by JoAnn Ross
"He was at the scene of a murder."
"But he was shot."
"So was his wife. His dead wife," Trace said patiently.
"But he's a senator."
"And we're cops. With a job to do. Which includes checking out all possible suspects."
"Christ, the shit's really going to hit the fan when this gets out," the young man muttered.
"Don't look now, J.D.," Trace drawled, jerking his head in the direction of the ranch house. "But it already has."
Chapter Three
Trace arrived at the hospital on Ponderosa Street just as the technician he'd requested from the Department of Public Safety was pulling into the parking lot.
They were forced to wait while the physician on call conducted a cursory examination of the wounded senator. After the exam, X rays were taken. Throughout it all, Alan Fletcher remained conscious and coherent.
"The wound isn't life threatening," the doctor advised Trace, "but I need to remove the bullet and stitch up any damage to internal organs." He frowned. "Small caliber bullets have an unfortunate tendency to bounce around like pinballs once they're inside the body."
"Sounds as if you've spent some time on the front lines."
"I worked ER for eight years at Oakland's Highland Hospital." The doctor shook his head. "I figured I put all that behind me when I moved here."
"Join the club," Trace said dryly.
"Getting back to the senator, there's no way to tell how much damage was done until we open him up. And we'll need to clean the wound to prevent peritonitis."
"I know the drill, Doc." Trace glanced over to where the senator was lying on the gurney. A pretty blond nurse in a white pantsuit was holding his hand and assuring him that he'd be all right. "But since the guy's not critical, I'll need to test for residue before you take him into surgery."
The doctor, too, knew the drill. "Of course."
Alan Fletcher didn't. "You want to test me?" he asked unbelievingly. "Why?"
"It's nothing to take personally, Senator," Trace said, accustomed to such protestations. "It's strictly policy."
"It's policy to harass shooting victims?"
"It's policy to test everyone involved in a crime. Once we eliminate you as a suspect, Senator, we can get on to the business of apprehending the perpetrators." Trace had switched to the tone he used in the old days whenever it became necessary to appease police department brass.
"Well, since you put it that way…" Beads of sweat glistened on the senator's forehead and above his top lip. "Go ahead." Alan Fletcher invited magnanimously. He held out his hands. "Do whatever you have to do."
"Thank you, Senator," Trace said politely. He watched as the DPS technician opened the kit and used a cotton swab to wipe a weak solution of nitric acid over the senator's hands, concentrating heavily on the palm and the webbing between the thumb and first finger. Fletcher's gold wedding band gleamed in the fluorescent overhead light.
After she was done, the technician peeled the protective seal from a piece of paper, pressed it against those same parts of his hands, then sealed the samples in an evidence jar.
"Thank you, Senator," Trace said again, once the test was finished and he'd gotten the wounded man's signature on a consent to search form. This case was too high profile not to be played strictly by the book. "Have you remembered anything else about the man who attacked you? Height, weight, clothing?"
Fletcher shook his head, then winced as if the gesture were painful. "Sorry."
"Don't worry about it. Perhaps after your surgery, when you're feeling stronger, things might come back."
"Do you think so?" The senator looked hopeful and sounded doubtful.
"Sure. It happens all the time," Trace said, not quite truthfully. More often than not time only faded memory. He closed the notebook and returned it to his shirt pocket. "I'll keep in touch." The statement, spoken with a deliberate lack of inflection could have been a promise. Or a threat.
As he watched Alan Fletcher being wheeled off to surgery, Trace considered the fact that during the more than thirty minutes Senator Fletcher had been in the emergency room, he hadn't again asked about his wife.
Trace recalled his own experience after the shooting that had ended his homicide career and almost his life. He remembered lying on a gurney, furious that the trauma team wasn't working on Danny. His concern for his partner had been so strong he hadn't even experienced pain from his own near-fatal wounds until much later.
Daniel Murphy had been his partner for five years. During that time they'd become closer than most brothers. But though they'd known almost everything there was to know about one another, their bond had still not been as intimate as a man and wife.
Trace had been divorced for ten years. But even during that last year of marriage, when his home had felt like an armed camp, if Ellen had been injured in any way—let alone shot in the head by masked intruders—a SWAT team wouldn't have been able to stop him from being with her.
"Different strokes," he murmured as he walked over to the nurses' station. Trace also could not discount the possibility that the senator's lack of curiosity regarding his wife's condition was because he was guilty.
Worried that the shooting may have been some cockeyed attempted political assassination plot, he telephoned Ben Loftin at home, instructing him to get to the hospital and stand guard outside the senator's door.
When he returned to the ranch, Trace saw that J.D. had followed his instructions, securing the crime area with yellow plastic police tape. The Evidence Technical Unit had arrived on the scene.
As primary investigator, Trace was in charge of supervising the meticulous search of the premises. Sticking to the old adage that a victim could only be killed once, but a crime scene could be murdered in countless ways, he kept the pace slow and methodical. He'd witnessed too many occasions when speed had resulted in the destruction of vital evidence.
Without a detailed description of the armed intruders, he put out an APB on anyone seen driving in the vicinity of the ranch that night. The mayors of the nearby communities of Pine, Payson and Strawberry had offered to send additional police to join in the search of Rim back-roads and the sheriff from neighboring Coconino County had volunteered additional manpower.
The much appreciated cooperation allowed Trace to remain at the house with the ETU crew. He watched the photographer snap away on a 35 mm, then shoot a videotape record of the scene.
Eager to help, J.D. had donned a pair of surgical gloves and was on his hands and knees, combing the bedroom carpet for fibers.
"We need to contact Matthew Swann before he hears the news on the radio," Trace said.
"Cora Mae called Swann's ranch right after the 911 call came in," J.D. revealed. "The housekeeper says he's in Santa Fe. Some livestock convention or something."
"Does she have the name of the hotel?"
"She did. She also called it. But the desk clerk said Swann got into some kind of argument with the night manager over room service hours so he checked out… Bingo!"
The deputy happily plucked a blue thread from the carpet, dropped it into a plastic bag and carefully labeled it. Trace observed the action with mild amusement thinking how you never forgot your first homicide. Trace hoped like hell this would be J.D.'s last one for a very long time.
"The clerk didn't know what hotel he moved to. But Cora Mae's on the case," J.D. assured him as he resumed his methodical carpet combing. "She'll track him down."
Of that, Trace had no doubt. The woman had a tongue like a razor blade, cursed like a lumberjack at spring thaw and guarded her precious records as if they were the Holy Grail.
But she was remarkably efficient. She also made the best cup of coffee west of the Pecos and could bluff at poker with the best of them.
Thinking he might be dealing with a sexual assault as well as a murder, Trace began going through the lingerie strewn over the floor, checking the frothy bits of silk and satin and lace a piece at a time to see if by chance an
y of the skimpy pairs of panties had been stripped off the victim.
"Jesus!" He picked up a garment so sheer he could see his hand through the diaphanous silk.
J.D. glanced up and couldn't quite repress his grin. "It's a teddy. I bought Jilly a red one for Valentine's day. At Victoria's Secret. She liked it a lot." His grin widened. "I liked it even better."
"I'll bet." Trace wondered why, if the senator's wife was such a fan of sexy lingerie, she went to bed nude. Perhaps, he considered, thinking of what Fletcher had said about not wanting to wake his wife up, she didn't bother dressing seductively when she knew she was going to be sleeping alone.
Ellen had always come to bed wearing his ratty old oversize police academy T-shirts. It crossed Trace's mind that if she'd favored underwear like this, they might still be married.
Then again, probably not. Sex had never been their problem. At least, not in the beginning. By the time they finally called it quits, neither of them had felt like rolling around in the sheets.
Trace held up an ivory teddy. The early morning light streaming through the bedroom window rendered it nearly transparent.
"You actually walked right into a store, in a public mall, where anyone could see you and bought something like this?"
Shit, he'd been married nine months before he worked up the nerve to buy tampons at the 7-Eleven. For the second time today, Trace found himself feeling like an over-the-hill dinosaur.
"Actually," J.D. admitted, "I ordered it from a catalog."
Deciding that he'd love to get a look at J.D.'s catalog, Trace moved the teddies aside and found the letters, tied with a blue satin ribbon.
Love letters, he figured. So the lady had been a romantic. He could have guessed that from the fancy underwear and the romance novel on the nightstand. What Trace did find interesting was that the bold black script on the out-side of the envelopes didn't begin to resemble the precise cursive found on the pages of Alan Fletcher's appointment book.
Holding one of the letters gingerly by the edges, Trace turned it over. It was signed simply Love always, C.
The postmark on one of the envelopes was stamped right here in Whiskey River a little over a week ago, which added an interesting twist to the murder. Although Trace never spent much time dwelling on why a crime was committed—humans were willing to kill for often ridiculously mundane reasons—sex often proved as strong a motive as greed.
Sometimes stronger.
"Where the hell is the M.E.?" he demanded impatiently. He'd placed the call to the county medical examiner over an hour ago.
"Someone looking for me?" a tobacco-roughened voice asked from the doorway.
"It's about time you got here."
"Don't know what the hurry is," Dr. Stanley Potter drawled around a fat cigar. "Looks like this little lady isn't going anywhere." He chuckled at his own bad joke.
It took an effort, but Trace reminded himself that back in Cook County, before he'd gone into semiretirement, Potter had performed more than fifteen hundred autopsies and observed thousands more. He'd also appeared as an expert witness in innumerable cases around the country, proving himself a valuable member of the prosecution team.
"Just call the death so we can get her out of here."
The physician dutifully recorded the victim's lack of pulse. "She's dead, all right." Next he took her temperature. "Ninety-four degrees."
"Which would set the murder between two and three a.m.," Trace calculated. The exact figures varied with environmental differences, but the rule of thumb was about one and a half degrees Fahrenheit temperature loss per hour.
"Close enough for government work," the M.E. agreed. He turned over her hand. Her nails were unpainted. "No skin or signs of a struggle."
"That could mean she was surprised," J.D., who'd risen to his feet to watch the examination, offered.
"It could also mean she knew her killer," Trace said.
After the doctor finished his initial examination, Trace stood by as the body was wrapped in a white sheet, slid into a thick bag, placed on a stretcher, and carried downstairs, where she was strapped onto a gurney in the M.E.'s wagon.
When the gunmetal gray van pulled away from the scene, Trace allowed himself a momentary feeling of frustration at a life cut too brutally and tragically short.
Then, shaking off the brief regret, he turned, intending to go back into the house, when he heard a voice calling his name.
"Sheriff Callahan!"
Trace glared at the man hurrying toward him, past the yellow tape barricade. Rudy Chavez was the sole reporter for the Rim Rock Weekly Record. The young reporter reminded Trace of Jimmy Olson. With just enough Bob Woodward thrown in to make him one helluva pest. Reporters were not Trace Callahan's favorite people. He considered them akin to vultures, only lower down on the evolutionary scale.
"I caught the call on my police scanner." Rudy whipped out a long narrow notebook and a transparent plastic pen. "Is it true? Was the senator shot?"
Knowing that there was no way he could avoid the publicity on this case, Trace said, "I'll be holding a press conference in my office at noon. You'll get a statement then."
"But that's six hours away."
"You can tell time, too," Trace said with mock admiration. "Congratulations." He caught sight of his deputy out of the corner of his eye. "J.D., escort Mr. Chavez to his car."
The reporter visibly bristled. "You can't run me off the property!"
"Watch me," Trace advised easily. But there was steel underlying his tone.
"Come on, Rudy," coaxed J.D., who'd worked with his boss long enough to recognize when not to argue. "You know you can't interfere with a crime scene."
"So there was a murder?"
"I didn't say that." A red flush rose from the starched khaki collar of the deputy's uniform. "Dammit, Rudy," he muttered, practically dragging the reporter back to the Subaru Justy parked behind the phalanx of police vehicles. "You're going to get us both in a world of hurt."
"I'm just trying to do my job."
"And I'm just doing mine," J.D snapped. This was the most exciting day of his career—hell, his entire life so far—and he damn well didn't want to waste a minute of it arguing.
"Haven't you ever heard of freedom of the press? I just need one quote," Rudy persisted.
"If you don't get out of here, I'm going to run you in for interfering in a criminal investigation." The young cop's tone sounded like a copy of Trace's earlier one.
Rudy looked inclined to argue. His dark brown gaze went from J.D. to Trace, who was watching the exchange with an unblinking gaze, back to J.D. again.
Apparently knowing when he was licked, he turned to leave just as another truck turned into the driveway.
"I'll be damned," the reporter breathed as he recognized the driver. "Talk about timing!" His belief in journalistic good fortune restored, Rudy Chavez headed in the direction of the muddy red Jeep.
J.D. watched as the driver's door opened, revealing a pair of long legs clad in tight black jeans and red cowboy boots. The legs were followed by a female body which, while slender, had curves in all the right places. Her sun-streaked blond hair fell in loose soft waves to her shoulders. Her eyes were hidden behind a pair of oversize sunglasses.
As she marched toward them in a brisk, ground-eating stride, J.D. recalled how, in his boyhood, though many residents of Whiskey River had clucked their tongues over Mariah Swann's outrageous behavior, he'd suffered a secret crush on the high-spirited girl who'd been his babysitter before she had run off to Hollywood like her mother.
During his hormone-driven adolescent days he'd raced home from school to watch her steamy love scenes on "All Our Tomorrows" and fantasized acting out those scenes with the woman who'd become locally known as the "Vixen of Whiskey River."
"Who's that?"
Trace's deep voice, coming from just behind him, made J.D. jump. For such a big man, it was downright nerve-racking the way the sheriff could sneak up behind a guy without making a sound.
"That," he answered, as a few of Mariah's more infamous escapades came to mind, "is trouble. With a capital T."
Mariah was stunned by the swarm of activity surrounding the ranch house. At the sight of that unmistakable yellow plastic tape, she cursed. Just last month her beach house had been broken into.
She jumped down from the driver's seat and headed toward the two men standing in the driveway. One was of average height, with the slim-hipped build of the cowboys Mariah had grown up with. He was wearing a Smokey the Bear hat pulled down low over his forehead like a Marine drill instructor and the khaki uniform of the sheriff's department. A silver star was pinned to his starched uniform blouse.
The other man was large enough to play offensive line for the Raiders. Even without the wedge-heeled cowboy boots Mariah would guess his height to be about six-four. Clad in a green-and-black plaid flannel shirt and jeans, he reminded her of Paul Bunyan. He radiated a palpable authority.
She directed her question to the larger man. "What's going on here?"
"Good morning," Trace said in his best Joe Friday, just-the-facts-ma'am voice. He raised two fingers to his black Stetson. "May I ask who you are?"
Although his greeting was unfailingly polite, Mariah knew instinctively that this was a man who could give her authoritative father a run for his money. His firm, unshaven square jaw suggested an equally unyielding nature. She noticed he hadn't answered her question.
Refusing to be intimidated, she stopped close enough to him that the toes of their boots were nearly touching, and realized her mistake when she had to tilt her head back to look a long, long way up into his face.
"I'm Mariah Swann. Who are you?"
"Sheriff Trace Callahan." Trace held out his hand.
"Sheriff?" A blond brow climbed her forehead as she absently extended her own hand in response. His palm was rough, calluses on top of calluses. "What happened to Walter Amos?"
"Amos retired six months ago." Her skin was as soft as it was fragrant. "Last I heard he was spending his time telling lies about birdies and eagles on the golf course in Sun City. This is Deputy Brown."