I followed Sheriff Brady from the public lobby into her private office, realizing as I did so that I hadn’t expected her to be so short, in every sense of the word. She waited until she had closed the door behind us before she really turned on me. “What exactly do you want?” she demanded.
I know how, as a detective, I used to hate having outside interference in one of my cases, so I didn’t expect her to welcome me with open arms. But I hadn’t foreseen outright hostility, either.
“We have a case to solve,” I began.
“We?” she returned sarcastically. “I have a case to solve. My department has a case to solve. There’s no we about it.”
“The Washington State Attorney General’s Office has a vested interest in your solving this case,” I said.
“So I’ve heard,” she responded, crossing her arms and drilling into me with those amazingly green eyes.
In that moment Sheriff Joanna Brady reminded me eerily of Miss Edith Heard, a young, fearsomely outspoken geometry teacher from my days at Seattle’s Ballard High School. At the time I was in her class, Miss Heard must have been only a few years older than her students, but she brooked no nonsense. After suffering through two semesters of geometry that I barely managed to pass, I had fled in terror from any further ventures into higher math.
Like Joanna Brady, Miss Heard had been short, red-haired, and green-eyed, and she had scared the hell out of me. But a lot of time had passed since then. I wasn’t nearly as terrified by Joanna Brady as I was annoyed. And it wasn’t lost on me that she hadn’t offered me a chair.
“Look,” I said impatiently, “today happens to be my birthday. There are any number of ways I’d rather be spending it than being hassled by you. So how about if we cut the crap and get our jobs done so I can go back home.”
She never even blinked. “Your going home sounds good,” she said. “Now, if the Washington State Attorney General is so vitally interested in this case-”
“The AG’s name is Connors,” I interjected. “Mr. Ross Connors. He’s my boss.”
“If Mr. Connors is so vitally interested in this case, why can’t I get any information about Latisha Wall out of his office?”
I set my briefcase down on a nearby conference table and flicked open the lid. “You can,” I said, extracting Latisha Wall’s file from my briefcase. “That’s why I’m here.” I handed it over to her. She took it. Then, without opening the file or even glancing at it, she walked over to her desk and put it down.
“I’m delighted to know that Mr. Connors’s office has the financial wherewithal to have files hand-delivered by personally authorized couriers. It seems to me it would have made more sense for him to fax it. All we needed were straight answers to a few questions. Instead, we got stonewalled, Mr. Beaumont. And now we have you,” she added. “When you get around to it, you might let Mr. Connors know that the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department doesn’t require the assistance of one of his personal emissaries.”
The lady was getting under my skin. I pulled out a business card and handed it to her.
“I’m not an emissary,” I said. “As you can see, I’m an investigator – a special investigator – working for the attorney general. Latisha Wall was in our witness protection program. Mr. Connors needs to know whether or not her death is related to her being in that program. If not, fine. What happened is on your turf. It’s your problem and not ours. But if it is related,” I added, “if Latisha Wall died because someone wanted to keep her from giving potentially damaging testimony in a court of law, then it’s our problem as much as it is yours. Whoever killed her should never have been able to find her in the first place.”
“In other words, your witness protection program has a leak, and you’re the plumber sent here to plug it,” Sheriff Brady returned.
“Exactly,” I said.
She recrossed her arms. “Tell me about Latisha Wall,” she said.
I had read through the file several times by then. I didn’t need to consult it as I related the story. “After graduating from high school, Latisha Wall did two stints in the Marines where she worked primarily as an MP. Once she got out of the service, she went to work for an outfit from Chicago called UPPI. Ever heard of them?”
“I know all of that,” Sheriff Brady said.
“You do?”
She smiled. “We only look like we live in the sticks, Mr. Beaumont. Have you ever heard of the Internet? My chief deputy, Frank Montoya, was able to glean that much information from newspaper articles. What else?”
Score one for Joanna Brady.
“Mind if I sit down?”
“Please do,” she said. She motioned me into a chair and then sat behind a huge desk that was so impossibly clean it was frightening. I worry about people with oppressively clean desks.
“So in the nineties,” I continued, “United Private Prisons, Incorporated, saw coming what they thought was a long-term prisoner-incarceration boom. They set out to corner themselves a piece of that market. The state of Washington went for them in a big way, and when it came to picking up one of those lucrative state contracts, it didn’t hurt to have an African-American female on board to help deal with all those pesky EEOC considerations.
“UPPI won the bid to build and run a boot-camp juvenile facility near the town of Aberdeen in southwestern Washington. Once the Aberdeen Juvenile Detention Center opened, UPPI appointed Latisha Wall to be its first director. On the surface of it, I’m sure putting an African-American female who was also an ex-Marine MP in charge of a place like that must have seemed like a good choice all around.”
“What went wrong?” Joanna asked.
“According to subsequent investigations, UPPI had cut some serious corners in order to get costs low enough to win the contract. Some of those cut corners were in basic building materials. Only the cheapest and shoddiest materials were used during the construction phase. Subsequent investigations show that basics like insulation and wiring didn’t even meet code, but they somehow had passed all required building inspections. Consequently, the deficiencies came to light only after the building was occupied, at which point they were passed off as the fledgling director’s fault.”
“We had a few jail-construction problems of our own,” Sheriff Brady said thoughtfully. “So they turned her into a fall guy.”
“Or girl,” I suggested.
Sheriff Brady didn’t return my smile. “Whatever,” she said.
“UPPI’s corner-cutting at the facility didn’t stop with construction of the physical plant. UPPI budgets expected to provide for food, medical care, bedding, and personnel were too low to sustain a livable environment. Even with a boot-camp-style existence, the available monies and feeding the inmates nutrition loaf three meals a day, seven days a week, wouldn’t have stretched far enough.
“The state had situated the facility in an economically depressed part of southwestern Washington in hopes of creating living-wage jobs for people after the lumber industry pretty much disappeared. Only UPPI didn’t budget for living wages, either. Nor did they make any effort to turn new employees into trained correction officers. As a result, people who ended up working there weren’t necessarily the best or the brightest. That caused real problems, too, in terms of lack of discipline, inappropriate sexual interactions, gang activity, drug and alcohol abuse – all the things a boot-camp environment is supposed to prevent.
“Aberdeen Juvenile Detention Center opened in the spring three years ago and was operating at full capacity within three months. By the time fall came along and the rains started, the walls began weeping moisture and forming mold. Latisha Wall immediately reported the facility’s shortcomings to her supervisor. When inmates complained that the food they were given was full of bugs and wasn’t fit to eat, she passed that information along as well. Nothing happened. No corrective measures were taken, and no additional expenditures were allowed. Finally, Latisha was told that dealing with the ongoing difficulties was her problem. At that point, she went to her supervisor’s supervisor, with the same result.