Partner In Crime (3 page)

To combat the loneliness left by all the bare walls, Rochelle wrestled a new canvas out of storage and put it on her easel. It sat there staring back at her, waiting for her hands to fill it with color and give it life. Turning away from the empty canvas, she settled down at her drafting table and went through her sketchbooks trying to decide what she would paint next. Finally, around nine or so, she went to bed.

In her dream, she was back in Desert Storm. Oil-well fires, burning all around her, filled the air with evil-smelling smoke. She couldn’t breathe. She felt as if she were choking; her eyes were tearing. What woke her up, though, wasn’t the dream. It was a terrible cramping in her gut. Writhing in pain, Rochelle attempted to get out of bed, but before her feet touched the floor, her body heaved. The involuntary spasm hurled a spray of vomit halfway across the room. Falling back onto the bed, she grasped blindly for the phone. Somehow she reached it. Her stabbing fingers seemed numb and out of control, almost as though they belonged to someone else. Struggling desperately to manage her limbs, she finally succeeded in dialing.

“Nine one one,” the calm voice of an emergency dispatcher responded. “What is the nature of your emergency?”

By then Rochelle Baxter was beyond answering. Another wild spasm of vomiting hit her and sent her reeling back onto the bed. As she lay there, retching helplessly and unable to move, the phone clattered uselessly to the floor.

“Ma’am?” the operator said more urgently. “Can you hear me? Is there anyone there to help you? Can you tell me your location?”

There was no answer. By then Rochelle Baxter was beyond hearing as well. A few minutes later, medics dispatched by the Cochise County emergency operator arrived at the scene. When no one responded to their repeated knocking, they finally splintered the sturdy front door to gain entry. While a noisy burglar alarm squawked its insistent warning in the background, a young EMT located Rochelle in her vomit-splattered bed. Gingerly, he felt for a pulse, then looked at his supervisor and shook his head.

“We may have already lost her,” he said.

A
S
S
HERIFF
J
OANNA
B
RADY DROVE
through the last thicket of mesquite, the house at High Lonesome Ranch lay dark and still under a rising moon. Usually her daughter Jenny’s two dogs—Sadie, a bluetick hound, and Tigger, a half golden retriever/half pit-bull mutt—would have bounded through the undergrowth to meet her. This time, Joanna surmised, they had chosen to accompany Butch on his appointment with the contractor at the site of the new house they were planning to build a mile or so away.

Butch had bugged out of St. Dominick’s immediately after the service, while he and Joanna waited for the sanctuary to empty. “I’ll stay if you want,” he had whispered. “But I really need to go.”

“Right,” she had told him. “You do what you have to. I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll stop by the house and do the chores first,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.”

Joanna had simply nodded. “Thanks,” she said.

By then Yolanda Ortiz Cañedo’s grieving husband, her two young sons, her parents, brothers, and sister were walking out of the church through two lines of saluting officers made up of both police and fire department personnel. Joanna could barely stand to watch. It was all too familiar, too close to her own experience. As her green eyes filled with tears, Joanna glanced away, only to catch sight of the prisoners. That forlorn group—eleven county prisoners, freshly barbered and dressed in civilian clothes—stood in respectful silence under the watchful eyes of two jail guards and Ted Chapman, the executive director of the Cochise County Jail Ministry.

Ted had come to Joanna’s office the day after the young jail matron had died of cervical cancer at a hospice facility in Tucson. “Some of the inmates would like to go to the services,” Chapman had said. “Yolanda Cañedo did a lot of good around here. She really cared about the guys she worked with, and it showed. She helped me get the jail literacy program going, and she came in during off-hours to give individual help to prisoners who were going after GEDs. Some of the people she helped—inmates who have already been released—will be there on their own, but the ones who are still in lockup wanted me to ask if they could go, too. The newer prisoners, the ones who came in after Yolanda got sick, aren’t included, of course. They have no idea who she was or what she did.”

“What about security?” Sheriff Brady had asked. “Who’s going to stand guard?”

“I already have two volunteers who will come in on their day off,” Chapman answered. “You have my word of honor, along with that of the prisoners, that there won’t be any trouble.”

Joanna thought about how good some of the jail inmates’ words of honor might be. But then she also had to consider the notebook full of greetings—handmade by jail inmates—that Reverend Chapman had brought to Yolanda and her family as the young woman had lain gravely ill in the Intensive Care Unit at University Medical Center in Tucson. Sheriff Brady had been touched by the heartfelt sincerity in all those clumsily pasted-together cards. Several of them had been made by men able to sign their own names at the bottom of a greeting card for the very first time. Other cards had names printed by someone else under scrawled Xs. Their good wishes had seemed genuine enough back then. Now, so did the Reverend Chapman’s somewhat unorthodox request.

“How many inmates are we talking about?” Joanna had asked.

“Fourteen.”

“Any of them high-risk?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Give me the list,” Joanna had conceded at last. “I’m not making any promises, but I’ll run the proposition by the jail commander and see what he has to say.”

In the end, eleven of the proposed inmates had been allowed to attend the service. In his eulogy, Father Morris had spoken of Yolanda Cañedo as a remarkable young woman. Certainly the presence of that solemn collection of inmates bore witness to that. And, as far as Joanna could tell, the prisoners’ behavior had been nothing short of exemplary.

They stood now in a single straight row. With feet splayed apart and hands clasped behind their backs, they might have been a troop of soldiers standing at ease. Seeing them there, dignified and silent in the warm afternoon sun, Joanna was glad she had vetoed the jail commander’s suggestion that they attend the funeral wearing handcuffs and shackles.

Chief Deputy Frank Montoya came up behind her then. “Hey, boss,” he whispered in her ear. “They’re putting the casket into the hearse. Since we’re supposed to be directly behind the family cars, we’d better mount up.”

Nodding, Joanna left the inmates to the care of the two guards and Ted Chapman and walked back toward Frank’s waiting Crown Victoria. Even in heels, the five-foot-four sheriff felt dwarfed as she made her way through the crush of uniformed officers. A light breeze riffled her short red hair.

“Looks like the members of Reverend Chapman’s flock are behaving themselves,” her chief deputy observed, as he started the Civvie’s engine.

“So far so good,” Joanna agreed.

“But they’re not coming to the cemetery?”

Joanna shook her head. “No. Having them at the church is one thing, but going to the cemetery is something else. If there’s any confusion, I was afraid one or more of them might slip away.”

“You’ve got that right,” Frank agreed. “We don’t need to give your friend Ken Junior anything else to piss and moan about.”

“Since when does he need a reason?” Joanna returned.

Ken Junior, otherwise known as Deputy Kenneth Galloway, was Sheriff Brady’s current problem child. He was the nephew and namesake of another Deputy Galloway, one who had been part of a network of corrupt police officers in the administration that had immediately preceded Joanna’s. The elder Galloway had died as a result of wounds received during an armed confrontation with Joanna Brady. Although Joanna had been cleared of any wrongdoing in that incident, the dead man’s relatives continued to hold her responsible for Galloway’s death.

Although the younger man was the deceased deputy’s nephew rather than his son, around the department, he was referred to as Ken Junior. Fresh out of the Arizona Police Academy at the time of his uncle’s death, the younger Galloway had been far too new and inexperienced to have taken an active part in the police corruption that had marred Sheriff Walter V. McFadden’s administration. For that reason, Ken Junior had been allowed to stay on as a Cochise County deputy sheriff. Never a great supporter of Joanna’s, he had quickly gravitated to union activism and had recently been elected president of Local 83 of the National Federation of Deputy Sheriffs.

In recent months Joanna had clashed with Ken Junior twice regarding Yolanda Cañedo’s illness. The first confrontation had occurred when Joanna suggested that members of the union ought to do at least as much for the Cañedo family as the jail inmates had. The second had happened only a few days earlier, as the Cañedo family had struggled to make arrangements for Yolanda’s funeral.

Deputy Galloway had balked at Joanna’s insistence on giving Yolanda the honor of an official Fallen Officer funeral. Ken Junior had taken the position that, as a mere jail matron, Yolanda Cañedo didn’t qualify as a real Fallen Officer. Joanna had gone to the mat with him on that score. Only over his vociferous objections had two lines of smartly saluting officers greeted Yolanda’s grieving family as they exited St. Dominick’s Church after the funeral.

Led by two Arizona Department of Public Safety motorcycle officers, the hearse pulled away from the curb. One by one the other members of the funeral cortege formed up behind them for the slow, winding trip down Tombstone Canyon to Bisbee’s Evergreen Cemetery two miles away. The ceremony in the cemetery was the part of the service Joanna had steeled herself for. She dreaded the symbolic Last Call and the moment when she would be required to take a carefully folded American flag and deliver it into Leon Cañedo’s hands.

She remembered too clearly another bright fall afternoon, not so different from this one, when Walter V. McFadden had placed a similarly folded flag in Joanna’s trembling hands at the close of Andy’s graveside services.

During the ride down the canyon and around Lavender Pit, Joanna was glad her daughter, Jenny, wouldn’t be at the cemetery. Once again she had reason to be thankful for her former mother-in-law’s kindness and wisdom. Eva Lou Brady had called High Lonesome Ranch early that morning.

“Let Jenny come stay with Jim Bob and me tonight,” Eva Lou had urged. “After what happened to Andy, Yolanda’s funeral is going to be difficult enough for you. It’ll be even harder on Jen. I’ll have Jim Bob pick her up after school so she’s here with us before the service gets started. That way she won’t have to see the hearse and the cars pulling into the cemetery. We’ll take her out for pizza and try to keep her occupied.”

Lowell School, where Jenny attended seventh grade, was situated directly across the street from Evergreen Cemetery. Not only that, Joanna had been dismayed the day before when she drove by the cemetery and noticed that the plot Leon Cañedo had chosen was fully visible from some of Jenny’s classroom windows.

Bearing all that in mind, Joanna had readily agreed to her former mother-in-law’s suggestion. Now, driving into her own front yard and seeing the darkened house, Joanna was even more grateful. This was a night when she needed a buffer between home and work. The killer combination of funeral, wailing bagpipes, graveside service, and church-sponsored reception afterward had stretched Sheriff Joanna Brady’s considerable resources to the breaking point. Had Butch or Jenny asked about Yolanda Cañedo’s funeral, Joanna would likely have dissolved in tears.

The motion-activated light above the garage flashed on, illuminating Joanna’s way from the car to the house. The afternoon had been warm, but as soon as the sun went down, there was a hint of fall in the air. Once inside, Joanna hurried to the bedroom, where she stripped off her clothing and weapons. She locked away her two Glocks and pulled on a thick terry-cloth robe. Headed for the kitchen, she was stopped halfway there by a ringing phone.

“How did it go?” the Reverend Marianne Maculyea asked. “And how are you doing?”

Joanna’s friendship with Marianne dated from when the two of them had been preadolescent students at the same school Jenny now attended. Married and the mother of two, Marianne was also pastor at Tombstone Canyon United Methodist Church, where Joanna and Butch were members. She was the only person to whom Joanna had confided her concerns about attending and participating in Yolanda Cañedo’s funeral service.

“I’m all right,” Joanna replied grimly. “But it was tough.”

“You don’t
sound
all right,” Marianne observed.

“No, I suppose not,” Joanna said. “The Last Call was bad, but when I had to give Leon the flag, I really choked up. If I could have come home right then, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad. Instead, I had to go back up to the church and stay through the whole reception. That almost killed me, Mari. Yolanda’s sons, Manny and Frankie, were there in their white shirts and blue slacks and little bow ties. They’re such cute kids, but they’re so lost and hurt right now, I could hardly stand to look at them, to say nothing of speak to them. What do you say to kids like that? What
can
you say?”

“You say what’s in your heart,” Marianne Maculyea replied. “I’m sure seeing them bothered you that much more because it made you think about what it was like for Jenny during Andy’s funeral.”

Marianne Maculyea’s on-the-money comment left Joanna with nothing to say. After a moment of silence, Marianne added, “Speaking of Jenny, how is she?”

“Fine, I’m sure,” Joanna replied. “She’s with Grandma and Grandpa Brady. Eva Lou called this morning and invited her to spend the night. They’re going out for pizza. I wish Eva Lou had asked me to join them. For two cents I would have ditched the reception and eaten pizza instead.”

“You
had
to go to the reception, Joanna,” Marianne reminded her. “It’s your job.”