And his head was shaved absolutely smooth.
“Hello,” he said as he approached my chair. “You must be Special Investigator Beaumont. I’m Chief Deputy Frank Montoya. What can I do for you?”
He escorted me back to his office, which was in the same wing of the building as the sheriff’s private office. I thought maybe I could pull out the good ol’ boy card and jolly Chief Deputy Montoya out of some useful information. But Sheriff Brady had her people firmly in line as far as J.P. Beaumont was concerned. Montoya gave me diddly- squat.
“Look,” he said in answer to my direct question about the Bobo Jenkins interview. “I can appreciate your wanting to know about that, but our department is conducting what is becoming a more and more complicated investigation. Without Sheriff Brady’s express permission, I’m not authorized to give out any information. Period.”
“It is complicated,” I agreed, “what with the addition of not one but two missing persons cases.”
Montoya’s eyes narrowed when I said that. He didn’t like my knowing about the missing art dealer and her boyfriend.
“If I were Sheriff Brady,” I said aloud, “I think I’d be glad to have an extra detective show up and lend a hand with all this.”
Frank Montoya’s lips curled into a tight smile. “I don’t think that’s quite how she views the situation,” he said. “And until I have a chance to talk to her about it…”
By then I had pretty well decided that Sheriff Brady’s supposed family emergency was nothing but a smoke screen to keep me out of her hair.
“When will that be?” I asked. “When will you be able to talk to her again? And how long is this so-called family emergency scheduled to last?”
That one pissed him off. “As long as it takes,” he replied, standing up. “Now, if there’s nothing else, I’m quite busy at the moment.”
With that he escorted me to the door, down the hall, and back into the public lobby. As he booted me out I realized that, years ago when I had the chance, I should have coughed up the six hundred bucks and taken myself through the Dale Carnegie course.
JOANNA DIALED THE HOTEL and was relieved when Cornelia Lester didn’t answer. She left word with the desk clerk and had just put down the phone when Frank called her back. “Losing a dog is tough,” he said. “How’s Jenny faring?”
Joanna liked the fact that everyone who knew about Sadie asked about Jenny. “Better than I would have expected,” Joanna told him. “She took Kiddo and Tigger and went for a ride. Now, tell me. What did Mr. Beaumont want?”
“Anything and everything,” Frank replied.
“I’m not surprised, but what exactly?”
“He asked about the Bobo Jenkins interview.”
It was something Joanna hadn’t anticipated. “How did he know about that?” she demanded.
“Who knows?” Frank replied. “I sure as hell didn’t tell him. He also asked if we were making any progress in locating Dee Canfield and her boyfriend.”
“So he knows about the missing persons part of it, too,” Joanna mused. “Who all has he been talking to?”
“Beats me, boss,” Frank said. “Remember, though, the man’s an ex – homicide detective. He’s probably been all over town asking questions. You know how people here love to talk.”
Joanna knew that very well. Bisbee was a small place where everyone had a finger in everyone else’s pie.
“What did you tell him?” she asked.
“Nothing. Not without your approval.”
“Which I’m not in danger of giving anytime soon,” Joanna said. “Now let me tell you what Dave Hollicker found out.”
When she finished explaining about sodium azide, Frank Montoya was aghast. “Geez!” he exclaimed. “That stuff sounds scary!”
“You’ve got that right,” Joanna told him grimly. “It’s scary as hell.”
“You’re saying this sodium azide crap is lying around all over the place where any nutcase in the universe can lay hands on it?”
“That’s the deal,” she told him. “And,” she added, “unlike cyanide or arsenic, there aren’t any limits on who can have it.”
“There should be,” Frank said.
“Amen to that,” Joanna agreed.
There was a pause. “Maybe I should go on the Internet and check this out,” Frank suggested. “I’ll see what more I can find out about it.”
“Good idea,” Joanna said. “Unfortunately, we have no idea how much of it the killer still has in his or her possession. I’m guessing there’s some left over after loading up the sweetener packets in Latisha Wall’s kitchen.” Then, as an afterthought, she added, “While you’re surfing the Net, there’s something else I’d like you to check out, Frank. I want you to do some research on Anne Rowland Corley.”
“Wait a minute,” Frank said. “Isn’t she the young girl from Bisbee who, years ago, supposedly killed her father and then skated?”
At the time, the two Rowland deaths had been high-profile cases in southern Arizona, and they still were. Joanna wasn’t surprised to learn that, years later, their outcomes continued to be common knowledge in local law enforcement circles.
“She’s the one,” Joanna replied.
Frank frowned. “I seem to recall she died several years ago.”
Joanna nodded. “I vaguely remember that, too,” she said. “But the details escape me. That’s why I want you to check it out.”
“This Rowland thing is ancient history,” Frank objected. “Why the sudden interest?”
“Because Special Investigator Beaumont told me he used to be married to Anne Rowland Corley,” Joanna told him. “I believe he said she was his second wife, although he’s probably on number three or four by now.”
“Beaumont was married to her?” Frank asked. “That’s interesting.”
“Isn’t it, though,” Joanna agreed. “Very interesting.”
EARLIER AT THE HOTEL I had tried using my laptop to check my e-mail. Years ago, when Seattle PD dragged me kicking and screaming into the twentieth century and forced me to start using a computer, I hated the damned things. Now that I’m used to them, I can see they have some advantages. I’ve adjusted. On this day, however, not being able to make my connection work in the twenty-first century drove me nuts.
Frustrated, I had turned to my cell phone. I wanted to talk to Ross Connors and ask him who all had been in the know when it came to witness protection living arrangements for Latisha Wall. To my astonishment, I found that my cell phone didn’t work, either – not in Bisbee. The call wouldn’t go through. When I went downstairs and asked the desk clerk about the problem, he explained that maybe my cell phone’s poor signal strength was due to the hotel’s location deep inside the steep walls of what he called Tombstone Canyon.
Now, having been thrown out of Frank Montoya’s office, I sat in my Sportage in the Justice Center parking lot and considered my options. Reflexively checking the readout on my cell phone, I was delighted to see that I had full signal strength. Again I dialed the Washington State Attorney General’s home number. The phone rang once and was immediately answered by a woman speaking in a torrent of rapid-fire Spanish. After a couple of futile attempts to get her to switch to English, I realized I was talking to a recording.
Thinking I must have dialed the wrong number, I dug the list of Ross Connors’s phone numbers out of my wallet and checked to be sure I hadn’t transposed some of the digits. No such luck. The number I had dialed was correct. I had no idea what was going on with my cell phone now.
