Without replying, Joanna started to leave the room. “One more thing,” Maggie added before the door could close. “You might want to check out the first story. It’ll be in late editions of the Reporter. I phoned it in last night, too late to make the statewide editions, but it’ll be in the metropolitan ones.”
“Great,” Joanna muttered, after slamming the door shut behind her. “I can hardly wait.”
Joanna left Bisbee seething with anger. Between there and Phoenix, she drove too hard and too fast. Twice she booted left-lane-hugging eighteen-wheelers out of the way by turning on the Civvie’s under-grille lights. Several times along the way she tried phoning Butch, but now when he didn’t answer she hung up before the voice-mail system ever picked up the call. She was tired of leaving messages in the room since he evidently wasn’t bothering to pick them up. A call to Dispatch told her that Detectives Carpenter and Carbajal were on their way to Portal, where they hoped to locate and question Ron Haskell. She also learned that there was still no trace of Sally Matthews.
No surprises there, Joanna told herself.
A little past ten she pulled into the porte cochere at the Conquistador and handed her car keys over to the parking valet. Joanna let herself into their twelfth-floor room to find that the bed was made and the message light was flashing. She assumed that the room had been made up after Butch left that morning, but a check of the messages disabused her of that notion. The messages were all her messages to Butch. There were none from him for her.
She felt a sudden tightening in her stomach. What if something’s happened to him? she wondered. What if he’s been in a car accident or was struck while crossing a street?
Turning on her heel, she hurried out of the room and lack down to the lobby, where she planned to buttonhole someone at the desk. By now it was verging on checkout time, so naturally she was stuck waiting in a long line. While there, she caught a glimpse of a copy of the Sunday edition of the Arizona Reporter held by a man two places in front of her. “Murder Strikes Close to Home,” the newspaper headline read. Beneath the headline was a black-and-white photo of two women, one of whom was unmistakably a much younger version of Maggie MacFerson.
Leaving her place in line, Joanna went to the hotel gift shop and purchased her own copy of the paper and then sat down on one of the couches in the lobby to read it. There were actually two separate articles. Keeping an eye on the line at the front desk, she skimmed through the staff-written piece with three different reporters’ names listed in the byline. That one was a straightforward news article dealing with the murder of Constance Marie Haskell, daughter of a well-known Valley of the Sun developer, Stephen Richardson, and his wife, Claudia. Maggie MacFerson, a longtime Arizona Reporter columnist and investigative reporter, was listed in the article as a sister of the victim. The other article carried a Maggie MacFerson byline and was preceded by an editor’s note.
For years Arizona Reporter prizewinning staff member Maggie MacFerson has distinguished herself as one of the foremost investigative reporters in the nation. Now, after years of being on the reporting side of the news, she finds herself in the opposite camp.
The discovery late Friday night of Ms. MacFerson’s brutally slain younger sister and fellow heiress, Constance Marie Haskell, puts Maggie in the shoes of countless others who have suffered through the unimaginable horror of having a loved one murdered.
Ms. MacFerson’s reputation as a trusted investigative reporter allows her a unique position from which to write about the other victims of homicide—the relatives and friends of the dead—who have few choices to make and even less control in the aftermath of a violent death.
She has agreed to write a series of articles recounting her terrible journey, which began with the discovery of her murdered sister’s body two days ago in rural Cochise County. The first of those articles appears below.
Editor
Years ago I stood in a rainy, windblown cemetery in south Phoenix talking to a grieving mother whose sixteen-year--old son’s bullet-riddled body had been found iii the garbage-strewn sands of the Salt River four days earlier. Her son, a gang member, had been gunned down by two wannabe members of a rival gang as part of an initiation requirement. I’ll never forget her words.
“Cops don’t want to tell me nothin’,” she said. “Just what they think I need to know. Don’t they understand? I’m that boy’s mother. I need to know it all.”
That woman’s words came back to me today with a whole new impact as I tried to come to grips with the horror that someone has murdered my forty-three-year-old sister, Constance Marie Haskell.
I didn’t hear the news over the phone. The cops actually did that part right. Connie’s body was found Friday night in Cochise County, near a place called Apache Pass. Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady herself came to see me Saturday to give me the terrible news. But somehow, in the process she neglected to tell me several things, including who it was who had found the body.
I suppose that oversight should be understandable since, in addition to being sheriff, Joanna Brady is also the mother of a twelve-year-old-daughter, and mothers—even mothers who aren’t sheriffs—are known to be protective, sometimes overly so.
Jennifer Ann Brady and an equally headstrong friend, Dora Matthews, slipped away from a Girl Scout camp-out on Friday night to have a smoke. It was while they were AWOL from their tent that they discovered my sister’s naked and bludgeoned body.
Most of the time juveniles who find bodies are interviewed and made much of in the media. After all, in reporting a crime they’re thought to be doing the “right thing.” Sheriff Brady told me none of this, but the information was easy enough for me to discover, along with a possible explanation for Ms. Brady’s apparent reticence.
After all, what law enforcement officer wants to reveal to outsiders that his or her offspring is hanging out with the child of a known criminal? Because that’s exactly what Dora Matthews is—the daughter of an alleged dealer in illegal drugs.
The fact that convicted drug dealer Sally Lorraine Matthews was reportedly running a meth lab out of her home in Old Bisbee may have been news to local law enforcement authorities who called for a Department of Public Safety Haz-Mat team to come clean up the mess last night, but it certainly wasn’t news to some of Sally’s paying customers, the drug consumers who hang out in city parks or wander dazedly up and down Bisbee’s fabled Brewery Gulch.
With my sister’s chilled body lying in the Cochise County Morgue, all I had to do was ask a few questions to find out what was really going on. I suspect that Sheriff Brady could have discovered that same information earlier than yesterday—if she’d bothered to ask, that is. But then, maybe she thought what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, either.
Moving on to the Cochise County Morgue brings me to something else the sheriff failed to mention—the fact that Cochise County Medical Examiner Dr. George Winfield happens to he married to Sheriff Brady’s mother. I’m sure if I had asked her why she didn’t tell me that, her answer would have been the same—I didn’t need to know.
Which brings me back to that heartbroken mother standing in that Phoenix cemetery. What all did police officers fail to tell her that she, too, didn’t need to know?
At this moment, the only thing I know for sure is that Connie, my baby sister, is dead. I can’t think about her the way she was as a sunny six-year-old, when I taught her how to ride a bike. I can’t think about how she almost drowned when I tried to teach her to swim in our backyard pool. I can’t think about how we sounded when our mother tried, unsuccessfully, to teach us to sing “Silent Night” in three-part harmony.