Judgment Call (18 page)

“She says she's a friend of Debra Highsmith and she may have important information for us. I offered to put her in touch with one of the detectives on the case, but she wants to speak to you—to you and no one else. She's also on her way here.”

“To the department?” Joanna asked.

“Yes,” Tica replied.

“Right now?” Joanna demanded. “In the middle of the night?”

“That's what she said,” Tica replied.

Joanna sighed. Going into the office on a middle-of-the-night wild-goose chase was exactly what she didn't want to do, but she also didn't seem to have a choice.

“All right,” she said. “I'll be there. Do me a favor. Start a fresh pot of coffee in the break room. I don't want to drink the stuff that's been sitting there cooking since the swing shift came on duty.”

“Do you want me to call out Detectives Howell and Carbajal?”

“No,” Joanna said. “Whatever this is, I'll handle it. I'm going to need them to be on their toes tomorrow. Better for one person to be dragging instead of the whole crew. Besides, you said she asked for me by name, right?”

“You're the one she wanted.”

“Okay. I'll be there ASAP.”

Joanna tiptoed back into the bedroom to get her clothes. “Somebody dead?” Butch asked.

A reasonable question for a middle-of-the-night call-out. “Someone with information about Debra Highsmith,” Joanna answered. “She wants to give it to me and nobody else.”

“Couldn't it wait until morning?”

“Evidently not.”

Joanna managed to pull on her clothing without turning on the light. Once she was dressed, she paused long enough to give Butch a kiss on the top of his head.

“Be safe,” he murmured.

“Will,” she replied, then she hustled out to the laundry room, where she collected her weapons from the wall safe Butch had installed over the washer/dryer. As the ten-minute drive in the cool night air cleared the cobwebs out of her head, she remembered that the Falling H Ranch in the Animas Valley was part of the Malpai Borderlands Group. It was possible that the woman coming to see her might be able to explain why that organization in particular had been designated as Debra Highsmith's life insurance beneficiary.

By the time Joanna arrived at the Justice Center, she was already second-guessing her decision to interview the unexpected witness alone. Having more than one investigator present was a good idea, not only in terms of asking the questions but also for remembering the answers.

“I have a witness coming in,” she told her watch commander, recently promoted Sergeant Ted Lang. “I want you to set up interview room one.”

“Do you want me to have a deputy come sit in?” he asked. “I can call someone in from Patrol, or I could do it myself.”

“No,” Joanna said. “Don't bother. I don't foresee this witness causing any kind of difficulty, but at the same time, I want to be sure that I don't miss anything. If we tape it, I can go back over it later, and so can my detectives. When the witness—Sue Ellen Hirales—gets here,” Joanna added, “have her taken directly to the interview room as though it's standard procedure.”

“You got it, boss,” Lang said.

Joanna had come into the building through the secure door into her private office. After stopping by the break room to collect a freshly brewed cup of coffee, she returned to her office and settled in to wait. She didn't know exactly how long it would take to get from Animas to Bisbee—probably the better part of two hours—but she also had no idea if Sue Ellen had called the department while already in transit. Joanna sipped her coffee, knowing as she did so that it would probably make sleep difficult later on, providing there was time to sleep.

Since she was at her desk, she decided to make good use of the time. She had been out of the office most of the day. That meant she was behind on her paperwork. She looked through the watch commanders' summaries of what had gone on. Other than an accident down by Greenbrush Draw involving a DUI and multiple non-life-threatening injuries, there wasn't much to report. She soon found her attention straying from the routine paperwork. Putting it aside, she stared at the eerie moonlit desert outside her window and struggled with the unanswered but essential questions of the Debra Highsmith case. Who was Debra Highsmith? How old was she? Where had she come from? It seemed to Joanna that the only way to get some traction in finding out who had killed the woman was to find out who she was and why she had been in hiding.

Joanna returned to Abby Holder's half-kidding suggestion that perhaps Debra Highsmith had been in a witness protection program of some kind. Since all of her school records had been done under the alias, Joanna was left to wonder what she could possibly have known as a girl—what damning evidence could a mere teenager have provided—that would have required placing her in a witness protection program? And what about her child? Dr. Machett claimed that she had given birth to a child, but where was it? Was Debra's murder somehow related to this unknown child? Had she given him or her up for adoption? Had the baby died in childbirth? What?

Lost in thought, Joanna was startled when Sergeant Lang tapped on her door. “Witness is ready and waiting in the interview room,” he said. “I offered her coffee. She declined. Watch yourself. She looks tough—as though she wouldn't mind taking on a couple of black bears single-handed.”

“I'll keep that in mind.”

Joanna stopped in the hallway outside the interview room and peered in at Sue Ellen Hirales through the two-way mirrored glass. Ted Lang was right. It was hard to tell the woman's age. Her weathered skin made her look to be somewhere in her sixties. Her iron-gray hair was cut in a short, straight bob. She was dressed the way cowboys dress for cold weather—long-sleeved flannel shirt, worn jeans, and a pair of dusty boots that had seen plenty of stirrup use in their day. On the floor next to the boots sat an old-fashioned piece of luggage, one that Joanna's mother referred to as a train case and which Eleanor still preferred to use when transporting makeup and hair equipment on long hauls in the RV.

Clearly this was a working cowgirl who spent hours in the sun and wasn't likely to have a close relationship with anyone in the cosmetics industry, including a neighborhood Avon lady. There was no lipstick on her thin, parched lips, and Joanna doubted she squandered time, money, or energy on moisturizers or sunscreen, either. After a quick mental calculation, Joanna chopped twenty years off what she had initially assumed to be the woman's age. Sue Ellen Hirales was probably only in her forties.

She waited quietly at the small Formica table in the interview room. There was no fidgeting. Her hands rested in her lap. She exhibited no interest or curiosity in her surroundings. This was a woman who was accustomed to waiting out the seasons. For someone like that, a few minutes spent in an interview room were of no consequence.

Joanna opened the door and let herself into the room, holding out her hand as she did so. “Ms. Hirales? I'm Sheriff Brady. I understand you wanted to see me.”

Sue Ellen Hirales stood up. Her handshake was beyond firm. Her skin was dry and rough. Her palms were callused from doing hard manual labor. Joanna suspected that she was someone who had not only ridden fence lines but had built them as well.

“Can I get you something?” Joanna offered.

Sue Ellen shook her head. “Pretending this is a social visit won't make it any easier. I'm here because my friend is dead, and I'm doing what she asked me to do. That's all.”

“I'm sorry for your loss,” Joanna murmured, taking a seat.

“Thank you,” Sue Ellen said, nodding stiffly and wiping away a tear as she resumed her seat. She looked too tough to be susceptible to tears.

Is that the big secret? Joanna wondered. Were Debra Highsmith and Sue Ellen Hirales a gay couple? William Farraday probably wouldn't have approved of having a gay high school principal any more than he would have liked having one with an out-of-wedlock baby.

Joanna had been prepared to ask questions. That proved unnecessary. Sue Ellen had come there to tell her story and did so with no prompting.

“I spent the last five days out on the trail with some well-to-do assholes from back east who think they're great white hunters but who didn't have brains enough to take a shot when I gave 'em one. We got back home late tonight. Mom was watching the news and saw the story about Debra. I was out feeding and watering the stock when she came to the barn to tell me. When I finished with the horses, I got cleaned up and headed out.”

The hunting part was what finally allowed Joanna to pull the pieces together. Cougars poaching livestock were an ongoing problem for ranchers in both the San Bernardino and Animas Valleys and in the Peloncillo Mountains, which stuck up like a rocky spine between the two. For years Augusto Hirales, one of the ranchers in the area, had offered guided cougar hunts to big-game hunters. If Sue Ellen was Augusto's daughter, it appeared she had now taken over that aspect of the business.

“Augusto is your father?” Joanna asked, just to be sure.

Sue Ellen nodded.

“If you don't mind my asking,” Joanna said, “what is the nature of your relationship to Ms. Highsmith?”

“It's a long story,” Sue Ellen said.

“That's all right,” Joanna told her. “I'm in no hurry. We've got all night.”

“If that's the case, maybe I'll take you up on that offer of coffee after all.”

Joanna recognized the request as a delaying tactic. “Cream and sugar?”

“Just black. It's too much trouble to drag all that stuff along on a hunt. I've learned to do without.”

Joanna went back to the break room, poured herself a second cup, and brought another one along for Sue Ellen.

“Are you recording this?” Sue Ellen asked when Joanna set the cup down in front of her.

“Taping it, yes,” Joanna answered. “You asked for me, but I have a team of homicide detectives who are handling the case. If anything you tell me is applicable to the case, they need to have access to the information.”

Sue Ellen nodded her understanding. “All right,” she said, “but first tell me. How did Debra die? The news said something about her being shot.”

“Several times,” Joanna said. “In the leg and in the back. She was alive when she was taken from her home in town and then held for several hours. Sometime later she was transported to a deserted area out along High Lonesome Road where she was shot, maybe while she was attempting to escape. We can't be sure about that. There was evidence that restraints had been used, but no restraints were found on the body.”

“Not somebody local, then,” Sue Ellen said.

“What makes you say that?”

“High Lonesome Road. That's where you live, isn't it—on High Lonesome Ranch? A local would have to be dumb as a stump to shoot somebody just up the road from the sheriff's place.”

It was an astute observation, and one that didn't exclude either Marty Pembroke or his father. They were new to town. Joanna doubted they had any idea about where she lived.

“You're right, of course,” Joanna said. “I sometimes forget that this is a place where almost everybody knows everybody else. Except for Debra Highsmith, that is. What I've learned so far is that she was a very private person and hardly anybody knows much about her. I'm hoping you're the exception to that rule.”

“She was my best friend,” Sue Ellen said with a sudden burst of emotion. “The first real friend I ever had. I can't believe she's gone.”

“Tell me about her,” Joanna urged. “Where did you meet?”

“At Good Shepherd Academy in Albuquerque,” Sue Ellen said. “It's a boarding school. Expensive. Two girls to a room, but none of the other girls wanted to room with me because I was a dyke. They acted like being queer was contagious or something. When Debra showed up as the new girl that fall, the nuns put her with me, and she didn't seem to mind. I'd lived on the ranch all my life. I'd been friends with ranch hands and the like, but I'd never been friends with another girl before, and not friends with benefits, either,” she added, giving Joanna a hard look. “Just friends.

“She told me that she was alone—that her whole family, her parents and a younger brother, had died in a car wreck in Michigan a year earlier. They were on vacation without her when the driver of an eighteen-wheeler fell asleep, lost control, and smashed their car flat. Other than a grandmother somewhere back east, Debra had no one. The grandmother was the one who had sent her to Albuquerque to Good Shepherd. Later on that fall, she told me the grandmother had died, too. It turns out that was a lie, but I believed it at the time. I believed it until tonight.”

Sue Ellen looked down at the train case at her feet. She paused for a moment. Rather than pushing her, Joanna let the silence linger. Finally, Sue Ellen resumed her story.

“Because she had no family left and nowhere to go for the holidays, when Christmas came around that year, I invited her to come home with me. My family loved her as much as I did. From the moment she walked through the door, they treated her like she was another daughter, which, as far as my parents were concerned, she was. They gave her a room of her own. That's where she stayed whenever she came to see us, and that's where I found this tonight.” She nodded toward the train case. “It was on the top shelf of her closet, just where she said it would be.”