Remembering all too well how many bugs the new cook had rousted from what supposedly had been a clean jail kitchen, Joanna shivered. No doubt there were plenty of well-fed but currently invisible bugs hiding in this very room.
Turning her back on her visitors, Maggie staggered as far as the end of the couch and then fell onto it. She picked up a remote control and muted the droning television set, turning an afternoon talk show into a wordless pantomime of moving lips and wagging heads. She stared at it with such avid interest, however, that Joanna wondered if she even remembered that someone else was in the room.
“This is about your husband,” Joanna said.
Maggie Hastings’s eyes never wavered from the set. “What about him?” she asked.
“Do you know where he is?”
“Work.” Maggie’s reply was little more than a grunt.
“No, he’s not,” Joanna told her. “Mr. O’Brien told us your husband went away for a day or two.”
“Well, that’s news to me,” Maggie said with a noncommittal shrug. “If he was going somewhere, don’t you think he’da told me?”
The firmness in Joanna’s question somehow must have penetrated Maggie Hastings’s drunken haze. “Why all the questions?” she asked, finally glancing away from the television set for the first time. “Whiz going on?”
“On Saturday night, a young man was severely beaten out-side the gate to Green Brush Ranch,” Joanna replied. “Not only was he beaten, but burned, too, with the lit end of a cigar.”
Joanna said no more than that, but it was evidently enough. Maggie Hastings’s response was instantaneous. Her face seemed to collapse. Her mouth went slack while her eyes brimmed with tears. “Oh, no,” she wailed. “Not that. Not again.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t believe it. How could he? What if we lose this job, too?” Maggie whispered brokenly but with far less drunken slurring. “And the roof over our heads, too, just like the other time. You don’t know what it was like then. We lost everything-our house, our furniture, our friends. Stevie will kill him when he finds out. He’ll just plain kill him.”
Overcome with a combination of emotion and booze, she fell into a long series of racking sobs. For several minutes, she was totally incapable of speech. Joanna had no choice but to wait until the sobs subsided before she could ask another question. “Who’s Stevie?”
Maggie took a ragged breath, blew her nose, and wiped her eyes. “Stephan Marcovich,” Maggie answered. “Alf’s cousin up in Phoenix. He’s an old friend of the O’Briens. He’s also the one who arranged this job for us. If it hadn’t been for Stevie, once the lawyers got done with us, we’da been sunk. We had no place to go. Alf couldn’t find a job anywhere in Yuma, not even flipping burgers. It was like we had a disease or something. We were one step away from living on the street when Stevie sent Alf here. Oh, my God. And now he’s done if again. 1 can’t stand it,” she wailed. “I just can’t.”
Once more Maggie’s voice trailed off into a torrent of hope-less tears.
“Mrs. Hastings, would your husband’s cousin have any idea where Alf might be?”
Blowing her nose again, Maggie shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “If I don’t know where he is, how would Stevie?”
“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.
