No Honor Among Thieves

by J. A. Jance

  Not surprisingly, George Winfield—the retired ME and Joanna’s stepfather—was their leader. Joanna glanced at her watch: four twelve A.M. A phone call to George at this hour wouldn’t faze him in the least, but it would put her mother in a complete snit. Joanna knew from personal experience that having Eleanor Lathrop Winfield get up on the wrong side of the bed wouldn’t be good for anyone. That was the truth of the matter, but she also didn’t want to spill those kinds of family beans in front of Sergeant Crane.

  “Now that you mention it,” she said, “calling out the SCRs is an excellent suggestion, but there’s no sense having them out here milling around in the dark. If they’re going to be conducting a search of both sides of the roadway, I’d rather wait until daylight before putting them to work. George is an early riser. Give him a call at five. Tell him what’s up and that I’d like his people here right around sunrise. Before he comes out this way, though, ask him to stop by the Justice Center and pick up our supply of metal detectors. At last count, I think we had ten or so. And remind him that anyone turning up for this operation needs to be wearing orange reflective vests. Understood?”

  “Roger.”

  About then, several flashlight beams came bouncing toward the spot where Joanna, Kendra Baldwin, and Deb Howell stood conferring. At the center of the group were four men—Kendra’s two dieners and two of Joanna’s deputies—lugging a loaded and unwieldy gurney across sandy terrain that rendered the wheels useless.

  “Do you want to see him?” Kendra asked.

  Joanna shook her head. “Not right now,” she said. “I’ll see him later at the autopsy.”

  “Go ahead and load him up, then,” Kendra told her attendants. While they struggled to do so, the ME turned back to Joanna.

  “So you’re coming to that?” she asked. “I thought only detectives viewed autopsies.”

  “It’s my job, too,” Joanna told her. “When do you plan to do it?”

  “Probably first thing this morning,” the ME replied. “Will eight work for you?”

  “That’s fine. Both Detective Carbajal and I will be there,” Joanna said. “In the meantime, I’ll put Deb here in charge of tracking down the victim’s next of kin. Was the guy carrying a cell phone?”

  “I didn’t see one,” Kendra answered. “Probably got thrown out of the truck in the crash.”

  “Don’t worry,” Joanna said. “We’re going to be combing through this scene with a fine-toothed comb. If he had a cell phone in that vehicle, we’ll find it. What about the Border Patrol officer who called it in? Where is he?”

  “Agent Cannon,” Kendra answered, pointing. “His vehicle is there on the right, just beyond where the truck came to rest. The last I saw of him, he was talking to Detective Carbajal.”

  “Cannon drove through our crime scene?”

  “Don’t be too hard on him,” Kendra said. “He got here within five minutes of the incident. At the time, he was far more focused on possible survivors than he was on preserving evidence.”

  “Point taken,” Joanna agreed.

  As Kendra started back up the embankment, someone else was coming down. In the glow of Kendra’s flashlight, Joanna caught a glimpse of a bristling electrical-socket hairdo and had to stifle the urge to groan aloud. The last thing she needed at the crime scene was reporters of any kind. Among those unwanted reporters, Marliss Shackleford of the Bisbee Bee sat at the top of the list.

  “You’ve got no business being here, Marliss,” Joanna said coldly. “This is a crime scene. Go back up top where you belong.”

  “Come on, Sheriff Brady,” Marliss said. “Do we have to do this? Can’t you just tell me what’s going on? I heard that a truckload of LEGO boxes had been hijacked or something.”

  “ ‘Or something’ is the operant phrase for the day,” Joanna told her. “This is an open investigation. Until we’re ready to give a full press briefing, there will be no comment at all from anyone in my department.”

  “You can go ahead and deny it all you want,” Marliss prodded. “The point is I already know that a truckload of LEGO sets is involved. If you’re going to go the ‘No comment’ route, you’ll have to live with the story the way I tell it.”

  Joanna knew then that Marliss had probably been listening in on a police scanner and had learned enough to send her out in the middle of the night ready to do her stint of on-the-scene reporting.

  “I’m not confirming or denying,” Joanna insisted, “and I’m sticking with ‘No comment.’ Now, go back to your vehicle and get out of here. You’re interfering with a homicide investigation.”

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Joanna knew she had screwed up, but it was too late to take them back.

  Marliss perked up instantly. “Did you say ‘homicide’?” Marliss asked. “I was under the impression it was nothing more than a motor vehicle accident.”

  “Go,” Joanna insisted. “Go now, before I have one of my deputies escort you away.”

  “That’s all right,” Marliss said. “A homicide with LEGO sets on the side sounds intriguing enough. I should be able to do something with that.”

  She left then, scrabbling, unassisted back up to the highway. Joanna turned to Detective Howell. “Would you follow her and make sure that if anyone up there talks to her, especially people in my department, they understand that they will have to answer to me?”

  While Deb hurried away to do as she’d been told, Joanna turned and walked across the sandy riverbed to where Jaime Carbajal in plain clothes and Bill Cannon in his Border Patrol uniform stood leaning against the front bumper of Bill’s marked SUV.

  Border Patrol was a booming business in southern Arizona these days. Back when Joanna’s father, D. H. Lathrop, had been the sheriff of Cochise County, he would have known all the local Border Patrol guys, the names of their wives, and probably the names of their kids, too. Now, however, with agents cycling in and out of the Tucson sector with astonishing regularity, Joanna knew no more than a handful on sight or by name, and Agent Bill Cannon was one she had never met.

  Approaching the two men, she held out her hand. “Sheriff Joanna Brady,” she said, introducing herself. “I understand you’ve been a big help here tonight.”

  Agent Cannon, with dark stains on the shirt of his uniform, turned out to be a young guy, not more than twenty-five or so. He was short and stocky and wore his blond hair in a crew cut. “Glad to meet you, ma’am,” he said. “I wish I could have done more. I was just up the river a ways, walking the bank, trying to spot footprints, when I heard gunfire. I made tracks back to my vehicle and was almost there when I heard the crash. Tearing through that guardrail made a hell of a racket.”

  “How long between the gunfire and the crash?”

  Agent Cannon thought about that for a moment before he answered. “Twenty seconds or maybe thirty at the most. When I came up the riverbed, I spotted the truck right away because the headlights were still on. The truck must have gone end over end a couple of times, because it came to rest a long way from the base of the embankment. And for the cargo box to split apart the way it did when it hit the tree trunk, the driver had to be going way over the speed limit when he hit the guardrail.”

  Detective Carbajal nodded. “Deputy Ruiz tells me there aren’t any skid marks up above. I’m wondering if maybe the guy was already dead. His foot could have been deadweight on the gas pedal at the time it went off the road.”

  Nodding, Joanna stood for a minute examining the wreckage. The truck had evidently been airborne as it plunged off the embankment. It landed nose down in the dirt and then flipped over at least twice before the bed of the truck slammed into the trunk of one of San Pedro’s venerable old cottonwood trees. The blow was forceful enough to split the cargo box in half and send an eruption of cellophane-covered LEGO boxes exploding in every direction. The delivery truck turned out to be larger than Joanna had envisioned, mak
ing her wonder if the single U-Haul truck she had ordered would be big enough to contain this unconventional cargo spill.

  Joanna turned her attention back to the conversation in time to hear Jaime Carbajal say, “We’ll need you to leave your vehicle here until we’re finished processing the crime scene.”

  “Okay,” Cannon agreed. “Let me know when you’re done. In the meantime, I’ll let my supervisor know that I need someone to come give me a ride so I can go home and clean up.”

  For the first time, Joanna realized that the stains on Agent Cannon’s uniform were most likely bloodstains. Since he had been the first one at the scene, that made sense, Joanna supposed, but still . . . The person who called in a homicide often had something to do with it.

  “And you’ll stop by the department later today to give an official statement?” Jaime continued.

  “Sure thing,” Agent Cannon said. “My shift ends at eight A.M. Give me a call after that and let me know what time is convenient.”

  “Will do.”

  Joanna watched Cannon walk away. “He’s the one who called it in,” she said quietly. “You don’t think he’s involved, do you?”

  “I doubt it,” Jaime responded, “although, just in case, I asked Deb to request a copy of his radio transmissions from Border Patrol.”

  “We won’t have those anytime soon,” Joanna observed.

  She got along fine with the local Border Patrol folks, but relations between her and the headquarters folks for the Tucson sector weren’t always the best. TSA routinely ignored or else delayed responses to requests for information from local jurisdictions. The message being that they were the feds, and everyone else could take a number and get in line.

  “Maybe sooner than you think,” Jaime Carbajal said with a grin. “Deb can be quite the bulldog once she sinks her teeth into something.”

  Donning a pair of latex gloves, Joanna reached down, picked up one of the boxes, and shook it, listening and hearing the sound of rattling. The corners of the box were crumpled but not torn. The cellophane wrapping on the outside was still intact. She suspected that all this careful packaging meant that everything inside was still fine, including any drugs that might be hidden there. Turning on her flashlight, she discovered she was holding something that purported to be the TIE fighter with 1,685 pieces.

  Joanna had no idea what a TIE fighter was. In their family, Butch Dixon was the resident expert on all things Star Wars, but she guessed that this model was probably worth a fair amount of money. Even the small LEGO sets Dennis lusted for on the shelves in Target were pricier than Joanna thought reasonable. This one was probably somewhere in the $200 range.

  But examining the colorful box itself offered no hints about why the driver of a vehicle hauling LEGO sets would have been traveling on an out-of-the way route that wasn’t a direct connection to anywhere else. Nor did it explain why the truck had been ambushed and taken down with automatic weapons fire. Shaking her head, Joanna returned the box to what seemed to be the same place she’d found it.

  “We’ll have to wait for sunrise to finish the crime scene photos,” Jaime observed. “That’s a little over an hour away.”

  Joanna nodded. “And I’ve asked for the SCRs to show up and search the roadway for brass. I want to know exactly where those shots came from and what kind of weapon was used.”

  “Take a look at the cab,” Jaime suggested.

  Together, Joanna and her detective approached the driver’s side of the truck. The door lock had given way, leaving the door dangling on its hinges. A cursory survey of both sides of the door reminded Joanna of a cheese grater: smooth indentation on the outside and jagged ones on the inside.

  “That’s a bunch of holes,” Joanna said. “Have you found any spent bullets?”

  “Not yet,” Jaime replied. “The CSIs have been working the scene but they haven’t started on the truck. They’ll probably have to wait until the truck is towed to the impound lot before they can finish up.”

  Joanna stepped away from the truck, shaking her head. “I don’t need a team of CSIs to tell me what’s really going on here,” she said. “I already know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Whoever the shooter is, he has way more firepower than we do and he’s not afraid to use it. Not only do we need to find him fast, we’ll have to be careful as all hell when it comes to taking him down.”

  • • •

  Ali Reynolds was peacefully asleep when her husband’s cell phone buzzed them both awake at seven A.M.

  “Hey, Stu,” B. Simpson said. “What’s up?”

  B. Simpson’s company, High Noon Enterprises, had started off years earlier as a locally owned and operated cyber security company located in Sedona, Arizona. Since then it had grown exponentially, morphing into a well-respected international firm that numbered some of the world’s leading companies among its clientele. Stuart Ramey, a high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome guy with a brilliant head for computers and abysmal people skills, was B.’s second-in-command.

  “We just got a hit on our LEGO media scanning program.”

  As part of their security process, they maintained a constant search for any media hits involving one of their clients. Media hits often meant that some kind of security issue was brewing, and keeping a multilingual worldwide watch for trouble was one of the services High Noon offered.

  “What kind of hit?” B asked, switching the phone to speaker as Ali got out of bed and ushered Bella, their recently rescued miniature dachshund, over to the patio door to let the dog out. Because of the presence of too many nighttime critters in Sedona’s semi-wild environs, Ali stayed at the door and kept watch until Bella finished her business. Then the dog came inside, leaped gracefully back up onto the bed, and curled into a small ball in her designated spot in the middle of the foot of their bed.

  “I thought you’d be interested,” Stu said, “because, for one thing, it’s from right here in Arizona.”

  “Where in Arizona?”

  “Bisbee.”

  “What exactly are we talking about?”

  “It’s a column called Bisbee Buzzings from the local newspaper, the Bisbee Bee, written by someone named Marliss Shackleford. It reads more like a blog than an actual article, but it posted just a few minutes ago at 6:45. The electronic version evidently comes out before the paper version.”

  “What does it say?” B. asked with a hint of impatience leaking into his voice.

  Stu cleared his throat and began reading aloud.

  Early this morning the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office was investigating a fatality motor vehicle incident at the point where Highway 92 crosses the San Pedro River. Although Sheriff Joanna Brady refused to make any comments, this reporter was able to ascertain that the case involves a delivery truck that slammed through the guardrail into the riverbed. The damaged truck was clearly visible, but my understanding is that the investigation is being conducted as a possible homicide.

  An anonymous source close to the investigation, speaking without permission, claimed that the truck was transporting a load of LEGO sets when it crashed in the early morning hours. There were indications that automatic weapons fire was involved.

  So what’s really going on here? Is this a situation where bad guys with guns targeted some poor truck driver who was minding his own business and was gunned down for simply doing his job? If that’s the case, every resident of Cochise County is in danger and needs to be on high alert.

  What I’m asking is this: When will someone from Sheriff Brady’s department come forward and speak candidly about what’s really going on? In the meantime, I can assure you that, as more information becomes available, your intrepid reporter will be on the job.

  B. couldn’t help but be pleased that the automated media surveillance network he and Stu had created had managed to pick up on that one-word mention from a tiny ele
ctronic newspaper article in an out-of-the-way corner of Arizona. But he also knew why Stu was calling him. LEGO sets were essentially limited editions. Once a popular model was no longer available through regular retail channels, the prices of those sets skyrocketed, creating a lucrative black market trade. The LEGO company, based in Denmark, had hired High Noon as an outside source to address that black market and to search out the source of inventory that was obviously going astray.

  The sets were manufactured at several overseas locations. B. had recommended placing GPS locator chips inside the boxes of some of the higher-priced models, concealed inside the gel-packs used for moisture protection. That idea had been dismissed out of hand as being “unworkable and too expensive.”

  Having a chip inside even one of the sets from the wreck would have been a huge help about now. The regular radio-frequency identification chips, RFIDs, on the outsides of the packages would provide some information, however, including where they had been manufactured and where they were going. B. assumed that legitimate freight haulers would be using eighteen-wheelers and traveling on interstate highways. They wouldn’t be utilizing midsize box trucks on back roads in the middle of the night. If there were LEGO sets involved in the incident, B. was confident that, one way or the other, they were stolen goods.

  “That’s all?” B. asked. “Just that one-word mention?”

  “So far.”

  “Nothing more on local television feeds?”

  “The place where the wreck happened is a good seventy-five miles outside Tucson,” Stu replied. “A motor vehicle accident, even a fatality MVA, in Cochise County generally wouldn’t garner any attention from the Tucson news outlets. If the incident ends up being classified as a homicide, however, the Tucson stations will be all over it.”

  “We need to be all over it before they are,” B. declared. “I want someone with a chip reader on the scene as soon as possible. Can you find out where and when the latest LEGO shipments have come ashore? Since we have an ending point, if we can pin down a beginning point, we may be able to track down who’s responsible.”