“Just the same, can you give us his number?”
“Stevie’s? Up in Phoenix?”
Joanna nodded. “Please,” she said.
“I guess so.” Unsteadily, Maggie Hastings hoisted herself off the couch, then she wobbled across the room and staggered down a short hallway. For several minutes, Joanna and Ernie could hear her in a room down the hall, mumbling and cursing. Finally she returned, carrying a frayed business card.
“Here it is!” she announced triumphantly, handing it over to Joanna. “Alf says I never can find anything in all this mess, but he’s wrong, you know. There’s a system around here. He just doesn’t understand it, that’s all.”
She belched then, spewing a cloud of stale gin throughout the room. “Can I get you something?” she asked.
Looking down at the card, Joanna barely heard her. “Air Conditioning Enterprises,” the raised print said. “Stephan J. Marcovich, President.”
“No,” Joanna managed, coming to her senses. “Nothing, thank you. We’ve got to go.”
As soon as the door opened and they stepped out into the fresh air and light, the dog resumed its barking. “What’s going on?” Ernie asked as they headed toward the cars. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
In a way, Joanna had seen a ghost-her father’s. She was remembering a breakfast from long ago. Her father, D. H. Lathrop-only a deputy back then-had been working on a case. “When it comes to homicide,” he had announced over his bacon and eggs, “there ain’t no such thing as coincidence.”
“Isn’t,” Eleanor had returned at once, correcting his gram-mar as usual. She was forever doing that, trying to weed out the remnants of her husband’s Arkansas childhood. “There isn’t any such thing,” she added for good measure.
It was one of the few times Joanna could remember her mother’s habitual corrections riling her easygoing, even-tempered father. “Ellie,” he had said, banging his coffee cup back into the saucer. “It would be nice if, just once in your life, you’d listen to what I mean instead of picking apart whatever I say.”
With that, he had stood up and stalked out of the house. “Well?” Ernie pressed. “What’s going on?”
“I’m remembering something my father said years ago,” she told him, handing over the card. “He told me once that, in a homicide case, there’s no such thing as coincidence.”
“I’d have to agree, but…”
“Did I mention anything to you about Jim Hobbs being offered the opportunity to get in on an illegal Freon buy? The guy trying to put the deal together was Sam Nettleton.”
“Nettleton? The scuzzball towing operator from up in Benson?”
“Right.”
Ernie shook his head. “You didn’t say a word to me about it.”
“Sorry. With everything else that happened, it must have slipped my mind. But I did call Adam York about it. He said the DEA is investigating a big Freon-smuggling deal up in Phoenix, something involving one of the big refrigeration con-tractors. So here we have a Cochise County Freon case, supposedly unrelated to theirs, and a Phoenix air-conditioning contractor connected, however loosely, to one of our homicides. What do you think?”
Ernie handed Joanna back the card. “You’re right,” he said. “There’s no such thing as coincidence. What are you going to do about it?”
“As soon as I have some lunch, I’m going back to the office to call Adam York. What about you?”
“I’m supposed to meet Rose uptown. After that, I’ll run by the coroner’s office to see if George has that official copy of the autopsy typed up for us by then.”
Joanna nodded. “Good deal,” she said. “I’ll see you back at the office right after that. I don’t know about you, but I can do a whole lot better job of strategic planning on a full stomach than I can on an empty one.”
On her way back to the office, Joanna stopped long enough to grab a hamburger. She sat alone in the midst of Daisy’s noisy lunchtime clatter, letting her thoughts wander back to Green Brush Ranch. What had happened to Bree was an appalling tragedy, but it seemed to Joanna that there were other tragedies looming there as well. She had read somewhere that the death of a child was one of the most difficult marital storms for a couple to weather. From what she had seen that afternoon from both David and Katherine O’Brien, Joanna didn’t hold out much hope for the long-term survival of their marriage.
Leaving the restaurant, she glanced off to the south. A series of tall columns of cumulus clouds was rising up on the far horizon. Another afternoon storm was brewing. If this one turned out to be as bad as yesterday’s, there’d be another big bite in the overtime department. Frank Montoya would have a fit.
Back at her desk, Joanna immediately tried calling Adam York, but he didn’t answer his phone. Following his voice mail directions, she left her number on his pager. Even so, it was almost forty-five minutes before he answered the page and called her back. In order to contain her impatience, Joanna had buried herself in that day’s pile of paperwork and correspondence.
“Just how mad are you?” the DEA agent asked as soon as Joanna picked up her phone.
“Mad?” she repeated. “Why would I be mad?”
“D.C. went over my head on this one,” he said. “I couldn’t help it. It’s all gone down since I talked to you this morning. I tried to call you about it the minute it happened, but you weren’t available, and it was too complicated-”
“Adam,” she interrupted. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“The Freon deal. We’ve been in touch with the guy you ‘old me about, the one in Bisbee.”
“Jim Hobbs?”
“Right. He’s agreed to make the buy. Somebody was sup-posed to meet him in Benson just a little while ago to give him a briefcase full of marked bills.”
“Wait a minute,” Joanna fumed. “Are you telling nee that you people are initiating a sting operation in my jurisdiction without anyone letting my department know beforehand?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Joanna, I’m sorry. As I said, I did try calling you earlier to let you know. If you had a damn cell phone, maybe I could get through to you once in a while. Ever since that one attempt, I’ve been shut up in meetings. This case is all coming together so fast-”
“What case?” Joanna interrupted. “With Air Conditioning Enterprises, you mean?”
Adam York stopped in mid-sentence. “What did you say?”
“With Air Conditioning Enterprises,” Joanna repeated, reading from the card Maggie Hastings had given her. “Stephan J. Marcovich, President.”
“How the hell did you do that?” Adam York demanded. “This was supposed to be totally hush-hush. Nobody is supposed…”
The undisguised shock in Adam’s voice told Joanna that she had indeed made the right connection. Stephan Marcovich did have something to do with the DEA’s Freon deal. “It’s like you told me the other day, Adam,” she reminded him, not worrying if she sounded a little smug. “Little fish lead to big fish, remember?”
“But what…?”
“Hush-hush or not, maybe it’s time we traded info,” Joanna informed him. “I’ve got a homicide case down here-a young girl, eighteen years old, who was murdered and dumped off the side of a cliff out in the Peloncillos east of Douglas some-time over the weekend. We didn’t get a positive ID until late last night. My public information officer has been dealing with the press about it all morning, so it’ll probably be headlines statewide by late this afternoon.”
“Why?” Adam York asked. “What makes a weekend homicide in Cochise County headline news all over Arizona?”
“Because the girl’s name is O’Brien.”
“So?”
“And her parents, David and Katherine O’Brien, are good friends of the Hickmans-as in Wally and Abby.”
“I don’t think I want to hear this.” Adam groaned. “You mean as in Governor Wallace Hickman?”