Downfall

by J. A. Jance

  “Are we going to have a party?” Denny asked. “A party for Grandma Eleanor and Grandpa George?”

  “Not exactly a party,” Butch said. “More like a celebration in their honor.”

  “Will there be balloons?”

  “There can be,” Butch said with a shrug. “If you’d like Grandma Eleanor and Grandpa George to have balloons, balloons there will be. Hustle up, now. Go brush your teeth and get a move on or we’ll miss the bell.”

  Dennis did as he was bidden without a word of protest.

  Once he was gone, Joanna gave Butch a dubious look. “Why do I get the feeling that I’ve just been played?”

  “Maybe you have,” he replied with a grin. “Just a little. Now let me give Bob and Marcie a call. They said that if more brisket was required, they’d be happy to drive to Tucson and pick it up.”

  CHAPTER 21

  A FEW MINUTES LATER, AS JOANNA WAS STEPPING OUT OF THE shower, her phone rang with Caller Unknown showing in the ID window. At first she was tempted to let it go to voice mail, but the moment she heard Agent Watkins’s voice, she was glad she had answered.

  “What’s up?”

  “I have some probably not so good news,” Robin said. “Remember Colonel Thomas told us to call her if we needed anything else?”

  “Yes,” Joanna answered. “So what do we need?”

  “It occurred to me that since Kevin and Travis Stock are such close friends,” Robin said, “maybe Kevin could lead us to those two no-last-name kids, Jack and Nathaniel. It turns out Colonel Thomas runs a very tight ship in terms of supervising her son’s online presence. She was able to friend me, which gave me access to the people on Kevin’s page. Sure enough, he does know the boys in question—Jack Stockman and Nathaniel Digby. I’m sending you a photo.”

  Joanna put the phone down on the counter long enough to dry off and wrap a robe around her body before the photo turned up in her message file. The picture showed a middle-aged man with two teenage boys—high-school-age kids from the looks of them—standing on either side of him. All three of them were decked out in standard University of Arizona football-game attire—red-and-blue baseball caps along with red-and-blue T-shirts, all of them bearing the standard Wildcat insignias. The caption on the photo read, Me and dad and Nate at the game. Wildcats won walking away. Go CATS!

  Joanna put the phone back to her ear. “No Travis?” she asked.

  “Indeed,” Robin replied. “No Travis. In other words, Travis lied straight out when he told me he’d gone to the game instead of the tutoring session.”

  “Which means he no longer has an alibi for either the abduction or the two murders—at least not the alibi he claimed to have,” Joanna breathed.

  “Right,” Robin said. “Since his father is one of your deputies, I didn’t think you’d want this information dropped into the middle of that ten o’clock meeting, without my giving you some advance warning.”

  “Thank you for that,” Joanna said.

  “It’s a delicate situation,” Robin said. “How are you going to handle it?”

  “As of right now I have no idea,” Joanna admitted. “Are you coming to the meeting?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Robin said.

  “Fair enough,” Joanna said. “By the time it starts, I’ll have some kind of game plan in mind. In the meantime, I really appreciate your keeping this under your hat.”

  “Wait,” Robin said quickly before Joanna had a chance to hang up. “There’s one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Colonel Thomas asked if it would be possible for us to view Kevin as a confidential informant and not reveal his name in public. She’s worried that if word gets out on campus that he’s the one who spilled the beans on Travis, he’ll be treated as a pariah on the SVSSE campus and end up being shunned as a snitch the whole of his senior year. I told her that treating him as a CI was fine with me, but that ultimately it was up to you.”

  Joanna thought about that for the better part of a minute.

  “Well?” Robin asked finally.

  “As long as we have other ways of sourcing the information, I don’t have a problem with giving Kevin Thomas CI status,” Joanna replied at last. “It seems to me that this investigation is already blowing up plenty of people’s lives. How about if we give Kevin Thomas a pass?”

  “Good,” Robin said. “Glad we’re of the same mind.”

  Joanna ended the call, put down the phone, and then spent a few minutes drying her hair—thinking about Allison and Jeremy Stock, with her heart aching the whole time. Right now Travis’s parents were most likely doing whatever ordinary things they would do on a perfectly ordinary day. She was pretty sure Allison Stock worked as a bank manager somewhere in Sierra Vista. Joanna didn’t have a departmental scheduling chart handy just then, but since Jeremy had been working day shift yesterday, chances are he was working day shift today as well, unless, of course, it happened to be his day off.

  So here they were, going about their day-to-day lives with no idea that their whole existence was about to be blown to smithereens. Joanna remembered someone mentioning that Travis had been on scholarship at SVSSE. Even so, with another son away at college, it had probably been something of a financial stretch for a pair of ordinary working people to send their second child to a private school in hopes of giving him the very best chance for making a success of his life. Instead, Travis’s future had been hijacked when he was sexually victimized by someone who should have been a respected teacher and mentor.

  Joanna had a hard time wrapping her head around the idea of calling what had happened to Travis rape, but as she had so carefully explained to Kevin Thomas, that’s what it was legally—statutory rape. Travis was a juvenile and still under the age of consent, even though his relationship with Susan Nelson had evidently been ongoing for some time. Now, even worse than the fact that Travis had been victimized, Jeremy and Allison were about to learn that their beloved son was also a suspect—maybe even the prime suspect—in the murders of two women. One of those was most likely the mother of the boy’s unborn child, while the other’s only offense had been nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  During the series of interviews conducted in the school library, all of the students—Travis Stock included—had been handled with kid gloves. The next time someone spoke to him, however, the gloves would be off. A whole new set of very pointed questions was likely to be posed to him in an official interview room at the Justice Center. No doubt one or both of Travis’s parents would be present at the time, as would a defense attorney, court-appointed or not.

  Joanna desperately wanted to have the DNA confirmation of the dead baby’s parentage in hand before she passed along any of this bad news to the family involved or to the remainder of her investigative team as well. The landscape of the case had just shifted substantially. Her handling of interviews with her deputy’s family had to be spot on. If there was even the smallest appearance of special treatment in the way the Stocks were handled, there was always a possibility that the case against Travis might be thrown out of court. And much as she might have wished to pass this challenging task on to one of her underlings, that wasn’t in the cards.

  This is what you signed on for, Joanna told herself grimly. The hard things as well as the easy things. So you’d better put on your big-girl panties and figure it out.

  On her way into the office, Joanna called the ME. Naturally Madge left her on hold for a time, but eventually Kendra Baldwin came on the line. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, and yes.”

  “What does that mean?” Joanna asked.

  “Yes, whoever chewed the hell out of that pencil stub is definitely the father of Susan Nelson’s unborn baby.”

  The idea of having DNA results back so fast took Joanna’s breath away. “How can you possibly know that already?” she asked.

  “Because the state of Arizona ponied up some big bucks to have that new RapiDHITTM DNA identification technology onli
ne in all their crime labs. You send in the sample, and they send you the results. Easy-peasy. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, if you’ll pardon the use of that expression under these particular circumstances.”

  For good reason, the inappropriate and definitely politically incorrect comments cops and MEs routinely trade back and forth are usually not shared with anyone outside exclusive law enforcement circles.

  “So that accounts for the first yes,” Joanna said. “What’s the second one?”

  “After the autopsy, I found evidence of what may or may not have been consensual sex. I located a tiny trace of what appears to be semen on Susan’s underwear—on her clothing rather than on her person.”

  “Like maybe the guy used a condom and some of the semen got away?”

  “Exactly,” Kendra said. “And just so you know, DNA from that matches up with the DNA from Pencil Boy, too.”

  “Wait,” Joanna interrupted. “You said the sex might or might not be consensual?”

  “If it had been rape, there would be signs of defensive wounds. There was nothing suspicious in the scrapings from under her nails. So either she was a willing participant or else . . .”

  “Or else what?”

  “She was unconscious at the time,” Kendra answered. “So tell me about Pencil Boy.”

  “The pencil came from an SVSSE school locker used by Travis Stock, so we’re operating under the assumption that the pencil belongs to him.”

  “Wait,” Kendra said. “Did you say Travis Stock—as in Deputy Stock’s son?”

  “I’m afraid so—one and the same.”

  “That’s terrible. The kid has been having sex with one of his teachers, and now he’s apparently the father of her unborn baby?”

  “That’s what we were told by a confidential informant, and it looks as though your findings confirm it.”

  “Before this goes any further,” Kendra cautioned, “we’ll need to double-check those results with a properly obtained and documented DNA sample from Travis himself.”

  “I agree,” Joanna said. “That’s my next task.”

  “So where does all this leave the investigation?” Kendra asked.

  “Agent Watkins and I were told that when Travis found out Susan was pregnant, he supposedly begged her to marry him, at which point she told him to take a hike—that marriage to him wasn’t happening, ever—no way José.”

  “I can see why Travis might have had a motive to kill Susan Nelson,” Kendra said. “But what about Desirée Wilburton? Why would he murder her, too?”

  “That’s a question with no obvious answer,” Joanna replied. “As of now, we still haven’t come up with any kind of direct connection between the two women—no texts, e-mails, or phone calls—at least none that we can find. But what we do know for sure is that everything Travis Stock told us about his whereabouts at the time of Susan Nelson’s kidnapping and murder is entirely bogus. If he lied about his alibi, what else is he lying about?”

  “But a teacher screwing around with one of her students?” Kendra asked. “The woman had to be a piece of work.”

  “Yes, she was definitely that,” Joanna agreed. “Your basic sexual predator all the while passing herself off as a respected member of the community and the wife of a local minister, no less.”

  “Speaking of Reverend Nelson,” Kendra said. “Did you ask him about his wife’s funeral arrangements yesterday? If so, he never got around to contacting me about who will be handling them.”

  “Reverend Nelson didn’t contact you because he has no intention of making funeral arrangements of any kind,” Joanna answered. “At least that’s what he told me. Once he found out about Susan’s unborn baby, he went totally ballistic. He told me quote/unquote that you’re welcome to dump his wife’s body in the nearest landfill.”

  “That’s not going to fly and you know it,” Kendra replied. “Would you please speak to him about this again? I can’t keep Susan’s body on ice indefinitely. Roberta Wilburton is sending someone from Flint Mortuary up in Tucson to collect her daughter’s remains later on today. That will take some of the pressure off the morgue’s occupancy rate, but with both Susan’s and Hal’s bodies currently on hold, I’m about to have to post a ‘No Vacancy’ sign. For the time being, nobody else around here is allowed to die, got it?”

  Joanna couldn’t help smiling. “Got it,” she said. “I’ll do my best.”

  At that moment, she was just slowing to turn into the parking lot at the Justice Center. “I need to hang up now,” she said. “It’s time for me to go inside and tell my team what’s up. After that, we’ll spend the rest of the day messing up other people’s lives—starting with Deputy and Mrs. Jeremy Stock.”

  CHAPTER 22

  DEB HAD OBTAINED THE SEARCH WARRANT FOR THE NELSONS’ home and left it on Joanna’s desk. Taking the warrant with her, Joanna headed for the conference room, where the entire team was already assembled. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and expectant, they watched as she walked to the front of the room and took her place at the lectern.

  “Good morning,” she said. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

  There were smiles and guffaws all around, and that’s what she wanted. This was going to be a tough day for all concerned. She hoped that bit of lightness would relieve some of the tension in the room.

  “We’ve had some developments overnight,” she announced. “For one thing, we now have another unsolved homicide on our plate. Hal Hopkins, an Arizona Sun Sites resident, whose wife clobbered him in the head with a golf club yesterday, was DOA when he arrived at the TMC trauma center in Tucson. For the time being, Deb will be handling that case with Dave assisting with crime-scene investigation. I take it the autopsy is scheduled?”

  Deb glanced at her watch. “In about forty-five,” she said. “So don’t be surprised if I have to rush out.”

  “Don’t worry,” Joanna said. “For once, the briefing is going to be brief. Last night, as Agent Watkins and I were preparing to leave the SVSSE campus, we were approached by a confidential informant. The CI is a close personal friend of Travis Stock, who, as some of you may already know, is Deputy Stock’s son.”

  The room went dead quiet. It seemed to Joanna that for a time, people stopped breathing. After a moment, she continued. “The CI told us that for some time—a period of at least a year and maybe longer—Travis had been involved in a romantic relationship with Susan Nelson. According to the CI, when Susan told Travis about her pregnancy, he begged her to divorce her husband and marry him. She evidently found the suggestion laughable and made it blazingly clear that she intended to pass the baby off as her husband’s. Again, according to the CI, Travis reacted badly to being rejected.”

  “Which sounds like motive to me,” Ernie muttered.

  “Possibly,” Joanna agreed. “It seemed to me that the first step was to ascertain whether or not Travis was the father of the victim’s unborn child. With the help of the school principal, Agent Watkins and I obtained an item from Travis’s locker—a pencil stub we assume belongs to him. With Dr. Baldwin’s assistance, the pencil was transported to the crime lab in Tucson, where it was tested for DNA. Dr. Baldwin reported the crime lab’s findings as I was on my way here.”

  “And?” Jaime Carbajal asked.

  “It turns out that DNA from the pencil belongs to the father of Susan Nelson’s unborn baby.”

  “So Travis Stock is the father?” Ernie breathed. “Does Jeremy know any of this?”

  “I have no idea what Jeremy knows or doesn’t know,” Joanna replied. “The crime lab’s DNA findings will need to be confirmed with a properly obtained sample. The DNA we have now came from an item in Travis’s school locker, which was opened by the school principal.”

  “Which may or may not constitute a legal search,” Detective Howell volunteered.

  “Exactly,” Joanna agreed. “In other words, although it seems reasonable enough to assume that Travis is the father of the baby, I don’t want any of this information being rela
yed to Deputy Stock or his family until they’ve been officially notified of their son’s suspected involvement with the homicide victim. That’s something I intend to handle personally. Is that understood?”

  The people gathered in the room nodded in somber unison. “In addition, in the course of examining Susan Baldwin’s clothing, Dr. Baldwin obtained a DNA sample from what she says ‘may or may not be consensual sex,’ and may or may not lead us to our killer. In any event, due to Deputy Stock’s connection to the case, everything about our investigation into the Susan Nelson homicide must be handled by the book.”

  “If Susan Nelson was screwing around with one of her students,” Jaime Carbajal muttered, “it sounds to me like she got just what she deserved.”

  Joanna sent him a frosty look. “Excuse me, Detective Carbajal. Since when is statutory rape a capital crime? Reprehensible as the victim’s behavior may have been, her actions don’t justify someone taking her life. This department isn’t in favor of vigilante justice. You’re all welcome to think those ‘she deserved it’ thoughts in private, but do not utter those words aloud. Understood?”

  Jaime looked properly chastened. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “But what are you suggesting—that Travis is the doer here? Just because he may be the father of Susan Nelson’s baby doesn’t mean that he killed her.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Joanna agreed, “not for sure, but here’s the next troubling piece of the puzzle. This morning Agent Watkins was able to access social media accounts that seem to indicate that Travis’s alibi—his claim that he was in Tucson attending a U of A football game on Saturday afternoon and evening—is a complete fabrication. At this time we have no idea of his real whereabouts during the commission of the crimes.”

  “Which might give Travis both motive and opportunity,” Ernie suggested.

  “Exactly,” Joanna agreed. “When we finish here, I’d like you two—Jaime and Ernie—to track down the kids Travis was supposed to accompany to the football game.”

  “What are their names?” Ernie asked.