Dead to Rights

by J. A. Jance

  “The court ordered me to pay a fine and to get treatment. I’ve done that,” Bucky Buckwalter replied stiffly. “If you want to take me to civil court, fine. Go ahead. That’s up to you. In the meantime, I’ve got a business to run, Mr. Morgan, so why don’t you get the hell out of here and let me do it? And if you so much as set one foot on my property, I swear I’ll have you arrested.”

  With that, Dr. Amos Buckwalter turned his back on the group and stalked off toward the building’s entrance where his wife still stood waiting for him. When the man with the sign made as if to follow, Joanna stepped in and stopped him. “Excuse me, Mr. Morgan. Maybe we should talk about this.”

  Morgan spun around and turned on her. His dark brown eyes flashed with barely suppressed fury. “What’s there to talk about?” he demanded. “And who the hell are you?”

  Obviously Morgan hadn’t been paying much attention to Deputy Pakin. “I’m Joanna Brady,” she answered coolly. “Sheriff Joanna Brady.”

  “How many cops did that jerk call? I’m surprised he didn’t have someone issue an all-points bulletin.”

  “Nobody called me,” Joanna replied, matching the severity of her tone to his. “And there’s no APB, either. My dog got into a porcupine last night. I came by to drop him off so Dr. Buckwalter can pull out the quills. What are you doing here, Mr. Morgan?”

  “Picketing,” he replied more evenly, making a visible effort to calm himself. His troubled eyes met and held Joanna’s questioning gaze. “This is the first time I’ve had a whole week off since he got out of jail and treatment. And if this is what I want to do with my spare time, no one’s going to stop me.”

  In that tense atmosphere, when Morgan’s hand disappeared into a jacket pocket, Deputy Pakin made as if to reach for his own bolstered weapon. Instead of a gun, however, Morgan’s hand emerged from his pocket holding a fanfold of brochures. While the deputy breathed a sigh of relief, Morgan handed one of the brochures to Joanna.

  “It’s informational picketing only,” he added. “I’m passing out literature for Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. There’s no law against that, is there?”

  Joanna looked down at the brochure. On the cover was the cap-and-gown high school graduation portrait of a sweet-faced young woman. “Danielle Leslie Mitchell,” the caption read. “Born June 17, 1976. Died June 18, 1994.” That was all it said, but it was enough. For Danielle Leslie Mitchell, eighteen years had been an entire lifetime.

  Joanna raised her eyes once more and met Morgan’s challenging stare. “There’s a law against this,” she said, nodding toward the picture. “But not against picketing, as long as you do as the deputy said and don’t disrupt traffic or trespass on private property. Understood?”

  Morgan said nothing, but he nodded. She turned to the photographer. “I think you can stop now, Kevin. The incident’s over. And Deputy Pakin, since it looks as though everything’s under control, you might as well go on to your next call while I take my dog into the clinic.”

  “Right, Sheriff Brady,” Lance Pakin said. “Thanks for the assist.”

  Joanna returned to her Blazer, turned off the flashing lights, and drove across the cattle guard. As she passed the man with his sign, she paused and rolled down her window. “Please accept my condolences about your wife, Mr. Morgan,” she said. “You must have loved her very much.”

  For the space of a second or two, the mask of anger dropped away from the man’s face, leaving behind nothing but an expression of naked, unaffected grief. That painful look was one Joanna Brady recognized all too well. Something very much like it reflected back at her every time she gazed into a mirror. However long Mr. Morgan’s wife had been dead, the man’s overwhelming grief was still close enough to the surface to be noticed by even the most casual observer.

  “Thank you,” he murmured and then turned away, wiping at his eyes with the back of his sleeve. It was possible that a sudden gust of wind had blown some dust or grit into his eye, causing it to tear, but Joanna didn’t think so. Anger was all that had held Morgan together during his heated confrontation with Doc Buckwalter. With that gone, the slightest kindness—even something so small as an expression of condolence—made him fall apart. That was something else Joanna recognized. That, too, had happened to her—more than once.

  Shaking her head, Joanna drove on through the gate and into the clinic parking lot. Poor guy, she thought. There’s somebody who’s in worse shape than I am.

  TWO

  “NOT TIGGER and the porcupine again,” Terry Buckwalter said, peering over the reception desk as soon as Joanna led the quill-sprouting dog into the animal clinic’s waiting room.

  Joanna leaned down and rubbed the dog’s ears. “I’m sure it hurts, but he doesn’t seem to mind the quills as much as we do. Still, you’d think he’d wise up after a while.”

  “Some dogs can be pretty hardheaded,” Terry said.

  Joanna laughed. “To say nothing of expensive. For what we’ve spent on porcupine quills, we probably could have ended up with a purebred puppy, as opposed to this ugly mutt. But Jenny loves him to pieces, and he’s great at catching Frisbees.”

  “And porcupine quills,” Terry added with a smile. She came around the counter and took Tigger’s lead. “We already have several surgeries scheduled for this morning,” she said. “Bucky probably won’t be able to get around to doing this until mid-afternoon. If it looks like Tigger’s starting to get dehydrated, we’ll start him on an IV.”

  Joanna nodded. “What time do you think he’ll be ready to pick up? I won’t be off work before five.”

  “He should be ready to go by then,” Terry said. “If not, we may have to keep him until tomorrow morning.”

  “That’s all right with me,” Joanna said, “but Jenny isn’t going to like it.”

  Terry Buckwalter led a subdued and unprotesting dog through a swinging door into a kennel area at the back of the clinic. The new arrival was greeted by frantic barking from the several dogs already in residence.

  “Sounds like you have quite a crowd back there,” Joanna commented when Terry returned to the waiting room.

  She nodded. “Some are patients and some are being boarded,” she said. “We also have three reject Christmas puppies that we’re hoping to find other homes for. You don’t happen to need another dog, do you?”

  Joanna shook her head. “Two are more than enough. What do you mean, ‘reject puppies’?”

  “It only takes a couple of weeks after Christmas for some people to figure out that owning a puppy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The reality turns out to be a whole lot different from those red-ribboned golden-retriever pups in all those cute Kodak photo ads.”

  “You’re right.” Joanna grimaced. “Now that you mention it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad showing a dog with his nose full of porcupine quills.”

  Terry went back behind the counter, searched through a file drawer, and pulled out a folder that was evidently Tigger’s treatment record, which she perused for a few moments. “Tigger’s due for his rabies shot next month. Do you want us to go ahead and handle that while he’s here? It’ll save you an extra trip later on.”

  “Sure,” Joanna replied. “That’ll be fine.”

  Terry Buckwalter added the file folder to several others that were already stacked on the counter. “I’m sorry you got stuck in all that mess outside,” she said. It was the first time either woman had referred to the earlier confrontation by the clinic’s entrance.

  Joanna tried to pass it off. “It wasn’t any big deal,” she said reassuringly. “Don’t worry about it.”

  But Terry Buckwalter didn’t seem ready to let it go. “It just goes on and on,” she said, shaking her head. “This whole year has been a nightmare. Ever since Bucky’s accident…”

  She broke off suddenly, as if concerned that she had said too much.

  Terry Buckwalter was a slight, potentially attractive woman in her mid-thirties. She might have been better-looking if she had made the effort. She
was tanned and solidly built, but whatever figure she had was perpetually concealed beneath the flowing folds of a man-sized, knee-length lab coat. Her shoulder-length, naturally streaked blond hair was pulled back into an unbecoming bun. And her tanned, sun-lined face showed not the barest hint of makeup. There were dark circles under her eyes, and a grim set to her mouth.

  Looking at her, Joanna was struck by the thought that Terry Buckwalter was living under the weight of some heavy emotional burden. Although Terry herself had been at home in Bisbee, some two hundred miles away from her husband’s fatal car accident, no doubt she had been dealing with fallout from that event ever since. Clearly, Hal Morgan wasn’t the only innocent victim suffering in the aftermath of Bonnie Morgan’s death.

  “I’m sure it’s been difficult for you,” Joanna said sympathetically. “Situations like that are tough on everyone connected to them.”

  Terry nodded, biting her lip in agreement, although she said nothing more, and neither did Joanna. A few empty-sounding platitudes came to mind—“This too will pass,” for instance, and “Time heals all wounds.” The problem was, those were the very same supposedly comforting words that had been passed along to Joanna in the emotional devastation following Andy’s death. They hadn’t helped her much, and she cringed at the idea of inflicting them on someone else.

  Glancing at the time, Joanna was ready to start for the door when Bucky Buckwalter’s voice burst in on them from another room, from somewhere beyond the swinging door.

  “Is that son of a bitch still out there, or did he finally leave?”

  Terry flushed with embarrassment. “Bucky,” she cautioned. “Sheriff Brady’s…”

  If Bucky heard Terry’s warning tone, he disregarded it completely. “Just tell me whether or not he’s gone.”

  “He’s still here,” Terry answered, “but—”

  “That media-courting asshole!” Amos Buckwalter snorted. “Maybe I should take the hose out and water down the parking lot…” He charged through the swinging door, stopping abruptly when he finally realized that his wife wasn’t alone in the outer office.

  He turned on Terry. “Why didn’t you tell me someone was here?” he fumed. “The least you could have done was let me know.”

  Over the years, Bucky Buckwalter had established the reputation of having a great bedside manner where animals were concerned. His people-handling skills, however, were something less than wonderful.

  She tried to, you arrogant jerk, but you weren’t listening, Joanna wanted to say.

  Meantime, Bucky stopped in mid-tirade. Leaving off the harangue, he turned to Joanna with an instantly manufactured smile that oozed public charm. Joanna’s mother-in-law, Eva Lou Brady, would have called it turning on his company manners. The telling difference between Bucky Buckwalter’s public persona and his private one wasn’t lost on Joanna.

  “Why, Sheriff Brady,” he said smoothly. “I had no idea you were still here. Hal Morgan isn’t filing some kind of complaint against me, is he?”

  Joanna shook her head. “Not that I know of,” she said. “I’m here because Tigger has another faceful of porcupine quills.”

  The vet frowned and looked at Terry. “Another?” he asked. “Have we removed quills from him before? I don’t remember doing it.”

  “It happened while…” Terry paused, as if struggling to find the right thing to say. “…while you were away,” she finished lamely. “Twice. Dr. Wade took care of it both times.”

  “Oh, I see,” the vet said, nodding and rushing on in a way that was calculated to smooth out any awkwardness. “Well, I’m sure we’ll be able to handle it just fine. Maybe we can juggle the schedule enough to work Tigger in sometime this morning.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you could,” Joanna told him. “And I’m sure Tigger would be more than happy to second that motion. I’ll be back to pick him up right after work. Right now, though, I have to run or I’ll be late for the board of supervisors meeting.”

  Joanna made it as far as the door before she paused and looked back. Terry and Bucky Buckwalter were standing on either side of the counter. There was an almost palpable tension between them. Joanna sensed that they were holding off the beginning or, more likely, the continuation, of a serious family argument. No doubt, hostilities would resume the moment Joanna stepped outside. In the meantime, Bucky—with almost casual nonchalance—picked up the pile of folders and began thumbing through them.

  “Dr. Buckwalter?” Joanna said.

  He glanced up at her. “Yes. What is it?”

  “Don’t worry about Mr. Morgan,” Joanna said, looking Dr. Amos Buckwalter straight in the eye. “He’s doing what he feels he has to do—what he has a constitutional right to do. If you just leave him alone, I doubt he’ll cause you any trouble.”

  The practiced but phony smile dimmed. “You’re saying I have to let him stand out there and harass my customers without doing anything about it?” Bucky returned irritably.

  Instead of being irate that Hal Morgan was outside the clinic gates of Buckwalter Animal Clinic protesting Bonnie’s death, Bucky might have shown a little contrition, acted as though he were sorry, even if he was only going through the motions. As far as Joanna was concerned, spending two months in jail, paying a hefty fine into the coffers of the Maricopa County Superior Court, and going through a drug-and-alcohol treatment didn’t seem like much of a punishment for the taking of a human life.

  Joanna had known Bucky Buckwalter for years, not only as the family vet but also as an insurance client at the Davis Insurance Agency, where she had worked for years, both as office manager and as saleswoman, prior to her election to the office of sheriff. Bucky had always struck her as an egotistical, overbearing blowhard. As an employee of the Davis Insurance Agency, Joanna Brady had endured his tantrums because it was in the company’s best interests for her to do so. Now, though, she was out of the insurance business. Glossing over Bucky’s bad behavior was no longer necessary. Amos Buckwalter was accustomed to pushing people around. Sheriff Brady decided it was high time someone pushed back.

  “That’s right,” she replied firmly. “You’re to do nothing at all. Leave Hal Morgan alone. And just to be on the safe side, don’t water down your parking lot as long as he’s out there, either. Some of that icy spray just might make it over the fence into the public right-of-way. That would be unfortunate. Don’t forget, Dr. Buckwalter, harassment is a two-way street.”

  Before Bucky could respond and before Joanna could complete her exit, the clinic’s front door slammed open. A disheveled woman darted inside. Joanna recognized her as Irene Collins, a retired schoolteacher who lived up Tombstone Canyon in Old Bisbee. One arm cradled a huge calico cat. The other hand clutched one of Hal Morgan’s M.A.D.D. brochures.

  “Oh, Dr. Buckwalter!” Irene exclaimed. “I’m so glad you’re here. Murphy Brown has some kind of bone stuck in her throat. I’ve been trying for almost an hour to get it out with a pair of tweezers, but I can’t do it myself. She just won’t hold still long enough so I can grab it.”

  “Come on,” Bucky said at once, holding open the door to one of the examining rooms. “Bring Murphy right on in here. I’ll see what I can do for her.”

  Irene Collins dropped both her purse and the brochure on the counter as she hurried toward the examining room. Terry Buckwalter left the purse where it was, but with a glance in her husband’s direction, she snatched up the brochure and tossed it into the trash. She wasn’t quite fast enough at removing the offending piece of paper. Bucky had already seen it. They all had.

  Irene and the ailing Murphy Brown disappeared into the examining room. Shaking his head, the vet stalked after them. Joanna turned back to the door.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” Terry Buckwalter called after her. “It’s so embarrassing.”

  Terry was clearly stuck in a no-win situation. Maybe Bucky Buckwalter didn’t feel any regret over the death of Hal Morgan’s wife, but Joanna was convinced that his wife did. “Don’t worry abo
ut it, Terry,” Joanna said. “It’s no big deal. Besides, you’ve got nothing to apologize for. It’s Bucky’s problem.”

  Terry Buckwalter’s eyes filled with tears. “That’s where you’re wrong,” she mumbled. “It’s a problem for both of us.”

  Joanna left the clinic then. As she drove through the gate, she gave Hal Morgan a passing wave, but she didn’t stop to talk. Instead, she headed straight for the county administration building on Melody Lane, where the board of supervisors meeting was already in session. Frank Montoya, Chief Deputy for Administration, had saved a seat next to him in the far back row.

  “How’s it going?” she whispered.

  “It’s a good thing you got here when you did,” he said. “You’re up next. From the treasurer’s report of another downturn in expected tax revenues, it isn’t going to be any kind of picnic.”

  And it wasn’t, either. Joanna spent the better part of the next three hours in the hot seat being grilled about exactly how she intended to reduce her departmental budget by the required seven and a half percent across-the-board cuts that were being demanded of all of Cochise County’s department heads. When twelve o’clock rolled around, she was relieved to head for Daisy’s Café in Bakerville for a quiet lunch with the Reverend Marianne Maculyea, her pastor and also her best friend.

  Their friendship had started with their first day in seventh grade at Lowell School. During lunch recess, one of the boys had made the mistake of calling Marianne Maculyea a half-breed. Marianne’s Hispanic mother and Irish father had met and married in Bisbee at a time when such unions were regarded with a good deal of disapproval. Marianne’s two younger brothers had inherited both their mother’s lustrous dark hair and brown eyes. Like her brothers, Marianne had come away with Evangeline Maculyea’s hair, but that was combined with Timothy Maculyea’s arresting gray eyes as well as his volatile temper.

  The half-breed comment had been a typical grade school taunt, delivered with casual indifference and with zero expectation of consequence. What Marianne’s hit-and-run tormentor failed to realize was that Marianne Maculyea was a confirmed tomboy and the fastest sprinter ever to come out of Horace Mann Grade School up the canyon in Old Bisbee. The boy—a year older and half a head taller than his victim—never anticipated that she would turn on him in pint-sized fury, chase him to the far end of the playground, capture him by his flapping shirttail, and then proceed to beat the crap out of him. Joanna Lathrop, a fellow seventh grader and also a confirmed tomboy, witnessed the whole drama, cheering for Marianne at the top of her lungs. Once Marianne escaped her sentence of detention in the principal’s office, Joanna had been the first to offer her congratulations. They had been best friends ever since.