Partner In Crime (33 page)

By then, Kimball was practically beside himself. “Mr. Jenkins, please. No more. Sheriff Brady, you haven’t informed my client of his rights. I must ask that you refrain from asking any more questions, the answers to which may be prejudicial. . . .”

Ignoring the lawyer, Joanna sat down on the porch step next to Bobo Jenkins. “Tell me about today,” she said quietly.

“Today?” He gave her an anguished look, as though not quite comprehending the question.

“Tell me everything that happened,” she urged. “Everything that led up to your finding the box.”

He sighed and shook his head. “Last night I couldn’t sleep.” He said. “I kept tossing and turning and thinking about . . .” He paused and swallowed hard before continuing. “. . . about what had happened. I couldn’t believe I’d lost Shelley just like that. I still can’t believe it. Sometimes it seems like it’s got to be some awful nightmare. Eventually, I’ll wake up and she won’t be gone.

“Anyway, after lying in bed for hours, I finally got up about three o’clock this morning. I dressed and went for a run. I ran all the way down to Warren and back. By the time I finished, the sun was just coming up. I showered and went to bed. I finally fell asleep after that and didn’t wake up until a little while ago. I went out to the kitchen to put on some coffee. While I waited for the coffee to finish, I decided to start a load of clothes. That’s when I found that box—a duct-taped box I’d never seen before—sitting there on top of the dryer. The flexible vent duct is connected to it.”

“Did you touch it?”

Jenkins shook his head. “Give me some credit. I’m smarter than that. The box has a window in the top that’s covered with plastic wrap. As soon as I saw the white powder in it, I called Mr. Kimball.”

“Why?”

“Are you kidding? When Jaime Carbajal and Frank Montoya interviewed me yesterday morning, they didn’t give out any details, but I could tell from their questions that I was under suspicion—that they thought I was somehow responsible for Shelley’s death. Now I know why. You must have found my fingerprints on the sweetener packets, since I’m the one who poured them into her glass.”

Ignoring that, Joanna responded with yet another question. “When you saw the box, what did you think was in it?” she asked.

Jenkins shrugged. “I assumed it was cocaine. I figured someone was trying to frame me for dealing drugs or something worse.”

“But why would you think someone from my department placed it there?” Joanna asked.

He shook his head as though no explanation should have been necessary. “You’re not a black man considering running for public office in this country,” he said softly. “You’re not being paranoid if people really are out to get you.”

I had been listening to all of this and trying to keep my mouth shut. Now, though, I couldn’t resist putting in my two cents’ worth. “Look. If someone planted the box in Mr. Jenkins’s house, how was it done? Any sign of a break-in? It takes time to rip off a dryer duct and reconnect it.”

“I don’t lock my doors,” Bobo said. “I never have.”

Burton Kimball looked distinctly unhappy about the way the conversation was going, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Nobody paid any attention to him, least of all his client.

“You said you were making coffee,” Joanna mused thoughtfully. “What do you use in it?” she added.

It seemed like an off-the-wall question. At first I couldn’t see where she was going. Bobo Jenkins seemed puzzled as well. “What do you think? Coffee and water,” he said. “What else is there?”

“I mean, how do you take it?” Joanna asked. “Black, or with cream and sugar?”

“Sugar but no cream,” he said. “I’m lactose-intolerant.”

“Where do you keep your sugar?”

“In the fridge,” he said. “If I leave it out on the counter or table, I sometimes have problems with ants. Why?”

Then I understood. The white powder in the duct-taped box. It would have taken time, effort, and ingenuity to put sodium azide in sweetener packets. By comparison, putting a few spoonfuls of it into a sugar bowl would be simple—and just as deadly.

At that moment a deputy I didn’t know—an officer named Matt Raymond—hustled up the steps and into the yard. “What’s happening?” Joanna asked.

“Detective Carbajal says it’s confirmed. The abandoned car definitely belongs to Dee Canfield. It’s on a road that winds through the hills and ends up about half a mile east of here, on the far side of B-Hill.”

I had noticed a big whitewashed “B” on one of the hills as I drove into town for the first time. Now I realized that Bobo Jenkins’s home was on one of the flanks of that selfsame hill. Half a mile away wasn’t very far.

“Which way was the Pinto going when they found it?” Joanna asked. “In or out?”

“Out,” the deputy returned. “Detective Carbajal says it looks like the driver was attempting to turn the vehicle around so he could head back to the highway when he got hung up on a boulder. Broke the axle right in two.”

“Thank God for small favors,” Joanna said. “We’d better get the K-9 unit out there on the double.”

“Already done,” Officer Raymond said. “Deputy Gregovich and Spike are on their way.

Nodding, Joanna turned back to the attorney. “Look, Burton,” she said, “we’ve called in the Haz-Mat team. The fewer people we have hanging around when they get here, the better. How about if you take Mr. Jenkins and go someplace else for a while? Let me know where you are. Someone from the department will notify you when it’s safe for him to return home.”

“I’ll be only too happy to,” Kimball said, still sounding slightly miffed. “Come on, Bobo. Let’s get out of here. We wouldn’t want to be in anyone’s way.”

J
OANNA
B
RADY WASN’T GOOD AT WAITING
; she never had been. As the minutes ticked by, she paced back and forth in Bobo’s small terraced yard. If her suspicions proved correct, her jurisdiction had been plagued by two murders and an attempted homicide in less than a week. Right that minute, the only thing working in her favor was the fact that the supposed getaway car—Dee Canfield’s aging Pinto—had finally come to grief. Had it not been for that, Warren Gibson would have been long gone. Then again, with as much of a head start as he’d had, maybe he’d made good his escape after all.

It didn’t help that J.P. Beaumont sat on the porch staring at her and watching her every move as she anxiously paced the confines of the yard. The last thing she needed right then was an audience.

“Sit down,” he suggested. “Take a load off.”

But Joanna didn’t want to sit. She didn’t want to be patronized, either. “I’d rather stand,” she said.

Across the yard, Matt Raymond’s radio crackled to life.

“What is it?” she demanded.

The deputy listened for a moment, holding one finger in the air. “It’s Detective Carbajal. He says the K-9 Unit has found two separate trails. One seems to head in this general direction. The other one heads back along the road and out to the highway.”

“Have them follow that one,” Joanna said at once. “Let’s try to see where the SOB went.”

When she glanced back at Beau once more, she noticed he had taken his packet of Xeroxed reports out of his coat pocket. He unfolded the pages, put on a pair of horn-rimmed reading glasses, and began studying the pages, occasionally making notes.

At least he finally quit staring at me,
Joanna thought as she checked her watch for the third time in as many minutes. At this rate, the hour-and-a-half wait for the arrival of the Haz-Mat team was going to take a very long time.

Several long minutes passed without a word being exchanged. Beaumont finally broke the lingering silence. “Could you do me a favor?” he asked.

“What’s that?”

“It says here that Jack Brampton was incarcerated in the Gardendale Correctional Institute outside Elgin, Illinois.”

“Right.”

“I need to find out if that’s a state- or privately run facility.”

“Frank Montoya’s your guy,” Joanna said. She removed her cell phone from her pocket, punched up Frank’s direct number, and handed it over to Beau. He looked down at it in baffled silence, as though he had never seen a cell phone before in his life.

“The number’s already programmed in,” she told him impatiently. “All you have to do is hit ‘Send.’ “

Beaumont shot her another dubious look and then did as he was told. A moment later he was explaining to Chief Deputy Montoya what was needed.

Joanna glanced at her watch once more. Time was passing, but not nearly fast enough. She listened to Beau’s part of the conversation with only half an ear. The call had barely ended when another one came through. She took the phone from Beau’s hand and answered the call herself.

“What is it, Jaime?” she asked.

“Sorry, boss,” he said. “It’s a dead end. Spike led us right back here—to the highway. That’s where the trail stops. Brampton got into a vehicle and rode away.”

“Have Terry and Spike go back to the Pinto and try following the trail in the other direction,” she ordered. “I want to know where that one goes as well. In the meantime, send Casey out to Dee Canfield’s house. I’ll need Dave up here so he can handle the chain of custody on whatever evidence the Haz-Mat guys turn up.”

She ended the call. Beaumont had obviously been listening. “If the killer got in a car and rode away,” he said, “that probably means one of two things.”

“What would those be?” Joanna asked.

“Either Jack Brampton has an accomplice who came and picked him up, or else he hitched a ride with some poor innocent passerby who’s going to wind up being our next victim.”

“Great,” Joanna muttered. “Just what I want to hear.”

About that time the first member of the moon-suited Haz-Mat team came huffing up the stairs. “I’m Ron Workman, the team captain,” the leader announced to everyone in the small yard. “Who’s in charge here?”

Since Deputy Raymond’s was the only visible uniform, the question was addressed to him. The deputy nodded in Joanna’s direction and she stepped forward.

“I am, Mr. Workman. I’m Sheriff Joanna Brady.”

The man gave Joanna a skeptical top-to-toe appraisal, from her grubby tennis shoes to the skirt, blouse, and blazer she had dressed in for church. He seemed less than thrilled at the idea that she was in charge.

Workman peered around the yard. “I was told we’d find a hazardous material situation here,” he said. “What is it, some kind of false alarm?”

By then three more moon-suited guys had crowded into Bobo Jenkins’s tiny front yard. They stood in a clump like a bunch of stranded astronauts waiting to see what would happen.

It would have been nice if Workman’s dismissive attitude hadn’t been quite so blatant. Joanna had dealt with similar reactions for years; they still irked her.

“It’s no false alarm,” she assured him crisply. “The hazardous material is inside the house. In the laundry room you’ll find a box we suspect contains sodium azide. The box is hooked up to the dryer vent.”

That got Mr. Workman’s attention. “Sodium azide?” he demanded. “My God, woman! Do you have any idea how dangerous that stuff can be?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Joanna said sweetly. “That’s why we called you.”

“Where is it?”

“Around back. A uniformed officer is standing by at the back door—”

Not waiting for her to finish, Workman motioned to his team. “All right, guys. Let’s get moving.”

“Stop,” Joanna barked. “That’s not all.”

A moment earlier, Workman had been prepared to write the whole thing off as a false alarm. Now he scowled impatiently at the delay. “What then?” he asked.

“Your team is to remove and examine all open food containers, including the contents of all sugar, flour, and salt containers. We’ve had one homicide due to sodium azide poisoning and suspect we may have another. In the first case, the poison was concealed in sweetener packets. My concern is that here it may have been used to contaminate other foodstuffs. So, although this is primarily a hazardous-materials operation, it’s also a crime scene investigation. I want photographs and a properly documented evidence log.”

“I was told no one here was hurt,” Workman objected. “In fact, I asked the dispatcher specifically, and he said—”

“You’re right, no one
is
hurt here,” Joanna corrected. “Not at this location, but only because we got lucky. Let me remind you, however, Mr. Workman, that two other people
are
dead. If you find any trace of sodium azide in the food inside the house, that adds one count of attempted murder as well.”

“All right, all right!” Workman conceded grudgingly. “I get the picture.” He turned once again to his waiting crew. “Okay, guys,” he said. “Move it.”

One by one, the Haz-Mat team disappeared into the house.

“Good work,” Beaumont said after they left.

Joanna turned on him. “What do you mean?”

He grinned at her. “You know exactly what I mean. You chewed that poor guy up and spit him out. He never even saw it coming.”

The next thing Joanna Brady knew, she was grinning, too.

“Something’s bothering me,” he said, when the lighthearted moment had passed.