Outlaw Mountain by J.A. Jance

Author:J.A. Jance [Jance, J.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Mystery, Western
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Twelve

CASEY LEDFORD, the gifted young technician who ran Cochise County’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System, was a Bisbee girl who had gone off to college on a full-ride Veterans of Foreign Wars scholarship. She had enrolled in the University of Arizona’s College of Fine Arts, where she had planned on becoming a commercial artist. Smart, but not smart enough to avoid all the treacherous pitfalls of young adulthood, she had returned to her parents’ home two years later, with no degree, but with a four-month-old baby—a daughter named Felicity—in tow. Back in Bisbee, Casey had taken whatever work she could find, including stints waiting tables in the dining room at the Copper Queen Hotel while she continued to attend college-level classes on a part-time basis.

Like a lot of other things, the AFIS equipment had fallen into Cochise County hands through a law enforcement, War Against Drugs grant that paid for hardware and software, but no “liveware”—the people necessary to make the other two work. Prior to receiving the equipment, Joanna had mistakenly supposed that automated fingerprint identification meant just exactly that—automated. With the arrival of the equipment and the technical documentation that accompanied it, Joanna learned that fingerprints usually had to be augmented by hand before they could be fed into the computer. That meant that the department was going to need to hire someone who was not only artistically inclined but also more than moderately computer-literate. When the position was advertised in the paper, only one applicant had responded—Casey Ledford.

“What’s so urgent?” Joanna asked, poking her head in Casey’s lab, where dozens of images of Felicity Ledford—most of them framed pastels—covered the walls.

“It’s the Rogers case,” Casey said.

“You got a hit?”

Casey Ledford nodded, but she didn’t look any too happy about it. Joanna perched on a lab stool. “So tell me,” she urged. “What did you find?”

“The hit resulted from prints we found at the mobile at Outlaw Mountain.”

“Farley Adams’ place,” Joanna murmured. “The ones left on the dirty dishes?”

Casey nodded again. “Right,” she said. “None of the guys thought to look there. They had dusted the outside controls, but they hadn’t bothered to check inside.”

“Good work,” Joanna said with a grin “That’s what it takes around here sometimes—a woman’s touch. Go on.”

“I actually brought the dishes back here to process them,” Casey continued. “It was easier that way. And the prints I lifted were good ones. They didn’t need all that much augmentation or anything. And once I fed them into the computer, the hit came back almost right away.”

“So what’s the problem then?”

“The computer spits out the person’s name and the name of the jurisdiction that’s looking for him. We usually have to call that department by phone in order to get the original fingerprint card as well as details on the criminal activity in question. I’m the one who does that. It’s just a bureaucratic formality. I get the information and pass it along to whoever’s working our end of it.”

“You did that, then?”

“Yes. The hit was from North Las Vegas, up in Nevada.

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