Damage Control

by J. A. Jance

  Frank came up behind Joanna and clapped her on the shoulder. “Way to go, boss!” he exclaimed. “Pretty impressive!”

  “Where should they take her?” Chief Bernard asked as officers led Samantha past the fire truck and toward one of the city’s waiting patrol cars. She was no longer fighting or resisting. Instead she had started singing again, Roger Miller’s “King of the Road.”

  “To the county hospital,” Joanna said. “She’ll need a police guard and a complete psychological workup.”

  “Your nickel or mine?” Alvin asked.

  That was what it always came down to—a question of whose budget was about to be dinged. But Samantha Edwards had started out as Joanna Brady’s problem. No matter where she was at the time she was actually taken into custody, she still was.

  “We’ll take care of it,” Joanna said. “My department will be responsible.”

  Frank gave Joanna one of his “What-are-you-thinking?” looks, but he nonetheless hustled around arranging transport. In the meantime Joanna set Deb Howell the task of collecting the names and jurisdictions of all officers on the scene. The way the world worked these days, it was likely the sheriff’s department would need that information and statements from everyone present in order to prove that Samantha Edwards had been taken into custody in the course of an entirely lawful procedure.

  Jaime Carbajal showed up while Deb was still collecting names. “Any luck finding Luis?” Joanna asked.

  “Not so far,” Jaime said. “I spent the whole day looking, too. Marcella is a basket case. She’s been dogging my heels all day, raising hell, holding me responsible. I wanted a break. I heard about the hostage situation over the radio and told Marcella you needed me to come help out, but it sounds like everything’s under control.” He stopped and looked at the house. “Wait a minute. Isn’t this where the Beasleys lived?”

  Joanna nodded. “Yes, it is. And you’re right. The hostage situation has been resolved, but I do need you. This whole area is a crime scene. If you wouldn’t mind taping it off—”

  “Sure thing, boss,” Jaime said. “I’ll get right to it.”

  While he was doing that, Joanna led a still shaken Sandra Wolfe over to the parked Crown Victoria, let her into the backseat, and offered her a bottle of water. “I need to call my husband and let him know I’m all right,” Sandy said. “But my phone is wrecked.”

  “Here,” Joanna said, offering hers. “Use this.”

  Joanna opened her own bottle of water. Then, sinking into the driver’s seat, she leaned back and closed her eyes. I did it, she told herself. I talked her out of her weapons. Nobody died. No one got hurt. We all get to go home tonight.

  Then dimly, in the background, she became aware of what Sandra was saying. “I couldn’t believe it, Larry; Sammy just went completely nuts. This morning she was fine, but then right after lunch she started going bananas. It was like someone had flipped a switch. She was a totally different person. She decided I was a stranger who had broken into the folks’ house to rob them blind. There was no reasoning with her. When she grabbed Dad’s gun and turned it on me, I thought I was a goner. She shot my cell phone to smithereens. That’s why I’m using Sheriff Brady’s. If it hadn’t been for her—”

  Like someone had flipped a switch. The comment triggered something in Joanna’s head. Hadn’t Deb said something just like that about Alfred Beasley? That the neighbors had claimed he was fine in the mornings but by late afternoon and evening he barely knew his own name? Larry Wolfe had said something to that effect—that Martha had said not to worry about it. She had told him on Thursday night that Alfred would be fine by morning.

  In a chilling instant, Joanna knew she was onto something—that she had found part of the answer. She sat very still with her heart hammering in her chest, waiting for Sandra Wolfe to finish her phone call.

  “Thank you,” Sandy said, handing the phone back to Joanna. “Larry’s on his way down from Tucson. He said he’ll be here as soon as he can.”

  “What did you have for lunch?” Joanna asked.

  “For lunch?” Sandra returned. “There was food in the folks’ fridge. Since it was just going to go to waste, Sammy and I helped ourselves.”

  “What food?”

  “Some tuna salad that was already made, a couple pieces of bread, and some canned peaches. I had those for dessert. Sammy had ice cream—ice cream with chocolate syrup and Spanish peanuts. That was always Dad’s favorite, and Sammy’s, too. Dad never had a problem with his weight, and it’s what he always had for dessert at lunchtime—a chocolate sundae. Mom didn’t like ice cream that much, but she definitely didn’t like chocolate. Her top choice was caramel. In all the years Mom and Dad were married, that’s one thing they always disagreed about—the right kind of syrup for ice cream. As for me? I’m a little like my mother. I don’t despise chocolate the same way she did. I can take it or leave it. But when it comes to caramel, I’m there.”

  “And your father always had his sundaes at lunchtime?” Joanna asked. “Not at dinner?”

  “Always at lunch,” Sandra said. “There’s caffeine in chocolate, you know. He claimed that if he had chocolate any later in the day, he couldn’t sleep at night.” She paused. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Why all the questions about ice cream?”

  But Joanna knew it wasn’t about the ice cream at all. It was about the syrup. She remembered hearing that’s how meds were sometimes administered to recalcitrant seniors and to little kids, too—ground up and served in chocolate. What were the chances that someone had been delivering mind-altering drugs to Alfred Beasley in hopes of convincing him that he was losing his mind? And now his daughter had certainly lost hers.

  “Just curious,” Joanna said casually.

  Leaving the Crown Victoria, she hustled over to where Deb Howell had finished talking to the last of the officers and was closing her notebook.

  “How soon can you get Judge Cameron to issue a search warrant for this house?”

  Deb glanced at her watch. “It’s almost five,” she said. “It’ll depend on whether or not he’s still at the courthouse. But why? What kind of a search warrant? What are we looking for?”

  “Attempted murder,” Joanna said. “We need to collect all the food in the Beasleys’ refrigerator, but most especially, any and all chocolate syrup. I think someone may have been tampering with Alfred Beasley’s food for some time, and I’ve just figured out how it was done. This afternoon Samantha got a dose of the same thing.”

  “I’m on it,” Deb said.

  “Ask Frank to give you a ride wherever you need to go. I’m going to need my car to take Sandra back to the office.”

  While Deb jogged off after Frank Montoya, Joanna went looking for Jaime Carbajal. “Deb’s on her way to get a search warrant for this place,” she said. “Find a couple of deputies and have them stay here to keep an eye on things. Tell them that no one is to go in or out until after that warrant has been executed. Then you and Ernie probably better come down to the Justice Center to take Sandra Wolfe’s statement.”

  When she got back to the car, Sandy was still sitting in it with the car door open. For the second time that day, Joanna handed Sandy her cell phone.

  “You should probably call your husband back. We’ll be going back to my office to take your statement while my officers search this place. Mr. Wolfe can pick you up there.”

  “Back to your office?” Sandra repeated. “Why? You’re not going to put me under arrest again, are you?”

  “No,” Joanna said. “You’re a victim here. Our job it to lock up assailants, not victims.”

  “Where have you taken Sammy?”

  “To the county hospital down in Douglas. They’ve got a unit with a padded cell down there, and that’s what your sister needs. In her current condition, when she’s a danger to herself and others, a padded cell is a better alternative than an ER someplace or one of the holding cells at my jail.”

  “Oh,” Sandra said, and she began punching number
s into the phone.

  As they drove down through Bisbee and out toward the Justice Center, Joanna listened as Sandy explained to her husband where he should come to find her.

  “No,” she said finally. “You can’t stop by the house. It’s off-limits, and we can’t stay there, either. We’ll have to see if there are any rooms available at the hotel. I checked out today, but they may have a vacancy.” She paused and listened to her husband. “Why is the house off-limits?” she resumed. “Because it’s been declared a crime scene again. That’s where Sammy attacked me and held me at gunpoint, so I guess that means there has to be an investigation.” There was another long pause. “Okay, then. If you don’t want to stay at the hotel, fine. We can always drive back home.”

  Sandy gave the cell phone back to Joanna. “Men!” she muttered. “The Copper Queen isn’t nearly as expensive as some of the places where we used to stay, but I’ll be glad when things settle down. Larry won’t have to stress so about every miserly penny he spends. Maybe he’ll finally be able to retire and play more golf.”

  “You said when things settle down,” Joanna said. “Are you talking about when you receive your inheritance?”

  “Not just my inheritance,” Sandy said. “Larry’s due to receive one, too—from his parents. They both died last year. Within months of each other. His brother, Mark, his older brother—the asshole—is the executor. Larry and Mark get along about the same way Sammy and I have, which is to say not at all. And Mark has done everything in his power to keep Larry from getting what’s due him. We keep hearing the first of the money is going to show up any day now, and it’ll be a relief when it finally does. The last couple of years have been tough. I give Larry a lot of credit. Taking that job at Home Depot was a big comedown for someone like him. He used to be a high-powered executive and all, back when we lived in Houston. So when he starts stressing about money, I usually give him a pass. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I suppose I would,” Joanna agreed, but at the same time she was wondering how stressed Larry was about money, and how much were they talking about? He and Sandy were about to reap close to a quarter-million-dollar bonanza from her dead parents, but the way she was talking about Larry’s situation, it sounded as though his folks had amassed a far larger fortune than the cool half million put together by his blue-collar in-laws.

  “So Larry’s parents were fairly well-to-do?” Joanna asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Sandy said. “They lived in Kansas City, Missouri, but Larry’s father owned auto-parts stores all over the Midwest. He sold the whole works to one of the big auto-parts chains in the early nineties and made himself a fortune in the process. Jonathan said he’d had enough of cold weather by then, so he and Fern retired to Florida. They loved it there, right up until Fern got so sick.”

  Sandy lapsed into silence. Glancing in the rearview mirror, Joanna could see the woman was crying. Finally she blew her nose.

  “It’s just so sad,” Sandy said. “They don’t make people like that anymore—like Larry’s folks and mine—people who got married and stayed together through thick and thin for fifty-plus years. I’m sorry that generation is gone.”

  “So am I,” Joanna said as they pulled into the Justice Center parking lot. “Very sorry.”

  She escorted Sandy into the building through her private entrance and seated her in the conference room. “Coffee?” she asked.

  “Please,” Sandy said. “That would be very nice.”

  Joanna went down to the break room. There was nothing but dregs left in the pot. She made a new one. While she stood there waiting for the coffee to brew, she looked up at a photo that hung on the wall over the pot. It was a foam-core-mounted panoramic photo of the Justice Center with Joanna’s predecessor, Sheriff Walter McFadden, and most of his staff posed in front of it. When Joanna had taken over the department, she had removed the photo from her own office. Someone had rescued it from the scrap heap and it had found its way to the wall in the break room. Joanna went there so seldom that she had actually forgotten about the photo. Now, studying it closely, Joanna found what she was looking for—an image of the blonde she remembered so vividly from Andy’s funeral.

  In the photos, the sworn officers, including deputies and jail personnel, were all in uniform. The blonde wasn’t. She stood at the end of the front row, tucked in among the support personnel—clerks, dispatchers, and secretaries—who had also been part of Sheriff McFadden’s administration.

  Who are you? Joanna wondered. Where did you go?

  Just then her cell phone rang.

  “I tracked down Judge Cameron,” Detective Howell said. “I got the warrant, and we’re in. Now what?”

  “I want you to take every bit of food out of the fridge,” Joanna said. “I want it bagged, labeled, and stored. Same goes for whatever you find in their pantry and cupboards. If it’s edible, take it.”

  “Where are we going to put it all?” Deb said. “We don’t have enough cold storage.”

  “We’ll find enough cold storage,” Joanna said determinedly, “if I have to go out and buy another refrigerator and stick it in the evidence room. You’re there right now?”

  “Yes. In the kitchen, standing in front of an open fridge that’s way cleaner than mine is.”

  “Do you see any chocolate sauce in there?”

  “Yes,” Deb said. “Right here in the door. Tante Marie’s Chocolate Sauce, a product of Canada. And here’s another bottle. This one’s Tante Marie’s Caramel Sauce. I’ve never seen this brand before. I don’t think you can buy it at Safeway.”

  “Let’s hope not,” Joanna said. “That would be far too easy.”

  “Okay,” Deb said. “We’re on it.”

  Joanna closed her phone just as the last of the coffee sputtered into the pot, but she was still staring at the photo. There was a part of her, the reasonable, commonsense part, that was counseling Joanna to leave it alone and let sleeping dogs lie. If Andy had been carrying on with this woman, what did it matter? He was dead and gone. But there was another part of her, too, the part of Joanna that was undeniably her mother’s daughter, that wouldn’t let it go.

  One way or the other, I’m going to find you, Joanna told herself and the image smiling back at her from the photo. No matter how much it hurts, I need to know the truth.

  CHAPTER 14

  WANTING ALL HANDS ON DECK FOR SANDY’S INTERVIEW, JOANNA had summoned Ernie Carpenter to be there along with Jaime. Joanna sat in as well. During the interview Sandy repeated most of what she had told Joanna earlier. She and Samantha had gone to their parents’ house as soon as Deb Howell had told them they could. They had sorted out clothing to take to the mortuary for the cremation. While in the process of contacting friends and relatives about the service, they had paused for lunch. Shortly after that Samantha, who had seemed fine all morning, started acting strangely.

  “Is your sister prone to these kinds of episodes?” Jaime asked. “There was the situation the other night—”

  “That was different,” Sandy said. “Then we’d both had too much to drink and things came to a head. But we were over that—at least I thought we were.”

  “Maybe, without your knowledge, Samantha had something to drink today, too,” Jaime suggested.

  “No,” Sandy declared. “Absolutely not. If Sammy had been drinking, I would have smelled it on her breath. One minute she was fine and the next minute she had no idea who I was—like I was a complete stranger who had turned up in the folks’ house for no reason. And then she started saying totally bizarre things—wondering when our parents would be back home. I tried to explain to her that our parents were dead—that we were there planning their memorial service! It was weird. At first I thought she was just joking around, but then when she brought Dad’s guns out of the back bedroom…” Sandy shook her head as though she still couldn’t quite grasp the reality of what had happened.

  “Is it possible your sister has a problem with some other drug besides alcohol?” Jaime asked. “People on
crack and meth often carry on like they’ve got a few screws loose.”

  “I suppose a drug problem of some kind is a possibility,” Sandy conceded. “My sister and I have been estranged for a long time, Detective Carbajal. There’s a lot I don’t know about her and a lot she doesn’t know about me. Still, I didn’t see any evidence of her popping pills or smoking anything.”

  The whole time Joanna had been sitting in on the interview, she’d been thinking about Alfred Beasley’s chocolate topping. With her laptop open in front of her, she’d been quietly surfing the Net. She found the official Web site for Tante Marie’s Toppings, based in Montreal, Quebec. The company motto, plastered over the top of their home page in bright red letters, proclaimed: “If Your Sweetheart Has a Sweet Tooth, Doesn’t She Deserve the Very Best?” The text claimed that Tante Marie’s Toppings were made from only the highest-quality ingredients. Not available in stores, Tante Marie’s products were shipped to discerning customers all over the globe, with a discount for case-lot orders. Visa, MasterCard, and Amex accepted.

  In other words, there should be some way to trace the jars of caramel and chocolate syrups that had found their way into Alfred and Martha Beasley’s fridge. Joanna wanted to find a way to bring the food issue into the official interview without necessarily letting Sandy know where the questions were leading.

  “Is it possible Samantha had an allergic reaction to something she ate?” Joanna asked.

  “Maybe,” Sandy said. “But I’ve never heard any mention of that.”

  “Still, it might be worthwhile for you to tell Detectives Carbajal and Carpenter exactly what you and Samantha had for lunch, just in case.”

  While Sandy launched into that discussion, Joanna continued surfing. This time she located obituaries for Jonathan and Fern Wolfe—two obituaries each, one in Tampa, Florida, where they were living at the time of their deaths, and another in Kansas City, Missouri, where they had lived prior to retirement. The one in Tampa was clearly a paid obituary. The second one seemed more like an ordinary news article.