fingerprint information on me. I expect our people to give him their full cooperation, and courtesy, too,” she added. “If he needs help collecting latent prints at the scene, he’s welcome to request Casey Ledford’s services. He shouldn’t have a problem with that. As far as I know, at this point Doc Winfield and I are the only ones accused of any complicity. I don’t believe anyone else in the department is under suspicion.”
“Doc Winfield?” Frank repeated. “What did he do?”
“Clayton’s autopsy, for one thing,” Joanna answered. “But since George Winfield is also my stepfather, Reba Singleton is claiming conflict of interest. She’s asking for a second-opinion autopsy. She’s going before a judge to get a court order.”
“Doc Winfield’s gonna love that,” Frank said.
Joanna continued. “I assume they’ll ask the ME up in Pima County for assistance. The problem is, we’ve done so much work with them lately, that, for all I know, they might be considered contaminated as well.”
Frank Montoya shook his head. “I can’t believe it, Joanna. You’re really going to help Dick Voland open this can of worms?”
“The can’s already open,” Joanna said firmly. “And everybody in this office is going to cooperate with Dick’s investigation. I’ve got nothing to hide or apologize for, and neither does George Winfield. The sooner we get this mess handled, the less outside interference we’ll have to deal with. And now,” she added, reaching for the stack of incident reports, “what all went on yesterday?”
“Do you want to read all those?” Frank asked.
“Not especially. Give me the
“In descending order, fifteen UDAs held for the INS, and four DWIs. Two each motor-vehicle accidents and domestic-violence incidents-no fatalities and no serious injuries in any of them. One of the inmates in the jail suffered a seizure of some kind and had to be transported down to the county hospital in Douglas. He’s still there, under guard. In other words, all pretty much routine stuff.”
“What about the Sandra Ridder investigation?”
“We had a team from the crime lab out at the scene-at the two scenes-pretty much all day yesterday. They picked up some trace evidence-threads, hair, that kind of thing-but there’s no way to tell whether or not it has anything to do with what happened.
“Jaime and I picked up Catherine Yates and brought her in to George’s office yesterday afternoon. She IDed the dead woman from the culvert as her daughter, Sandra Ridder. No surprises there, since we’d already pretty much figured that out on our own. According to the doc, he was scheduling the autopsy for sometime this morning. Still no sign of that missing Lexus.”
“What about Lucinda Ridder?”
“She’s still missing, too. Deputy Gregovich and Spike worked the problem all day yesterday. They had no trouble following her after she left the house. She stuck to the road for half a mile or so, then the trail disappeared. They lost her.”
“So she either got in a vehicle or took off on her bike. Since the bike is missing, I’m betting on the latter. Can Spike follow a trail left by a bike?”
“Not as well as he can follow one left by a pair of human feet. On a hunch, I had him check out the crime-scene area over by Cochise Stronghold. They hit a jackpot there and picked up Lucy’s scent again. She spent some time concealed in a dry creek bed, with her bike hidden nearby. She came out of hiding long enough to go over by the sign, then she disappeared into thin air again, same as she did before, when she left Catherine Yates’ house.”
“If she was at the crime scene when her mother was,” Joanna mused, “she might have seen what happened.”
“Or she might have been involved in what happened.”
“You’re still thinking Lucy might have had something to do with what happened to Sandra?”
Frank nodded. “It’s possible,” he said. “According to Catherine Yates, Lucy is desperately unhappy that her mother is getting out of jail. Embarrassed, probably, more than unhappy. It’s like I said the other night. She sneaks up on her mother armed with a gun that she knows how to use. Maybe she goes to the sign for the same reason her mother did-looking for whatever was in that damned Tupperware bowl. Maybe she’s still there when her mother arrives. That could just be a coincidence, or maybe Lucy knew that’s where her mother would go the first moment she had a chance.
“One way or the other, regardless of what Catherine Yates told us about Lucy refusing to have anything to do with her mother, I think she was wrong. I’m pretty sure Lucy and Sandra did meet up that night.”
“Why’s that?”
“Remember the necklace Sandra Ridder was wearing when she was found?”
Joanna nodded. She hadn’t seen the necklace, but she remembered hearing it described by Hal Witter. “The devil’s-claw necklace?”
“Right. Well, guess what. According to Catherine Yates, that necklace actually belongs to her granddaughter. Lucinda Ridder was wearing it the last time Catherine saw her.”
Joanna followed that line of reasoning for several long moments. “Maybe the whole thing was set up,” she suggested at last. “Suppose Sandra Ridder contacted her daughter without Catherine Yates’ knowledge and arranged for Lucy to meet her at the Cochise Stronghold in the middle of the night.”
“Seems far-fetched,” Frank said, “but I suppose it could have happened that way.”
“And,” Joanna continued, “if Spike and Terry can’t pick up Lucy’s trail after that, it probably means that Lucy left the scene on her bike or in a vehicle of some kind. The first question that comes to mind, then, is whether Lucy Ridder is a suspect or a fellow victim in this case. If she took a ride, was it voluntary or not? Did whoever drove off in the missing Lexus take Lucinda and Big Red and the missing bicycle along with him?”
“What would a UDA want with Lucinda Ridder and her red-tailed hawk?”
“Nothing good,” Joanna answered with a slight shiver. “Not every illegal who comes across the line looking for work is a fine upstanding citizen.”
“No,” Frank agreed, “especially when you take into consideration the fact that Sandra Ridder was shot in cold blood.”
“Getting back to the necklace,” Joanna said. “Did you take a look at it?”
Frank nodded. “Doc Winfield showed it to Ernie and me before he returned Sandra’s personal effects to her mother. That’s when Catherine told us the necklace really belonged to Lucy-that Catherine’s mother, Lucy’s great- grandmother-had commissioned it made for Lucy’s tenth birthday. It’s a pretty little thing-two silver prongs that seem to be growing out of a tiny turquoise bead. Beautiful workmanship, and signed, too.”
“Signed?”
“Catherine said it was made by a friend of her mother’s-someone who lives over in Gallup, New Mexico. The signature was too small for me to read with the naked eye, but the doc had checked it out under the microscope. Vega is the name of the guy who made it. L. Vega.”
“Valuable, do you think?” Joanna asked.
“Maybe,” Frank responded. “Depends on the reputation of whoever made it.”
“Try to find out,” Joanna said. “I’d like to know more about the artist who made it and also about how much it cost. But more than that, I want to know why it’s still here.”
Frank wrote himself a reminder. “You mean why didn’t whoever killed Sandra Ridder take the necklace at the same time they took the car?”
Joanna nodded. “Exactly. It stands to reason they would, if robbery was part of the equation.”
“What if they only wanted the car?”
Joanna shook her head. “I’ve never yet met a car thief who wouldn’t steal something else as well if the opportunity presented itself. By the way, what are Jaime and Ernie doing today?”
Detectives Jaime Carbajal and Ernie Carpenter, the Double Cs, as they were sometimes called, constituted the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department entire Detective Division.
“Jaime was supposed to sit in on Sandra Ridder’s autopsy this morning, but Doc Winfield had a conflict. So now they’re both heading out to the valley. They’ll most likely stop by and see Catherine Yates again, then they plan on going to Elfrida to interview Lucinda Ridder’s friends and classmates. Jaime thinks that if Lucy had plans, she might have confided them to someone out there at the high school. After that, Jaime will go on up to Tucson. He has an early-afternoon appointment to see Melanie Goodson. He also plans on going out to Old Spanish Trail. He wants to nose around Mrs. Goodson’s neighborhood to see if anyone there saw something out of line. Ernie will be coming
