No Honor Among Thieves: An Ali Reynolds Novella (Kindle Single) (2 page)

“What can you tell us?” Joanna asked.

“Driver’s license in his pocket identifies him as Fredrico Arturo Gomez from Bakersfield, California. He signed up to be an organ donor, but that’s not going to happen. I found multiple gunshot wounds in his body, all of which penetrated the victim’s left side. Any one of them could have done the trick. I’d say he was dead long before the truck smashed through the guardrail and hit the ground. From what I could see, a barrage of bullets entered the cab of the truck through the passenger side with enough force to penetrate both the truck and the victim.”

“We’re talking real firepower, then,” Joanna observed.

“Right,” Kendra agreed. “If the victim was traveling at sixty miles per hour or even sixty-five, we’d have to be talking either a whole troop of shooters or else an automatic weapon of some kind for there to be that many hits.”

“Since the entry wounds are all on the victim’s left side, that means the shooter was either on the left-hand shoulder of the highway, waiting for him,” Deb suggested, “or else in a vehicle that was passing in the left lane.”

“That could be, too,” Joanna said. “Shooting from a passing vehicle makes more sense than coming from opposite directions. If each of the two meeting vehicles was doing sixty, that adds up to 120 miles per hour. The split second the two would have been side by side wouldn’t allow enough time for multiple hits, even with an automatic weapon. There’s a posted no-passing zone right there where he went through the guardrail, but if someone was out to kill the guy, a solid yellow line on the pavement wouldn’t count for much. What we know for sure is that, one way or another, this guy was ambushed. Either the shooter was following him, or else he knew the exact time he would be traveling this particular section of roadway. So where’s the brass—still on the pavement or on the shoulder somewhere?”

Joanna pulled out her phone and dialed Sergeant Crane’s number. “We need some manpower out here,” she said when he answered. “The targeted vehicle went off the bridge on Highway 92 at the San Pedro River. From the damage to the guardrail, it looks as though he was headed east, but we don’t know exactly where the shooting took place. That part of the highway is fairly straight. The shooting might have happened as far away as a mile or so, and it took the truck that long to finally veer off the road. We need people out here combing the highway on both sides of the crime scene looking for brass and, if we’re really lucky, maybe some usable tire prints.”

“Is this a situation where we should bring the old duffers into play?” Sergeant Crane asked.

Recently a group of local seniors, several of them still in possession of Eagle Scout badges from long ago, had erased the natural dividing lines between the Kiwanis, Rotary, and Lions Clubs and shown up at Joanna’s office offering to form a group of senior citizen reserve officers. Officially dubbed the SCRs (Senior Citizen Reservists), they had all gone through citizens’ academy training and had done a number of patrol ride-alongs. Some of them helped out with routine filing and clerical procedures at the Justice Center. They had also proved to be invaluable in helping locate several vulnerable adults when the sheriff’s office posted Silver Alerts. This, however, was the first time any of them would be deployed on a search for evidence.

Not surprisingly, George Winfield—the retired ME and Joanna’s stepfather—was their leader. Joanna glanced at her watch: four twelve
A.M.
A phone call to George at this hour wouldn’t faze him in the least, but it would put her mother in a complete snit. Joanna knew from personal experience that having Eleanor Lathrop Winfield get up on the wrong side of the bed wouldn’t be good for anyone. That was the truth of the matter, but she also didn’t want to spill those kinds of family beans in front of Sergeant Crane.

“Now that you mention it,” she said, “calling out the SCRs is an excellent suggestion, but there’s no sense having them out here milling around in the dark. If they’re going to be conducting a search of both sides of the roadway, I’d rather wait until daylight before putting them to work. George is an early riser. Give him a call at five. Tell him what’s up and that I’d like his people here right around sunrise. Before he comes out this way, though, ask him to stop by the Justice Center and pick up our supply of metal detectors. At last count, I think we had ten or so. And remind him that anyone turning up for this operation needs to be wearing orange reflective vests. Understood?”

“Roger.”

About then, several flashlight beams came bouncing toward the spot where Joanna, Kendra Baldwin, and Deb Howell stood conferring. At the center of the group were four men—Kendra’s two dieners and two of Joanna’s deputies—lugging a loaded and unwieldy gurney across sandy terrain that rendered the wheels useless.

“Do you want to see him?” Kendra asked.

Joanna shook her head. “Not right now,” she said. “I’ll see him later at the autopsy.”

“Go ahead and load him up, then” Kendra told her attendants. While they struggled to do so, the ME turned back to Joanna.

“So you’re coming to that?” she asked. “I thought only detectives viewed autopsies.”

“It’s my job, too,” Joanna told her. “When do you plan to do it?”

“Probably first thing this morning,” the ME replied. “Will eight work for you?”

“That’s fine. Both Detective Carbajal and I will be there,” Joanna said. “In the meantime, I’ll put Deb here in charge of tracking down the victim’s next of kin. Was the guy carrying a cell phone?”

“I didn’t see one,” Kendra answered. “Probably got thrown out of the truck in the crash.”

“Don’t worry,” Joanna said. “We’re going to be combing through this scene with a fine-toothed comb. If he had a cell phone in that vehicle, we’ll find it. What about the Border Patrol officer who called it in? Where is he?”

“Agent Cannon,” Kendra answered, pointing. “His vehicle is there on the right, just beyond where the truck came to rest. The last I saw of him, he was talking to Detective Carbajal.”

“Cannon drove through our crime scene?”

“Don’t be too hard on him,” Kendra said. “He got here within five minutes of the incident. At the time, he was far more focused on possible survivors than he was on preserving evidence.”

“Point taken,” Joanna agreed.

As Kendra started back up the embankment, someone else was coming down. In the glow of Kendra’s flashlight, Joanna caught a glimpse of a bristling electrical-socket hairdo and had to stifle the urge to groan aloud. The last thing she needed at the crime scene was reporters of any kind. Among those unwanted reporters, Marliss Shackleford of the
Bisbee Bee
sat at the top of the list.

“You’ve got no business being here, Marliss,” Joanna said coldly. “This is a crime scene. Go back up top where you belong.”

“Come on, Sheriff Brady,” Marliss said. “Do we have to do this? Can’t you just tell me what’s going on? I heard that a truckload of LEGO boxes had been hijacked or something.”

“ ‘Or something’ is the operant phrase for the day,” Joanna told her. “This is an open investigation. Until we’re ready to give a full press briefing, there will be no comment at all from anyone in my department.”

“You can go ahead and deny it all you want,” Marliss prodded. “The point is I already know that a truckload of LEGO sets is involved. If you’re going to go the ‘No comment’ route, you’ll have to live with the story the way I tell it.”

Joanna knew then that Marliss had probably been listening in on a police scanner and had learned enough to send her out in the middle of the night ready to do her stint of on-the-scene reporting.

“I’m not confirming or denying,” Joanna insisted, “and I’m sticking with ‘No comment.’ Now, go back to your vehicle and get out of here. You’re interfering with a homicide investigation.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Joanna knew she had screwed up, but it was too late to take them back.

Marliss perked up instantly “Did you say ‘homicide’?” Marliss asked. “I was under the impression it was nothing more than a motor vehicle accident.”

“Go,” Joanna insisted. “Go now, before I have one of my deputies to escort you away.”

“That’s all right,” Marliss said. “A homicide with LEGO sets on the side sounds intriguing enough. I should be able to do something with that.”

She left then, scrabbling, unassisted back up to the highway. Joanna turned to Detective Howell. “Would you follow her and make sure that if anyone up there talks to her, especially people in my department, they understand that they will have to answer to me.”

While Deb hurried away to do as she’d been told, Joanna turned and walked across the sandy riverbed to where Jaime Carbajal in plain clothes and Bill Cannon in his Border Patrol uniform stood leaning against the front bumper of Bill’s marked SUV.

Border Patrol was a booming business in southern Arizona these days. Back when Joanna’s father, D. H. Lathrop, had been the sheriff of Cochise County, he would have known all the local Border Patrol guys, the names of their wives, and probably the names of their kids, too. Now, however, with agents cycling in and out of the Tucson sector with astonishing regularity, Joanna knew no more than a handful on sight or by name, and Agent Bill Cannon was one she had never met.

Approaching the two men, she held out her hand. “Sheriff Joanna Brady,” she said, introducing herself. “I understand you’ve been a big help here tonight.”

Agent Cannon, with dark stains on the shirt of his uniform, turned out to be a young guy, not more than twenty-five or so. He was short and stocky and wore his blond hair in a crew cut. “Glad to meet you, ma’am,” he said. “I wish I could have done more. I was just up the river a ways, walking the bank, trying to spot footprints, when I heard gunfire. I made tracks back to my vehicle and was almost there when I heard the crash. Tearing through that guardrail made a hell of a racket.”

“How long between the gunfire and the crash?”

Agent Cannon thought about that for a moment before he answered. “Twenty seconds or maybe thirty at the most. When I came up the riverbed, I spotted the truck right away because the headlights were still on. The truck must have gone end over end a couple of times, because it came to rest a long way from the base of the embankment. And for the cargo box to split apart the way it did when it hit the tree trunk, the driver had to be going way over the speed limit when he hit the guardrail.”

Detective Carbajal nodded. “Deputy Ruiz tells me there aren’t any skid marks up above. I’m wondering if maybe the guy was already dead. His foot could have been deadweight on the gas pedal at the time it went off the road.”

Nodding, Joanna stood for a minute examining the wreckage. The truck had evidently been airborne as it plunged off the embankment. It landed nose down in the dirt and then flipped over at least twice before the bed of the truck slammed into the trunk of one of San Pedro’s venerable old cottonwood trees. The blow was forceful enough to split the cargo box in half and send an eruption of cellophane-covered LEGO boxes exploding in every direction. The delivery truck turned out to be larger than Joanna had envisioned, making her wonder if the single U-Haul truck she had ordered would be big enough to contain this unconventional cargo spill.

Joanna turned her attention back to the conversation in time to hear Jaime Carbajal say, “We’ll need you to leave your vehicle here until we’re finished processing the crime scene.”

“Okay,” Cannon agreed. “Let me know when you’re done. In the meantime, I’ll let my supervisor know that I need someone to come give me a ride so I can go home and clean up.”

For the first time, Joanna realized that the stains on Agent Cannon’s uniform were most likely bloodstains. Since he had been the first one the scene, that made sense, Joanna supposed, but still . . . The person who called in a homicide often had something to do with it.

“And you’ll stop by the department later today to give an official statement?” Jaime continued.

“Sure thing,” Agent Cannon said. “My shift ends at eight
A.M.
Give me a call after that and let me know what time is convenient.”

“Will do.”

Joanna watched Cannon walk away. “He’s the one who called it in,” she said quietly. “You don’t think he’s involved, do you?”

“I doubt it,” Jaime responded, “although, just in case, I asked Deb to request a copy of his radio transmissions from Border Patrol.”

“We won’t have those anytime soon,” Joanna observed.

She got along fine with the local Border Patrol folks, but relations between her and the headquarters folks for the Tucson sector weren’t always the best. TSA routinely ignored or else delayed responses to requests for information from local jurisdictions. The message being that they were the feds, and everyone else could take a number and get in line.

“Maybe sooner than you think,” Jaime Carbajal said with a grin. “Deb can be quite the bulldog once she sinks her teeth into something.”

Donning a pair of Latex gloves, Joanna reached down, picked up one of the boxes, and shook it, listening and hearing the sound of rattling. The corners of the box were crumpled but not torn. The cellophane wrapping on the outside was still intact. She suspected that all this careful packaging meant that everything inside was still fine, including any drugs that might be hidden there. Turning on her flashlight, she discovered she was holding something that purported to be the TIE fighter with 1,685 pieces.

Joanna had no idea what a TIE fighter was. In their family, Butch Dixon was the resident expert on all things
Star Wars
, but she guessed that this model was probably worth a fair amount of money. Even the small LEGO sets Dennis lusted for on the shelves in Target were pricier than Joanna thought reasonable. This one was probably somewhere in the $200 range.

But examining the colorful box itself offered no hints about why the driver of a vehicle hauling LEGO sets would have been traveling on an out-of-the way route that wasn’t a direct connection to anywhere else. Nor did it explain why the truck had been ambushed and taken down with automatic weapons fire. Shaking her head, Joanna returned the box to what seemed to be the same place she’d found it.