hired Sammy Cotton’s crew to come work on the air-conditioning.
They’ll be here by three this afternoon.”
“Good enough,” Joanna said. “Sounds like a win-win situation to me.”
She hurried outside. She and Chief Deputy Montoya watched as the prisoners were allowed out of their cells and into the sun-drenched, razor-wire-surrounded rec yard, which, at this time of day, was at least partially shaded from direct sunlight by the jail itself. The inmates, apparently grateful to be allowed out 82
of their oven like cells, helped themselves to paper cups of ice water and then moved in an orderly fashion into the long narrow sliver of shade beside the building or sat on the covered concrete picnic tables that lined the yard.
“The prisoners will be fine,” Joanna said. “They have some shade. It’s the detention officers and extra deputies I feel sorry for. None of them have any shade at all.
Let’s make sure they have plenty of water, too. I’d hate to protect the prisoners and lose one of our deputies to heatstroke.”
“I’ll have Tom Hadlock take care of it right away.”
It wasn’t long before the blazing sun drove Joanna herself back into the relative cool of her office. With the dog curled contentedly at her feet, Joanna spent the next two hours dealing with routine paperwork. At three-thirty, her phone rang.
“Detectives Carbajal and Carpenter are here,” Kristin announced. “I told them you’d see them in the conference room.”
“Right. By the way, any sign of the air-conditioning crew?”
“They’ve been here for almost an hour now,” Kristin said.
“Great,” Joanna replied. “Sometimes it pays to be the squeaky wheel.”
Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal were already in the conference room. Frank Montoya arrived at the same time Joanna did. “Okay, guys,” Joanna said. “What do we have so far?”
“Doc Winfield says Carol Mossman was struck by two bullets—one in the gut and one in the shoulder. The wound to the midsection was the one that actually killed her.
She bled to death,” Ernie Carpenter added. “No surprises there. All the shots, including the ones that missed the victim, were fired into the back door of her mobile home.
The door was locked at the
83
time from the inside, with her and all of her dogs … all but one of her dogs,”
he corrected, “inside the house with her.”
“Why were they inside?”
“That I can’t say. There were food bowls everywhere. The victim may have brought them into the house to feed them, but there was no food in any of the dishes. Either the dogs ate it or she hadn’t finished feeding them before the killer arrived. We don’t believe her assailant ever gained access to the house. After being shot, Carol Mossman managed to drag herself as far as the living room. We think she was trying to reach the phone, but she passed out and died a few feet shy of it.”
“Wait a minute,” Joanna said. “I thought someone told me last night the electricity was turned off at the Mossman place. Now you’re saying the phone was still working.
How’s that possible?”
Beetling his thick eyebrows into a frown, Ernie nodded. “It’s one of those old-fashioned Princess phones. Hard-wired. Unlike the new cordless phones everyone has these days, the old ones worked even with the power off. Not that it did Carol Mossman any good.”
“Time of death?”
“She was shot at seven twenty-eight yesterday morning,” Ernie said, consulting his notes. “Doc Winfield says she died some time after that, maybe as much as two or three hours.”
“Seven twenty-eight?” Joanna asked. “How were you able to pinpoint the time of the attack?”
“There was evidently a clock hanging on the wall behind her. When she went down, she took the wall with her and knocked out the clock’s battery.”
“Did you pick up any pertinent information from Carol 84
Mossman’s neighbors?” Joanna asked, turning her attention to Jaime Carbajal.
“I talked to a Rhonda Wellington. She has a place off the Charleston Road about half a mile away. She’s evidently the neighbor who called Animal Control two weeks ago to report that Carol Mossman’s dogs were running loose. Believe me, there’s no love lost there.”
“Is Wellington a possible suspect?” Joanna queried.
“I doubt it,” Jaime answered. “She says she was scared to death of Carol Mossman’s dogs and wouldn’t go anywhere near them. She said she reported them when they showed up loose on her property and chased her horses. She claims that a couple of times she had to run into her house to get away from the dogs. I doubt she would have gone over there on her own.”
“Maybe she would have if she’d been armed,” Joanna suggested.
Jaime shook his head. “I’m telling you, she was scared of the dogs, and with that many of them, one gun wouldn’t have done much good. Rhonda did claim to have heard what sounded like shots. She said she was outside hanging laundry on her clothesline when she heard a whole series of pops. With the Fourth of July coming up, she
