Damage Control

by J. A. Jance

  “Good,” Joanna said. “Mr. Dietrich shouldn’t be too hard to miss. Keep an eye on the parking lot,” she added to Deb. “It would be a shame if he tried skipping out by some other door.”

  The ploy worked. Within minutes two separate people came to collect the sales representatives. As soon as they were safely out of sight, the double doors glided open and Don Dietrich himself marched into the lobby. He was a tall, painfully thin man with his sparse gray hair molded into an appalling comb-over.

  “What’s going on here?” he demanded.

  Joanna once again produced her ID wallet and showed it to him. “As I told your receptionist, we’re investigating a homicide—the death of one of your clients, Wanda Mappin. Since you’ve been unable to return my investigator’s calls, Detective Howell and I decided to stop by and see you in person. We could do this here, or, if you’d rather—”

  “Come along,” Dietrich said abruptly, heading back toward the double doors. “This way. We’ll go to my office.” He turned back to the receptionist. “Hold all my calls, Cindy,” he barked over his shoulder. “This shouldn’t take long.”

  He led them down a short hallway to an expansive and well-appointed corner office. He gestured them into visitor’s chairs and seated himself behind a magnificent polished wood desk. By then he seemed to have gathered his resources.

  “You’re right,” he said smoothly. “I’m sorry to say, I’ve been far too busy with critical matters here, and I haven’t been able to get back to”—he glanced around his desk and settled on a yellow message form before finishing the sentence—“to Detective Carbajal, I believe it was. Thankfully, though I’ve managed to contact Ms. Mappin, Wanda’s mother, to express my sincere condolences at her loss. Losing a child, even a special-needs child, is always terribly traumatic. I’ve asked her to stay in touch and keep me apprised of where and when Wanda’s services will be held. We’ll want to send flowers, at the very least.”

  “Of course,” Joanna said. “I should think so.”

  Don Dietrich’s bland facade hardened a little. “What do you mean by that?”

  “When an organization like yours is charged with caring for vulnerable people, I would think you would take that responsibility very seriously, and when you lose them—”

  “Sheriff Brady,” he interrupted. “Let me point out that as soon as Wanda Mappin missed that first midnight bed count, our people immediately reported her missing. We also launched an extensive search of the neighborhood surrounding Holbrook House. We utilized a search and rescue group with dogs and people and canvassed every inch of a three-square-mile area. As you said, these are exceedingly vulnerable people. From time to time, a few of them do wander off. When that happens, we treat it very seriously because we understand the risks. Special-needs people are often loving and trusting, which leaves them terribly susceptible to some of the evils this wicked world has to offer.”

  “Yes,” Joanna said. “I’d have to agree that being trussed up, taped into a plastic bag, and then having your skull beaten in is pretty evil.”

  Don Dietrich paled. “As I said to Ms. Mappin, we’re outraged and appalled by what happened to poor little Wanda. It is a tragedy in every sense of the word.”

  Little? Joanna thought. Wanda Mappin was a size twenty. You didn’t even know her, you worthless jerk!

  “So in the course of their missing persons investigation, did detectives from Tucson PD speak to people at the group home—to staff members and clients?”

  “I’m sure we made our staff members available for questioning, although I don’t know for sure whether or not any of them were actually interviewed,” Dietrich said quickly. “As for our clients, I doubt detectives would have been allowed access to them. We have an obligation to protect client privacy, something else we take very seriously.”

  “How many clients do you tend to lose in any given year?” Joanna asked.

  Dietrich’s eyes turned stony, but he answered smoothly enough. “As I said earlier, clients do wander away from time to time, but we usually find them somewhere in the near neighborhood and are able to bring them back.”

  “What about Wayne Hamm?” Joanna asked.

  “Who?”

  “Wayne Leroy Hamm,” Joanna repeated. “He was another one of your clients—a friend of Wanda’s, we believe—who went missing from a place called Warwick House—another Flannigan Foundation facility—on May 12, almost two months after Wanda disappeared. He, too, has never been found.”

  Dietrich frowned in concentration. “Now that you mention it, I do seem to remember the name. Again, another very unfortunate circumstance.”

  “Is it possible there’s a pattern here, Mr. Dietrich?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Could it be that some of the people who work for your organization are in fact victimizing the very people they’re supposed to be caring for and protecting?”

  “That’s an outrageous accusation,” Dietrich declared. “Our caregivers are all highly qualified. Our employees go through a rigorous security check before they’re ever hired, and we offer the best in-house continuing-education training program in the caregiving business.”

  “Were Wanda Mappin and Wayne Hamm ever in the same facility?” Joanna asked.

  “No!” Dietrich said categorically. “We don’t have any coed kinds of facilities. Many of our clients may be developmentally disabled, but their hormones aren’t necessarily limited in the same fashion. We have the occasional picnic, trips to the Desert Museum, and other supervised social events, but staying in the same facility is an absolute no-no.”

  “Is it possible that Wayne Hamm and Wanda Mappin might have met at one of those ‘social occasions’ and become friends?”

  “I don’t know that for sure, but if they were clients at the same time, I don’t suppose it would be out of the question, no.”

  “Why, then, would some of your people—your well-trained caregivers—tell Lucinda Mappin that it wasn’t possible for Wanda to have a friend named Wayne, that he was someone she had made up?”

  “Someone told her that?”

  Joanna nodded.

  “I’m sure Ms. Mappin was going through a very difficult time,” Dietrich said. “It’s possible that she’s simply mistaken. She might have been told one thing and have understood something else.”

  “It’s also possible she was lied to,” Joanna said.

  Don Dietrich leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “If you’re going to make these kinds of wild accusations, I believe this interview is over.”

  “Yes,” Joanna agreed, rising to her feet. “I believe it is, but don’t be surprised if you see a lot of my investigators and me in the next little while, Mr. Dietrich. We’re going to be combing through your records, talking to your people.”

  “Not without a warrant.”

  “Oh, we’ll have warrants, all right,” Joanna returned. “This is a homicide investigation. Any expectation of patient confidentiality went away the moment someone bashed Wanda’s skull in and stuffed her into those two garbage bags. I don’t know for sure where she was murdered, but her body was found in Cochise County. That means I’m going to find out who did it and why. You may not be overly concerned about who did this to one of your most vulnerable clients, but I am. As sheriff, that’s my job. Believe me, I take that responsibility the same way you take yours, Mr. Dietrich—very seriously.”

  CHAPTER 12

  “HE WAS LESS THAN HELPFUL,” DEB COMMENTED AS THEY WALKED back to Joanna’s Crown Victoria.

  “I noticed,” Joanna said. “Where to now?”

  Deb glanced at her watch. “It’s a little past one. How about if we try Home Depot next? Larry Wolfe works at a store that’s just off Broadway, the one at El Con Mall. Want me to drive?”

  Joanna nodded and climbed into the passenger seat. With the midday sun bearing down on them, the car was like an oven. Joanna was grateful for the Civvie’s downscale cloth seats. In the fierce heat, leather
would have been impossible. As they drove from the airport into town, with the air-conditioning struggling to gain headway, Joanna picked up her notebook and paged through it until she found the place where she had jotted down the Tucson PD case numbers for Wayne Hamm’s disappearance and for Wanda Mappin’s as well. Moments later, with the help of directory assistance, she was on the phone introducing herself to a records clerk for Tucson PD.

  “The investigating officer assigned to Wanda Mappin’s case is Detective Ramsey,” the clerk told Joanna in answer to her question. “Detective Rebecca Ramsey. Do you need her number?”

  “Sure,” Joanna said. “Thanks. And then I’ll need to ask about a second case—another missing person.”

  “Which one?”

  “Wayne Leroy Hamm? He disappeared in May of this year.”

  Joanna heard a keyboard clicking in the background. “Here it is,” the clerk said. “That case was assigned to Detective Maldonado—Richard Maldonado.”

  “Do you have a phone number for him?”

  The clerk sighed. “Sorry, Sheriff Brady,” she said. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to reach him. Period. Rick retired on July first of this year. Unfortunately, he died on July fourth. Self-inflicted gunshot wound. His wife left him.”

  Four brief sentences, Joanna thought, holding a whole lifetime’s worth of tragedy.

  “Who’s handling Detective Maldonado’s cases, then?” she asked.

  “The active ones have all been transferred to other detectives. But Mr. Hamm’s case is a couple of months old now, and it’s also relatively cold. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been reassigned to anyone in particular.”

  It took another few minutes before Joanna was able to reach Detective Ramsey by phone.

  “I heard your people had located the remains,” Becky Ramsey said. “I figured I’d be hearing from someone on this before long. I have Wanda Mappin’s case file right here on my desk. I pulled it first thing this morning.”

  “So you remember it, then?” Joanna asked.

  “Wanda’s mother has called me once a week ever since it happened, but I’d remember Wanda Mappin even without the case file,” Becky said. “I have a cousin named Sally who’s also developmentally disabled and probably has a lot of the same issues Wanda did. Sally’s one of the lucky ones. Her parents are still able to keep her at home. Everyone kept telling them that Sally needed to be institutionalized, but my Aunt Jane absolutely refused. It hasn’t been easy for them, but I’ve always respected that decision. Dealing with Wanda’s case brought me face-to-face with the reality of how those places work. Now I respect my aunt and uncle that much more.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you study the Flannigan Foundation Web site, they claim to provide their clients with quality care in a ‘comfortable, homelike atmosphere.’ The words paint a pretty picture. Pardon me if I’m not convinced.”

  “Did you visit Holbrook House, the place where Wanda Mappin lived?” Joanna asked.

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you,” Detective Ramsey said bitterly. “Logic dictates that most missing persons investigations start from where the person lived and where he or she was last seen. When I tried to gain access to Wanda Mappin’s place of residence, I was turned down cold. According to their rules and regs, having outside visitors of any kind is an absolute no-no due to client confidentiality considerations. I was told I could interview employees but only off-site, and I did so. What I wasn’t allowed to do was to have any kind of interaction with Wanda’s housemates, even though they might well have had some knowledge of when and why she disappeared.”

  “Couldn’t you have gotten a warrant?” Joanna asked.

  “Tried that,” Becky said, “but it didn’t work. My supervisor shot it down. Told me we didn’t have jurisdiction.”

  “Jurisdiction or not, you’d think the people from Flannigan Foundation would have bent over backward to help you. Why didn’t they? Are they hiding something?”

  “That’s pretty much what I decided,” Detective Ramsey answered.

  “What?”

  “I suspect a lot of human warehousing goes on in places like that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Docile clients that don’t cause trouble are easily ignored. As for the troublemakers? I wouldn’t be surprised if the caregivers tend to keep those folks overmedicated and zoned out of their gourds to the point of being comatose. It would make them easier to handle.”

  “Which category did Wanda Mappin fall into?”

  “Definitely the second one.”

  Joanna was taken aback. “Really?” she asked. “Wanda a troublemaker? From talking to her mother, I would have thought Wanda would fall into the sweetness-and-light category.”

  “You can’t always trust mothers,” Detective Ramsey observed. “They’re blinded by love, so all they see is the best in their kids no matter what. Betty Saroyan is the one who gave me the lowdown on Wanda.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “The housemother at Holbrook House. Betty was the only person from Flannigan who agreed to see me, and the two of us had several long talks. She told me that there were times when Wanda was docile and cooperative, but if you happened to cross her or if something made her mad, she could turn into a hundred eighty pounds of pure trouble. She was also something of an escape artist.”

  “She was able to get out? From what Lucinda said, that sounded impossible.”

  “Mothers don’t always know best,” Becky observed. “Wanda evidently got out time and again. Betty said that sometimes she made it back home on her own. Other times they’d have to send out a search party. They usually found her wandering in the near neighborhood without ever having to report her missing. The only incident where they went so far as to call in an actual report was the last time it happened, when she took off and didn’t come back.”

  “And ended up dead in a pair of duct-taped trash bags a hundred miles away,” Joanna added.

  Becky nodded. “I’m sure her mother is devastated, but family members usually prefer knowing the worst to not knowing anything.”

  “That’s probably the case,” Joanna agreed. “Lucinda Mappin came down to Bisbee yesterday and identified some of her daughter’s effects. She also mentioned a friend of Wanda’s, someone named Wayne. She wasn’t able to provide any details but she said Wayne had disappeared and that his being gone had Wanda upset and out of sorts.”

  “Oh, yes,” Becky said. “I remember the Wayne part of the story and the fact that Wanda had complained to her mother that he was gone. The whole bit reminded me of that old Jimmy Stewart movie, the one where his character can see an enormous rabbit that no one else can see. But after Lucinda mentioned it to me, I did ask Mrs. Saroyan about it. She claimed she’d never heard of anyone by that name, either in Flannigan Foundation or out of it. She wondered if maybe Wayne was someone Wanda had met when she was out on one of her illicit jaunts. I checked on this mysterious Wayne character to the best of my ability and finally gave it up as a lost cause.”

  “What if I told you we’ve now uncovered a second missing person case involving a Flannigan Foundation client?” Joanna asked.

  “Another one?” Becky asked. “Who is it and when did this happen?”

  “The guy’s name is Wayne Leroy Hamm. He was reported missing from a Flannigan Foundation group home called Warwick House off South Swan and East Twenty-fourth. That was on May twelfth.”

  “You think this may be Wanda’s mysterious Wayne?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  “But how is this possible? I was already investigating a case involving a Flannigan Foundation client. How come I never heard one word about it? Who’s working the case?”

  “It was assigned to someone named Detective Maldonado.”

  Becky let out her breath in what sounded like a whoosh of frustration. “Not good,” she said. “Not good at all.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not nice to
speak ill of the dead,” Becky replied, “so let’s just say Rick was a troubled guy. If he was handed this case in May, it probably didn’t get much attention because by then Rick Maldonado had lots of other fish to fry.”

  “I know,” Joanna said. “The records clerk told me what happened to him.”

  “Would you like me to take a look at his case book and give you a call back?”

  “Please,” Joanna said. “I’d really appreciate it.”

  “Give me your number.”

  By the time Joanna put down the phone, Deb was driving north on Alvernon. As they neared Home Depot, Joanna found herself beset by a swarm of second thoughts. Homicide detectives routinely find it necessary to question their victims’ grieving family members, friends, and associates. Talking to people who knew the deceased is the only way to find out what was going on in the victim’s life just prior to the time of death.

  Larry Wolfe was Alfred and Martha Beasley’s son-in-law. Interviewing him would have been routine except for one small thing. The last Joanna had heard, Larry Wolfe was at war with her department. His attorney had threatened a police brutality lawsuit against the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department in general and against Sheriff Joanna Brady in particular. Had she consulted the county attorney on this score, he probably would have advised her against being anywhere near Larry Wolfe. At this point, not seeing the man wasn’t an option, but Joanna knew that if he pursued the police brutality charge, she needed to defend herself.

  Best cover your butt, girl, Joanna told herself.

  As soon as Deb stopped the car, Joanna grabbed her briefcase out of the backseat. She rummaged through it until she located the tiny tape recorder she kept there. Naturally, when she tried switching it on, the batteries were dead. No matter. They were going into Home Depot—replacement-battery central.