Partner In Crime (39 page)

The next set of knobs were the two phone numbers in Illinois. Because of the volume of calls, I started with the log for the residence number first. The logs were arranged in order of the most recent calls first. I worked my way down list after list after list until I could barely see straight. Until I felt myself starting to doze in the chair. And then I saw it. The words “Olympia, Washington,” leaped off the page and brought me bolt upright and wide awake.

The call had been placed two months earlier at ten o’clock in the morning and had lasted for forty minutes. Excited now, I scanned faster. Three weeks before that was another call. A month before that was another. All of the calls were placed to the same 360 prefix number. Shaking my head, I extracted my wallet from my pocket and pulled out the list of telephone numbers, and there it was. That 360 number was the unlisted home number for Ross Alan Connors.

“What the hell does this mean?” I asked myself aloud.

Actually, the answer seemed pretty clear. I remembered that long empty silence when I had told Ross about the phone calls to the Illinois law firm. Now I had to face the possibility that Washington State Attorney General Ross Connors was actually involved in the plot that had resulted in the death of his own witness.

I’ve never been long on patience. Cooler heads might have paused for a moment or two of consideration. Not me. There was a phone on a table at the far end of the conference room. I grabbed the receiver off the hook and dialed in Ross Connors’s office number, only to be told he was out to lunch. Next I tried his cell phone. As soon as he answered, I heard the tinkle of glassware and the muted hum of background conversation. Connors was in a public place—some fine dining establishment, no doubt—and most likely with friends or associates. It wasn’t the best venue for me to try forcing him to tell me the truth, but I wasn’t willing to wait any longer. If my boss was a crook, I wanted to know it right then so I could deliver my verbal resignation on the spot.

“Beau,” he said when he recognized my voice. “I really can’t talk right now—”

“Sorry to interrupt your lunch, but the suspect we were looking for, Jack Brampton, is dead,” I told him. “He died this morning making a run for the Mexican border. I thought you’d want to know.”

“You’re absolutely right!” Ross Connors exclaimed. “I do want to know about that. Good work. Anything else?”

“Answer me one question,” I growled into the phone. “Why didn’t you come clean with me when I told you about Maddern, Maddern, and Peek? Louis Maddern is obviously a friend of yours.”

He excused himself from the table and didn’t speak again until he was outside the restaurant. “Louis really isn’t a friend of mine,” he said. “The Madderns are closer to Francine. She’s known Madeline since college, since she was Madeline Springer, in fact. The girls were sorority sisters together. Lou can be a bit of a pill sometimes, but I suppose he’s all right. Why? What’s going on?”

Sorority sisters,
I thought.
That might explain those widely spaced, long-winded phone calls. It could be they were nothing more than that, the totally harmless chatting of a pair of old friends, but still . . .

“Probably nothing,” I said.

“Well,” Connors said. “I should get back to my guests. I’ll be back in my office about three. Why don’t you give me a callback then.”

“Sure,” I told him. “Will do.”

I put down the phone. I’ve spent most of my adult life working as a homicide detective, and I can usually spot a liar a mile away. J.P. Beaumont’s gut-instinct opinions carry about the same weight in a court of law as polygraph results do—which means they’re widely regarded as totally unreliable.

The problem for me right then was that my gut instinct didn’t think Ross Alan Connors was lying. True, he hadn’t answered my question in front of his guests, but nowadays that was considered to be polite cell-phone behavior. Still, he had sounded glad to hear from me and delighted that Jack Brampton had been run to ground. He didn’t sound to me like someone with some dark, hidden secret.

I should have been ecstatic about thinking my boss wasn’t a crook after all, but I wasn’t. Because if his relationship to Madeline and Louis Maddern was totally harmless, then I was getting nowhere fast.

I went back to my place at the table and returned to the telephone logs. The law firm logged hundreds of phone calls a day, which meant I was dealing with a huge stack of pages. I lit into scanning them with renewed vigor, but instead of starting from the most recent ones, I decided to go to the end of the list and begin there. Halfway through the fourth page, Olympia, Washington, began appearing again. Not one call or two, but dozens of them, some only a minute or two long, some that lasted for forty or fifty minutes.

That pattern was obvious almost immediately. None of the calls were placed earlier than 11
A.M.
central time, which would have been 9
A.M.
Pacific. And none were placed later than 5
P.M.
Pacific. And, although they all went to the same number in Olympia, it wasn’t one of the numbers I had on my Ross Connors contact list. I guessed then where this was most likely leading, but before I did anything about it, I wanted to be absolutely sure.

O
NCE BACK IN HER OFFICE
, Joanna immediately tried reaching Governor Wallace Hickman, only to be told that he wasn’t in, who was calling, and he would call her back.
Not likely,
Joanna thought. She’d had previous dealings with Wally Hickman in a case that had reflected badly on one of the governor’s former partners. With that in mind, she doubted the governor would be eager to return her phone call—no matter how urgent.

The surface of Joanna’s desk was still unnaturally clean. While she waited, Joanna took messages off the machine. One was from Terry Gregovich. “Sheriff Brady, sorry I didn’t call in earlier. Kristin went into labor and there was too much happening. Kristin is fine. We think Shaundra is, too, but she had some breathing problems. Dr. Lee is having her airlifted to the neonatal unit at University Medical Center in Tucson. Kristin went with her in the medevac helicopter. Spike and I are going along, too, but we’re driving, not flying. I’ll let you know how things are as soon as I know anything.”

As she erased that message, Joanna said a small prayer for the whole Gregovich family.

Next came a call from Joanna’s mother. “Hi,” Eleanor Lathrop Winfield said airily. “George and I are planning a little dinner get-together for Friday evening. We wanted to know if you and Butch could come.”

The fact that Eleanor had finally unbent enough to call her son-in-law Butch rather than insisting on using the more formal given name of Frederick still gave Joanna pause.

“He said there wasn’t anything on his calendar, but that I should check with you,” Eleanor’s message continued. “Grown-ups only this time, but Jenny won’t mind. She’d probably rather be with Jim Bob and Eva Lou anyway. Let me know. We’ll get together around six and eat at seven or so.”

Joanna groaned inwardly. This would be one of her mother’s command performances. Since Butch had already said they were free, Joanna probably wouldn’t be able to dodge it. She made a note in her calendar, then called Eleanor back and left a message that she and Butch would indeed attend.

The next voice she heard was Marliss Shackleford’s. “I understand you’ll be speaking to a high school career assembly later this week,” she said. “I wanted to put an item in my column about that. I was also wondering if you have any comment on the fact that Deputy Galloway has officially declared that he’s running for sheriff.”

With a decisive poke of her dialing finger, Joanna erased that message without bothering to jot down the number. She had suspected it was coming. Still, now that Ken Junior’s candidacy was evidently official, Joanna felt a sudden flash of anger toward Deputy Galloway. She had allowed him to continue with the department when others might have manufactured reasons to let him go. He had repaid Joanna’s kindness by undermining her administration in secret. Now his opposition had gone public.

If he had made a public announcement, it was probably in that day’s edition of
The Bisbee Bee
. Under normal circumstances, Kristin would have placed the paper on Joanna’s desk with any pertinent articles marked with Hi-Liter. But Kristin wasn’t here. Wanting to know exactly what candidate Galloway had to say, Joanna called the mail room and spoke to the clerk, Sylvia Roark.

“Kristin Gregovich is out today,” Joanna said into the phone. “Would you please bring the admin mail down to my office?”

Minutes later Sylvia Roark appeared in the office doorway, wheeling a large metal cart that was filled to the brim with a mass of papers. Joanna was surprised when she saw it. She had often objected to the piles of paper Kristin Gregovich routinely brought into Joanna’s office and stacked on her desk, but she had no idea that the relatively small piles that actually appeared had been culled from this kind of daunting heap.

“What should I do with it?” Sylvia asked.

Sylvia was a mousy, painfully shy young woman with bad teeth and ill-fitting clothing who came and went from the mail room on a daily basis without exchanging a word with anyone. She spent most of her work hours closeted in the mail room. When not actively dealing with mail, she hunkered over a computer and transferred cold-case information from microfiche into files that could be accessed via computer.

“I’m going to need you to sort it for me,” Joanna said.

Sylvia’s face turned crimson. “But I don’t know
how
!” she objected.

“Then you’ll have to learn,” Joanna told her firmly. “Make five stacks. One for junk mail, one for magazines, newspapers, and newsletters, one for Chief Deputy Montoya, one for me, and one for don’t know. I’ll help you sort through the don’t-know stack later.”

“But doesn’t Kristin do that?”

“Kristin just had a baby,” Joanna said. “Until she’s back on the job, we’ll be counting on you.”

“All right,” Sylvia said, backing up and scuttling toward the hallway. “I’ll take it back to the mail room and sort it there.”

“No,” Joanna said. “That won’t do. Use Kristin’s desk. And if the phone rings while you’re there, you’ll have to answer it.”

“But . . .” Sylvia began.

“Please,” Joanna insisted. “I need your help.”

Nodding, Sylvia pushed the cart closer to Kristin’s desk. Joanna didn’t want to spook the young woman further by looking over her shoulder as she set about doing an unfamiliar task. Spying a copy of
The Bisbee Bee
near the top of the pile, Joanna grabbed it, then retreated to her office and closed the door.

W
ITH THE NEW UNIDENTIFIED
number in hand, I left the conference room and went looking for Frank Montoya. The desk outside Sheriff Brady’s office was almost buried under stacks of paper. Seated there was a young woman I hadn’t seen before. When I asked if Chief Deputy Montoya was in, she didn’t answer. Instead, she ducked her head and pointed.

When I entered the chief deputy’s office, Frank was on the phone patiently explaining to an out-of-town reporter that, until the dead suspect’s relatives had been contacted, he was unable to release any further information.

“How’s it going?” he asked, when the call finally ended.

I handed him a sheet of paper on which I had written the unidentified number, the next cog in my telephone Tinkertoy trail. “Can you find out whose phone number this is?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “It may take a few minutes.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll be in the conference room.”

T
HE HEADLINE
J
OANNA SOUGHT
was in the right-hand bottom corner of the
Bee
’s front page:

“Crime rates may be down in the rest of the country,” Cochise County Deputy Sheriff Kenneth Galloway declared yesterday while throwing his hat into the ring in the race for sheriff. “But here, on Sheriff Joanna Brady’s watch, it seems to be going in the opposite direction.”
    Citing increased numbers of undocumented aliens who are flooding into the county, Galloway says sheriff’s deputies are often outgunned and outnumbered. “We don’t have the manpower to deal with UDAs and with our regular law enforcement responsibilities as well. Sheriff Brady hasn’t done enough to increase staffing to deal with this ever-growing problem.”