Judgment Call (32 page)

Yes,
Joanna thought,
and he's also your great-grandson.

Joanna knew that Sue Ellen Hirales and her little “brother” would be here soon, coming to start planning Debra Highsmith's funeral. Was it her job to tell Isadora Creswell the truth or was it someone else's?

“I believe he is bright,” Joanna said softly, “but there's something else you need to know about Michael Hirales, Ms. Creswell, something Debra may have neglected to tell you.”

“What's that?”

“Your granddaughter got pregnant when she was a senior in high school,” Joanna said. “She had the baby out of wedlock, and Nancy and Augusto Hirales adopted him. Michael Hirales is really Debra's child, your great-grandson.”

For a moment after the words landed in the room, nothing at all happened—like the pause between a flash of lightning and the distant rumble of thunder. Then, Isadora Creswell seemed to slip from her chair, falling onto her knees on the carpeted floor in front of Joanna's desk.

“Praise be!” she exclaimed. “Praise be!”

After that her tears began to flow in dead earnest.

DEB CHOSE THAT MOMENT TO MAKE A GRACEFUL EXIT TO CHECK ON
Maggie Oliphant's phone records. Eventually Isadora regained her composure. “I always blamed myself that Debra never had a chance to have a family,” she said regretfully. “I was just so concerned about getting her out of one messy situation that I didn't realize I was inadvertently putting her into another, one that was equally difficult.”

“She did have a family,” Joanna pointed out. “She had you, and she must have treasured that relationship since she evidently saved every letter you wrote her through the years. She also had a stepmother and a half brother. Whatever happened to them?”

Isadora dried her tears and shrugged her shoulders. “As I said, after years of getting my cards, letters, and packages back marked ‘Return to Sender,' I decided I was done. The notation on the outside of the envelopes and packages was always written in Isabelle's handwriting. My former daughter-in-law was not a pleasant person. It seemed likely to me that she would have poisoned Jimmy against me as well. It was less painful for me to simply stop thinking about them than it was trying to stay in touch and being rejected over and over.

“I certainly hope you don't expect me to notify Isabelle now that Debra is gone,” Isadora added. “As far as she's concerned, Alyse is someone she didn't care that much about to begin with. Besides, Alyse went away decades ago, and Debra Highsmith is someone Isabelle Cameron—she took back her maiden name after Gunnar's death—never knew.”

“What about the other side of the family, Alice's side?” Joanna asked.

“I stayed in touch with Alice's parents for some time. Not much more than annual Christmas cards, but they're both gone now. I'm sure it seems selfish on my part, but it was easier to live the lie when I didn't have to keep lying to people's faces. Does that make sense?”

Joanna nodded.

“So am I given to understand that Sue Ellen Hirales has now told Michael the truth about Debra? Does he know about me, too?”

“I believe she told him most of it last night—at least as much as she knew—and that you exist. She learned that from reading your letters, but I doubt she has any idea about the rest of what you've told us this morning concerning Debra's background. I expect Sue Ellen and Michael will turn up later this afternoon. I'm sorry to say that most likely the first thing you'll be doing with your great-grandson is planning his birth mother's funeral.”

“I don't blame Debra for not telling me about him, or him about me,” Isadora said. “I hope he understands that, too.”

“Why didn't she?” Joanna asked.

“I'm sure she was afraid that the people who were after her might use him to get to her.”

Joanna had to refrain from rolling her eyes. Maybe it was time to go ask Jaime Carbajal for some of those tinfoil hats after all.

“Look,” she said reasonably. “So far our investigation has turned up nothing at all to indicate this is a situation with any kind of national intelligence overtones. It's far more likely that Debra's death has something to do with a disgruntled student from the high school, but let me ask you this. Does the name Maggie Oliphant ring a bell?” she asked.

Isadora shook her head. “No. I don't think so. Why?”

“My department is investigating another murder,” Joanna explained, “one that occurred two days after Debra's death. Maggie Oliphant is the second victim. I was wondering if there might be a connection—if Debra might have mentioned their having any dealings with each other.”

“Not that I know of. How did this Maggie die?”

“She was strangled.”

“Debra was shot. So it's probably two different people, right? That's how it is on TV at least. People who kill multiple times generally use the same MO. Still,” Isadora added with a frown, “with a distinctive name like Maggie Oliphant? I'm quite certain that if Debra had ever mentioned her to me, I would have remembered it, and I don't.”

Isadora stood up abruptly and then paused for a moment, straightening her skirt and jacket. “I suppose I look a fright,” she said. “Some people can manage to look decent when they cry. I'm not one of them.”

It was true. Her carefully applied makeup had literally come to grief. As a result, Isadora's advanced age was definitely showing.

“I managed to get a room at the Copper Queen for tonight,” Isadora said. “That's what the people at the hotel in Tucson recommended. I called on my way through town, and they said I can have an early check-in in an hour or so. In the meantime, I'd like to see Debra's house and her school.”

“You can't go inside either one. They're both still considered active crime scenes.”

“Of course. I just want to drive by. If you'll give me the addresses, the limo driver will be able to locate them on his GPS. After that, I'll have him drop me off at the hotel. My room should be ready by then. I think I'll go there and have a rest and put my face back on. You said that Sue Ellen and Michael are coming over from New Mexico later today?”

Joanna nodded. “This afternoon.”

“Tell them that's where I'll be, then, at the hotel,” Isadora said. “Let them know that I'm looking forward to meeting them both.”

“Would you like me to show you out?” Joanna asked.

“Not necessary,” Isadora said. “I'm perfectly capable of finding my own way.”

As Isadora made her determined way out of the office, Joanna was again struck by the differences between her and Elizabeth Stevens. In the face of a terrible tragedy, Isadora was staunchly self-contained while all Elizabeth could do under far less difficult circumstances was whine and berate her daughter for no good reason. It seemed to Joanna that Abby Holder would have been a far better daughter to Isadora and Lloyd Creswell than Gunnar had been a son.

Thinking about mothers and sons and daughters made Joanna think again of her own mother and of the telephone call from Maggie that had been under way when Joanna arrived at her mother's house the previous day. Joanna had heard her mother's part of the conversation. Now she needed to know the rest of it. A glance at her watch told her that it was late enough in the morning that her mother and George were probably already home from church. When she dialed their house, however, George was the one who answered.

“Ellie and I came home in separate vehicles,” he said. “With Maggie gone, your mother is the one in charge, and she's determined to keep things at the Plein Air tea from falling apart. The last I saw of her, she was on her way to the school to supervise setting up the art display for this afternoon's closing reception and to make sure the judges are on the job. You can't have a juried show without judges.”

Joanna considered calling her mother to say she was coming. Instead, she decided to simply show up. She was on her way there when her phone rang.

“Great news, boss,” Dave Hollicker said with unrestrained glee. “You'll never guess what we found in Maggie Oliphant's car.”

“I give up.”

“Her cell phone. It was shoved down between the driver's seat and the center console, completely out of sight. There was no other obvious trace evidence. Now that she's done with the prints, Casey is going to continue searching the car. In the meantime, I'm dropping the phone off with Deb, and then I'm on my way to Tucson.”

Larger departments might be able to have CSI personnel who did only one aspect of the job. In Joanna's, both Dave and Casey had to wear multiple hats.

“All right,” Joanna said. “I'm going up to the Plein Air reception to check out a couple of loose ends. Tell Deb I'll be in touch later.”

In exchange for providing art education for local school children, the Bisbee Art League operated out of space rented from the school district at a price well under market value. Their main offices were in the old Horace Mann School, a former junior high school situated in the upper reaches of Old Bisbee. Joanna parked in a lot that still had faded signs reserving the spaces for
TEACHERS ONLY
.

The open house was due to start at two
P.M
. Since it was barely noon, Joanna wasn't surprised that the doors were still locked, but a wave of her badge was enough for the silver-haired gatekeeper to allow her to enter.

Upon pushing open the door, Joanna's nostrils were assailed by the familiar smell. Years after the last middle school child had left the building, the apparently indelible odor of overheated lunch-box bananas and apples still lingered. The wooden floor of the hallway was polished to a high gloss, and the long passage with its antique overhead fluorescent fixtures had been converted to a make-do art gallery of sorts, with paintings mounted on easels strung from one end of the hall to the other.

Eleanor Lathrop Winfield stood in the middle of a beehive of activity. Still dressed in her Sunday go-to-meeting finery, she barked a steady stream of orders to minions who jumped to do her bidding.

Leaving her mother alone for the moment, Joanna made her way down the middle of the hallway, pausing here and there to view the paintings on either side of the long, narrow room. Clearly the fluorescent fixtures didn't show the paintings in the best possible light. Even so, a few of the pictures exhibited genuine talent.

Because Joanna knew Bisbee's cityscape intimately, as only a native-born resident would, she knew the sights and could see where things worked and where they didn't. One artist had attempted but not quite captured the untidy clutter of Brewery Gulch and OK Street buildings, huddled in stark contrast to the steep sides of the red shale hill with Bisbee's school letter, B, standing delineated in white limestone.

An attempt to paint the front facade of the Copper Queen Hotel didn't quite work because the perspective was out of whack, making the hotel appear larger than the buildings in front of it. Several paintings focused on the town's sole statue, the figure of a copper-covered, bare-chested miner known as the Iron Man. All of those were crookedly out of kilter. A painting of Lavender Pit did a better job of capturing the actual subject matter, but the immense and decaying hole with its collapsing walls and levels was hardly a thing of beauty, and Joanna found herself wondering why anyone would bother.

The painting of San Jose Peak rising in purple mountain's majesty out of the dusty plain of Sonora, Mexico, was nothing short of stunning. That one, painted from what was evidently the top of Vista Park, was easily the best of the bunch. A close second was a painting of the cliff-covered limestone hillock generations of Bisbee kids had called Geronimo. With a distinctive double hump at the top of the peak, Geronimo looked like a gray Valentine gone bad, looming over the reddish brown flattened expanse of the tailings dump.

Of all the paintings, that was the one Joanna liked the most, perhaps because climbing Geronimo had been a triumph of her youth when she and Marianne Maculyea had conquered it together during a daring junior high school mountain-climbing expedition.

The painting at the end of the hall, the last one Joanna viewed, was also an odd man out. All the others, although often imperfectly executed, were nonetheless clearly representational. This one was not. Here three wide stripes of paint covered the whole canvas. It was reddish brown on the bottom, gray in the middle, and blue on top. There was no definition; no shading, no telling details. A slightly darker smudge in the reddish part might have been a shadow or it could have been the vague outline of a house. It was impossible to tell.

As far as Joanna was concerned, there was nothing in the picture that made it work, nothing that made it speak to her. The title printed on the card said:
LIMESTONE CLIFFS SOUTH OF BISBEE
. The name scratched in yellow in the lower-right-hand corner was “Richard Reed.”

Joanna was still studying the painting when her mother walked up behind her. “Don't say it,” she said. “I already know. If this is art, then so is second-grade finger painting. I'm almost embarrassed to put it up, but I have to since he came and paid good money to be here.”