“No.”
“I have a cell phone here,” Joanna said quietly. “You’re welcome to use it, if you’d like to call her and get her on the job.” For several seconds there was no sound, only the ever-slowing scrape of the rope. “And, if what you suspect is true—if your husband is busy moving assets offshore—you probably don’t have a moment to lose.”
There was another long pause. “You’d let me do that?” Reba Singleton asked. “You’d let me use your telephone?”
“Sure. But first, let me ask you something. When you were in my house, did you take a gun?”
“Yes.”
“Where is it?”
No answer.
“Where?”
“It’s in my pocket.”
“Put it down, Reba,” Joanna ordered calmly. “Put it down on the ground so no one gets hurt.”
“I’m not going to hurt anyone else with it. I was going to use it on myself.”
“You don’t want to do that,” Joanna said. “You want to stick around and give Dennis Singleton what he deserves, and I’m sure Joyce Roberts will be more than happy to help you do it.”
There was another long, long silence after that, followed eventually by a soft thud in the grass. “There,” Reba said. “I dropped the gun. Now can I use the phone?”
CHAPTER 26
Walking back to the cars, Joanna was almost giddy with relief. She had taken what could have been a terrible situation and had turned it around. Her strategic calls—her critical decisions—had transformed something that might have turned SWAT-team ugly into pass-the-cell-phone and not pass-the-ammunition.
“What do you mean, we’re not going to arrest her?” Frank Montoya demanded.
“Just what I said. We’re not. Her attorney is making arrangements for Reba to check into a hospital in Tucson for ten days of psychiatric evaluation. This way she pays for it. If we arrest her, we pay. Which of those two choices sounds like a better idea to you? Not only that, Reba says she’s willing to sign a statement acknowledging her culpability. She’s also going to have her attorney draw up a letter outlining her willingness to pay for all damages. If the letter isn’t forthcoming by the time she’s dismissed from the hospital, fine; we can arrest her then. But in my opinion, the Cochise County Jail can’t afford to house someone who’s used to flying in and out of town on board a private jet.”
Frank shook his head. “Think how it’s going to look. People will say you didn’t have her arrested because of what was going on between the two of you concerning her father’s will.”
“And people will say the same thing if I do have her arrested, only then we’ll have to deal with everything else,” Joanna countered. “I want Reba Singleton free to leave the hospital, go straight home, and start working on her divorce proceedings, in which, by the way, I wish her the best of luck.”
Just then Tica Romero’s voice came over the radio again. “What is it this time?” Joanna asked.
“I have a call from Detective Carbajal. He’s still with Mrs. Yates. She’s wondering where her granddaughter is and wants to know when she can see her.”
So much had happened between the last time Joanna had spoken to Jaime Carbajal and right then that she had to think hard about what he knew and didn’t know. Joanna turned to Frank. “Has anyone told him about the diskette?”
“I did,” Frank said. “At the same time I let him know Lucy Ridder had been found. I just didn’t tell him where she had been found.”
Joanna nodded. “Patch me through to him, if you can, Tica,” Joanna said. “I think we’ll do better talking directly than with you passing messages back and forth.”
“Wait,” Frank said during the pause while they waited for Tica to make the connection. “There’s something else neither one of you know—something I forgot to tell you in all this other excitement. Two things, actually.”
“What?”
“For one thing, the evidence clerk in Tucson pulled off a small miracle. She found the bullet from Tom Ridder’s case and shipped it over to the state crime-lab gun unit. And guess what? It matches the bullet that killed Sandra Ridder.”
“I already knew that,” Joanna said. “Lucy told me.”
Frank made a face. “Nothing like spoiling a guy’s fun,” he grumbled.
“What else?” Joanna asked.
“Ernie Carpenter spent all afternoon working with his connections at Fort Huachuca.”
“And?”
“There’s no official record that Sandra Ridder ever worked on post. We have anecdotal evidence that she worked there. That’s what people have told us. If so, however, every single official reference to her has been deleted from the computer records. Right this minute there isn’t even so much as a parking pass with her name on it.”