Judgment Call (17 page)

“Is he okay?” Joanna asked.

“Giles? Not really. He has a snootful of porcupine quills and is badly dehydrated. I had my ACO transport him directly to Millie's. She put him on IV fluids, and she's removing the quills even as we speak. She says she thinks she needs to keep him overnight.”

Millie was Dr. Millicent Ross, the same vet Jenny worked for. She and Jeannine were partners. As a consequence, Dr. Ross provided an astonishing amount of pro bono vet work for the animals who happened to come to the attention of Cochise County Animal Control.

“Did you say porcupine quills?”

“Yes, indeed.” Jeannine chuckled. “Millie calls dogs like that carpet dogs or yard dogs. They get out in the wild and have no idea what's what. Giles probably got hungry and thought the porcupine was something good to eat. Small error on his part. Believe me, the porcupine got the better end of that deal.”

Joanna had thought the Doberman was a goner, right along with Debra Highsmith. Who would kill the dog's owner and let the dog go? Giles had been found in Huachuca City—a good thirty miles from home. How had he gotten there? If he was from Fort Huachuca, maybe he had been trying to get back to his original owner, so had he walked there on his own or had someone given him a ride? Maybe Debra Highsmith herself had taken the dog there.

“If that poor woman thought she was getting herself a first line of defense by acquiring a guard dog, she didn't get much of a bargain,” Joanna said.

“Now wait,” Jeannine said. “Don't jump to any conclusions, and don't be so hard on the dog. It's not his fault. Millie says the dog has a seeping puncture wound on his right shoulder that didn't come from a porcupine quill. She says it's consistent with a wound from the kind of dart gun they use to tranquilize bears and cougars who happen to wander into suburban neighborhoods. She thinks someone took the dog out of the equation early in the game by tranquilizing him. Then the perp transported Giles and dumped him while he was still unconscious.”

The moment Jeannine mentioned the tranquilizing gun, Joanna made a possible mental connection between what had happened to Giles and to Debra Highsmith as well.

“Can she do a tox screen and find out if there's any residue of the tranquilizer in the dog's blood?”

“Why would you need that?”

“Because the killer may have used the same tranquilizer to incapacitate both the dog and the dog's owner. If we know what the exact compound is, we may be able to trace it.”

“I'll ask her, but it might turn out to be expensive. I don't want her to end up having to do it for free.”

“My department will pay for the tox screen,” Joanna said.

“What about next of kin?” Jeannine asked. “Any sign of them?”

“Not yet.”

“I'm going to need to find someone to foster Giles until we can locate one of the victim's friends or family members who would be willing to take him,” Jeannine said. “It's not fair to bring a dog that's been through this much trauma into the pound.”

That was one of the difficult aspects of homicide. Unexpected deaths usually left grieving family members behind; some were human, some were not. It was no accident that the first people to come in contact with the bereaved animals—animal control officers dispatched to crime scenes—often ended up taking bereaved pets into their own homes on a permanent basis. After all, that was how Lucky had come into their lives—as the only surviving dog of a murdered animal hoarder.

“Good luck with that,” Joanna said. “Let me know how it goes.”

She grabbed her purse and had made it as far as her parking space when Deb Howell pulled into the parking lot with Matt Keller's unmarked city patrol car on her six. Joanna dropped her purse on the front seat of the Yukon and then waited for the detectives to park and come to her.

“How'd the Pembroke deal go?” she asked.

“About how you'd expect,” Deb said. “We'd had about five minutes with Marty when Daddy Pembroke came flying into the driveway, jumped out of his car, and came inside to … let's just say encourage … his son to lawyer up.”

“So you didn't get anywhere before that happened?”

“Not completely,” Matt said. “Marty claimed he was with somebody last night. If his father hadn't come screaming to the rescue, I think Marty would have given us his alibi, which we could have verified or not.”

“Check with the other kids,” Joanna suggested. “Starting with the kids whose names I gave you earlier. With all this social networking going on, I think everybody probably knows what everybody else is doing at any given time, but don't worry about following up on that tonight. We've all had a long day, and tomorrow isn't going to be any better.” She turned to Detective Keller. “Did Chief Bernard authorize overtime?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Even so, let's go home,” she suggested. “We'll get a good night's sleep, and hit it again in the morning. I want to have a task force meeting at eight sharp in the conference room. We'll have Dave and Casey give us an update on what they've found. By then we should have access to Dr. Machett's preliminary report.”

“I'm hoping we'll have the phone records by then, too,” Keller said.

“All right,” Joanna said. “Let's see what the morning brings. We'll go from there.”

“You want me to call everybody?” Deb offered.

“No. You go home. I'll have Dispatch give people a heads-up.”

With that the two detectives headed home, and so did Joanna. Usually she looked forward to going home and settling in for a quiet evening with her family. This wasn't one of those times. All afternoon, in the background of whatever she was doing, she had continued to noodle away about how best to deal with Jenny and the crime scene photo. Caught in the cross fire between being a mother and being a cop, she dreaded the coming confrontation.

Due to the late-afternoon press conference and the subsequent meeting with the two detectives, Joanna had already missed eating with the family when she pulled into her garage at High Lonesome Ranch. Lady was the one who greeted her at the door, so she went looking for everyone else. Butch was closeted in the bathroom overseeing Dennis's bath. Jenny's bedroom door was shut. Not unusual, but given what had gone on that day, not a good sign, either. Joanna started to knock but then thought better of it. She and Butch would have to deal with the Jenny situation together, after Dennis was in bed.

Back in the kitchen, Joanna found her dinner plated and on the kitchen counter, ready to pop into the microwave. She was in the process of reheating it when Butch and Dennis showed up. Dennis threw himself at Joanna with a joyful exuberance that made her smile. She grabbed him up in a bear hug, sniffing his damp hair, fresh with the unmistakable odor of Johnson's baby shampoo.

“So how's my boy today?” she asked.

Without answering, he slipped from his mother's grasp and darted over to Lady, who accepted his effusive greeting with a modest thump of her tail.

Joanna looked at Butch. “I guess that puts me in my place.”

He grinned back at her. “It could be worse,” he said. “At least you're ahead of the dog in Denny's estimation. Care for a glass of wine with dinner?”

“I'd like that, but shouldn't we deal with Jenny first?”

“That's already handled,” Butch said. He pulled a bottle of wine from the rack and set two glasses down on the counter.

“Handled?” Joanna asked. “What do you mean?”

“Look,” Butch said, peeling the foil off the cork. “With you and Jenny both calling me ‘Dad,' I figured I'd better step up my game. I spent my whole childhood with a mother who was forever pulling the whole ‘wait till your father comes home' routine. The last thing I want to do is be a clone of my parents.”

Having spent some time with Butch's parents, especially his mother, Joanna had no argument on that score.

“So I took care of it myself,” Butch said, expertly removing the cork. “You and I don't use texting. I called the cell phone people and asked how much we were paying for texting. Then I told Jenny she had a choice. If she wants to be able to text, she has to pay that part of the bill. She chose no texting, so that part of the service is gone as of this afternoon.”

Joanna was impressed. “That's called making the punishment suit the crime.”

Butch handed Joanna a glass of merlot, passed her the plate of food, and then sat down across the table from her with his own glass.

“What's she doing now?” Joanna asked. “Sulking in her room?”

“No,” Butch said. “She's writing a eulogy for Ms. Highsmith.”

“A eulogy, really?” Joanna asked. “Does she even know what a eulogy is?”

“Sure,” Butch said. “She's a junior. I'm not sure why, but everybody has to read
Julius Caesar
when they're sophomores. That's the way it's always been, but just to bring her up to speed, we went over the whole ‘I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him' bit. I told her that taking and sending the photo was wrong and that the way to make amends to Ms. Highsmith's family would be for Jenny to write a eulogy, something that the family could use at the woman's funeral if they chose to. I told her that even if she thought Ms. Highsmith was the scum of the earth, it's her assignment to find something good to say about her.”

Joanna was looking at him with something akin to slack-jawed wonder. One of Eleanor Lathrop Winfield's objections to Butch as marriage material was the fact that he had never been a father before. She had doubted he was up to the task of taking on a ready-made family, especially one that included a potentially headstrong teenager. Joanna couldn't imagine any biological father, including Andy Brady, doing a better job in this instance, which Butch had handled with complete aplomb.

“How'd I do?” he asked.

“Not bad,” Joanna said, raising her glass in his direction. “Not bad at all. You're definitely top-drawer daddy material, but about my mother …”

“Oh, that,” Butch said offhandedly. “The gala thing.”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “The gala thing. Are you really going to wear your tux?”

“It's black tie optional,” he said. “Since I already have a tux, I might just as well get some use out of it.”

Butch had bought the tux for the Edgar Awards banquet when his first book,
Serve and Protect,
had been nominated for a First Novel Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America. Of course, he hadn't won, and the tux had languished accusingly in the far corner of his closet ever since.

“Besides,” Butch added, “it's for a good cause. The school board and the superintendent of schools think of art as an expendable afterthought. Maggie Oliphant is in the process of proving them wrong.”

“Good point,” Joanna said. “If it's something that's going to put William Farraday in a bad light, I'll go with a happy heart.”

OVER GLASSES OF WINE, JOANNA BROUGHT BUTCH UP TO SPEED
on the investigation into Debra Highsmith's murder, including the fact that the victim apparently wasn't who she had claimed to be. Along with the identity-theft aspects of the case, there was also the disturbing knowledge that Debra had, somewhere along the way, borne a child whose very existence was a mystery.

They stayed up talking until the ten o'clock news came on. Not surprisingly, the murder of Bisbee's high school principal was again the lead story on the broadcast. The segment included Joanna's press conference plea for help in locating family members.

“That's unusual, isn't it?” Butch asked as they headed off to bed right after the news.

“What's unusual?”

“To release the victim's name without first notifying the next of kin.”

“Everything about this case is unusual,” Joanna said, “but with Jenny's photo all over the Web, we really didn't have a choice. Since everybody in town already knew the victim was Debra Highsmith, it made no sense to continue referring to her as an ‘unidentified woman.' Besides, it's possible someone will see the story and come forward.”

“Possible but not likely,” Butch said.

His pessimism wasn't unfounded.

“Stranger things have happened,” Joanna agreed, “but I'm not holding my breath.”

Surprisingly enough, the story bore fruit slightly more than an hour later. Joanna was in bed and sleeping soundly when her cell phone, hooked to a charger on her nightstand, started its ungodly rooster-crowing racket. Butch, who despised that particular ring tone, rolled over and covered his head with a pillow as Joanna answered. Tica Romero, the nighttime dispatcher, was on the line.

“What's up?” Joanna mumbled as she got out of bed and stumbled into the living room to take the call.

“I've got a woman on the line whose name is Sue Ellen Hirales from the Falling H Ranch over in New Mexico.”

The name sounded familiar, but still half asleep, Joanna couldn't put it together. “What does she want?”