by J. A. Jance
Ten minutes after the SCRs were deployed, George called her. “Okay,” he said. “We found your casings—a whole flock of ’em—inside a mesquite grove on the left side of the road just west of the parking lot for the Saddle Up Steakhouse. Couldn’t see any tire tracks at all. The restaurant’s parking lot is paved, so the shooter may have parked on that and walked from there. With all the grass on the shoulder of the road, I doubt you’ll find footprints.”
“Probably not,” Joanna agreed.
“But as close as this is to Hereford,” George continued, “I’m surprised no one heard anything.”
“Tell your guys I said ‘Thanks and good work,’ ” Joanna told him. “Make that ‘great work.’ I’ll send the CSI team down to bag and tag the casings. I’ll also get someone on the horn to the owners of the steakhouse to see if they have any security cameras.”
“Wait a minute,” George said. “Are you telling me I dragged everybody out of bed for something that only lasted ten minutes and now I’m supposed to say, ‘Go home and go back to bed’?”
Joanna thought about that for a second. “No,” she said finally. “Don’t do that. Once the CSIs finish processing the scene down on the river, we’ll need someone to go around collecting LEGO sets—hundreds of them—and load them onto another truck.”
“How much time before they’ll be ready for us?” George asked. “Enough for us to head back to the café in Palominas for some breakfast?”
“That should work out fine,” Joanna assured him.
By seven thirty the SCRs, now sporting latex gloves, were down in the riverbed gathering scattered LEGO sets and packing them one by one into the U-Haul truck that Deputy Stock had parked on the bank nearest the highway. Joanna felt guilty watching people she regarded as “old codgers” hoofing it through the sand, but the truth was she needed the help and they seemed to be having a ball. Besides, if she’d called in her deputies to do the job, there would have been no one left out on patrol.
As the boxes were gathered and loaded, it soon became apparent that a second U-Haul would not be required. The same could not be said of the totaled box truck. That one for sure required two flatbed tow trucks: one for the cab and one for the body, which had literally split into two pieces. The tow truck guys were in the process of finishing loading the cab onto the second flatbed, when Joanna’s phone rang. Her secretary, Kristin Gregovich, was on the line.
“I know you’ve got your hands full out there today, Sheriff Brady,” Kristin said, “but I just had a call from Dr. Baldwin. Jaime’s already up at the morgue, waiting. Dr. Baldwin wants to know if you’re still coming or should she do the autopsy without you?”
Glancing at her watch, Joanna was astonished to discover that it was almost eight thirty. She had been at the crime scene for the better part of five hours, and she was now almost half an hour late for the autopsy.
“Tell Dr. Baldwin I’m sorry to have kept her waiting,” Joanna said, sprinting back up the embankment to where her Yukon was still parked. “I’m on my way right now. I’m probably another half hour out at most.”
• • •
The trip to the morgue wasn’t one that merited lights and sirens, but Joanna drove well over the posted limits to get there. When she arrived in the parking lot, Jaime was climbing out of his car to go back inside.
“What’s up?” she asked, hurrying to intercept him.
“Dr. Baldwin took the victim’s prints and I just finished running them,” he reported. “Turns out Mr. Fredrico Gomez is actually a small-time crook out of Santa Ana, California—one Alberto Ricardo ‘Taquito’ Mendoza.” He simulated quotation marks in the air with his index fingers when saying the word “Taquito.”
“His nickname is Taquito?” Joanna asked. “Really?”
“That’s what it says on his rap sheet.”
“What else does it say?”
“Small-time drug violations, mostly: possession with intent to sell, everything from crack to meth. He’s been out on probation for three months. I’m sure this little out-of-state venture would have sent him straight back to the slammer. Now that he’s dead, that’s a moot point.”
Jaime was already properly dressed for the occasion. All he needed to do was slip a new pair of paper booties on over his shoes. It took a moment longer for Joanna to dress herself in the paper gown and booties that constituted proper autopsy-viewing attire. When she finally entered the room, Dr. Baldwin stood over the naked body with a scalpel in hand and a frown on her face.
“It’s about time,” she said.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Joanna murmured in return. “It was crazy out there.”
The pallid body had been stripped of its clothing and washed. There were at least four entrance wounds visible, but those weren’t easy to see among hundreds of jagged lacerations that covered the entire left side of the body. A broken piece of the truck’s steering wheel still protruded from the chest wall. The part of the body that should have been a face was totally unrecognizable.
“He went through the windshield,” the ME explained as Joanna took her place at the table.
“How?” Joanna asked. “I saw deployed airbags.”
“They deployed, all right, but by the time the truck slammed into the tree, they had already deflated. Some of the lacerations and the broken steering wheel are from that. Most of them, though, were caused by the bullets propelling shrapnel from the outside of the truck into the cab.”
Using the scalpel as a pointer, Dr. Baldwin indicated the various entry wounds, which Joanna had already noticed. “We have bullet wounds here, here, here, and here—four of them in all. These two are nothing more than flesh wounds and would not have been fatal. The other two bullets entered his chest cavity. Presumably those remain lodged inside, since there are no exit wounds. I’m assuming I’ll be able to retrieve them.”
Joanna kept trying to pay attention as Kendra droned on in an emotionless voice; she might have used it to discuss the weather.
“From the debris we found on the clothing, I suspect that at least one of the chest wound shots entered the cab through the driver’s-side window. The nonfatal wounds came in through the door itself. From here it looks as though either the bullets killed him or else the broken steering wheel did. The only way we’ll be able to sort that out is to get on with it, so let’s get started.”
Joanna steeled herself for that first cut. Dr. Baldwin was still speaking as her scalpel sliced into the pale chest and she found that the ME’s voice, strangely muffled, had somehow drifted into the background. For a time she seemed to be speaking from very far away. Then suddenly her voice was much closer at hand and much sharper. “Hey. Are you all right? For God’s sake, Jaime, catch her!”
The next thing Joanna knew, Jaime had grabbed her under the arms. Holding her upright, he manhandled her across the room and held her up in front of a large stainless steel sink in time for her to be very sick. Embarrassed beyond bearing, she shrugged her way out of Jaime’s grasp, cleaned off her face, and dried it with a paper towel.
“Hey,” Kendra Baldwin said when Joanna gathered herself and turned back toward the examining table. “I thought you were an old hand at this.”
In truth Joanna really was an old hand. She’d been through countless autopsies through the years and never once with this kind of humiliating result.
“Sorry,” she said. “It must have been something I ate.”
“No harm, no foul,” Dr. Baldwin said lightly. “It happens to the best of us, but you still look a little green. If you want to take a rain check . . .”
“No,” Joanna said firmly. “I’ll be fine.”
And she was. It took a lot of grit, but she managed to hang in there through the remainder of the procedure. When the autopsy finally ended with Dr. Baldwin’s declaration of “death by homicidal violence,” Joanna didn’t hang around for any chitchat. Once out in
the mercifully fresh air, she waited for Detective Carbajal to emerge as well. The nausea that had plagued her earlier had passed. Having long since missed breakfast, she was starving.
“It’s almost eleven,” she said, glancing at her watch. “Want to go grab a bite?”
Jaime shook his head. “Delcia packed me a lunch,” he said. “Besides, I need to get back to the department and give Deb a hand with the paperwork.” Jaime started to walk away, then he stopped and turned back to her. “What happened inside there, boss, is between us,” he told her. “It’s nobody else’s business.”
Both embarrassed and gratified, Joanna took a moment before answering. “Thank you,” she said. “Thanks a lot.”
Still humiliated and nursing a headache, Joanna headed for Daisy’s Café in Bisbee. The restaurant’s new owner, Liza Machett, greeted her at the door. “It’s eleven,” she said, “so you can have your choice: breakfast or lunch.”
Liza had turned up in Bisbee months earlier. She had come to town on the run from a band of murderous thugs who were on the trail of her long-estranged brother. Unfortunately, her brother—the ME who had made Joanna’s life miserable—had already fallen victim to the same bad guys. As Guy Machett’s half sister and as his only surviving heir, she inherited both his house on the Vista and a fair amount of cash—enough to purchase the café when the previous owners decided to retire. Much to the relief of most of the townsfolk, once Liza took over, she made precious few changes to the menu, although she did occasionally offer a breakfast special of apple-filled Dutch pancakes.
“Breakfast,” Joanna answered. “Eggs over easy, crisp bacon, whole wheat toast, refried beans instead of hash browns. And some coffee,” she added, remembering the still-full cup of coffee sitting cold and almost untouched in her parked Yukon. “I’ve had a very long morning.”
The coffee arrived first, of course. Joanna’s very first taste of it was enough to make her want to race for the nearest restroom. She pushed the cup away and then sat there staring at it, because she remembered all too well the other two times in her life when she hadn’t been able to tolerate coffee.
• • •
Once the helicopter landed in Sierra Vista, naturally there was a hang-up with the rental car. The delay in getting the car meant that Ali and Cami were also late in arriving at the crime scene. By the time they reached the bridge over the San Pedro, only a strip of yellow crime scene tape stretching between two crumpled segments of guardrail served as evidence that anything out of the ordinary had occurred earlier in the day.
“What now?” Cami asked.
“I guess we head for the sheriff’s office.”
With Ali at the wheel, Cami keyed the address of the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office into the GPS. Cami Lee was California born and bred. When she was hired on with High Noon, she had driven over on I-40, dropped down I-17 to Sedona and Cottonwood, and stayed there. This was her first venture out into the wilds of southern Arizona.
“I don’t think I ever realized Arizona was this big,” she said.
“You need to spend some time touring around and learning about your new home,” Ali told her. “There’s a lot to see.”
They drove into Bisbee by what seemed like a back way. The Justice Center was located on a tract of land that was well outside the town itself. They pulled into the parking lot right at eleven. Inside, Cami lingered in the background, clutching Stu’s tool kit, while Ali approached the counter in the lobby, business card in hand.
“My name is Ali Reynolds. I’m an investigator with a firm called High Noon Security. Ms. Lee here is my associate. We’d like to see Sheriff Brady,” she said.
“Is this about the next press briefing?” the clerk asked. “That’s scheduled for noon.”
“It has nothing to do with the press briefing,” Ali said. “We’re here about that truckload of LEGO sets that came to grief in the San Pedro riverbed early this morning.”
That statement was enough to provoke a raised eyebrow from the young woman behind the counter. “One moment,” she said.
Except it wasn’t just one moment. For the next ten minutes, Ali and Cami cooled their heels in the lobby. One whole wall was devoted to a glass display case featuring photos of previous sheriffs of Cochise. The ones dating from the late 1800s and the early 1900s were all dour-faced men with handlebar mustaches, some photographed on horseback. The more recent sheriffs, mostly without facial hair, looked like standard chiefs of police, businesslike and serious. The newest one featured a young girl in a Brownie uniform, grinning from ear to ear and dragging a wagonload of Girl Scout cookies.
Ali realized that the photo’s stark contrast from the others carried an important message. Joanna Brady was the first and only female sheriff in this part of the world. In that case, Ali figured that was either very good or very bad. Trailblazers were generally one of two types. Confident women were comfortable in their own skins and able to work with others with little difficulty. Ones lacking that confidence were generally a pain in the butt. Since this sheriff had gone against the grain enough to post this particular photo, Ali dared hope Sheriff Joanna Brady was one of the former.
Soon an inner door opened and another young woman walked into the room. “I’m Kristin Gregovich, Sheriff Brady’s secretary,” she said. “The sheriff is out of the office at the moment, but she should be back in a few minutes. Would you care to wait inside?”
Kristin led them through a locked security door, down a long hallway, and into a secondary lobby that was much smaller than the first.
“Can I get you some coffee?”
When Ali and Cami both nodded, Kristin went to fetch it. Returning with the coffee, Kristin took a seat at the desk and busied herself on the computer while another ten minutes dragged by. Ali was almost ready to give up when the door behind Kristin’s desk opened and a uniformed thirty-something young woman marched into the room. She had bright red hair, a sheriff’s badge pinned to her chest, and ten or so pounds of armament and equipment belted to her hip. Since the woman hadn’t come in through the lobby entrance, she’d either been in the office the whole time or else had come in the back way.
“I’m Sheriff Brady,” she announced. “You wanted to see me?”
Ali and Cami both stood up. Ali, at five ten, felt as though she had wandered into the land of the Lilliputians. The sheriff couldn’t have been more than five four or so, but she towered over the diminutive Cami.
“It’s about what happened this morning,” Ali said. “The truck wreck on Highway 92.”
Sheriff Brady crossed her arms. “What about it?”
In answer, Ali produced a copy of a letter that B. had faxed to her in care of the fixed-base operator at the Sierra Vista Municipal Airport. It was a copy of a handwritten document on what appeared to be corporate stationery. She waited quietly while Sheriff Brady read it through.
To whom it may concern:
This letter will serve to introduce Alison Reynolds and Camille Lee, two investigators for a security firm called High Noon Enterprises. They are assisting us with an investigation into missing merchandise that disappeared from a shipment that arrived in the U.S. via Long Beach late last week, some of which may have been on board a truck that crashed in your jurisdiction earlier today.
When she finished reading, Sheriff Brady handed the paper back to Ali.“You expect me to believe that this guy is top dog in the world of LEGO?” she asked.
“You’re welcome to Google him,” Ali replied.
“The press briefing we had earlier made no mention of LEGO, and the next one isn’t due to start for twenty minutes. Do you mind telling me how someone in Denmark already knows there were LEGO sets in our wrecked truck?”
“We read about it online,” Ali answered, “in an article posted by someone from right here in Bisbee. What was her name again?”
“Marliss,” Cami replied instantly. “Marl
iss Shackleford.”
Sheriff Brady shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Spare me,” she said. “That woman’s going to be the death of me, but I guess you need to come on in.”
They followed the sheriff past the secretary’s desk and into what turned out to be a private office. Behind a desk piled high with an untidy collection of paperwork was a wall of windows that looked out at a line of forbidding gray hills topped with limestone cliffs. Between the back parking lot and the mountains was an expanse of wilderness dotted with ocotillo, prickly pear, bear grass, and yucca. It had rained recently enough that the spindly branches of the ocotillo were covered with bright green leaves.
Sheriff Brady motioned them into guest chairs and then sat down on the far side of the desk. “I’m not sure why you’re here,” she said. “You’re both welcome to attend the press briefing, but I’m sure you understand that I can’t and won’t comment on an ongoing investigation.”
“We’re not interested in the briefing,” Ali said at once. “Would it be possible for us to examine one of the LEGO sets?”
“Please.” Joanna shook her head. “Those sets are part of the evidence in what appears to be a sophisticated criminal enterprise. You can’t expect—”
Ali interrupted her: “How many LEGO sets were inside that wrecked truck?”
“Five thousand two hundred and seventy,” Sheriff Brady answered at once. The SCRs had given her a complete inventory.
Cami pulled out an iPad, keyed in some numbers, and then consulted whatever showed on her screen. “According to the shipping manifest, there were four pallets coming from Monterrey, Mexico, containing that number of individual sets,” she said quietly.