"Impound my car! Take my prints! What the hell are you talking about? I tell you, I didn't steal my own damn car!"
Hanson looked at me first with a puzzled frown and then with dawning awareness. "I'm sorry. I thought you'd been told."
"I haven't been told a goddamned thing except to get my butt up here and bring my car keys along."
"Your roommate is dead, Detective Beaumont."
That stopped me cold. "Dead?" I repeated.
"That's right. A rancher just up the road found the body hung up on a mesquite tree along the bank of the river about six-fifteen this morning. That's why I'm so late getting here. It was right on the boundary, so it took a while to figure out if the body was found in Maricopa or Yavapai County. The line runs right through Don Freeman's ranch. Don's an old geezer, ninety-one if he's a day. He got all confused and thought it was on the Maricopa side. Then, when Mrs. Crenshaw called to report one of her residents missing, we started putting two and two together."
The news staggered me. Joey Rothman dead? A parade of one-word questions, detective questions, zinged through my head like so many bouncing Ping-Pong balls in a lottery bottle: How? When? Who? Where?
"You said they pulled him out of the water. Drowned?"
Deputy Mike Hanson shook his head. "Nope."
"What then?" I demanded, feeling a clammy sinking in my gut, remembering the acrid odor of burnt gunpowder in the car when I opened the glove box of the Grand AM at four-thirty in the morning, the smell that had told me the Smith and Wesson had been fired sometime within the previous few hours, to say nothing of the two missing rounds.
"You can tell me," I insisted. "I'm a homicide cop."
"Not here you're not," Hanson replied decisively.
He didn't add that here in this god-forsaken corner of Nowhere, Arizona, I was just another one of the suspects. Hanson didn't have to say it, because I already knew it was true.
Desperately my mind swung back and forth as I tried to decide on the best path to follow, given the incriminating circumstances. It seemed as though I'd be better off making full disclosure right away than I would be letting Deputy Hanson find out about the gun later-the recently fired gun with my fingerprints on it and hopefully the killer's as well. If I told Hanson first, it might look a little less as though I was withholding information.
"Deputy Hanson," I said quietly, "you should probably know that my departmental issue. 38 is locked in the glove box."
The startled look on Deputy Hanson's face confirmed my worst suspicions. Joey Rothman hadn't drowned. Somebody had plugged him. And I knew with dead certainty that the murder weapon had to be my very own Smith and Wesson.
Just then I heard the sound of laughter and approaching voices. Finished with the Round Robins, early morning Group had broken up. Family members from my session and others were on their way to an outlying portable, this one a new addition across the parking lot. The group had to pass down the aisle directly in front of where Deputy Hanson and I were standing.
Several people gave us curious glances as they went by. Kelly walked past without acknowledging my existence. Karen nodded but didn't stop. Scott walked past but then turned and came back, frowning.
"Dad, is something wrong?"
"No," I said quickly. "I'm fine. It's nothing."
Scott smiled. "Good," he said. He started away again, but stopped once more. "I just wanted to tell you in there that it's all right. Kelly's a spoiled brat. She carries on like that all the time, and Dave and Mom let her get away with it. You know how it works."
"Yeah," I said. "I know."
"And I…" Scott paused.
"You what?"
"I just wanted to tell you that I love you," he said.
The lump returned to my throat. I grabbed Scott then, right there in the parking lot with a puzzled Deputy Hanson looking on, and held him tightly against me, feeling his strong young body next to mine, marveling at how tall my little boy had grown, how well built and capable.
"I needed that, Scotty," I said at last, when I could talk again. "You've no idea how badly I needed that."
CHAPTER 5
Despite the extraordinary circumstances, Louise Crenshaw sent word through her secretary that I was to return to Group until the sheriff's department investigators were ready to speak to me. Deputy Hanson reluctantly agreed to let me leave the parking lot only after cautioning me not to mention Joey Rothman's death to anyone at all until after a decision had been made on an official announcement.
Bearing that in mind, I returned to our portable where Burton Joe was leading the client group through a meandering discussion about denial and its impact on a dysfunctional, chemically dependent families. The bottom line revolved around the catch-22 that denying you have the disease of alcoholism is in and of itself a symptom of the disease. Naturally, until you admit you have a problem, you can't fix the problem. According to Burton Joe, breaking through denial is a major step on the road to recovery.
I've heard it before, and I must confess I didn't pay very close attention during the remainder of the morning. My mind wandered. There was no denying I had a problem all right. Regardless of the fact that the weapon belonged to me, the presence of my fingerprints as the most recent prints on a possible murder weapon clearly posed a very touchy problem, one that had nothing to do with alcoholism or liver disease, although I'd say that in terms of potential for long-term damage it rivals either one.
I could feel myself being sucked inevitably into the vortex of circumstances surrounding Joey Rothman's death. If any homicide cop worth his salt started asking questions, it wouldn't take much effort to discover that J. P. Beaumont had both motive and opportunity. I took small comfort from the fact that all the circumstantial evidence pointing at me also pointed at Lieutenant Colonel Guy Owens. (In the course of the long night and longer morning, his official title and rank had surfaced in my memory.) Whatever fatherly motive I might have had, Owens had more. In spades. Kelly Beaumont wasn't pregnant. Michelle Owens was.
Blocking out Burton Joe's psycho-babble, I wondered about the official time of death. Lacking that critical piece of information, I couldn't assess exactly how much trouble I was in. If the coroner happened to declare that the murder occurred while Guy Owens and I were together in the cabin, then life would be good. Each of us could provide the other with an airtight alibi.
But if Joey Rothman died later than that, I thought uneasily, if the autopsy indicated that the crime occurred sometime after Guy Owens left my cabin and before I went to see Lucy Washington and to report the problem with my car, that would be a white horse of a different color.
Around eleven o'clock, Nina Davis came to the door of the portable and crooked a summoning finger in my direction. Annoyed at the barrage of unexplained interruptions, Burton Joe nonetheless nodded that I could go. I followed Nina out the door wondering why Louise had once more sent her secretary instead of coming herself. This was exactly the kind of one-woman show Louise did so well, playing the part of a grande dame puppet master, jerking the strings of anyone dumb enough to let her.
But even outside, Louise Crenshaw was nowhere in sight. Instead, waiting on the path was an attractive Mexican-American woman in her mid-thirties. Nina Davis introduced her as Yavapai County Sheriff's Detective Delcia Reyes-Gonzales.
I've survived a good portion of my career in the fuzzy world of affirmative action. Years of departmental consciousness-raising seminars have taught me better manners than to call women girls, especially not the ladies who make their way up through the law enforcement ranks and land on their feet in detective divisions.
The female detectives with the Seattle police are women who definitely carry their own weight. Although I can't say the trail-blazers have always been welcomed with open arms, they've done all right for themselves and for the department as well, because the ones who really make it in a man's world, quotas notwithstanding, have to be smart and capable both.