by J. A. Jance
Joanna sobered, too. “The homicide happened inside the city limits, but both the Bisbee PD and the sheriff’s department are involved in the case. The lead investigators are Bisbee’s Detective Matt Keller and one of my homicide detectives, Deb Howell. Detective Keller left a few minutes ago. Detective Howell is here, and she’ll be glad to take your statement, but she’s currently interviewing someone else, a woman named Amber Sutcliff.”
“I know Amber,” Lyle said. “Not well, but I’ve met her. She was Guy’s girlfriend—a relatively new girlfriend. She’s only been at the Whetstone a few times. They met at another colony closer to Phoenix. Guy enjoyed mixing it up now and then. He didn’t just come to my place. He went to others, too.”
Joanna recalled being shocked at seeing Guy Machett’s naked body lying supine on the floor. The idea of his willingly trotting around wearing shoes and socks while otherwise in the buff was something she couldn’t quite grasp. She preferred picturing the man properly attired in his expensive and carefully pressed suits. As for being in the nude with other people, to say nothing of with someone he was just starting to date? That didn’t work for her either.
“How did he appear to you when you saw him last?” Joanna asked. “Was he upset or worried about anything?”
“Upset, yes,” Lyle said. “Inconvenienced more than worried. He and Amber had planned to stay at the retreat for the entire weekend, but he had to cancel part of it—something about having to work on Saturday.”
Junior Dowdle’s autopsy, Joanna thought, but how did the killers know about that?
“Do you know anything about Dr. Machett’s family situation?” Joanna asked.
Lyle frowned. “His father’s evidently been out of the picture for a long time. I know his stepmother had been very ill. His half sister called to let Guy know that she was moving the mother . . .”
“Selma,” Joanna said, supplying the name.
“The sister said she was moving Selma into hospice care. I asked Guy if he planned on going home for the funeral. He told me he had no intention of doing so. He and his stepmother had been estranged for some time—a number of years—and he felt there was no reason for him to make the trip.”
Joanna’s phone rang. Matt Keller’s name appeared in the caller window. Excusing herself, Joanna went out into the reception area and sat down at Kristin’s desk to take the call.
“Hey, Matt,” she said. “What’s up?”
“I just got off the phone with Sandy Henning,” Detective Keller said.
Through a process of mergers and attrition, there was only a single bank left in town—a single bank with several branches. Sandy Henning was the manager in charge of the whole shebang.
“I know Sandy,” Joanna said.
“Me, too,” Matt said. “We were sort of an item back in the day, and we’re still friends. Rather than wait until tomorrow to ask her to be on the lookout for that coffee money, I gave her a call at home just now. Turns out she’s already been notified about that. She was told to have her people watch their transactions for any hundred-dollar bills reeking of coffee, especially ones with out-of-date serial numbers.”
“Who notified her?” Joanna asked. “And how did they contact her?”
“The notice came through by e-mail on Friday afternoon. I’ll forward a copy of it to you.”
“Okay,” Joanna said. “I’ll get back to you.”
She waited long enough for the e-mail to arrive and then read it through. The sender was listed as Cesar Flores, Special Agent, U.S. Treasury.
U.S. TREASURY ALERT
You are advised to be on the lookout for currency, specifically one-hundred-dollar bills, containing out-of-date serial numbers. Some or all of the bills may be readily recognizable due to the distinct odor of coffee. If any of the bills in question arrive in your banking establishment, please call the following number immediately.
The alert looked genuine enough; what bothered Joanna about it was the timing. According to Detective Franklin, the banker in Great Barrington had raised the coffee money issue weeks earlier. At the time, the banker had been told that the bills, although old, were still good. If he’d had some kind of reservations about them, why hadn’t a notice been sent out then? Instead, this one had appeared weeks later, on the day before Guy Machett had been murdered and before Liza had been reported missing. Maybe Guy wasn’t the only target. Maybe his sister was, too. If Liza was on the lam and using her so-called coffee money to cover expenses, maybe someone was using the power of the Treasury Department—most likely someone inside the Treasury Department—to cast a net wide enough to track her down.
Making up her mind and leaving Lyle cooling his heels in her office a while longer, Joanna called Matt back. “I need Sandy’s number,” Joanna said. “I’d like to talk to her.”
A moment later, Sandy Henning was on the line. “Sheriff Brady here,” Joanna told her. “I’m calling about that coffee money alert. Do you have a minute?”
“Sure,” Sandy said. “What do you need?”
“Do you get alerts like this often?”
“Sure, they come in all the time, usually when there have been incidences of counterfeiting in the area. They send out lists of bogus serial numbers. I print up copies and pass them along to my tellers. That’s what I did with this one. I sent e-mail copies to everyone on Saturday morning.”
“Is there anything off about this one?” Joanna asked.
“What do you mean, off ?”
“Out of the ordinary,” Joanna answered. “For instance, who usually sends out these kinds of notices?”
“A guy in D.C., a Treasury agent named Cesar Flores. I doubt he sends them out personally. Cesar’s department is the one in charge of communications with banks, so I’m sure they have a massive database. Still, his name is always the one on the send line. What’s this all about, Sheriff Brady?”
“The currency we’re all calling ‘coffee money’ has now been linked to three separate homicides,” Joanna answered, “and the timing on this seems strange. Would you mind taking another look at it?”
“I just sent it to Matt. Give me a minute, and I’ll look at the e-mail.”
“You’re right,” Sandy said when she came back on the line. “I never noticed it until you asked, but the phone number is wrong. It’s not a D.C. area code. I thought maybe Treasury had parceled weekend responses to a call center operating somewhere else, but I just tried calling it. After three rings, it came up as a disconnect. That’s weird. Why would they send out an alert and then cancel the number before people have a chance to call in a report? It doesn’t make sense.”
It would if whoever sent the message already figured out what they need to know, Joanna thought.
“Is there anything else?”
“Yes,” Joanna said. “If you happen to have it handy, I’d like Agent Flores’s number.”
“Of course,” Sandy said. “I’m sure it’s in my contact list.” She found the number and read it off.
“Thanks,” Joanna said after jotting the number down.
Joanna was about to hang up, but Sandy stopped her. “Matt hinted that this might have something to do with Guy Machett’s homicide,” Sandy said. “Is that true?”
“I can’t answer that directly,” Joanna said, “but I will say this. If anyone shows up in one of your branches this week and passes along any coffee money, have your tellers dial 911, because their lives may be in danger. Is that clear enough?”
“Absolutely,” Sandra Henning breathed.
Joanna ended the call and then dialed Cesar’s number. An answering machine clicked on after only one ring. “Special Agent Cesar Flores,” a deep voice said. “I am currently out of the office. If this is a banking emergency, please wait for the tone and then press one to be connected directly to my cell phone.”
In other words, Cesar Flores was important enough to be on call 24/7. Joanna waited for the tone and then pressed one.
“Agent Flores speaking.”
&nb
sp; “My name is Sheriff Joanna Brady,” she said. “I’m calling about the alert you sent out on Friday warning banks to be on the lookout for certain kinds of currency.”
“What alert? I wasn’t even in the office on Friday. I was in New York City at a meeting. Notices like that don’t go out without my personal stamp of approval. Who is this again?”
“Sorry,” Joanna said quickly. “I’m sure there’s been some kind of mistake.”
There’s a mistake here, all right, she thought, hanging up, and the killers just made it.
With the phone still in her hand, she consulted her contact list, settling at last on the name Frank Montoya. For years Frank had been her chief deputy and right-hand man, until he had been lured away from her department by a lucrative offer to take over as chief of police in the neighboring city of Sierra Vista. Joanna and Frank were still friends and colleagues, but she sorely missed having Frank’s technical savvy at her disposal.
Cueing up the e-mail that Cesar Flores had categorically denied sending, Joanna turned it into a forward. She typed in both Frank’s and Alvin Bernard’s e-mail addresses along with the following message:
Alvin and I are working the Machett homicide, and we could use your help. Cesar Flores denies having sent this notice. Either he is lying about not sending it or the person who sent it was pretending to be him. Is it possible to verify that one way or the other?
Also could you see about tracking down the contact telephone number listed at the end of the notice? It’s now been disconnected, but I need to know who owned it and where it was located.
Thanks, and boy, do I miss you.
J.B.
After that she scrolled through her incoming calls. Once she located the one from Detective Franklin in Great Barrington, she hit the call button.
“Franklin here,” he said.
“This is Sheriff Brady. Did your M.E. list a time of death for Clifford Small?”
A distant sound of papers being shuffled preceded Detective Franklin’s answer. “Between one and two this morning. Why?”
“When was the fire first reported?”
“The 911 call came in shortly after three AM. The fire was extinguished about half an hour later. The body was found around five, but why all the questions?” Amos asked.
“I’m looking for a pattern here,” Joanna said. “If something comes of it, I’ll get back to you.”
Joanna was about to go back into her office when Deb Howell came past Kristin’s desk. “I just finished interviewing the girlfriend and sent her on her way.”
“Do any good?”
“Not much, but I’ll go write it up.”
“Before you do that, there’s one more interviewee waiting in my office,” Joanna told her. “His name’s Lyle Morton. He’s the owner of the Whetstone Mountain Retreat. He claims to be a friend of Guy’s and says he last saw Guy on Friday afternoon when he and Amber left the retreat. It sounds like Lyle and Amber may have been the last people to see Guy alive.”
“Is Mr. Morton dressed?” Deb asked.
Joanna smiled. “Yes.”
“I’d better go talk to him then.”
“A word of caution,” Joanna said. “Lyle seems to know quite a bit about Guy’s family background. I’d like to know what he knows without telling him everything we know, so please hold back the information that Guy’s mother is dead and that his younger sister, his half sister, has gone missing. The last Lyle knew, Liza Machett was in Great Barrington and Selma was in hospice.”
Deb nodded. “You’ve got it,” she said. “My lips are sealed.”
Detective Howell detoured into Joanna’s office, collected Lyle Morton, and headed back to the interview room. Lyle trailed behind with the rubber tires of his cart whispering on the hallway’s polished concrete floor.
Joanna sat for a while longer, lost in thought, after Deb and Lyle Morton disappeared. She was still sitting there when her new e-mail alert sounded. She wasn’t surprised to see it was from Frank:
Looks interesting. I’ll see what I can do.
F.
Relieved as she was to have Frank onboard with the problem, she still felt like a Ping-Pong ball being batted back and forth between the two opposing cases. Once again all her assets seemed to be focused on Guy Machett’s murder while no one was working Junior’s. Maybe it was time to change that dynamic. The other night, Ernie Carpenter had been the only officer in the interview room when Jason Radner’s parents had put a stop to the questioning. She had been outside the room rather than in it. Matt Keller had been absent as well, and right now she was counting on his having been too busy to view the tape. She would leave Ernie to enjoy Tina’s birthday party and use Matt Keller to do her dirty work.
She picked up the phone and dialed Matt. “Bringing Sandy Henning into the picture was definitely the right move,” she told him. “Good work.”
“Thanks,” he said.
Joanna felt a momentary qualm of conscience. For days now, Matt Keller had been working his heart out. He didn’t deserve to be thrown under the bus. Approaching Jason Radner behind his parents’ backs wasn’t fair to Jason, either, but right at that moment Joanna couldn’t afford the luxury of being fair, especially since she knew the answer to her next question before she even asked it.
“You don’t happen to know Jason Radner, do you?”
“Sure,” Matt said. “He was on the JV football team last year when I was a volunteer coach. He and Curt, my son, hang out together occasionally. Why?”
“Jason’s parents brought him in for an interview with Ernie Carpenter the evening we found Junior Dowdle’s body. There are a couple more things that I’d like him to clarify, but I don’t want to put his parents into a state of panic. Is there any way you could spirit him away from the house so I could ask him a few questions?”
“Jason’s a good kid,” Matt declared. “In fact, I’d say he’s a great kid. I hope you’re not thinking he had something to do with what happened to Junior. He wouldn’t!”
“I agree completely,” Joanna responded truthfully. “I don’t think he’s in any way responsible for Junior’s death, but I do believe he knows more than he’s letting on. He was in an interview room with a homicide cop asking him questions. He was probably scared to death. If we approach him again with more questions, we run the risk of making it look like he’s ratting someone out even if he doesn’t say another word. That’s why I want to keep this informal and off the record. If we need what he says to be on the record later, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“What if he says something self-incriminating?” Matt asked.
“Then I won’t be able to use it.”
There was a long pause after that while Matt Keller struggled with his own conscience. “Okay,” he said finally. “What do you need?”
“See if you can spirit him out of the house long enough for me to have a private word with him.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Matt said.
Hanging up, Joanna left Kristin’s desk behind, returned to her own office, and pulled four sheets of paper out of the printer behind her desk. Using a pencil she labeled them with the names of the four victims—Olivia Dexter, Guy Machett, Clifford Small, and Junior Dowdle. Since Junior was the first, she wrote down as much as she knew—time and manner of death, animal torture, interviews conducted, questions remaining, and finally a personal to-do list: talk to Jason; move the crime lab forward on the DNA issue; check on the injured kitten.
Setting Junior’s sheet aside, she went to work on the Great Barrington cases, jotting down everything she could recall on each of those from her conversations with Detective Franklin. Olivia had been murdered on Thursday. Clifford Small had died in the wee hours of Sunday morning. The same arsonist who burned down Clifford’s house on Sunday had burned down Liza Machett’s mother’s house on Thursday afternoon. In the meantime, Liza had disappeared into thin air. Joanna pulled out another piece of paper and labeled that one with Liza’s name. She ha
d to be the heart of the matter. After all, she had connections to the two victims in Massachusetts and to Guy as well. Unfortunately, she was the one about whom Joanna knew the least.
As she drew out the diagrams, an ominous pattern began to emerge. With crimes and crime scenes washing back and forth across the country, Joanna could see they were dealing with a collection of perpetrators: at least two in Bisbee and maybe more than one in Great Barrington as well.
Guy’s killers had made mistakes. They had failed to contain Guy when they first encountered him. The damage from the fight in the living room testified to that. Then there was the bruising that suggested a futile attempt to revive their victim when the waterboarding went too far. It was easy to mark these guys off as less-than-adequate guns for hire, but it was inarguable that they had come to their mission in possession of first-rate intel.
They must have known in advance that Guy would be out of town, since they had used his absence to conceal themselves inside their victim’s house. They must also have known when he was expected to return. That probably meant they had kept Guy under some kind of surveillance. Since it was unlikely that a pair of murderous thugs would risk turning up and showing their faces at a nudist colony, Joanna discounted the possibility that there had been any physical surveillance. It was more likely that they had somehow hacked into his phone or Internet communications.
Pushing Guy’s paper to one side, she laid the one for Clifford Small next to it. Clifford “Candy” Small had been tortured, too, but in a way that differed from what had been done to Guy. Besides, bouncing back and forth across the country to commit three murders a day or so apart made no sense. So what had Clifford’s tormentors wanted from him? If Liza Machett was the real target, maybe they suspected him of helping her and wanted him to tell them where she was. Had he capitulated? Had he given up Liza’s whereabouts? There was no way to tell.