by J. A. Jance
“This is Sheriff Joanna Brady, from Bisbee. Is there somewhere else where I could reach her in the meantime?” Joanna asked. “It’s urgent. I really do need to speak to her as soon as possible.”
“She’s over at the school,” Sister Emelda said. “But she has a faculty meeting that’s scheduled to start at three and won’t be out until around four o’clock. Is that too late?”
Joanna glanced at her watch. It was only a little before three, but waiting until after four to speak to Sister Celeste would make it chancy for her to do an interview, drive out of town in rush-hour traffic, and still make it home to Bisbee in time for Eleanor Lathrop Winfield’s command performance dinner.
“Could you give me her office number?” Joanna said. “Maybe I can catch her before she goes into the meeting.”
“You can try,” Sister Emelda said dubiously. “But one thing about Sister Celeste. She’s very prompt, and she expects other people to be the same.”
Seconds later, Joanna was speaking to a secretary at Santa Theresa School. “Sister Celeste, please,” she said.
“Could I take a message, please? She’s about to go into a meeting.”
“This is Sheriff Joanna Brady from Cochise County,” Joanna said. “And it’s really quite important that I speak to her as soon as possible. I won’t keep her long.”
The secretary went off the line. Seconds later the phone was answered again. “Yes,” a clipped voice said. “What can I do for you?”
“My name is—”
“You’re Sheriff Brady,” the woman interrupted. “I know all that. My secretary already told me. This is Sister Celeste. What is it you want?”
“We’re investigating a homicide that occurred sometime overnight last Friday down near Elfrida,” Joanna said. “We have reason to believe that a person of interest in that case—a girl by the name of Lucy Ridder—called your convent in the early hours of Saturday morning and spoke to someone there for some time—fifteen minutes or so. I was hoping I could speak to whoever that person was.”
“I don’t think so,” Sister Celeste said abruptly. “In fact, I’m sure that would be quite impossible. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go.”
With that, the line went dead. Joanna sat in the Blazer holding her cell phone, staring at it, and feeling as though a door had just been slammed shut in her face.
You may think it’s impossible, Sister Celeste, Joanna thought. But I will be back.
Joanna was still sitting in the Quick Custom Metals parking lot and holding her phone when it came to life in her hand. When she answered, her caller turned out to be Detective Carpenter.
“Thought you’d like to know that we’re having the Lexus towed to the impound lot,” Ernie said. “Looks like our victim was there, all right. Or, if not Sandra Ridder, somebody else bled all over the leather upholstery. Casey Ledford came out to the site and did a preliminary look-see. She tried lifting prints from several places and couldn’t find any.”
“No prints again,” Joanna breathed. “Just like all those plastic water jugs.”
“Right,” Ernie agreed. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t see one of your ordinary run-of-the-mill UDAs working that hard to keep his fingerprints out of sight and out of our computers. That suggests to me that whoever it is has been in some kind of hot water before, and he knows once we get a lock on his prints, we’re going to get a hit on AFIS and know exactly who he is.”
“Can you tell where whoever it was went after abandoning the Lexus?”
“I’d say the driver of the Lexus was picked up by someone driving a second vehicle. The driver went from one vehicle to the other without leaving any kind of prints we could cast. And the tire tracks of the second vehicle are in the roadway, so they’ve long since been obliterated by passing traffic. We’ll probably pick up trace evidence from the car’s interior that will help us get a conviction if we ever catch who did it, but for right now . . .”
“The Lexus is a dead end for identifying the suspect,” Joanna supplied, “unless Casey can pull something out of the hat.”
“How many low-life crooks do you know who are this cagey?” Ernie Carpenter asked. “Most of them never consider the possibility that they might get caught. In other words, Joanna, I’m getting a funny feeling about this case.”
“What kind of feeling?” Joanna asked.
“Like we’re supposed to think we’re dealing with illegals when we’re not.”
“Who then, Lucy Ridder?”
“She’s fifteen years old. I doubt very much that a kid her age would know enough or be sophisticated enough about criminal procedures to wipe down prints. Besides, she doesn’t have a driver’s license.”
“I don’t think Lucy Ridder has a license to carry, either,” Joanna said. “But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know how to fire that twenty-two she stole from her grandmother.”
“Point taken,” Ernie said.
There was a momentary pause before Joanna spoke again. “What if all this has something to do with what went on eight years ago? Maybe it goes back to Tom Ridder’s murder. Maybe that’s why Lucy was trying to get in touch with all those folks from back then. Is Jaime there?”
“He’s driving,” Ernie replied. “I know better than let him talk on the cell phone when he’s supposed to be concentrating on the road. What do you want to know?”
“He’s talked to Melanie Goodson, hasn’t he?”
Ernie was off the phone for a few seconds. “He says three times so far. Why?”
“Did she say anything about receiving a middle-of-the-night phone call around three o’clock on Saturday morning?”
Ernie passed along the question. “No,” he said when he came back on the line “She never mentioned it. Do you want him to ask her about it?”
“Why don’t I do it?” Joanna said. “After all, I’m right here in Tucson. Where’s her office?”
“On Speedway. The street number is four fifty-eight.”
“Tell him I’m on my way. And, Ernie?” Joanna added. “One more thing. When you get back to the department, I want you to ask Frank Montoya to get on the horn and try to get faxed copies of all the Tucson newspaper reports from back then that dealt with either Tom Ridder’s death and/or with Sandra Ridder’s prosecution. I’m convinced that what went on then has something to do with what’s happening now, but I don’t know what.”
“This sounds suspiciously like we’re operating on women’s intuition again,” Ernie said.
“Do you have a problem with that?” Joanna asked.
“Not at all,” Ernie Carpenter told her cheerfully. “Whatever works works for me.”
CHAPTER 15
When Joanna turned off I-10 onto Speedway Boulevard, the speed limit was signed at 35 miles per hour. Most traffic, including not one but two City of Tucson patrol cars, whizzed around Joanna at ten to fifteen miles above the posted limit. Meanwhile, knowing she’d be turning right somewhere beyond Fourth Avenue, Joanna stayed in the right hand lane stuck behind a Nebraska-licensed Buick whose snowbird driver was content to drive at five miles under.
I guess they got the name right when they called it Speedway, she thought.
Number 458 was one of those old stucco places that dated from the twenties or thirties. Most of the remaining houses on that stretch of Speedway seemed to come from that same pre-air-conditioning era and had been built along the same lines, with cavernously shaded front porches designed to keep out the worst of the afternoon sun. In the fifties and sixties, most of those old houses had fallen on hard times and decrepitude. Many had been carved up into boardinghouse-style living spaces for students attending the University of Arizona a few miles to the east.
It was possible there had been a similar house on the lot just to the west of number 458. If so, all sign of it had been erased, bulldozed into oblivion to make way for a smoothly paved parking lot that came complete with accents of blooming bright-pink verbena. Joanna parked her Blazer between a boxy bright-red Cadill
ac and a white Nissan Sentra.
Walking past them, Joanna forced herself to notice details about them—the gold emblem on the Caddy’s trunk and the smashed left rear fender on the Sentra. That was one part of Joanna’s law-enforcement training that was still giving her trouble. She constantly had to battle herself to notice and identify the vehicles she saw around her.
Walking from the lot to the office, Joanna found that in its new incarnation as a professional office, the former residence boasted a desert-friendly but beautifully Xeriscaped front yard that was alive with an abundance of drought-resistant blooms—verbena, purple sage, and desert poppies, accented here and there by clumps of prickly pear, agave, and barrel cactus. Not a single stray weed poked its nervy head out of the red-gravel-covered earth. Joanna knew from looking at it that, in the middle of the city, that kind of artfully created and impeccably maintained “natural” landscaping didn’t come cheap.
Bathed in shadow from afternoon sun, the magnificent hand-carved mahogany front door with its brass-plated handle contained an oval of etched, leaded glass. The door may not have been part of the house’s original equipment, but the look of it left little doubt that the house and door were full contemporaries, and if the door had been expensive back then, now it was even more so. Stenciled onto the glass in blocky gold letters were the words melanie j. goodson, attorney at law.
Pressing down the old-fashioned thumb latch, Joanna let herself into dusky, air-conditioned comfort. The entryway floor was shiny, high-gloss hard wood. It was covered with a Navajo rug that spoke of both age and money. Joanna had seen rugs like that before, but the people she knew who owned those Native American treasures had long since declared them far too valuable to continue using them on floors.
“May I help you?” Behind the reception desk was a mid-twenties woman with a headful of loose auburn hair. She was decked out in suitably serious business attire—blazer, skirt, silk shirt, and heels. If it hadn’t been for the seven or eight pierced earrings decorating both ears and a mouthful of very expensive orthodontia, Joanna might have taken her for Melanie Goodson herself.
“I’m Sheriff Joanna Brady from down in Cochise County,” she announced, pulling out her ID. “I’d like very much to speak to Ms. Goodson.”
“I don’t remember Ms. Goodson having an appointment scheduled with anyone by that name for today.” While the young woman ran a black-enameled fingernail down the page of a leather-bound appointment calendar to check, Joanna did her best to ignore the unfortunate and noticeable lisp caused by her braces.
No doubt the receptionist was intimately familiar with her boss’s schedule. Hers was a form question worthy of nothing more than a form answer. “No,” Joanna said, swallowing a bubble of annoyance. “One of my deputies had an appointment to see her earlier this afternoon, but he found it necessary to cancel. I’m sure Ms. Goodson will want to see me,” she added. “It’s about her missing vehicle.”
“So someone has found it then?” a husky female voice asked from an open-doored office. “When will I be able to have it back? I hate driving rentals.”
Joanna looked up in time to see a woman appear in a doorway just to the left of the reception desk. She was tall and good-looking but tending to be heavyset. Her highlighted hair was precision-cut in a timeless bob. She wore an ivory silk blouse with a pair of custom-made slacks, and her fingers carried a full contingent of heavily jeweled rings. Here’s a high-maintenance woman if I ever saw one, Joanna thought. Stylish and expensive both.
“I’m Melanie Goodson,” she said, holding out her hand. “Who are you again?”
“Joanna Brady. Sheriff Joanna Brady.”
“Oh, yes. I’ve spoken to one of your deputies.”
“Detective Carbajal?” Joanna suggested.
“Right. That’s the one. I believe I was supposed to see him this afternoon, but he called in and canceled. Come on in.”
Melanie Goodson led Joanna into a spacious, cove-ceilinged office that looked as though it had been carved from two separate rooms. The ornate white molding on the wainscoting, the lush floral draperies and muted grass-cloth wallpaper all announced their quality workmanship. In one corner of the room was a seating area that consisted of a polished coffee table, a wing chair, and an old-fashioned settee. Melanie Goodson settled into the chair and motioned Joanna onto the settee, which turned out to be far better-looking than it was comfortable.
“You never answered my question,” Melanie said, pouring two glasses of ice water from a cut-crystal pitcher into matching glasses.
“What question?” Joanna asked after taking a grateful sip of the water.
“My car. When will I be able to have it back?”
“Probably not for some time. There are bloodstains inside it, Ms. Goodson. My investigators have reason to believe it was used to transport a homicide victim. I have a feeling my crime-scene investigators are going to need to keep it in our secure impound lot for some time. We’ll no doubt need to hang on to it as evidence at least until this case comes to trial.”
“You’re saying whoever killed Sandra did it in my car?”
“I don’t know for sure that’s where the homicide actually took place, but the presence of bloodstains certainly indicates that a seriously wounded individual was in the car. Whether or not that person turns out to be Sandra Ridder remains to be seen.”
Melanie shook her head. “They say no good deed goes unpunished, and it must be true. That’s what I get for picking Sandra Ridder up at the prison gate and bringing her into my own home. Not only did she steal my car the moment my back was turned, she also managed to get herself killed in it. Well, no big deal. Maybe I can get my insurance company to total the damned thing so I can buy a replacement and get on with my life. Once you’ve driven a Lexus, a Caddy doesn’t quite measure up, if you know what I mean.”
“Of course,” Joanna agreed, although, never having driven either a Lexus or a Cadillac, Joanna hadn’t the vaguest idea of why Melanie might find her rented “Caddy” so objectionable. No doubt, Joanna would have found both of them equally acceptable and luxurious.
“Is that what you came to talk to me about?” Melanie asked. “The car?”
“Not entirely. Since I wasn’t directly involved in investigating your vehicle, I don’t know that much about it. Detective Carbajal was on the scene, and he expects to come talk to you about it tomorrow if you can work him into your schedule. No, the main reason I’m here is I wanted to ask you about something that came to my attention an hour or so ago.”
“What’s that?”
“A phone call you received around three o’clock Saturday morning. It was placed from a pay phone.”
“What about it?” Melanie asked, her voice hardening. “How would you know whether or not I received a call in the middle of the night, to say nothing of the fact that it came from a pay phone?”
“From telephone-company phone logs. The one to you was part of a series of calls Lucy Ridder made that night, one right after another. Did she actually speak to you, or did the call go to a machine?”
Melanie Goodson frowned. “There was a call,” she said. “I saw it on caller ID Saturday morning when I got up, about the same time I realized the Lexus was missing. And there was a message on it, sort of, although not a real message. All I heard was a voice—a girl’s voice. She said my name, and then for several seconds she didn’t say anything. There was just this breathing on the phone. I thought for a second or two that it was going to turn into one of those heavy-breathing crank calls. But then, whoever it was hung up without saying anything more.”
“Did you happen to mention this to the Tucson cops when you reported your vehicle missing?”
“Report what?”
“The fact that you had received a strange middle-of-the-night phone call. Did it occur to you that the two events—your stolen car and the phone call—might be related?”
“I had no way of knowing they were,” Melanie Goodson replied. “In fact, I never even co
nsidered it. I do a lot of defense work, Sheriff Brady. Phone calls coming in from pay phones at three o’clock in the morning aren’t all that unusual for people like me, especially not on a weekend. No offense, Sheriff Brady, but DUIs are my bread and butter, which means three o’clock on a Saturday morning is a golden time for me.
“But if that’s when Lucy Ridder called,” Melanie added, “she was probably looking for her mother. I know Sandra had told someone—her mother, most likely—that she’d be staying with me on Friday night. Lucy probably expected that she’d be able to reach Sandra there. I imagine Lucy was excited at the prospect of seeing Sandra and didn’t want to wait until the next day. I know if I hadn’t seen my mother in eight years, I would have been.”
“Lucy never went to visit her mother while she was in prison?” Joanna asked.