Partner In Crime

“Kristin Gregovich is out today,” Joanna said into the phone. “Would you please bring the admin mail down to my office?”

Minutes later Sylvia Roark appeared in the office doorway, wheeling a large metal cart that was filled to the brim with a mass of papers. Joanna was surprised when she saw it. She had often objected to the piles of paper Kristin Gregovich routinely brought into Joanna’s office and stacked on her desk, but she had no idea that the relatively small piles that actually appeared had been culled from this kind of daunting heap.

“What should I do with it?” Sylvia asked.

Sylvia was a mousy, painfully shy young woman with bad teeth and ill-fitting clothing who came and went from the mail room on a daily basis without exchanging a word with anyone. She spent most of her work hours closeted in the mail room. When not actively dealing with mail, she hunkered over a computer and transferred cold-case information from microfiche into files that could be accessed via computer.

“I’m going to need you to sort it for me,” Joanna said.

Sylvia’s face turned crimson. “But I don’t know how!” she objected.

“Then you’ll have to learn,” Joanna told her firmly. “Make five stacks. One for junk mail, one for magazines, newspapers, and newsletters, one for Chief Deputy Montoya, one for me, and one for don’t know. I’ll help you sort through the don’t-know stack later.”

“But doesn’t Kristin do that?”

“Kristin just had a baby,” Joanna said. “Until she’s back on the job, we’ll be counting on you.”

“All right,” Sylvia said, backing up and scuttling toward the hallway. “I’ll take it back to the mail room and sort it there.”

“No,” Joanna said. “That won’t do. Use Kristin’s desk. And if the phone rings while you’re there, you’ll have to answer it.”

“But…” Sylvia began.

“Please,” Joanna insisted. “I need your help.”

Nodding, Sylvia pushed the cart closer to Kristin’s desk. Joanna didn’t want to spook the young woman further by looking over her shoulder as she set about doing an unfamiliar task. Spying a copy of The Bisbee Bee near the top of the pile, Joanna grabbed it, then retreated to her office and closed the door.

WITH THE NEW UNIDENTIFIED number in hand, I left the conference room and went looking for Frank Montoya. The desk outside Sheriff Brady’s office was almost buried under stacks of paper. Seated there was a young woman I hadn’t seen before. When I asked if Chief Deputy Montoya was in, she didn’t answer. Instead, she ducked her head and pointed.

When I entered the chief deputy’s office, Frank was on the phone patiently explaining to an out-of-town reporter that, until the dead suspect’s relatives had been contacted, he was unable to release any further information.

“How’s it going?” he asked, when the call finally ended.

I handed him a sheet of paper on which I had written the unidentified number, the next cog in my telephone Tinkertoy trail. “Can you find out whose phone number this is?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “It may take a few minutes.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll be in the conference room.”

THE HEADLINE JOANNA SOUGHT was in the right-hand bottom corner of the Bee’s front page:

DEPUTY KENNETH GALLOWAY

OPPOSES SHERIFF BRADY

“Crime rates may be down in the rest of the country,” Cochise County Deputy Sheriff Kenneth Galloway declared yesterday while throwing his hat into the ring in the race for sheriff. “But here, on Sheriff Joanna Brady’s watch, it seems to be going in the opposite direction.”

Citing increased numbers of undocumented aliens who are flooding into the county, Galloway says sheriff’s deputies are often outgunned and outnumbered. “We don’t have the manpower to deal with UDAs and with our regular law enforcement responsibilities as well. Sheriff Brady hasn’t done enough to increase staffing to deal with this ever-growing problem.”

That was as far as Joanna could bear to read. Increased staffing simply wasn’t possible in the face of lower tax receipts and across-the-board budget cuts. It was easy for someone outside the process to point a finger and call her incompetent, but Ken Junior wasn’t the one who had to face up to the board of supervisors and try to balance the budget. She tossed the paper aside.

She had already decided she would run again. With the next election still more than a year away, she hadn’t wanted to start campaigning quite so early. But if Kenneth Galloway was already out on the stump, she would be forced to follow suit. That meant organizing a committee, raising funds, and doing appearances, all while doing her job.

For several minutes she sat brooding, wondering where she’d find the time and energy to do both. Gradually, though, her thoughts shifted. She was mentally back at Chico’s and analyzing the conversation she and Beau had shared there. She recalled the man’s painful admission about how Anne Rowland Corley had conned him and others; about how the real miscarriage of justice hadn’t been in confining a twelve-year-old to a mental institution but in releasing her years later.

Joanna had dropped the offending copy of The Bisbee Bee on top of the serial-killer piece from the Denver Post. Now she unearthed the article and scanned the timeline sidebar that had accompanied the feature article. It showed when the child Anne Rowland had been shipped off to Phoenix and when she had been released.

With a growing sense of purpose, Joanna picked up the phone and dialed Frank Montoya’s office. When he didn’t answer, she tried Dispatch. “Where’s the chief deputy?” she asked. “Is he still out at Palominas?”

“No,” Tica Romero said. “I think he’s out in the lobby talking to some reporters. Want me to interrupt?”

“Never mind,” Joanna said. Her next call was to Ernie Carpenter. “When did Bill Woodruff disappear?” she asked when he answered.

“Who?”

“Bill Woodruff. You remember him. He used to be the Cochise County Coroner.”

“Oh, that Bill Woodruff,” Ernie said. “Sure, I remember him. That’s a long time ago. I was a brand-new detective back then. Woodruff went fishing down at Guyamas and never came back.”

“That’s what I remember, too, because Dad was sheriff,” Joanna said. “But wasn’t there something about Woodruff having a ‘side dish’ somewhere down across the line in Old Mexico?”

“Sounds familiar,” Ernie allowed.

“Do you remember any of the details?”

“Like I said, it’s been a long time,” Ernie said.

“Yes,” Joanna said. “It has. Thanks.”

She hurried to the office door. Sylvia Roark was still pulling envelopes out of the cart. “How are you doing?” Joanna asked.

“Okay,” Sylvia mumbled.

“Not on the mail,” Joanna corrected. “I mean, how are you doing on the microfiche project?”

“I can’t do anything on it if I’m here,” Sylvia sputtered. “I thought you said I should-”

“Not right now,” Joanna said quickly. “I don’t mean today. I mean in general. How far have you gotten?”

“Only the mid-eighties, I guess,” Sylvia said. “I’m working backward, and it takes time, you know. I can work on it only an hour or two a day, but I’m doing the best-”

Without waiting for Sylvia to finish, Joanna headed for the mail room. Tucked into a far corner sat the clumsy old microfiche machine next to its multiple-drawered file. Pulling out the one marked “1979 – 1981,” Joanna settled herself in front of the screen and went to work.