Judgment Call (20 page)

What about the young man who had fathered Debra Highsmith's son? Where did he fit in? Did he even know Debra had gotten pregnant? Did he care? Had he known about it, would he have insisted on being involved in the child's life? He might have objected to his son being adopted by anyone and refused to relinquish his parental rights, but not if he had no idea that he had parental rights. Maybe that was what this was all about. Maybe twenty-six years down the line, he had finally discovered the existence of his son. Was that the answer? Had Debra Highsmith been murdered in an act of naked revenge by her son's outraged biological father?

The last time Joanna looked at the clock, it was after three. Her ringing cell phone awakened her at seven. Butch was out of bed. The aroma of bacon frying leaked into Joanna's senses along with the appropriately early-morning rooster crow of her phone.

“Hello,” Joanna said, trying to clear the sleep from her voice.

“Are you Sheriff Brady?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“My name is Isadora Creswell, Debra's grandmother. Those bastards finally got her, didn't they! The officers who came to the house told me to call you, but it was the middle of the night where you are, and I decided to wait until a less ungodly hour. Besides, I needed to make some decisions as well as some travel arrangements.”

“I'm sorry for your loss,” Joanna began.

“Of course you are,” Isadora replied crisply, “but we don't need to waste time talking about that right now. It's Saturday morning. My vet's office doesn't open until nine. That's the earliest I'll be able to check Pixie in for boarding. Pixie is my cat, by the way.”

Joanna had already read about Mr. Rufus, Isadora's previous cat, going to kitty heaven. It stood to reason that her post-Rufus pet would also be of the feline variety.

“After that it's more than a two-hour drive to get to the airport in Pittsburgh,” Isadora continued. “Trying to catch the eleven forty-five flight was just cutting it too close what with all these new TSA security regulations. The first flight I can catch out is the one that goes through Dallas/Fort Worth. That one should get me into Tucson around seven thirty or so. I googled Bisbee. It's supposed to be about two hours from the airport. How far from there is your office?”

Joanna sat up straighter in bed as her assumption about Isadora being digitally illiterate went out the window.

“My office is in the Justice Center,” Joanna said. “It's a few miles east of Bisbee on Highway 80.”

“The airline schedule says I'll get in at seven thirty, but with the time zone changes, it'll be far later than that as far as my body is concerned. Since I'm not wild about driving on strange roads in the dark, I'll rent a car at the airport, get a hotel room in Tucson, and then drive to Bisbee first thing in the morning. I know it's Sunday, but will you be able to meet me at your office?”

“Of course,” Joanna said. “If you call this number when you come through the tunnel, we'll arrive at the Justice Center about the same time. If you'd prefer, however, I could have one of my detectives come to Tucson to pick you up.”

Joanna's offer may have sounded like a bit of common courtesy, but it was also sound law enforcement practice. Having Isadora in a vehicle for two hours with either Deb Howell or Jaime Carbajal would give them an opportunity for uninterrupted questions and answers. It turned out, Isadora wasn't having any of it.

“If you have detectives working on Sunday, I want them out looking for Debra's killers, not hauling me from place to place. I'm perfectly capable of driving myself wherever I need to go.”

Killers plural, Joanna thought, plucking that one critical word out of Isadora's answer.

“Ms. Creswell,” Joanna said, “it sounds as though you have some idea of who's behind this.”

“Call me Isadora, but you're right, I do know!” the woman declared forcefully. “I most certainly do, but let's not discuss any of this on the telephone. They might be listening.”

“They who?” Joanna pressed.

“Why, the CIA of course, who do you think?” Isadora demanded. “Although it could also be whoever's on the other side. They never made it clear exactly who that was. As I said earlier, I refuse to discuss this any further on the telephone.”

She made that one stick by simply disconnecting the call.

Joanna was crawling out of bed, aware that she'd had far too little sleep, when Butch appeared in the bedroom doorway with a very welcome mug of coffee.

“I heard your phone,” he said. “I figured with the amount of sleep you'd had, you could use some coffee.”

She took it gratefully. “Thank you.”

“Who was that on the phone?”

“Debra Highsmith's grandmother,” Joanna answered. “I managed to track her down late last night. She's flying in from Pennsylvania today. She'll come to the office to meet with us first thing tomorrow morning.” She paused and glanced at the clock.

“I have a task force meeting at eight,” she told Butch. “Since I'm the one who called the meeting, I'd better be there.”

“Breakfast to go then?” Butch asked. “I can do you a homemade McButch BELT.”

When it came to breakfasts to go, Butch's special concoction—bacon, egg, and tomato sandwiched between two slices of lettuce and two slices of whole wheat buttered toast—was Joanna's all-time favorite.

“Sounds good.” She brushed his cheek with a kiss on her way to the bathroom. “There are real advantages to marrying a short-order cook.”

Joanna stood for a time in the hot shower, letting the water pound some of the weariness out of her body and thinking about her conversation with Isadora Creswell.

The CIA?
she wondered.
Why would someone from the CIA target a harmless high school principal in Bisbee, Arizona?

That made no sense—none at all. Did that mean Isadora was a paranoid nutcase and completely delusional? Possibly, although during the rest of the conversation, given the kind of bad news she'd just gotten, the woman had seemed to have her wits about her and a good grasp on reality. Joanna had no intention of bringing any outside agencies—most especially the CIA—into her investigation until she had to, and that wouldn't happen until she had a better idea of Isadora's state of mind.

Meanwhile, there was something else about the conversation with Debra Highsmith's grandmother that Joanna found disturbing. Debra had left home, presumably in Pennsylvania or somewhere else back east, a good twenty-seven years earlier. Joanna's brief scan through the train case of letters had shown no indication of a visit—of Isadora coming to visit Debra in Albuquerque or Tucson or Bisbee or of Debra going home for a holiday visit, either. So why, now that her beloved granddaughter was dead, was Isadora suddenly ready to hop the first available plane and come to Bisbee? Why now? Why come to oversee funeral arrangements instead of coming to visit a living, breathing, and apparently well-loved granddaughter? Why honor the dead more than the living?

That makes no sense, either,
Joanna told herself as she stepped out of the shower and began to towel herself dry.

By the time Joanna was dressed and ready to leave, the rest of the family was gathered in the kitchen. Jenny was at the table, poring over her driver's training manual. Denny was on the floor, attempting to teach Lucky to hold a Cheerio on his nose. It wasn't working. Butch was loading the dishwasher.

“Here you go,” Butch said, handing her a lunch bag with the still-warm breakfast sandwich sitting at the bottom.

“What's on the agenda for you guys?” Joanna asked.

“Dad is taking me out for a driving lesson this morning.”

“Yes,” Butch agreed, beaming just a little. “If I had hair, I could count on it turning white by the end of the day. I'm sure my knuckles will be, too.”

His natural hairline was sparse enough that he had worn his head shaved for as long as Joanna had known him, but she was eternally grateful that he was the one giving Jenny her manual-transmission driving lesson.

“Carol's going to come over and look after Dennis while Jenny and I go out for our ride. What about you?”

Joanna glanced at her watch. “Murder and mayhem starting in about ten minutes. I'd better go.”

“Yes,” Butch said, “but remember. I don't care how many people croak out in Cochise County today. When it's six thirty
P.M
. and time for us to make our appearance at the Plein Air gala, I expect you to be at the Rob Roy Links, properly dressed and in my Outback rather than arriving in uniform in your Yukon. Got it? This is a social occasion, and we're going to treat it as such.”

Joanna looked at him and laughed. “You're just worried about what my mother will do if I turn up late.”

“Or don't turn up at all,” Butch said, “which you and I both know has happened before. I don't want tonight to be one of those times when I'm left holding the bag while Eleanor Lathrop Winfield goes on the warpath.”

Joanna held up the lunch bag. “I won't stand you up,” she said. “Why would I? Aren't you the same guy who just made me this sandwich?”

“That's me,” Butch said with a grin. “Now get going, or you'll be late.”

THAT SATURDAY MORNING, JOANNA LEFT THE REGULAR MORNING
shift-change briefing to Tom Hadlock while she huddled in her office with the investigators and CSIs working the Debra Highsmith homicide. Dave Hollicker and Casey Ledford had finished up their crime scene investigation of the victim's San Jose Estates home about the same time Joanna had gone back to bed. They were at the meeting on time, but they were also swilling coffee and looking every bit as bedraggled as their boss.

Usually in those kinds of briefings, Joanna functioned more as an observer and moderator than as an active participant. This time, however, she was the one with news to impart, including the identity of the homicide victim's grandmother as well as the unanticipated existence of Debra Highsmith's biological son.

The meeting started with the assembled officers settling in to watch the Sue Ellen Hirales interview. When that ended, Joanna went on to tell them about tracking down Isadora Creswell and asking to have officers from the Altoona Police Department do the actual next-of-kin notification.

Jaime raised his hand. “Does the M.E. know about the next of kin? Machett is real touchy about who knows what when.”

“I'll call him when the meeting is over,” Joanna said. “He fancies himself a Monday-to-Friday kind of guy. He won't be happy being called at what he probably thinks of as the crack of dawn on Saturday.”

She then recounted a brief summary of her early-morning conversation with Isadora Creswell.

“She really said that?” Deb Howell asked when Joanna ended her presentation. “That she thought the CIA was responsible for Debra's death?”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “She also said that she thought whoever killed Debra might have people eavesdropping on her phone calls. My assumption would be that's why she's coming to Bisbee to talk to us in person. She's afraid her phones are bugged.”

“Sounds like paranoia on the hoof,” Jaime Carbajal observed, and everyone else nodded in agreement. “What about the situation with the son? Is it possible that the father finally got wind that he was a father and came here demanding some kind of parental rights?”

“It's a little late for that,” Joanna said. “According to Sue Ellen Hirales, the kid is twenty-six years old now and a first-year law student at the University of New Mexico. That makes him an adult. If the biological father wanted to have a relationship with his son, he could do so without having to ask for permission, and certainly without knocking someone off.”

“Still, it sounds like there was bad blood there,” Deb said. “Why else would Sue Ellen have dragged the guy out of the bar and beaten the crap out of him? Logical or not, we need to check this out and see if we can identify the guy. Even date rapes get reported.”

“Good luck with that,” Joanna replied. “Date rapes still don't get the kind of reporting they deserve, and all this happened more than two decades ago. Times have changed, but I'm guessing that back then a senior at Good Shepherd Academy wouldn't have been caught dead telling the cops she had been having sex, especially consensual sex. Dealing with the cops would have been one thing. Dealing with the nuns would have been a nightmare.”

As they talked, the train case—brought over from the evidence room for the meeting—had been making the rounds, with the investigators plucking out one or another of Isadora's notes and briefly scanning through them.

“Hey,” Jaime said. “I've got an idea. If the grandmother thinks the CIA was after Debra, maybe this is all written in code. When she's writing about the garden club or the Friends of the Library, maybe she's talking about something else.”

Deb looked at him and shook her head disparagingly. “You thought Isadora Creswell was paranoia on the hoof  ? What about you?”

“Leave the letters with me,” Joanna said. “There's no sense in taking the time to read through them since we'll be able to talk to Isadora in person tomorrow. In the meantime, what's happening with Debra Highsmith's dog?”