Cool in Tucson (36 page)

“Hey, thanks for coming,” Sarah said from the floor.

“Dan Daly,” he said, looking around.  “You’re Sarah Burke?” 

“Yes.  This is my niece, Denny Lynch.”

“Hey, Denny.  You having an exciting day?”  He holstered his gun.  “Sarah, you didn’t leave me much of anything to do here, did you?  Shall I take this piece of trash out of your house?”

“Yes, could we put him in your car for a few minutes?  I need to make a couple of phone calls.”

“You gonna ask Delaney for permission to shoot him?” Daly said, putting leg and belly chains on Hector and clipping them together.  “I’ll be glad to help you with that.”

“We might not want to shoot him.  This little thug may be more important than he looks.”  She could see that Hector, even as he shuffled out to Dan’s car in full chains, got kind of a boost out of hearing that.

Standing at her curb behind the Brat, Sarah called the DMV.  “Dolly?  Sarah Burke.  I’m fine, you?  Good.  Run this for me, will you?”  She recited the license number, adding, “1987 Subaru Brat, one of those stupid things that looks like a sedan that lost a fight with a chain saw.” 

“Or a pickup in fancy dress.”  Dolly had an enviable ability to talk and giggle while typing accurately in machine-gun bursts.  “Here you go,” she said after a few seconds.  “Hector Rodriguez…” She read off a birth date and an address on Ohio Street.

“Hah!”  Sarah said.

“Oh, you like that answer, huh?”

“Yes, indeed.  That is an excellent answer, thank you very much.”

“Hey, we aim to please,” Dolly said.

Her phone rang.  It was Delaney, wondering where she was, and wanting to warn her that Bud Ganz had just matched a print from this morning’s homicide scene to the single print Gloria had lifted off Ace Perkins’ leg Tuesday morning.  It took her a few minutes to explain how, more or less by accident and acting with perhaps slightly less than textbook caution, she had just captured the killer they’d all been chasing.

Then she dialed the number Morrell had given her an hour earlier.  The red-dress girl was polite but cool, explaining that Special Agent Morrell was away from his phone.  “Would you like to be connected to his voice mail?”

“No.  Find him as fast as you can and tell him I just arrested Hector Rodriguez.     Rodriguez, yes.  Trust me, he wants him.  Tell him I’ve got the missing money, too, and he should call this number within fifteen minutes if he wants to talk to me about him.  After that I’m going to be on my way to the Pima County jail to charge this man with…oh, kidnapping and assault and murder, just for starts.”  She had to say her number twice; there was a good deal of noise around the phone at the other end. 

Dan helped her with the detail work, then, bringing in gloves and evidence bags.  They bagged and tagged Hector’s gun and knife, and counted the money together.  Sarah looked up once and met Denny’s watching eyes, and Denny looked away.       

The handsome patrolman kept his expression stoic but his eyes indicated that while a thug on the floor with a detective straddling him was no big deal, a skinny child standing nearby in a man’s T-shirt, a granny struggling out of a collapsed recliner, and a significant quantity of large bills drifting around their modest dwelling made this an interesting crime scene. “So,” he finally ventured, “this guy broke into your house and brought his own cash, huh?”                

“Yeah, in this neighborhood we make ‘em wipe their feet before they come in, too,” Sarah said.  She knew he deserved to hear the whole story but she wasn’t in any position to chat.  She watched Denny sneaking peeks at Dan, the studly showboat cop.    
Wow
,
she looks like Janine right now
. 
Our next family disaster’s growing up before my eyes. 
A corner of her mind not completely absorbed with police work ran off alone on its own track, wailing a warning.  
She stole all this money, hid it in my house and never said a word.  What kind of a kid is she turning into? 
The answer stared her in the face: 
The kind whose mother brings home a new boyfriend every week and frequently gets stoned out of her mind.  Denny needs to be rescued from her life!

A DEA van pulled into the carport behind Dan’s squad.  Two DEA agents got out of it and knocked.  When Sarah opened the door, the taller one held out his phone and asked her, politely, to push button number one. 

“When it answers, Ma’am,” he said, “will you ask for the director, please?”   

Morrell said, “Well, from now on, Sarah Burke, I’m going to be very careful what I ask you for.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

After lengthy phone tag and dickering, about the time Sarah began threatening to die of impatience the DEA took Hector to Hemisphere Loop.  Delaney got his firm understanding that Tucson PD would get him back as soon as they had picked his brain clean.  As the van pulled out of her driveway, Sarah’s phone rang and it was Delaney again, saying, “One more thing—” 

“Boss, they’re just leaving,” Sarah said.  “I don’t think I can—”

“It’s not about DEA.”  Delaney made the funny noises, mmp mmp, that she knew meant he was pulling his nose and thinking.  “I just thought you might enjoy knowing that Bud Ganz just matched the fingerprints we found at this morning’s crime scene to that same one you and Gloria lifted off Ace Perkins’ leg Tuesday morning.”

“Oh, so…Hector did today’s crime too?”

“Looks like it.  Too bad you didn’t know that when you ran into your house after him without waiting for backup.”

“Boss, he had a gun pointed at my niece.  What would you have done?”

“Just what you did, I guess.  The best police work I knew how to do.  And you did very well with it, but I want you to think about it, Sarah.” 
    

No, I’m going to try to put it right out of my mind that my Denny  faced up to that double murderer a few minutes ago.  Otherwise how will I get through all the work I still have to do today? 
  

She hung up and hurried back into her house, where Denny was replacing the broken peg on the Morris chair.  Aggie sat erect by the dining table, fanning herself with the paper.  Sarah leaned over her and asked, “Are you okay?”

“Oh, sure.  Never a dull moment around my daughter, the cop.” 

“Well, I don’t usually do law enforcement from my home.  You need anything?   Drink of water?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“I’d like to stay and look after you but I have to go and file a lot of reports to keep  that bad guy in jail.”

“Where we all devoutly want him to stay forever.  Don’t worry.” Aggie’s eyes glinted.  “Denny’s here, what could go wrong that she can’t handle?” 

As if on a signal, Denny pushed the Morris chair back into its upright position and said with a flourish, “Ta-dah!”

Aggie said, “Beautiful.  Come here to me, child.”  She put her arm around Denny and pulled her close.  “Seems like the day before yesterday I was holding you on my lap, reading you stories.”  She made a little clucking noise,
tsk.
  “Maybe from now on you should read to me.”

Denny giggled nervously and said, “Well, I can do that, I guess.”

“I’m sure you can.  You’re a lot like your Aunt Sarah, I’m starting to think.” 

Sarah said, “She did all right with that Hector, didn’t she?”

“She did, and so did you.  Honestly,” Aggie smiled ruefully, “all these years I’ve given you grief about your career…you know what I thought when you went past me like a panther with that gun in your hand?  I thought,
Thank God, Sarah’s here
.”

“Ah, Mamadiddle.”  She patted her mother’s hand.  
Still a little tremble.  Not bad
.  “I better get to work.  You two take care of each other, hear?  Eat some comfort food.”

Denny said, “Grilled cheese sandwiches?”

“Why not?” Sarah said. 

As she walked out she heard Aggie say behind her, “What was all that talk about money, sweetheart?”  She closed the door quickly, not wanting to hear Denny’s reply.

As she drove to Stone Avenue along the sleepy streets of mid-afternoon, she felt her energy sag sharply and her legs began to shake—a reaction to the extraordinary effort of subduing Hector.  She pinched her cheeks to stay alert till she could park, wobbled into the break room on rubber knees and grabbed a sports drink and a banana.  When her hands were steady enough, she fixed a coffee with two sugars and walked calmly into her section sipping it, doing her best to project
No problem.
        

“Here she is,” Ibarra said, as she walked past his desk.  “Now, guys, come on, help me tell Sarah what she missed at this morning’s crime scene.”  He got up and followed her into her workspace with his dimples flashing.

“Did Delaney tell you,” Eisenstaat said, following him in, “what a piece of work the wife is?”

“I haven’t heard anything, I just got here,” Sarah said.

“Oh. God, it was so much fun,” Ibarra gleamed. 

“The neighbors saw all these flies collecting on the windows and got worried when nobody answered the phone,” Eisenstaat said, “so they called 911—”

“And the first responders broke in the house and found the body,” Tobin said, crowding in. “So the neighbor’s wife called Pinetop and found the victim’s wife.”

“You guys think this is funny?  Yech.” 

“Well, not the first part, but wait.” Eisenstaat raised a magisterial hand.  “The widow arrived just in time to identify the body before they moved it.  She went through all the requisite weeping and gnashing, but then, you should have seen her recovery speed, Sarah!  In five minutes, she was doing this elaborate song and dance about why she couldn’t let us into the back room—”

“The back room that just happened to have a padlock on it,” Greenaway tittered.   

“Three verses and a chorus about priceless art works that mustn’t be disturbed—”  Eisenstaat looked genuinely happy for once , Sarah thought.  

Ibarra said, “So Delaney started looking at that door like a dog at a bone—”

“Finally he says,” Tobin did his blinking imitation of Delaney, “ ‘You want to give us the key or shall we break it down?’  But really polite, like a deacon in church.”

“Okay, enough already,” Sarah said, “what was in the room?” 

“His printing press!” Ibarra said.  “And all these special papers…this victim was a first-rate counterfeiter.”     

“Oh?  I haven’t heard
that
word for a while.” Sarah looked at Eisenstaat.  “You used to say it was Tucson’s fall-back cottage industry.”

“It was, in the old days.  Right behind smuggling dope and people, and boosting cars.  You don’t hear about it much any more.”

“Whaddya mean?” Greenaway said.  “This town is crawling with fake driver’s licenses and green cards—”

“Offa computers, sure,” Eisenstaat said.  “Computer software’s so good now, nobody does it the hard way any more.  Hell, you can make yourself the King of Romania in two minutes if you want to, and it’ll look
almost
right.  But this guy was a throwback, everything the old-fashioned way, beautiful etching tools, great paper.”

“Why’d it get him killed, though?” Sarah asked.

 “We don’t know
why
yet,” Tobin said, “but
how
is sure no mystery.  Three slugs from a nine mil, and we brought back the casings.”