“So Latisha Wall was murdered, then?”
Joanna ignored the question. “What Detective Carbajal needs, I believe, is for someone to fax Latisha Wall’s information to us so we’ll know where to start. All we have so far is her real name and her family’s address in Georgia.”
“That file isn’t faxable, ma’am,” Harry Ball told her.
“What do you mean, it isn’t faxable?” Joanna returned. “What is it, chiseled in granite?”
“It’s confidential. We have no assurances that it might not fall into unauthorized hands in the process of transmitting it.”
“You’re implying that someone in my department might leak it?” Joanna demanded. “And why is it so damned confidential? Let me remind you, Mr. Balclass="underline" Latisha Wall is already dead. If she was in a witness protection program you guys set up, I’d have to say you didn’t do such a great job of it. And I still need the information.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, ma’am. We’re sending it to you.”
“How? By pony express?”
Joanna glared at the clock, whose hands were moving inexorably forward. The board of supervisors meeting would start at nine sharp. Even skipping a shower, it was going to be close.
“One of the members of my team, an investigator named J.P. Beaumont, will be delivering it in person. Once he does so, Mr. Connors would like him to stay on as an observer.”
“A what?”
“An observer. This is an important case with long-term, serious financial implications for the state of Washington,” Harry Ball continued. “We wouldn’t want someone to inadvertently let something slip.”
Joanna was dumbfounded. “Let something slip?” she deman-ded. “Connors thinks my department is so incompetent that he’s sending someone to bird-dog my investigation? I don’t believe this! You can give that boss of yours a message from me. Tell him he has a hell of a lot of nerve!”
Slamming down the phone, she hopped into the shower after all. She was too steamed not to. Her hair was still damp and her makeup haphazardly applied when she slid into a chair next to Frank Montoya at the board of supervisors’ Melody Lane conference room fifty minutes later. Frank glanced at his watch and sighed with relief when he saw her. The board secretary was already reading the minutes of the previous meeting.
“What happened?” he whispered.
“I overslept.”
“Oh,” Frank said. “Is that all? From the look on your face, I thought it was something serious.”
Sheriff Joanna Brady hated having to attend board of supervisors meetings. For routine matters, Frank Montoya usually attended in her stead. This meeting, however, was anything but routine. The general downturn in the national economy had hit hard in Cochise County, requiring budget cuts in every aspect of county government. Today, with the board’s cost-cutting knives aimed at the sheriff’s department, she and Frank had decided they should both appear. Within minutes, Joanna knew they’d made a wise decision.
The newest member of the board, Charles Longworth Neighbors, was a man no one ever referred to as Charley – at least not to his face. He was a full-bird colonel who had retired from the army at Fort Huachuca a year or so earlier. He had now been appointed to fill out another board member’s unexpired term of office.
Since Charles Neighbors was career army, the United States government had seen to it that he had earned a Harvard MBA while in the service. Now in civilian life, he loved to wield his relatively recent degree as a double-edged sword. He had no compunction about inflicting everything he had learned on the unwashed masses in every branch of Cochise County government, one reluctant department at a time. Today he homed in on the sheriff’s department, going over budget items line by line, convinced that there were substantial cuts that could and should be made.
“If it can be done, it should be done,” he told Joanna, with a patronizing smile that made her want to grind her teeth.
Three and a half grueling hours later, she and Frank escaped the boardroom, having taken a 10-percent-across-the-board hit. She waited until they were safely outside the building and out of earshot before she exploded.
“If it can be done, it should be done,” she grumbled, doing a credible job of imitating Charles Longworth’s pedantic, school-principal-like delivery. “If he had said that one more time, I think I would have thrown something! Of course, his should-bes are all one-way streets. Budget items are to be taken out and never put back in.”
“Now, now,” Frank counseled, “give the man a break. He’s new and trying to get a grip on how things work. Supervising county government has to be different from being an officer in the army.”
“Right,” Joanna agreed. “We can’t afford two-hundred-dollar toilet seats. And then there’s Harry I. Ball.”
“What hairy eyeball?” Frank asked. “I don’t remember anyone saying a word about that.”
“Not ‘hairy eyeball,’ “ Joanna returned. “That’s a man’s name,” she said, reading off the scrap of paper she had stuffed in the pocket of her blazer. “First name is Harry, middle initial I, and last name Ball. I made him spell it out for me.”
“Who the hell is he?”
“Some high mucky-muck with the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. He called me at home this morning when I should have been on my way to work.” She didn’t add that Harry Ball’s unwelcome call was the only reason she hadn’t been even later to the board of supervisors meeting.
“What did he want?”
“His office is sending someone to bring us Latisha Wall’s file because the material is too volatile to be sent any other way than in person. Not only that, whoever they send is supposed to hang around and keep an eye on us – an observer to bird-dog us the whole time we’re doing the Latisha Wall investigation. I believe the exact phrase he used is that his boss didn’t want anyone to ‘let something slip.’ The good folks up in Washington are evidently convinced that our department is totally incapable of conducting an adequate homicide investigation. If you ask me, Mr. Ball sounded exactly like some of those high-handed yahoos from the other Washington, and just as screwed up.”
“When does this so-called observer arrive?” Frank asked mildly.
“Who knows?” Joanna shot back. “And who cares? His name’s…” She paused again to consult her note. “J.P. Beaumont. All I can say is, Mr. Beaumont had better stand back and stay out of my way.”
Frank shook his head and unlocked the door to his waiting Civvie. “Want to stop off and grab some lunch before we head back to the office?” he asked. “Something tells me you’re running on empty.”
Joanna gave him a sidelong glance. “What makes you say that? Just because I’m ranting and raving?”
Frank nodded. “The thought crossed my mind.”
“We’ve been working together for too long,” Joanna said, grinning in spite of herself. “And lunch is probably a good idea. Butch left the house early this morning. I ran late and skipped breakfast.”
“I thought so,” Frank said.
Minutes later Frank and Joanna turned their matching Crown Victorias into Chico’s Taco Stand in Bisbee’s Don Luis neighborhood. The building that housed Chico’s had once served as the office of a junkyard. The wrecked cars had all disappeared, and now the building itself had been transformed. The tiny restaurant consisted of a counter where people lined up to place their orders. In addition to the counter’s four stools, there were five booths that consisted of sagging, cigarette-scarred red vinyl benches with matching chrome-and-chipped-Formica tabletops. All of the furnishings had been purchased secondhand from a soon-to-be-demolished diner in Tucson. Several dusty, fading piñatas and a few unframed bullfight posters provided what passed for interior decor.