“Chief Voland said for you to wait right here. He’ll come down and get you.
“Deputy Hollicker, I don’t believe you under stood what I said to you back there. I’m issuing orders, not taking them. And I have no intention of standing here waiting for Deputy Voland to come get me. Is that clear?”
Even as she said it, Joanna realized it wasn’t fair to put Dave Hollicker in the middle of a power play between Dick Voland and herself, but some thing definitive had to happen to get the chief deputy’s attention.
Hollicker waffled only a few seconds longer before making up his mind. “Drive just like you’re going to the house,” he directed. “When you reach the corrals, instead of turning in, go straight on past. About a half-mile farther on, you’ll come to a gate. Go through that, then take the left-hand fork. Whenever you can after that, bear left. It’s three miles, give or take.”
“Thank you.” Joanna turned and started back toward her Eagle.
“It’s a pretty rough road,” he called after her.
“That’s why Chief Deputy Voland wanted you to wait here. He said he’d come get you in his Blazer.”
“Radio back and tell him not to bother,” Joanna said over her shoulder. “My four-wheel-drive Eagle can make it anywhere Dick Voland’s Blazer can.”
“Oh,” Dave Hollicker mumbled into the cloud of dust that billowed in her wake. “I’ll be sure to tell him that. He’ll love hearing it. And then he’ll chew my ass.”
Even without directions, Joanna would have had no trouble finding her way. Much of the road was over coarse, trackless shale, but here and there in still-muddy low spots or in patches of dry, dusty dirt-a collection of freshly laid tire indentations left their separate marks. Wherever visible tracks remained in the roadway, Joanna was careful to drive around them.
She followed the ever-narrowing trail, through a scrub-oak-dotted landscape toward the rockbound red cliffs that crowned the mountain. As she drove through the ranch where Harold Patterson had lived all his life, Joanna allowed herself a moment of private grief. She hadn’t thought about that part of the job, about investigating the death of someone she knew and cared for. But Cochise County was a relatively small community. Some of the people whose deaths came under investigation were bound to be acquaintances if not friends.
Looking around her, she hoped Jim Bob was right; that Harold had “died with his boots on,” doing the work he loved. But there was something worrisome in the back of her mind, a stray thought that wouldn’t disappear no matter how much she wanted to stifle it.
The last time Joanna had seen Harold Patterson was two days ago, when he came to Milo’s office. He had seemed anxious and upset when he came looking for those change-of-beneficiary forms. He had talked about wanting to change the provisions of his policies from Ivy alone to someone else.
Those are the kinds of changes people don’t undertake without some reason prodding them to do so, marriage, a death, or, in this case, what seemed to be a change of heart.
Taken together, Harold Patterson’s policies didn’t add up to a huge fortune, but a cool quarter of a million dollars or even half that much couldn’t be overlooked as a possible motive for murder. If Harold Patterson had, in fact, been murdered.
Joanna racked her brain trying to remember the old man’s exact words. He had told her a story, a parable about his daughters, comparing them to two dogs pulling apart an old saddle blanket rather than sharing it. Did that mean Harold in tended to split the proceeds of his policies fifty fifty? It would be important for the investigators to learn whether or not those beneficiary forms had been properly signed and witnessed and a phone call to Milo Davis or Lisa would have answered that question in a minute, but Joanna was in her own car, with no radio and no kind of communications capability. How long would it take, Joanna wondered, for the new sheriff to have an official, properly equipped vehicle of her own? And how did she go about requesting one?
Deputy Hollicker had told her three miles. Dick Voland’s Blazer blocked the path at 2.5 in a spot where the road wound between two immense boulders. When Voland stepped up to the side of her car, he leaned down as if expecting her to roll down the window so he could speak to her. In stead, she turned off the ignition, opened the door, and stepped out of the car.
“What’s going on here?” she demanded.
Voland shrugged and glowered meaningfully at Joanna’s Eagle. “Nothing much,” he replied sarcastically.
“Ernie Carpenter asked me to limit access to the area until he can have casts made of all the tire tracks. As you can see, we’ve been driving on the hump in the middle of the road and on the shoulder to avoid messing up anything important.”
“So have I,” she answered crisply. “I do know how plaster casts work.”
A shadow of disappointment crossed Dick Voland’s face so fleetingly that Joanna almost missed it. Clearly the chief deputy had fully expected her to screw up her first time out, but she had managed to outmaneuver him. So much for Round One.
“Why wasn’t I notified when Harold Patterson’s body was found?” she asked, taking the offensive “Why wasn’t I called?”
“The man was already dead,” Voland answered.
“Deputy Hollicker, Detective Carpenter, and I had the situation well in hand through the regular chain of command.”
“Mr. Voland, are you or are you not aware that I was sworn into office as of two o’clock yesterday afternoon?”
“I knew about that,” he answered reluctantly, “but I saw no reason to drag you out of bed. It didn’t seem like that big a deal.”
“For your information, I was already up and working at the time the call came in. I haven’t yet had time enough to study all the policies and procedures, but tell me something. How would a situation like this have been handled under Walter McFadden’s administration? Chain of command be damned, would he or would he not have been notified?”
“Would have,” Voland conceded grudgingly. “Out of courtesy.”
