Sarah's List

by Elizabeth Gunn

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Elizabeth Gunn From Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Also by Elizabeth Gunn from Severn House

  Novels

  BURNING MEREDITH

  The Sarah Burke series

  COOL IN TUCSON

  NEW RIVER BLUES

  KISSING ARIZONA

  MAGIC LINE

  RED MAN DOWN

  DENNY’S LAW

  The Jake Hines series

  McCAFFERTY’S NINE

  THE TEN-MILE TRIALS

  ELEVEN LITTLE PIGGIES

  NOONTIME FOLLIES

  SARAH’S LIST

  Elizabeth Gunn

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2020

  in Great Britain and 2020 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2021 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2020 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Gunn.

  The right of Elizabeth Gunn to be identified

  as the author of this work has been asserted

  in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-9049-8 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-706-4 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0427-1 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  ONE

  Monday

  ‘Between Camino Del Cerro and Sweetwater, Dispatch told me, on Silverbell Road.’ Sarah leaned forward, squinting across the driver. ‘Must be almost— There it is. See all the squads?’

  Bogey turned left quickly to drive through iron gates standing open, onto a fresh asphalt driveway. He parked to the right of the three black-and-whites that were nosed in behind a passenger van covered with logos. Its ads matched the ones on the new brick building behind it. They all read Fairweather Farms, with senior living in smaller print below.

  A couple of Tucson street cops, new recruits that Sarah didn’t know, were stringing crime scene tape around the rear end of the van. The front end was out of sight, improbably buried in the half-open garage door of the handsome three-story building.

  ‘Whoa,’ Bogey said. ‘Somebody forgot to stop, huh?’ For a few seconds, both detectives sat still while their eyes scanned the puzzling scene. Besides being stuck in a half-open door, the vehicle was pocked with what looked like fresh bullet holes, their sheared metallic edges winking in the sunlight.

  Two men stood just outside the tape, wearing brown jumpsuits with logos that matched the van. They carried gardening tools, a rake and an edger, and were watching the vehicle warily, as if they thought it might explode.

  A few feet away, between the men and the front door of the building, a woman in tan scrubs with the same logo as theirs was standing with her hands over her eyes. She was shouting something. Or crying? Both, Sarah decided as she opened her door and heard, ‘… never saw so much blood in my life! Omigod!’

  Sarah said, ‘I don’t see any blood, do you?’

  ‘Sure don’t,’ Bogey said, but he unclipped the cover on his Glock.

  He was still trying to fit in, she thought. She had watched his efforts, during his first week in homicide division, to get everybody comfortable with his big square face and his name, Zivko Boganicevic. A mouthful for sure, but he’d spelled it for anybody who asked and, if they still looked confused, pronounced it again: Zeef-ko Bo-gan-EESS-uh-veech. By the end of the week they had all begun, at his suggestion, to call him Bogey.

  In the shady interior behind the half-raised garage door, Sarah could see the feet and lower legs of more patrolmen. They must be taping an area around the front of the van. She watched as the two outside patrolmen finished stretching their end of the tape. Simultaneously, each man fastened his end to the door frame on his side and stood back, looking for the next order of business. Looking for Pratt? Sarah thought. Where is he?

  Big, loud, hard to miss, Pratt was the patrolman who had called homicide, looking for somebody to take over this crime scene. Sarah had been at her desk when Delaney answered the phone, and she’d heard him tell Pratt to wait for the team of detectives that he would send right away. Delaney had not become head of homicide by being shy about issuing orders – rattlesnakes hid quivering in the cactus, his detectives claimed, when Delaney got riled about an order overlooked.

  So where’s Pratt?

  ‘You know either one of these boys?’ Sarah asked Bogey. It was a reasonable question – Bogey had just made his rating, and he was fresh off the Tucson streets, not a transfer from out of town – he must know most of the guys on patrol.

  Like every other detective in homicide, Sarah had heard about the bold collar that got Bogey’s application lifted out of the slush pile and put up front in the promotion queue. He was replacing Leo Tobin, who had given plenty of notice about his intention to retire in September, and they all knew one or two detectives who were slogging through domestic abuse or auto theft, waiting their turn for homicide. So when they got a few spare minutes for the gossip that greases the wheels of police work everywhere, they began to ask each other, what kind of juice has this Bogey got?

  Sarah tried to steer clear of department gossip, usually, and Bogey’s story – the single-handed arrest of five armed men – had a show-boat slant that made her extra dubious. Why didn’t he call for backup? She would not have picked him to partner with today, but Delaney said, when he assigned her to this oddball street attack, ‘Might as well take Bogey along for backup. Good chance to get him started.’

  She’d been listening to chaotic radio traffic from the street chase while she worked, and began to play closer attention as the chase cars reported in from a place called Fairweather Farms. So when the call came in for homicide and she got the case, she’d asked her backup to drive and let her monitor radio traffic on the way.
But there’d been nothing much going on for the last few blocks. Well, we’ll get the skinny from the patrolmen on site.

  ‘The short one’s Frank O’Neill,’ Bogey said. His voice had a little rasp of tension in it – he knew all the experienced detectives were watching him, curious to see his chops. He added the other thing he knew about O’Neill, ‘The Irish guy who speaks Spanish?’

  ‘Ah.’ That was the other story on the grapevine this week, the new recruit with an edge in la lengua. Most Tucson cops, the Anglo ones, quickly acquired the few words of Spanglish sufficient to make an arrest. But this recruit from last fall’s class had a father whose job with a major oil refiner had kept him travelling the Mexican states, and afforded his son many school holidays cruising the barrios of outback Mexican towns. O’Neill spoke street Spanish, it was said – he could even roll his Rs.

  ‘The other guy on the tape is Francisco Gomez,’ Bogey said. ‘Mexican but second or third generation; people call him Franny. He and O’Neill seem to team up often, and the guys say they gossip together in Spanish, sound like a pair of old abuelas sitting around the pueblos.’

  ‘Fine, then, ‘Sarah said. ‘You download O’Neill and his gossipy partner. I’ll check the victim and see what the staff has to say.’

  ‘Gotcha,’ Bogey said. And then, over his shoulder as he walked away, ‘Call me if you need any help with that screamer.’

  ‘You bet,’ Sarah said. When pigs fly, I will call you for help. Back in the day when she was new in homicide, part of the first wave of female detectives in Tucson, men had offered to help her all the time – her male peers had made no secret of their disbelief in her ability to do the job. She had ignored the snickers, bit her tongue to hold back sharp answers, and worked hard to prove she could hold up her end. She was proud now that she was treated as an equal by the men and respected as a leader by the many younger women coming on board.

  She unclipped the badge from her belt, aware as she got out of Bogey’s unmarked Ford Fusion that they were the only two people in sight whose clothes and vehicle did not identify them. Like the Glock in her shoulder holster, her badge didn’t show under her neat jacket. A savvy observer might realize she was too well-dressed for the weather, but this group looked too preoccupied to notice style points.

  So she held the badge up for the two gardeners to read as she passed them, and said, ‘Wait here for me, please, while I get a look at the body. Is that what’s bothering this lady?’

  ‘Tammy? I guess,’ the older one said. The name tag on his pocket read Henry. ‘I know she ain’t as crazy as she sounds right now,’ he added. ‘Must be the first time she ever seen bl—’

  Just then the woman cried, ‘I’m going to be sick!’ and bolted for a door under an arch in the building behind her.

  No use following her there. Watching the attendant run toward a bathroom, Sarah noticed for the first time a tiny woman seated on a bench in the shade near the front door of the building. Not in uniform, so she must be a patient. She seemed oddly detached, paying no attention to the activity churning all around her. As Sarah watched, she raised her hands from her lap and scrutinized them carefully as she matched fingers – thumb to thumb, index to index. Her lips moved but no sound came out.

  She probably shouldn’t be alone, Sarah thought, but I don’t have time – is anybody controlling access to this scene? Bogey was already talking to the tape-stringers. She held up her badge and called, ‘I’m going aboard here.’

  Bogey held up one hand with fingers curled in the ‘OK’ sign, and made a note. It would have to do for now; the squad stringing tape hadn’t brought a posse box evidently, and nobody was controlling access to the van. She gloved up and ducked under the newly strung tape.

  The steps slid out from under the chassis when she pushed back the big side door of the van. Luckily the vehicle hadn’t penetrated the building far enough to jam the lock. She climbed aboard and turned right.

  Somebody had turned on the overhead lights in the garage, but the front of the van was still gloomy compared to the brightness outside. There was indeed a lot of blood, spread over the whole front of the van. And glass – the windshield had shattered and there were shards of glass scattered over the console, the floorboards and the dead man.

  He was still in the driver’s seat, slumped over the steering wheel, left arm lying on the padded armrest. His shoulders rested on the steering wheel and his right hand had slid forward onto the console.

  The entry wound from the bullet that had killed him looked surprisingly small. She leaned over his back, put one gloved finger under his chin and lifted his head a fraction of an inch. They were not going to find an exit wound – the area under his face was clean. So the bullet was still in his head – good; the crime lab might get some news off that.

  The smell wasn’t bad yet. She took a deep breath to get her olfactory nerves adjusted, so she could ignore it as it got worse.

  What was left of the windshield, and the undamaged window on the driver’s right, were streaked with blood. The blood streaks, in turn, were festooned with clinging fragments of dust and pollen. She felt an impulse to close the window but quelled it – it was crime scene evidence that the driver’s side window was open. Open, in this weather? She made a note and went on.

  She kept turning left, typing notes on her tablet. Most of the spatter had stayed up front. The chase car must have come from behind, and never quite caught up – even the two shots that had come in through the open window had buried themselves above the windshield. The one lucky shot that killed the driver must have been fired on an inside curve. By the end of her first turn she had a dozen questions in the hasty code she used for first impressions: Hi-pow rif – ammo 22 or up – w-sh brok, right wind not?? Where casings from (how many) shots?

  Wanting answers, she climbed out of the van and asked the two gardeners, who were still jittering nearby, ‘Tell me how this trouble started.’ She had scrolled back to what Delaney told her when he gave her the case: ‘People working outside heard shots and yelling.’

  Usually the story changed considerably in the telling, but today the crew members confirmed what Delaney had told her.

  ‘Shots is what I heard first,’ Henry said. He wore an air of being in charge of the whole place. When she’d asked, he said he was head of the grounds crew, which seemed to be this two-man team.

  ‘Yeah, and then a lotta yelling,’ the younger man said, ‘out on the road.’ His pocket said his name was Jacob. He avoided eye contact, had trouble with r’s and l’s and a nervous habit of scratching his elbow. Sarah noted these quirks as she always did, handy reminders when she had to get acquainted with a group in a hurry.

  ‘Two shooters with high-powered weapons,’ Henry said, ‘hanging out the rear windows and they shot fast. Yelling and shooting, going bam bam bam …’ He did his best Tom Cruise imitation.

  ‘About what time was this, do you remember?’

  ‘Uuuhhh,’ Henry looked pointlessly at his watch as if he expected it to tell him how many minutes had passed since the van grazed his shins. ‘Few minutes after eleven.’

  ‘Good. Thanks.’ Knowing the time of death would save some time for the coroner who got this autopsy. They were always overloaded, so you earned some credit with the coroner if you helped speed up the process. Sarah was a careful collector of credits.

  ‘The yelling,’ she said, ‘could you hear what they said?’

  Henry turned his hands over and looked at Jacob, who shrugged. ‘No idea,’ Jacob said.

  Henry added, ‘Spanish.’

  As she watched them over her glasses, they began to nod, each encouraging the other to go on. Finally Henry said, ‘… And then our van, this one here, came through the gate very fast. We was working over there near the entrance, spreading gravel on the plant beds next to the driveway. That van missed killing the two of us, Jesus, just by inches.’

  Emphatic head-shakes from Henry and a little groan from Jacob, who said, ‘But it did miss us, but then
it didn’t stop! Crashed right into the garage door when it was only halfway up. That got it stopped all right, but the motor kept on running.’

  ‘But right behind it – I mean right behind,’ Henry said, ‘the shooters’ car come roaring in – and man, it was lucky we’d already jumped out of the way of our shuttle bus or they’d a’ got us for sure. Because them bozos wasn’t thinking about anything but killing, never looked at a friggin’ thing but our van. I never seen anything like it – we coulda been sticks and stones for all they cared!’

  ‘Wasn’t for these cops here,’ Jacob said, nodding at the tape-stringers, ‘we’d a been dead ducks right now.’

  ‘These patrolmen my partner’s talking to?’ Sarah said. ‘They were the ones chasing the shooters?’

  ‘With lights and sirens going soon as they turned onto Silverbell at the light up there,’ Jacob said. He got excited, waved his arms. ‘And the shooters, soon as they heard the sirens they started yelling at each other. All in that Mex lingo, but it wasn’t hard to guess what they were saying.’

  ‘Oh? What do you think they were saying?’

  ‘“Let’s get the hell outta Dodge!” Right, Henry?’

  ‘Right. And did they ever – look what they done to our perfect gravel.’ He waved mournfully at the trenches in the freshly manicured grounds. ‘Three days we been rakin’ this place, we had it smooth as a new baby’s ass.’

  ‘Even so, I guess we should be grateful,’ Jacob said. ‘They’d a run over us without battin’ an eye if we happened to be standin’ in the way.’

  Henry waved forlornly at the toppled desert plants all around him. ‘Drove right through the yard without slowin’ down, see the track? Straight through the fence like they never heard of obstacles, down into the borrow pit and back up onto the road. Tore off back to town about a hundred miles an hour.’