J. Jance - Partner In Crime

Ouch , Joanna thought.

She followed him into the house and locked the back door once she was inside. Butch put the blueprints on the dining room table. Joanna thought he would unroll them and pore over them as he did almost every night. Instead he said, “I think I’ll turn in.”

“You just got home,” Joanna objected. “Don’t you want to talk?”

Butch shook his head. “I’m beat. Quentin and I have a meeting first thing in the morning. Night.”

He gave Joanna a halfhearted peck on the cheek and left her standing in the middle of the dining room. Rebuffed and hurt, Joanna returned to the kitchen. In a bid for sympathy, she had wanted to tell her husband about her day. She had wanted Butch to give her a loving pat and tell her that of course Ross Connors from Washington State was an unmitigated jerk. But Butch Dixon had surprised her. He had given her a cold shoulder rather than one to cry on.

Joanna sulked in the kitchen for a while. Then, wanting to talk and thinking Butch must still be awake, she crept into the bedroom, only to find him snoring softly. So much for that ! she thought.

It was midnight before she finally went to bed and much later than that before she fell asleep. And overslept. If it hadn’t been for the telephone ringing at ten after eight the next morning, she might have missed the board of supervisors meeting altogether.

“Hello,” she mumbled into the phone. Staring wide-eyed at the clock, she staggered out of bed. The caller ID box next to the phone said the number was unavailable. Taking the phone with her, she headed for the bathroom.

“Sheriff Brady?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“My name’s Harry Eyeball and-”

“Look, mister,” she said, cutting him off. “If this is some kind of joke-”

“Believe me, Sheriff Brady, it’s no joke. My name is Harry, initial I, Ball. I’m with the Washington State Attorney General’s Special Homicide Investigation Team. I’m returning the call you made to Ross Connors yesterday afternoon.”

“Oh, yes,” Joanna said. “I called about Latisha Wall.”

“Making any progress?”

Joanna bristled. “My call was to Mr. Connors,” Joanna said. “I’m not in the habit of discussing ongoing cases with people I don’t know.”

“I just told you-”

“Yes, yes, I know. Your name is Harry Ball. But I don’t know you from Adam’s Off Ox, Mr. Ball,” she said, resorting to one of her father-in-law’s favorite expressions. “My homicide detective, Jaime Carbajal, has been trying to contact Mr. Connors’s office for information regarding this case. Up to now there’s been no response.”

“So Latisha Wall was murdered, then?”

Joanna ignored the question. “What Detective Carbajal needs, I believe, is for someone to fax Latisha Wall’s information to us so we’ll know where to start. All we have so far is her real name and her family’s address in Georgia.”

“That file isn’t faxable, ma’am,” Harry Ball told her.

“What do you mean, it isn’t faxable?” Joanna returned. “What is it, chiseled in granite?”

“It’s confidential. We have no assurances that it might not fall into unauthorized hands in the process of transmitting it.”

“You’re implying that someone in my department might leak it?” Joanna demanded. “And why is it so damned confidential? Let me remind you, Mr. Ball: Latisha Wall is already dead. If she was in a witness protection program you guys set up, I’d have to say you didn’t do such a great job of it. And I still need the information.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, ma’am. We’re sending it to you.”

“How? By pony express?”

Joanna glared at the clock, whose hands were moving inexorably forward. The board of supervisors meeting would start at nine sharp. Even skipping a shower, it was going to be close.

“One of the members of my team, an investigator named J.P. Beaumont, will be delivering it in person. Once he does so, Mr. Connors would like him to stay on as an observer.”

“A what?”

“An observer. This is an important case with long-term, serious financial implications for the state of Washington,” Harry Ball continued. “We wouldn’t want someone to inadvertently let something slip.”

Joanna was dumbfounded. “Let something slip?” she deman-ded. “Connors thinks my department is so incompetent that he’s sending someone to bird-dog my investigation? I don’t believe this! You can give that boss of yours a message from me. Tell him he has a hell of a lot of nerve!”

Slamming down the phone, she hopped into the shower after all. She was too steamed not to. Her hair was still damp and her makeup haphazardly applied when she slid into a chair next to Frank Montoya at the board of supervisors’ Melody Lane conference room fifty minutes later. Frank glanced at his watch and sighed with relief when he saw her. The board secretary was already reading the minutes of the previous meeting.

“What happened?” he whispered.

“I overslept.”

“Oh,” Frank said. “Is that all? From the look on your face, I thought it was something serious.”

Sheriff Joanna Brady hated having to attend board of supervisors meetings. For routine matters, Frank Montoya usually attended in her stead. This meeting, however, was anything but routine. The general downturn in the national economy had hit hard in Cochise County, requiring budget cuts in every aspect of county government. Today, with the board’s cost-cutting knives aimed at the sheriff’s department, she and Frank had decided they should both appear. Within minutes, Joanna knew they’d made a wise decision.

The newest member of the board, Charles Longworth Neighbors, was a man no one ever referred to as Charley – at least not to his face. He was a full-bird colonel who had retired from the army at Fort Huachuca a year or so earlier. He had now been appointed to fill out another board member’s unexpired term of office.

Since Charles Neighbors was career army, the United States government had seen to it that he had earned a Harvard MBA while in the service. Now in civilian life, he loved to wield his relatively recent degree as a double-edged sword. He had no compunction about inflicting everything he had learned on the unwashed masses in every branch of Cochise County government, one reluctant department at a time. Today he homed in on the sheriff’s department, going over budget items line by line, convinced that there were substantial cuts that could and should be made.

“If it can be done, it should be done,” he told Joanna, with a patronizing smile that made her want to grind her teeth.

Three and a half grueling hours later, she and Frank escaped the boardroom, having taken a 10-percent-across-the-board hit. She waited until they were safely outside the building and out of earshot before she exploded.

“If it can be done, it should be done,” she grumbled, doing a credible job of imitating Charles Longworth’s pedantic, school-principal-like delivery. “If he had said that one more time, I think I would have thrown something! Of course, his should-bes are all one-way streets. Budget items are to be taken out and never put back in.”

“Now, now,” Frank counseled, “give the man a break. He’s new and trying to get a grip on how things work. Supervising county government has to be different from being an officer in the army.”

“Right,” Joanna agreed. “ We can’t afford two-hundred-dollar toilet seats. And then there’s Harry I. Ball.”

“What hairy eyeball?” Frank asked. “I don’t remember anyone saying a word about that.”

“Not ‘hairy eyeball,’ “ Joanna returned. “That’s a man’s name,” she said, reading off the scrap of paper she had stuffed in the pocket of her blazer. “First name is Harry, middle initial I, and last name Ball. I made him spell it out for me.”