad to see they do now.”

  Smiling back, Joanna was careful to return Isadora’s handshake without squeezing too hard. This woman and Abby Holder’s mother, Elizabeth, were most likely members of the same generation, yet their respective attitudes toward women in law enforcement were diametrically opposed.

  “Won’t you come in,” Joanna said, gesturing toward the door of the interview room. Pausing at the doorway, Isadora peered inside.
When she caught sight of the camera, for the first time she seemed to have second thoughts.

  “Do you have to record this interview?” she asked. “There’s always a chance that it might fall into the wrong hands. Couldn’t we do this in your office with a civilized conversation?”

  Joanna thought about it for a minute and then made up her mind. “Of course,” she said with a nod in Deb’s direction. “No problem.”

  Turning around, she ushered Isadora and Deb Howell back to her office. Settled into one of the visitor’s chairs in front of Joanna’s desk, Isadora stared out the window at the ocotillo-studded landscape that eventually gave way to a towering wall of limestone cliffs that sprang up out of the desert floor a mile or so away.

  “Are those plants all dead?” Isadora asked.

  “Which plants?”

  “The ones with those long, spiky gray branches.”

  “The ocotillo?” Joanna asked with a laugh. “No. They’re not dead, although they certainly look dead. They lose their leaves when it gets too dry, but they leaf back out again when it rains.”

  “Not just in the fall and spring?”

  Joanna said, “Regardless of the time of year, within twenty-four hours after a rainstorm, they’re green again.”

  “Fascinating,” Isadora said, turning back to Joanna. “Debra loved this place,” she said, “but she never mentioned the … what is it again?”

  “Ocotillo,” Joanna repeated.

  “She mostly talked about her work and school. That’s what interested her most. Her kids.”

  Joanna reached into her bottom drawer and pulled Jenny’s eulogy out of her purse. “My daughter, Jenny, is one of your granddaughter’s ‘kids,’” Joanna said. She walked the paper around her desk and handed the eulogy to Isadora. “She wrote this yesterday.”

  Isadora reached into her own purse and plucked out a pair of reading glasses. Joanna and Deb Howell waited patiently while Isadora read through it, moving her thin lips slightly as she read. When she finished, she carefully refolded the paper and placed it in her purse, then withdrew a lace-edged hankie and wiped away the trail of tears that had blossomed on her carefully rouged cheeks.

  “So you’re Jenny’s mother,” she said. “This year’s rodeo queen, right?”

  Joanna nodded.

  “Debra often spoke about her, thought she was a promising young woman, but then she took a keen interest in all the kids, not just the ones singled out for some kind of honor.”

  Joanna nodded. “From what I can tell, your granddaughter was a wonderful principal. The whole community is feeling her loss, but it turns out we’ve discovered that there’s a lot we don’t know about the woman we all thought of as Debra Highsmith. Maybe you’d care to enlighten us. For instance, it might be helpful if you told us her real name.”

  Isadora looked up sharply. “So you know about that?”

  “We know that your granddaughter was using someone else’s name and Social Security number from the time she was a freshman in high school.”

  Isadora drew a deep breath before blurting out her answer. “My son was a spy,” she said simply. “A contemptible traitor to his country. He worked in the defense department in Washington, D.C., as an intelligence analyst. This was back before the end of the Cold War, back when there were all kinds of Russian spies on the ground in this country, and Gunnar worked for them.”

  “Gunnar was Debra’s father?” Joanna prompted.

  Isadora nodded. “You can google him if you like. That will give you some idea of what we’re dealing with. It’ll give you an overview of his part of it anyway.”

  Joanna’s computer was right there on her desk. “That’s G-U-N-N-A-R?”

  Isadora nodded. “Lloyd was my husband. His father’s forebears came from England. His mother’s hailed from Denmark. Gunnar was his maternal grandfather’s name.”

  Punching the letters into the computer, Joanna waited for the search engine to find the article.

  Gunnar Lloyd Creswell, born October 10, 1937. Died March 26, 1979.

  Joanna looked away from her computer screen and shot a questioning look in Isadora’s direction.

  Isadora seemed to understand exactly what she was thinking. “I was twenty when my son was born,” Isadora explained. “In some circles I’m considered to be very well preserved for my age.”

  Joanna upped Isadora’s estimated age by another decade. “And still driving,” Joanna said.

  “Yes,” Isadora agreed with a nod, “just not at night, and not, as it turns out, in rental cars.”

  Joanna returned to reading the article.

  The only son of Lloyd and Isadora Creswell, Gunnar Creswell was raised in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where he was considered to be an outstanding student as well as an all-around athlete who won an appointment to West Point. Graduating as a second lieutenant, he served two tours of duty in Vietnam. Returning from overseas, he was posted to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., where he served as an intelligence analyst for the Department of Defense during the Cold War. Suspected of spying for the USSR, he was taken into federal custody in March 1979. He died two days later of an apparent suicide. No charges against him were ever filed.

  “As you can well imagine,” Isadora observed as Joanna finished reading, “that’s a highly sanitized version of what happened. Most of the real story is still classified.”

  Joanna turned her computer screen far enough around so Deb could read the article for herself. If the guys at Wikipedia believed Gunnar Creswell was a spy, maybe there was something to the CIA story.

  “Tell us what you can of the unsanitized version,” Joanna urged.

  Isadora sighed. “My first daughter-in-law, Gunnar’s first wife and Debra’s mother, was named Alice. She died in an automobile accident a few months after Debra was born. My second daughter-in-law was a money-grubbing gold digger. Isabelle came from Indiana—a farm girl with delusions of grandeur who ended up being Miss Indiana.

  “She assumed that since Lloyd and I had money that Gunnar had money, too. She may not have been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but you couldn’t tell that from the way she acted. Not long after they married, Isabelle made it abundantly clear that Gunnar wasn’t living up to her high expectations. His job at the Pentagon didn’t earn enough to allow him to keep her in the manner to which she wanted to become accustomed. She insisted that he buy her a house in what she regarded as the right neighborhood in D.C. regardless of whether they could afford it. She wanted expensive cars. She wanted expensive clothes. She wanted the best schools for Alyse and for Jimmy.”

  “Who are Alyse and Jimmy?” Deb asked.

  “Alyse was Debra’s given name,” Isadora explained. “Her original given name. Jimmy was her baby brother.”

  “Was?” Deb asked. “Is he dead, too?”

  “Not as far as I know. But back then, whenever Gunnar’s salary didn’t stretch quite far enough to suit her, Isabelle fully expected him to come to us for a handout. He must have gotten tired of having to ask us for help. Instead of doing that, he went looking for another source of funds. Unfortunately, he found one.”

  “And a spy was born,” Joanna said.

  “Yes,” Isadora agreed. “The problem is, Gunnar wasn’t very good at it. He got caught.”

  “How?”

  “Alyse,” Isadora said simply.

  “She turned in her own father?”

  “Not exactly. You have to understand that even before Jimmy was born, Isabelle treated Alyse like so much extra baggage. Whenever Isabelle lit into Alyse, my son always took his wife’s part. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the girl. She was a sweet thing. Lloyd and I were more than happy to have her spend a few weeks with us each summer, and she never gave us a bit of trouble. As my husband got older, he was ill and housebound much of the time. Whenever Alyse visited us, she was our little ray of sunshine.

  “One day when Alyse was thirteen, the three of us were having breakfast when she announced, out of the blue, that she th
ought her daddy was a spy. Lloyd choked on his coffee. I thought he was going to have another coronary on the spot. He may have been a retired banker, but he was a true patriot. Before he could go off on a rant, I managed to step in and ask Alyse whatever would give her such a strange idea.

  “She said she was coming home from the library with some friends. They were taking a shortcut through Book Hill Park when she saw him sitting there on a bench with a woman—a beautiful woman—Alyse had never seen before. She thought it was odd that he would be there then because he was supposed to be at work. She started to go over to him and then something made her stop. Instead, she stayed where she was and watched.

  “Knowing men, my first assumption, of course, was that Gunnar was playing around and maybe having an affair, but Alyse soon disabused me of that notion.

  “‘It was just like in the movies,’ she said. ‘When he got up to leave, he took her briefcase and left his with her.’

  “When breakfast was over, Alyse went on her way, leaving Lloyd and me sitting there shattered. I tried to pass it off as a case of a thirteen-year-old with an overly active imagination, but Lloyd took it seriously, and he went into overdrive. He fought in World War Two, you see. He was there on D-day and at the Battle of the Bulge. The idea that his own son might be a traitor to his country was more than he could tolerate.

  “Lloyd had a friend of a friend look into Gunnar’s finances. It took some time to pull all the facts together, but sure enough, he was spending half again more than he was making. He wasn’t even smart enough to hide it. The Russians must have been keeping an eye on things, too. They knew he was compromised even before the people on our side did. Whoever the woman was, they pulled her out and sent her back home.