by J. A. Jance
But back to my face. It really was green. I was having a tough time standing upright, and believe me, I hadn’t had a drop to drink, either. By then, though, Mel figured out that I was in trouble.
Melissa Majors Soames is my third wife. That seems like a bit of a misnomer, since my second wife, Anne Corley, was married to me for less than twenty-four hours. Our time together was, as they say, short but brief, ending in what is often referred to as “suicide by cop.” It bothered me that Anne preferred being dead to being married to me, and it gave me something of a complex-I believe shrinks call it a fear of commitment-that made it difficult for me to move on. Mel Soames was the one who finally changed all that.
She and I met while working for the S.H.I.T. squad. (Yes, I agree, it’s an unfortunate name, but we’re stuck with it.) Originally we just worked together, then it evolved into something else. Mel is someone who is absolutely cool in the face of trouble, and she’s watched my back on more than one occasion. And since this whole idea of having a “three-day family-bonding vacation at Disneyland” had been her bright idea, it was only fair that she should watch my back now.
She didn’t come racing up to see if I was all right because she could see perfectly well that I wasn’t. Instead, she went looking for help in the guise of a uniformed park employee, who dropped the broom he was wielding and led me to the first-aid station. It seems to me that it would have made sense to have a branch office of that a lot closer to the damned teacups.
So I went to the infirmary. Mel stayed long enough to be sure I was in good hands, then bustled off to “let everyone know what’s happening.” I stayed where I was, spending a good part of day three of our three-day ticket pass flat on my back on an ER-style cot with a very officious nurse taking my pulse and asking me questions.
“Ever been seasick?” she wanted to know.
“Several times,” I told her. I could have added every time I get near a boat, but I didn’t.
“Do you have any Antivert with you?” she asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Antivert. Meclizine. If you’re prone to seasickness, you should probably carry some with you. Without it, I can’t imagine what you were thinking. Why did you go on that ride?”
“My granddaughter wanted me to.”
She gave me a bemused look and shook her head. “That’s what they all say. You’d think grown men would have better sense.”
She was right about that. I should have had better sense, but of course I didn’t say so.
“We don’t hand out medication here,” she said. “Why don’t you just lie there for a while with your eyes closed. That may help.”
When she finally left me alone, I must have fallen asleep. I woke up when my phone rang.
“Beau,” Ross Alan Connors said. “Where are you?”
Connors has been the Washington State Attorney General for quite some time now, and he was the one who had plucked me from my post-retirement doldrums after leaving Seattle PD and installed me in his then relatively new Special Homicide Investigation Team. The previous fall’s election cycle had seen him fend off hotly contested attacks in both the primary and general elections. With campaigning out of the way for now, he seemed to be focusing on the job, enough so that he was calling me on Sunday afternoon when I was supposedly on vacation.
“California,” I told him. “Disneyland, actually.”
I didn’t mention the infirmary part. That was none of his business.
“Harry tells me you’re due back tomorrow.”
Harry was my boss, Harry Ignatius Ball, known to friend and foe alike as Harry I. Ball. People who hear his name and think that gives them a license to write him off as some kind of joke are making a big mistake. He’s like a crocodile lurking in the water with just his eyes showing. The teeth are there, just under the surface, ready and waiting to nail the unwary.
“Yes,” I told him. “Our plane leaves here bright and early. We should be at our desks by one.”
When Mel had broached the Disneyland idea, she had wanted us to pull off this major family-style event while, at the same time, having as little impact as possible-one and a half day’s worth-on our accumulated vacation time. We had flown down on Thursday after work and were due back Monday at one.
On my own, I’ve never been big on vacations of any kind. Unused vacation days have slipped through my fingers time and again without my really noticing or caring, but Mel Soames is another kind of person altogether. She has her heart set on our taking a road trip this summer. She wants to cross the border into BC, head east over the Canadian Rockies and then come back to Seattle by way of Yellowstone and Glacier. This sounds like way too much scenery for me, but she’s the woman in my life and I want to keep her happy, so a-driving we will go.
“Mel can go to the office,” Ross said, “but not you. I want you in Ellensburg at the earliest possible moment.”
If you leave the Seattle area driving east on I-90, Ellensburg is the second stopping-off place after you cross the Cascades. First there’s Cle Elum and next Ellensburg. Neither of them strikes me as much of a garden spot.
“Why would I want to go to Ellensburg?” I asked.
“To be there when the Kittitas M.E. does an autopsy. Friday afternoon some heavy-equipment operator was out snowplowing a national forest road over by Lake Kachess where he ended up digging up more than he bargained for. This is number six.”
I didn’t have to ask number six what-I already knew. For the past two months S.H.I.T. had been working on the murders of several young Hispanic women whose charred remains had been found at various dump sites scattered all over western Washington. So far none of them had been identified. As far as we could tell, none of our victims had been reported missing. We’d pretty well decided that our dead girls were probably involved in prostitution, but until we managed to identify one of them and could start making connections, it was going to be damnably difficult to figure out who had killed them.
These days it’s routine for the dental records of missing persons to be entered into a national missing persons database. That wasn’t possible with our current set of victims. None of them had teeth. None of them! And the teeth in question hadn’t been lost to poor dental hygiene, either. They had been forcibly removed. As in yanked out by the roots!
“Same MO?” I asked.
“Pretty much except for the fact that this one seems to have her teeth,” Ross said. “So either we have a different doer or the guy ran out of time. This victim was wrapped in a tarp and set on fire just like the others. The body was found late Friday afternoon. It took until Saturday morning for the Kittitas County Sheriff’s Department to retrieve the remains. Unfortunately, their M.E. has been out of town at a conference, so that has slowed down the process. They put the remains on ice until she returns and expect the autopsy to happen sometime tomorrow afternoon. That’s where you come in. I want you there when it happens in case there’s some detail that we know about that the locals might miss.”
“Our plane’s due to depart at ten-twenty,” I told him.
“That’ll be cutting it close then,” Ross said. “God only knows how long it’ll take for you to get your luggage once you get here.”
Thanks to a legacy from Anne Corley, Mel and I had flown down to California on a private jet. All we’d have to do was step off the plane and wait for the luggage to be loaded into our waiting car before we drove it off the tarmac, but rubbing my boss’s nose in that seemed like a bad idea.
“I’ll make it,” I said. “I’ll drop Mel off at the condo to pick up the other car and then I’ll head out.”
“All right,” Ross said. “Be there as soon as you can.”
“Do you have a number for the Kittitas M.E.’s office?” I asked.
“Sure. Can you take it down?”
I had no intention of telling him that I was flat on my back in the first-aid station and I wasn’t about to ask the nurse to lend me a pen or pencil.
“Can you te
xt it to me?” I asked.
This was something coming from someone who had come to twenty-first-century technology kicking and screaming all the way. I’m surprised I wasn’t struck by lightning on the spot, but that’s what comes of having Generation X progeny. I had learned about text messaging the hard way-because my kids, Kelly and Scott, had insisted on it.
“Sure,” Ross said. “I’ll have Katie send it over to you.”
Katie Dunn was Ross’s Gen X secretary. Knowing Ross is even more of a wireless troglodyte than I am made me feel some better-more with it, as we used to say back in the day.
I had just stuffed the phone back into my pocket when the nurse led Kelly into the room.
“How are you?” she asked, concern written on her face. “Mel told us what happened and that you needed to take it easy for a while. Are you feeling any better?”
I swung my feet off the side of the bed and sat up slowly.
“Take it easy,” the nurse advised.
But the nap had done the trick. I was definitely feeling better. “I’m fine,” I said. “One hundred percent.”
“Mel went with Jeremy. He’s taking the kids back to the hotel,” Kelly explained. “She’ll help get them fed and make sure the babysitter arrangements hold up. If you’re still feeling up to having that dinner, that is.”
That was what Mel had told Kelly, of course. And that’s what she was doing, but only up to a point. The reasons she was doing those things were a whole lot murkier-to Kelly, at least, if not to me.
Kelly and I haven’t always been on the best of terms. In fact, we’ve usually not been on the best of terms. She had run away from home prior to high school graduation and managed to get herself knocked up. Her shotgun wedding had ended up being unavoidably delayed, so Kayla had arrived on the scene before her parents had ever tied the knot. I have always thought most of this Kelly-based uproar is deliberate.
Mel takes the position that it’s more complex than that-both conscious and not. She thinks Kelly’s ongoing rebellion has been a way for her to get back at her parents-at both Karen and me. Although I didn’t know about it at the time, Kelly was mad as hell at her mother for coming down with cancer and dying while Kelly was still in her teens, and she was mad as hell at me for having been drunk most of the time while she was growing up. And now she’s apparently mad at me for not being drunk. When it comes to kids, sometimes you just can’t win.
So Mel had designed this whole Disneyland adventure, complete with inviting my son and daughter-in-law, Scott and Cherisse, along for the ride, for no other reason than to see if she could help smooth out some of the emotional wrinkles between Kelly and me. So far so good. As far as I could tell, everyone seemed to be having a good time. There had been no cross words, at least none I had heard. And I suspected that was also why Mel had sent Kelly to drag me out of the infirmary.
“I should have gone on the teacups with her,” Kelly said as we walked toward the monorail. “Jeremy won’t set foot on one of those on a bet, but rides like that don’t bother me. They never have. And Kayla loves them so much. She rode the teacups three more times after you left. She didn’t want to ride on anything else.”
I stopped cold. Kelly turned back to look at me. “Are you all right?” she asked.
It took me a minute to figure out what to say. I now knew something about Kelly and her mother and her daughter, and it was something she didn’t know about me. As I said already, I was mostly AWOL when Kelly and Scott were little-drinking and/or working. Karen was the one who took them to soccer and T-ball and movies. She was also the one who “did the Puyallup” with them each fall. When it’s time for the Western Washington State Fair each September, that’s what they used to call it-“doing the Puyallup.” It was Karen instead of me who walked them through the displays of farm animals and baked goods; who taught them to love eating cotton candy and elephant ears; and who took them for rides on the midway.
“You’re just like your mother,” I said, over the lump that rose suddenly in my throat and made it difficult to speak. “And Kayla’s just like you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kelly asked. She sounded angry and defensive. It was so like her to take offense and to assume that whatever I said was somehow an underhanded criticism.
“Did your mother ever tell you about the first time I took her to the Puyallup?”
“No,” Kelly said. “She never did. Why?”
“She wanted to ride the Tilt-a-Whirl, and I knew if I did that, I’d be sick. Rides like that always make me sick. So I bought the tickets. Your mother and I stood in line, but when it came time to get on, I couldn’t do it. She ended up having to go on the ride with the people who were standing in line behind us. Here I was, supposedly this hotshot young guy with the beautiful girl on his arm, and all I could do was stand there like an idiot and wait for the ride to end and for her to get off. It was one of the most humiliating moments of my life. We never talked about it again afterward, but she never asked me to get on one of those rides again, either.”
Kelly was staring up into my face. She looked so much like her mother right then-was so much like her mother-that it was downright spooky. It turns out DNA is pretty amazing stuff.
“So why did you do it?” she asked.
Now I was lost. Yes, I had been telling Kelly the story, but her question caught me off guard. I didn’t know what “it” she was asking about.
“Do what?” I asked.
“If you already knew it would make you sick, why on earth did you get on the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party with Kayla?”
“I thought maybe I’d grown out of it?” I asked lamely.
Kelly shook her head as if to say I hadn’t yet stumbled on the right answer. “And?” she prompted.
“Because my granddaughter wanted me to?” I added.
The storm clouds that had washed across Kelly’s face vanished. She reached up, grabbed me around the neck, and kissed my cheek.
“Oh, Daddy,” she said with a laugh. “You’re such a dope, but I love you.”
See what I mean about Mel Soames? The woman is a genius.
CHAPTER 2
The call came in just after the morning briefing ended and as Sheriff Joanna Brady was about to tackle that day’s bushel basketful of paperwork.
“Sorry to disturb you,” Larry Kendrick, her lead dispatcher, had said. “We’ve had a call about a possible homicide north of Bowie at a place called Action Trail Adventures.”
“Never heard of it,” Joanna said.
“I’m not surprised. It’s an all-terrain vehicle hot spot. They keep a fairly low profile, probably to avoid coming up against planning and zoning restrictions. I’ve dispatched Detectives Carpenter and Howell to the scene, and I’ve asked Jeannine to send out an Animal Control officer. She has Natalie Wilson coming over from Willcox. She should be on the scene within the next twenty minutes or so.”
Ernie Carpenter was Joanna’s senior homicide detective, a guy who had put in his twenty years and was verging on being ready to pull the plug and put himself out to pasture. Debra Howell had been working homicide for the better part of two years, partnering with Ernie as often as possible as she gradually learned the ropes. Jeannine Phillips, on the other hand, was Joanna’s head of Animal Control. Animal Control had been stuffed into Joanna’s area of responsibility years earlier, supposedly on a temporary basis, which had now turned permanent. Natalie Wilson was Jeannine’s new hire.
“What’s going on?” Joanna asked. “Why an ACO?”
“A concerned citizen called it in. He was out on his ATV when he saw buzzards circling overhead. He went there and saw what he thinks is a body, but he can’t get close enough to tell for sure. There’s a dog there with the victim, and he’s fierce as hell. The dog is keeping the vultures away, but he’s doing the same thing to everyone else, acting like he’s ready to tear them limb from limb. With the dog there, no one has been able to get close enough to the victim to check on him. He looks dead, but maybe
he’s not.”
“Any idea what happened to him?” Joanna asked.
“The guy who called it in on his cell phone says it looks like he was run over by something. It could be an accident, but it could be something else, too.”
Five years earlier, when Joanna Brady had first run for office as sheriff of Cochise County, it had been in the aftermath of her first husband’s death. Deputy Andrew Roy Brady had been gunned down by a drug trafficker’s hit man while he himself had been standing for election. People had encouraged Joanna to run in Andy’s place. When she was elected, many people had assumed it was a gesture of sympathy more than anything else. She may have been the daughter of one law enforcement officer and the widow of another, but she had never been a cop herself, and no one really expected that she would be.
Once she took office, Joanna had assumed the administrative duties that came with the office, but she had also set herself the task of becoming a real cop. She had enrolled in and graduated from the same police academy course of training that was required of all her new recruits. She did enough range work to keep her weapons skills at proper levels, and rather than hiding out in her office and behind her desk, she had insisted on going to the scene of every homicide that had occurred on her watch and in her jurisdiction. If this possible homicide turned into a real one, Joanna knew she would go there as well.
“Thanks for keeping me posted, Larry,” she told him. “When you know more details, let me know or tell Ernie to call me.”
As soon as Joanna put down the telephone, she returned to the stack of paperwork-the never-ending stack of paperwork-that was the bane of her existence. It had always been bad, but now it was worse. Her longtime chief deputy and second in command, Frank Montoya, had been wooed away from her department when he was offered the chief of police job in the nearby city of Sierra Vista. She missed him more than she could say.
Frank had been one of her opponents in her original race for sheriff. After winning the election, she had chosen him to serve as one of her two chief deputies. Turning a major opponent into a loyal ally had been a stroke of genius on Joanna’s part. Frank’s attention to detail had been a major asset to her. He had kept an eagle eye on budgetary issues and had handled the complex job of shift scheduling with a casual flair that had made it seem easy. He had also been at the forefront of bringing Joanna’s department into the world of twenty-first-century information/technology.