Outlaw Mountain

“You can keep it if you like,” Jessie said. “Alice gave me ten copies for my birthday last year. Even with this one gone, I still have seven. That should be plenty. It’s not like I have any children of my own to leave them to. I did give one to the Douglas Historical Society and another to the historical society over in Tombstone. Alice lived both places, you see. Both towns are in the book.”

“I’m looking forward to reading it,” Joa

As the door closed behind Jessie Monroe, Joa

With the book lying open on her desk, Joa

“Casey down in AFIS needs to see you right away.”

“What about?” Joa

“All I know is she said it’s urgent.”

Before Joa

CHAPTER TWELVE

Casey Ledford, the gifted young technician who ran Cochise County’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System, was a Bisbee girl who had gone off to college on a full-ride Veterans of Foreign Wars scholarship. She had enrolled in the University of Arizona’s College of Fine Arts, where she had pla

Like a lot of other things, the AFIS equipment had fallen into Cochise County hands through a law enforcement, War Against Drugs grant that paid for hardware and software, hut no “liveware”-the people necessary to make the other two work. Prior to receiving the equipment, Joa

“What’s so urgent?” Joa

“It’s the Rogers case,” Casey said.

“You got a hit?”

Casey Ledford nodded, but she didn’t look any too happy about it. Joa

“The hit resulted from prints we found at the mobile at Outlaw Mountain.”

“Farley Adams’ place,” Joa

Casey nodded again. “Right,” she said. “None of the guys thought to look there. They had dusted the outside controls, but they hadn’t bothered to check inside.”

“Good work,” Joa

“I actually brought the dishes back here to process them,” Casey continued. “It was easier that way. And the prints I lifted were good ones. They didn’t need all that much augmentation or anything. And once I fed them into the computer, the hit came back almost right away.”

“So what’s the problem then?”

“The computer spits out the person’s name and the name of the jurisdiction that’s looking for him. We usually have to call that department by phone in order to get the original fingerprint card as well as details on the criminal activity in question. I’m the one who does that. It’s just a bureaucratic formality. I get the information and pass it along to whoever’s working our end of it.”

“You did that, then?”

“Yes. The hit was from North Las Vegas, up in Nevada.”

“Let me guess,” Joa

“Right,” Casey agreed. “It’s Jonathan Becker.”

“What’s he wanted for?”

“He was wanted for conspiracy to commit murder.”

“You said was,” Joa

“Jonathan Becker is dead,” Casey said. “At least that’s what the first person I talked to up in Nevada told me. He said Becker’s prints should have been pulled from the system because he’s deceased. According to the guy I talked to, Becker died in a one-car roll-over accident on the road between Vegas and Kingman. And that’s where he’s supposedly buried-Kingman, Arizona. The problem is, Becker obviously isn’t dead. If he were, he couldn’t have left fingerprints for us to find.”

“There has to be some kind of mixup,” Joa

Casey shook her head determinedly. “There’s no mixup,” she said. “Not ten minutes after I get off the phone with the first detective, somebody else was on the line, calling me from North Las Vegas and pumping me for any and all information we might have on this case. It just didn’t sound right, Sheriff Brady. There’s something weird about this, and I don’t know what it is.”

“I don’t know either,” Joa

She went straight back to her office and shut herself inside. There she studied the papers and tried to make sense of the conflicting bits of information. The more she examined the materials, the more she agreed with Casey’s assessment. Something was wrong there. Obviously Becker and Farley Adams were one and the same. If Jonathan Becker really were dead, then the detective in North Las Vegas would have no possible interest in what was going on in Cochise County.

Joa

Joa

“Who?”

“Detective Garfield,” Joa

“I’m afraid we don’t have anyone here by that name. This is North Las Vegas. Have you checked with Las Vegas Metropolitan PD? Detective Garfield probably works there. People are always getting the two cities mixed up. Would you like me to give you that number?”

Joa