Dead to Rights Read online

  J.A. JANCE

  DEAD TO RIGHTS

  This book is dedicated to M.A.D.D., Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for making possible the constructive use of pain and anger. It is also dedicated to W.I.C.S., Widowed Information Consultation Services of King County, for providing a place for the mending of broken hearts.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  Hal and Bonnie Morgan wended their way through the crowded,…

  ONE

  “Mom,” Jenny Brady shouted, pounding on the bathroom door. “Come…

  TWO

  “Not Tigger and the porcupine again,” Terry Buckwalter said, peering…

  THREE

  By the time Joanna bounced over the cattle guard and…

  FOUR

  By the time the Cochise County Coroner, Dr. George Winfield, showed…

  FIVE

  It was so late by the time Joanna finally escaped…

  SIX

  “There you go, Sheriff Brady,” Dr. Reginald Wade said the next…

  SEVEN

  Expecting to be raked over the coals because of her…

  EIGHT

  Feeling frustrated, Joanna left the Rob Roy for the fifteen-mile…

  NINE

  Once back in the Blazer, Joanna radioed the department and…

  TEN

  Halfway home, with the groceries safely stowed in the back,…

  ELEVEN

  The next half hour or so was a blur of…

  TWELVE

  It was almost seven by the time Joanna stumbled home.

  THIRTEEN

  It wasn’t until Joanna pulled up to the entrance to…

  FOURTEEN

  In the course of the next hour and a half,…

  FIFTEEN

  Late as it was when Joanna arrived home, she started…

  SIXTEEN

  Back at the cars, Eva Lou was already waiting in…

  SEVENTEEN

  When Jenny and Joanna reached the Pizza Palace, Butch Dixon’s…

  EIGHTEEN

  “What’s happening with the Highway Patrol?” Joanna demanded into the…

  NINETEEN

  Seeing that the waffle-making was in good hands, Joanna abandoned…

  TWENTY

  As they headed east on Highway 80, Joanna could barely…

  TWENTY-ONE

  Terry Buckwalter died of her injuries before she ever made…

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  OTHER BOOKS BY J. A. JANCE

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  PROLOGUE

  HAL AND Bonnie Morgan wended their way through the crowded, overheated movie-theater lobby into the cool air of a midwinter Phoenix night. Once outside the theater doors, the aroma of popcorn quickly gave way to a haze of smoke from a dozen hastily lit cigarettes. As they moved across the open-air patio, Bonnie reached out, took her husband’s hand, and squeezed it.

  In response, Hal leaned toward her. “The name’s Bond,” he whispered, “James Bond.” Bonnie and Hal had just finished seeing Golden Eye for the third time. Hal’s imitation of Pierce Brosnan’s accent and delivery was so dead-on that Bonnie giggled aloud.

  “You’re good enough that they should have made you the new James Bond,” she told him.

  A passion for James Bond movies was something the two of them had shared in common when they met twenty years earlier. And now, after a celebratory dinner in honor of their nineteenth wedding anniversary, they were on their way back to the Hyatt Regency two blocks away. They came to Phoenix each February to celebrate both Saint Valentine’s Day and their wedding anniversary. Once a year, they would splurge and pretend, for that one evening at least, that they, too, were a pair of carefree snowbirds.

  On their anniversary trips they made a conscious effort to put aside all day-to-day concerns. Hal would do his best to forget whatever crisis might be brewing in the small trailer park he managed up in Wickenburg while Bonnie turned her back on the petty small-town grievances simmering in the Wickenburg Post Office where she worked as a part-time clerk. For that single day, they concentrated on each other and on the miracle that had brought them together in the first place, one that had given them the blessing of nineteen wonderful years.

  Riding down on the outdoor escalator, Bonnie breathed deeply. As the pall of cigarette smoke dissipated, a sweet, delicate scent permeated the air. “Smell those orange blossoms,” she said. “It’s like every year God gives us my wedding bouquet all over again, except now it’s free. We don’t even have to pay for it.”

  Bonnie had carried a bouquet of orange blossoms to their Valentine’s Day wedding ceremony in front of a curmudgeonly Justice of the Peace in Palm Springs. They had gone to Palm Springs to marry in hopes Bonnie’s recently divorced ex-husband wouldn’t get wind of the ceremony and try to screw things up.

  “You were a very beautiful bride,” Hal said with a sudden catch in his throat. He was still as smitten with his wife as he had been the first day he laid eyes on her, as she had walked along the beach with her little niece and nephew in tow.

  Before meeting Bonnie, Hal Morgan had already had a disastrous first marriage blow up in his face. In the lonely aftermath of his divorce, he had thrown himself into his work as a police officer with single-minded dedication. He had been the one who always volunteered to take those unpopular Sunday-afternoon and holiday shifts. What little spare time was left to him he had spent prowling around dusty used-book stores.

  From the moment he and Bonnie had struck up a casual conversation outside a snow-cone stand, all that had changed. Bonnie had come into his life bringing both her radiant smile and her sunny disposition, either of which would have been enough to melt Hal Morgan’s heart. Her spontaneous joy of living had caught him up and carried him along like the current in a swiftly moving babbling brook. Even now he sometimes couldn’t help but marvel at his great good fortune.

  “You were beautiful then,” he added, almost as an afterthought. “And nineteen years later, you still are.”

  Bonnie looked up at him and smiled. As usual, Hal Morgan’s heart seemed to skip a beat.

  They reached the intersection of Third and Van Buren just as the light changed from red to green. At nine o’clock at night, downtown traffic was almost nonexistent. Still, Hal checked in both directions before they stepped off the curb.

  There were a few headlights coming toward them in the right-hand, west-bound lanes, but they were a block away, stopped at the next light as Hal led Bonnie into the marked crosswalk. They were in the middle of the street when Hal heard the squeal of rubber as a car came careening around the corner, coming the wrong way on Third and then skidding into a wrenching right-hand turn onto Van Buren. The speeding vehicle, a late-model full-sized Chevy pickup of some kind, bounced over the edge of the sidewalk and then slid, spinning out of control, into the intersection.

  Hal jumped back out of the way and tried to pull Bonnie with him, but he was too late. One moment Hal was holding Bonnie’s hand; the next she was yanked from his grasp. He stood there frozen in stunned silence as she flew away from him, up into the air, seeming to float above him like a rag doll someone had tossed out of the window of a moving vehicle. The pickup was still doing a 180 when Bonnie Morgan started back to earth. She crashed to the pavement just to the left of the spinning truck, hitting the ground back-first with an awful, bone-crushing impact and then disappearing completely beneath the body of the truck as it finally came to rest, landing on its side.

  Almost at once there were horns honking. Within seconds a crowd gathered out of nowhere, but Hal Morgan heard nothing, saw no one. He vaulted forward, reaching the truck at almost the same time it stopped moving. Several passerby, most of them fellow moviegoers
who had followed Hal and Bonnie down the escalator, joined him an instant later.

  The engine was still running.

  “Turn the damned thing off before it catches fire,” someone shouted. “For God’s sake, turn it off!”

  Knowing the danger, Hal did what years of police training had taught him. He scrambled in through the smashed passenger side window, into a fog of spilled booze and across a seat slick with whiskey-laced vomit. The driver, cushioned by the now deflated air bag, was still strapped inside.

  “Whazza matter?” he was asking. “What the hell happened?”

  Ignoring him, Hal managed to reach across the seat far enough to turn the key in the switch. Then he clambered back outside.

  The swelling crowd stood together in stricken silence. All that was visible of Bonnie Morgan were the graceful fingers of a single hand protruding from underneath the pickup’s crushed driver’s side. On one of those fingers the gold from Bonnie’s wedding band glinted in the glow of a streetlight.

  It was then Hal noticed there was someone standing next to him—a young black man in torn jeans and a ragged shirt with a baseball cap perched on a thicket of dreadlocks.

  “Help me,” Hal choked. “Maybe we can lift it off her.”

  “Sure thing, man,” the kid said. “No problem.”

  As the two of them set to work, several of the passerby joined in. They knelt together alongside the fallen pickup. Then, on the count of three, they lifted it, rolling it back upright, pushing it onto its wheels. Uncovered, Bonnie Morgan lay inert. In the lamp-lit dusk, a thin dribble of blood, tinted purple by the mercury vapor lights, leaked out of the corner of her mouth and ran downward into her ear and hair.

  Hal rushed to his wife’s side and threw himself down on the pavement beside her. As he took her wrist to check for a pulse, a hushed silence once again drifted over the crowd of onlookers. That was broken suddenly by a frantic pounding from inside the truck.

  “Hey, somebody!” the trapped driver yelled. “Lemme out! The door’s stuck. I can’t get it open. Get me out of here.”

  Gently, as if the bone might shatter, Hal Morgan placed his wife’s still wrist back where he had found it. Then, with a groan that was more rage than anything else, he sprang to his feet and headed for the truck once more. Of all the people gathered around at that moment, only the kid in the torn jeans read the murderous look on the other man’s face.

  “Leave him be, man,” the kid said, taking hold of Hal’s shoulder, forcibly restraining him. “Let the cops take care of the stupid jerk.”

  Seemingly on command, the cops showed up just then, arriving in a cacophony of sirens and a blinding flash of lights. Hal barely noticed. His whole being remained fixed on his wife’s crushed body and on the spot of pavement where the trickle of blood had become a puddle.

  Burying his face in his hands, Hal subsided once again next to his wife’s body. The ambulance and fire trucks might be coming, but he knew that whatever aid they brought would be too little, too late. Bonnie Genevieve Morgan—Hal’s beloved Bonnie Jean—was dead at the age of fifty-two.

  A uniformed police officer burst through the crowd. “What’s going on here?” he demanded. “What happened?”

  “He killed her,” Hal Morgan murmured brokenly into his cupped hands. “That rotten, drunken son of a bitch murdered her.”

  “Are you okay?” the cop asked. “Were you hit too?”

  “I’m fine,” Hal insisted. “He hit her, not me.”

  Reassured, the cop turned away and fixed his attention on Bonnie. As he did so, Hal tried to rise to his feet, but there was something holding him down, some unfamiliar weight on his shoulder that made it almost impossible to stand. Grunting with effort, he managed to struggle himself upright. Only then did he realize that the extra weight came from a hand gripping his shoulder—a hand that belonged to the kid with the torn jeans and dreadlocks. Tears streamed down the young man’s face. He seemed incapable of letting Hal go.

  “I’m sorry about your wife, man,” he managed to say. “I’m really sorry.”

  Hal nodded. “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for everything.”

  When he said thanks, he meant it, because he knew in his soul that had it not been for the restraining weight of that powerful grip, Hal Morgan, too, might have killed someone that night. If the kid hadn’t held him back when Hal started for the truck, the son of a bitch of a driver would have been dead, too. Right then and there. Of injuries inflicted after the incident itself.

  Feeling suddenly weak and shaky, Hal limped back over to the edge of the street and sank down on the cold concrete curb. He sat there quietly, knowing all too well what would come next. There would be a world of inquiry—of investigators and paperwork, of questions and answers. In the long run, none of it would make a single whit of difference. Whatever the cops decided in determining how to fix the blame, it wouldn’t bring Bonnie back. She was dead. Gone forever. Nothing any well-meaning cop could do would restore her to him.

  As Hal sat there with unnoticed tears streaming down his face, an uncontrollable tremor assailed his whole body. Another concerned police officer hurried over to him. Kneeling beside him, the cop shone a flashlight into Hal Morgan’s eyes.

  “How did it happen?” the officer asked.

  “The guy creamed us,” Hal answered through chattering teeth. “The bastard in the pickup was driving the wrong way up Third. He came screaming around the corner on two wheels and smashed into us right in the middle of the crosswalk.”

  “Officer Stephens told me you weren’t hurt, but are you sure you’re okay?”

  Hal Morgan shook his head. Already the finality of it was soaking in. “No,” he groaned. “I’m not okay. Bonnie’s dead. I don’t think I’ll ever be okay again.”

  ONE

  “MOM,” JENNY Brady shouted, pounding on the bathroom door. “Come quick.”

  Joanna Brady, half-dressed in her slip, bra, and panty hose, stood in front of the steamy bathroom mirror. A mascara brush was poised in her hand. Jenny’s frantic pounding startled her enough that she left a smudge of mascara under her green eyes as she hurried to throw open the door. “What is it?”

  “Tigger did it again.”

  “Did what?”

  “Got into another porcupine. Look,” Jenny said, kneeling next to the panting dog. “He’s got quills all over his face, even in his tongue this time.”

  Joanna knelt beside her nine-year-old daughter to examine the injured dog. Tigger’s mixed bloodlines, half golden retriever/half pit bull—had left him looking more comical than fierce. He had the blunt nose and the white eye patch of a pit bull combined with a lush, flowing golden-retriever coat. Now he stood there, patient and dejected, letting Joanna study him. His head resembled a pincushion, only the pins in question were three-to-four inches long and a quarter of an inch wide. Threads of bloody drool dangled from his mouth and dripped onto the tile floor.

  “What about Sadie?” Joanna asked, referring to their other dog, a female bluetick hound.

  “Sadie’s fine.” Jenny struggled to hold back her tears. “She’s eating and Tigger can’t, so I brought him inside.”

  Joanna Brady, sheriff of Cochise County in the far-southeastern corner of the state of Arizona, glanced at her watch and then back into her daughter’s blue eyes. There wasn’t much time. The last thing she needed was some new crisis on the home front as she set off to fight her department’s budget wars. Still, the seriousness of the quills embedded in Tigger’s nose precluded any delay.

  “That was good thinking,” Joanna said, touching Jenny’s shoulder and trying to reassure her troubled child that she had done the right thing. “If we hurry, I’ll have time to drop him off at Doc Buckwalter’s on my way to the board of supervisors meeting. Do you think you can load him into the Blazer while I finish getting dressed?”

  Jenny nodded wordlessly and started toward the kitchen, with the dog trailing obediently at her heels. “And, Jenny?”

  Jenny stopped a
nd turned back to her mother. The tears were flowing now, sliding down her cheeks, dripping onto her blouse. It wounded Joanna, made her heart hurt, that Jenny had tried so hard to keep her tears from showing.

  “What?” Jenny asked.

  “Make a bed for him in the backseat with some of those old clean blankets from the laundry room,” Joanna cautioned. “Otherwise he’s likely to drip all over the carpet.”

  Nodding again, Jenny set off.

  The new Blazer Joanna drove was, after all, a county-owned vehicle. She wasn’t eager to explain to the guys in Motor Pool how bloodstains found in the back of her vehicle came from a dog so terminally dumb as to go after a porcupine—most likely the same one—for the third time in as many months.

  Back in the bathroom, Joanna repaired the mascara damage and ran a brush through her red hair. It was getting too long, she noticed. She’d have to have it cut soon, although she had delayed going back to the beauty shop because she was still irked about Jenny’s awful and unauthorized permanent.

  While Joanna had been off in Phoenix attending a police officer training school, her mother, Eleanor Lathrop, had engineered a trip to Helene’s Salon of Hair and Beauty for her granddaughter as a “surprise” for Joanna—with disastrous results. Jenny’s fine blond hair had been chemically fried to a crisp in the process. Two months later, she still looked as though she had put her finger in an electrical socket. And although Joanna held her mother primarily responsible, she was still peeved at Helen Barco, the beautician, as well.

  Hurrying into the bedroom, Joanna grabbed clothes from the closet. Since most of the day would be taken up with meetings with the Cochise County Board of Supervisors, she was tempted to leave her body armor at home. Supervisor meetings were held in an overheated conference room, and the soft body armor always made the heat that much worse. But Joanna was a sheriff who was determined to lead by example. Since she was trying to convince her officers of the advisability of wearing bullet-resistant vests whenever they were on duty, she put hers on as well. Besides, considering the fact that the new sheriff’s honeymoon period with the board was already over, maybe wearing body armor to the meeting wasn’t all that bad an idea.