Jaime rose at once and followed Joanna out into the lobby. “What’s going on in there?” she asked.
Jaime shrugged. “You heard some of it. Bobo insists he knows nothing about Rochelle Baxter’s other life. As you can see, he’s more than a little upset about it.”
“Why wouldn’t he be?” Joanna returned. “Someone he cared about is dead. It must seem to him as though we’re treating him more like a suspect than a witness. No wonder he’s upset. But that’s not why I called you out here, Jaime. Dave Hollicker and Casey Ledford have come up with something important.”
“What?”
“Several of the sweetener packets they removed from the crime scene appear to have been tampered with. They contain an unknown substance Dave is taking to the DPS crime lab in Tucson for analysis and identification. Not only that, Casey found Bobo Jenkins’s fingerprints on some of the tampered packets that were empty. When I talked to Bobo right after we found Latisha Wall’s body, Bobo told me he had been to her place the evening she died to have a drink.”
“In other words, if his prints are on the sweetener packets, why isn’t he dead, too?”
“Exactly,” Joanna said. “I thought you’d want to know about this as you go forward with the interview.”
Jaime nodded. “Thanks,” he said. With that, he turned and let himself back into the conference room.
Joanna stared at the closed door and thought about what kind of person would knowingly place a fatal dose of poison in someone else’s glass, especially when the unsuspecting victim was someone close – a lover, a friend. Joanna had thought Bobo Jenkins capable of striking out in anger, but that was vastly different from committing cold, premeditated murder.
Just thinking about it was enough to leave Joanna feeling chilled and sick at heart.
Nine
FOR THE NEXT TWO AND A HALF HOURS, Joanna waited impatiently for the Bobo Jenkins interview to come to an end. During that time, she would have welcomed Kristin’s waddling into her office to pile another load of correspondence onto her desk. Unfortunately, an hour into the process, her jungle of paperwork was entirely cleared away. All e-mails had been answered, all memos duly signed off on. Desperate to keep herself occupied, Joanna rummaged through a stack of previously unread issues of Law Enforcement Digest and the Arizona Sheriffs’ Association Newsletter, where she actually scanned several of the articles. By twelve-thirty she had been reduced to the rarely performed task of cleaning her desk.
When someone knocked on the doorjamb a while later, Joanna looked up eagerly, hoping for Jaime Carbajal or Frank Montoya. Instead, Lupe Alvarez, one of the public lobby receptionists, stood in the doorway.
“Yes?” Joanna said.
“There’s someone to see you, Sheriff Brady. Do you want me to bring him back?”
“Who is it?”
“He gave his name and showed me a badge. He’s Special Investigator Beaumont, J.P. Beaumont, from Seattle, Washington.”
So, she thought, Mr. J.P. Bird Dog has arrived.
No doubt the big-city cop who was here to screw up her investigation and look down his nose at her department would expect to find a small-town sheriff in a squalid office with her shirtsleeves rolled up and her feet planted on her desk. She was glad to be in uniform that day and grateful that her office was, for a change, in pristine order.
“Thanks, Lupe,” she said. “I’ll come out and get him myself.”
Lupe disappeared. Joanna checked her makeup and hair in the mirror before venturing into the lobby. As she stepped through the secured door, she glanced around the room. The only visible visitor was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a gray crew cut and a loose-fitting sport coat. He stood at the far end of the room, examining a glass case that contained a display of black-and-white photos of the current sheriff of Cochise County along with all of her male predecessors.
The photos of the men were all formal portraits. Most of them had posed in Western garb that included visible weaponry. Their faces were set in serious, unapproachable expressions. Joanna’s picture stood in stark contrast to the rest. The informal snapshot, taken by her father, showed her as a grinning Brownie Scout pulling a Radio Flyer wagon loaded front-to-back with stacked boxes of Girl Scout cookies.
As Joanna’s uninvited visitor lingered in front of the display case, Joanna wished for the first time that she had knuckled under to one of Eleanor Lathrop Winfield’s never-ending bits of motherly advice. Eleanor had tried to convince Joanna that she should do what the previous sheriffs had done and use her official, professionally done campaign photo in the display. She realized now that it wouldn’t be easy for her to be taken seriously by this unwelcome emissary from the Washington State Attorney General’s Office if his first impression of Sheriff Joanna Brady was as a carefree eight-year-old out selling Girl Scout cookies.
“Mr. Beaumont?” she asked, holding out her hand and straining to sound more cordial than she felt. She wasn’t especially interested in making him feel welcome, since he was anything but. As he turned toward her, she realized he stood well over six feet. Naturally, at five feet four, she felt dwarfed beside him. She held herself erect, hoping to appear taller.
“I’m Sheriff Brady,” she said.
As he returned her handshake, Joanna realized J.P. Beaumont wasn’t a particularly handsome man. Despite herself, though, she was drawn to the pattern of smile lines that crinkled around his eyes. At least smiling isn’t an entirely foreign activity, she thought.
“Glad to meet you,” he said, pumping her small hand with his much larger one. “I’m Beaumont – Special Investigator J.P. Beaumont. Most people call me Beau.”
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
“I believe we need to talk,” he replied.
“In that case,” she said, “we’d better go to my office.”
I HAD BEEN WAITING for Sheriff Brady for several minutes, but she surprised me when she walked up behind me without making a sound. Her bright red hair was cut short. The emerald-green eyes that studied me could have sparked fire. She wore a dark olive-green uniform, which looked exceptionally good on her since she filled it out in all the right places. If it hadn’t been for the forbidding frown on her face, she might have been pretty. Instead, she looked as if she had just bitten into an apple and discovered half a worm. In other words, she wasn’t glad to see me.
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.