by J. A. Jance
Joanna eased open the swinging door. On the far side of the kitchen, a woman sat at a cloth-covered kitchen table, her head cradled in her arms. The woman was so still that for a moment Joanna thought she might be dead. On the table beside her, arranged in a careful row, were three separate items: a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label, a completely empty tumbler-sized crystal glass, and a handgun—a small but potentially lethal Saturday-night special.
Holding her breath, Joanna waited until a slight movement told her the woman was alive. The droning voices of the talk-show host and his call-in guests had drowned out the sound of Joanna’s own entrance. Standing there, Joanna battled a storm of indecision. If she spoke again, this near at hand, what were the chances that the startled woman would react by reaching for her gun? Wakened out of a sound sleep and probably drunk besides, she might shoot first and ask questions later. It was then, with her heart in her throat, that Joanna Brady came face-to-face with the realization that she had come on this supposed mission of mercy without one of the Kevlar vests she insisted her officers wear whenever they were on duty.
Joanna hesitated, but not for long. Still using the noisy radio program for cover, she tiptoed across the room and retrieved the handgun. She slipped it into the pocket of her blazer along with her keys and phone. As she did so, the woman issued a small snort that sent Joanna skittering back across the room and safely out of reach. Only when she had regained the relative safety of the door way did she turn around. The woman had merely changed her position slightly, but she was still asleep. Joanna allowed herself a single gasp of relief. At least the still-sleeping woman was no longer armed.
Once Joanna had regained control of her jangled nerves, she tried speaking again. “Hello,” she said, in a more conversational voice. “Are you all right?”
This time the woman stirred. She sat up and stared uncomprehendingly around the room. Once her bleary eyes settled on Joanna, the woman groped for her missing gun. The fact that it was no longer there made tingles of needles and pins explode in Joanna’s hands.
“Who are you?” the woman demanded. “What are you doing here? Who let you in?”
“I’m Sheriff Joanna Brady from Cochise County. Who are you?”
“Maggie,” the woman said flatly. “Maggie MacFerson.”
“Do you live here?” Joanna asked.
Maggie MacFerson glared belligerently at Joanna from across the room, but before she answered, she reached for the bottle and poured a slug of Scotch into the glass. “Used to,” Maggie said after downing a mouthful of it. “Live here, that is. Don’t anymore.”
“Who does?”
“My sister and that worthless shit of a husband of hers. He’s the one I’m waiting for—that no-account bastard. One way or another he’s going to tell me what he’s done with Connie’s money.”
“Connie?” Joanna asked. “That would be Constance Marie Haskell?”
Maggie nodded. “She never should have changed her name. I told her not to. You’d think she’d be able to learn from somebody else’s mistake. I did,” she added bitterly. “Took old Gary MacFerson’s last name, that is. Look what it got me.”
“Where’s your sister now?” Joanna asked.
“Beats me. Probably dead in a ditch somewhere if the message on the machine is any indication. ‘Meet me in paradise,’ the son of a bitch says to her on the phone. Meet me in paradise, indeed! I’m here to tell you that if that SOB has killed my sister, I’m going to plug him full of holes. Where’s my gun, by the way? Give it back. I’ve got a license to carry, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s right over there on the counter in my purse. Check it out for yourself if you don’t believe me.”
“You’re saying you think your sister’s dead?” Joanna asked. “Why’s that?”
“The neighbors called me because Connie took off sometime on Thursday. They noticed she left the garage door open. When it was still open . . . What day is it?”
“Saturday,” Joanna answered.
“When it was still open on Friday, they were worried enough to call, and I came to check things out after work. That’s when I heard the message on the machine. You can listen to it too, it you want to.”
An answering machine sat on the kitchen counter next to a large black satchel-style purse. Joanna pressed the message button. “You have no new messages,” a recorded voice told her.
“Damn,” Maggie MacFerson muttered, taking another swig from her glass. “Must have punched ‘erase’ without meaning to. But that’s what he said. ‘Meet me in paradise.’ The dumb broad was so completely enthralled, so totally besotted with the weasely little shit that if he had said ‘Jump in the lake,’ Connie would have done it in a minute even though she can’t swim a stroke. There’s no fool like an old fool.”
“You said something about her money. What about that?”
“There was another message on the machine as well—from Ken Wilson. He’s Connie’s personal banker, but he’s also mine. He was our parents’ private banker before that. I heard that message, too. He said Connie had bounced a check. Which wouldn’t happen—never in a million years. Connie never bounced a check in her life—unlike some other people I could mention.”
Maggie grinned ironically and took another mouthful of Johnnie Walker. “I, on the other hand, have never balanced a checkbook in my life, and I’m still here to tell the tale. But I did call Ken Wilson. I nailed his feet to the ground and made him tell me what the hell was going on. That bastard Ron Haskell has cleaned Connie out, lock, stock, and barrel, just like I said he would. Except it doesn’t feel all that good to say I told you so. It’s gonna break Connie’s heart, as if she hasn’t had enough heartbreak already.”
Standing at the counter, Joanna glanced into the purse. A small wallet lay at the top. “Your license to carry is in this?” she asked, lilting the wallet.
Maggie MacFerson glanced away trout pouring herself another drink. “It’s there,” she said. “Help yourself.”
Joanna opened the wallet and thumbed through the plastic card holders. One of the first things she saw was a press credential that identified Maggie MacFerson as a reporter for Phoenix’s major metropolitan newspaper, the Arizona Reporter. As soon as the woman had mentioned her name, it had sounded familiar. Only now did Joanna understand why.
That Maggie MacFerson, Joanna thought. The investigative reporter.
Behind the press credentials was indeed an embossed concealed-weapon license. Joanna put down the wallet and then reached into her pocket to remove the weapon. “Is this thing loaded?” she asked.
“Sure is,” Maggie replied. “My father used to say that having an unloaded weapon in the house was about as useful as having one of those plumber’s whaddaya-call-its without a handle. I can’t think of the name for the damned thing now. You know what I mean, one of those plunger things.”
“You mean a plumber’s helper?” Joanna offered.
“Right,” Maggie agreed. “A plumber’s helper without a handle. Dad wasn’t big on telling jokes. That’s about as good as his ever got. And that’s gone, too, by the way.”
“What’s gone?”
“Dad’s gun. From the bedroom. The safe is open and the gun is gone. I’ll bet the jerk took that, too.”
Gingerly Joanna opened Maggie MacFerson’s gun and removed the rounds from the cylinder. If Maggie wasn’t still drunk, then she was well on her way to being drunk again. Joanna had already heard the woman threaten to shoot her hapless brother-in-law. Under those circumstances, handing Maggie a loaded weapon would be outright madness. Joanna dropped the nine bullets into her blazer pocket before placing the gun in Maggie’s purse.
“So what are you doing here anyway?” Maggie asked, peering at Joanna over the rim of her raised glass. “What’d you say your name was again?”
“Joanna. Joanna Brady. I’m the sheriff in Cochise County.”
“Tha’s right; tha’s right,” Maggie said, nodding. “I ‘member you. I came
down to cover the story when you got elected. So whaddaya want?” With every word spoken, Maggie’s slurred speech grew worse.
“I’m here because a body was found last night in Apache Pass down in the Chiricahuas,” Joanna said quietly. “A medical identification bracelet was found nearby with your sister’s name on it. We need someone to come to Bisbee and identify the body.”
Maggie slammed her empty glass onto the table with so much force that it shattered, sending shards of glass showering in all directions.
“Goddamn that son of a bitch!” she swore. “I really am going to kill him. Just let me get my hands on him. Where is he?”
She sat there with her eyes wide and staring and with the palms of both hands resting in a spray of broken glass. From across the room, Joanna saw blood from Maggie MacFerson’s lacerated hands spreading across the otherwise snow-white tablecloth. Maggie didn’t seem to notice.
“Come on,” Joanna said calmly. “Come away from the broken glass. You’ve cut your hands.”
“Where’s the body?” Maggie demanded, not moving. “Just tell me where Connie’s body is. I’ll go right now. I’ll drive wherever it is. Just tell me.”
Watching the blood soak unheeded into the tablecloth, Joanna knew Maggie MacFerson was in no condition to drive herself anywhere. Walking over to the table, Joanna gently raised Maggie’s bleeding hands out of the glass.
“I’ll take you there,” she said quietly. “Just as soon as we finish cleaning and bandaging your hands.”
Several hours later, after opening the car door and fastening Connie MacFerson’s seat belt, Joanna finally headed out of Phoenix for the three-and-a-half-hour drive to Bisbee while Maggie slept in the Civvie’s spacious front seat. Once out of heavy city traffic, Joanna reached for her phone and asked information for the Conquistador Hotel. Rather than speaking to Butch, she found herself dealing with an impersonal voice-mail system.
“There’s been a slight delay,” she told him in her message. “I’m on my way to Bisbee to do a positive ID. I’m just now passing the Warner Road Exit going southbound, which means you’re right. I am going to miss that rehearsal dinner. I’m so sorry, Butch. I’ll call later and let you know what time I’ll be back at the hotel. Give me a call on the cell phone when you can.”
What she didn’t say in her message was that she had spent the better part of two hours in the ER at St. Joseph’s Hospital while emergency room doctors and nurses removed dozens of tiny pieces of crystal from Maggie MacFerson’s glass-shredded hands and put stitches in some of the longer jagged cuts. Both hands, bandaged into useless clubs, now lay in Maggie’s lap. Even had the woman been stone-sober—which she wasn’t—Joanna knew Maggie wasn’t capable of driving herself the two hundred miles to Bisbee to make the identification—not with her hands in that condition.
Joanna settled in for the trip. She generally welcomed long stretches of desert driving because they provided her rare opportunities for concentrated, uninterrupted thinking. With Maggie MacFerson temporarily silenced, Joanna allowed herself to do lust exactly that think.
Weeks earlier, as Joanna sat in her mother’s living room, she had thumbed through George Winfield’s current copy of Scientific American. There she had stumbled upon a column called “Connections.” The interesting content had tumbled back and forth across the centuries showing how one scientific discovery was linked to another and from there bounded on to something else. At the time, Joanna had recognized that the solutions to homicide investigations often happened in much the same way, through seemingly meaningless but nonetheless critical connections.
Was the death of Constance Marie Haskell linked to the outbreak of carjackings that had plagued Cochise County? If Maggie MacFerson’s version of events was to be believed, Connie Haskell had an absent, most likely estranged, and quite possibly dishonest, husband. Once Ron Haskell was located, he would no doubt be the first person Joanna’s detectives would want to interview. Still, rape, torture, and a savage beating were more in keeping with a random, opportunistic killer than they were with a cheating spouse. And so, although Ron Haskell might well turn into the prime suspect, Joanna wasn’t ready to dismiss the idea of a crazed carjacker who, upon finding a lone woman driving on a freeway late at night, might have veered away from simple carjacking into something far worse.
Picking up her cell phone, Joanna dialed Frank Montoya’s num her. “What are you doing calling me?” he asked. “You’re supposed to be at a wedding rehearsal and dinner.”
“Think again,” she told him. “I’m on my way to Bisbee bringing with me a lady named Maggie MacFerson. We have reason to believe she’s the sister of Constance Marie Haskell, the Jane Doe from Apache Pass. I’m bringing her down to George’s office so she can ID the body.”
“On your weekend off?” Frank objected. “What’s the matter? Doesn’t Maggie know how to drive?”
“Knows how but can’t,” Joanna replied. “She hurt her hands.”
She discreetly left out the part about probable blood alcohol count in case Maggie MacFerson wasn’t sleeping as soundly as she appeared to be.
“How about calling Doc Winfield and having him meet us at his office uptown,” Joanna continued. “It should be between eight-thirty and nine, barring some unforeseen traffic problem.”
“Wait a minute,” Frank said. “I’m the one who’s supposed to tell your mother her husband has to go in to work on Saturday night? Is that so you don’t have to do it?”
“That’s right,” Joanna returned evenly. “You’re not Eleanor Lathrop Winfield’s daughter. She can’t push your buttons the way she does mine.”
“Okay, Boss,” Frank said. “But I’m putting in for hazardous-duty pay.”
Joanna smiled sadly. It hurt to know that Eleanor Lathrop Winfield’s reputation for riding roughshod over everybody was common knowledge around the department.
“What else?” Frank asked.
“According to Maggie MacFerson, Connie’s husband, Ron Haskell, emptied his wife’s bank accounts before he took off for parts unknown. He left a message on his wife’s answering machine Thursday sometime. Ms. MacFerson inadvertently erased it, so I don’t know exactly what it said. Something about seeing Connie in paradise, which Ms. MacFerson seems to have concluded was a death threat.”
“You want me to trace the call?”
“You read my mind.”
“Okay. Got it.”
Frank, an inveterate note-taker, may have balked at having to deal with Eleanor Lathrop Winfield, but he had no concern about tackling telephone-company bureaucracy. As far as Joanna was concerned, that left Eleanor in a league of her own.
“Next?” Frank prodded through the momentary silence.
“Did you get a list from the DMV on vehicles registered to that Encanto Drive address?”
“Yes, ma’am. I have it here somewhere. A Lincoln and a BMW, if I remember correctly.”
Joanna listened as he shuffled through loose papers. “Once you find them,” she said, “I want those vehicle descriptions posted with all of our patrol units and with the folks from Border Patrol as well.”
“So you’re still thinking this might be just another carjacking?” Frank asked.
“Until we know otherwise, I’m not dismissing any possibilities,” she replied. “A single woman traveling alone at night might be easier pickings for a carjacker than that little old guy in his Saturn.”
“We don’t know for sure Connie Haskell was coming to Cochise County,” Frank objected.
“We sure as hell know that’s where she ended up!” Joanna responded. “And since she didn’t fly from Phoenix to Apache Pass, that means she must have driven.”
“I see your point,” Frank conceded. “I have that DMV info. It was buried on my desk. I’ll have Dispatch put it out to the cars right away.”
“Good, but before you do, let’s go back to that carjacked Saturn,” Joanna added. “You said it was picked up at a Border Patrol checkpoint. How many other stolen
or carjacked vehicles have ended up in Border Patrol impound lots? Has anybody ever mentioned that particular statistic to you?”
“Not that I remember,” Frank said. “But I can try to find out.”
“Okay. Now, what’s happening on the Dora Matthews front?”
“Not much,” Frank said. “As far as I know, she’s still out at the High Lonesome, and there hasn’t been a peep out of Sally. The last time I checked, the note we left for her was still pinned to the screen door on her house up Tombstone Canyon.”
Joanna groaned inwardly. “When I asked The Gs to look after the place while Butch and I were gone, they were supposed to look after the animals. Now they’re having to deal with two adolescent kids as well.”
“I’m sure they can handle it,” Frank returned.
“I’m sure they can, too,” Joanna said. “But they shouldn’t have to.”
“Where are you now?” Frank asked.
“I just passed the first Casa Grande turnoff, so I’m making progress,” Joanna said.
“I should probably get on the horn to Doc Winfield and let him know you’re on your way. Do you want me to meet you at the ME’s office?”
“No,” Joanna said. “Don’t bother. It’s Saturday night. You’re a good-looking single guy, Frank. Don’t you have anything better to do on a Saturday night besides work?”
“Not so as you’d notice,” Frank told her.
They signed off after that, and Joanna continued to drive. Still accustomed to the time the trip had taken under the old fifty-five miles-per-hour speed limit, Joanna was amazed at how fast the miles sped by. At last Maggie MacFerson groaned and stirred.