"Dead Wrong" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jance J.A.)

Chapter 1

Ken Galloway sauntered up to the lectern and wrenched the neck of the microphone to its full height. Then, smiling, he gazed out at the “Candidate’s Night” audience assembled in the spacious meeting room of the Sierra Vista Public Library.

“First off,” he said with an engaging grin, “let me say that I’m in favor of motherhood and apple pie. After all, if it weren’t for my mother, where would I be?”

The anticipated ripple of polite laughter drifted through the crowd. This was Ken’s favorite way of opening his stump speeches. It always served him well in getting things off to a good start. Beginning with a familiar joke was a way of putting his whole political agenda front and center.

Seated off to Ken Galloway’s right, Sheriff Joanna Brady steeled herself for what she knew would come next. She folded her hands in her lap, plastered a faint and entirely fake smile on her face, and willed her ears not to turn red. This far into the campaign she should have been used to her opponent’s constant references to what he described as her “delicate condition.” Joanna should have been accustomed to it, but she wasn’t. The subject still rankled her every time Ken Jr. brought it up. She resented his constantly drawing attention to her growing belly and casually discussing her pregnancy again and again as though she were nothing more than an obliging live-action mannequin in some high school sex-ed classroom.

“The point is,” Ken continued, “when my brothers and I were little, our mother stayed home and took care of us.”

Yes, Joanna thought, because your father took off and left Lillyan Galloway penniless. She ended up living on welfare and raising her kids on Aid to Dependent Children. But Ken Galloway never mentioned that part of his wonderfully idealized family history, and neither did Joanna.

“Call me old-fashioned,” Ken went on, “but I think there’s a lot to be said for mothers being at home with their kids. Cochise County is a big place. There have been times in the last four years when Sheriff Brady hasn’t been as responsive to her duties as she might have been due to the very real conflict of having a child at home. How much more difficult will it be for her to attend to law enforcement needs when she has two children to contend with, including a newborn baby?”

In the back of the room a woman, applauding furiously, rose to her feet. “That’s right, Ken! Way to go!” Eleanor Lathrop Win-field shouted. “You tell her.”

Joanna’s mother’s enthusiastic outburst was enough to propel Joanna out of her dream. She awakened panting and sweating, but the dream stayed with her for several long minutes. Although those were likely Eleanor’s true feelings, to Joanna’s personal knowledge her mother had never made any such statement-at least not in public-not during the campaign or after it.

The election itself was now a full three months in the past. Joanna had managed to eke out a narrow 587-vote victory, so she should have been over the campaign nightmares, but she wasn’t. Night after night, in some variation of that same dream, she was perpetually running for office, and night after night her mother’s continuing disapproval was always with her.

She reached out, longing to cuddle up to Butch’s comforting presence, but he wasn’t there. He had left early the previous afternoon for El Paso and a weekend mystery conference, where he would be on what his editor called the “limbo” panel-made up of first-time writers whose books were sold but not yet published. Butch’s first novel, Serve and. Protect, wasn’t due out until September, but his editor, Carole Ann Hudson, had engineered his being placed on a panel at the conference so he could “start getting his name out there.”

“I’m not going to go running off to El Paso for three days when the baby’s due in less than a week,” Butch had declared.

“Due dates aren’t exactly chiseled in granite,” Joanna had responded. “Look at Jenny. She was ten days late, and I was in labor for the better part of eight hours before she was born. Think about it. El Paso is only five hours away, especially the way you drive. If I called you right away, you’d be here in plenty of time. Besides, Carole Ann must have gone to a lot of trouble to make this happen, including having bound galleys available. You need to be there.”

But now, with the nightmare still lingering and her back hurting like crazy, Joanna wished she hadn’t insisted Butch go. What she would have liked more than anything right then was one of his special back rubs. And although massages helped, Joanna was tired of having a sore back. Tired of not being able to sleep on her stomach. Tired as hell of being pregnant. And, as if to add its own two cents’ worth, the baby stirred suddenly inside her and began hammering away at her ribs.

“All right, all right,” she grumbled. “Since we’re both wide awake, I could just as well get up.”

Pulling on a wool robe that no longer connected around her middle, Joanna waddled out into the kitchen and started heating water. The bouts of morning sickness that had plagued the beginning of her pregnancy no longer existed, but her aversion to the taste of coffee lingered. Tea, not coffee, was now her drink of choice.

Joanna stood at the back door while Lady, the loving Australian shepherd she had rescued the previous summer, went outside to investigate the news of the day. In the crisp chill of early morning, Joanna savored the gentle warmth of the heated floor on her bare feet. Radiant heat in the floor was one of the things Butch had built into their rammed-earth house. At the time he suggested it, Joanna had thought it a peculiar thing to be worrying about heating a house in the Arizona desert. In the past few months, though, when her feet had been swollen after a long day at work, it had been wonderful to kick off her shoes and walk barefoot on the warmed floor. The dogs seemed to like radiant heat every bit as much as she did.

Once her tea was ready, Joanna repaired to her cozy home office, opened her briefcase, and removed her laptop. In the months before and after the election, she and Butch, along with her chief deputy, Frank Montoya, had strategized on how best to handle the complications of juggling being both sheriff and a new mother-the very question Ken Galloway had harped on throughout the campaign.

Under departmental guidelines, Joanna could have taken up to six weeks of paid maternity leave, but that didn’t seem like a reasonable way to run her department. Barring some kind of unforeseen complication, she had settled on the idea of taking only two weeks of maternity leave. Beyond that, she’d do as much of her paperwork from home as possible. In a world of telecommuting, that wasn’t such an outlandish idea. Between them, Butch and Frank had installed a high-speed Internet connection at High Lonesome Ranch and created a teleconferencing network that would allow Joanna to participate in morning briefings without her having to be at the Cochise County Justice Center in person.

“As long as you cooperate,” she said, patting the lump of her belly where the as-yet-unnamed baby was still kicking away. Months earlier she had brought home the ultrasound report her doctor had given her that would have revealed whether the baby was a boy or a girl.

Butch had taken the envelope from her fingers and stuck it on the fridge with a heavy-duty magnet. “I’m an old-fashioned kind of guy,” he told her. “When we unwrap the baby will be time enough to know what it is.” And there the unopened envelope remained to this day-much to Joanna’s mother’s dismay and despite her many remonstrances to the contrary.

For the next hour or so, Joanna answered e-mail. Yes, she would be honored to be the commencement speaker for Bisbee High School‘s graduation. No, she would be unable to participate in the Girl Scout Cookie-Selling Kickoff Breakfast in two weeks. No, she would not be able to speak to the Kiwanis Key Club meeting on March first. Yes, she would come to the May 2 Career Day assembly at St. David High School. Baby or no baby, Joanna could see that her calendar was already filling up for the months ahead, even without a reelection campaign to worry about.

The next e-mail was an announcement that the annual sheriffs’ convention would be held in June. What about that? Some of her fellow lady sheriffs (there were now approximately thirty of them nationwide) would be having their first-ever meeting of the newly formed LSA (Lady Sheriffs Association) at the convention. Joanna was eager to meet some of the women who did the same job and faced the same struggles she did. In fact, she now corresponded regularly with someone she had never met in person- the female sheriff of a tiny department in San Juan County, Colorado. Much as she wanted to be in attendance, Joanna knew that a final decision on that needed to be discussed with Butch. She saved that e-mail as new.

At six, as Joanna began scanning on-line news articles and with the sun just coming up, Lucky, a gangly black Lab pup, trotted into Joanna’s office, proudly carrying one of Jenny’s socks. At sixty-plus pounds and less than a year old, Lucky’s oversize paws indicated that he still had some growing to do. The dog had been born deaf, but he was smart, and Jenny’s patient training was paying big dividends. When Joanna signaled for him to sit and to drop the sock, he immediately complied. After checking to see that the sock was still in one piece, Joanna rewarded the dog with one of the dog treats she kept in her top drawer.

“Mom,” Jenny said from the doorway. “Since Butch isn’t here, can I fix a pot of coffee?”

“May I,” Joanna corrected. “And no. You’re too young for coffee.”

“Butch lets me have coffee,” Jenny countered.

“He does?”

“Sometimes.”

There was a lot that went on between Jenny and Butch that Joanna wasn’t necessarily consulted on or even knew about.

Blond and blue-eyed, Jenny was a willowy teenager who was already a good two inches taller than her mother. She was a responsible kid who got good grades and did more than her fair share of chores around the ranch.

“All right,” Joanna relented. “Go ahead.”

As Jenny left for the kitchen, their third dog, an improbably ugly half pit bull/half golden retriever named Tigger, joined the others and padded along after her. Just then the phone rang. “I didn’t know you let Jenny have coffee in the morning,” she told Butch once she knew who it was.

“It won’t kill her,” he returned. “I started drinking coffee when I was eight. It didn’t stunt my growth. Well, on second thought, maybe it did. Maybe I’d be a few inches taller if I hadn’t started drinking Java so early, but still. One cup isn’t going to hurt her. Besides, wouldn’t you rather have her drinking it at home with us instead of hanging out with her friends at the local Starbucks?”

“There is no local Starbucks,” Joanna pointed out.

“Oh, that’s right,” Butch said. “I forgot.”

Joanna couldn’t help laughing. “So how’s the conference?” she asked.

“Weird. Turns out Hawthorn put a bound galley of Serve and Protect in the goody bags they hand out to each of the conference attendees. I had dinner with Carole Ann last night. According to her, handing out bound galleys like that is good. It shows the publisher is putting some horses behind this book-and that’s not all that common for a first-time author.”

“It’s a good book,” Joanna said. “But what makes the conference weird?”

“For one thing, it means that people see my name badge and then they want me to sign their books, so I’m already signing autographs even though my book isn’t actually published yet. One of my fellow newbies-a lady named Christina Hanson-is on the same panel I am. Her book is due out in June. At the pre-conference cocktail party she made it abundantly clear that she’s more than a little annoyed that I have bound galleys here and she doesn’t. I’m worried that later on today when we do the panel, the sparks will fly.”

“Are you saying even mystery writing is political?” Joanna asked.

Butch laughed. “Evidently. Now, how are you?”

“Woke up early with my usual backache. And the baby’s a busy little bee today. I’ve been doing paperwork, but it’s about time to shower and go in to work.”

“You don’t have to work until the last minute,” Butch said.

“I want to work,” Joanna said. “If I stayed home, I’d sit around and worry. Besides, Marianne and I are supposed to have lunch at Daisy’s today. If I don’t go to work, I won’t have an excuse to go out to lunch.”

Marianne Maculyea, the Reverend Marianne Maculyea, had been Joanna’s best friend since junior high. She was also the pastor of Tombstone Canyon United Methodist Church, where Joanna and Butch were members.

“Wish I could join you,” Butch said. “I don’t think lunch here will be that much fun.”

Joanna’s call-waiting buzzed in her ear. Caller ID told her it was Dispatch. “Got to go,” Joanna said. “I’ve got another call. Have fun. I love you.”

“Good morning, Sheriff Brady,” Tica Romero said. “I hope it’s not too early to call.”

“It’s not,” Joanna said. “I’ve been up working for a while. What’s going on?”

“We’ve got a homicide,” Tica responded. “Halfway between Bisbee Junction and Paul’s Spur.”

Joanna’s initial election to office had been in the immediate aftermath of her first husband’s murder. Andy had been running for sheriff at the time, and Joanna’s subsequent election had been regarded more as a gesture of community sympathy than anything else. Once in office, however, she had been determined to function as a real sheriff rather than sheriff in name only. Through the years she had done her best to show up on the scene of every homicide that happened within her jurisdiction. Now was no time to stop.

“How long ago did it happen?” she asked.

“A border patrol officer called it in just a few minutes ago,” Tica answered. “Detectives Carbajal and Carpenter are already on their way. So’s Dave Hollicker.”

Dave was Joanna’s senior crime scene investigator. Jaime Carbajal and Ernie Carpenter, sometimes-known as the Double Cs, comprised Joanna’s single team of homicide detectives. All three officers were tremendously overworked. Joanna had planned on adding another CSI, and she had wanted to promote two patrol unit deputies to detectives, so Ernie and Jaime could have worked with the new guys while they learned the ropes. Unfortunately the War on Terror had intervened. So many of Joanna’s experienced deputies had been called up for National Guard duty that she couldn’t afford to deplete the patrol roster further. Her homicide investigation team was overworked, and overworked it would remain.

Joanna glanced at her watch. If she showered and went to the scene with her hair still wet, she could probably be there within half an hour. “An illegal?” she asked.

It was a reasonable assumption. Border Road was called that because it ran for miles right along the sagging remains of a barbed-wire fence that constituted the official dividing line between the United States and Mexico. The unimpeded flood of illegal crossers pouring over that line posed a constant drain on Joanna’s officers and her budget.

“The Border Patrol guy says it’s not,” Tica replied. “The victim is wrapped in a tarp, but from what the officer could see, he’s male, balding, and with light-colored hair and fair skin.”

“Which means he’s probably some poor Anglo dummy who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. A coyote probably got him.”

Joanna’s coyote reference had nothing to do with the four-legged fur-bearing kind. In the parlance of Southwest law enforcement officers, coyotes were smugglers who trafficked in bringing illegal entrants across the border from Mexico into the United States. Often operating in stolen vehicles and with zero concern for the welfare of their human cargo, human coyotes had become a particularly dangerous category of criminal. Speeding vehicles, wrecking and spilling their hapless passengers, were almost everyday occurrences.

On one occasion, fifty-eight men had been crammed in the back of an eighteen-wheeler when the truck hauling them had broken down. The driver had abandoned the locked vehicle on the side of the road at high noon on a hot August afternoon. When someone finally pried open the locked cargo door, all but one of the men were dead, and he had perished on his way to the hospital.

“That would be my first guess,” Tica agreed.

“All right,” Joanna said. “It’s going to take a little time for me to get there. I’m not dressed, but tell the Double Cs I’ll show up as soon as I can.”

“Show up where?” Jenny asked from the doorway.

She came into Joanna’s office fully dressed and sipping coffee from one of the white oversize diner-style mugs Butch preferred. Jenny was drinking a whole lot more coffee than Joanna had originally envisioned, but she let it go.

“At a crime scene,” Joanna said as she shut down her computer and began stowing it into her briefcase.

“Oh,” Jenny said. “I was hoping you’d give me a ride to school. The bus takes so long, and it’s so boring!”

As far as Joanna was concerned, when it came to teenagers, boring was the best of all possible worlds. “Can’t, sweetie,” she replied. “It’s in the wrong direction. I can give you a ride to the bus stop, but that’s about it.”

“I can hardly wait until I’m old enough to get my driver’s license,” Jenny said. “It’s just a little over a year and a half before I’ll be old enough to get my learner’s permit.”

This wasn’t a fact Joanna enjoyed pondering. She wasn’t ready for her daughter to be old enough to learn to drive a car. One of the biggest concerns with the idea of Jenny’s turning fifteen had to do with its being a mere two years away from seventeen, which is how old Joanna had been when she herself got pregnant with Jenny-pregnant and unmarried.

“Did you feed the dogs?” she asked.

Jenny gave her mother an exasperated look. “I fed the dogs and Kiddo and the cattle and chickens, too,” she said. Kiddo was Jenny’s sorrel gelding. “I told Butch I’d take care of all that while he was gone so you wouldn’t have to.”

“Thank you,” Joanna said. If Jenny was old enough to do all that without having to be asked, maybe having that mugful of coffee wasn’t out of line after all.

“I have to hit the shower,” she said. “Can you be ready to go in fifteen?”

“I guess,” Jenny said. When she left her mother’s office this time, Tigger and Lucky followed. Lady stayed where she was.

Joanna made short work of her shower and makeup, then crammed herself into her uniform. When she had first purchased the two maternity uniforms, the tops had seemed hilariously big. The first time she put one on she had felt like she was dressing in a clown suit. Now, though, it fit snugly over her bulging middle. Is this damn thing going to hold up until my delivery date? she wondered. Or am I going to end up popping the buttons?

Twenty minutes later, Joanna dropped Jenny off at the end of High Lonesome Road. Then, munching a peanut butter sandwich, she headed for Paul’s Spur, where she turned off the highway and made her way to the dirt track called Border Road. Ten minutes after that she arrived at the end of a long line of parked police vehicles. As she exited her Crown Victoria, she caught sight of a pair of hopeful vultures circling lazily in the air above. Up ahead Dr. George Winfield, Cochise County‘s medical examiner and Joanna’s stepfather, was unloading his crime scene satchel from his van.

“Ugly critters, aren’t they,” he observed, following Joanna’s glance.

She nodded. “They are that,” she agreed.

“So how’s my favorite mother-to-be?” George added as he dragged an unwieldy folded gurney onto the ground. His pleasant, upbeat manner never failed to surprise Joanna, especially since he spent so much time with her mother-a woman who was, in Joanna’s estimation, one of the most difficult people on earth.

“Back hurts,” Joanna replied. “And I’m not getting much sleep.”

“The back part will get better soon,” George observed, “but lack of sleep is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.”

“Thanks,” Joanna said. “That’s exactly what I needed to hear this morning.”

Ernie Carpenter had evidently spotted their arrival. He came marching purposefully down the long line of vehicles parked on the shoulder of the narrow road. Ernie was a stout bear of a man. His broad face included a line of thick black eyebrows that seemed to meet in the middle whenever he frowned.

“What have we got?” Joanna asked.

“Not much,” Ernie grumbled. Effortlessly he picked up George’s gurney and carried it as easily as if it were a kiddie tricycle. “This is a dumping scene, not a crime scene. Most likely the body’s been here for a matter of hours. Looks to me like somebody dropped him out of the back of a vehicle-a minivan or a truck-and then rolled him over the edge of the berm of rocks that runs along the side of the road.”

“In other words, no usable tire tracks or footprints.”

“You’ve got it,” Ernie agreed. “Border Patrol is up and down this road all night long, so any tracks that had been left would have been obliterated long ago. The body’s wrapped in a brown canvas painter’s tarp. It blended in with the rocks well enough overnight that no one actually spotted it until after the sun came up this morning. Dave has been scouring the area, but there’s nothing to see. No cigarette butts, no soda cans, no garbage, nothing.”

“Any sign of what killed him?” George asked.

“Like I said, he’s all wrapped up in that tarp. We can see the top of his head and that’s about it. Some blood seems to have leaked through the tarp. I’m guessing he’s either been shot or stabbed, one or the other. We were waiting for Doc Winfield to get here before we did anything more.”

George stopped walking long enough to remove a thermometer from his kit and check the air temperature. A chill brisk wind was blowing down off the Mule Mountains. “If this isn’t the crime scene, then whatever we find inside that tarp is all we’re going to have to go on. I’ll remove enough of the tarp to check the body temp, but with the wind blowing like this it could easily blow away hair or fiber evidence without us even noticing. Let’s unwrap him at the morgue, inside and out of the wind.”

“You’ve got it, Doc,” Ernie said. “All we needed was for you to give the word.”

Joanna followed the two men as far as the scene itself. The dirt in the roadway showed signs that something heavy had been dropped out of a vehicle and then rolled as far as the edge of the road, where it had been heaved over the rocky bulldozed shoulder. The body had been placed far enough away from any passing traffic so as to be out of sight, but not so far that whoever had put it there would have risked leaving behind detectable traces of hair or fiber evidence.

One of the officers had surrounded the scene with a hopeful border of bright yellow crime scene tape. Inside the tape Joanna spotted the body, rocks, and a few tufts of brittle, closely cropped yellow grass. Outside the tape, a desolate landscape of scrubby mesquite trees stretched for miles in all directions. The thorn-studded, winter-bare branches might well have trapped some critical hair or fiber evidence. Unfortunately, the nearest of the spindly trees stood well outside the taped crime scene boundary.

Joanna stood on the edge of the roadway huddled in the warmth of her long leather coat, while Dave and Jamie helped George wrestle the corpse into a body bag and onto the gurney. It may have been winter and cold as hell, but as they moved the body, a swarm of flies buzzed skyward while the stench of rotting flesh wafted in Joanna’s direction.

Watching the process, she was struck by the total lack of dignity. She was glad none of the unidentified victim’s relatives were present to see him hefted around like a hunk of unwieldy trash. He had been dumped out along the road with no more ceremony than someone would use when discarding a cigarette butt or an empty beer can.

And that very lack of dignity-the awfulness of it-was exactly why Joanna Brady, Ernie, Jaime, and Dave were all here. Redressing what had been done to this poor unknown man was what they did. It was their job to avenge man’s inhumanity to man with justice. It was why Joanna had worked her heart out running for office and why taking a six-week maternity leave was far longer than she wanted to stay away from work.

With the cold wind blowing through her still-damp hair, she realized she had changed. Being sheriff was no longer an empty title she had wanted to achieve. Somehow it had become what she was. Finding out who the victim was and why he was now dead and encased in a body bag was what she had been summoned to do with her life. The good guy/bad guy game she had once discussed with her father had somehow seeped into her blood. Or maybe, as with D. H. Lathrop, the compulsion to be a cop had been there all along.

Oh my God! she thought with a start. / really am turning into my father!

“Are you all right?” George asked, bringing her out of her reverie.

“I’m fine,” she said at once.

“You looked a little funny there.”

“No, really. I’m fine.”

“Nothing much is on my agenda for today,” George continued, “so I’ll try to get this autopsy out of the way first thing. Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal drew straws. Ernie lost, so he’s coming along for the ride. What about you?”

Joanna thought about that peanut butter sandwich she’d gobbled down in the car and about what might happen to it if she ventured into George’s stainless-steel-studded room to observe an autopsy in progress.

“Since Ernie’s going,” she said, “I think I’ll take a pass.”

George Winfield gave her a fond grin. “Good girl,” he agreed. “I thought you might.”