Dead to Rights

by J. A. Jance

  The Maculyeas had moved to Safford by the time Marianne announced her intention of leaving the Catholic Church to become a Methodist minister. Eventually, Marianne had been appointed pastor of Canyon Methodist Church. When she returned to town, bringing along her easygoing husband, Jeff Daniels, the two women had resumed their long-term friendship as though the ten intervening years of separation had never existed.

  “You look like you’ve been through a meat grinder,” Marianne said as Joanna sat down across from her and slid wearily across the booth’s sagging orange bench seat.

  “I’m sorry it shows that much,” Joanna said with a rueful shake of her head. “But meat grinder just about covers it. Actually, slaughter of the Christians might be more apt.”

  Joanna paused long enough to study Marianne’s face. Usually, Marianne Maculyea’s whole being radiated a kind of glowing confidence. Today the glow was missing completely. Marianne’s tan skin had a sallow look to it. The sparkle had disappeared from her eyes.

  “Besides,” Joanna added. “Who’s calling the kettle black? You don’t look all that chipper yourself.”

  “You’ve got me,” Marianne said with a grin.

  Daisy Maxwell, the café’s rail-thin, seventy-year-old owner, plunked an empty cup and saucer down in front of Joanna. Knowing her regular clientele’s habits and preferences, Daisy poured two cups of coffee from the regular pot without having to ask if coffee was what they both wanted.

  “It’s Tuesday,” she announced, setting the pot down on the table and pulling a pencil from her towering beehive hairdo and a tablet of tickets from the pocket of her uniform. “The lunch special today is two tacos with a side of beans. That, or meat loaf and gravy.”

  Joanna and Marianne both ordered tacos.

  “You go first,” Marianne said, once Daisy had taken the pot and their order and headed back to the kitchen. “What’s going on?”

  “If the board of supervisors wanted me to do a seven-and-a-half percent across-the-board budget cut,” Joanna groused, “why didn’t they tell me that before I took delivery on all those new Crown Victorias? They were all contracted for last year by Walter McFadden’s administration. It seems to me it would have been easier to renege on the purchase of several vehicles than it’s going to be to cut head count in either patrol or jail personnel. I’ve got a fifteen-percent increase in caseload and an eighteen-percent increase in jail population, but I’m supposed to handle all of it with seven and a half percent less money than we originally budgeted. And that, I might add, was far less than the department should have had to begin with.”

  Marianne smiled at Joanna over the top of her coffee cup. “Sounds like loaves and fishes time. You’ll just have to take what you have and make it stretch.”

  “Right,” Joanna said. “But how? They won’t let me move any of the money from one category to another. According to Melanie Hastings, the funds used to pay for the cars came out of the capital-improvement budget. That money had to be spent for the vehicles or we would have lost it entirely. According to her, those figures were frozen. So here I sit with ten brand new cars in a department where I’m expected to get by with two fewer deputies to drive them. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Since when do bureaucracies have to make sense, Joanna?” Marianne asked.

  Joanna sat back in the booth. “All right now,” she said. “Your turn.”

  Marianne shrugged. “Same song, second verse. Bureaucracies are the same all over.”

  “The adoption people?” Joanna asked.

  Marianne nodded. “That’s right,” she said.

  Jeff Daniels, Marianne’s career homemaker husband, had left for China the day after Christmas on what was supposed to be a two-week expedition to bring home an orphaned baby girl. Those two weeks had stretched into three and now almost four, with no end in sight.

  “What do you hear from Jeff?” Joanna asked.

  “Not much,” Marianne replied. “I talked to him last night. He said there’s lots of coal dust in the air. I’m worried sick.”

  Joanna frowned. “How come? Is Jeff allergic to it or something?”

  “It’s code,” Marianne explained. “We talked to some of the other parents who’ve gone through this same agency. They warned us that the Chinese authorities sometimes monitor phone calls, so before we left, Jeff and I established a code. The orphanage is located in Chengdu. People there mostly burn coal for heat, so in the winter especially the whole city is hazy with smoke and soot. The coal dust gets into everything.

  “Since visiting Americans always complain about the coal dust, Jeff’s talking about it on the phone shouldn’t worry the authorities, but it does me. It means trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “That’s just it. I don’t know, but he did tell me that he’s got to have more money. I spent the rest of the night worrying about where I’m going to get it.”

  “How much more money does he think he’ll need?” Joanna asked.

  Marianne sighed. “Five thousand dollars.”

  Joanna whistled. “That sounds like a lot.”

  “It is,” Marianne told her. “It’s exactly double what we’d been told to expect. What I’m afraid is that the authorities have changed their minds. Maybe the baby is sick and they don’t want to release her. From what Jeff said, it sounds as though, if we don’t come up with the extra money, they won’t let us have her.”

  “What are you going to do?” Joanna asked.

  “There’s a special board of directors meeting going on up at the church right now. I’ve asked them to advance me the money. Jeff told me last night that he needs it right away. Today, if possible. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Jeff and Marianne, almost thirty and childless not by choice, had been on several potential adoption lists for years. Andy Brady’s sudden death the previous fall had infused a whole new urgency into the process. When the possibility of adopting a little girl from China had presented itself, they had jumped at the chance.

  Having both of them fly across the Pacific to pick up the baby had turned out to be prohibitively expensive, so they had opted for Jeff to go on his own. That somewhat unorthodox behavior—the idea of having an adoptive father show up to collect the baby rather than an adoptive mother—had proved to be a real stumbling block. What had seemed like a perfectly sensible idea to Jeff and Marianne—having the primary caregiver pick up the baby—seemed somehow suspect in the eyes of officials in the Chinese orphanage. For weeks now, they had been throwing up one obstacle after another.

  “Do you think it would help if you were there?” Joanna asked.

  Marianne shrugged. “Probably not,” she said. “Besides, having me there would make it far more expensive. It would only complicate things that much more. We’d be having to worry about my schedule and about finding someone to substitute for me while I was gone. At least this way, Jeff’s time is totally his own.”

  With a disconsolate Marianne staring into her almost empty coffee cup, Joanna tried to offer some words of encouragement.

  “Come on,” she said. “Jeff Daniels may seem like the most mild-mannered guy on earth, but that’s only on the surface. Once he gets his back up, you know as well as I do that he’ll shrivel up into a little old man before he’ll come back home empty-handed.”

  Acknowledging Joanna’s support with a wan smile, Marianne changed the subject. “Speaking of world travelers,” she said, “what do you hear from your mother?”

  Joanna glanced at her watch. “Her plane’s due into Tucson International around four. She was bound and determined to be back in time for the women’s club luncheon tomorrow. That’s when the Historical Committee presents the framed picture of me to hang in the lobby out at the department.”

  Marianne smiled. “I know,” she said. “I’m on the committee.”

  Joanna continued. “Since today is a workday, I told Eleanor I wouldn’t be able to come pick her up. Jim Bob and Eva Lou offered to go get her, but Mother insi
sted on having her friend, Margaret Turnbull, meet her instead. They’ll have an early dinner in Tucson and then be home around nine or so.”

  “Has she had fun?” Marianne asked.

  Joanna nodded. “It sounds like it. Marcie and Bob must have seen to it that they’ve hit every tourist attraction and museum for miles around. I’m sure my mother has been in seventh heaven.”

  The previous Thanksgiving, Joanna’s long-lost brother had resurfaced. As a baby, he had been given up for adoption prior to Joanna’s parents’ wedding. Joanna had grown up without ever knowing that her mother and father, Eleanor and Big Hank Lathrop, had an out-of-wedlock child that Eleanor’s parents had insisted they not keep. After the death of both his adoptive parents, forty-four-year-old Bob Brundage had come searching for his biological mother. Eleanor Lathrop had welcomed him with open arms. The feeling was evidently mutual. For Christmas, Bob and his wife, Marcie, had invited Eleanor to come visit them in Washington, D.C., for two weeks.

  “She’s never had a chance to do anything like that before, has she?” Marianne asked.

  “Never,” Joanna said. “She was widowed young and had a snotty teenager to deal with, sort of like yours truly and a certain hot-tempered nine-year-old.”

  “Well then,” Marianne said, “I’d say she’s earned the right to have some fun.”

  Joanna nodded. “Me, too,” she admitted.

  The very fact that Joanna was finally able to concede that maybe the difficulties between her and her mother weren’t all Eleanor’s fault was in itself a gigantic first step. Eleanor was tough to live with, but perhaps Joanna hadn’t been all sweetness and light, either. Still, it was difficult for Joanna to forget or forgive Eleanor all the years she had spent carping about Joanna’s shotgun wedding when she herself had been guilty of a very similar transgression.

  Maybe, Joanna thought, it’s time for me to stop acting like a big, overgrown kid. Maybe I should just shut up, and get in the damned car.

  “Where did you go?” Marianne asked.

  “I was thinking,” Joanna said. “Maybe I’ve been too hard on my mother.”

  Marianne Maculyea laughed. “It’s possible,” she said. “But then, haven’t we all?”

  Daisy Maxwell brought their lunches right then. That was pretty much the last chance the two women had to talk. During the course of the meal, several people stopped by to visit with one or the other of them—parishioners from Canyon Methodist Church who were worried about how the organ repairs were going, or someone trying to sign them up to bake cakes to be sold at a local charity auction.

  Joanna and Marianne had finished up the last of their coffee and were standing in line at the cash register when a fire truck, siren blaring, roared past the outside door. The truck was headed north on Bisbee Road.

  “Somebody’s probably trying to burn down Brewery Gulch again,” Daisy Maxwell quipped as she took Joanna’s money and handed back a fistful of change. In the past few months there had been a series of arson fires up in Old Bisbee, where a combination of steep terrain and tinder-dry conditions had made fire fighting difficult.

  “Let’s hope not,” Joanna answered. “If the wind happens to be blowing in the wrong direction, we could end up with a disaster on our hands.”

  Out in her vehicle, Joanna turned the Blazer in the direction of the department, heading north on Bisbee Road, following the same route the fire track had taken. When she came through the underpass that had been used to carry mine waste out to the tailings dump, she could see smoke just off to the right over the crest of the hill.

  Beyond the underpass, a traffic circle had been installed to facilitate movement of traffic on Highway 80 and in-town vehicles moving from one area of Bisbee to another. Half a mile east of the traffic circle, Joanna could see a flock of emergency vehicles gathered on either side of the roadway at a spot she knew had to be right by the entrance to the Buckwalter Animal Clinic. Not only was there a clot of emergency vehicles, there was also a cloud of smoke billowing up into a deep-blue sky.

  Joanna’s heart fell. If the clinic had somehow caught fire, what did that mean for the animal patients there awaiting treatment? What about Tigger? What if he was dead? Jenny was already an emotional powder keg. After everything else that had happened to her, would she be strong enough to withstand the loss of a beloved pet?

  Traffic had come to a halt, backing up for the better part of a mile, almost as far as the traffic circle itself. Turning on both flashers and siren, Joanna made her way into the left-hand lane, but even there she had to swerve around vehicles that had simply stopped in the middle of the road. As she picked her way forward, she pulled the Blazer’s two-way radio microphone out of its holder and thumbed the push-to-talk button.

  “Dispatch,” she said. “This is Sheriff Brady. I’m just east of the traffic circle on Highway 80. What’s going on?”

  “We’ve got a fire at the Buckwalter Animal Clinic,” dispatcher Larry Kendrick answered.

  “I can see that from here,” she returned. “What kind of fire?”

  “It’s confined to the barn.”

  “Not the clinic?”

  “No, the clinic is fine.”

  Joanna allowed herself the smallest sigh of relief. Tigger wouldn’t have been anywhere near the barn, so he was obviously fine. “As many emergency vehicles as they have out here, it must be some fire.”

  “That’s because of the body,” Kendrick answered. “One of the deputies on the scene just radioed in asking me to locate Ernie.”

  Veteran Detective Ernie Carpenter was the Cochise County Sheriff Department’s lead homicide investigator.

  “What body?” Joanna demanded. “My pager’s been on. Nobody’s tried to contact me.”

  “There hasn’t been time. The deputy on the scene only called a few minutes ago.”

  Just as he said that, an ambulance pulled out from the clinic grounds and came shooting west along the highway, leaving Joanna no choice but to cut back in between two of the stopped cars lining the right-hand side of the road.

  Sitting there waiting for the ambulance to drive past, Joanna couldn’t help thinking about the confrontation at that same entrance several hours earlier. She had assured Deputy Pakin that everything was fine—“under control” were the words she remembered using. But if a body had turned up there, Joanna must have been dead wrong about that. She had mistaken grievances under wraps for grievances under control. Now someone had paid for that mistake with his or her life.

  It didn’t take much imagination to figure out that whoever was dead was most likely Bucky Buckwalter. If that was the case, it followed naturally enough that his killer would turn out to be none other than Hal Morgan, the bereaved, sign-wielding protester.

  Joanna’s two-taco lunch staged a sudden rebellion in her gut. If that was true, how much of the responsibility for what had happened would rest squarely on the all too inexperienced shoulders of Sheriff Joanna Brady?

  Too much, she thought grimly, clutching the steering wheel. Too damned much!

  THREE

  BY THE time Joanna bounced over the cattle guard and into the grounds of the Buckwalter Animal Clinic, Richard Voland, the Cochise County Sheriff Department’s Chief Deputy for Operations, was already there. He was standing outside his Ford Bronco, conferring with Captain Ben Lowrey of the Bisbee Fire Department. In the background, thirty yards from the clinic itself, stood the sagging remains of Bucky Buckwalter’s metal Bild-a-Barn shed.

  The some-assembly-required shed was a mini replica of an old-fashioned barn slapped together over a concrete slab. Beyond that was a corral. At the far end of the corral, tethered to the fence by a halter but dancing nervously from side to side, was Bucky’s winter-coated, eight-year-old quarter horse, Kiddo. A young woman Joanna recognized as Bucky’s veterinary assistant, Bebe Noonan, was with the distressed animal, petting it and trying to calm it. The horse seemed unconvinced.

  “How bad is it?” Joanna asked as she came within speaking distance of Dick
Voland and Ben Lowrey.

  A long-time sheriff’s department officer, Voland had served as chief deputy in the previous administration, and he had actively opposed Joanna’s election. Once elected, Joanna’s first impulse had been to dump him. It had taken her only a matter of days, however, to realize that his experience was a vital asset—one her fledgling administration couldn’t afford to ignore. As a result, she had kept Voland on even though their day-to-day working relationship continued to be prickly at best.

  Balding and massive at six-four, Dick Voland shook his head. “Bad,” he said. “We’ve got at least one dead body inside. There could be more.”

  Joanna felt sick. “Bucky Buckwalter?” she asked, dreading the answer.

  Voland shook his head. “Can’t say for sure. Right off the bat, though, the doc would be my first guess.”

  “Who left in the ambulance, then?”

  “The perpetrator,” Voland growled. “I understand the guy’s an acquaintance of yours, Sheriff Brady. Somebody named Hal Morgan. According to Deputy Pakin, a few hours ago you seemed to be of the opinion that Morgan didn’t pose any kind of threat to the Buckwalters. Looks to me as though you were wrong about that.”

  Joanna nodded. She had already reached the same conclusion, but it was far worse to hear confirmation of her own worst fears coming from someone else, especially from her second-in-command.