Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(11)
Arlee Jones had served as the county attorney for as long as Joanna could remember. Well into his seventies, he should have been past his pull-by date, but he was also a political animal through and through. He was the proverbial “good old boy,” someone who won reelection time after time, seemingly without having to lift a finger. He and Joanna had crossed swords on more than one occasion. It was his job to determine whether an officer-involved shooting was justifiable, and she didn’t want Arlee Jones looking into the Whetstone situation with a chip on his shoulder.
As for Joanna? In the car with her seat belt fastened and the transmission in reverse, she was confident about how this situation would sort itself out. Armando Ruiz was an experienced officer, one who didn’t take shortcuts. She felt sure he must have had good reason to utilize deadly force. She also had a complete understanding of the bare seconds cops have to make those life-or-death, shoot/don’t-shoot decisions. Other people—especially folks in the media—would no doubt buzz around, second-guessing the man’s choice to their hearts’ content, but it was a decision Deputy Ruiz himself would have to live with for the rest of his life.
Soon Joanna was speeding westbound on Highway 80, her flashing lights ablaze and siren screeching. With a dead civilian and a gravely wounded officer, what had started out as a normal morning was now infinitely more complicated. Driving through Bisbee’s Lowell neighborhood and past Lavender Pit, she listened in on the urgent radio chatter going back and forth between Dispatch and personnel in the field. That was how she heard, for the first time, that EMTs at the scene were calling for an air ambulance to transport Armando to the trauma unit at Banner–University Medical Center in Tucson. Gravely wounded indeed!
When Andy had been shot and left to die, no one had knocked on Joanna’s door to deliver the devastating news because she was the one who’d found him. That wasn’t the case with Armando. Officers from other jurisdictions were currently on the scene, but it was Joanna’s sacred duty to be the one to let Amy Ruiz know what had happened. So although Joanna originally set out to go directly to the crime scene, she soon changed her mind.
Mentally, she ticked off everything she knew about Armando Ruiz. He was in his thirties and had been a deputy for the past seven years. He and his wife, Amy, lived in Sierra Vista along with their three school-age kids—all of them boys. Joanna was relatively certain Amy Ruiz was a schoolteacher, but she didn’t know which school or what grade level. After a moment’s thought, however, she realized that there was someone at her disposal who might be able to fill in a few of those blanks.
“Siri,” she ordered, “call Frank Montoya at work.”
During Joanna’s first run for office, she had faced two formidable opponents, both of them Cochise County deputies—Dick Voland and Frank Montoya. Her victory had been met with a good deal of bad-mouthing, to the effect that her running for office had been little more than a bid for sympathy. In addition, there was concern about having an amateur—someone whose knowledge of law enforcement was secondhand at best—heading up the department.
In order to defuse the situation and stifle the criticism, Joanna had baffled supporters and critics alike by naming her two former opponents to serve jointly as co–chief deputies.
It had been an instinctive but inspired choice. While Joanna went to work learning the ins and outs of law enforcement, Montoya and Voland had been on hand to supply the necessary professional expertise. Dick Voland had left a couple years later to start his own private-investigation firm. At about the same time, he’d hooked up with Joanna’s least favorite reporter, Marliss Shackleford, a match-not-made-in-heaven that had eventually come to grief. Frank had stayed on with Joanna's department until fairly recently, when the lucrative offer of becoming chief of police in Sierra Vista had lured him away.
At the time Armando Ruiz was hired, Frank had been in charge of doing the initial interviews, and Joanna seemed to remember that Frank and Armando had some shared Sierra Vista connections.
“Hey,” Frank said when he came on the line. “I hear you’ve got some excitement out Whetstone way. How bad is it?”
“Pretty bad,” Joanna replied. “Deputy Ruiz was serving a no-contact order and ended up in a shoot-out with the recipient. The protection-order guy is dead at the scene. Armando is being airlifted to a trauma unit in Tucson.”
“Whoa,” Frank murmured.
“You can say that again, but Armando is the reason I’m calling. I’m on my way to Sierra Vista right now, and I need to let Amy know what’s going on. We have emergency numbers for her, but this isn’t the kind of news that should be delivered by telephone. The thing is, I have no idea where she works. . . .”
“She teaches second grade at Carmichael Elementary,” Frank supplied. “Do you want me to go talk to her?”
A call was coming in from Tom Hadlock.
“Thanks, Frank,” Joanna said, “but this is my responsibility. I should be the one to do that, but right now I need to take another call.”
“If there’s anything else I can do, let me know,” he said.
“Will do,” she responded before switching over. “Okay, Tom,” she told him, “brief me. What have we got?”
“The address for the crime scene is 2101 North Sheila Street, Whetstone. I know you’re driving, so I just texted it to you. The no-contact order was sworn out yesterday by Madison Hogan, the estranged wife of one Leon Hogan. At this point I don’t know if Deputy Ruiz even got a chance to deliver it, because it’s still not clear why or how the situation devolved into a shoot-out. According to the EMTs, they found Armando lying on the ground next to the driver’s door of his vehicle, and there was no visible sign of any court order at the scene. What we do know for sure is that several shots were fired.”