Partner In Crime

“Beaumont!” he exclaimed. “What’s the news?”

“Not good, I’m afraid,” I told him. “It’s looking more and more like whoever did this went to great effort to frame Latisha Wall’s boyfriend.”

“Damn!” Ross Co

“But wait,” I added, “there’s more.” I must have sounded for all the world like an agitated a

“The one Sheriff Brady threw you off?” Co

“Right. It turns out the second victim was a good friend of Latisha Wall’s. Her name was Deidre Canfield. The prime suspect in that case is a guy named Jack Brampton. Ever heard of him?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Bisbee’s a small town,” I explained. “A snoopy neighbor let on that this Brampton character routinely used a pay phone down near the post office. Our informant was under the impression that Brampton had a girlfriend on the side.”

“Do people do that in small towns?” Co

Right that minute I didn’t feel like explaining the difficulties of cell-phone usage in Bisbee, Arizona. Instead, I forged on. “We suspect that Brampton used one of those phones three times on Thursday, once in the morning and twice in the afternoon, the second time was within minutes of his learning that Cochise County investigators were going to fingerprint him as part of the Latisha Wall investigation.”

“Get to the point,” Co

“The calls went to someone in Wi

There was stark silence on the other end of the phone, a silence so complete that I wondered if maybe I’d been disco

“No shit,” I agreed.

“I’ll have to bring the feds in,” he added.

It was a statement, not a question. My response should have been an unequivocal and resounding yes, but I said nothing, letting Ross Co

“All right, Beau, here’s what we’re going to do. I know how this must look to you, but I’m going to let sleeping dogs lie for another day or so. I don’t want to do anything prematurely. So far this all sounds pretty circumstantial. You keep right on doing whatever it is you’re doing, and keep me posted on anything else that comes up. I’m not going to make my move until after we have rock-solid evidence.”

What more do you want? I wondered.

Thinking about it, I figured Co

“Sure,” I said coldly, “I’ll be in touch,” And we signed off.

I put down the phone and gave myself the benefit of a long, hot shower. Then I lay down on the bed with every intention of watching television. I saw a few minutes of 60 Minutes. It wasn’t even dark yet before I was sound asleep.

A

No wonder the A

IT WAS TEN O’CLOCK THAT NIGHT when Joa

A broadly gri

“Nothing much,” he said casually, but Joa

“What nothing much?” Joa

“I had a call from an agent today,” he beamed. “Her name is Drew Mabrey, and she wants to represent me. She says she thinks she knows an editor who’s looking for something just like Serve and Protect.”

Joa

“She,” Butch corrected. “The agent’s a woman.”

“Did she tell you how good it was?” Joa

“Yes.” He smiled, heading for the champagne. “I think you did say something to that effect. That it was all right, anyway.”

Joa

“Like I said before,” he told her, carefully loosening the cork. “Drew loves it and wants to handle it, but there’s a problem.”

“What? Tell me.”

“It’s my name.”

“Your name?” Joa

“Drew said she almost didn’t bother to read it because it came under the name F. W. Dixon.”

“So what? Those are your initials. It is your name.”

“But it’s also the pseudonym of the author who wrote the Hardy Boy books, remember?”

“So?”

“Drew said that while she was growing up, she had to go visit her grandmother in Co

“So drop the initials then,” Joa

“There’s a difficulty there, too,” Butch said. With a practiced hand he poured champagne into the glasses, doing it slowly enough that no liquid bubbled over the sides. “Drew says that with all the humor in the story it’s really more of a cozy than a police procedural. She says male readers don’t buy cozies; women do, and most cozies are written by women.”

“What are you supposed to do, then?” Joa

“She wants me to change my name to something ‘less gender-specific’ were the words she used. Something like Kendall Dixon or Dale Dixon or Gayle Dixon.”

“The agent wants you to pretend to be a woman to fool your readers?”

“And the editor, too,” Butch said. “She wants me to pick a name before she submits the manuscript to anyone.”

“What do you do when it comes time for an author photo?” Joa

Giving her the champagne, Butch shrugged. “I give up. I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

Joa

“So tell me about your day,” Butch said as they settled into the breakfast nook to sip their champagne. “I knew you’d never make it to church.”

WHEN JOANNA ARRIVED AT WORK the next morning, Kristin Gregovich was nowhere to be seen, but the conference room down the hall was already crowded. Frank Montoya, Ernie Carpenter, and Jaime Carbajal were seated around the table. J.P. Beaumont, however, was among the missing.