J. Jance - Fire and Ice

Mel gave me an exasperated look, but she restrained herself from giving me the full verbal blast until we were safely inside the Cayman and well out of Donita Mack’s earshot.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Mel asked as she waited on the phone to see what could be learned about Mama Rose’s address. “If this Brotsky woman has anything to hide, once Donita lets her know we’re on our way there, she’ll probably be lawyered up before we can drive from here to there.”

“Exactly,” I said. “ And if she does, we’ll know for sure she has something to hide.”

Shaking her head, Mel fed some address information into the navigation system and handed the phone over to me. “Call Records,” she added. “Mama Rose sounds like a piece of work.”

That turned out to be something of an understatement. Mama Rose Brotsky had what could only be referred to as a colorful past. Her record included more than a dozen arrests for prostitution and drug dealing in the late eighties. But all activity on her rap sheet stopped in 1990, with the exception of a speeding ticket in 1992.

When prostitutes go out of business, it’s seldom due to old age. They usually wind up on drugs first, followed by jail and/or death. The speeding ticket-fifty-five in a thirty-five-mile-an-hour zone-meant she was alive and out of the slammer two years after she had supposedly started walking the straight and narrow.

“Maybe she wised up and stopped getting caught,” Mel said as she weaved her way onto 1–5. “Or maybe she found something more profitable.”

“I’ll say,” I agreed, thinking that drug dealing was Mama Rose’s most likely post-hooking career choice. “As far as I can see, dealing drugs would be the shortest distance between walking the mean streets in Tacoma twenty years ago and owning that much prime property along I-5 right now.”

“It’s not prime property,” Mel reminded me. “It’s a trailer park.”

“It’s a trailer park where everybody pays their rent in cash,” I countered. “She may not be dodging the Vice Squad anymore, but I’d be willing to bet she’s cheating on her income taxes.”

“Great,” Mel said. “If I were Mama Rose, I’d prefer duking it out with the Vice Squad to tangling with the IRS.”

After that we didn’t talk much. Mel was driving. I kept quiet and let the woman’s voice from the nav system do all the talking.

Now that Mel and I are married, I find it works better that way.

That afternoon, by the time Butch and Joanna got home from Tucson and had the groceries unpacked and put away, it was almost time for dinner. Fortunately, Carol had that end of things handled. The food-meat loaf and baked potatoes-was cooked. All they had to do was put it on the table. Once dinner was over, Joanna moved on to overseeing Dennis’s bath. She had just rinsed the shampoo out of his hair when Butch came into the bathroom holding the telephone.

“You’d better take this,” he said. “It’s Tica.”

Tica Romero was Joanna’s nighttime dispatcher. Leaving Butch in charge of Dennis, Joanna stepped out of the bathroom. “What’s up?” she asked.

“We’ve got a missing person,” Tica said. “A ninety-three-year-old woman, Philippa Brinson, walked away from her assisted living home, a place called Caring Friends out in Palominas, earlier this afternoon.”

“How long has she been gone?”

“Since three o’clock,” Tica said. “There was a communications error of some kind. No one figured out she was missing until dinnertime, and they didn’t call us right away even after they realized she was gone. I’ve dispatched a deputy and the K-9 unit to the scene along with Chief Deputy Hadlock. He’s the one who wanted me to call you. He also asked for a homicide detective. Howell is on call.”

Hadlock’s request for a homicide detective was worrisome, but he was showing initiative here, so Joanna let that pass. “Patch him through,” she said. “What’s going on, Tom?” she asked once Hadlock was on the line.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your day off, but there’s this missing person…” he began.

“Yes. Ms. Brinson. Tica told me. She said there was some kind of communication problem at the facility where she was staying.”

“It’s not much of a facility, if you ask me,” Tom answered. “A private house that’s been converted into a group home for Alzheimer’s patients. The daytime nurse took the day off. As near as I can tell, the attendant who was supposed to be on duty until four left around two, and the one who was supposed to arrive at four had car trouble and didn’t get there until five. The place is a mess. I think it should be shut down. If my mother or father were living here, that’s what I’d do-call in the health department and have them pull the plug. But I’m just the chief deputy, Sheriff Brady. And the way things stand between Ms. Whitehead and me, you’re the one who should make that call.”

Peggy Whitehead was the head of the Cochise County Health Department. Joanna gave Tom high marks for understanding that what should have been a simple interdepartmental transaction could blow up into something far more complicated.

Peggy had long been jealous of Joanna’s position in the county’s administrative hierarchy. The sheriff’s department had far more personnel than hers did, which meant that Joanna controlled a larger piece of the annual budget.

In the past year or so, Peggy had used her inspectors to keep the jail’s kitchen facilities and even the department’s break room under constant scrutiny. Tom, in his former position as jail commander, had borne the brunt of the criticism. The minor infractions that had been found there had little to do with inmate or employee health and well-being and everything to do with Peggy’s being able to put Joanna in her place. Well-placed notices in the Bisbee Bee that had focused on jail-kitchen health department infractions had served to turn the feud between two competing heads of departments into public fodder.

There was the potential for the same kind of drama playing out here as well. Unless Joanna proceeded carefully, the situation might turn into yet another political football. Rather than simply shutting down an underperforming facility and protecting vulnerable patients, Peggy Whitehead was liable to keep it open just to spite Joanna.

“You were right to call me,” Joanna assured Tom. “I’m the one who needs to make the call, and I can’t do that without assessing the situation firsthand. I’ll be there as soon as I can. In the meantime, what are we doing to find Ms. Brinson? Do we know exactly what time she left?”

“Not really,” Tom said. “Like I said, she disappeared while the place was unsupervised, sometime between when the one attendant left and when the other one arrived.”

“No surveillance cameras?”

“None. Deputy Gregovich and Spike got here just a few minutes ago. I’m hoping they’ll be able to track her.”

Terry Gregovich and his German shepherd constituted Joanna’s K-9 unit.

“I’ll get the address and directions from Tica once I’m on the way,” Joanna said. “How far is the house from the highway?”

“Half a mile at least.”

“And how cold is it supposed to get tonight?”

“Upper thirties,” Tom replied grimly. “Which is pretty cold if you’re in your nineties and out wandering around with nothing more than a sweater on.”

“That’s all she’s wearing-a sweater?”

“We don’t know that for sure, but it’s likely. Sylvia Cameron, the nurse who was supposed to be here all day, finally turned up a little while ago. Someone must have called her. When she got here, she smelled like a brewery.”

“You mean she’s drunk?”

“Seems like it to me,” Tom answered. “Anyway, she claims Ms. Brinson only had a sweater here at the home, not a coat, and the sweater’s not here now.”