Dead to Rights

Je

“See you at Maria

“No bet,” Joa

Butch gri

Shaking her head and stepping out of the way, Joa

On her way up to the Canyon Methodist parsonage in Old Bisbee, following behind the motorcycle, Joa

At the parsonage the three newcomers were part of a stream of well-wishers. They stayed for only a few minutes-long enough for introductions. Ruth was a shy but bright-eyed little one who clung fiercely to Jeff Daniels and didn’t want him out of her sight. By comparison, Esther was a pale reflectionof her sister. To Joa

“I can see why Jeff couldn’t bear to leave her,” Joa

Maria

“Esther’s going to be just fine.” Joa

“Prayers,” Maria

As a new batch of visitors descended on the parsonage, Joa

She had barely made it to her desk when Ernie Carpenter shambled into her office. There had been dark circles under his eyes on Friday. If anything, now they were worse-almost black rather than merely purple.

“It’s Saturday,” she pointed out. “I told you to take the weekend off. What are you doing here?”

“These loose ends are killing me,” he said. “I can’t sleep anyway, so I could just as well be working.”

Joa

“Right,” he said.

“In the meantime, I’m on my way over to the hospital to watch Mr. Bly, the composite artist, do his stuff. Care to join me?”

“Sure.”

They were in Joa

“Peter Wilkes?”

“‘That’s the one. Evidently Terry Buckwalter really is one hell of a golfer. Shoots in the high sixties and low seventies most of the time. As a consequence, there are only a few guys out there, besides the pro, who are willing to golf with her. But he did come up with the name of one guy who has gone out with her several times, even though she’s walked all over him. Larry Matkin. Isn’t he the young mining engineer who works for P.D.?”

Joa

“And wasn’t he at the funeral yesterday, too?”

“He was,” Joa

“After this deal at the hospital,” Ernie said thoughtfully, “maybe we ought to interview him.”

“Sounds great,” Joa

“No,” Ernie said. “But it won’t take long to find out.”

In Joa

Joa

“That’s all right,” he said. “By the time I put this together with the witness we’re going to see in Elfrida, it’ll be better. Just you wait and see.”

While Joa

“Got it, Sheriff Brady,” he a

They took the Rifle Range Road to a trailer parked on the first gentle slopes of Gold Hill. “Why would anyone want to live all the way out here?” Joa

“Beats me,” Ernie Carpenter said with a laugh, “but it looks like you don’t have much room to talk. The High Lonesome isn’t exactly Grand Central Station. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with this. He’s got phone, electricity, and propane. What more could you want?”

The old-fashioned trailer-a moldering relic from the fifties or sixties was parked on a concrete slab. Out behind the trailer was a long empty corral. There were no vehicles parked anywhere in sight, and when they pounded on the door, no one answered. Drawn curtains made seeing inside the place impossible.

Leaving the door, Ernie sauntered over to the edge of the slab and then squatted down to examine the dusty earth. “Looks to me as though this is where he usually parks,” Ernie said. “But I’d say he hasn’t been home today. These tracks from yesterday at least, maybe even earlier.”

“Do you know his boss?” Joa

“Skip Lowell, the general manager? Sure,” Ernie said, “I know him.”

“Why don’t we go check with him,” Joa

“Don’t have to,” Ernie said. “When he and Mindy came bock to town, they moved into his mother’s old place on the Vista. They’re in the process of fixing it up. God knows it needs it. The renters the last owners had in the place really let it go.”

After years of working for Phelps Dodge all over the world, Armand “Skip” Lowell had returned to his hometown as general manager of P.D.’s Bisbee operation. Mindy and Skip Lowell had been in town only a matter of weeks and were a long way into rehabbing the early-twentieth-century brick home that had once been one of Bisbee’s finest.

Joa

Skip glanced tip at them as they came up the walk. “Howdy, Sheriff Brady, Ernie,” he said. “Would you please tell me why someone would use this crap to paint over every goddamned-excuse the expression-window in the place?” he grumbled.