Outlaw Mountain (17 page)

“Maybe not,” Joanna agreed. “But in addition to freedom of the press, this country also makes allowances for private property. If you go where you’re not welcome—and I can pretty well promise that you won’t be welcome at Butch Dixon’s house—then you can count on being arrested for trespassing.”

“See there!” Marliss shrilled. “Another threat.”

“No, it’s not,” Joanna said. “Not as long as you stay where you belong.”

Slamming her notebook back into her purse, Marliss Shackleford rose from her chair and swept regally from Joanna’s office. As soon as she was gone, Joanna picked up the phone and dialed Butch’s number.

“How are things?” she asked.

Butch sighed. “If I’d known how much trouble it was going to cause, I would never have given you back your badge last night. Junior wants it—and he wants it bad. He’s been searching all over the house for it, ever since he woke up.”

“I’ll find him another one,” Joanna promised. “I’ll come by later and drop one off. Right now, I’m calling to give you a storm warning.”

“A storm? Are you kidding? I’m looking out the kitchen window right now. It’s clear as a bell outside.”

“Not that kind of storm,” Joanna told him. “Remember Marliss Shackleford?”

“The
Bisbee Bee’s
intrepid columnist?”

“None other,” Joanna said grimly.

“What about her?”

“Frank Montoya suggested Marliss write a human-interest story about Junior in hopes that, if it was distributed widely enough, it might lead us to Junior’s family.”

“I suppose it could work,” Butch said.

“It could but it won’t,” Joanna replied. “She came in to interview me about him and I ended up throwing her out of my office. In Marliss Shackleford’s book, developmentally disabled and pedophile/pervert are all one and the same. She’s afraid you’ll turn Junior loose and he’ll go attack some little kid from Lowell School.”

“Arc you kidding? I don’t believe Junior would hurt a fly, not on purpose.”

“You know that,” Joanna said. “And I know that, but try convincing Marliss.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” Butch asked.

“Fill the moat and raise the drawbridge. If she comes by the house and tries talking to Junior, don’t let her near him. Period.”

“With pleasure,” Butch said. “I can hardly wait to see her try.”

Reassured that Marliss wouldn’t be hassling Junior, Joanna spent the next half hour concentrating on the correspondence. Then, when she had worked her way through the worst of it, she dropped a completed stack off on Kristin’s desk for filing, duplicating, typing envelopes, and mailing.

“I’ll be out of the office for the next little bit,” she told Kristin. “Probably until late afternoon. I’m heading out to Sierra Vista to check on things.”

“Will you be seeing Deputy Gregovich?” Kristin asked. “Probably,” Joanna said. “Why?”

Kristin sighed. “He’s so cute,” she said dreamily.

Cute?
That was hardly the term Joanna herself would have used to describe Deputy Gregovich. He was tall, gangly, and moved with the loose-jointed jerkiness of a drunken marionette. There was nothing about the man that was remotely cute.

Frowning, Joanna studied her secretary. At twenty-four, Kristin Marsten was probably six or seven years younger than Deputy Gregovich. She was a good-looking, leggy, natural blonde who favored skirts with hemlines several inches above the knee. Although Kristin had never lived anywhere but in Bisbee proper, she was forever putting on airs of being worldly and sophisticated. Terry Gregovich came across as something of a small-town hick, even though he had done two separate tours with the Marine Corps, including time overseas and in the Gulf War, where he had served as an MP.

Had Joanna been picking out likely romantic pairings in her department, Kristin Marsten and Terry Gregovich would never have made the list. Furthermore, on a morning already overloaded with complications, the idea of a blossoming romance between Joanna’s newest deputy and her secretary was almost more than she could handle. It wasn’t just the idea of having two of her subordinates get involved that caused Joanna difficulty. There was always the distinct possibility that later they might become uninvolved, which could prove even worse.

“For a rookie,” Joanna said, choosing her words carefully, “I think Deputy Gregovich is a pretty capable officer.”

She made the comment in hopes of stressing the law enforcement nature of Terry Gregovich’s job. She also wanted to make Kristin aware that, as sheriff, Joanna would have more than a casual interest in that kind of entanglement. Those subtleties, however, sailed over Kristin’s smooth blond tresses without making any noticeable impact.

“And don’t you just love the way Terry and Spike get along?” Kristin continued adoringly. “I mean—you know—it’s like they really
like
each other.”

Joanna knew all too well that the relationship between Deputy Gregovich and his dog represented hours, days, and weeks of grueling training as well as the expenditure of a big chunk of that year’s officer-education budget. Joanna couldn’t step back and see Terry Gregovich and Spike as a man and his dog. For her they were a K-nine unit—an important investment in her department’s future.

While Kristin continued to gush, Joanna felt suddenly old and wise and very, very official. “‘Terry and Spike are both still quite new at their respective jobs,” she said finally. “We have to do our best to make sure nothing happens to disturb their concentration.”

Kristin stopped short. “Are you telling me I shouldn’t have anything to do with him?” she asked.

“No. What I’m saying is that at this time Deputy Gregovich really needs to have his mind on the job. He can’t afford any distractions.”

“Which I am, I suppose?” the secretary asked with a pout.

“Kristin,” Joanna said. “You’re young, you’re blond, and you’re very pretty. Of course you’re a distraction.”

Kristin had to think about Joanna’s comment for a moment. She wasn’t sure how to take it—as a compliment or as something else. “Thank you,” she said stiffly after a pause. “I think.”

Joanna went back into her office, collected her purse and her To-Do list, and then headed for the car. She had arrived at the Justice Complex too late to stop by Motor Pool before the morning briefing. She had parked the Crown Victoria in her usual place. Now, the sun had spent two hours shining in through the window and onto the urine-soaked front seat. When Joanna opened the car door, the odor inside the vehicle was almost overpowering. Not wanting to leave the onerous job of moving the car to someone else, she got in and drove straight to the garage.

When Joanna walked into the cavelike service bays, at first she thought no one was there. “Anybody home?” she called.

About then she caught sight of a pair of work boots sticking out from under the midsection of the jail’s utility van. Seconds later, Danny Garner, chief mechanic in charge of Cochise County Sheriff’s Department Motor Pool, rolled out from ruder the van on a creeper. “Morning, Sheriff. What can I do for you?”

“I’ve got a little problem with my Crown Victoria.”

“Not another water hose.”

“Not a hose,” Joanna told him, “but it
is
a water problem.”

When Joanna left the garage a few minutes later, one of the jail trustees, armed with an upholstery shampooer, was already scrubbing away at the front seat. Joanna returned to the back parking lot and collected her Blazer. Heading for Sierra Vista, she had thirty minutes to organize her thoughts.

Other people claimed to see things in their mind’s eye. Joanna exercised her mind’s ear. Driving west on Highway 92, she rehearsed possible conversations with both Mark Childers, Oak Vista’s developer, and with Dena Hogan, Alice Rogers’ attorney. She wanted to let Childers know that members of her department would do what they could to protect his property and equipment while, at the same time, trying not to interfere with private citizens’ rights to assembly and free speech. That meant that Joanna’s people would be walking a tightrope between Childers’ interests and those of the demonstrators. She also wanted to let him know that she wasn’t about to be cowed by a cozy romantic relationship between him and a member of the board of supervisors.

As far as Dena Hogan was concerned, Joanna wondered how she could encourage the attorney’s cooperation. She would have to finesse her way into the needed information and find out about Alice Rogers’ newly written will or lack of same. Not only that, discovering a few pertinent details about Alice’s financial situation would give everyone concerned a better idea of what the stakes were.

That was how far she had gone in her thinking process as she drove across the San Pedro at Palominas, where a blazing column of golden-leafed cottonwoods followed a meandering path through unexpectedly lush green river-bottom farmland in the middle of an otherwise parched desert.

Pulling out her cell phone, she dialed Fran Daly’s office in Tucson. One of the things Joanna appreciated about Fran’s down-to-earth way of doing business was that she usually answered her own calls.

“Daly here,” the assistant medical examiner growled into the phone in her gravelly smoker’s voice.

“It’s Joanna—Joanna Brady.”

“Should have known,” Dr. Daly grunted. “You must operate on radar. I only finished the autopsy ten minutes ago. Detective Hemming was here during, but I haven’t talked to Detective Lazier yet. He’s going to be pissed as all hell when he finds out I talked to you before I talked to him.”

“Tough,” Joanna said. “Then again, on second thought, maybe you shouldn’t tell him.”

“There are some really good people working for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department,” Fran Daly told her. “Hank Lazier just doesn’t happen to be one of them. He and I have gone nose-to-nose on several different occasions. But since I believe in picking my fights and this one doesn’t seem worth it, I probably won’t—tell him, that is.”

“Thanks,” Joanna said. “That’ll make your life easier, and it should help Ernie Carpenter, too.”

“Ernie. Isn’t he the detective who was at the crime scene yesterday?” Fran asked.

“He’s the one,” Joanna replied. “He’s also the same investigator Detective Lazier banned from attending Alice Rogers’ autopsy this morning.”

“Banned?” Fran repeated, “You mean Hank Lazier told someone he couldn’t come to
my
morgue?”

“That’s right.”

“What a jackass!” Dr. Daly muttered.

Smiling to herself, Joanna knew that just like the Little Engine That Could, she had succeeded in finding another way over the mountain. Lazier had been hell-bent on shutting Cochise County’s investigators out of the loop. Joanna had managed to open another channel.

“What did you find?” she asked, returning to postmortem results.

“Did you ever hang out with football players much?” Fran responded.

Joanna wished she could point out to Dr. Daly—as she often did with Jenny—that it wasn’t polite to answer a question with a question. “No,” she said. “I can’t say that I ever did.”

“I don’t suppose Alice Rogers did, either,” Fran continued. “But the bruises I found on her back, just over the kidneys, are consistent with the kinds of injuries you’d see in an emergency room on a Saturday morning after a hard-fought football game on Friday night. We’re talking about bruises that would show up on someone’s body after they were tackled from be-hind. That’s the first thing I noticed—the bruising. And not just on the victim’s back, either. There are definite fingertip-type bruises around her wrist—her right wrist. There’s some additional bruising there as well that isn’t obviously related to the handprints.” Fran paused. “Wait just a minute, will you?”

Joanna expected Dr. Daly to go off the line, perhaps to take another call. Instead, she heard a rustle of paper and then, a moment later, the telltale click of a cigarette lighter. “There now,” Fran said, inhaling deeply, “that’s better. Where was I?”

“Bruising to the wrist.”

“Right. So I’m thinking somebody knocked her down and then grabbed her by the wrist, which, considering the cholla spines in the back of her hands, was probably a little tricky.”

“In other words, her attacker should have some cholla puncture wounds of his own.”

“His or her,” Fran Daly said. “Whichever. Most of the cholla puncture wounds are on her back, although there were also quite a few on her legs, arms, and both hands.”

“Anything else?”

“She was drunk,” Fran answered. “Point one-eight. And something else.”

“What’s that?”

“She was clutching a vial in one hand—an empty insulin bottle. Which makes me wonder if maybe that extra bruise on the inside of her wrist might have been caused by a needle—an injection.”

“An insulin shot then,” Joanna murmured. “You’re saying Alice Rogers was diabetic?”

“Insulin isn’t usually injected in arms,” Fran Daly told her. “Since it’s self-injected, it usually goes in the thighs. With long-term insulin use then, there’s damage to the fat tissue in the legs—a puckering where the fat cells die due to repeated injections. I examined Alice Rogers’ legs. There was no evidence consistent with long-term use. If she was on insulin, she hadn’t been for long. We can find out for sure, once we locate her personal physician.”

“Diabetics don’t usually drink, do they?” Joanna asked. “Alcohol?” Fran Daly asked. “It’s not recommended.”

“I talked to her daughter,” Joanna said. “Susan Jenkins said her mother came to dinner on Saturday and that they had drinks before dinner and wine with the meal. It doesn’t seem likely that a daughter, knowing her mother had diabetes, would serve drinks.”

“Unless the daughter
wanted
to kill her,” Fran put in.

“There is that,” Joanna conceded. “But what if Alice didn’t have diabetes? What happens to someone with normal insulin when they’re given extra?”

“It depends on how much extra, what the person’s physical condition is, and any number of variables.”

“And if the person was already drunk?”

“Well,” Daly said. “Again, it depends on how much insulin is administered. A hundred units of insulin or so, given to someone as drunk as Alice Rogers was, might cause her to pass out, but she’d wake up hours later and be fine, except for a hang-over, that is. With five or six hundred units, though, it could very well be lethal. In this case it might not have taken nearly that much, especially since there was already so much booze in her system, she was probably in shock from falling in the cactus, and she had almost no protection from the cold. I believe she passed out and her blood pressure dropped too low to sustain life. Whatever the cause, she died of heart failure. Still, I’m betting on insulin. If it’s there, you can be sure we’ll find it.”