Jaime raised an eyebrow. “As in partners?”
“As in,” Joanna returned.
Jaime made a note. “What about the Bradley Evans investigation?” he asked. “Are we dropping it for the time being, or what?”
“Something has to give,” Joanna said. “With Ernie gone, we’re way too shorthanded to do everything. As far as I can tell, no one other than Ted Chapman is particularly upset over Evans’s death, which means no one is going to be pressuring us to solve that case. Jeannine Phillips, on the other hand, is one of our own. She was in the process of investigating possible criminal activity when she was attacked.”
“In other words,” Jaime said, “we’re pulling out all the stops.”
Joanna nodded. “That’s right,” she said.
Around the table Joanna’s grim-faced team of investigators nodded in solemn agreement.
“Is there anything else?” she asked. When no one volunteered anything, Joanna nodded. “All right then, you guys,” she told them. “Go get ‘em.”
The investigators hustled out of the conference room, leaving Joanna and Frank alone. “What are we going to do about Jeannine’s position?” Frank asked.
“Fill it,” Joanna said.
“A temporary fix or a permanent one?”
“Temporary for now,” Joanna said. “Check with the part-timers. Maybe one of them will be able to work full-time for the next little while, but if Jeannine’s injuries are as severe as Millicent said, she may never be able to come back.”
“That’s tragic!” Frank exclaimed.
Joanna nodded. “I couldn’t agree more. I know you’re working on checking phones and credit-card charges on Bradley Evans, but if you have any spare time, see what you can find out about the O’Dwyers. I have a general idea of what they’ve been up to the past few years, but we need specifics. If they sicced that gang of thugs on Jeannine because she was too close to something, I want to find out what that something is.”
“Will do, boss,” Frank told her.
The remainder of their morning briefing took the better part of an hour. After that, Joanna went into her office and dived into the paperwork. It was close to one when the phone rang. “Are you ready for lunch?” Butch asked. “Dad heard it’s pasty day at Daisy’s Cafe. I called and they still have a few left. I put three of them on hold. One each for Mom and Dad and another for the two of us to split.”
“Sounds great,” Joanna said. “I’ll be right there.”
Cornish pasties-meat pies filled with cooked beef, rutabagas, and other vegetables-had migrated from Cornwall, England, to Bisbee, Arizona, along with the miners who had hailed from there. Because pasties were readily portable, miners had taken them underground in lunch pails. Most mining operations in and around Bisbee had been shut down for decades, but the foods the miners had brought with them from all over the world remained part of Bisbee’s traditional fare. Don Dixon had been astonished to find pasties available in southeastern Arizona on a previous visit and had been thrilled to find that the ones served at Daisy’s compared very favorably with the ones he remembered finding in Upper Michigan.
Junior Dowdle met Joanna at the door. “I want to see the baby,” he said with his customary grin.
“So do I,” Joanna said.
“When?”
“Soon now,” she said. “I hope.”
Junior led her to the table where Butch and his parents were already seated.
“Is he always here?” Margaret asked with a frown and a nod in Junior’s direction as he walked away from the table. “He’s so weird.”
“He’s not weird, Mom,” Butch explained. “Junior may be developmentally disabled, but he’s far less weird than a lot of so-called normal people around here.”
“Still,” Margaret insisted. “It seems to me that having someone like him hanging around all the time would be bad for business.”
“He isn’t hanging around,” Butch said. “He actually works here-as in making a contribution.”
Seeing Butch’s temper fraying, Joanna tried to smooth things over. “He’s really very nice.”
Junior returned with a glass of water, which he placed in front of Joanna. “Yes,” he said, thumping his chest while looking directly at Margaret Dixon. “Nice, not deaf.” And then he stalked off.
As Junior walked away that time, Joanna was gratified to see Margaret blush to the roots of her peroxided hair. Junior Dowdle had nailed her. It was about time someone did.
“Are you ready to order?” Daisy Maxwell asked.
They ordered and ate, but lunch wasn’t a complete success. Joanna, Butch, and Don downed their pasties with gusto. Margaret picked at hers.
“I doubt Mom will be eager to come back here anytime soon,” Butch said to Joanna as he walked her to her car.
“You’re right,” Joanna agreed. “But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
Butch grinned. “Me either.”
Back at the Justice Center, Joanna was disappointed not to hear anything from Debbie Howell and Jaime Carbajal. While waiting for word, she returned to the drudgery of paperwork. She was lost in concentration when Ted Chapman showed up an hour later.
“Any progress?” he asked.
He was asking for progress in the Bradley Evans case. Joanna was reluctant to tell him that the Jeannine Phillips assault case had knocked his friend’s down a notch as far as priority was concerned.
“Not much,” she answered.
“What does that mean?”
“It means we’ve located the person he was stalking,” Joanna said. “That is, we know who she is, but no one’s had a chance to interview her yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re shorthanded, Ted,” Joanna returned. “Ernie’s off for the next several days. We’ve got another important case that we’re working on up near San Simon. But believe me, she will be interviewed.”
“Oh,” Ted said. “All right. I just wanted to let you know that Brad’s funeral is tomorrow at one o’clock in the afternoon. It’ll be held at the Papago Unit at the prison down in Douglas. People who want to attend need to be on the guest list for security reasons. Do you think any of the detectives on the case will want to go?”
Joanna knew Ernie was out and Debbie and Jaime would be busy with the Phillips case. Frank would have his hands full all morning with the board of supervisors meeting. That left only one person available.
“Put me on the list,” she said. “I’ll be there.”
“Thanks,” Ted said. He started to leave. As he turned, Joanna noticed the name badge clipped to his shirt pocket-a name badge that came complete with a photo ID.
“Do the jail ministry guys down in Douglas wear the same kind of name badge?” she asked.
Ted looked down at his. “Sure,” he said. “Why?”
“Do you think you could get someone from there to fax me a copy of Bradley Evans’s ID photo?”
“Probably,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
He left. Joanna went back to work, but her mind wandered. She kept going back to what she had said to Ted. Yes, Debbie had located Leslie Markham, the woman who had been Bradley Evans’s stalking target. That had happened day before yesterday. More than twenty-four hours had passed without anyone interviewing the woman. Regardless of what else was going on in Joanna’s department, it was inexcusable to allow an important lead to lie fallow for that long this early in an investigation.
A few minutes later, when Kristin came into her office carrying a faxed copy of Bradley Evans’s ID photo, Joanna made up her mind. She rummaged through the mess on her desk until she located an interoffice envelope containing her copies of the prints from the camera found in Bradley Evans’s vehicle. The same envelope also contained a mug shot of Bradley Evans that dated from his original arrest back in 1978. There was some resemblance between the young man in the mug shot and the guy in the ID photo, but clearly the years spent in prison hadn’t been kind to him.
With all the photos now collected in the same envelope, Joanna stuffed it into her briefcase. Then she jotted down the address of Rory Markham Real Estate Group, told Kristin she was on her way to Sierra Vista, and left the office. As she drove, she was honest enough to realize that the main reason she was going was to get away from the paper jungle on her desk, even though she knew that leaving it for another day would only make matters worse.