“I’m going to be late,” I said.

“You and everybody else,” he muttered. “Why the hell don’t you move to the right side of the lake?”

Harry lives in North Bend, right up against Mount Si on the west side of the Cascades. His commute is even longer than mine. The only difference is, there are no bridges.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “I understand I-90 is shut down in both directions.”

“Who knows?” he grumbled. “And who cares? When you gonna be in?”

“As soon as I can.”

And I was. I arrived at nine-thirty, an hour and a half late, having spent two and a half hours making what is, in the best of circumstances, a twenty-minute drive. Barbara Galvin, Unit B’s office manager, hadn’t made it in yet, either. Knowing better than to risk my stomach lining on a cup of Harry I. Ball’s crankcase-oil coffee, I timed in and then slipped into my tiny cubicle to go to work.

Every new hire in the Special Homicide Investigation Team spends his first few weeks of employment going over cold-case files before being brought on board one of the current investigations. Conventional wisdom dictates that one of us may bring to the table some previously unheeded bit of insight that will magically solve one of those cold cases. As far as I know, it’s never happened, but it might.

I had worked my way through most of the files, saving the biggest and, as a consequence, most unwieldy, to last. I was manfully working my way through the Green River Killer Task Force documents when Harry’s stocky figure darkened my doorway.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

Sorry to be caught with my reading glasses on, I quickly stowed them in my pocket. “Okay,” I said. “But it’s like slogging though mud.”

“I know,” he said. “And you’re dying to read every word, but I need you in my office. Now.”

I followed him back down the hall. Since Barbara was at her desk by then, I stopped into the break room long enough to pour myself a cup of her freshly brewed coffee. Harry sat at his desk, massive arms resting on a file folder as I eased myself into one of the chairs.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I understand you’re acquainted with a town in Arizona called Bisbee,” he said casually.

I was so dumbfounded that I nearly dropped my coffee in my lap. The Department of Labor and Industries would have had a blast with that workman’s comp. claim. Yes, I did know Bisbee. My second wife, Anne, had come from there, along with the money that had once been hers and was now mine.

To say Anne Corley was as troubled as she was beautiful is something of an understatement on both counts. I personally never discuss the circumstances surrounding her death on what was our wedding day, but I knew enough about Harry I. Ball to understand that if he was asking the question, he also knew the correct answer.

“Yes,” I said. “I know a little about Bisbee.”

He looked at me with a raised eyebrow worthy of Mr. Spock from Star Trek. “Ever been there?” he asked.

I had gotten as close to Bisbee as Sierra Vista once – twenty-five miles or so away. At the time I hadn’t been ready to face visiting Anne’s hometown. I wasn’t emotionally equipped to deal with what I might have learned there. Fresh out of treatment at Ironwood Ranch up near Wickenburg, I was smart enough to know that there were some questions I was better off leaving unanswered.

“No,” I said. “I never have.”

“Would you have a problem going there now?” Harry asked.

I was stronger, older, and hopefully a little wiser. “I don’t think so,” I said.

“Good,” Harry told me. “Because something’s come up that needs looking into. It means sending someone out for an undetermined period of time. Since you say you prefer working alone, I thought it would be a helluva lot easier on the budget if we sent one investigator rather than two.”

He had that right. I’m not a partner kind of guy. “What needs investigating?” I asked.

Harry sighed. He glared at the folder on his desk, but he didn’t open it. “Know anything about UPPI?” he asked.

I shook my head. Another collection of damnably meaningless letters. Doesn’t anything go by its full name anymore?

“Those initials mean nothing to me,” I said. “Give me a clue.”

“United Private Prisons, Incorporated.”

Then it registered. “Okay, okay,” I said. “I remember now. That’s the company the state of Washington contracted with to ease overcrowding in the state juvenile justice system, right?”

“Exactly,” Harry agreed, “right up until we fired ’em. Now they’re suing the state of Washington’s ass for a hundred and twenty-five million dollars – breach of contract.”

“Great,” I said. “What does that have to do with us – with me, I mean?”

“The state of Washington’s star witness, a young lady by the name of Latisha Wall, was murdered in Bisbee, Arizona, the day before yesterday. Or maybe not murdered, because the local sheriff’s department down there is playing coy. The point is, Latisha Wall is dead, and we need to know how come.”

I was a little foggy on the details of the Latisha Wall situation because I hadn’t been directly involved, but I remembered the name. There had been a huge problem at a new, supposedly state-of-the-art correctional facility built near Aberdeen in southwestern Washington. Aberdeen had been given the nod in hopes that locating a new prison there would help relieve some of the long-standing unemployment in the state’s lumber industry. Two years after opening, the place was summarily closed.

“Wasn’t Latisha Wall some kind of whistle-blower?”

Harry nodded morosely. “That’s right, and now she’s dead. She begged Ross Connors to put her in a witness protection program. Said she was afraid somebody from UPPI might come gunning for her. We did as she asked, but now it looks like they found her anyway.”

Ross Connors, the Washington State Attorney General, was Harry I. Ball’s boss and mine as well.

“Didn’t you say she was murdered in Bisbee, Arizona? Why should we be involved in the investigation?”

At last Harry moved his arms and opened the folder. “Turns out Latisha Wall didn’t actually die in Bisbee proper,” he said. “She died in a place called Naco, a little burg that’s seven or eight miles outside of town and right on the U.S./Mexican border. Technically, the murder is being investigated by the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department.”

“So?”

“So. The sheriff’s a young woman named Joanna Brady. I talked to her a little while ago. Sounds like she’s just barely out of high school. Anyway, as soon as I started asking questions, she got her tits in a wringer and threatened to go to my boss. Of course, that’s no problem since Ross is the one who had me call her in the first place.”

Did I tell you that Harry I. Ball is an almost terminally unreconstituted male chauvinist? Word has it that when the personnel folks at the city of Bellingham diplomatically suggested he attend a sensitivity seminar, Harry told them to put their sensitivity where the sun don’t shine. He then pulled the pin and went down the road, pension in hand. As for Attorney General Ross Connors? I wouldn’t call him a beacon of political correctness, either. That goes for me as well, but I like to think I’m trying.

“Once I got off the phone with her, I called Ross myself,” Harry continued. “Believe me, he has no intention of leaving a case this big in the hands of some little wet-behind-the-ears cowgirl who probably rides a horse, wears ten-gallon hats, and packs a forty-five on her hip, just for show.”

For me, easy acquiescence to that kind of comment has been forever erased by the searing memory of my former partner, a bloodied Sue Danielson, sitting slumped against the wall of her trashed living room, my Glock in her wavering hand. She hadn’t been holding it just for show. And no matter how much I try to avoid thinking about it, I know she would have used that weapon if she’d had to. She would have used it to save my life.