Free Damage Control by J. A. Jance Page B

him or her fired. Immediately!”
    Since Alfred and Martha Beasley had been dead for less than twenty-four hours, Samantha Edwards had obviously, one way or another, learned about the incident in what most of the world would regard as “a timely fashion.”
    But she’s just lost both her parents, Joanna reminded herself. No point in being churlish about all this.
    “Your sister would be the responsible party,” Joanna said aloud. “And since she’s not an employee of my department, I can’t exactly fire her, now can I.”
    “My sister?” Samantha repeated.
    “Yes,” Joanna replied. “Sandra Wolfe is your sister, correct?”
    “What about her?”
    “She told my investigator, Detective Howell, that you were dead,” Joanna said. “That made notifying you pretty much impossible.”
    “She said what?” Samantha demanded. “As you can see very well, I’m anything but dead. I’m standing right here in front of you, aren’t I?”
    “Indeed you are,” Joanna agreed. “Unfortunately my investigator relied on the information she was given. She had no way of knowing—”
    “That my sister is a lying sack of crap?” Samantha returned. “Sandy stopped telling the truth sometime within the first minutes of birth, and nothing has ever changed. Of course she lied. When hasn’t she lied? So what actually happened to my parents? According to the news reports, Dad hit the accelerator when he meant to hit the brake and went off a cliff.”
    “We won’t know for sure what happened until after the autopsy,” Joanna said quietly.
    Samantha’s narrow jaw dropped. “Autopsy!” she repeated. “Someone is doing an autopsy? Who said anything about an autopsy? Who authorized that?”
    “Ms. Edwards,” Joanna said patiently. “Please have a seat. Your parents’ deaths qualify as sudden and unexplained. As such they are currently under investigation. I’m the one who authorized the autopsies. In situations like this, they’re a routine matter.”
    “Cutting my parents to pieces is not routine!” Samantha objected. “And their deaths are anything but unexplained! In fact, they’re perfectly understandable. They died in an automobile accident.”
    “We don’t know that for sure,” Joanna explained. “The autopsy will tell us whether or not your father was suffering some kind of physical impairment that might have interfered with his being able to operate a vehicle in a safe manner. Toxicology screens will let us know if he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the incident.”
    “That’s a laugh,” Samantha returned. “My father never had a drop of liquor in his life!”
    “But he may have been overmedicated,” Joanna said. “That’ssomething that happens fairly often with the elderly. They take so many medications from so many doctors that they end up operating under the influence of drugs without even knowing it.”
    “If you want to check for toxic substances,” Samantha advised, “check out my sister. That woman is poison—absolute poison. She’s the one who turned my parents against me, by the way.”
    “Are you saying you were at odds with your parents?” Joanna asked. It was an innocuous question, asked more because it seemed a polite way to keep the conversation going rather than with any expectation of an answer. To her surprise, Samantha Edwards’s features seemed to collapse in response to that solitary question.
    “Yes,” she said, her voice breaking into a wrenching sob. “As a matter of fact, my parents and I were estranged,” she managed. “I never meant for it to happen. I was trying my best to fix it, really I was.”
    Caught momentarily off guard by Samantha’s unexpected outburst of grief, Joanna searched in her top drawer until she found a box of tissues which she pushed across the desktop toward her weeping guest. At that same moment, Joanna’s cell phone, lying directly in front of her, began to ring insistently. Joanna could see from the