by J. A. Jance
“Cutting my parents to pieces is not routine!” Samantha objected. “And their deaths are anything but unexplained! In fact, they’re perfectly understandable. They died in an automobile accident.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Joanna explained. “The autopsy will tell us whether or not your father was suffering some kind of physical impairment that might have interfered with his being able to operate a vehicle in a safe manner. Toxicology screens will let us know if he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the incident.”
“That’s a laugh,” Samantha returned. “My father never had a drop of liquor in his life!”
“But he may have been overmedicated,” Joanna said. “That’s something that happens fairly often with the elderly. They take so many medications from so many doctors that they end up operating under the influence of drugs without even knowing it.”
“If you want to check for toxic substances,” Samantha advised, “check out my sister. That woman is poison—absolute poison. She’s the one who turned my parents against me, by the way.”
“Are you saying you were at odds with your parents?” Joanna asked. It was an innocuous question, asked more because it seemed a polite way to keep the conversation going rather than with any expectation of an answer. To her surprise, Samantha Edwards’s features seemed to collapse in response to that solitary question.
“Yes,” she said, her voice breaking into a wrenching sob. “As a matter of fact, my parents and I were estranged,” she managed. “I never meant for it to happen. I was trying my best to fix it, really I was.”
Caught momentarily off guard by Samantha’s unexpected outburst of grief, Joanna searched in her top drawer until she found a box of tissues which she pushed across the desktop toward her weeping guest. At that same moment, Joanna’s cell phone, lying directly in front of her, began to ring insistently. Joanna could see from the readout that the caller was Jaime Carbajal. As much as Joanna wanted to pick up the phone, she couldn’t very well do that in the face of Samantha Edwards’s very real need. Instead she let the call go to voice mail.
“I’m very sorry for your loss, Ms. Edwards,” Joanna said quietly once Samantha seemed to have regained control of her emotions. “And I’m doubly sorry that you and your parents were having difficulties at the time of their deaths. That makes something like this that much more traumatic and harder to bear.”
Nodding, Samantha collected another handful of tissues and mopped her eyes. “It does make it worse,” she agreed.
“But I can’t understand why your sister would tell my detective you were dead,” Joanna said. “Why would she make such an outrageous claim?”
“It’s a long story,” Samantha said sadly. “I suppose it’s because I am dead to her. I have been for a long time, ever since we were in high school—since she was a senior and I was a sophomore.”
So this was a family fracture of long standing, Joanna realized. The brouhaha over the missing next-of-kin notification was merely the tip of the iceberg. The challenge for Sheriff Joanna Brady would be handling this unfortunate incident while, at the same time, keeping her department out of the cross fire between two perpetually feuding siblings.
“Were your parents in good health?” Joanna asked.
“As far as I know they were,” Samantha said. “For someone their ages, that is. But, as I said earlier, we’d had some disagreements in recent years. Once Sandy and her husband moved back here from Texas, they stayed in closer touch with the folks than I did, so I may not have been completely in the loop with everything that was going on with them. Why do you ask?”
Joanna had just come from Lenny Sunderson’s burned-out mobile home. It was possible that the man’s failing health had caused him to choose suicide as a way of avoiding being more of a problem to his already overburdened family. It seemed likely that Alfred Beasley’s plunge from the Montezuma Pass parking lot fell in that same category.
“Would someone have told you if they weren’t?” Joanna asked.
Samantha thought about that for a moment. “Probably not,” she said finally. “I would have had to find it out on my own, just like I did with this. One of the neighbors might have let on to me eventually. That’s what happened this morning. After I saw the item on the news, I called Maggie Morris. She’s lived next door to my folks for the past thirty years. She was the one who told me Sandy was already here in Bisbee last night.”
Joanna decided to steer away from that particular topic. “What was the rift with your sister all about?” she asked. “What went wrong between you?”
“The usual, I suppose,” Samantha said. “We both fell in love with the same guy, Norbert Jessup. Sandy was hoping he’d invite her to the senior prom. He asked me instead.”
In terms of jaw-dropping, now it was Joanna’s turn. She knew Norbert Jessup. He had run a family-owned construction company in town for as long as she could remember. Maybe in his high school days he’d been a hot item, but now he was a butt-sprung old guy with a dual reputation, as a hard worker and as a hard drinker. He was also known for being a bit of a brawler when he’d had one too many. And for as long as Joanna had known Norbert, she’d also known his wife. Sally Jessup was a legitimate character in her own right, a cigar-smoking, tough-talking dame who handled the office-work part of Norbert’s various business enterprises and kept a notoriously close rein on her husband as well. It was astonishing to think that a dissolute old rogue like him could possibly be the cause of a decades-long feud between Alfred and Martha Beasley’s two daughters.
“So what kind of difficulty did you have with your parents?”
Samantha shrugged. “Once Sandy came back here with her new husband, our parents wanted the two of us to kiss and make up. I told them no way.”
“But didn’t you say earlier that you were trying your best to solve the problem? How exactly did you expect to accomplish that?”
Samantha looked away and didn’t answer.
“What were you doing to fix it?” Joanna pressed. “Did you come down to visit them? Write them letters? Did you ever tell your sister you were sorry and get rebuffed?”
Samantha Edwards squirmed uncomfortably in her seat. “I prayed about it,” she said at last. “I prayed that our quarrel would be healed, but it wasn’t.”
“It’s not too late,” Joanna pointed out.
“What do you mean?”
“It may be too late for your parents to know about it, but it’s not too late for you and Sandy to bury the hatchet,” Joanna said. “Praying about it is a good thing, but my mother-in-law is always telling me, ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ Maybe instead of praying and waiting around for a miracle to happen, you should be actively doing something about it.”
In actual fact, those words of wisdom came from Eva Lou Brady, Joanna’s first mother-in-law, not her somewhat troublesome current one. After Andy’s death, Joanna’s close relationship with his parents had never faltered. Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady had remained an important part of her life and her in-laws of choice regardless of Joanna’s marital status. Their commonsense approach to life had helped see Joanna through more than one serious crisis, but in this instance, Eva Lou’s words didn’t seem to resonate very well with Samantha Edwards.
The woman’s narrow features hardened. “Sheriff Brady, how dare you imply this is all my fault. You don’t even know me, yet you think you can decide I’m the one who’s supposed to fix it? Why? Sandy sure as hell didn’t pick up the phone and call me when she found out what had happened. She knew about the folks yesterday afternoon—soon enough for her to drive down and be here last night. Did she let me know? Not on your life.”
Joanna sighed. Isn’t this where I came in? she wondered. Her phone rang again. Once again Jaime Carbajal was calling.
“Look,” Joanna said. “I’m very sorry to interrupt, but I’m going to have to take this call.” She picked up the phone. “Hang on,” she said into the receiver, then she looked back at Samantha
. “Are you going to be staying in town?”
Samantha nodded.
“When you go out, then, please stop by the desk in the outer office and leave your local-contact information. That way, if one of my investigators needs to speak to you, we’ll know how to reach you.”
“All right,” Samantha said, rising to go. “Thank you,” she added. “You really have been very kind.”
Just doing my job, Joanna thought.
She went back to the phone. “Jaime? What’s up?”
“We need assistance,” he said.
“Where are you?”
“Out in the middle of nowhere,” Detective Carbajal grumbled. “I didn’t want to bring anyone else along in case this turned out to be some kind of wild-goose chase. Luis assured me he remembered exactly where the body was and could lead me right to it. That didn’t quite happen, but we’re here now, and it wasn’t a wild-goose chase.”
Up to that very moment, Joanna had hoped that somehow Jaime’s nephew would have been mistaken—that whatever he had found and assumed to be human remains would turn out to be something else—anything else.
“You did find a body, then?” she confirmed.
“What’s left of a body,” Jaime replied. “The skull’s all I’ve been able to see so far. There are probably additional remains, but they’re stuck inside what’s left of two torn garbage bags along with about fifty pounds of wet sand. If Doc Winfield is coming out, have him bring along some kind of body board. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to lift this mess without losing some of it. And it’s going to take a four-wheel-drive vehicle to get in and out of here. No roads.”
“If there aren’t any roads to the site, how did the bags get there?”
“I’d say the bags were left somewhere else and got washed here during last night’s rainstorm.”
“Doc Winfield’s van doesn’t have four-wheel drive,” Joanna pointed out.
“We can’t carry it by hand,” Jaime said. “What about Dave Hollicker? We’re most likely talking skeletal remains, rather than a corpse. I doubt the M.E.’s presence is required. CSI can probably handle it.”
The Crime Scene Investigation unit at the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department was limited, to say the least. It consisted of two officers—Dave Hollicker, the officially designated crime scene investigator, and Casey Ledford, the latent fingerprint tech. In practice, the two shared lab space and worked together as a team more often than not. In this particular case, if retrieving this set of remains was going to be as strenuous as Jaime was hinting, it was probably a good idea if Joanna sent Dave. He was several decades younger than George Winfield and in much better physical shape.
“I’ll give Dave a call,” Joanna said. “Can you give me your exact location?”
“We’re about two miles north of Naco, off Wilson Road and on the west side of Greenbush Draw. Tell him if he comes due west from there, we’ll hear him coming and wave him in.”
Once off the phone with Jaime, Joanna tried calling Dave’s extension. When there wasn’t any answer she got up, let herself out the back door, and walked across the steamy parking lot to the department’s barbed-wire-enclosed impound lot. There, as expected, she found Dave bent under the crumpled hood of the almost unrecognizable hunk of shredded metal that had once been Alfred Beasley’s Buick.
“Find anything?” Joanna asked.
Dave straightened up and cleaned his hands with a paper towel. Then he wiped the sweat off his brow as well. “Not much, mechanically speaking,” he said. “Other than a set of very bald tires, there’s nothing amiss. I did find something interesting, though. It was in the glove box, which somehow managed to stay closed the whole time the vehicle was tumbling down the mountain.”
Walking over to a rolling tool cart, Dave picked up a see-through evidence bag, which he handed to Joanna. Inside was a single piece of paper covered with handwritten script done in shaky pen and ink:
To Whom It May Concern: Martha and I are done. My mother had Alzheimer’s. She was helpless at the end. I know it’s coming for me, too. Martha doesn’t want to be alone, and I don’t blame her. We’ve decided to go together. Tell the girls we love them. Tell them good-bye. That’s my only real regret in life, and Martha’s, too—that our daughters couldn’t be friends.
The note was signed “Alfred Beasley” and “Martha Beasley.”
When Joanna finished reading the note, she found herself blinking back tears. Alfred and Martha had, indeed, succeeded in going together. She wished she had known the contents of the note prior to her emotional meeting with Samantha Edwards.
“I’m no homicide detective, but it all looks like a pretty straightforward case of suicide pact to me,” Dave said. “I called Ernie’s cell and left a message about what I’d found.”
Joanna returned the bag to Dave. “You’ve already put this in the evidence log?”
“You bet.”
“So now I’ve got something else for you. Jaime Carbajal is out in the desert down near Naco with the remains of what will probably turn out to be a homicide victim. The skull fell out of some plastic garbage bags, and we’re assuming the rest of the bones are still inside. He says you’ll need to take along a body board of some kind. He also says you’ll need four-wheel drive to get there.”
“Busy Saturday,” Dave observed as he started putting away his tools.
That’s the truth, Joanna thought. Overtime pay for this weekend alone was going to be off the charts.
“There’s one thing more,” she added, after giving Dave Jaime’s detailed directions. “Do you happen to know any arson investigators?”
“Not up close and personal. Why?”
“Because that’s the other thing that’s going on this morning—a fatality mobile home fire down by Double Adobe. Nobody has been able to get close enough to tell for sure, but the man we’re assuming died in the blaze was in poor health and confined to a wheelchair.”
“Another possible suicide?” Dave asked.
“That’s what I’d like to know. So would the guy’s landlord, Tom McCracken.”
“That jerk?” Dave returned.
“You know him?”
“I helped out on a couple of his evictions. He’s a real piece of work.”
“A politically well-connected piece of work,” Joanna countered. “And that’s why I want to make sure we have certifiable experts handling the fire investigation. I don’t want anything missed.”
“I’m pretty sure the Department of Public Safety has some arson investigators on staff—one in Tucson and maybe a couple in Phoenix. I think we can send through a request for one of those.”
“Thanks,” Joanna said. “I’ll look into it.”
Joanna made her way back into the building through the public entrance, letting the people who ran the front end of the building know she was on the premises. When she reached the office area at the back of the building, however, she could hear Frank Montoya’s raised voice.
“This is absolutely outrageous. You can’t possibly expect us to pay this. It’s highway robbery!”
Joanna’s chief deputy was anything but excitable. Curious about the cause of this unaccustomed uproar, Joanna made her way into his office and waited in the doorway while he finished up with a phone call.
“What?” she asked when he slammed down the receiver.
“That!” he exclaimed. He sailed a piece of paper—a receipt or a bill of some kind—across his desk.
Joanna plucked it out of the air as it flew past. Ordinarily Frank would have congratulated her on making a good catch. Today he was in no mood for pleasantries.
“They know they have us over a barrel,” he said. “So they’re sticking it to us.”
It was a bill—from Ajax Towing in Sierra Vista. When Joanna saw the figure written in pen at the bottom of the page, she couldn’t believe it, either. “Four thousand five hundred fifty-three dollars and sixty cents? For towing?”
Frank Montoya was Joanna’s budgetary
watchdog. He was the one who tried to make sure her department stayed within its fiscal means. He was the one who watched the payroll expenditures, letting Joanna know when overtime hours were outstripping the money designated for that purpose. No wonder Frank was taking this very personally.
“They claim it took two drivers and two trucks fifteen hours to drag the Beasleys’ car back up the mountain so they could bring it here,” Frank said. “They say because the accident happened inside a portion of the national park system, they had to comply with federal rules and regulations, blah, blah, blah. And when they delivered it to the impound lot this morning, the new girl out in the public office signed off on it. They say her signature on their form means we accepted the billing at the time the vehicle was delivered, and now we’re stuck with it.”
“But it’s over forty-five hundred dollars!” Joanna objected. “That’s ridiculous. We can’t afford that. Think about it. That’s enough money to pay a good portion of the jail’s monthly food bill. Or to buy ten or so brand-new Kevlar vests.”
Frank nodded bleakly. “Or to keep gas in a pair of patrol cars for a couple of weeks.”
“And all because poor Alfred Beasley decided to end it all,” Joanna said.
Her chief deputy’s face brightened slightly at those words. “He did?” Frank asked. “We know this for sure?”
“We’re reasonably sure,” Joanna told him. “Dave Hollicker found what sounds like a handwritten suicide note in the glove box of the Beasleys’ Buick. It’ll have to be verified, of course, probably by a certified handwriting expert, but in the note Alfred said that he was worried about the possible onset of Alzheimer’s and that he and Martha wanted to go together so she wouldn’t be left behind. That sounds like a suicide pact to me.”
“It may give us an out,” Frank observed.
“What do you mean?”