She was doing exactly what Joanna had asked her to do, yet somehow it felt like a rebuke.
“I’m your mother,” Joanna said. “I’m only trying to protect you.”
“I’m almost grown up,” Jenny said, with a defiant toss of her blond hair. “You can’t always protect me, you know.”
With that, she touched her heels to Kiddo’s flanks, and they raced off down the road, leaving Joanna standing in the cloud of dust kicked up by the departing horse’s galloping hooves. With a sigh, Joanna pulled out her cell phone and called home.
“Incoming,” she said, when Butch answered. “Jenny’s on her way home and she’s bent out of shape again. She thinks I’m being unreasonable for sending her home instead of having her hang around here to be interviewed by one of my detectives.”
“Doesn’t sound unreasonable to me,” Butch said.
“Maybe you can convince her of that. In the meantime, I’m waiting for my crime scene team to show up. Debra Highsmith’s vehicle is stuck in the first wash and blocking the road. It’ll have to be towed out of the way before anyone else can get here. I’m not sure how long that’s going to take.”
“I guess I should have packed you a lunch.”
“Too late for that,” Joanna said. “I’ll stop off and grab something on my way to the office. In the meantime, rather than inadvertently messing up some evidence, I’m walking back to the first wash. Since no one can get in or out for the time being except on foot, I’m deeming the crime scene secure.”
“You’re walking?” Butch asked.
“Yes, the Yukon is on the far side of the first wash.”
“How did you get from there to the body?”
“Jenny gave me a ride on Kiddo. The fact that she didn’t offer me a ride back gives you some idea of how mad she is.”
“Sometimes parenthood sucks,” Butch said, “but since she bestowed the honorary title of dad on me yesterday, I guess I’d better see what I can do to calm the troubled waters once she gets home.”
“Thanks, Butch,” Joanna said, and she meant it.
Call waiting buzzed. “Phone call,” she said. She clicked over to find Deb Howell on the line.
“I’m stuck on the far side of the first wash,” Deb said. “No sign of the tow truck so far.”
“I’m coming that way on foot,” Joanna said. “I’ll be there when I can, but how did you make it there so fast? I thought you’d be the last to arrive.”
“If I’d had to track down a babysitter, I probably would have been, but Maury’s here today and tomorrow. Ben and I were supposed to go ATVing with him today. Now Maury and Ben are going without me.”
A year earlier Maury Robbins, a 911 operator in Tucson, had called in a homicide that had occurred at Action Trail Adventures, a combination RV/all-terrain vehicle park north of Bowie in the far-northeast corner of Cochise County. During that investigation, Maury had exhibited more than a passing interest in Deb Howell, one of the detectives on the case. When Ernie Carpenter had mentioned as much, Deb had replied with an immediate denial, insisting that it was all about work. In the months since, however, Ernie’s assessment had been proved correct. Deb Howell and Maury Robbins were now a romantic item. Although he still lived in Tucson, he spent many of his days off in Bisbee, parking his Jayco pop-up camper at the RV park in Old Bisbee, a few blocks from the home on Brewery Gulch that Deb shared with her son.
The news that Deb trusted the man enough to let Ben go ATVing with him alone struck Joanna as significant, but she didn’t make any comment to that effect.
“What’s going on?” Deb asked. “Larry said something about your finding a body.”
“I didn’t find it; Jenny did,” Joanna replied, “and it’s not just any body. It’s Debra Highsmith, the missing high school principal. Jenny found her near the third wash, which is about two miles north of your current location.”
“The high school principal?” Deb asked.
“That’s the one. So this will be a joint investigation,” Joanna explained. “Chief of Police Bernard is sending Matt Keller, his only detective. Due to budget cuts, the city had to lay off all their forensics folks. Fortunately, we’ve still got ours. So we’ll be handling all the crime scene and forensic lines of inquiry. And since you’re the first to arrive, you’ll be lead investigator.”
Deb was the greenest of Joanna’s three detectives. With a high-profile school principal involved, Debra Highsmith’s murder was bound to garner plenty of publicity. Someone else might have opted for a more senior investigator, but Joanna thought that leading the charge on this one might help give Deb some much-needed street cred. In order for Detective Howell to carry her weight inside the department, people on the outside needed to know that she was capable of doing the job. This case was her chance to prove it.
“The tow truck’s here,” Deb reported.
“Crap,” Joanna said. “I was hoping Casey Ledford would show up first. Ask the driver to hold off until Casey has a chance to dust the doors and door handles as well as the steering wheel, gearshift, and emergency-brake handle for prints.”
Deb was off the line for a moment. In the background Joanna could hear her negotiating with the tow truck driver. Eventually she came back on the phone.
“He’s not happy about it, but I told him this is a homicide investigation. He’ll wait. I didn’t exactly give him a choice.”
“Good,” Joanna said. As far as Sheriff Brady was concerned, in dealing with the tow truck driver, Detective Howell had just passed her first test in being lead investigator.
“While you’re waiting, you might have a look around the general area,” Joanna said.
“Isn’t this still a long way from the actual crime scene?”
“Yes, but it looked to me like whoever was driving the Passat spent some time and effort trying to get it out of the sand. While he was concentrating on that, he might have inadvertently dropped something that would help us identify him.”
“You believe the killer was leaving the scene when the car got hung up?”
“Yes,” Joanna replied.
“Where’d he go from here and how did he do it—on foot?”
Joanna didn’t bother pointing out Deb’s sexist assumption that the killer was male, because she shared the same opinion.
“Terry Gregovich and Spike are on their way,” Joanna said. “If he did walk away, I’m hoping Spike and Terry will be able to pick up the scent.”
“Your place is the closest one to where the car is,” Deb said. “Do you think he might have gone there?”
“I doubt it. At least I hope not,” Joanna said. “Still, you might have a uniformed deputy stop by Carol Sunderson’s place and ours and take a look around the outbuildings just in case he did head there and hunker down for
