Fire and Ice (22 page)

“We believe it was money Marcella’s husband had stolen from a drug dealer down here in Arizona. But now the husband is dead, too. He was murdered in prison in California several months ago. Somebody shanked him. I’m guessing that whoever killed him may also be responsible for killing Marcella.”

“Do you have any idea who?” I asked.

“I’ve only been able to pull up one name, Juan Francisco Castro,” Jaime said. “His street name is Paco. He’s a drug dealer who moves back and forth between Arizona and Mexico, and probably California as well.”

I wrote down the name.

“Do you have any idea where Paco might be right now?”

“Not really. I’ve had feelers out all along. So far nothing’s turned up.”

In the background I heard Joanna Brady’s voice. “Ready?” she asked.

“I have to go now,” Carbajal said. “We’ve got to go talk to my nephew, Marcella’s son.”

That wasn’t a job I envied.

“You go ahead,” I said. “But keep me posted. If you learn anything on your end, let us know. We’ll do the same.”

“What?” Mel asked.

I handed her the piece of paper I had used to jot down Juan Francisco Castro’s name. “Let’s look into this guy,” I told her. “He may be the one.”

Without another word, we both reached for our respective laptops.

When they stepped out of the house, Joanna took one look at the yard. The garage door was blocked by several parked cars. The only way to retrieve her Crown Victoria would have meant going back inside and asking several guests to abandon their poker hands long enough to come move their vehicles. When Jaime wasn’t at work, he drove a Toyota Camry. As a latecomer to the party, no one had blocked him in.

“It’s all right,” Joanna said. “I’ll ride with you.”

“Why don’t you just stay here—” Jaime began.

Joanna cut him off in mid-sentence. “I’m coming,” she said determinedly. “When we finish, if I need to, I’ll get one of the nightshift deputies to bring me home.”

Once buckled into Jaime’s car, they were silent as he maneuvered down the bumpy dirt track that led from the house back down to High Lonesome Road. As they bounced across the cattle guard at the end of the of the ranch’s private road, Joanna caught sight of a vehicle tucked in close to the fence line and the stand of
mesquite trees behind it. Caught up in his own thoughts, Jaime seemed not to notice and started to drive past.

After registering the vehicle’s presence, it took only a moment for Joanna to identify it. The snub-nosed Toyota RAV-4 sitting just beyond Joanna’s mailbox belonged to none other than reporter Marliss Shackleford.

“Stop, please,” Joanna said. “Go back.”

Jaime pulled a U-turn. The Camry’s wheels had barely stopped moving when Joanna hopped out of the passenger seat. She charged over to the parked SUV and rapped sharply on the window, which Marliss eventually opened.

“What are you doing?” Joanna demanded. She asked the question, but she already knew the answer. Marliss was here hoping to dredge up some dirt on someone; whose dirt it was hardly mattered.

“It’s a party,” Marliss said.

“Yes, it is,” Joanna agreed. “And I’m quite sure you weren’t invited. As I said before, what are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see who all came.”

You wanted to see if anyone had too much to drink before they left, Joanna thought. “Now would be a good time for you to leave,” she said.

“This is a county road,” Marliss objected. “You can’t order me off it. I have every right to be here.”

“She’s right, boss,” Jaime called from behind her. “Leave her be. Let’s go.”

“Where are you going?” Marliss asked. “What’s so important that you’re leaving in the middle of your own party?”

Joanna definitely didn’t want Marliss trailing along behind them. Taking a deep breath, Joanna suddenly found herself remembering Marianne Maculyea’s sermon from the previous Sun
day. It had been all about turning the other cheek, along with the verse from Proverbs about a soft answer turning away wrath. Maybe, in this situation, giving a soft answer was the only solution.

“When we left, Butch was about to serve dessert,” Joanna said. “I’m sure there’s plenty to go around. Why don’t you mosey on up to the house and see for yourself who all’s there?”

Joanna saw at once that her invitation left Marliss torn. She wanted to know all the details about who had come to the party and what was going on. She was also curious about where Joanna was going. In the end, curiosity about the party won out.

“Are you sure it’ll be all right?” she asked, turning the key in the ignition.

“Absolutely,” Joanna said. “Tell Butch I sent you.”

Joanna stood there and waited while Marliss turned her RAV-4 around and headed up the road toward the house. As soon as she got back in Jaime’s car, he put it into gear.

“Thanks for getting rid of her,” he said. “I don’t think I would have been that nice.”

WHEN THE NEXT-OF-KIN NOTIFICATIONS HAD BEEN MADE, JOANNA
asked Deputy Raymond to drop her off at home. By then the bachelor party was long since over. She fell into bed and into a sound sleep. When she staggered into the kitchen the next morning with Lady at her heels, Joanna was amazed to see that the place was clean as a whistle and unnaturally quiet. Dennis and the three other dogs were evidently still at Carol’s place. Butch had made use of the child- and dog-free time to haul the rented tables and chairs out of the family room and to return pieces of furniture to their customary positions.

“How was it?” Butch asked, studying her face as he handed her a cup of coffee.

“Pretty rough,” she admitted, stroking Lady’s long smooth fur.

“Pretty rough” was an understatement. It had been more than
rough. Joanna would never forget how fifteen-year-old Luis had heard the awful news of his mother’s murder in stoic silence. Only when Jaime finished had the boy’s narrow shoulders slumped. He had turned away and tried to bolt from the room, but Jaime had caught him on the way past. Engulfed in a smothering embrace, the boy had sobbed brokenly into his uncle’s chest.

Eventually, leaving the boy in the care of Jaime’s wife, Delcia, Joanna and Jaime had gone on to take the bad news to Jaime’s parents’ house. The moment Elena Carbajal answered the bell and saw who was standing on her doorstep, she knew why they were there. She had burst into a keening wail of grief before either Jaime or Joanna said a word. The gut-wrenching sound had prompted Jaime’s father to burst into the living room. He had emerged from the bedroom wearing slippers and pajamas.

“What is it, Elena?” Conrad Carbajal, Jaime’s father, had asked. “What’s going on?”

Jaime, as he had done with Luis, was the one who gave his parents the bad news.

“Naturally the parents blame themselves for what happened to their daughter,” Joanna told Butch over coffee. “But parents always do. Marcella was evidently a headstrong, out-of-control teenager. She ran off at age seventeen without ever completing high school. Her parents disapproved of her friends and her lifestyle, but they were thankful when she and Luis moved back here a year or so ago. At least that gave them a chance to look out for Luis.”

“How’s Jaime doing?” Butch asked.

“He’s on bereavement leave as of this morning,” Joanna answered. “Naturally he’s devastated.”

“Why wouldn’t he be?” Butch replied. “When someone dies, the people who are left behind assume that they’re somehow the
root cause—that the tragedy happened because of something they did or didn’t do at some critical juncture.”

Joanna nodded. “You’ve got that right,” she said. “On our way uptown Jaime told me about a family Easter-egg hunt when he and Marcella were little. He was three years older than she was. She was running. She tripped and spilled her basket. Jaime tried to find all the missing eggs and put them back. He traded some of his own good eggs for some of her broken ones.”

Butch looked puzzled. “What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?”

“I think that was probably the first time Jaime tried to smooth things over for his little sister, but I think he’s been doing the same thing all his life.”

“Except this one can’t be smoothed,” he said.

Just then Carol Sunderson bustled in through the back door with a bright-eyed Dennis parked on her hip and with the three boisterous dogs trailing behind. None of them seemed any worse for wear for having spent the night away from home. For the next several minutes the kitchen was a chaotic circus of dogs and boy as Dennis did his best to relate everything that had gone on the evening before. Eventually, though, Dennis trotted off, taking the dogs with him. In the sudden quiet, Butch turned to Joanna.

“How about some breakfast?” he asked.

“Toast, maybe,” Joanna said. “I’m not very hungry.”

While Butch set about fixing it, Joanna leaned back, rested her head against the wall behind her, and closed her eyes.

“So what’s the plan?” Butch asked.

Joanna looked at her watch. “It’s supposed to be a light day,” she said. “The daily briefing first and then the Board of Supervisors meeting. After that, you and I are supposed to have our fare
well lunch with my mother and George, followed by a haircut and a wedding rehearsal.”

The plate Butch set in front of Joanna contained a piece of buttered toast along with a hunk of leftover steak. “Have some protein,” he advised. “Even the Energizer Bunny needs to refuel sometime. Oh, and about that lunch,” he added.

George and Eleanor Winfield were about to embark on their second snowbird season, driving back to George’s Minnesota cabin in their motor home. They had delayed their spring departure in order to attend Frank Montoya’s wedding. Now they were due to leave on Sunday morning. Hence the scheduled get-together today.

“What about it?” Joanna asked.

“I may not make it,” Butch said. “My editor sent me an e-mail early this morning. They want to have a telephone conference later on today so we can get the next book tour organized. If the call is over in time, I’ll come. If not…”

“That sounds a little lame,” Joanna said.

Butch grinned. “I know,” he said. “But it’s a good excuse. Besides, she’s your mother.”

Based on Jaime Carbajal’s phone call, Mel and I had stayed up until the wee hours tracking down information on Paco Castro—no relation to Fidel and Raul, by the way. It didn’t seem likely that a tip from a grieving relative would lead us straight to a killer. That hardly ever happens. But what our research did do was show us that Paco Castro had an extensive rap sheet dating back to juvenile days. If he was representative of the caliber of Marco and Marcella Andrade’s friends, they had run with a pretty tough crowd.

The next morning, Mel and I filled our traveler’s cups with
java, got in our two separate vehicles, and headed across the water to our office in Bellevue’s Eastgate neighborhood. It’s a fifteen-mile commute that, under good traffic conditions, can take as little as twenty minutes. As I’ve mentioned before, during rush hour in Seattle, there are no good traffic conditions. That day the drive took over an hour door-to-door in wall-to-wall rain. Once inside the building, we settled into our tiny but nonetheless private offices. My job that morning was to go nosing around in the world of a now-deceased two-bit thug named Marco Andrade.

From the multiple offenses listed on Marco Andrade’s rap sheet, everything from aggravated assault to attempted murder, I was mystified as to why he would have been transferred from a maximum security facility near Lancaster in southern California to a medium-security lockup called Wild Horse Mesa Prison near Redding. While doing time in Lancaster, Marco had been tagged with numerous infractions, including fighting and being nonco-operative. If it had been up to me, I would have left him where he was instead of transferring him to something less severe.

Anyone who has ever tried to outwit a recalcitrant two-year-old will be happy to tell you, chapter and verse, why it’s never a good idea to reward bad behavior.

Once again, however, I was grateful to be working for Ross Connors. When I’m initiating contact with folks in other jurisdictions, it always gives me a big leg up on the credibility ladder when I’m able to drop the name of Washington State Attorney General into the mix. If I need to go to the top, using his name makes it possible for me to take the express elevator, so to speak. It was a lot tougher back in the old days when I was a grunt working for Seattle PD.

In this instance, the top turned out to be a guy named Donald Willison, the warden of Wild Horse Mesa Prison. When his secre
tary put me through to him at ten past nine, Willison sounded surly and argumentative, but then again, if I had to spend every day and hour of my working life locked up inside an institution right along with a bunch of convicted criminals, maybe I’d be surly, too.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “And what do you want?”

I told him who I was and that I was calling about Marco Andrade.

Willison sighed. “Oh, crap,” he said. “Him again? You and everybody else. I knew that mope was going to be trouble the minute they dropped him off in my sally port. And once I got a look at his paperwork, I was even more convinced. I could see right off that he was going to be a problem and had no business being here. Sure enough. As soon as he got in a pissing match with one of my guards, I started trying to send him back where he came from, but reversing transfers is a lot like trying to push a rope uphill.”

That’s the way it works in bureaucracies. It may be possible to undo whatever’s been done, but you can count on it taking lots of time and extraordinary amounts of effort.

“And now that he’s dead,” Willison continued, “things will probably get worse. I expect that a whole army of grieving relatives will come crawling out of the woodwork in time to file a bunch of wrongful death lawsuits against me and the state of California. As a matter of fact, I’ve already heard from one. He called on the pretext of working a missing persons case on Andrade’s wife, but I checked the paperwork. Surprise. That so-called detective also happens to be Andrade’s brother-in-law. He said nobody had told his family that Marco was dead. God knows we tried. But it turns out Marco’s wife—this detective’s sister—seems to have gone to ground. If he can’t find her, why the hell does he think we should be able to?”

“What happened to Marco?” I asked.

“I already told you. He’s dead.”

“I mean, what happened to his body?”

Willison sighed. “We buried him.”

“On site?”

“Not exactly,” Willison said. “We’ve got a little plot just outside the gate that’s dedicated as a cemetery. When guys die in prison, it often happens that no one’s willing to step up and take responsibility for the body or for final arrangements. We do it here, but we bury them outside the fence, not inside. I’m of the opinion that a life sentence shouldn’t turn into more than that.” He paused and then added, “But you still haven’t explained why the Washington State Attorney General is interested in one of my dead inmates.”

“We’ve been investigating a series of homicides up here in Washington. In the course of the last year and a half, we’ve had six women with known or suspected connections to prostitution who have been murdered and dumped. As of yesterday, Marco Andrade’s wife, Marcella, was positively identified as one of our six.”

“And you’re wondering if what happened to Marco had anything to do with what happened to his wife.”

“Exactly,” I told him.

“Hang on just a minute,” Willison said. “Let me get his file. I had it pulled after I heard from the alleged brother-in-law so I’d be able to know what I’m talking about.”

I heard paper rustling somewhere in the background. I found it reassuring to know that paper files still exist somewhere in the world. I’ve met a few wardens in my time, and they’re not often likable, but behind Willison’s gruff delivery I glimpsed a guy who sounded a lot like me—like someone determined to do a tough job to the best of his ability and someone who doesn’t need everything in life boiled down into bare-bones computerese.

“Here it is,” he said at last. “Name is Marco Javier Andrade. Age thirty-four. Died as a result of homicidal violence at four forty-six
P.M.
on October 31 of last year. He was doing five to ten for drug dealing and for attempted homicide. What else do you want to know?”

It interested me to hear that Marco Andrade had been murdered within two weeks of the time his wife had disappeared from her new home in Federal Way. That seemed like more than a mere coincidence.

“Halloween,” I said. “Not my idea of trick or treat. Do you know who killed him or why?”

“There’s an ongoing investigation into that incident,” Willison said.

That’s CYA-speak for “I don’t know squat.” I waited long enough. Finally Willison continued just to fill up the dead air.

“Andrade’s throat was slit with what started out as a toothbrush with a handle that got turned into a deadly weapon. Twelve guys went into the showers; eleven came out. He bled out right there on the shower floor.”

“What about surveillance cameras?”

Willison paused again. “Funny you should ask,” he said with some reluctance. “It turns out we just happened to be having a facility-wide problem with our surveillance equipment at that very same time. We have no tape of what happened in that shower and no way of knowing who was responsible.”

How convenient, I thought, but I could hear what he left unsaid. Willison didn’t know who had murdered Marco Andrade, and he also didn’t know who had sabotaged his surveillance equipment. It seemed to me, and most likely to Warden Willison as well, that Marco Andrade had attracted the unwelcome attention of someone with a lot of deadly horsepower.

“I suppose your investigators have talked to all the inmates who were in the shower at the time.”

“My investigators haven’t talked to anyone!” Willison retorted. Outrage was clearly audible in his voice. “Because of the surveillance camera screw-up, I was ordered to hand the investigation over to someone else—to the local guys, in this case—in order to avoid ‘any further appearance of impropriety.’”

In other words, Willison had been disciplined for both the death of his inmate and the breach of the prison security cameras. That gave me an even better idea of why the warden wasn’t happy to be discussing Marco Andrade.

“And none of the guys in the showers have come forward to volunteer any information?” I asked.

Willison hooted aloud at that one, but I don’t think he thought it the least bit funny. “You could say that,” he said. “And why would they? If there was even the slightest suspicion one of them had turned snitch, he’d probably be next on the hit list.”

“What about the surveillance cameras? Did you ever find out what happened to them?”

“I’ve been told that someone from outside hacked into our supposedly ‘super-secure’ system and that the breach has been handled, that it’s a done deal,” Willison said. “Super-secure, my ass! Just for the record, I’m not at all sure this whole thing, Marco’s death included, wasn’t an inside job, but that’s strictly between you and me. And just because I’ve been told something is a done deal doesn’t mean it is a done deal.”