by J. A. Jance
Sinking back down on the bed, Joanna realized she’d have to call someone. Whom? Her mother? Eva Lou or Jim Bob Brady? They would have been asleep for hours. It wasn’t fair to wake them up. The same held true for Marianne Maculyea. She’d be asleep, too. Despairing, Joanna glanced at the clock once more—five to one.
And that’s when she realized that there was one friend who would still be awake. One A.M. would be closing time at the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge up in Brewery Gulch. Angie Kellogg would just be getting off work. In Angie’s previous life, and in this one as well, she lived what was essentially a night shift existence. Other people might think it was the middle of the night. For Angie, it was late afternoon.
Seconds later, worrying that she might already be too late, Joanna dialed the number. “Blue Moon,” a voice said. “Angie speaking.”
“Thank God you’re still there. It’s Joanna.”
“Of course I’m still here,” Angie replied. “It’s not quite one yet. I’m just washing up the last of those godawful ashtrays. What’s the matter?”
“I’ve got to go into work, and I don’t know what to do about Jenny. I need someone to look after her while I go back to the office.”
“Now?” Angie asked.
“There’s been a problem over at the jail. Once I go in, no telling how long I’ll be there. I don’t want to wake Jenny up—tomorrow’s a school day—but I don’t want to leave her here by herself, either.”
Angie Kellogg still couldn’t quite fathom how she had become friends first with Joanna and then with Joanna’s friends, the Reverend Marianne Maculyea and Jeff Daniels. What she did know, however, was that those three people were the ones who had made her new life possible. Faced with an opportunity to repay some of what she regarded as an overwhelming debt of kindness, Angie was eager to help.
“Do you want me to come there, or would you like to bring her to my place?” Angie asked.
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, I’d appreciate your coming here,” Joanna answered.
“Sure,” Angie answered. “No problem. I’ll be there just as soon as I can. I’ll lock up right now, but I’ll leave Bobo a note so he’ll know why I didn’t finish cleaning up.”
“You’re sure he won’t mind?”
“No. Not at all, but it’ll still take the better part of twenty minutes for me to get there.”
Joanna looked at the clock once more. It was one straight up. Still, after what had happened earlier that evening, Joanna wasn’t willing to leave Jenny alone, not even for a minute. “Don’t rush, I can wait that long,” she said. “The woman’s dead. My getting there a few minutes earlier or later isn’t going to make a bit of difference.”
As Joanna hurried into her clothing, she was overwhelmed with guilt. Hannah Green had come to Joanna, come specifically to the sheriff, for help. Joanna had done what she could for the unfortunate woman—handled the situation to the best of her ability. She had been terribly moved, as much by Hannah’s broken spirit as by the woman’s mangled hand and crippled fingers. Joanna had listened and had been kind to her even while using Jenny to engineer the woman’s capture. There was nothing bad or dishonorable in that. It was Joanna’s job.
Still, she felt guilty. In the first days and weeks after Andy’s death, she, too, had lived with the same kind of abject hopelessness that she had recognized in Hannah Green. Joanna, too, had seen a future empty of all promise and possibility. Even now, the future still didn’t look all that bright, but at least Joanna could see that she had a future. Hannah Green did not.
Joanna Brady had Jenny to live for, but she had something else as well—something beyond simply being needed. As an upholder of law and order, she still possessed a good deal of faith in the justice system. Just as Joanna had told Jenny, she would have expected Hannah Green to have her day in court. A court-appointed attorney would have been at her side. She would have had the opportunity to tell her story to a jury. Having heard it all—the years of casual and debilitating meanness Reed Carruthers had inflicted on his daughter—surely no jury would have convicted Hannah Green of first degree murder. Maybe not even of manslaughter.
Had Hannah Green only lived long enough to hear that verdict read in court! But she had not. Instead, she had short-circuited the justice system by taking her own life. She had come to Joanna and willingly confessed to the crime of murder because she had already made up her mind. Long before she climbed into Joanna’s Blazer she had known that whatever confession she made to Sheriff Brady was all the unburdening she would ever have a chance to do.
So why didn’t I order a suicide watch for her? Joanna demanded of her reflection in the mirror. Why didn’t I see it coming?
Did that mean it was her fault? Was it a natural outgrowth of her own lack of experience? There had been other, far more experienced, officers involved in what had happened, but Hannah Green had died on Joanna’s watch. So, although Joanna might not be directly to blame, responsibility for what had happened rested squarely upon her shoulders.
She was just finishing combing her hair when Angie Kellogg drove into the yard. It should have taken a full twenty minutes for her to drive from the Blue Moon in Brewery Gulch to High Lonesome Ranch, but her Oldsmobile Omega stopped outside Joanna’s gate in just under fifteen. Joanna stifled the barking dogs and then rushed into the yard to meet her.
“What’s going on?” Angie asked. “You sounded upset.”
“One of the inmates committed suicide at the jail,” Joanna answered. “I’ll probably be gone the rest of the night, so when you get tired, go ahead and bed down in my room. If I get home before you’re up and out, I can always sack out on the couch.”
“Are you sure?” Angie asked.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Joanna said. “After all, you’re the one who’s doing me the favor. Thank you.”
“Go and don’t worry,” Angie said. “I’m glad to help out.”
A few minutes later when Joanna pulled into the Cochise County Justice Center, the place was alive with people moving around in the clear, chill night. The driveway was thick with a clot of vehicles. She recognized most of the emergency equipment. Picking her way up the drive, she came around to the back of the building. There, she pulled into her reserved parking place.
When she opened the car door, she was momentarily blinded by the flash of a camera. “Who the hell is that?” she demanded as spots of light continued to dance in her eyes.
“Kevin Dawson with the Bisbee Bee,” a voice said out of the darkness. “Any reason you’re sneaking in the back door, Sheriff Brady?”
“This happens to be my parking place,” Joanna snapped back at him.
“Do you have any comments about what happened in the jail tonight?”
“My comment, Mr. Dawson, has to do with the fact that this parking lot is off limits to the public. I suggest that you get back around to the front of the building where you belong.”
“Come on, Sheriff Brady. I’m just doing my job.”
“So am I,” she told him. “Now get moving.”
She stood and watched until he disappeared around the corner of the building. To steady herself, she paused long enough to take several deep breaths. She gazed up at the canopy of stars and tried to prepare herself for what was coming. This would be an ordeal for all concerned. Kevin Dawson was only the beginning of it.
Using her combination on the push-button lock, Joanna let herself into the building through the private door that led directly into her office. When she switched on the lights, she found to her surprise that the room was already occupied. Ernie Carpenter was sitting in one of the captain’s chairs opposite her desk. He looked up at her. His face was bleak, his skin ashen.
“I blew it,” he said.
“You had no way of knowing,” Joanna told him, dropping her purse on the corner of the desk and then coming around to stand leaning against it. “Don’t blame yourself, Ernie. I’ve been thinking about it all the way here. It’s not my fault, and it’s not yours,
either.”
“But it is,” Ernie insisted. “Don’t you understand? Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I’m usually a better judge of people than that—better at reading what’s going on with them. I’ve always prided myself at being able to tell in advance if someone’s going to turn violent on me or go gunny-bags. I didn’t see this one coming, not at all.”
“How long had Hannah Green been in her cell before it happened?” Joanna asked.
Ernie shook his head. “Not long. No more than half an hour or so. She waived her right to a lawyer, so Jaime and I stayed long enough to get the whole interview down on tape. I’d just managed to drag my ass home and crawl into bed when the call came in saying she was dead.”
“Did she leave a note?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Not nothing, Ernie. Her confession to you and Jaime, her confession to me was a note of sorts.”
“I realize that now,” Ernie agreed. “I should have picked up on it at the time. But I didn’t. That’s why I’m quitting.”
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the leather wallet with his badge in it and tossed it on Joanna’s desk. Joanna could barely believe her eyes or her ears. “Quitting?” she echoed.
“That’s right.”
“Over this? Over Hannah Green?”
Ernie nodded. “If you want me to, I’ll go write my letter of resignation right now. That’s why I was waiting for you here in your office. I wanted to talk to you alone. Without Dick Voland hanging around. He’ll try to talk me out of it.”
“You don’t think I will?”
“Why should you? Look, there are other, younger, guys coming along. I’ve put in my twenty-plus years. This wasn’t a fatal error for me, but it sure as hell was for Hannah Green. By the time we had finished talking to her, I could see that if she was telling us the truth about her father, we’d have a problem when it came to charging her with murder one. Maybe we could get voluntary manslaughter. Maybe even second-degree homicide. Whatever the charges might have ended up being, they wouldn’t have amounted to a capital offense. She may have committed a crime, but she shouldn’t have died for it. The fact that she did is my fault plain and simple. Who’s to say that the next time I won’t screw up worse and somebody else will die? Jaime Carbajal, for example.”
“You’re overreacting,” Joanna said.
“The hell I am.”
Joanna picked up the wallet. The leather was still warm to the touch from being in Ernie’s pocket. She flipped it open and studied the badge. The picture was of a somewhat younger man. A man with a less florid, less careworn face. “Detective Ernest W. Carpenter,” the card said. “Cochise County Sheriff’s Department.”
“You’ve been here a long time,” Joanna said softly. “Since my father’s time.”
Ernie nodded. “That’s right. Your dad is the one who hired me. That’s so long ago it seems like ancient history.”
“How many times, in all the years you’ve been here, have you had two homicides and a suicide in three days?” Joanna asked.
Ernie looked up at her quizzically. “Never,” he said.
“Is there a chance that you’re spread too thin right now? That you’ve been doing too much? Could that account for your not reading Hannah Green the way you might have under ordinary circumstances?”
“I suppose it could,” Ernie allowed grudgingly. “Jamie and I have both been working our tails off.”
“What about Jaime?” Joanna asked. “Do you think he’s ready to step into your shoes? Is he capable of doing this job without you?”
Folding his arms, Ernie stuck his feet out in front of him and examined his shoes. For the first time ever, Joanna noticed that his usually immaculate wing tips were in need of a shine. “Jaime’s young,” Ernie said. “But he’s getting there.”
“But he’s not all the way up to speed yet, is he?”
“No.”
“If you drop the ball now, Ernie, you’ll leave us all in the lurch. Jaime will be in over his head, so will I. So will my department.”
“But what about…” He stopped.
“Hannah Green?”
Ernie nodded.
“I’ve been thinking about that all the way here,” Joanna said. “We gave Hannah Green what she wanted and needed, Ernie. You and Deputy Carbajal and I not only listened to her, we believed her. It may have been the first time ever in her poor unfortunate life that anyone really listened to her. If Reed Carruthers was the kind of man we both suspect, he never paid any attention to a word she said—including what television channels she wanted to watch.”
Holding out the wallet, Joanna handed it back to Ernie. He studied it. “So what are you saying?” he asked. “What do you want me to do?”
“Stay,” she said simply. “Go over to the jail and take charge of our part of the investigation. Hannah Green’s death will have to be investigated by an outside agency, of course. Dispatch has already called in the State Department of Public Safety, haven’t they?”
Ernie nodded. “But you’re to handle our end of it,” Joanna said.
When Ernie Carpenter looked up at her, his eyes were grave. “You’re sure?”
“Absolutely,” Joanna said with conviction.
Slowly, Ernie pulled himself up and out of the chair. He stood there with the leather wallet still open in his hand, staring down at his badge. “All right, then,” he said. “I’ll get on it. You’re sure you don’t mind having old duffers like me hanging around?”
Joanna shook her head and smiled. “It’s the old guys, as you call them, who keep the rest of us from having to reinvent the wheel. Not only that, if I were dumb enough to let you quit over Hannah Green, then I’d have to quit myself. After all, I didn’t see it coming any more than you did. As of right now, we’d both be out of a job.”
Closing the wallet, Ernie stuffed it back in his pocket. “I guess I’d better get cracking,” he said. “Are you coming along over to the jail?”
“In a minute,” Joanna told him.
Ernie headed for the door. “All I can say is, Sheriff Brady, you’re a hell of a salesman. I’ll bet Milo Davis is still kicking himself over losing you.”
At the time Joanna left the insurance agency, she had not yet quite completed the transition from office manager to sales, but there was no reason to explain that to Ernie—not right then.
“I hope so,” Joanna said. “I certainly do.”
TWELVE
IT WAS almost seven by the time Joanna stumbled home. She walked into a house that was alive with the fragrance of frying bacon and brewing coffee. Jenny and Angie Kellogg were already eating breakfast in the kitchen nook. Because she planned on trying to grab another few hours of sleep, Joanna passed on Angie’s offer of coffee. Instead, she opted for a glass of orange juice. Dragging the kitchen stool to the end of the breakfast counter, she sat down, kicked off her shoes, and began rubbing the soles of her aching feet.
“Where were you, Mom?” Jenny asked. “Angie said you had to go to work.”
All the way home, Joanna had dreaded having to answer that question. She was already so mind-numbingly weary, she had hoped to dodge the subject of Hannah Green entirely, but now Jenny’s questioning stare made avoiding the issue impossible.
“Mrs. Green died last night,” Joanna said carefully, mincing around the word “suicide.” “She died at the jail after the guards put her in her cell.”
Jenny’s eyes widened momentarily, then she turned to Angie. “Mrs. Green is the one I was telling you about,” Jenny explained. “She was waiting by the mailbox when we came home last night.” The child turned back to her mother. “What happened? Was she sick?”
Maybe Andy would have been brutally honest at that point, but Joanna simply wasn’t up to it. “Yes,” she answered. “She was very sick.” Which isn’t a complete lie, she thought. But it’s a long way from the truth.
“Couldn’t a doctor have saved her?” Jenny asked.
“I don’t think
so,” Joanna said. “A doctor did come to the jail afterward, but he was too late.”
Jenny seemed to consider that for a moment. Then, abruptly and with childlike unconcern, she simply changed the subject. “The quail were here just a little while ago,” she said. “We used to have roadrunners out here, too,” she added in an aside to Angie. “But that was before we got Tigger.”
Angie Kellogg, newly come to the wonders of birding, both feeding and watching, looked horrified. “You mean your dog chases them?” she asked.
“Of course,” Jenny said with a shrug. “He chases everything, but the only thing he ever catches is porcupines.”
“Can’t you make him stop?” Angie asked.
“Not so far,” Jenny said.
The jarring juxtaposition of Hannah Green’s death and Tigger’s senseless antics cast Joanna adrift from the spoken words. Looking around the kitchen, she realized that the place was spotless. When she had left the house, dirty dishes and pots and pans from last night’s long delayed dinner had still been stacked on the counter and in the sink. Between then and now, someone—Angie, no doubt—had rinsed them, loaded and run the dishwasher, and emptied it as well. The unspoken kindness and concern behind that simple act made Joanna’s eyes fill with tears of gratitude.
“I love roadrunners,” Angie Kellogg was saying when Joanna tuned back into the conversation. “Growing up back in Michigan, I used to think they weren’t real, that the people who made the Roadrunner/Coyote cartoons had just made them up.”
“I like those cartoons, too,” Jenny said, scrambling out of the breakfast nook. “But I always feel sorry for the coyote.”
Without having to be told, she took her dishes as far as the sink, rinsed them, and loaded them into the dishwasher. Then she headed for the bathroom to brush her teeth.
“Thanks for doing the dishes,” Joanna said. “You didn’t have to do that.”