Cramming her purse back into the basket on the walker, Jessie Monroe struggled to her feet. “I’d best be going,” she said.
“Will you be needing a ride back to Douglas?” Joanna asked. “If you do, I can get one of my deputies…”
Jessie waved the offer aside. “Oh, no,” she said. “I have my own wheels. Not really mine, of course. I turned in my license when I hit eighty-five. Seemed like the responsible thing to do because my reflexes were getting so bad. But Helen Dominguez, one of the attendants from the home, drove me here. I’m paying her, of course. That’s only fair. But she can’t get home too late. She’s a young person, you see, and still has children that will be coming home from school soon. I’ve always felt that mothers should be at home when their children get out of school, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” Joanna agreed. “I certainly do.”
By force of will she managed to keep herself from casting a guilt-ridden glance at her own watch. Jenny would be out of school by now and on her way to Butch’s house where there would be no at-home mother in attendance.
Jessie started toward the door. “By the way,” she added, “when you read Ali’s book-Alice’s book-don’t expect it to be great literature. It was done by one of those self-publishing outfits. Vanity presses, I think they call them. I don’t know how much she paid for it-probably way too much-but the company who did it certainly didn’t squander any of what she paid on editing. My sister was a great gal, but she never was much of a writer, so the book’s a bit rough in spots. You’ll get the picture, though. Or your detectives will.”
“Thank you,” Joanna said, following her guest to the door. “By the way, is your address in the book, so I’ll be able to return it to you when I finish reading it?”
“You can keep it if you like,” Jessie said. “Alice gave me ten copies for my birthday last year. Even with this one gone, I still have seven. That should be plenty. It’s not like I have any children of my own to leave them to. I did give one to the Douglas Historical Society and another to the historical society over in Tombstone. Alice lived both places, you see. Both towns are in the book.”
“I’m looking forward to reading it,” Joanna said. “I’ll get to it just as soon as I can.”
As the door closed behind Jessie Monroe, Joanna picked up Alice’s book and began to read. The first chapter was a charming childhood remembrance of playing hide-and-seek with her older brothers and sisters. Halfway through the second chapter, though, Joanna could no longer hold her eyes open.
With the book lying open on her desk, Joanna laid her head on her arms and fell fast asleep. She had no idea how much time had passed when Kristin tapped on the door. “Yes,” Joanna managed, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and hoping she sounded more wide awake than she felt. “What is it?”
“Casey down in AFIS needs to see you right away.”
“What about?” Joanna asked.
“All I know is she said it’s urgent.”
Before Joanna could stand up, she had to find the shoes she had kicked off under her desk. It took several tries before she was able to force her aching feet back into them. “All right,” she said. “Tell her I’m on my way.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Casey Ledford, the gifted young technician who ran Cochise County’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System, was a Bisbee girl who had gone off to college on a full-ride Veterans of Foreign Wars scholarship. She had enrolled in the University of Arizona’s College of Fine Arts, where she had planned on becoming a commercial artist. Smart, but not smart enough to avoid all the treacherous pitfalls of young adulthood, she had returned to her parents’ home two years later, with no degree, but with a four-month-old baby-a daughter named Felicity-in tow. Back in Bisbee, Casey had taken whatever work she could find, including stints waiting tables in the dining room al the Copper Queen Hotel while she continued to attend college level classes on a part-time basis.
Like a lot of other things, the AFIS equipment had fallen into Cochise County hands through a law enforcement, War Against Drugs grant that paid for hardware and software, hut no “liveware”-the people necessary to make the other two work. Prior to receiving the equipment, Joanna had mistakenly supposed that automated fingerprint identification meant just exactly that -automated. With the arrival of the equipment and the technical documentation that accompanied it, Joanna learned that fingerprints usually had to be augmented by hand before they could be fed into the computer. That meant that the department was going to need to hire someone who was not only artistically inclined but also more than moderately computer-literate. When the position was advertised in the paper, only one applicant had responded-Casey Ledford.
“What’s so urgent?” Joanna asked, poking her head in Casey’s lab, where dozens of images of Felicity Ledford-most of them framed pastels-covered the walls.
“It’s the Rogers case,” Casey said.
“You got a hit?”
Casey Ledford nodded, but she didn’t look any too happy about it. Joanna perched on a lab stool. “So tell me,” she urged. “What did you find?”
“The hit resulted from prints we found at the mobile at Outlaw Mountain.”
“Farley Adams’ place,” Joanna murmured. “The ones left on the dirty dishes?”
Casey nodded again. “Right,” she said. “None of the guys thought to look there. They had dusted the outside controls, but they hadn’t bothered to check inside.”
“Good work,” Joanna said with a grin “That’s what it takes around here sometimes-a woman’s touch. Go on.”
“I actually brought the dishes back here to process them,” Casey continued. “It was easier that way. And the prints I lifted were good ones. They didn’t need all that much augmentation or anything. And once I fed them into the computer, the hit came back almost right away.”
“So what’s the problem then?”
“The computer spits out the person’s name and the name of the jurisdiction that’s looking for him. We usually have to call that department by phone in order to get the original fingerprint card as well as details on the criminal activity in question. I’m the one who does that. It’s just a bureaucratic formality. I get the information and pass it along to whoever’s working our end of it.”
“You did that, then?”
“Yes. The hit was from North Las Vegas, up in Nevada.”
“Let me guess,” Joanna said. “Farley Adams’ name isn’t Farley Adams.”
“Right,” Casey agreed. “It’s Jonathan Becker.”
“What’s he wanted for?”
“He was wanted for conspiracy to commit murder.”
“You said was,” Joanna said. “You mean he isn’t anymore?”
“Jonathan Becker is dead,” Casey said. “At least that’s what the first person I talked to up in Nevada told me. He said Becker’s prints should have been pulled from the system because he’s deceased. According to the guy I talked to, Becker died in a one-car roll-over accident on the road between Vegas and Kingman. And that’s where he’s supposedly buried-Kingman, Arizona. The problem is, Becker obviously isn’t dead. If he were, he couldn’t have left fingerprints for us to find.”
“There has to be some kind of mixup,” Joanna suggested.
Casey shook her head determinedly. “There’s no mixup,” she said. “Not ten minutes after I get off the phone with the first detective, somebody else was on the line, calling me from North Las Vegas and pumping me for any and all information we might have on this case. It just didn’t sound right, Sheriff Brady. There’s something weird about this, and I don’t know what it is.”