“Connie?” Joanna asked. “That would be Constance Marie Haskell?”
Maggie nodded. “She never should have changed her name. I told her not to. You’d think she’d be able to learn from somebody else’s mistake. I did,” she added bitterly. “Took old Gary MacFerson’s last name, that is. Look what it got me.”
“Where’s your sister now?” Joanna asked.
“Beats me. Probably dead in a ditch somewhere if the message on the machine is any indication. ‘Meet me in paradise,’ the son of a bitch says to her on the phone. Meet me in paradise, indeed! I’m here to tell you that if that SOB has killed my sister, I’m going to plug him full of holes. Where’s my gun, by the way? Give it back. I’ve got a license to carry, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s right over there on the counter in my purse. Check it out for yourself if you don’t believe me.”
“You’re saying you think your sister’s dead?” Joanna asked. “Why’s that?”
“The neighbors called me because Connie took off sometime on Thursday. They noticed she left the garage door open. When it was still open . . . What day is it?”
“Saturday,” Joanna answered.
“When it was still open on Friday, they were worried enough to call, and I came to check things out after work. That’s when I heard the message on the machine. You can listen to it too, it you want to.”
An answering machine sat on the kitchen counter next to a large black satchel-style purse. Joanna pressed the message button. “You have no new messages,” a recorded voice told her.
“Damn,” Maggie MacFerson muttered, taking another swig from her glass. “Must have punched ‘erase’ without meaning to. But that’s what he said. ‘Meet me in paradise.’ The dumb broad was so completely enthralled, so totally besotted with the weasely little shit that if he had said ‘Jump in the lake,’ Connie would have done it in a minute even though she can’t swim a stroke. There’s no fool like an old fool.”
“You said something about her money. What about that?”
“There was another message on the machine as well—from Ken Wilson. He’s Connie’s personal banker, but he’s also mine. He was our parents’ private banker before that. I heard that message, too. He said Connie had bounced a check. Which wouldn’t happen—never in a million years. Connie never bounced a check in her life—unlike some other people I could mention.”
Maggie grinned ironically and took another mouthful of Johnnie Walker. “I, on the other hand, have never balanced a checkbook in my life, and I’m still here to tell the tale. But I did call Ken Wilson. I nailed his feet to the ground and made him tell me what the hell was going on. That bastard Ron Haskell has cleaned Connie out, lock, stock, and barrel, just like I said he would. Except it doesn’t feel all that good to say I told you so. It’s gonna break Connie’s heart, as if she hasn’t had enough heartbreak already.”
Standing at the counter, Joanna glanced into the purse. A small wallet lay at the top. “Your license to carry is in this?” she asked, lilting the wallet.
Maggie MacFerson glanced away trout pouring herself another drink. “It’s there,” she said. “Help yourself.”
Joanna opened the wallet and thumbed through the plastic card holders. One of the first things she saw was a press credential that identified Maggie MacFerson as a reporter for Phoenix’s major metropolitan newspaper, the Arizona Reporter. As soon as the woman had mentioned her name, it had sounded familiar. Only now did Joanna understand why.
That Maggie MacFerson, Joanna thought. The investigative reporter.
Behind the press credentials was indeed an embossed concealed-weapon license. Joanna put down the wallet and then reached into her pocket to remove the weapon. “Is this thing loaded?” she asked.
“Sure is,” Maggie replied. “My father used to say that having an unloaded weapon in the house was about as useful as having one of those plumber’s whaddaya-call-its without a handle. I can’t think of the name for the damned thing now. You know what I mean, one of those plunger things.”
“You mean a plumber’s helper?” Joanna offered.
“Right,” Maggie agreed. “A plumber’s helper without a handle. Dad wasn’t big on telling jokes. That’s about as good as his ever got. And that’s gone, too, by the way.”
“What’s gone?”
“Dad’s gun. From the bedroom. The safe is open and the gun is gone. I’ll bet the jerk took that, too.”
Gingerly Joanna opened Maggie MacFerson’s gun and removed the rounds from the cylinder. If Maggie wasn’t still drunk, then she was well on her way to being drunk again. Joanna had already heard the woman threaten to shoot her hapless brother-in-law. Under those circumstances, handing Maggie a loaded weapon would be outright madness. Joanna dropped the nine bullets into her blazer pocket before placing the gun in Maggie’s purse.
“So what are you doing here anyway?” Maggie asked, peering at Joanna over the rim of her raised glass. “What’d you say your name was again?”
“Joanna. Joanna Brady. I’m the sheriff in Cochise County.”
“Tha’s right; tha’s right,” Maggie said, nodding. “I ‘member you. I came down to cover the story when you got elected. So whaddaya want?” With every word spoken, Maggie’s slurred speech grew worse.
“I’m here because a body was found last night in Apache Pass down in the Chiricahuas,” Joanna said quietly. “A medical identification bracelet was found nearby with your sister’s name on it. We need someone to come to Bisbee and identify the body.”
Maggie slammed her empty glass onto the table with so much force that it shattered, sending shards of glass showering in all directions.
“Goddamn that son of a bitch!” she swore. “I really am going to kill him. Just let me get my hands on him. Where is he?”
She sat there with her eyes wide and staring and with the palms of both hands resting in a spray of broken glass. From across the room, Joanna saw blood from Maggie MacFerson’s lacerated hands spreading across the otherwise snow-white tablecloth. Maggie didn’t seem to notice.
“Come on,” Joanna said calmly. “Come away from the broken glass. You’ve cut your hands.”
“Where’s the body?” Maggie demanded, not moving. “Just tell me where Connie’s body is. I’ll go right now. I’ll drive wherever it is. Just tell me.”
Watching the blood soak unheeded into the tablecloth, Joanna knew Maggie MacFerson was in no condition to drive herself anywhere. Walking over to the table, Joanna gently raised Maggie’s bleeding hands out of the glass.
“I’ll take you there,” she said quietly. “Just as soon as we finish cleaning and bandaging your hands.”
Several hours later, after opening the car door and fastening Connie MacFerson’s seat belt, Joanna finally headed out of Phoenix for the three-and-a-half-hour drive to Bisbee while Maggie slept in the Civvie’s spacious front seat. Once out of heavy city traffic, Joanna reached for her phone and asked information for the Conquistador Hotel. Rather than speaking to Butch, she found herself dealing with an impersonal voice-mail system.
“There’s been a slight delay,” she told him in her message. “I’m on my way to Bisbee to do a positive ID. I’m just now passing the Warner Road Exit going southbound, which means you’re right. I am going to miss that rehearsal dinner. I’m so sorry, Butch. I’ll call later and let you know what time I’ll be back at the hotel. Give me a call on the cell phone when you can.”
What she didn’t say in her message was that she had spent the better part of two hours in the ER at St. Joseph’s Hospital while emergency room doctors and nurses removed dozens of tiny pieces of crystal from Maggie MacFerson’s glass-shredded hands and put stitches in some of the longer jagged cuts. Both hands, bandaged into useless clubs, now lay in Maggie’s lap. Even had the woman been stone-sober—which she wasn’t—Joanna knew Maggie wasn’t capable of driving herself the two hundred miles to Bisbee to make the identification—not with her hands in that condition.