“She’s a what?” Joanna asked.
“She’s just a matron in the jail.”
“Yes,” Joanna replied evenly but her green eyes were shedding sparks. “She is, and it turns out all the jail inmates and the people who work there got together to send her get-well wishes. It seems to me the deputies shouldn’t do any less.”
“You can’t order us to do anything.” Galloway bristled.
“Who said anything about ordering?” Joanna said. “It’s merely a suggestion, Deputy Galloway. A strong suggestion. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re a team here. Yes, Yolanda Cañedo is a jail matron. In your book that may make her somehow less worthy, but let me tell you something. If it weren’t for the people running our jail, you’d only be able to do half your job, and the same would hold true for every other deputy out on a patrol. You wouldn’t be able to arrest anyone, because there wouldn’t be anyplace to put them. So what I’m strongly suggesting, as opposed to ordering, is that some of the deputies may want to make it their business to see that some cards and letters go wending their way to Yolanda in care of University Medical Center in Tucson.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ken Galloway said, standing up. His face was flushed with anger. “Will there be anything else?”
“No,” Joanna said quietly. “I think that just about covers it.”
Galloway strode out of her office. With her hands still trembling with anger, Joanna cleared her desk by swiping the remaining paperwork into her briefcase, then she took a stack of correspondence due for mailing and/or filing out to Kristin.
“Frank and I are leaving for Bowie,” she told her secretary. “If either Jaime Carbajal or Ernie Carpenter calls in, tell them to try reaching me by cell phone.”
“When will you be back?”
“That remains to be seen,” Joanna said. “How about that bunch of reporters? Are they still parked outside?”
Kristin nodded. “I thought the heat would have driven them away by now, but so far they haven’t budged.”
“Call over to Motor Pool and have Frank pick me up at the back door,” Joanna said. “When we take off, I’d rather not have a swarm of reporters breathing down our necks.”
Back at her desk, she paused long enough to marshal her thoughts before dialing her mother’s number. Three rings later, the answering machine came on. It seemed unlikely that leaving a recorded message would qualify for keeping her promise to George Winfield. She certainly wasn’t about to launch into any detailed discussion of the Dora Matthews situation.
“Hi, Mom,” Joanna said in her most noncommittal and cheerful voice. “Just calling to talk for a minute. I’m on my way to Bowie with Frank Montoya. Give me a call on my cell phone if you get a chance. Bye.”
She was waiting in the shaded parking area a few minutes later when Frank came around the building.
“I was thinking,” he said, once she was inside with her seat belt fastened. “We may be making too much of this telephone thing. We don’t know for sure that Alice Miller or whatever her name is really made that second call.”
“Who was it billed to?” Joanna asked.
“It wasn’t. The call to Quartzite East was paid for in cash. The problem is, Alice Miller could very well have put the phone down and someone else was standing next to the phone waiting to pick it up.”
“You could be right,” Joanna said a moment later. “I guess we’ll see when we get there.”
They drove past the collection of air-conditioned press vehicles that were parked in front of the building and from there out through the front gate and onto the highway. Watching in the passenger-side mirror, Joanna was happy to see that no one followed them. “It’s like a feeding frenzy, isn’t it,” she said.
Frank nodded. “Since the Arizona Reporter thinks it’s an important story, everybody else thinks it’s an important story, too.”
“Maybe it is an important story,” Joanna allowed. “Doc Winfield is of the opinion that the guy who killed Connie Haskell was’t a novice.”
“Point taken,” Frank said. “In other words, if he’s done it before, we’d better nail the bastard quick before he does it again.”
“Exactly,” Joanna said, trying to keep the discouragement and dread out of her voice, because she was sure both George Winfield and Frank Montoya were right. If she and her people didn’t catch Connie Haskell’s killer soon enough, he would certainly strike again.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Half an hour later they were nearing Elfrida when Joanna’s cell phone rang. “Hello, Jaime,” she answered “What’s up?”
“I’ve spent the last two hours of my life with a bitch on wheels named Mrs. Richard Bernard—Amy for short.”
“Chris’s mother?”
“Affirmative on that.”
“What about Chris himself? Did you talk to him?” Joanna asked.
“According to Mama Bernard, she has no idea where her son Christopher is at the moment and no idea when he’s expected home, either. He’s evidently out for the afternoon with some pals of his. In addition, she says nobody’s talking to him without both his father and his attorney being present. Ernie and I have tentative appointment with the Bernards for tomorrow morning at ten o’clock. But we did manage to ferret out the connection between Chris Bernard and Dora Matthews.”
“Really. What’s that?”
“When Dora was placed in foster care here in Tucson last summer, the foster family she lived with happened to be the Bernards’ next-door neighbors, some people named Dugan. I can tell you for sure that Mrs. Bernard is still ripped about that. The Bernards live in a very nice, ritzy neighborhood up in the foothills off Tanque Verde. In that neighborhood, they’re the new kids on the block. They happen to have more money than anybody, and they don’t mind flaunting it. When they moved in, they were dismayed to learn that the Dugans—Mr. and Mrs. Edward Dugan, who are the Bernards’ nearest neighbors—happen to be state-approved foster parents with a long history of taking in troubled kids and helping them get a fresh start.
“The Bernards were unhappy about the foster-parent bit and went before the homeowners’ association to complain. They asked the association to keep the Dugans from accepting any more foster children. As Amy Bernard told us, she didn’t like the idea of her son being exposed to those kinds of kids.
“But it turns out the Dugans are nice people who have been doing foster-care work for years. Most of the kids they’ve taken in have gone on to have excellent track records. When the Bernards’ complaint came before the homeowners’ association, the board ruled against them. Caring for foster children may have been against the neighborhood’s official CC and Rs, but that rule had gone unenforced for so long that the board just let it slide.”
“So much for neighborly relations,” Joanna said.
“Let me add,” Jaime continued, “that when it conies to plain old ordinary obnoxiousness, Amy Bernard is a piece of work. She doesn’t approve of the Dugans’ foster-care work, and from the way she acted, she didn’t much like having to talk to a Latino detective, either. It I had been on the homeowners’ board, I probably would have voted against the woman on principle alone. I’m sure she has lots of money—her hubby’s a radiologist—but she’s not exactly Mrs. Congeniality. When we told her Dora Matthews was dead, she said, and I quote, ‘Good riddance. She was nothing but a piece of trash.’ ”
“Not a nice way to talk about the person who was carrying your grandchild,” Joanna said. “And how old is Christopher Bernard?”
“Sixteen,” Jaime answered. “Just turned. According to his mother, he got his driver’s license in April.”
“That makes him three years older than Dora. So my question is, who was being exposed to whom?”