Fire and Ice (24 page)

“Because she didn’t really care that much back then,” Joanna answered. “But now she’s got a chance to get that autopsy on our nickel.”

“But why?” Deb asked.

“My guess is that once Caring Friends hit the news, Candace saw a chance to make some money out of the deal. She’s hoping we’ll help her make a case for a wrongful death suit. And she probably figures she won’t have to go to court—that just threatening to do so will be enough to get Alma DeLong to send some money Candace’s way just to get her to shut up. And I’m guessing if we scratch Candace’s surface, we won’t have to go very deep to find a personal injury lawyer.”

“No wonder Bobby Fletcher is pissed,” Deb said. “I would be, too.”

Joanna stood up and grabbed her purse from the credenza behind her. “Gotta run,” she said. “I’m off to do my weekly song and dance with the Board of Supervisors.”

As I put down the phone, Mel came into the room, sat down beside my desk, and crossed one shapely stocking-clad leg over the other.

“I just spoke to Marcella’s brother, Mr. Carbajal. The family is eager to make funeral arrangements. He’s planning on coming up later today to collect the remains. I told him to send us his flight
time and number—that one or both of us would be glad to pick him up and drive him to Ellensburg.”

“Picking his brain all the while.”

Mel grinned. “Sure,” she said.

We both know that it’s often easier to elicit information in a casual setting than in a more formal one.

“Any luck locating Paco Castro?” I asked.

Mel shook her head. “None so far,” she said.

Just then Brad Norton poked his head into my tiny office. “Is it safe to come in?” he asked. “No office hanky-panky, right?”

Being the only newlyweds on the S.H.I.T. squad leaves Mel and me open to a lot of good-natured teasing from our associates.

“None whatsoever,” I said. “What’s up?”

“I just had a call from Frances Dennison, the woman who’s the registered owner of that abandoned 4-Runner. She said when her grandson brought it down to Tucson, it was a mess—full of trash and garbage. She said when they cleaned it out, she found a man’s wallet. She didn’t tell me about it when I first talked to her because she had put it away somewhere and wasn’t sure she could find it again. Now that she has, she wanted to know if she should open it and tell me what’s inside. I told her to leave it be, that opening it or handling it might destroy possible evidence. I also told her that I’d send someone by her place to pick it up and log it into evidence. Here’s the address. She lives on East Helen Street in Tucson.”

“Tucson?” Mel repeated. “How far is that from where your friend Joanna Brady is? Maybe she could go by and pick it up.”

I could have gone into a whole song and dance about Joanna Brady being a colleague rather than a friend. After all, I had already come clean with Mel about Joanna Brady. But then I remembered that old line “Methinks she doth protest too much.” I certainly didn’t want to make that mistake. Instead, I picked up the phone and dialed.

My spotty remembrance of Arizona geography told me that the state is a lot like Washington in that it’s bigger than you think. And it’s a lot farther from Tucson to Bisbee than it appears when you’re looking at it in your handy
AAA Road Atlas
.

Joanna answered on the second ring. She sounded stressed and not the least bit happy to hear from me, which may have been because (a) she really was busy; or (b) she wasn’t particularly interested in hearing from me ever again.

“Hey, Joanna,” I said cheerfully. “We’ve got a situation here. We’re hoping you can give us a hand.”

“All right,” she said after I explained what I needed. “I’m on my way to a meeting right now. I have a detective who’s currently on his way to Tucson on another matter. His name is Ernie Carpenter. I’ll have him give you a call.”

JOANNA PLACED THE CALL TO ERNIE WHILE PULLING INTO A PARKING
place in the county government complex on Melody Lane. It was only after she got out of the car and was walking toward the building that she noticed Marliss Shackleford’s RAV-4 parked three spots away from her Crown Victoria.

That in itself seemed odd. Marliss seldom attended “Board of Stupidvisors” meetings, as she sometimes playfully referred to them in her column. Had Joanna been more on her game, she might have sensed a trap, but she’d had a very complex past several days.

The meeting was already well under way when she stepped into the room and slipped into the last row of chairs reserved for heads of departments. Her arrival, however, didn’t go unnoticed. The door had made a slight swishing sound as it closed. Several
people looked up and glanced in her direction. Marliss, seated in the second row, gave her a smile and a tiny wave. The smile especially should have been ample warning, but it wasn’t.

When the chairman announced it was time for new business, Peggy Whitehead surged to her feet and walked briskly over to the speaker’s podium, unfolding a piece of paper as she stepped in front of the microphone.

“I’m here today to lodge an official complaint against Sheriff Joanna Brady,” she announced, reading from a prepared text. “Her actions this past week and those of her officers have deliberately undermined my department as well as my ability to do my job. As head of the county health department I’ve been hired by this board to look out for the health and well-being of our citizenry. This is an important endeavor and a complicated one. Sheriff Brady seems to be under the impression that her job is the only one of any importance. As an elected county official she seems to be under the mistaken impression that she’s won some kind of popularity contest, one that gives her the right to be rude and disrespectful to the rest of us.

“Two nights ago, at Caring Friends, a fully licensed Alzheimer’s care facility in Palominas, her people, supervised by an inexperienced chief deputy, grievously overstepped their authority. Without consulting anyone other than Sheriff Brady—without consulting medical personnel or family members, I might add—they moved several frail and at-risk patients to other facilities. When the owner of the facility attempted to object to those precipitous actions, she was verbally attacked by Sheriff Brady and physically assaulted by several of Sheriff Brady’s senior officers. They went so far as to jail her overnight.

“Caring Friends is a health-care facility and it falls in my area of responsibility. It may be that there are and were serious deficien
cies at Caring Friends, but it’s impossible for me or my people to do a proper investigation with Sheriff Brady and her officers running roughshod over the premises. I don’t get in the way of how Sheriff Brady does her job, and I respectfully request that she stay away from mine.

“I am placing my words in the minutes of this meeting as a way of expressing my dismay about the manner in which this was handled and to officially serve notice to the board that I expect you to properly supervise Sheriff Brady and her officers in the future. Thank you.”

Stunned to momentary silence, Joanna was about to stand up and respond to Peggy Whitehead’s charges when Claire Newmark, the chairman of the board, unexpectedly came to Joanna’s defense.

“It’s my understanding that the sheriff’s department was summoned to Caring Friends the other night on a missing persons call. Is that correct?”

Peggy had been about to sit down. Now she returned to the podium. “Yes,” she said. “That’s right. One of the patients had walked away from the facility.”

“How did that happen?” Claire asked.

“I understand there was a staffing problem,” Peggy answered.

“And was this patient found safely?”

“Yes, but—”

“As for those patients who were moved. Where were they taken?”

“Two of them were admitted to the hospital in Sierra Vista, one went to the Copper Queen Hospital in Bisbee, and one to Tucson, Tucson Medical Center, I believe.”

“And did Sheriff Brady’s deputies drag those unfortunate people out of their beds and force them into patrol cars in order to transport them?”

A titter of laughter went through the room. This wasn’t going the way Peggy had intended, and she flushed angrily. “No,” she said. “Of course not! They were transported in ambulances.”

“Presumably ambulances accompanied by EMTs,” Claire added drily. “Which means that there was some agreement on their part that the patients in question required further medical assistance. And isn’t it true that what you refer to as a ‘staffing problem’ was actually a situation where the patients were left entirely on their own for a number of hours? And weren’t the conditions found there something less than sanitary?”

“Yes, it was unstaffed,” Peggy admitted. “But when the nurse on duty arrived and tried to intervene, she, too, was waylaid and manhandled by Sheriff Brady’s overzealous deputies.”

That nurse was drunk, Joanna wanted to say. But she didn’t have to.

“Thank you, Ms. Whitehead,” Claire Newmark said, dismissing her. “That will be all. Now, is there any other new business?”

A few minutes after getting off the phone with Joanna Brady, I was speaking to Detective Gerald Lowell with the Shasta County Sheriff’s Department. When I identified myself, he didn’t sound any happier to hear from me than Joanna Brady had been. My lack of popularity was almost enough to give me a complex.

“Warden Willison told me you’d be calling, but there’s not much I can tell you. Marco Andrade’s dead and so is my investigation.”

“But—”

“I was ordered to back off,” Lowell told me, “and I have.”

“Who told you to back off?” I asked.

“My boss,” Lowell said. “That’s who. When he said drop it, I did.”

“Does Warden Willison know you’ve dropped it?”

“For all I know, Willison may be part of the problem. So, no, I haven’t told him, and I’d be much obliged if you didn’t mention it either.”

“Part of the problem—” I began.

“Look,” Lowell interrupted. “This is evidently a much bigger deal than some worthless punk getting his on a shower-stall floor. At least that’s what I was told by the people who took over.”

“What people?” I asked.

Lowell sighed impatiently, as though I were a complete idiot. “How do you spell F-E-D-S?” he asked.

“You’re saying the feds have taken over?”

“Yes, they have—lock, stock, and barrel.”

“What about Marco Andrade’s personal effects?”

“Gone,” Lowell said. “I already told you. They took everything I had. I was told this is all part of a much larger investigation into one of those new Mexican drug cartels. The DEA doesn’t want any of us local guys getting in the way of something they’ve been working on for months.”

“Did they give you any names?” I asked.

Lowell laughed outright at that. “You’ve got to be joking. They didn’t tell me anything—not a single damned thing. They told me that the case operates on a need-to-know basis only. I must have come up short in that department because so far they’ve given me nothing. So what’s your interest in all this? If the DEA finds out you’re asking questions, my guess is that they’ll send you your very own personal cease-and-desist order.”

For the next few minutes I told Gerald Lowell how I had run across Marco Andrade while working a series of Washington State homicides. I was telling him about Marcella Andrade’s murder when he interrupted me.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “What’s her name again?”

“Marcella,” I said.

“And where did you say she was from?”

“A town called Federal Way,” I told him.

“Just a sec,” he said. “Hang on.”

He was off the line for several long seconds. In my ear I heard what sounded like someone paging through pieces of paper. Eventually he picked up the receiver again.

“Here it is,” he said triumphantly. “I thought Federal Way sounded familiar.”

“What?” I asked.

“When the feds showed up here with a warrant, they went away with Marco Andrade’s personal effects, the evidence we had gathered, including the murder book. They’re planning to make a federal case of it, but they didn’t bother taking my trusty everyday notebook. You say her name was Marcella?”

“Yes.”

“In with Marco’s personal effects was a note from Marcella telling him she had met someone else and that she wanted a divorce.”

“Was there a return address?”

“There was no envelope,” Lowell answered. “Right, here’s what I was looking for. You might want to make a note of it. The address is in Federal Way.” He read off a street address complete with a zip code.

“Whose address is that?” I asked. I knew for a fact that it wasn’t anywhere near Silver Pines.

“Beats me,” Lowell said. “But it was important enough that Marco Andrade had it tattooed on the inside of his left arm. The M.E. found it during the autopsy. It’s a crude homemade job, just barely legible. My guess is that he did it himself. Before I got ordered off the job, I tracked it down through the reverse directory.”

“And?”

“Turned out to be a Denny’s restaurant. I spoke to the manager. He claimed he didn’t know anybody there named Marcella Andrade.”

Of course he didn’t, I realized. Because Marcella Andrade had worked there under an assumed name.

“Boy howdy,” Lowell said. “That would be a kick, wouldn’t it?”

“What would be a kick?” I asked.

“If that big federal case turned out to be nothing more than a little old romantic triangle. Marco wouldn’t give Marcella a divorce, so the boyfriend put out a hit.”

I signed off the call. I thought Lowell was barking up a wrong tree. I had met Mason Waters, Marina Aguirre’s grieving fiancé. He didn’t seem like the type to put out a hit on anyone, most especially not a complicated in-prison hit. Besides, Marina hadn’t let on to Mason Waters that she was still married. She had claimed to be dodging an ex-boyfriend, not a current husband.

Knowing these background details caused a lot of other things to start making sense. Marcella had stayed in touch with her soon-to-be-ex-husband by using her work address instead of her home address. Worried about being found, she hadn’t told many people where she lived, including Mason. Once she disappeared, the poor guy had been reduced to hiring a private eye to find out where his missing fiancée had once lived.

It occurred to me that if Marcella’s killer or killers had snatched her from her workplace, that would help explain why the man who had come to Tom Wojeck in search of Marcella’s missing money had no idea where she lived, either. He might have uncovered the Silver Pines part, but he couldn’t risk breaking into one trailer after the other until he finally hit on the right one.

The conversation with Lowell brought me up against another
realization—one I didn’t like. In all the busy hubbub—in finding out Marina’s real name and notifying Marcella Andrade’s family—I had forgotten all about Mason Waters. Down in Federal Way, Marcella had left behind one additional survivor, a not-quite-family member who had not yet been notified. My heart went out to the poor guy who still cherished the Seiko watch he had purchased as a Christmas gift for his missing fiancée. Somebody needed to go see him and let him know that the Christmas morning he had in mind was never going to come.

I picked up my car keys and headed for Mel’s office. She was on the phone. When she saw me standing there waiting, she signed off. “That was Detective Carpenter on the phone,” she said. “He went by that house in Tucson and picked up the wallet. The name on the driver’s license is Tomas Eduardo Rivera. He lives on North Wright Avenue in Cle Elum. There was money in the wallet—five twenty-dollar bills and six ones. Carpenter said that tucked in among the ones and written in pencil on what appeared to be the corner of a paper napkin was the name Miguel, along with a phone number that listed a 360 prefix. There were also school pictures of two dark-haired boys. I told Carpenter that I’d see what I can do to track Rivera down, find out where he works, et cetera, as well as what his connection might be to Marina.”

“Great,” I told her. “In the meantime, someone needs to have a talk with Mason Waters and tell him what we’ve learned.”

Mel doesn’t like doing next-of-kin notifications any more than I do, and she was happy to pass the buck. “Good thinking,” she said. “And since you’re going to be so close to the airport, maybe you could stop by and pick up Jaime Carbajal. His plane’s due in at two-thirty.”

I glanced at my watch. It was just past noon. “It should work,” I told her. She gave me the flight information and I headed out.

When Joanna arrived at Daisy’s Café, she was surprised to find Daisy herself standing by the cash wrap. “Where’s Junior?” Joanna asked.

Junior Dowdle was a middle-aged developmentally disabled man who had been abandoned by his caregivers and who had been taken in by Daisy Maxwell and her husband Moe. For several years now, Junior had been a constant presence at Daisy’s—greeting arriving customers, handing out menus, and busing tables. In the past few months, Joanna had noticed that his smile wasn’t as ready as it had once been and that he sometimes seemed confused.

Daisy’s face clouded. “He’s a little under the weather today,” she said, leading Joanna to the booth where Eleanor was already seated. “He’s at home with his dad.”

“I’m sorry to miss him,” Joanna said.

Daisy nodded. “Thank you,” she said.

Joanna slid into the booth.

“At least you’re here,” Eleanor said. “I thought you were going to stand me up, too. George is working on his baby. Packing. Everything has to be in just the right place. I swear, sometimes I think he loves that RV of his more than he loves me. He wants to be under way at the crack of dawn Sunday morning.”

George’s “baby” was a hulking Newell motor home that they had bought used and would be traveling in on their jaunts back and forth between their two homes, one in Arizona and the other in Minnesota. Joanna was disappointed to learn that George wouldn’t be there for lunch. She had wanted to talk to her stepfather about the situation concerning Inez Fletcher’s possible autopsy and the poor woman’s two feuding offspring.