J. Jance - Fire and Ice

Eventually, leaving the boy in the care of Jaime’s wife, Delcia, Joanna and Jaime had gone on to take the bad news to Jaime’s parents’ house. The moment Elena Carbajal answered the bell and saw who was standing on her doorstep, she knew why they were there. She had burst into a keening wail of grief before either Jaime or Joanna said a word. The gut-wrenching sound had prompted Jaime’s father to burst into the living room. He had emerged from the bedroom wearing slippers and pajamas.

“What is it, Elena?” Conrad Carbajal, Jaime’s father, had asked. “What’s going on?”

Jaime, as he had done with Luis, was the one who gave his parents the bad news.

“Naturally the parents blame themselves for what happened to their daughter,” Joanna told Butch over coffee. “But parents always do. Marcella was evidently a headstrong, out-of-control teenager. She ran off at age seventeen without ever completing high school. Her parents disapproved of her friends and her lifestyle, but they were thankful when she and Luis moved back here a year or so ago. At least that gave them a chance to look out for Luis.”

“How’s Jaime doing?” Butch asked.

“He’s on bereavement leave as of this morning,” Joanna answered. “Naturally he’s devastated.”

“Why wouldn’t he be?” Butch replied. “When someone dies, the people who are left behind assume that they’re somehow the root cause-that the tragedy happened because of something they did or didn’t do at some critical juncture.”

Joanna nodded. “You’ve got that right,” she said. “On our way uptown Jaime told me about a family Easter-egg hunt when he and Marcella were little. He was three years older than she was. She was running. She tripped and spilled her basket. Jaime tried to find all the missing eggs and put them back. He traded some of his own good eggs for some of her broken ones.”

Butch looked puzzled. “What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?”

“I think that was probably the first time Jaime tried to smooth things over for his little sister, but I think he’s been doing the same thing all his life.”

“Except this one can’t be smoothed,” he said.

Just then Carol Sunderson bustled in through the back door with a bright-eyed Dennis parked on her hip and with the three boisterous dogs trailing behind. None of them seemed any worse for wear for having spent the night away from home. For the next several minutes the kitchen was a chaotic circus of dogs and boy as Dennis did his best to relate everything that had gone on the evening before. Eventually, though, Dennis trotted off, taking the dogs with him. In the sudden quiet, Butch turned to Joanna.

“How about some breakfast?” he asked.

“Toast, maybe,” Joanna said. “I’m not very hungry.”

While Butch set about fixing it, Joanna leaned back, rested her head against the wall behind her, and closed her eyes.

“So what’s the plan?” Butch asked.

Joanna looked at her watch. “It’s supposed to be a light day,” she said. “The daily briefing first and then the Board of Supervisors meeting. After that, you and I are supposed to have our farewell lunch with my mother and George, followed by a haircut and a wedding rehearsal.”

The plate Butch set in front of Joanna contained a piece of buttered toast along with a hunk of leftover steak. “Have some protein,” he advised. “Even the Energizer Bunny needs to refuel sometime. Oh, and about that lunch,” he added.

George and Eleanor Winfield were about to embark on their second snowbird season, driving back to George’s Minnesota cabin in their motor home. They had delayed their spring departure in order to attend Frank Montoya’s wedding. Now they were due to leave on Sunday morning. Hence the scheduled get-together today.

“What about it?” Joanna asked.

“I may not make it,” Butch said. “My editor sent me an e-mail early this morning. They want to have a telephone conference later on today so we can get the next book tour organized. If the call is over in time, I’ll come. If not…”

“That sounds a little lame,” Joanna said.

Butch grinned. “I know,” he said. “But it’s a good excuse. Besides, she’s your mother.”

Based on Jaime Carbajal’s phone call, Mel and I had stayed up until the wee hours tracking down information on Paco Castro-no relation to Fidel and Raul, by the way. It didn’t seem likely that a tip from a grieving relative would lead us straight to a killer. That hardly ever happens. But what our research did do was show us that Paco Castro had an extensive rap sheet dating back to juvenile days. If he was representative of the caliber of Marco and Marcella Andrade’s friends, they had run with a pretty tough crowd.

The next morning, Mel and I filled our traveler’s cups with java, got in our two separate vehicles, and headed across the water to our office in Bellevue’s Eastgate neighborhood. It’s a fifteen-mile commute that, under good traffic conditions, can take as little as twenty minutes. As I’ve mentioned before, during rush hour in Seattle, there are no good traffic conditions. That day the drive took over an hour door-to-door in wall-to-wall rain. Once inside the building, we settled into our tiny but nonetheless private offices. My job that morning was to go nosing around in the world of a now-deceased two-bit thug named Marco Andrade.

From the multiple offenses listed on Marco Andrade’s rap sheet, everything from aggravated assault to attempted murder, I was mystified as to why he would have been transferred from a maximum security facility near Lancaster in southern California to a medium-security lockup called Wild Horse Mesa Prison near Redding. While doing time in Lancaster, Marco had been tagged with numerous infractions, including fighting and being nonco-operative. If it had been up to me, I would have left him where he was instead of transferring him to something less severe.

Anyone who has ever tried to outwit a recalcitrant two-year-old will be happy to tell you, chapter and verse, why it’s never a good idea to reward bad behavior.

Once again, however, I was grateful to be working for Ross Connors. When I’m initiating contact with folks in other jurisdictions, it always gives me a big leg up on the credibility ladder when I’m able to drop the name of Washington State Attorney General into the mix. If I need to go to the top, using his name makes it possible for me to take the express elevator, so to speak. It was a lot tougher back in the old days when I was a grunt working for Seattle PD.

In this instance, the top turned out to be a guy named Donald Willison, the warden of Wild Horse Mesa Prison. When his secretary put me through to him at ten past nine, Willison sounded surly and argumentative, but then again, if I had to spend every day and hour of my working life locked up inside an institution right along with a bunch of convicted criminals, maybe I’d be surly, too.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “And what do you want?”

I told him who I was and that I was calling about Marco Andrade.

Willison sighed. “Oh, crap,” he said. “Him again? You and everybody else. I knew that mope was going to be trouble the minute they dropped him off in my sally port. And once I got a look at his paperwork, I was even more convinced. I could see right off that he was going to be a problem and had no business being here. Sure enough. As soon as he got in a pissing match with one of my guards, I started trying to send him back where he came from, but reversing transfers is a lot like trying to push a rope uphill.”

That’s the way it works in bureaucracies. It may be possible to undo whatever’s been done, but you can count on it taking lots of time and extraordinary amounts of effort.