Tombstone Courage

by J. A. Jance

  “Competition?” Joanna frowned, offended by the idea that someone as seemingly upstanding as Burton Kimball might be two-timing his wife.

  “Ivy,” Linda Kimball answered simply. “He’s always worried about her more than anyone else in the whole world. He’s always tried to take care of her, to protect her.”

  “You don’t mean…?”

  “Oh, no,” Linda answered quickly. “Nothing nasty or improper—nothing like that. If he hadn’t cared about her so much, I’m sure he wouldn’t have blabbed to her about Harold wanting to make a settlement. And then, abracadabra, before Harold can make good on what he said, before he can change any of his other arrangements, Harold Patterson is murdered. And who benefits from those changes not being made? Ivy, that’s who! No one but Ivy.”

  “You think your husband is lying about what happened? You think he’s deliberately shifting blame to himself in order to protect her?”

  “No,” Linda Kimball returned somberly. “I think he really believes he did it. He was drunk and doesn’t remember, so now he thinks he was functioning in a blackout. No, he’s absolutely convinced of his own guilt. If I’d been smarter, I would have seen it coming a long time ago.”

  “Seen what coming?” Joanna asked, still in the dark.

  “Don’t you understand?” Linda Kimball pleaded, her voice cracking with suppressed emotion. “I’m afraid. Scared to death. And I don’t know what to do.”

  “Please, Linda,” Joanna said, shaking her head. “You must be leaving something out. I don’t understand what you’re talking about, what you’re afraid of.”

  “That if it comes to a choice between Ivy and me, he’ll choose her.”

  “Come on, be serious. That’s ridiculous. You’re married to the man, for God’s sake. You’re the mother of his children. Ivy is just Burt’s cousin. How could he possibly choose her over you?”

  “If Ernie arrests him, if Burt…How is it they say that on TV? Fall? Rap? That’s it, the rap. If Burt takes the rap, Ivy is home free. And if it came to that, I don’t think Burt would lift a finger to help himself. He as good as told me so tonight in his office. And what happens then? Whoever really murdered Harold Patterson gets away with it, and all because Burton is looking out for his precious Ivy!”

  “Linda,” Joanna began, “believe me, that’s not going to happen.”

  “Oh, yeah? I can even tell you how. Burton says that since he was blind drunk at the time it happened, the worst any judge in the state would give him is probably second degree. He’s sure he’ll be able to plea-bargain that down to simple manslaughter.”

  “You’re serious about this, then, aren’t you?” Joanna said, with sudden understanding.

  Linda nodded. “I’m serious all right, and so is Burt. He loves the kids and me, I’m sure of it. Being abandoned when he was a baby. Feeling like, except for Ivy Patterson, he was all alone in the world. Those things that happened to him when he was a child still have a powerful hold on him. I’m afraid he’d sacrifice Chris and Kim and me in a minute to save her. We wouldn’t starve, I suppose. I could always go back to teaching school, and the church would help us. But still…”

  They sat quietly for a few moments while the draining dishwasher whirred noisily in the kitchen. Jennifer had long since loaded the dishes and disappeared into her own room.

  “Why did you come to me with this?” Joanna asked finally. “Ernie Carpenter is the detective on the case. Why didn’t you go straight to him?”

  Linda shrugged. “I don’t know. I already talked to you about it this afternoon. It just seemed easier. I thought maybe another woman would understand better. A man might jump to the wrong conclusion. He might think something awful was going on between Ivy and Burton. It’s just not like that. My husband is a very honorable man. After what’s happened with Uncle Harold with Holly, it would kill Burton to have people thinking those same kinds of thoughts about him.”

  Linda glanced at her watch, then hurriedly rose to her feet. “I’d better get going,” she said. “Those meetings hardly ever last much over an hour. I don’t want him being suspicious.”

  “You still haven’t said what you expect me to do.”

  “I thought if I could get you to see through to what’s really going on, then maybe you could help keep Ernie on track. I wonder if maybe that boyfriend of Ivy’s has anything to do with it. Maybe they’re getting married in such a hurry so they can’t be forced to testify against one another.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Joanna said.

  “Well, I did,” Linda Kimball returned grimly. “And I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand still and let them get away with it.”

  “Ernie Carpenter’s a pro,” Joanna said reassuringly. “A real pro. If anyone can find out what really happened, Ernie can do it.”

  Linda Kimball straightened her shoulders. “Good,” she said, sounding somewhat heartened. “I’d better be going then.”

  After Linda left, Joanna forgot her intention to clean the refrigerator. Instead, she returned to the living room, where she sat alone for some time, wondering about the complicated relationship between Burton Kimball and his cousin Ivy. What was the tie between them that would make Linda afraid her husband would sacrifice his whole life—his career and his family—to protect Ivy Patterson? Was it nothing more than an innocent, brotherly-type love, or was it something much more malignant?

  Around nine Jenny slipped out of her room and sat down on the couch next to her mother. The child was wearing her flannel nightgown, one Grandma Brady had made for her at Christmas the previous year. At the time the gown was new, it had been so long that the hem had skimmed the floor with every step. Now it barely covered the child’s bony ankles. It was a shock for Joanna to realize how much her daughter had grown in such a short time.

  For the first time in weeks, Jenny snuggled close and let her mother wrap one arm around her.

  “Who was that lady?” she asked.

  “A woman from town,” Joanna answered, pulling Jenny closer. “Her name is Linda Kimball.”

  “What did she want?”

  “She’s worried about her husband. She’s afraid he’s going to say he did something he didn’t do, just to keep someone else from getting in trouble.”

  “But why did she come here?” Jenny asked.

  “I guess she came to talk to me because she didn’t want to talk to Ernie Carpenter. There were things she had to say that were upsetting to her; things she wanted to talk over with another woman instead of with a man.”

  “She wanted a woman detective instead of a man?” Jenny asked.

  Joanna smiled. “So far Cochise County doesn’t have any women detectives.”

  “But they do have a woman sheriff,” Jenny commented thoughtfully.

  “That’s right,” Joanna agreed. “Cochise County does have one of those.”

  Jenny nodded and then got up. “It’s late. I’d better go to bed. Good night, Mom.” Jenny leaned over and kissed her mother on the cheek.

  “Sleep tight,” Joanna managed to reply.

  She was glad Jenny didn’t turn and look back at her from the bedroom door, glad she didn’t see that her mother’s eyes had filled with tears—tears of gratitude.

  Which were very nice for a change.

  Thirty

  IT WAS ten o’clock before Joanna sat down at the dining room table to look at the stack of mail Kristin Marsten had dumped on her desk early that afternoon.

  One of the first pieces of paper Joanna picked up happened to be her own typed statement—the one concerning the election-night traffic incident, the one she had gone to the Justice Center to sign on Wednesday morning. That seemed so long ago now—so much had happened in between—as to be almost ancient history. To say nothing of unnecessary.

  Alvin Bernard, Bisbee’s chief of police, had left Joanna a message earlier that afternoon telling her that a decision had been made to cite Holly Patterson for driving without a license and negligent driving rather than veh
icular assault. Joanna didn’t care to contemplate why the decision had been made that particular way, or how it could have been made at all in view of the fact that her own statement had never been taken into consideration by the investigators, but she decided that wasn’t her problem. She tossed the statement aside and went back to the mail.

  As Sue Rolles had indicated, Martin Sanders’ letter of resignation was concealed in among all the rest, sandwiched between an inner-office memo listing the jail menus for the following week and a notice of the next board of supervisors’ meeting, which, as a county administrator, Joanna would now be required to attend. She read through the letter of resignation twice. It said very little, only that for personal reasons he was resigning immediately. For the next week and a half, he would be taking the remainder of his accrued vacation.

  “Thanks a lot, Martin,” she muttered, “maybe I can do you a favor sometime.”

  She took out her calendar and made a note of the supervisors’ meeting. On the bottom of that notice, someone had hand-changed the routing, crossing out R. Voland and replacing his name with J. Brady.

  At the very bottom of the stack was one of those eagle-decorated overnight mail packages that bore a Washington, D.C., postmark and no return address. Joanna tore it open.

  Inside she found a full-color catalog called Women Officers’ Mandatory Accessories and Notions of Santa Monica, California. WOMAN. Cute. In it she found pictures of stunning women with no subcutaneous fat and flawless teeth and nails. They looked as though they had never done a day’s work in their lives, but they were all outfitted in everything from female-proportioned Kevlar vests to lightweight weapons and listening devices. Most of the latter seemed designed to be concealed and carried on various female foundation garments. None of the price tags could be considered cheap, but Joanna conceded that the possibility of a comfortable Kevlar vest might be an important, life-saving investment.

  In addition to the catalog, Adam York’s CARE package contained two other items. One was a well-worn, dog-eared copy of a clearly outdated book. Entitled Officer Down, Code Three and written by someone named Pierce Brooks, the blue volume wasn’t a book Joanna had ever seen or heard of before. The ragged dustcover, complete with a picture of 1970s-era cops, showed its age, as did the original publication date of 1975.

  Puzzled as to why Adam York had sent her the book, but putting it aside for a moment, Joanna picked up the last item—Adam York’s DEA business card with a hand-scrawled note of congratulations on the back. She dialed the number listed on the card. After a strange series of clicks, the phone finally rang, and Adam York himself answered.

  “At this hour of the night, I was expecting an answering machine,” Joanna said with a laugh.

  “You got lucky. Through the wonders of phone-factory engineers, you can dial me in Tucson and speak to me in D.C. Isn’t technology wonderful?”

  “D.C.,” Joanna echoed. “That’s East Coast time, so it really is late. Sorry.”

  “Time’s relative. What’s up?”

  “I called to thank you for the package. I can see that a proportioned-to-fit vest is definitely in order. The one I wore today is way too long for my ribs. It rubs me raw in all the wrong places. But why the book?”

  “It’s used as a manual in police-officer-safety courses. Before you go take that class in Peoria, I want you to sit down and read the whole thing from cover to cover. It’s important.”

  “All right. I’ll do it, just as soon as things settle down a little bit around here.”

  “Do it sooner than that,” Adam York growled. “Until you get some training, you’re an accident waiting to happen. Now, how was your first full day?”

  “Let’s see now, two homicides—one old, one new—and one of my chief supervisors gave notice, but he’s on vacation for the duration. Other than that, I guess it was a pretty normal day.”

  “They didn’t give you much time to get your sea legs, did they?”

  “I’ll manage,” Joanna said, “but I do have a question for you. What, if anything, do you know about ex-cons from Russia?”

  Adam York’s voice suddenly turned serious. “Me, personally? Not that much. What do you want to know?”

  “I’ve evidently got one living right here in Cochise County,” Joanna said. “His name is Yuri Malakov. He’s been here for some time as an apparently law-abiding citizen, but he’s romantically involved with the daughter of one of my two victims.”

  “What makes you think he’s Russian ex-con?”

  “He is from Russia, for one thing. I already knew that about him, but this morning I happened to see him without his shirt. He has tattoos all over his upper body, mostly a cowboys-and-Indians motif. ‘Cowboy Sam’ is the only thing on it that’s written in English well enough so I could make it out.”

  “What else?”

  “What do you mean, what else?”

  “I mean what else can you remember about the tattoos?”

  “There were a couple of rattlesnakes, a hangman’s noose, a rodeo rider, and, I think, a rose. There may have been some other things, but I don’t necessarily remember them. Why? What’s so important about that?”

  “With all the problems we’ve been having with the Russian mafia, somebody over at the FBI is a known expert at decoding Russian prison tattoos,” Adam York answered shortly. “Let me check this out with him and see what he has to say. I’ll also get in touch with some guys I know at INS.”

  “I don’t think that’ll work,” Joanna said. “My guys already tried it that way from this end and were told hands off. So if you nose around about him, don’t say I sent you.”

  “And don’t you go wandering into any dark alleys with this character,” Adam York warned. “Those Russian mafiosi are dangerous as hell. And if he’s walking around wearing a hangman’s noose on his chest, you can pretty well figure he didn’t get sent up for stealing chicken feed.”

  When Joanna got off the phone, she retreated to her bedroom, taking both Officer Down and the People magazine along with her. She glanced at the book but put it aside. She was too tired for anything but the most mindless of articles.

  After hearing all the local fuss about the People story, Joanna was disappointed when she finally read it. There was some discussion of Holly Patterson, but the article focused more on Hollywood hypnotherapist Amy Baxter and several of her clients, all of whom had taken on their once abusive parents with sometimes greater and sometimes lesser degrees of financial success.

  Joanna’s last thought, as she put the magazine down and drifted off to sleep, was that some career choices were stranger than others.

  In the morning, she overslept. She was still sawing logs at seven when Jenny tapped on her bedroom door, poked her head inside, and said, “Mom, aren’t you awake yet? It’s late.”

  In a mad scramble, Joanna raced outside to feed and water the animals, then dived into the shower. She was still drying her hair when Jenny came back into the bathroom.

  “Do you want me to ride my bike down to catch the bus this morning?”

  “That would be a big help,” Joanna said. “It’s not going to look good if the new boss starts out by coming to work late.”

  Once again she wore one of Andy’s old T-shirts under the bulletproof vest. Then, expecting to spend most of the day in her office, she did pull on Eleanor Lathrop’s favorite, the pearl-gray skirt and blazer. The outfit gave her a dignified, businesslike look, and the blazer was roomy enough that both the Kevlar vest and Andy’s shoulder holster disappeared beneath it.

  Careful not to speed, Joanna drove to the Cochise County Justice Center and parked in her own designated spot. Armed with a newly assigned, push-button door code she had unearthed in the mail, she let herself into her office through the private back entrance. Propping the outside door open, she went back to the Eagle and retrieved her box of treasured office mementos. She had barely started unpacking them when the door to the reception area opened, and Dick Voland entered her office.

&nb
sp; Startled, he stopped short when he saw her. “I didn’t know you were here,” he said.

  “I came in the back way and decided to unpack,” she explained, holding Jenny’s Bible-school handprint plaque up to the light and rubbing some accumulated dust out of the ends of the tiny finger impressions. “What can I do for you?”

  Voland had lumbered into the room carrying an envelope, which he now attempted to shove into his shirt pocket. Pausing in the doorway, he seemed embarrassed, unsure of what to do next.

  “Did you need something?” Joanna prodded.

  He fumbled the envelope back out of his pocket and handed it over to Joanna. Her name was the only thing typewritten on the outside. “What is it?” she asked.

  “My letter of resignation,” Dick Voland answered. “Effective immediately.”

  Without opening it, Joanna dropped the envelope onto her desk. Stunned, she backed up far enough to find her way into the leather chair behind her. “Why?” she asked.

  “Have you read your mail yet?”

  Joanna glanced at the new stack of mail Kristin had placed on her desk. “Not yet. I wanted to unpack first. Why? What’s in there now that I should have read?”

  Voland reached out, pawed through the pile on her desk, pulled out a newspaper, and tossed it down in front of her. “You probably ought to read this,” he said gruffly.

  Joanna glanced down at a copy of that day’s Arizona Sun. “The whole paper?” she asked. “Or some article in particular?”

  He thumbed the paper open to the second section, the one that focused on statewide news. With the paper folded in half, Joanna could only see the bottom half of the page. Just below the fold was a two-column wide, two-line headline that read, OLD COPS VS. NEW SHERIFF/NO CONFIDENCE, by Arizona Sun staff writer Sue Rolles.

  Joanna quickly scanned the article: “The people of Cochise County may have elected Arizona’s first-ever female sheriff on Election Day last Tuesday, but that doesn’t mean long-time law-enforcement veterans of the County Sheriff’s Department are happy with the outcome.