Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(29)
As soon as Deb left the office, Joanna picked up her phone and dialed Casey Ledford.
“Deb was just here,” Joanna said. “Thanks for running the prints on that knife.”
“You’re welcome,” Casey said.
“Did you mention the knife to Dave Newton?”
“I had to,” Casey answered. “With clear signs that a confrontation of some kind had occurred in the living room, it seemed likely that the whole residence would be regarded as a crime scene. I have to say, however, that when I told him about the knife situation, he didn’t seem especially interested.”
“I’m not surprised,” Joanna said. “The man has twenty-twenty tunnel vision. He’s only concerned about getting the goods on Armando. Any prints on the shell casings you found?”
“Yes,” Casey answered. “I’ve run them. No hits so far. They don’t match Madison Hogan’s prints, and they don’t match Leon’s either.”
“Which means that a third party is most likely involved one way or another,” Joanna said. “What about gunshot residue? Did you run any GSR tests?”
“For sure on Leon Hogan,” Casey replied, “and GSR was definitely present on both his hands and clothing. I contacted the hospital in Tucson, and they collected samples from Deputy Ruiz’s hands as well. I also asked them to collect Armando’s clothing as evidence so it could be tested later.”
“Good,” Joanna said. “What about Madison? Did anyone run GSR tests on her?”
“Not so far as I know,” Casey answered. “If so, they would have been placed in evidence and I would have been the one doing the analyzing. But I’m not sure why you’re looking into Madison.”
“I’m not quite sure of that myself,” Joanna said. “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know. In the meantime thanks for the info. Now I’ll let you go. If Newton finds out you’ve been speaking to me, there’ll be hell to pay. I don’t want to put you in his crosshairs, too.”
Joanna hung up and sat there for a time thinking. From everything she’d been told, Madison Hogan had emerged from the house naked as a jaybird. If she had fired that first gunshot, the one inside the house, there would have been GSR on her hands and body at the time of the shooting, not that that would necessarily have proved anything. Whatever had been there the day before would certainly no longer be present more than twenty-four hours later. Had Dave Newton been half the investigator he thought himself to be, he would have ordered GSRs from everyone on the scene—Madison Hogan included. The problem was, this was Newton’s ball game, not Joanna’s. When it came to the Whetstone shooting incident itself, Joanna needed to stay out of it.
But Madison was the suspect in multiple domestic-violence incidents. If she’d had access to one deadly weapon, she could probably lay hands on another with the greatest of ease. Did that pose a danger for her children—for Kendall and Peter? In Joanna’s mind the answer to that question was an unqualified yes, and she wouldn’t be backing off until she was sure those two kids were no longer in jeopardy.
Not ever.
Chapter 9
For the first time all semester, Jennifer Ann Brady was pissed at her roommate. She also had a headache and was pretty sure she’d blown her first final, organic chemistry. It was an upper-division course. She might have been a first-semester sophomore on campus, but due to a collection of advanced-placement classes she had enough credits to qualify as a junior.
What she’d learned in biology and chemistry classes at Bisbee High School had been good enough to enable her to pass advanced-placement exams on both those subjects, but passing tests didn’t necessarily give you the same kind of foundation as that to be gained by doing actual classwork. At NAU organic chemistry was designed to function as a first sort, separating promising students from unpromising ones and sending the latter into degree programs less demanding than those called for in, say, premed or prevet programs. And that’s what Jenny wanted do more than anything else in life—she wanted to become a veterinarian.
So she’d spent the whole semester struggling with the classwork. When finals came around, she’d needed to burn the midnight oil, last night being a case in point. She had long since adjusted to the fact that her roommate was a night owl who seemed to stay up until all hours every single night. Earplugs and a sleeping mask helped with that most of the time. It was also annoying that Beth was pretty close to brilliant and had spent her whole first semester breezing through classes without so much as cracking a book.
When Jenny had finally called it quits the previous night and was ready to go to bed just before one o’clock in the morning, Beth had been in the bathroom. Jenny hadn’t been paying that much attention. She didn’t know how long Beth had been there. Wanting to respect her roommate’s privacy, she’d waited ten minutes. Finally, desperately needing to get some sleep, she knocked on the door.
“I need to go to bed.”
“Just a minute,” Beth had said.
The shower hadn’t been on before, but it came on then. Five minutes later a wet-haired Beth had finally emerged, tying the belt on her robe.
“Sorry,” she added. “I was taking a shower.”
Which turned out to be a lie. The vented fan in the bathroom was a joke. When somebody took a hot shower, the place steamed up like crazy. Jenny entered the room to find there wasn’t a trace of steam in the air or even on the mirror. If Beth had really been taking a shower, it would have been a cold one, and no one in his or her right mind would take a cold shower in the middle of the night in mid-December.