As Joanna penciled one obligation after another into her rapidly filling calendar, she realized that even without having officially announced her candidacy, as far as the people of Cochise County were concerned, she was already running for reelection. Every appearance put her in front of voters. Eventually she would have to make an official announcement one way or the other. Right that minute she wasn’t sure what she would do. The morning’s confrontation between Butch and photographer Owen Faulk of the Arizona Reporter had left her feeling as though the most important pieces of her world were at war with one another.
Butch Dixon had yet to come to terms with the idea that being married to Arizona’s only sitting female sheriff meant giving up all claim to anonymity. The incident with Owen Faulk wasn’t the first time Butch had bridled at the unaccustomed and unwelcome intrusion of the press in their lives, but it was certainly the most serious. The fact that Butch had been protecting Jenny made it easy for Joanna to forgive his overreaction, but she doubted that the rest of the world would be equally understanding.
Dealing with that volatile situation had required Joanna’s personal intervention and all her diplomatic skill. First Joanna had had to persuade Butch to cool it. Then she’d had to soothe Jenny, who, after her grueling interview with the Double Cs, was even more traumatized. And, after all that, she’d had to smooth Owen Faulk’s ruffled feathers, managing to dodge a potential liability suit in the process. She had offered assurances that Faulk’s expensive equipment, if broken, would be repaired or replaced. Since the photographer had accepted her offer without any argument, Joanna surmised that Owen Faulk realized that he, too, had been out of line.
So that thorny problem was solved for the time being, but dealing with it had taken Joanna’s attention away from her job and away from the conference room, where Sally Matthews, with Burton Kimball present, was still being interviewed by Raul Enemas, a detective with the City of Bisbee Police Department, and Frank Bonham, one of the officers from the Multi-Jurisdiction Force, along with a representative from the county attorney’s office. By the time Joanna had finished handling the photographer uproar, the interview with Sally Matthews had been in process for well over an hour. Joanna had known better than to walk in and interrupt, and it bothered her that, all this time later, it was still going on without her.
Realizing she’d have to content herself with reading the transcript, Joanna had gone into her office and tackled her logjam of waiting correspondence, only to be interrupted shortly thereafter by Casey Ledford poking her head into her office.
“Mr. Haskell is outside,” Casey told Joanna. “Kristin suggested I bring him back by here so one of the detectives could interview him.”
“That would be great except for one small glitch,” Joanna replied. “At the moment we’re fresh out of detectives.”
“What should I do with him then?”
“Let me talk to him.”
Ron Haskell looked up when Joanna entered the lobby. “Both my detectives are busy this afternoon,” she told him. “Are you planning on going back out to Pathway to Paradise?”
Haskell shook his head. “Amos Parker gave me the boot. He said that since I had violated Pathway rules and was insisting on leaving again without completing my course of treatment, that he’s keeping my money, but I’m not welcome to return. He had me pack up my stuff before I left this morning. I drove into Bisbee on my own.”
“Will you be staying here then?”
Again Ron Haskell shook his head. “I just heard that Connie’s sister, Maggie, is still in town. She’s saying all kinds of wild things about me and making lots of unfounded allegations. I think it’s a bad idea for me to be here when she is. Not only that,” he added, as his eyes filled with tears, “I guess I need to plan Connie’s funeral.”
Knowing Maggie MacFerson’s penchant for carrying loaded weapons, Joanna Brady heartily concurred with Ron Haskell’s decision to leave town. “That’s probably wise,” she said. “Your going home, that is.”
“From what I’ve heard, Maggie seems to think I’m responsible for what happened to Connie,” Ron added. “And she’s right there, you know. I am responsible even if I didn’t kill her myself. I’m the one who made the phone call and asked her to come down to Paradise to see me. If it hadn’t been for that, she’d most likely still be at home—safe and alive. But Connie was my wife, Sheriff Brady. I loved her.” His voice cracked with emotion.
While Ron Haskell struggled with his ragged emotions, Joanna thought about how difficult it would be for her already over-worked detectives to schedule an interview with him once he had returned to Phoenix, two hundred miles away.
Time to make like the Little Red Hen and do it myself, she thought.
“I expected my homicide investigators to be here this afternoon, but they were called to Tucson this morning,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go ahead and ask you a few questions myself.”
“Sure,” Haskell said. “I guess that would be fine. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“Do you want an attorney to be present?”
“I don’t really need one. I didn’t kill my wife, if that’s what you mean.”
“All right, but I’ll need to record our interview and have another officer present when I do it,” Joanna told him.
“Fine,” Ron Haskell said.
Joanna went out of her office and knocked on Frank Montoya’s door. “Care to join me playing detective?” she asked. “Ron Haskell is here and ready to be questioned, except Ernie and Jaime are both in Tucson.”
“Where should we do it?” Frank asked.
“The interview room is still busy with the Sally Matthews bunch. I guess it’ll have to be in my office.”
When Joanna reentered the room, Ron Haskell was standing by the large open window and staring up at the expanse of ocotillo-dotted limestone cliffs that formed the background to the Cochise County Justice Center.
“I really did love Connie, you know,” he said softly, as Joanna returned to her desk. “I never intended to do that—love her, you see. And I didn’t at first. Maggie must have figured that out. She didn’t like me the moment she first laid eyes on me. She said right off the bat that all I was after was Connie’s money, and to begin with, money was all I wanted. Why not? I’d had to struggle all my life. I went to school on scholarships and had to fight and work for everything I got while Connie was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Other than taking care of her folks when they got old and sick, she never had to work a day in her life. When we got married, she had money—enough, I suppose, so the two of us would have been comfortable as long as we didn’t do anything too wild or crazy.
“But then she made it too easy for inc. She gave me free rein with running the finances—turned them over to me completely. About that time is when I came up with the bright idea that I could turn that tidy little sum of hers into a real fortune for both of us.”
“I take it that didn’t work?” Joanna asked dryly.
Ron nodded miserably in agreement. “I got hooked into daytrading—tech stocks and IPOs mostly. I figured it was just a matter of time before I’d hit it big, but I ended up taking a bath. Connie’s money slipped through my fingers like melted butter. And that only made me try harder and lose more. It turned into a kind of sickness.”
“Which is how you ended up at Pathway?”
“Yes.”
Frank came in then, carrying a tape recorder which he set up on Joanna’s desk. “Tell us about last Thursday,” Joanna said to Ron Haskell, after Mirandizing him and going through the drill of starting the recording and identifying the participants.
“I called Connie,” Ron Haskell said. “I went down to the general store in Portal a little before noon. I called her at home without having Amos Parker’s express permission to do so. Clients at Pathway aren’t allowed to have any contact with their families until Amos gives the go-ahead, but I wanted to talk to her right then. I needed to tell her what had happened and explain what was going on. By then I was sure she had to know the money was gone, but I wanted to see her in person.”