I wound down a long canyon, through an abandoned open-pit mine, and around a traffic circle. It took several turns around the circle and more than one false start before I finally turned off on Highway 80 toward Douglas. For the better part of a mile I drove along a huge flat mound of red rocks that stretched along the highway. I assumed this had to be waste that had been removed from the open-pit mine I had just driven through. Beyond the dump, although the desert near at hand continued to be of that strange Mars-like shade of red, the cliff-lined hills that jutted up a mile or so beyond it were a dull, uninspiring gray that reminded me of Seattle’s winter skies.
The Cochise County Justice Center was on the left-hand side of the road a couple of miles out of town. To get into the parking lot, I had to cross a rough metal grating. The cluster of buildings I found there was about as different from Seattle’s Public Safety Building as possible. Of single-story construction, they spread across a wide swath of desert. The exterior walls were reddish brown in the early-afternoon sun. They might have been made by simply scooping up the surrounding earth and turning that into building material. The campus was good-looking enough, I suppose. It might even have been mistaken for a school if it hadn’t been for the curls of razor wire that surrounded what was evidently the jail.
I drove my panting Sportage into the public parking lot and got out of the car. Missing my sunglasses even more, I went looking for a lady sheriff named Joanna Brady.
JOANNA ARRIVED AT THE OFFICE at nine that Saturday morning. She put down her purse and called Jaime Carbajal. “Any sign of Dee Canfield or Warren Gibson?” she asked.
“Not so far, boss. I stopped by her house again this morning. Nothing’s changed since yesterday.”
“What about the search warrant?”
“I’ve got a problem with that, too. Judge and Mrs. Moore must have stayed over in Tucson last night. They’re still not home. I won’t be able to do anything about a warrant until after the Bobo Jenkins interview”
“That’s fine,” Joanna said. “The warrant can wait.”
Once again she tackled the endless stream of paperwork. At ten o’clock she was studying the latest vacation schedule and shift rotations when she saw Frank Montoya and Jaime Carbajal escort Bobo Jenkins and Burton Kimball into the conference room down the hall.
Dressed in a jacket and tie, Bobo didn’t look nearly as intimidating as he had in the Castle Rock Gallery two days earlier. At the time, Joanna had thought she had derailed his anger and that he no longer posed any kind of threat to Dee Canfield. Now Joanna wasn’t so sure about that. Both the gallery owner and her boyfriend were presumed missing, and Bobo Jenkins had come to a routine interview with a defense lawyer in tow.
When I’m wrong, I do it up brown, Joanna told herself.
Shaking her head, she returned to the rotation schedule. A few minutes later, Dave Hollicker knocked on the casing of her open office door. “May I come in?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, looking up. “Have a seat. What’s going on? And why are you at work on a Saturday morning?”
After the previous day’s budget-cutting ordeal with the board of supervisors, Joanna knew that, from now on, she would have to curtail overtime wages.
Dave seemed to read her mind. “I know Casey and I weren’t scheduled to work today,” he said, “but there’s so much crime scene evidence to process, we thought you’d want us to get on it as soon as possible.”
I may, Joanna thought. Charles Neighbors may have other ideas.
“Next time, you’d better have the overtime authorized beforehand,” she said. “But I can see from your face that you’ve found something, and I’m guessing it’s not good news.”
Dave sighed. “You know Bobo Jenkins came by the department on Thursday afternoon to see Casey.”
Joanna nodded. “Right. I’m the one who told him we’d need his prints. Why?”
“Casey’s found Mr. Jenkins’s prints on the empty sweetener packets we pulled out of the trash at Latisha Wall’s place.”
“Of course they are,” Joanna agreed. “He told me he’d been to see her Wednesday evening. He also said he’d had a drink. If he had tea or coffee, it’s to be expected that his prints would show up on some of the sweetener packets.”
“The problem is,” Dave said, “they may be sweetener packets, but what’s in them isn’t sweetener.”
Joanna felt a familiar clutch in her gut. If the sweetener packets had been tampered with, it was likely Doc Winfield was right.
“You’re saying Latisha Wall really was poisoned?”
“All I’m saying right now, Sheriff Brady, is that some of the packets appear to have been tampered with,” Dave replied. “They were slit open and then carefully resealed. When Casey was straightening one of them so she could lift prints off the outside, she noticed white powder clinging to something tacky inside. You know how those little packets work. Usually the paper isn’t sticky at all. So we checked the other packets, including several of the supposedly unopened ones we took from the crime scene. Most of them are fine. Three of them aren’t.”
“Do you have the contents from those three unopened packets?”
Dave nodded.
“Any idea what it is?”
“None. I tried taking just a little whiff to see if there was any odor. I started feeling woozy. Whatever it is, it’s powerful stuff. I’ve put the remaining packets in stainless-steel containers.”
“Good,” Joanna said. “You’d better hustle whatever you’ve got up to the DPS satellite crime lab in Tucson. Get them working on it ASAP. If they give you any grief, have them call me personally, understand?”
Taking that for a dismissal, Dave Hollicker stood. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll get on it right away.”
“Wait,” Joanna added, holding up her hand. “One more thing. Does Jaime Carbajal know about this?”
Dave shook his head. “As I was coming over from the lab, he was already in the conference room with the occupied sign showing. A clerk told me he and Chief Deputy Montoya are conducting an interview. Rather than interrupt, I came to you instead.”
“Thanks, Dave,” she said. “I’ll take it from here. You get that stuff to the crime lab.”
Joanna sat at her desk for a few moments after Dave left her office. Naturally, a mere deputy would have been wary about interrupting an ongoing homicide interview. Under most circumstances, interrupting detectives at work didn’t seem like a good idea to Sheriff Joanna Brady, either. However, she was in possession of vital information that Jaime Carbajal needed to have now, while he was still interviewing Bobo Jenkins, rather than later, when it no longer mattered.
Hustling to the conference room door, Joanna ignored the occupied sign and let herself in. As she entered, she was greeted by the sound of raised voices.
“Don’t keep calling her Latisha Wall, Detective Carbajal,” Bobo Jenkins growled. “I’m telling you, I don’t know anyone by that name. The woman I knew was Rochelle Baxter. Shelley. She’s the one I came here to talk about.”
Joanna heard the overwrought man’s voice falter on the word “Shelley.” She winced at the audible hurt in that word. Bobo Jenkins was angry and grieving both. He sat still, his powerful arms folded across a massive chest. His jaws were clenched so tightly that the muscles in his cheeks twitched. Burton Kimball, seated next to his client, reached over and touched Bobo’s shoulder. The attorney was the first person in the room to notice Joanna’s arrival.
He stood and held out his hand. “Good morning, Sheriff Brady,” he said politely. “So glad you could join us.”
Joanna ignored Jaime’s impatient scowl and returned the greeting. Then she turned to her detective. “Could I speak to you for a moment, please, Detective Carbajal?” she asked, beckoning him toward the door.