Paradise Lost

pack up my stuff before I left this morning. I drove into Bisbee on my own.”

“Will you be staying here then?”

Again Ron Haskell shook his head. “I just heard that Connie’s sister, Maggie, is still in town. She’s saying all kinds of wild things about me and making lots of unfounded allegations. I think it’s a bad idea for me to be here when she is. Not only that,” he added, as his eyes filled with tears, “I guess I need to plan Connie’s funeral.”

Knowing Maggie MacFerson’s penchant for carrying loaded weapons, Joanna Brady heartily concurred with Ron Haskell’s decision to leave town. “That’s probably wise,” she said. “Your going home, that is.”

“From what I’ve heard, Maggie seems to think I’m responsible for what happened to Connie,” Ron added. “And she’s right there, you know. I am responsible even if I didn’t kill her myself. I’m the one who made the phone call and asked her to come down to Paradise to see me. If it hadn’t been for that, she’d most likely still be at home—safe and alive. But Connie was my wife, Sheriff Brady. I loved her.” His voice cracked with emotion.

While Ron Haskell struggled with his ragged emotions, Joanna thought about how difficult it would be for her already over-worked detectives to schedule an interview with him once he had returned to Phoenix, two hundred miles away.

Time to make like the Little Red Hen and do it myself, she thought.

“I expected my homicide investigators to be here this afternoon, but they were called to Tucson this morning,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go ahead and ask you a few questions myself.”

“Sure,” Haskell said. “I guess that would be fine. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“Do you want an attorney to be present?”

“I don’t really need one. I didn’t kill my wife, if that’s what you mean.”

“All right, but I’ll need to record our interview and have another officer present when I do it,” Joanna told him.

“Fine,” Ron Haskell said.

Joanna went out of her office and knocked on Frank Montoya’s door. “Care to join me playing detective?” she asked. “Ron Haskell is here and ready to be questioned, except Ernie and Jaime are both in Tucson.”

“Where should we do it?” Frank asked.

“The interview room is still busy with the Sally Matthews bunch. I guess it’ll have to be in my office.”

When Joanna reentered the room, Ron Haskell was standing by the large open window and staring up at the expanse of ocotillo-dotted limestone cliffs that formed the background to the Cochise County Justice Center.

“I really did love Connie, you know,” he said softly, as Joanna returned to her desk. “I never intended to do that—love her, you see. And I didn’t at first. Maggie must have figured that out. She didn’t like me the moment she first laid eyes on me. She said right off the bat that all I was after was Connie’s money, and to begin with, money was all I wanted. Why not? I’d had to struggle all my life. I went to school on scholarships and had to fight and work for everything I got while Connie was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Other than taking care of her folks when they got old and sick, she never had to work a day in her life. When we got married, she had money—enough, I suppose, so the two of us would have been comfortable as long as we didn’t do anything too wild or crazy.

“But then she made it too easy for inc. She gave me free rein with running the finances—turned them over to me completely. About that time is when I came up with the bright idea that I could turn that tidy little sum of hers into a real fortune for both of us.”

“I take it that didn’t work?” Joanna asked dryly.

Ron nodded miserably in agreement. “I got hooked into day­trading—tech stocks and IPOs mostly. I figured it was just a matter of time before I’d hit it big, but I ended up taking a bath. Connie’s money slipped through my fingers like melted butter. And that only made me try harder and lose more. It turned into a kind of sickness.”