by Susan Dunlap
She eased open the door. There was no light in the hallway that separated the bedrooms from the living room. All the bedroom doors were closed. No light seeped from under any of them. It was dark, but she could just make out a figure heading toward the window at the far end of the hall. As Patsy watched, the shade was lifted and Beth Landau stood silhouetted by the moonlight. Patsy could see her peering out, moving her head very slowly, as if surveying the land outside.
Patsy stepped out. “What are you doing?”
Beth spun around. The moonlight showed the fear on her face.
“It’s the prowler, isn’t it? You were checking for the prowler.”
“No. There’s nothing to worry about.” She put a hand on Patsy’s arm.
Fighting the urge to shake it off, Patsy said, “Beth, you’re worried.” Reminding herself to stay in character, she patted Beth’s hand. “Look, I’m awake. I’m strong. I can help you.”
“It’s okay.”
“I know you think I can’t take care of myself. Why else would I be here, right?” Beth’s hand tensed on her arm. Patsy swallowed a smile of victory. “But I don’t panic. I can help—if you’re straight with me.”
Beth pulled her hand free. “Look,” she whispered, “it’s no big deal, but I have had a prowler. He’s never harmed anyone. He’s never even come inside as far as I know. But it’s just, well, I feel I ought to check.”
“How often does he come?”
“Sometimes twice in a week, sometimes not for a couple of weeks.”
Patsy walked to the front window and looked out at the hard ground that sloped down from the lodge, at the saguaro and ocotillo, at the bare, dry dirt. With all those stars and the moon, it was plenty light enough to spot a prowler out there. She leaned against the window frame, forcing Beth to stand in the moonlight facing her. Watching her reaction, Patsy asked, “Do you have any idea who he is?”
Beth ran her teeth over her lower lip.
“You do, don’t you?”
Stiffly, Beth nodded. “I’m sure it’s a friend of a friend, a guy in the neighborhood. He’s not a danger to any of the guests here.”
“What about to you?”
Beth shrugged, but her face remained tense. “He’s not likely to hurt me, not physically. He’s more of a nuisance than a threat.”
“So why don’t you call the sheriff when you see him?”
“Because I don’t want to make things worse than they already are here. I’ve got women here who are poised right on the edge. All they need is to have the sheriff’s men hanging around in the middle of the night. I can’t do that to them.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Too long. I know that. It’s just, well, the time is never right to deal with it.”
Patsy wanted to shake her, to tell the dumb fool how to deal with this asshole. Instead, she swallowed hard and said, “What’s this guy after?”
“I told you—”
“This place is five feet off the ground. From out there, you can’t see anything unless someone’s standing right by the window. No pervert’s going to come back here week after week in hopes of seeing that. He’s been inside, hasn’t he?” When Beth didn’t answer, Patsy grabbed her arm. She didn’t shake her, not quite. “Hasn’t he!”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I couldn’t prove anything. I thought something was gone. But it’s not. Maybe it never was. I just have a feeling he’s been in my office.” She looked straight at Patsy. In the moonlight her face looked powder-white; even her freckles were pale. “But I could be wrong. Listen, you’ve got enough to worry about without—”
“Forget it,” Patsy said, giving the arm a squeeze and releasing it. “It’s good to think about somebody else’s problems for a change. Look, if I can help you, it’s going to make me feel a lot better about myself,” she added, in the kind of social-work talk Beth would understand.
“Okay. If you see anything, knock on my door. It’s the one at the end of the hall, nearest the office.” She smiled. “And thanks, Patsy.”
“Sure.” Patsy walked back to her room, wondering how long she would have to wait to get into that office.
25
FEW THINGS AGGRAVATE A headache more, Kiernan thought, than being hauled into the sheriff’s office in the middle of the night. What a great Alka-Seltzer commercial this would make: “Sheriff pounding on your head? Plop plop, fizz fizz.”
The sheriff’s deputy held open the gate in the pine counter. “Right this way, Miss—”
“Doctor,” she snapped, without thinking. But the title had its effect.
“Right this way, Doctor,” he said with slightly less assurance.
The county sheriff’s department was lodged in a small weathered building with a covered walkway out front. It could have housed a sheriff when this area south of Phoenix was still Wild West. Everything about it was old, faded, and sere, as if the desert air had sucked it dry. It smelled of dust and ground-in grime and sour coffee.
Kiernan followed the deputy—tall, young, and apparently too dry of mouth to utter an unnecessary word—through the counter to the hallway that bisected the building. Above scuffed pine wainscoting the tan wall was dotted with clusters of thumbtack holes and rectangles of varying shades where notices had been hung over the years. Modern art, administrative style.
The deputy motioned Kiernan to the first door, into a room with a scarred wooden desk and two chairs. Silently, he indicated a chair for her, then reached into the drawer and came up with an ink pad and sheet with ten square boxes on it.
Kiernan recognized the booking form. “I’m not doing anything till I make my phone call, and until I talk to the sheriff,” she said barely controlling her anger. This sheriff’s department was not in Tempe, near her motel, but in the county of Mission San Leo. The deputy who had come for her had plunked her in the back of the patrol car, which smelled of ammonia and vomit. The window didn’t open, and of course the car wasn’t air-conditioned. The drive had taken half an hour. Four or five bumps had bounced her nearly to the ceiling; even small jolts had reverberated through her head. And the deputy had ignored every one of her questions.
“We’ll do the booking first, Mi—, Doctor.”
“I thought you said the sheriff was waiting for me.”
“He is.”
“Then please,” she said through gritted teeth, “take me to him.”
“Just as soon as we—”
“Now!”
“Just as soon—”
She leaned forward on the desk. “You book me, and you’re talking a false-arrest charge. Not just the department but you personally, since you seem to be taking this upon yourself.”
The deputy let a smile cross his tanned face. “You’re from California, right, Doctor?”
She could see it in his small hazel eyes, that speed-trap mentality. “Right,” she said, “but my boss isn’t. He’s a Phoenix lawyer.”
The deputy ran his finger across the booking form. His smile did not fade.
This was one round she was not going to win this way. Taking a breath, she reconsidered. When she spoke her voice was calmer. “You know how much time you can waste going to court. Judges postpone. Lawyers can get one continuance after another. And that’s before the trial starts. Every day that happens, you have to show up in court, on your own time. You know that. On a day when you could be in the mountains fishing, you’ll be hanging around for a one o’clock court date.” She didn’t need to look twice to see that he’d had an experience like that. She said, “I used to work for the coroner’s office. I know about that. But look, you and I are both just trying to save some time. You don’t want to get hung up in court, and I don’t want to spend time with booking and records and then hassle getting them cleared. The sheriff and I can handle this. Okay?”
“You worked for the coroner, huh?” he said, leaning back against the desk. “What’d you do?”
“Only one thing a doctor does there. And I’ll tell you, in my
line of work we didn’t have a problem with recidivism.” She laughed. It was a line that had worked before.
“Cut up stiffs, eh?” he said, smiling uncomfortably.
“Right,” she put on another smile.
He shifted in his chair, started to speak, then changed his mind. He glanced toward the door, as if expecting someone to step in and make his decision for him. Then he drew his hand slowly back from the booking form. “Well,” he said, “listen, I’ll let Sheriff Grimm know you’re here. He can decide …”
Sheriff Grimm? Not a good sign. She waited as the deputy hurried down the hall.
In less than a minute he was back. “Last door on the left,” he said with obvious relief.
“Thanks.” She stepped into the hall. Now that she was in control of the situation, the hallway looked less grimy, the wainscoting less scuffed.
The sheriff’s door was open. His office was the size of the first room, furnished in the same style: one scarred wooden desk holding a blotter stained with rings from coffee cups or beer cans and smaller rings that could have been made by a shot glass. To the right of the desk was a metal bookcase, to the left a brace of file cabinets, and in front, one wooden chair. There was a smell to the room that was hard to name—a mixture of sweat, beer, dust, but mostly just the smell of staleness.
Kiernan looked at the man behind the desk and restrained a sigh. He could not have been more aptly named. Sheriff Grimm looked like a mummy: dark, dry, all sharp edges. He looked about fifty but might not be that old. The dry heat and wind, or the boredom of being a country sheriff, had carved lines around his eyes, beside his mouth, and vertically down his cheeks. His wiry dark hair was well mixed with gray. She glanced around the room, trying to get a hint of what he had expected from this job, but there was no picture of Grimm arm-in-arm with Bruce Babbitt or Barry Goldwater, no framed citations or yellowed news stories lauding his triumphs. Whatever Grimm might have hoped the job would bring, it was clear from his expression and the weary slump of his shoulders, that he had settled for what he had got. It was also clear that in a hot, dull summer, she was a welcome diversion.
“Sit down, Dr. O’Shaughnessy. We’re not often called upon to make charges like this. Very unusual.” His lips parted again, showing long chalky teeth with spaces between them at the gumline. It was hard to tell whether he was smiling or baring his teeth.
“Sheriff, ‘unusual’ sounds like a doctor saying, ‘This is a very interesting case.’ The patient knows right off he’s a goner.” She sat down and leaned against the slat back of the chair. “What is the charge against me?”
“Surely you’re prepared for it? You seem to have been quite well prepared to handle my deputy.”
So that was it. “If you mean am I prepared to insist on my rights, I am. You’ve dragged me out of my room in the middle of the night. And for all the answers your deputy gave, he might have been a deaf-mute. Now what is the charge?”
“Now, Dr. O’Shaughnessy, I know that my deputy did tell you the charge.”
“What he said was forgery and falsification of public records, and I know that can’t be right. I’ve only been in Arizona two days and haven’t been near a public office. Even if I wanted to, I haven’t been in a position to forge so much as a mail-forwarding card.”
Grimm nodded. “All the more amazing.”
“Sheriff?”
“You’re not licensed to practice medicine in this state. I’m right?”
“You are right. Now about the charge?”
Grimm’s elbow rested on the desk. Moving only his forearm, he tapped the top sheet on a pile. “We’ve got a death certificate here. It’s signed by you.”
Kiernan’s breath caught. Vanderhooven’s death certificate! It had to be that. But Elias Necri had admitted to signing it. What was going on? “I did not sign any death certificate, and certainly did not forge anything.”
Grimm nodded again, noncommittally. “According to Arizona revised statute thirteen dash two-oh-oh-two-A: ‘A person commits forgery if, with intent to defraud, such person, one, falsely makes, completes, or alters a written instrument.’ That’s a felony, Dr. O’Shaughnessy.”
Forcing back her rage, Kiernan said, “Be that as it may, Sheriff, I haven’t seen Austin Vanderhooven’s death certificate. It is Vanderhooven we’re talking about?”
“It is.”
“But I do know that Dr. Elias Necri signed that death certificate.”
Grimm nodded once more, removed the top sheet from his pile, and passed Kiernan the next one. “This is a copy, of course.”
She scanned the death certificate. The date was correct. The cause of death, heart failure. And the signature, her own! She moved the sheet closer. From the sharp curls of the K to the tail of the Y, it was her signature. She held it up to the light, looking for signs of erased pencil tracing. There were none. And no marks of hesitancy. It was her signature. What had she signed since she arrived? Nothing but the contract with Bishop Dowd, and that she had read. There was no way he could have switched sheets. She remembered all too well telling Dowd the penalty for falsifying a death certificate: a fine of $150,000, and four years in jail. Then it had been Elias Necri she had been thinking of, with Dowd as an accessory. She had given Dowd the figures simply to frighten him, although she was sure that the State of Arizona would not throw the book at one of their own bishops. But for an out-of-state detective there was no such assurance. A splashy case like this, with a sheriff who had bare walls to fill, with a district attorney on the make … It would call for a lot more than Stu Wiggins to get her off.
She took another breath. The heat of the closed room pressed on her skin. This whole thing had to be stopped before it came to trial, before the D.A. had an established interest, before Sheriff Grimm had invested more than an hour’s time. She had to stop it here. “Sheriff,” she said, sounding considerably calmer than she felt, “I can see why you were misled by this document. It’s an excellent forgery. A work of art.”
“Are you trying to tell me that you did not sign this form?”
“Exactly. Sheriff, I am a detective. I have a license to keep up. I also have a medical license. No way would I endanger them to come to Arizona and sign a death certificate for a man I never saw alive.”
Grimm nodded, a mummy’s nod.
Her armpits were sticky. “And, Sheriff, it says right here”—she pointed to the form—“ ‘Date of last medical observation.’ How recently must an attending physician have seen the patient in order to sign the D.C.? A month, six weeks? There’s nothing written in that space at all. This form would be invalid just on that basis alone. Only a fool would expect that to escape your notice.”
Grimm nodded twice, then leaned back in his chair. “Very kind of you to say so, Dr. O’Shaughnessy. But a bit after the fact.” The man even spoke like a mummy: no inflection, no emotion.
“Check Vanderhooven’s body. I’m sure you have checked the body. You know damned well the man didn’t die of heart failure without contributing causes.”
“We can’t say that, Dr. O’Shaughnessy.”
“What do you mean, you can’t say?”
“Body’s gone.”
“Gone!”
“Been cremated.”
“But how?” she asked, amazed. “Don’t you require a interment permit for disposal of remains?”
“We do.”
“Who has to sign the interment permit?” she demanded.
Grimm’s finger tapped the pile of papers. His face remained stiff, the upper lip retracted slightly, showing those chalky teeth. “The sheriff.”
Kiernan leaned forward. “And you looked at that death certificate, with the name of an out-of-state doctor and nothing to indicate that doctor had ever seen the patient before … You saw a D.C. with the most common, most meaningless cause of death, heart failure … They all die of heart failure—the heart fails; they die. You saw all that and you signed the permit for them to cremate a Roman Catholic priest!”
&nb
sp; He pressed his finger down on the papers. The knuckle went white. “Dr. O’Shaughnessy, we’re not discussing—”
“But we are. Either you signed that form and you’re trying to cover your ass—”
His fingers closed around the top sheet. “Are you accusing—”
“Damned right! Either you are too incompetent to sweep streets much less be sheriff, or there’s another answer. The other possibility is that you did not sign that permit and whoever forged my name on the death certificate forged yours on the interment permit too.”
Grimm didn’t move. No nod, no nothing.
Her heart thumped against her ribs; her face was tight with rage. She took a breath to calm herself. “It’d be an easy thing to do, Sheriff: forge the form, stick it in your out box. How many forms do you sign in a week? More than enough so that you might forget a specific one. If for some reason you were going through your out box and came across that form and found your signature already on it, there would be no reason for you to go back and read it over. The probability is that you would never see the form at all. It would just be picked up, and one copy would go on to the mortician and the others to wherever they’re filed.”
He stared at her, yet appeared not to see her at all. The mummy stare. She leaned back against the slats of the chair, forcing herself to breathe more slowly. Sweat dribbled down her sides. From the front desk came the sound of a phone ringing. A low groaning sound came from the rear of the building. A prisoner? A dog outside? An echo of her own fear? Through the small high windows on either side of Grimm she could see no clouds, no stars, only darkness.
“Sheriff,” she said, more evenly, “there is only one copy of my signature in Arizona, and that is on a contract I signed with Bishop Raymond Dowd of Mission San Leo.”
“Bishop!” he exploded. “Well, lady, I can’t speak for California, but here in Arizona bishops of the Church don’t go around forging papers.”
“Bishop Dowd has the only copy of my signature,” she repeated, her voice controlled now.
“And a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church certainly could not steal into this office unnoticed and file away his forged form.”