Burton Kimball seemed to read her mind. “Don’t worry, Sheriff Brady,” he said. “Ignacio Ybarra won’t take off. I give you my word.”
Nodding, Joanna went out and closed the door. In the reception area, she met Ernie and Ignacio Ybarra as they entered the room. The young man was taller than Joanna expected-well over six feet. He was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and good-looking, except for the fact that his face was covered by a series of scrapes and ugly bruises. He held himself stiffly, as though his whole body hurt.
“How do you do, Mr. Ybarra,” Joanna said.
Anxiously, Ignacio peered around the room. “I thought Mr. Kimball was supposed to be here,” he said.
“He is,” Joanna responded. She pointed toward her closed office door. “In there. He’s waiting to speak to you. You may go in.”
With a glance over his shoulder at a fuming Detective Carpenter, Ignacio Ybarra walked past them both and into the sheriff’s private office while Joanna turned to her outraged detective.
“We don’t have to do this,” Ernie grumbled. “Allowing them a private conversation isn’t required by law. And why leave them alone in your office? What if Ybarra takes off?”
“He won’t,” Joanna said. “It may not be a legal requirement, but giving them the opportunity to confer in private is an act of common decency. Burton told me that he barely knows his client. Why shouldn’t we give them a chance to introduce themselves?”
“You’re telling me Kimball claims he doesn’t know him?” Shaking his head, Ernie broke off in disgust. “I doubt that. When we picked Ybarra up, he just happened to have Burton Kimball’s home telephone number on him. In a pencil-written note in his shirt pocket. That doesn’t much sound like strangers to me. And when he made his single phone call, all Ybarra had to do was tell Burton Kimball his name and the attorney says he’ll be right here. Which he is, by the way.”
“That’s all that was said, Ignacio Ybarra’s name?”
Ernie consulted his notes. “That’s right. Ybarra says, ‘It’s me, Mr. Kimball, Ignacio Ybarra,’ and then he hangs up. Burton Kimball drops everything on a Sunday night and scoots right over here. Yup, I’m sure they’re strangers.” The sarcasm in Ernie’s voice wasn’t lost on Joanna.
“So you’re saying Burton Kimball had already been alerted to some coming legal difficulty long before you and Jaime showed up at Ignacio’s house?”
“You bet. Mr. Ybarra may have put on an Academy Award-worthy performance when we told him Brianna O’Brien was dead, but it isn’t going to wash with mc. And neither is his cock and-bull story about some guy he didn’t know beating the crap out of him.”
“What do you think did happen?” Joanna asked.
“My guess is that he and Brianna got into some kind of beef. II turned physical. He ended up killing her, but with her giving almost as good as she got. Then, realizing what he’d done, he decided to run the truck off the cliff and try to make it look like an accident.”
“Without any clothes on?” Joanna raised an eyebrow. “Do you have anything at all to substantiate that theory, Ernie?”
“Not so far,” he grunted, “but I’m working on it.”
The door to Joanna’s office opened and both Burton Kimball and a subdued Ignacio Ybarra walked into the reception room. “We’re ready now,” the attorney announced. “Where are we going to do this? One of the interview rooms?”
“How about right here?” Joanna suggested. “It’s certainly noire comfortable than anywhere else, and bigger, too.”
They settled into places, with Ignacio and Burton Kimball pearling themselves in the two matching captain’s chairs. Ernie assumed the love seat, while Joanna leaned against the front of her secretary’s desk.
Ernie didn’t waste any time. “All right, Mr. Ybarra. May I call you Iggy?”
Ignacio shrugged. “I like Nacio better, but Iggy’s okay.”
“Very well, Nacio. Why don’t you tell us in your own words exactly what your relationship was to the dead woman.”
Ignacio Ybarra winced at the words. His face paled. “We were in love,” he said softly. “We wanted to get married someday.’’
“Did Brianna’s parents know anything about that?” Ernie asked.
“Probably not,” Nacio said.
“Why’s that?”
Ignacio’s eyes met and held Ernie’s. “Because we didn’t tell them. They wouldn’t have approved,” Nacio said.
“Because Mr. O’Brien doesn’t like Mexicans?”
“I guess,” Nacio said quietly. “But I’m an American. I was born in Douglas.”
“All right,” Ernie said. “Now, why don’t you tell us what happened last Friday?”
“Bree and I were supposed to go away together,” Nacio said. “To the Peloncillos, but when she came by to meet me, I told her my aunt got sick and ended up in the hospital in Tucson. I was going to have to work Friday night and Saturday morning both. I thought Bree would just go back home. Instead, she decided to go on up to the mountains by herself to wait for me. That way, she said, she could reserve our camping place, and I could come up on Saturday whenever I got off. That’s the last I saw her.”
“And you let her go? Just like that?”
“Bree did what she wanted,” Nacio said. “I didn’t have any choice.”
“So tell us about Saturday,” Ernie continued. “Did you go to the mountains to meet her?”
“Yes,” Nacio said. “I went where Bree was supposed to be, but she wasn’t there. She had been, but she must have left.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I found part of her earring. It was lying in the dirt.”
Joanna had been standing quietly to one side, listening. Mention of the earring jarred her out of her self-imposed silence. “What kind of earring?”
“A pearl,” Nacio said as tears suddenly welled in both eyes. “The earrings were a graduation present to her from me.”
Remembering Katherine O’Brien’s surprising response upon hearing about the existence of that one earring, Joanna thought she understood it better now. It wasn’t just a matter of David O’Brien’s being offended by pierced ears. It had as much or more to do with who had given Bree the pearl earrings in the first place.
“Where is it now?” Joanna asked.
“I lost it again.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” Nacio murmured.
There wasn’t a person in the room who didn’t believe Ignacio Ybarra’s barely audible answer was a lie. Ernie Carpenter bounced on it at once. “You expect us to swallow that?” he demanded. “You know exactly where you found it but you can’t tell us where you lost it again?”
Nacio shook his head. Ernie’s glower proclaimed he was unconvinced, but Nacio said nothing more.
“So,” Ernie continued a moment later, “you went up to the mountains. When Brianna wasn’t there, what did you think?”
Nacio shrugged. “I thought maybe she was mad at me.”
“Why?”
“Because I was so late. I thought maybe she got tired of waiting and just went home.”
“What did you do then?”
“I went back home, too. I went to work, actually. I kept thinking she’d come by and see me there, but she didn’t.”
“Let’s go back to the camping bit. Where was that, the spot where you usually stayed?”
“Up in the Peloncillos,” Nacio said. “Along the creek.”
“In Skeleton Canyon?”
“I’m not sure which canyon is which out there. They all sort of run together, but where we camped is in a little clearing. It’s just off the road, but hidden from the road. Easy to get to but hard to see.”
“You didn’t have to go four-wheeling it to get there?”
“No,” Nacio said. “Not at all.”
Standing outside the fray as the questions droned on and on, Joanna’s attention began to wander. She was going more by her impressions of how Nacio answered-of his manner in doing so-rather than by his specific replies. Joanna had the sense that, for the most part, Ignacio Ybarra was telling the truth-that he had loved Brianna O’Brien and was devastated by her loss. He spoke of her with the bewildered pain of someone who can’t quite come to terms with what has happened, of someone who wants nothing more than to awaken and discover what he thought had happened was nothing but a bad dream.