Downfall (30 page)

THE INTERVIEW ITSELF WENT PRETTY MUCH AS JOANNA EXPECTED
. The DPS detectives wanted to ascertain where everyone was at the time Jeremy Stock had gone airborne. Since at least two gunshots had occurred in the course of the incident, they wondered if anyone had administered GSR tests the night before. Joanna smiled when they asked that question.

“Yes,” she answered. “My chief deputy, Tom Hadlock, made sure that our CSI team did Gunshot Residue Tests on my K9 officer, Terry Gregovich, on me, and on the dog, too, before any of us left the scene.”

Go, Tom,
she thought to herself. That was something else—a big something else—that her chief deputy had gotten right under the most challenging of circumstances.

In the course of the interview, Joanna laid the whole thing out, from the original homicides to the deaths of Jeremy Stock's
wife and son, and on to Jeremy's suicide. She told the detectives as much as she knew about the ongoing investigation involving the Susan Nelson sexual-abuse scandal, something which, in the next hours and days, was bound to set all of southeastern Arizona on its ear.

Halfway through the interview, her phone rang . . . well . . . crowed, really. The DPS guys exchanged disparaging glances, but Joanna wasn't exactly a suspect, and they had no grounds to forbid her taking the call. With Kristin's name showing in caller ID, they would have had to physically wrestle the phone out of her hands to keep her from doing so.

“How's Spike?” she asked at once.

“Out of surgery," Kristin answered. “Dr. Ross thinks she's managed to save the leg, but it's still touch and go. Terry's really broken up over it. He says that without Spike he's ready to quit the department and look for some other kind of work.”

“Of course he's broken up,” Joanna said. “Why wouldn't he be? He and Spike have been partners for a long time. They'll both have some grieving and adjusting to do. As I told Terry while we were still up on Geronimo, Spike has earned every minute of his retirement.”

What came to her then was something she would later regard as a moment of divine inspiration. “While Spike is recovering and while we're finding a new partner for Terry, maybe you could bring the dog along to work with you. That way Spike will feel like he's still on the job, and maybe Terry will, too.”

“What a wonderful idea,” Kristin said. “I love it, and so will Terry. I'll go tell him.”

When the called ended, Joanna turned back to the DPS detectives, “Okay, gentlemen. Where were we?”

The interview ended at 2:45
A
.
M
. Joanna and Butch made it back home just after three. Falling into bed, Joanna slept a deep, dreamless sleep. When she opened her eyes in the morning, Butch was long out of bed and the clock on the nightstand told her she had overslept. Thinking she was about to be late for work, she started to scramble out of bed and then stopped. Everything hurt. There was no part of her that wasn't stiff, sore, and aching, and all of that reminded her of everything else—everything that had happened yesterday and everything that would happen today.

Joanna Brady was alive this morning, but George and Eleanor Winfield were still dead. Yesterday she had fought a life-or-death battle with a stone-cold killer. Today she had to get through the aftermath of another double homicide.

Squaring her aching shoulders, Joanna got up finally and limped into the bathroom, where a brand-new tube of Arnicare stood front and center on the bathroom countertop. Seeing her face in the mirror was a shock to the system. Her right cheek was purple from her eyebrow to the bottom of her nose. Where the bruise ended, the line of stitches began. Not a pretty picture. Taking Butch's pointed hint, she opened the box, took out the tube, and spread some of the soothing ointment over everything that hurt—at least over everything that hurt that she could reach. There were scrapes in the middle of her back where applying salve simply wasn't an option.

Summoned by the unmistakable scent of baking waffles, Joanna donned her robe and headed in that direction, only to come to a sudden halt in the living room. Most of the ceiling was covered with an array of brightly colored helium balloons, bunches and bunches of them, all tied together with strings.

“How many balloons did you buy?” she asked Butch when she reached the kitchen doorway.

“Morning, gorgeous,” he said with a smile as he looked up from his steaming waffle iron. “I bought as many as Safeway had on hand. I believe that's called cornering the market. I wanted them here at the house before the funeral rather than having to go pick them up afterward.”

“Good idea,” Joanna said. “I should have gone along.”

“Not enough room,” Butch said. “It turns out that balloons take up a lot of space, especially when you're transporting them in a vehicle.”

Dennis sat at the table staring at her. “Mommy,” he said finally. “What happened to your face? You look awful!”

“Out of the mouths of babes,” Butch said with a grin.

“I was out hiking and I fell down,” Joanna answered. It was a long way from the truth but it was close enough to do the job.

“Did you see the balloons?” Denny continued enthusiastically, paying no attention at all to his mother's truth-dodging explanation. “Do you know how long it takes to fill that many balloons? A long time. They ran out of . . . What's it called again, Daddy?”

“Helium,” Butch answered, setting a plate with a waffle on it directly in front of Denny's place at the table and a mug of tea in front of Joanna's.

“They ran out of helium,” Dennis finished. “Good thing they had another . . .”

“Bottle,” Butch supplied. “It looks like a tank, but I believe they call them bottles.”

“When we let them loose, will Grandma Eleanor and Grandpa George be able to see them?” Dennis wanted to know.

“Yes, they will,” Butch answered preemptively, before Joanna could say otherwise. “Of course they will.”

When Joanna's waffle came, she ate it gingerly, chewing on the left side of her mouth only. There were definitely some loose teeth on the other side.

“The service starts at eleven,” Butch said. “What time do you want to leave the house?”

“Probably around ten,” Joanna answered. “There are always last-minute details that need to be attended to.”

Jenny appeared in the doorway, wearing PJs and sniffing the air. “Waffles? Goody. I love waffles.”

“If Mom and I go uptown early, can you get Dennis ready and bring him along?”

“Sure thing,” Jenny said. “No problem.”

Minutes later, Joanna excused herself and headed back to the bedroom. She had to admit that the salve had helped some with the swelling. She did the best she could with makeup, but there was no way to cover up the worst of the damage. She dug her only black suit out of the closet and put it on. She was able to zip the skirt most of the way, but she couldn't fasten the button. She used a safety pin to close the placket, but the jacket was two inches shy of closing around her ample middle.

Yes,
she thought, appraising herself in the mirror.
No way Mom would ever give me a passing grade on this outfit.

Butch came in just then to get ready, too. “Do you know what you're going to say?”

“Pretty much,” she said. “I wrote something down. It's on my iPad.”

“You won't need your iPad,” he told her, handing her the freshly pressed lace-edged handkerchief Dennis had given her
for Mother's Day. “All you have to do is speak from your heart.”

Joanna and Butch drove from the house to the mortuary mostly in silence because, right then, filling the car with words simply wasn't necessary. While Butch negotiated with one of Norm Higgins's sons about the best place for them to park and who would ride in the limo from the mortuary to the cemetery, Joanna went inside the chapel.

Marianne Maculyea was already on hand. Had the final arrangements been left to Eleanor, no doubt she would have chosen the pastor from her church, First Presbyterian, to officiate. The problem was, the new minister, Reverend Donald Graham, had come on board after George and Eleanor had left town for their summer-long RV adventure. He would have been a complete stranger to them, just as he was to Joanna.

As a consequence, Eleanor's preferences simply didn't apply. After all, funerals were for the living rather than the dead, and Joanna wanted someone she knew officiating at the ceremony and issuing the words of comfort. Of course, there was that other important part of the equation—the one that included Marianne's troubled relationship with her own mother. That meant Marianne had a far better understanding of Joanna's current storm of conflicting emotions than anyone else on the planet.

“I heard what happened,” Marianne said, hurrying forward as if to wrap her arms around Joanna's shoulders.

“No hugs, please,” Joanna said, warning her away. “I hurt all over.”

Since Marianne functioned as a local police and fire chaplain, it was hardly surprising that she was aware of what had gone on.
Still, when she saw the stitches on Joanna's face, she visibly recoiled.

“How are you?”

“I'm okay,” Joanna admitted. “A little stiff and sore, but you're welcome to go ahead and tell me how awful I look. Everyone else does.”

“Considering what you went through yesterday, you're entitled to look the part,” Marianne said. “By the way, Marliss was on the phone early this morning complaining right and left that Tom Hadlock had scheduled a press briefing for eleven
A
.
M
. She was wondering if since she would be missing the service, could I possibly make arrangements to tape it. I told her no, by the way.”

“Thanks,” Joanna said. “I suspect there may have been a bit of malice aforethought on my chief deputy's part when he scheduled the briefing for the same time as the funeral. On the face of it, he's giving news outlets from out of town a chance to get here on time. Even so, with that eleven
A
.
M
. start time, he may have been sticking it to Marliss just a little.”

Norm Higgins appeared silently at her elbow. “May I show you to the family meditation room?”

With a nod, Joanna allowed herself to be led away. She sat alone for several minutes, studying what she'd written of the eulogies on her iPad. When Jenny, Dennis, and Butch filed in a few minutes later, she turned the iPad off and put it in her purse.

She'd do exactly as Butch had suggested, she decided—speak from the heart. And when in the course of the service, it came time for her to step forward, the iPad remained exactly where she had left it—stowed and closed in her purse.

“My mother, Eleanor Lathrop Winfield, would be appalled to see me standing here like this today—bruised and battered and
looking like, as she would have said, ‘something the cat dragged in.' Some of you may have heard that there was a serious incident out on Geronimo last night. It came about as part of an investigation into several homicides. As sheriff, I was involved in that incident, and I've got the stitches and bruises to prove it. I remember a limerick I heard once:

“On behalf of my mother and her husband, George Winfield, I offer my apologies for how I look today, but in this case, what you see is what you get.”

There was a small titter of laughter from the audience before Joanna continued. “What can I say about George? He was terrific. When he was appointed to be Cochise County's first-ever medical examiner, he and I soon became trusted colleagues and later friends.

“I was a bit surprised when he and my mother took up with one another. Mom had been a widow on her own for a very long time. When they put George's name up as one of the ‘most eligible bachelors' in a school district auction, I was surprised when Mom ponied up the kind of money she did. I thought it was a whim. Turns out it wasn't. George and I were working a case and driving to Douglas on the day he happened to mention that he and my mother had eloped to Las Vegas the previous weekend. I didn't total my patrol car that day, but it wasn't for lack of trying.”

Another whisper of laughter rippled through the room.

“As I said earlier, my mother had been widowed for a long time when George showed up in her life. He put a smile on her face and a sparkle in her eye that I never remember seeing before. For that, I'm forever grateful.

“And then there's my mom—Eleanor. If any of you ever had the misfortune of tangling with her, you know she was a force to be reckoned with—a ‘my way or the highway' kind of person. She was tough, yes, but she was tough because she had to be. I was fifteen when my father died, leaving her to finish raising a teenage daughter—a willful, stubborn, and defiant daughter, I might add—one you could easily call a handful. I can't tell you how grateful I am that my daughter, Jenny, sitting there at the end of the second row, isn't a chip off the old block—at least not off this old block. That's something for which I count my blessings every day.

“My mother didn't have a smooth, trouble-free life. She and my dad were high school sweethearts back in the day. When their romance got a bit out of hand, she ended up having an out-of-wedlock child—a baby boy she was forced by her parents to give up for adoption. That baby grew up to be my brother, Bob Brundage, seated next to Jenny.

“After giving up that first child, she and my father waited until she no longer required parental consent to marry. At that point and despite her family's disapproval, my parents did marry and finally, years later, had me, but I believe she always felt like a piece of her heart was missing. When Bob came looking for his birth family a few years ago, my mother welcomed him and his lovely wife, Marcie, with all her heart.