Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(44)

For the better part of a minute, Ernie studied the screen in stony silence. Finally he looked back at Lyndell. “We’ll be able to get all this material from Leon’s phone, too, but doing that will take warrants, time, and all kinds of technical effort that we don’t necessarily have available. It’ll go a hell of a lot faster if we simply copy what’s already here.”

“Suit yourself,” Lyn said. “Copy away.”

Ernie glanced at his watch. “Maybe I can catch Kristin before she takes off.” Without another word Ernie took the phone and left the room.

When Frank Montoya accepted the job in Sierra Vista, his departure had left Joanna in a world of hurt when it came to having someone who was up to speed on all things cyber. Fortunately, her secretary, Kristin Gregovich, had stepped into that void and was the department’s current IT guru.

While Ernie was gone, Joanna did her best to bring Lyndell Hogan up to speed, sharing what information she could about the ongoing investigation. In actual fact she probably told him more than she should have, but that was too bad. If Dave Newton found out about it and raised hell? That was a risk Joanna was willing to take.

In her telling, however, she left out some of the story—their suspicion that Madison was the one who’d brought the murder weapon to the crime scene, the fact that rather than being drunk during the confrontation there was a chance that Leon had been drugged, and the very real probability that Madison had locked the children in the second bedroom before launching what, by way of Armando Ruiz, would turn out to be a fatal attack.

Yes, Joanna told the story, but she did leave a few things out. Not lies, she told herself, more like sins of omission.

When Ernie returned at last, phone in hand, he passed the device over to Lyndell. “Got it,” he said, “all of it. I’d like to drive up to Tucson tomorrow and have a one-on-one with Mr. Moreno. Under most circumstances an attorney wouldn’t be able to speak to us. But your son is dead, and with you paying Mr. Moreno’s retainer, I think it’s safe to say that if you gave him permission to break attorney-client privilege, I think he would.”

“I think so, too,” said Lyndell Hogan, slipping the phone into his pocket and rising to his feet. “I’ll give him a call as soon as I get back to the hotel to let him know you’re coming. What’s your name again?”

“Detective Ernie Carpenter,” came the reply, “with the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department.”

Joanna waited until Lyndell Hogan left the room, and then she darted around her desk and gave Ernie a hug. “File sexual-harassment charges if you like, but that was damned fine work.”

“You’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” he said with a grin.

“You’re wrong about that,” she told him. “I already do.”





Chapter 16





Joanna was about to head for the parking lot when her phone rang, and she sank back down in her chair to answer.

“I’ve got several pieces of news for you,” Detective Howell said.

“Did you talk to Mrs. Ambrose?” Joanna asked.

“Yes,” Deb said, “and that was a lot like talking to a wall. She didn’t tell me much, although she did allow as how the kids, and most especially the little girl, didn’t seem exactly overjoyed to be dropped off at home. According to Mrs. Ambrose, under the circumstances that kind of behavior wasn’t at all unusual.”

“It sounds as though the CPS lead goes nowhere.”

“Yes,” Deb said, “but I had better luck with Kendall’s second-grade teacher, Mrs. Baird. Believe it or not, Kendall is in second grade at the same school where Amy Ruiz teaches. There are three second-grade classes at Carmichael. Amy may not have tumbled to the connection, but Frank did as soon as I asked him which school the Hogan kids would attend.

“So I talked to Mrs. Baird, and she expressed some real concerns. For one thing, she’s caught Kendall rescuing food out of the trash cans in the cafeteria to take home to eat. She says that the other kids tend to tease Kendall because she doesn’t always have clean clothes or clean hair.”

“So there’s bullying,” Joanna concluded.

“Mrs. Baird has gone so far as to suggest as much to the principal, but he told her it was just kids being kids and she shouldn’t worry about it.”

“Which is to say he’s sweeping it under the rug.”

“But here’s something that isn’t kids being kids,” Deb said. “Mrs. Baird gave me a piece of notebook paper that she said Kendall gave her sometime last week. Kendall showed Mrs. Baird a word she’d printed on the paper and asked what it meant.”

“What word?”

“H-O-R.”

“What does that mean?” Joanna asked.

“That’s what Mrs. Baird asked Kendall, and she sounded it out. ‘H-O-R’ equals ‘WHORE’! She said that one of the girls who lives up the street was saying that’s what her mommy calls Kendall’s mommy—a whore.”

Joanna’s heart gave a squeeze.

“Mrs. Baird said she was going to bring this to the principal’s attention,” Deb continued, “but he was out of town at a conference. She was waiting for him to come back, but then after all the uproar with the shooting and with Kendall absent from school this week, she decided not to.”