Dead to Rights

by J. A. Jance

  “On one condition,” Joanna told him.

  “What’s that?”

  “We go in my car. I’m not built for motorcycles.”

  The phone rang again, almost as soon as Jenny put it down. She answered and, after a moment, handed the receiver to her mother.

  “Matt Bly, the composite guy, is due here at ten,” Dick Voland announced in his customarily brusque fashion. “We’ll go from here to the hospital to interview Deputy Long, and from there out to Elfrida to see the gas-station clerk.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Joanna asked.

  “Jaime Carbajal,” Voland answered. “I figured that would give me a chance to check him out and see how he does when he’s working solo.”

  “How about if I meet you at the hospital?” Joanna suggested. “I need to stop by and see how Debbie Howell and Ted Long are doing.”

  “All right,” Voland said, “but be advised. It’s just like I said it would be. We’re paying through the nose for this guy. I don’t want to waste any of his time.”

  Once the breakfast dishes were loaded into the dishwasher, Jenny gathered up her overnight gear. Then she stood with an impish grin on her face while Butch Dixon zipped her into an oversized jacket and fastened on a helmet. “Ready?” he said.

  “Ready,” Jenny returned.

  To Joanna’s ear Jenny’s voice sounded strangely hollow and grown up, echoing through the plastic. As she watched Jenny climb onto the motorcycle and settle on behind Butch, Joanna felt her heart constrict. The idea of Jenny’s riding off on the thing was terrifying. What if something happened? What if there was an accident?

  Jenny, on the other hand, was thrilled beyond bearing and waving with delight as Butch Dixon started the smooth-sounding engine.

  “See you at Marianne and Jeff’s,” she crowed. “Bet we’ll beat you there.”

  “No bet,” Joanna replied.

  Butch grinned at her. “Don’t worry,” he told her over the drone of the engine. “There are old riders and bold riders, but no old bold riders. I’ll be careful.”

  Shaking her head and stepping out of the way, Joanna couldn’t help laughing at that, which was obviously exactly what Butch had intended.

  On her way up to the Canyon Methodist parsonage in Old Bisbee, following behind the motorcycle, Joanna gave herself points. After all, she had let Jenny go. She had overcome her own objections and let her daughter do something daring, rather than holding Jenny too close and trying to protect her from everything, from life itself.

  At the parsonage the three newcomers were part of a stream of well-wishers. They stayed for only a few minutes—long enough for introductions. Ruth was a shy but bright-eyed little one who clung fiercely to Jeff Daniels and didn’t want him out of her sight. By comparison, Esther was a pale reflection of her sister. To Joanna’s way of thinking, Esther Maculyea Daniels looked very ill indeed. She lay, silent and listless, in Marianne’s arms, brightening only when Ruth’s face happened to appear in her line of vision.

  “I can see why Jeff couldn’t bear to leave her,” Joanna said quietly.

  Marianne nodded while her eyes filled with unshed tears.

  “Esther’s going to be just fine.” Joanna spoke the comforting words with far more conviction than she felt. “Do you have everything you need? Is there anything I can get you?”

  “Prayers,” Marianne answered. “I think we’re going to need a lot of those.”

  As a new batch of visitors descended on the parsonage, Joanna, Butch, and Jenny headed out. Watching Jenny’s halo of golden hair disappear once more into Butch’s spare helmet, Joanna found something to be thankful for—two things especially. Not only was Jenny healthy—she was also a long way out of diapers.

  She had barely made it to her desk when Ernie Carpenter shambled into her office. There had been dark circles under his eyes on Friday. If anything, now they were worse—almost black rather than merely purple.

  “It’s Saturday,” she pointed out. “I told you to take the weekend off. What are you doing here?”

  “These loose ends are killing me,” he said. “I can’t sleep anyway, so I could just as well be working.”

  Joanna shook her head. “You look like hell, Detective Carpenter, but we do need you. Next week for sure you’re to take some time off. Understood?”

  “Right,” he said.

  “In the meantime, I’m on my way over to the hospital to watch Mr. Bly, the composite artist, do his stuff. Care to join me?”

  “Sure.”

  They were in Joanna’s Blazer, headed for the hospital, when Ernie tapped his head. “I almost forgot to tell you. I spent some time late yesterday afternoon with the guy out at the Rob Roy.”

  “Peter Wilkes?”

  “That’s the one. Evidently Terry Buckwalter really is one hell of a golfer. Shoots in the high sixties and low seventies most of the time. As a consequence, there are only a few guys out there, besides the pro, who are willing to golf with her. But he did come up with the name of one guy who has gone out with her several times, even though she’s walked all over him. Larry Matkin. Isn’t he the young mining engineer who works for P.D.?”

  Joanna nodded.

  “And wasn’t he at the funeral yesterday, too?”

  “He was,” Joanna said. “Not only that, he called me on Thursday and left a message for me to call him back. I’ve tried several times, but I’ve never been able to catch him.”

  “After this deal at the hospital,” Ernie said thoughtfully, “maybe we ought to interview him.”

  “Sounds great,” Joanna said. “Any idea where he lives?”

  “No,” Ernie said. “But it won’t take long to find out.”

  In Joanna’s head, the words “composite-sketch artist” had evoked the picture of an artist—a properly bereted, goateed, and smocked middle-aged man with a sketch pad in one hand and a fistful of charcoal in the other. From that standpoint, Matt Bly hardly measured up. He turned out to be tiny—five feet four, and incredibly young—twenty-four or twenty-five at the outside. He wore thick glasses, had a severely receding chin, and used a laptop computer rather than pad and pencil.

  Joanna looked in on a recovering Debbie Howell on her way to Deputy Long’s room. When she arrived, the composite creation process was already in full swing. As far as she could see, the whole thing proved to be exceedingly slow, exacting, and eventually disappointing. It had been evening and Deputy Long had been too far away from the suspect to pick up the kinds of painstaking details necessary to put together a successful composite. When Matt Bly pronounced the picture finished, there wasn’t anything about it that was the least bit familiar. The artist, however, didn’t seem at all discouraged.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “By the time I put this together with the witness we’re going to see in Elfrida, it’ll be better. Just you wait and see.”

  While Joanna had been watching the artist in action, Ernie had been out in the corridor using a pay phone to track down Larry Matkin’s address. When Joanna came looking for him, the detective was scribbling something in his notebook.

  “Got it, Sheriff Brady,” he announced. “Matkin lives in a rented trailer out by Gold Gulch.”

  They took the Rifle Range Road to a trailer parked on the first gentle slopes of Gold Hill. “Why would anyone want to live all the way out here?” Joanna asked, looking up at the steep but knobby mound of rock that Bisbee’s school-aged rock climbers knew as Geronimo.

  “Beats me,” Ernie Carpenter said with a laugh, “but it looks like you don’t have much room to talk. The High Lonesome isn’t exactly Grand Central Station. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with this. He’s got phone, electricity, and propane. What more could you want?”

  The old-fashioned trailer—a moldering relic from the fifties or sixties—was parked on a concrete slab. Out behind the trailer was a long empty corral. There were no vehicles parked anywhere in sight, and when they pounded on the front door, no one answered. Drawn curtains made seeing inside
the place impossible.

  Leaving the door, Ernie sauntered over to the edge of the slab and then squatted down to examine the dusty earth. “Looks to me as though this is where he usually parks,” Ernie said. “But I’d say he hasn’t been home today. These tracks are from yesterday at least, maybe even earlier.”

  “Do you know his boss?” Joanna asked.

  “Skip Lowell, the general manager? Sure,” Ernie said, “I know him.”

  “Why don’t we go check with him,” Joanna suggested. “Maybe he’ll know if Larry’s been called out of town. While I drive, maybe you can call in and get Skip Lowell’s address.”

  “Don’t have to,” Ernie said. “When he and Mindy came back to town, they moved into his mother’s old place on the Vista. They’re in the process of fixing it up. God knows it needs it. The renters the last owners had in the place really let it go.”

  After years of working for Phelps Dodge all over the world, Armand “Skip” Lowell had returned to his hometown as general manager of P.D.’s Bisbee operation. Mindy and Skip Lowell had been in town only a matter of weeks and were a long way into rehabbing the early-twentieth-century brick home that had once been one of Bisbee’s finest.

  Joanna and Ernie found Skip on his front porch. Clad in paint-speckled overalls with a matching sweatshirt, he was carefully using a paint-thinner-saturated cloth to remove several layers of black enamel from the leaded glass panels on either side of the front door.

  Skip glanced up at them as they came up the walk. “Howdy, Sheriff Brady, Ernie,” he said. “Would you please tell me why someone would use this crap to paint over every goddamned—excuse the expression—window in the place?” he grumbled.

  “As I recall,” Ernie said, “the last tenants who lived here didn’t want any of their neighbors to see the glow of the grow-lights on their marijuana crop.”

  “I see,” Skip said. Shaking his head in disgust, he kept right on cleaning. “What can I do for you?”

  “What can you tell us about Larry Matkin?” Joanna asked.

  Skip looked at her over the top of his drugstore glasses. “What do you want to know about him?”

  “Do you have any idea where he is?”

  “Probably out at his house,” Skip offered.

  Ernie shook his head. “We already checked,” he said. “He’s not there. Hasn’t been all night, from the looks of it. Was he going out of town for the weekend, by any chance?”

  “Not as far as I know.” Skip put down the paint-blackened cloth and then used a clean towel sticking out of his back pocket to clean his hands. He closed the can of paint thinner. “What’s this all about?” he asked. “It doesn’t have anything to do with that dead veterinarian, does it?”

  Joanna felt her whole body go on point. No doubt, Ernie’s did the same. He was the one who fielded the question.

  “It could,” he said. “What makes you think it might?”

  Skip seemed to consider for a moment before he answered. “When you come to a new post like this, it takes time to get the lay of the land. To figure out what’s going on and who’s responsible for what. All that sort of thing.”

  Joanna nodded. Taking over as general manager for the local Phelps Dodge branch didn’t sound all that different from taking over as sheriff.

  “The guys in corporate up in Phoenix sent me down here to get things moving,” he continued. “As you know, we thought we’d be reopening some operations last year, but there have been a few—well, shall we say—unforeseen complications. This has all been very hush-hush, but since the whole story’s due to be released publicly sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll go ahead and tell you now.

  “As you may or may not know, when we decided to return to Bisbee, we had three separate locations we thought might be viable—one north of Don Luis, one just east of Old Bisbee, and one east of Saginaw. The idea was to take core samples from all three, figure out which one had the most potential, and then get that one on a fast track. That’s what Larry Matkin’s been doing—sampling ore and doing assay reports.

  “According to those reports, the site east of Saginaw is far and away the winner. It has a major vein of ore, one that wasn’t viable with the old technology. With electrowinning, the new technology, it is.”

  “If you’ve got the technology and you’ve got the ore, what’s the problem?” Ernie asked.

  Skip Lowell sighed. “When Lavender Pit was opened back in the fifties, homes that were in the way of that operation—places in Johnson’s Addition, Jiggerville, and Upper Lowell—were loaded up on axles and trucked to company land elsewhere around town.”

  Joanna nodded. “Everybody in Bisbee knows about that,” she said.

  “What everybody doesn’t know is that, in the process of moving all those houses, the company ran into a problem. When they got to one house, a place that belonged to a guy named Melvin Kitteridge, he refused to budge. And the guy had a point. None of the other houses in Jiggerville had mineral rights. His house did. He finally agreed to move but only if the company agreed to give him the mineral rights to whatever other property they moved his house to. And that’s exactly what they did. It was a quiet kind of deal. I don’t think ten people in all knew about it. In fact, the Buckwalters themselves may not have realized…”

  “You’re saying the Buckwalters own the mineral rights to the property under the clinic?”

  “That’s right,” Skip said. “As I said, most of the houses in Saginaw are located on land the company already owns. We’ve moved those houses once, and if we have to, we can move them again. The big difficulty is that the main body of ore seems to run directly through the tract we don’t own.”

  “In other words,” Joanna said, “when you gave it away forty-odd years ago, you shouldn’t have. Now, in order to make the Saginaw site workable, you have to buy it back.”

  “You’ve got it,” Skip Lowell said. “That’s it in a nutshell.”

  “And you’ll be buying it back from Terry Buckwalter?”

  “Whoever the owner of record is, that’s who we’ll buy it from,” Skip answered. “The lawyers will be coming down next week to make the offer.”

  “But what does all this have to do with Larry Matkin?” Ernie asked.

  There was a slight hesitation before Skip answered. It could have been evasion, or simply reluctance.

  “Obviously, Larry has known exactly what’s going on. One day the project is on a fast track. The next, after some company researcher discovers the mineral-rights problem, everything grinds to a halt. Larry had to be told, but he was sworn to secrecy.”

  “You’re worried that he’s told someone?” Joanna asked.

  Skip shook his head. “No, it’s worse than that. In the past few weeks, I’ve become aware that there have been several unexplained absences on Larry’s part. There’ve been times when I’ve tried to reach him when he clearly wasn’t where he said he would be, where he was supposed to be. Late yesterday afternoon, through a fluke, I discovered that he’s been golfing at a place out near Palominas. He’s been doing it on company time and in the company of Terry Buckwalter. It could be it’s all on the up-and-up. But I’m concerned that if they’re involved somehow—romantically, I mean—that the company will end up with a conflict-of-interest problem.”

  Armand “Skip” Lowell was a company man to the bone. His sole worry lay in what kind of corporate repercussions might result from an inappropriate relationship between Terry Buckwalter and Larry Matkin.

  Ernie Carpenter and Joanna Brady were cops. Both their minds turned to murder.

  “How much is that property worth?” Joanna asked.

  “Surely, you don’t think…” Skip objected.

  “How much?”

  “Don’t quote me on this,” Skip cautioned. “The property is probably worth something in the upper six figures. Maybe even more.”

  Suddenly Joanna was thinking about Terry Buckwalter—about how pleased she had seemed to be at receiving what she considered fair value for he
r dead husband’s defunct veterinary practice. She was hoping to come out of the deal with enough money to pay off her debts and maybe get away clean. She was counting on the insurance proceeds to fund her venture into the L.P.G.A. That didn’t add up to an upper-six-figures kind of deal. It sounded to Joanna as though Terry Buckwalter was being shafted. Maybe she knew nothing at all about the mineral rights, and maybe, just maybe, Reggie Wade did.

  “Does Terry Buckwalter know any of this?” Joanna asked.

  Skip Lowell frowned. “She might,” he said. “But she isn’t supposed to.”

  Joanna stood up. “Come on, Ernie. We’ve got to go.”

  “But I’m not finished—”

  “We’re finished for the time being,” Joanna told him. “We can come back if we need to. For now, there’s something else we have to do.”

  “What the hell is going on?” Ernie growled as he climbed into Joanna’s Blazer. “I don’t leave off interviews—”

  “I think we’ve found our killer,” she said. “Reggie Wade is pushing through a deal to buy out the clinic at something far less than an upper-six-figure figure,” Joanna said. “In fact, I think Terry may have already signed papers on this.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’ll bet Reggie Wade knows all about this mineral-rights deal. Knew it was coming and knew when it was coming.”

  “You’re saying maybe he and Larry Matkin are in this thing together?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Ernie asked.

  “Drive down to Douglas and find out,” Joanna told him.

  Ernie leaned back in the seat, crossed his arms, and closed his eyes. “Sounds good to me,” he said. “Wake me when we get there.”

  TWENTY

  AS THEY headed east on Highway 80, Joanna could barely contain her excitement. With Ernie Carpenter snoring softly in the passenger seat beside her, Joanna could see that they were about to crack the case wide open.

  They didn’t have all the answers yet. So far, there were no proved links between Matkin and Wade. Other than Joanna’s having seen them together briefly at the Amos Buckwalter funeral, there were no direct connections. But Joanna was confident those would come. They had to.