by J. A. Jance
By the time Butch finished his sad lament, Joanna was laughing at him. “All right,” she relented. “But no more whining, either. I can’t stand it when you whine.”
“I don’t like it either,” Butch agreed. “I’m afraid my folks bring out the worst in me.”
He was out at the High Lonesome within fifteen short minutes. By then Joanna had thawed out some ground beef and was frying corn tortillas for tacos. Jenny had chopped up tomatoes and onions and was busy grating cheese when Butch walked in the door.
“Boy,” he said. “Are you two a sight for sore eyes! I’ve had about all of Maggie Dixon I can stand, and she’s been in town for barely twenty-four hours.”
Jenny wrinkled her nose. “You mean you don’t like her either, even though she’s your own mother?”
“That’s about the size of it,” Butch said.
Joanna’s phone rang just then. When she dragged it out of her shirt pocket, Butch relieved her of the tongs. “I’ll finish frying the tortillas,” he said. “You talk on the phone.”
“Where are you?” Joanna asked when she heard Jaime Carbajal’s voice.
“Benson,” he said. “We’ve given up for the day, and we’re on our way home. Dispatch said you wanted us to call.”
“I did-do,” Joanna said. “How’s it going?”
“Not too bad, considering. I guess Frank told you that we missed the boat when it came to talking to Melanie Goodson. And the nun you wanted us to talk to, the one who’s the principal at Santa Theresa’s…”
“Sister Celeste,” Joanna supplied.
“Right. We didn’t see her, either. She was out sick today, but we did have one bit of luck.”
“What’s that?”
“Not surprisingly, the Pima County homicide detectives weren’t too thrilled when we showed up hot on their heels. Since they wouldn’t let us anywhere near their crime scene, Ernie and I were stuck just sort of milling around down on Old Spanish Trail at Melanie Goodson’s turnoff, which, by the way, seems to be paved from there all the way to her house. That had to have cost a fortune. Anyway, we were left cooling our heels there, and since people are just naturally curious when they see a couple of stopped police vehicles, we did manage to talk to some of Melanie’s neighbors.”
“Jaime, could you stop stringing me along and try getting to the good part?”
“We ended up talking to a lady named Karen Gustafson who lives just up the street, if you could call it that. It’s a road, really. Anyway, she told us that she and her husband were coming home from Webb’s Steak House on Friday night about ten when they saw Melanie Goodson’s Lexus coming down the road. Karen said she was sitting in the car while her husband went over to the mailbox to pick up their mail. She said that when the car came by, she saw there were two people in it-Melanie Goodson and some other woman. The thing is, until we started asking her questions, she didn’t even know Melanie’s car had been stolen.”
“Good grief!” Joanna exclaimed. “Pima County’s supposedly investigating that case. What did they do, drop the ball?”
“I don’t think they ever bothered to pick it up. Grand-theft auto evidently isn’t a very high priority around here. In most cases they don’t do much more than take the report over the phone. I believe Melanie Goodson got an in-person officer visit because of who she was and what she did for a living. Of course, now that she’s dead, a possible homicide case is gathering a lot more attention than her stolen car did.”
“Could it be that Melanie Goodson and Sandra Ridder both went to Cochise Stronghold that night?”
“That’s how it sounds to Ernie and me,” Jaime answered.
“But why would she go along?” Joanna asked.
“I don’t know,” said Jaime, “but my guess is, once we have an answer to the first question, we’ll also know how come she’s dead. She was Sandra Ridder’s attorney, right?” Jaime asked.
“Right.”
“And Ridder went to prison on a plea bargain. That means there was never any trial in regard to Tom Ridder’s death, so maybe there wasn’t much of an investigation, either,” Jaime continued. “The detectives probably figured they had a slam-dunk domestic-violence case. Frank told us Tom Ridder got thrown out of the army for assaulting one of the brass. And since Sandra was willing to stand up in front of a judge and accept full responsibility for plugging her husband, the detectives on the shooting case probably figured, why waste any more time digging any deeper? She goes to prison. The detectives clear one case and go on to the next.”
Joanna considered the possibility. “So you’re thinking the same way I am-that all this has to have something to do with Tom Ridder’s death?”
“It’s the only tie-in Ernie and I can think of.”
“Me, too, Jaime,” Joanna said. “And maybe we’re on to something. Melanie Goodson told me that Sandra was planning to buy some new clothes, have her hair done, and pretty much get herself fixed up before she went on home to the Dragoons to see her mother and daughter. She also said she didn’t have any money worries about her upcoming makeover and shopping spree. We need to find out whether or not Catherine Yates sent Sandra get-out-of-jail money or if she had savings from her prison wages. If neither of those options pans out, maybe she was expecting to collect some cash somewhere else. What if somebody else killed Tom Ridder and Sandra stepped up to the plate and took the rap for it? What if she knew who really did do it? Then, after all these years, she gets out of jail and decides to collect on that old debt. What would happen then?”
“Whoever she was trying to put the squeeze on might prefer some other medium of exchange-say a hot bullet in place of cold cash.”
“Exactly,” Joanna said. “And since Melanie Goodson was Sandra Ridder’s attorney back then, she may have known about the connection as well. So where do we go from here?”
“I don’t know about you,” Jaime Carbajal said, “but I’m on my way home. Whatever we’re going to do next will have to wait until tomorrow. If I don’t get home in time to see at least the last couple innings of Pepe’s game, Delcia is going to kill me.”
“Your wife isn’t going to kill you over missing a Little League game,” Joanna said. “But if she does, we’ll see to it that Delcia doesn’t get any less of a sentence for knocking you off than Sandra Ridder did for shooting her husband.”
“Thanks, boss,” Jaime Carbajal said. “You’re all heart.”
CHAPTER 19
Over dinner, Butch turned serious. “What’s this I hear about Reba Singleton making a scene at Clayton’s funeral?”
Joanna glowered at Jenny. “It wasn’t a big deal,” Joanna said. “She didn’t mean anything by it.”
“She did too,” Jenny insisted. “She said you wouldn’t get away with it. She sounded so mean when she said it, that it scared me. It really did.”
“And now that I’ve heard about that,” Butch said, “there’s something worrying me as well. When I came home, there was a car pulling out of the drive onto High Lonesome Road, but Jenny tells me there was no one here but the two of you.”
“What kind of car?” Joanna asked.
“I couldn’t tell,” Butch replied. “All I saw were headlights. Still, if someone came to the ranch without coming up to the house and talking to you…”
“It was probably somebody using the facilities,” Joanna said. “People do it all the time, especially regulars who are stuck driving Highway Eighty on a weekly or monthly basis. It’s a long pit-stop-free zone from Benson to, say, Rodeo, New Mexico. People will pull off the highway and then come up High Lonesome Road until they hit the dips. Figuring they’re out of sight, they’ll stop there to relieve themselves.”
“Mom!” Jenny objected. “That’s gross.”
“It may be gross, but it happens,” Joanna said. “I’ve seen them myself.”
Butch shook his head. “In other words, I’m not supposed to worry about whether or not a crazed Reba Singleton was parked down by the mailbox because you think it was probably
just some weak-bladdered guy who couldn’t make it all the way from Bisbee to Douglas.”
“Right,” Joanna said, while Butch shook his head and rolled his eyes. Forty-five minutes later, dinner was over and cleared away. While Jenny and Butch settled down to play a game of dominoes in the breakfast nook, Joanna opened her briefcase and spread the contents out across the dining room table. Digging through the bale of paper, Joanna located Frank Montoya’s file folder labeled “Ridder, Thomas Dawson.”
The poor print quality on the faxed material made it difficult to read. There was no way for Joanna to tell which end of the process had the dying printer problem, but she suspected that if it was on the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department’s side of the equation, Frank Montoya probably had repaired it by now or was in the process of doing so.
Joanna read through the file’s contents one page at a time. True to his nature, Frank had arranged the material in meticulous chronological order. The first item-a single piece of paper-contained a copy of Thomas Dawson Ridder’s general discharge from the army. A separate document indicated he was being dismissed for cause, for behavior ill befitting an officer and a gentleman. Nowhere in the verbiage could Joanna find any indication that Ridder’s ill behavior had to do with assaulting a superior officer. Joanna made a note to herself: “Ask Frank where he picked up info on the alleged assault.”
Turning to a sheaf of copied newspaper clippings, Joanna discovered that the first newspaper account of the Thomas Ridder shooting incident was a small three-inch article in the Tucson Daily Sun that reported an unidentified male had been shot to death in his home on East Seventeenth Street in Tucson’s downtown area. It added that detectives from the Tucson Police Department were investigating the shooting as either the interruption of a robbery in progress or possibly as a domestic-violence incident.
That kind of surface-only reporting was typical of newspaper accounts that are written immediately after fatality incidents and before officials have an opportunity to notify next of kin. The second article was a more in-depth piece in which the reporter revealed the full names of both victim and alleged assailant.
The article recounted that at the time of Sandra Christina Ridder’s surrender and subsequent arrest, she had made a complete confession to investigators, saying that she had shot her husband in an effort to ward off another violent attack. Afterward, she had picked up her young daughter from a ballet class downtown and then had driven around for hours trying to come to terms with what she had done and also trying to decide what to do next. After disposing of the murder weapon at an undisclosed location, Sandra Ridder had finally contacted a friend, an attorney, who convinced her she should turn herself in to the authorities.
Toward the end of the article was a paragraph that answered one of the questions Joanna had planned to ask Frank:
Thomas Dawson Ridder, a self-employed landscape gardener, had recently been dismissed from the army, where he had served as Staff Sergeant with STRATCom at Fort Huachuca. He was brought up on charges for assaulting an unnamed superior officer. Rather than face court-martial in that incident, Ridder accepted a general discharge, left the army, and moved with his wife and young child to Tucson. While the child’s mother is being held without bond in the Pima County jail and with her father deceased, the Department of Child Protective Services has taken steps to remove the minor child from the family home. She has been placed in the care of relatives.
Joanna stared at the end of the article for a long time after she finished reading it. She went back into the text of the article and underlined the word “weapon.” Then she made a note in the margin. “Was this missing weapon ever found? Is that maybe what was hidden in the Tupperware bowl?” Then, as soon as Joanna wrote that comment, she had another thought.
If Sandra Ridder drove all the way to Cochise Stronghold the night of the murder, Joanna wondered, if she knew she was going to be arrested, why didn’t she drop Lucy off at Catherine Yates’ nearby house right then, instead of taking the child back to Tucson with her? Why had she put her daughter in a position where she would have to be shuffled around by a bunch of bureaucracy-wielding strangers?
If Joanna hadn’t been a mother herself, she might not have considered that question, but it was one she wished she’d had a chance to ask Sandra Ridder in person. And she hadn’t been able to ask that question of Sandra’s attorney, Melanie Goodson, either. There was still one person she might ask-Sandra’s mother, Catherine Yates. After mulling the idea for a few moments, Joanna dismissed that one as well. It seemed unlikely to her that Sandra’s mother would have any more of an idea about the whys and wherefores of her daughter’s behavior than Eleanor Lathrop Winfield did about Joanna’s.
The next article was a short one that recounted the plea-bargain hearing. In it Sandra admitted that some of the injuries she suffered that night had been self-inflicted. That, although she claimed her husband had beaten her on other unreported occasions, on the night in question he had not. She had shot him as he sat in his chair in front of the television news and then had staged the ransacking of the house and her own injuries in order to be able to establish a claim of self-defense.
In making his decision, the judge said that based on Sandra Ridder’s account of self-inflicted injuries, he agreed with the prosecutor in disallowing any claim of self-defense. However, in view of Tom Ridder’s known violent tendencies, the judge did find some mitigating circumstances. As a consequence, his judgment of voluntary manslaughter was one full step down from the prosecutor’s previously arranged plea bargain of second-degree murder.
Studying that article, Joanna realized that one of the standard newspeak phrases was missing from the references to Melanie Goodson. Nowhere in that article or in any of the others was there any mention that Melanie Goodson was Sandra Ridder’s “court-appointed” attorney. That meant that Melanie Goodson had taken on Sandra Ridder’s case on a fee basis.
Joanna jotted down another note to herself. “Who paid Melanie Goodson’s fee? Sandra’s mother???”
The whole while Joanna had been working, Sadie and Tigger had been sprawled comfortably in the cave beneath the table. Now, acting in unison, the two dogs scrambled to their feet. Shoulder to shoulder, they dashed from the dining room into the living room, where they stood side by side, barking frantically at the front door.
As Joanna followed the dogs to the door, she remembered Butch’s concern about the unidentified car that had been lurking at the entrance to High Lonesome Ranch. She looked out in time to see a pair of headlights pull up and stop at the gate. Whoever it is doesn’t know us very well, Joanna thought. If they did, they’d be coming to the back door instead of the front.
“Who is it, Mom?” Jenny called from the kitchen.
Peering out between the window blinds, Joanna couldn’t tell. The vehicle hadn’t come far enough into the yard to trigger the motion-activated yard light located on the side of the garage. Feeling vulnerable and besieged, Joanna wished for the comforting presence of either one of her Glocks, but those were both under lock and key in her bedroom.
“Joey?” Butch asked. “Do you want me to go out and check?”
Before Joanna could answer, the car door swung open. In the dim illumination of the dome light, she caught a glimpse of Kristin Marsten’s cloud of blond hair as she climbed out of her Geo.
Almost sick with relief, Joanna turned back to Butch and Jenny. “It’s Kristin,” she said. “From work. If you’ll take these two barking dogs into the kitchen, I’ll let her in.”
As Jenny and Butch collected the dogs, Joanna opened the door in time to see Kristin stumbling forward. She fumbled with the gate latch. Once inside the gate, she staggered up the walkway and onto the porch looking for all the world as though she was drunk.
“Kristin!” Joanna exclaimed, stepping onto the porch. “What are you doing here? Is something wrong?”
Without a word, Kristin propelled herself across the porch. Sobbing, she fell against Joanna with such for
ce that they both crashed into the wall.
“Kristin,” Joanna insisted. “Tell me. What’s happened?”
“My parents threw me out,” Kristin wailed. “My father told me to get out, that he didn’t want a daughter like me living in his house. He said that I had fifteen minutes to gather up what I needed and then he wanted me to clear out.”
Joanna was horrified. “What did your mother say?” she asked.
“Nothing. She sat there the whole time and listened to Dad yell at me, and she never said a word. Not a single word. I didn’t know where to go, Sheriff Brady. I couldn’t go see Terry, not like this. He already feels bad enough. So I came here. What am I going to do? What’s going to happen to me? Where am I going to stay?”
Joanna patted the younger woman’s heaving shoulder. “Come on inside,” she said. “It’s cold out here. You’re shivering. I’ll fix you something warm to drink, and we’ll try to decide what to do.”
“Joanna,” Butch said from just inside the door. “What’s wrong? Is there anything I can do to help?”
Kristin had taken a step toward the door. Now, hearing another voice, she broke away from Joanna’s hand and darted back across the porch. “I’m so embarrassed. I didn’t know you had company. I don’t want anyone else to know about this. I’ll just leave,” she insisted. “I’ll go somewhere else.”
Joanna reached out and captured one of Kristin’s flailing hands. “No, you won’t,” Joanna said. “It’s only Butch. You’ve met him, and I promise you he won’t bite. Be sensible, Kristin. Come on in now, please.”
“But I don’t want him to know,” Kristin pleaded. “I don’t want anyone to know. But now everybody will. Who knows what they’ll think. And say.” Once again she burst into incoherent sobs.
“Please, Kristin. It doesn’t matter what anyone says or thinks,” Joanna said calmly. “This is your business and Terry’s and nobody else’s. That includes your parents. Come on. Let’s get you inside and warmed up so we can talk things over and decide what to do. You said your father gave you fifteen minutes to pack. Do you have luggage along?”