Geet shook his head. “If you ask me, it seems a little suspect and way too convenient that she’s blaming Fred now, after he’s dead and unable to defend himself. Do you believe her?”
“Actually, I do,” Brandon told him. “She had her suitcase packed and her cat crated. She fully expected that I was coming to pack her off to jail. She was under the impression that by knowing about it and not telling, that made her an accessory after the fact. I think she was on the level.”
Reaching into his pocket, Brandon withdrew the Ziploc bag containing the hunting knife and handed it over to Geet.
“What’s this?”
“That may be the murder weapon,” Brandon told him. “After Fred died, one of their sons was going through his tools and found this hidden in the back of one of the drawers in his father’s tool chest. In all the years June and Fred were married, she said she had never seen it before, didn’t know it existed. I’ll get it over to the crime lab and see if they can find any DNA evidence. There might be some, right there in the crack where the blade meets the handle.”
Geet examined the knife through the clear plastic and then gave it back to Brandon. “What if there is?” he asked with an exasperated shrug. “What’s the point? Ursula is still dead. So are her parents. So is Fred. What about justice? No one is ever going to pay for that crime.”
“June is paying,” Brandon said quietly. “She may not have murdered Ursula, but she knows now that what the two of them did together that day was the ultimate cause of her friend’s death. I believe she’ll regret it every day for the rest of her life.”
Geet leaned back against his pillows, closed his eyes, and shook his head in obvious disgust. “So that’s it, then,” he said. “I’ve spent a lifetime chasing after this case and it’s all for nothing.”
“Not for nothing,” Brandon told him. “We finally have a better idea about what happened. Regardless of whether it goes to trial, I believe we can both know that this case is finally closed.”
“If Fred’s the one who did it, I should have caught him sooner,” Geet insisted. “There must have been something I missed, something that would have given the game away.”
“What if you had solved it?” Brandon asked. “What then? Fred might have gotten sent up for a couple of years, but you and I wouldn’t be here right now, Geet. It was because Ursula’s murder wasn’t solved that Hedda Brinker used her lotto millions to start The Last Chance. I personally know of at least fifteen separate families that TLC has helped over the years-families who now have answers about their murdered loved ones that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
Geet nodded. “I suppose that’s true,” he admitted, but the spark of focus that had briefly animated him seemed to have run its course. He closed his eyes briefly, then held out his hand. When Brandon took it, Geet’s skin was hot and paper-thin, but the grip of his handshake was surprisingly firm.
“Thank you, Brandon,” he said. “Following up on this last case of mine means more to me than you know.”
“You’re welcome,” Brandon said, rising to his feet. “Glad to help out.” He walked toward the door, then stopped. “Turns out it’s probably my last TLC case, too.”
Geet’s eyes popped open. “Why’s that?”
“Diana,” Brandon said with a shrug. “I think we’re facing some health issues, too. I’ll probably let Ralph know that I’m going to have to stand down.”
The fact that he’d made the admission surprised him. It was one thing to tell the kids. It was something else to mention the situation outside the immediate family.
“I’m sorry,” Geet said. “I hope it works out.”
“Thanks,” Brandon said. “I hope so, too.”
Tucson, Arizona
Sunday, June 7, 2009, 1:30 p.m.
87? Fahrenheit
When Brian’s cell phone rang, he expected it to be Kath. He had told her he was still working-that he wouldn’t be able to be there that afternoon to watch the girls while she went shopping.
The caller, however, turned out to be Alex Mumford. “Who the hell is Jake Abernathy?” she wanted to know.
“That would be one of Sheriff Forsythe’s fair-haired boys. I take it he called you?”
“Why didn’t you call me?” she returned pointedly.
“I got pulled from the case,” he said. “Abernathy’s lead.”
“That may be, but he’s also a jerk,” Alex said. “He called me up and started throwing his weight around. Make that he was trying to throw his weight around.”
“I take it that didn’t work out for him all that well?”
“You think?” Alex replied with a laugh. “I’m all for interagency cooperation and all that crap, but not when someone pisses me off. So here’s the deal. I did get those phone numbers added to the warrant, but I don’t have any information back on that just yet. It is Sunday, after all, but when I do get some information, I’ll be calling it in to you. I seem to have lost Detective Abernathy’s number.”
Brian laughed, too. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll be glad to pass it along. When I do, Abernathy will go straight up and turn left. A ripple in the force and all that. He’s not going to like it.”
“Good,” Alex Mumford said. “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”
Tucson, Arizona
Sunday, June 7, 2009, 1:45 p.m.
88? Fahrenheit
Ginny Torres’s heart was light as she wheeled her grocery-laden shopping cart through Safeway while her three-year-old son, Pepe, babbled happily if unintelligibly in the child’s seat. It was close to naptime, but so far he hadn’t hit the wall.
Ginny generally hated Sundays. There was always more than she could do in one day-laundry, household chores, grocery shopping. She worked five days a week at the AOL call center and one day a week at a hair-care kiosk at Park Place Mall. Not that she wasn’t glad to have both jobs. She was.
They had been living in Safford and doing all right-up until Felix, her husband, had been laid off from his well- paying job with Phelps Dodge. That had come as a big shock to the system. In the end, they’d had no choice but to come limping back home to Tucson, where they were able to live not quite rent-free in one of Felix’s parents’ rentals.
In the process, Ginny had made the leap from stay-at-home mom to major breadwinner. Her call-center job didn’t pay exceptionally high wages, but it did come with medical benefits. With a toddler to worry about, that was huge. Felix, on the other hand, found occasional construction and yard-work jobs. When he wasn’t working one of those, he took care of Pepe. On those occasions when both he and Ginny had to work, Felix’s mother looked after Pepe. That way, at least Ginny and Felix didn’t have to worry about paying for child care.
In other words, things could have been a lot worse, but Ginny did find herself wishing sometimes that Felix didn’t have such an aversion to doing housework-women’s work, as he liked to call it. He could be home all day without seeing any need to pick up the vacuum cleaner, and he could step over or around the mounds of dirty clothes out in the garage without once taking it on himself to start a load of laundry. Felix never fussed when it was time to go to the store for beer, but going to the store for groceries? Never. Grocery shopping was something else that had to wait for Ginny’s precious “day off.”
Today, though, with the exception of two items, she was picking up staples only-laundry detergent, dog food, and canned goods-things that could sit in an overheated car for several hours without coming to grief, because today, after her shopping excursion, she and Pepe weren’t going straight home.
Pepe’s third birthday was on Monday, but they were celebrating it today with tamales and tacos at Felix’s folks’ place. All the cousins would be there for an afternoon of fun in the pool. All Ginny and Pepe had to do was to show up, bringing along the birthday cake and ice cream-those were the only perishables in the cart. That cake was appropriately decorated with tiny plastic replicas of Wall-E and Eva and the ice cream was Pepe’s favorite, all
