Fire and Ice (8 page)

As for Debra Highsmith, the high school principal? Joanna had done a few rounds with the woman herself. Two years earlier, one of the high school counselors had suggested that Joanna, as sheriff of Cochise County, be invited to speak to the students at a career day assembly. Joanna had been pleased to accept until she’d been told that due to the school’s zero-tolerance weapons policy, she would have to check her weapons at the door. She had complied that one time, but since then, in the aftermath of a rash of school shooting fatalities around the country, that rule had been quietly rescinded. Zero tolerance of weapons no longer applied to those carried by trained police officers. The last time Joanna had addressed a school audience, she had done so in her uniform, and no mention had been made of the fact that she’d been armed with both a Taser and a firearm.

“Is Luis all right?” Joanna asked.

“He’s not all right,” Jaime said. “He’s a long way from all right. Marcella has wrecked everything she ever touched. Why should her son be any different?”

“Anything I can do to help?”

Jaime shook his head. “Ernie and I will execute this warrant,” he said. “At least it’ll give me something to think about besides going home and trying to knock some sense into Luis’s head.”

“Don’t do that,” Joanna said. “He’s been through a lot. He’ll come around eventually.”

“I hope so,” Jaime said, but he didn’t sound convinced.

Joanna was tempted to hang around while they searched for
clues in Lester Attwood’s Airstream. That sounded far more interesting than going back to her office and facing down a snarl of administrative nitty-gritty. Unfortunately, without Frank Montoya there to handle some of those issues, she had to focus more and more of her energy on day-to-day departmental issues. She knew that if she ever fell behind, she’d never catch up.

“Okay,” she said. “Good luck. I’ll head back to the office and leave you and Ernie to it.”

LUCY CALDWELL LEFT ME SITTING IN A GRIM LITTLE CUBICLE WITH
the murder book while she went to get the evidence box. I scanned through what was there. The skull and bones had been found on Friday afternoon by a road worker of some kind, a guy named Ken Leggett. I made a note of his name, address, and phone number.

Lucy returned, dragging another cop with her. “This is Gary Fields,” she said. “He’s my partner.” Gary dropped an evidence box on the desk, gave me a look, and rolled his eyes.

“Anything else?” he wanted to know. “I need a smoke.”

“Knock yourself out,” Lucy told him.

When you’re a cop, partners are important. Knowing what to expect from the officer next to you sometimes means the difference between life or death. Clearly the partnership between De
tectives Caldwell and Fields wasn’t a match made in heaven. And the fact that Gary preferred going out for a cigarette to discussing a current investigation didn’t speak well for him. This was a homicide—his homicide—and he should have exhibited a little more interest. At least I thought he should have.

“What’s his problem?” I asked.

Lucy shrugged. “He thinks a woman’s place is in the home and not in homicide.”

Truth be known, not too long ago that used to be my attitude as well. Once upon a time, the fifth floor at Seattle PD was an all-boys club, one with no girls allowed right up until Sue Danielson arrived on the scene. Since then, I had changed my mind about all that, and I thought the rest of the world had changed right along with me. But maybe not some of the “good old boys” in Kittitas County. And if Detective Caldwell was being treated as a pariah by her homicide detective colleagues, that could go a long way in explaining her pissed-off attitude toward me.

“Remind me to introduce Detective Fields to my wife,” I said. “She’ll clean his clock.”

Lucy Caldwell responded to that with a thin smile. Then she opened the box and pulled out a video—good old-fashioned VHS. The local M.E. might have gone high tech and high def, but the sheriff’s department was still stuck in the twentieth century.

“Here’s the interview we did with Leggett, the guy who found the body. Want to see it?”

I knew that watching the actual interview would take hours—as many hours as the interview itself. No instant replays. No commercial interruptions, and no TiVoed highlights. Besides, since it looked as though I was going to be working with Detective Caldwell, it seemed to me that a show of mutual respect might help us along.

“What about him?” I asked. “Do you think he might have had something to do with it?”

“I came to Homicide from Sexual Assault,” Lucy said. “I’ve interviewed a few scumbags in my time. Leggett is divorced. He drinks too much; he’s had several DUIs and several run-ins with the King County cops over in North Bend where he lives. He’s the guy who found the body, but in my estimation, he didn’t do this. When we interviewed him, he was beyond upset. He saw what he thought was a rock and took a leak on it. But being upset doesn’t make him a killer. I would have been upset, too.”

I read between the lines. “But somebody around here does think he’s the doer,” I ventured. “Who would that be?”

“Gary,” Lucy answered. “My partner.”

“Based on what evidence?” I asked.

“On what he likes to call gut instinct,” Lucy answered.

“His gut instinct but not yours, I take it?”

“Mine doesn’t count.”

Generally speaking, getting caught in the cross fire between feuding partners is a very bad idea. It’s true in domestic-violence situations, and it’s also true when the dueling partners happen to be cops. So I backed off. I made a mental note to stop off and visit with Mr. Leggett on my own. That way I’d be able to form my own opinions about his possible involvement and about his guilt or innocence.

While we talked, Lucy had removed the cardboard lid to the box. As soon as she did so, the room filled with the odor of dead smoke, and not just plain smoke, either. There was something else under the smoke, an ugly aftertaste that lingered on the back of my tongue. I recognized it but didn’t want to acknowledge what it was.

For a few minutes, Lucy busied herself with logging in the
item we’d brought back from the M.E.’s office—the broken watch—into the evidence log. The shattered watch was a Timex—relatively cheap but reliable. It wasn’t still ticking as the ads say, but the fact that the date was still visible gave us an invaluable piece of information.

“What else do you have in there?” I asked.

“Exhibit number one,” she said, handing me a small glassine bag. Inside it was what looked like a misshapen hunk of gold with a small emerald-cut stone.

“An engagement ring?” I asked.

Lucy nodded.

“Including a real diamond?” I asked.

Lucy nodded again. “My guess is that the heat of the fire was enough to melt the gold. But the diamond is real enough—three quarters of a carat, and it looks like good quality to me.

“So robbery definitely wasn’t part of the motivation here.”

Nodding again, Lucy reached into the box and pulled out a large paper bag. “This is exhibit number two,” she said. “A buckskin jacket, complete with fringe.”

Instead of handing it to me, she set that one down and pulled out another bag. “Cowboy boot,” she said. “Tony Lama. Snakeskin. Size seven. This is a man’s size seven, by the way, so I’m guessing the victim probably wore a woman’s size eight. That’s what I wear. If news about the boot and the jacket ever gets out, I imagine they’ll stop calling our victim the Lake Kachess Jane Doe and start calling her the Annie Oakley Jane Doe.”

Once again, Lucy set down the bag without letting me touch it. Then she opened the third bag for me. Inside I saw what looked like the remains of a belt.

“Our CSI guy says that the burn patterns on the belt are consistent with its being used as a restraint.”

“In other words, it wasn’t around her waist at the time of the fire.”

Lucy nodded and produced yet another bag. That one contained a collection of charred remains that were evidently the remnants of the tarp, and some frayed pieces of rope.

“We went out to the crime scene on Saturday morning,” Lucy explained. “We took along a generator and a commercial carpet dryer so we could melt the snow. The M.E.’s assistant gathered up the bones. We took everything else. The problem is, what do we do with it now?”

“What’s all this doing here?” I asked. “ Why isn’t it at the crime lab?”

“What crime lab?” Lucy returned. “We don’t have a crime lab.”

“But you have a state-of-the-art M.E….” I began.

“That’s because someone gave us a grant,” Lucy said. “Paid for the physical plant on condition that we staff it with an M.E. and an assistant. So now there’s a big budget shortfall for everything else. I’ve been trying all week to get Gary off the dime, asking him to send this batch of evidence out to the state patrol crime lab for examination. He’s been dragging his feet, though. Doesn’t want to have his name on the request that will put our department that much more in the red.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding me. He’s stalling on examining the evidence in a homicide investigation because he doesn’t want to sign off on a crime lab invoice? That’s ridiculous. There could be important evidence here.”

Lucy Caldwell nodded. “Yes,” she agreed. “There could be.”

Which meant that the bottom line here was…well, the bottom line. I understood that what looked like general ineptitude and stupidity was really a symptom of something else—that old bugaboo, interdepartmental fiscal warfare. I would guess that al
most every big-city cop has a hopeless daydream of someday ending up working in a sleepy little hamlet somewhere—a magical place where everything is all sweetness and light and where dirty interdepartmental infighting or personality-based political agendas would be forever banished. Right. Sure they will. That’ll happen about the time pigs fly.

“So what are you saying?” I asked.

Lucy Caldwell gave me a scathing look as if I just wasn’t getting it. “You work for the AG’s office, right?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Doesn’t that mean you could get this stuff into the Washington State Patrol crime lab for analysis?”

“I’m reasonably sure I could do just that.”

Just then Gary sauntered back into the room, bringing with him a cloud of leftover cigarette smoke. Lucy’s reaction to his return was not only immediate, it was downright riveting.

“You have a hell of a lot of nerve, Beaumont!” she barked at me, slamming the palm of her hand hard on the surface of the desk. “So does your boss. What makes him think he can send his lackey over here to demand we turn over our evidence to him? That sucks, and you can tell your boss I said so.”

Her performance amounted to a remarkable imitation of Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde. And since I’d made no such demands regarding their evidence, I was pretty much left staring at her in openmouthed amazement. I wasn’t sure why Detective Caldwell had suddenly decided to make me the bad guy here. For the sake of argument, however, I decided to play along, dropping names as I went.

“As I told you earlier, Attorney General Ross Connors is very interested in your case and its possible connection to several other cases we’ve been investigating. And I have an idea, when it comes
to storing, examining, and identifying trace evidence on this kind of material…” I waved vaguely at the collection of sacks. “In instances like this, we have far more assets at our disposal than you have here.”

This was pure BS, of course. Lucy had already told me that they had no assets—as in zero, but Gary was enjoying hell out of the performance. He looked from Lucy to me and then back to Lucy with a slow grin spreading across his face.

“What’s all this about?” he wanted to know. “And what’s all this about Ross Connors?”

“Mr. Beaumont here is a hotshot who works for the Attorney General’s Office,” Lucy said. She spoke calmly enough, but she looked like she was still ready to tear people apart. “He came here today expecting to lord it over us and make a grab for our Lake Kachess Jane Doe evidence. I told him no way. This is our case, Gary. We’re primary. They’ve got no right to interfere.”

Gary’s grin widened. He was so thrilled to have a chance to rub his underling’s nose in it that he didn’t realize he was being suckered by the tired old good cop /bad cop ruse.

“Now, listen here, Lucy,” Gary interrupted. “If the attorney general says jump, we’d by God better jump.”

His tone was so patronizing I was surprised Lucy didn’t haul off and slap him upside the head. I would have, but she didn’t. She let him get away with it.

“But, Gary…” she began earnestly.

Detective Fields dismissed her objection with a wave of his hand. “Let’s just be sure that when we check things out to him, we do it the right way. We’ll sign off on all the paperwork, preserve the chain of evidence, and all that. As long as we cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s, it won’t come back and bite us in the butt. So go get me the damned forms.”

After giving Gary one final look that should have turned him into a pillar of salt, Lucy marched out of the cubicle.

“Just ignore her,” Gary advised me with a grin. “She’s a little more emotional than usual. It’s probably that time of month.”

In the world of Seattle PD, where political correctness is the name of the game, a sexist comment like that would probably have been enough for Detective Fields to find himself brought up on charges of creating a hostile work environment. The social culture here was evidently a little different.

Lucy returned, bringing with her a set of forms that would release the evidence to my care and keeping. She slapped it down on the table.

“You fill it out then,” she told Gary. “I’m not going to.”

She left again. Gary turned his hand to the paperwork with an amazingly cheerful attitude. “There you go,” he said at last, signing off on the bottom of the last form with a considerable flourish. “It’s all yours,” he said. “Let us know what you find out, as I’m sure you will.”

“Yes, I will,” I agreed. “Absolutely.”

Of course, Fields hadn’t mentioned the budget problem to me or that his department was operating in a world of hurt. How could he? I’m a fellow officer and a guy. And of course he signed off on the request. It was his way of throwing his weight around and showing me that he was the big bad boss and poor little Detective Caldwell had to do things his way. Right. Of course she did.

I took charge of both the paperwork and the evidence box. As I emerged from the cubicle, Lucy Caldwell was waiting just outside. She stood with her arms crossed, her eyes shooting daggers at me and at her partner as well. She didn’t crack a smile, and neither did I, but we both knew she’d won.

Detective Fields had been screwed—without a kiss—and he didn’t even know it; didn’t have a clue.

Which, if you ask me, was exactly what he deserved.

Leaving the crime scene, Joanna headed back to the department. Her mind was still grappling with the apparent murder of Lester Attwood when her phone rang.

“Hey, Joey,” Butch said. “How’s it going?”

This is the kind of question spouses ask each other all the time. It’s usually on a par with “How’s the weather?” and doesn’t generally require a complicated answer. Unless what you’re doing right then is driving away from the scene of a homicide.

When Joanna was first elected sheriff, she was still a relatively new widow, a single mother of a single child. She had not anticipated remarrying, but that was before Butch Dixon appeared in her life and refused to take no for an answer. Now, sometime later, she was still sheriff. She was also the married mother of a usually cooperative teenager, fourteen-year-old Jenny, who would turn fifteen in a little over a week, and an almost never cooperative son, Dennis, who was just a little beyond his first birthday and more than slightly opinionated for his age, something his dot-ing grandmother chalked up to his bright red hair.

“Fine,” Joanna said, editing out any number of things she might have said. “How’s it going for you?”

“I’m still home.”

Joanna knew that Butch had been planning a quick trip to Tucson that day to pick up steaks for the Texas Hold’Em bachelor party they would be hosting for Frank Montoya on Thursday night.