Shocked, Kristin opened her mouth, but no words came out. Blushing furiously, she spun around and nearly ran over Dick Voland in her rush to escape Joanna’s office and her steady, appraising gaze.
“What’s the matter with Kristin?” Dick asked, as he shambled in and sank down into one of the side chairs.
“I believe it’s called culture shock,” Joanna replied. “Where’s Ernie?”
“He’ll be here in a minute.”
“Thanks for having the office ready for me to move into, Dick,” Joanna said. “That was thoughtful of you. I don’t know when you had time.”
The chief deputy shrugged grudgingly. “No big thing,” he said. Although Joanna knew it was.
Ernie appeared moments later. The man may have spent the entire morning grubbing around at a crime scene in a pair of much-used sweats and tennies, but by the time he appeared in Joanna’s office, he was wearing a well-pressed suit, a tie, and a stiffly starched white shirt, to say nothing of highly polished wing tips. Looking at him, Joanna was glad she’d taken the time to go home and clean up.
“What’s going on?” he asked irritably. “I’m busy as hell.”
“I’m sure you are, but we’ve got a press conference coming up in a few minutes,” Joanna told him.
“Since when?”
“Since I called it. This is a big case, and we’re going to handle it in a way that won’t have the press tearing us apart. Dick will be running the show, but I want a united front on what he says and what he doesn’t.”
Kristin walked in right then, bringing the three cups of coffee. Wordlessly, she delivered Joanna’s cup to the desk. When she turned back to the two men, she paused for a moment in front of the coffee table, struggling to find a way to deposit the cups on the low surface of the table without having to bend over to do it. She finally solved the problem by passing the cups directly to their hands.
“So where do we stand?” Joanna asked, once Kristin left the room.
“Two stiffs for the price of one,” Ernie Carpenter replied. “I’ve got Harold Patterson’s body pulled up to the surface. The coroner has taken charge of him, and we’ve packed out most of the skeleton in a body bag. The sump pump is doing the job, but it’s still too wet down there to finish searching the bottom of the glory hole.”
“Any possible I.D. on the skeleton?”
“None.”
“Cause of death?”
“Looks like a rock to the head to me, but that’s Just a wild guess.”
“Do you have any leads on either case?”
“Not really. But how could I? For Pete’s sake, I’ve been down in that damn hole mucking around in the mud all morning long.”
Joanna turned from Ernie Carpenter to the chief deputy. “All right then, Dick. That’s what you tell the press.”
“What?”
“Two separate homicides. One positive I.D one John Doe. No specific leads in either case at this time.”
“That’s all? You call a press conference and just give ‘em that little snippet of information? They’ll tear me apart.”
“Some information is better than no information,” Joanna countered. “They’ll have to make do. Tell them when we know more, they’ll know more.”
Shaking his head, a disgruntled Dick Voland took his coffee and headed out of the office. Ernie Carpenter made as if to follow, but Joanna stopped him. “Wait a minute, Ernie.”
Ernie sighed and reluctantly sat back down. “What now?”
“I picked up a few tidbits of information out at the Rocking P this morning,” she told him.
“Tidbits?” he asked with a disinterested shrug. “Like what?”
Joanna got up from behind her desk, walked over to the door and closed it. “Like who might have killed Harold Patterson,” she answered firmly. “And why.”
CARPENTER stayed in Joanna’s office for more than an hour. Once she started relating all she had learned out at the Patterson place and during her stop at Cosa Viejo, Ernie appropriated one of Joanna’s legal pads and pens and began scribbling notes.
When she finished telling him everything she could remember, Ernie studied his notes in silence for several moments. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, chewing one end of the pen, “what you’ve told me tallies with some of the things I picked up.”
“For instance?”
“For instance,” he replied, “near as I can tell, there were several sets of tire tracks in and out of that place for days. The only trouble is, they’re all from the same vehicle.”
“Which one?”
“Harold Patterson’s Scout.”
“That stands to reason.”
“But only up to a point,” Ernie said. “He could have driven it in one last time, but he sure as hell didn’t drive it out. According to the coroner’s preliminary look-see, he guesstimates time of death as sometime Tuesday or Wednesday, but Burton Kimball says he came to the Election Night party looking for his uncle because he saw his car in the convention-center parking lot.”
“So the question is, how did it get from the glory hole to the parking lot?”
“No way to tell, but presumably the killer drove it there.”
Ernie shook his head thoughtfully. “The part about all this that doesn’t add up is Ivy and her boyfriend spending the night in the Scout with Harold lying there dead a matter of a few feet away. That one just flat-out takes the cake!”
“It’s sick, all right,” Joanna agreed.
“And they’re getting married tonight?”
Joanna nodded. “That’s what they said. Seven o’clock at the Canyon Methodist parsonage. Marianne Macula is officiating.”
“I call that really rushing it,” Ernie said, frowning. “I mean, the old guy’s not even cold yet, and his daughter’s out banging her boyfriend in Daddy’s car. Next thing you know, she’s getting married. Couldn’t she hold off the celebration at least until after the funeral? And you say Burton Kimball didn’t know anything at all about the wedding until today?”
“That’s how it sounded-as though he’d never even heard of Yuri Malakov,” Joanna told him.
“So the Russian and Ivy were already engaged, but maybe no one in the family knew anything about it, including the old man.”
“Why keep your engagement a secret?” Joanna asked.
“Because you figure someone’s going to object,” Ernie answered. “So the next question has to be why there’d be an objection in the first place.”
Joanna nodded thoughtfully. “According to Marianne, Yuri is applying for U.S. citizenship. Wouldn’t Immigration have an application with fingerprints on it?”
“And with any criminal record as well,” Ernie said.
“Can we get a copy?”
Ernie laughed. “Supposedly, but nobody rushes those guys down at INS. I’ve gone to them for records before. Just getting an answer to a simple question could take months, even with the MJ boys working on it.”
The Multi-Jurisdictional Force was a recently created task force designed to counter criminal activity along the Mexican border, including unlawful enterprises that often crossed jurisdictional boundaries. One MJ squad was based out of the Cochise County Justice Center. Joanna knew about it, but only distantly. It was one of those aspects of her new job that she had expected to have time to research between Election Night and being sworn in sometime in January.
“Maybe you can get someone from there to pull a string or two,” she suggested.
“Don’t hold your breath,” Ernie said sourly, getting up. “But I’ll give it a whirl.”
He was already at the door when Joanna remembered the magazine.
“You don’t read People by any chance, do you?”
Ernie shook his head. “Not me. I’m more into Smithsonian and Home Mechanix,” he smiled. “Last month they had a great article on building decks. Why do you ask?”