Paradise Lost

PROLOGUE

Connie Haskell had just stepped out of the shower when she heard the phone ringing. Hoping desperately to hear Ron’s voice on the phone, she grabbed a towel and raced through the house, leaving a trail of wet footprints on the worn carpeting of the bedroom and hallway. For two weeks she had car­ried the cordless phone with her wherever she went, but when she had gone to the bathroom to shower that morning, she had forgotten somehow and left the phone sitting beside her empty coffee cup on the kitchen table.

By the time she reached the kitchen, the machine had already picked up the call. “Hello, Mrs. Haskell. This is Ken Wilson at First Bank.” The disembodied voice of Connie’s private banker echoed eerily across the Saltillo tile in an otherwise silent kitchen. As soon as she heard the caller’s voice and knew it wasn’t her husband’s, Connie didn’t bother to pick up the receiver. It was the same thing she had done with all the other calls that had come in during this awful time. She had sat, a virtual prisoner in her own home, waiting the other shoe to drop. But this call from her banker prob­ably wasn’t it.

“I’m calling about your checking account,” Ken Wilson con­tinued. “As of this morning, it’s seriously overdrawn. I’ve paid the two outstanding checks that showed up today as well as one from yesterday, but I need you to come in as soon as possible and make a deposit. If you’re out of town, please call me so we can make some other arrangement to cover the overdraft. I believe you have my number, but in case you don’t, here it is.”

As Ken Wilson recited his direct phone number, Connie slipped unhearing onto a nearby kitchen stool. In all the years she had han­dled her parents’ affairs—paying bills and writing checks after her father had been incapacitated by that first crippling stroke and then for her mother after Stephen Richardson’s death—in all that time, Connie had never once bounced a check. She had written the checks and balanced the checkbooks each month under Stephen’s watchful and highly critical eye. Because of stroke-induced aphasia, her father had been able to do nothing but shake his head, roll his eyes, and spit out an occasional “Stupid.” But Connie had perse­vered. She had done the task month after month for years. After her marriage to Ron, when he had volunteered to take over the bill-paying, she had been only too happy to relinquish that onerous duty. And why not? Ron was an accountant, wasn’t he? Dealing with numbers was what CPAs did.

Except Ron had been gone for two weeks now—AWOL. For two long, agonizing weeks there had been no word to Connie. No telephone call. No letter. She hadn’t reported him missing be-cause she was ashamed and afraid. Ashamed because other people had been right about hirer and she’d been wrong, and afraid she might learn that there was another woman involved. The woman was bound to be far younger and tar better-looking than Constance Marie Richardson Haskell. She was unable to delude herself into thinking there was a chance of foul play. No, Connie had made a point of checking Ron’s carefully organized side of the closet. Her missing husband had simply packed one of his roll-aboard suitcases with a selection of slacks and custom-made, monogrammed shirts, and left.

The main reason Connie had kept silent about his absence was that she didn’t want to have to face up to all those people who had told her so. And they had told her so—in spades. Any number of friends and relations had tried, both subtly and not so subtly, to explain that they thought Connie was making a mistake in marry­ing so soon after her mother’s death. Connie’s older sister, Mag­gie—someone who never suffered from a need to keep her opinions to herself—had been by far the most outspoken.

“If you ask me, Ron Haskell’s nothing but a gold-digging no-account,” Maggie MacFerson had said. “He worked for Peabody and Peabody for six months before Mother died. He knew everything about Mother’s financial affairs, and now he knows everything about yours. He also knows how naive you are, and he’s taking you for a ride. For him, you’re nothing but a meal ticket.”

“We fell in love,” Connie had declared hotly, as if that one fact alone should resolve all her older sister’s concerns. “Besides, Ron’s resigning from the firm, so there can’t be any question of conflict of interest.”

In response, Maggie MacFerson had blown an exasperated plume of smoke in the air. She shook her head and rolled her eyes. When she did that, she looked so much like Stephen Richardson that Connie had expected to hear her father’s familiar pronounce­ment of “Stupid!”

“We all have to make our own mistakes, I suppose,” Maggie said with a resigned sigh. “At least do yourself a favor and get a pre­nup agreement.”

That was the one and only time the two sisters had discussed Ron Haskell. Naturally, Connie hadn’t followed Maggie’s advice. She hadn’t wanted to ask for a prenuptial agreement because she was afraid if she mentioned it, Ron might think she didn’t trust him, which she did—absolutely and with all the lovesick fervor of a forty-two-year-old woman who had never fallen in love before, not even once.

But now, sitting alone in the house on Southeast Encanto Drive—a house that had once belonged to Stephen and Claudia Richardson but that now belonged to Connie and Ron Haskell—she suddenly felt sick to her stomach. What if Maggie had been right about Ron? What if his disappearance had nothing to do with another woman and everything to do with money? What if, in the end, that was all Ron had wanted from Connie—her money?

As soon as the thought surfaced, Connie shook her still-dripping hair and pushed that whole demeaning notion aside. Surely that couldn’t be. And whatever was going on at the bank was all a sim­ple mistake of some kind. Maybe there had been a computer glitch, a virus or something. Those happened, didn’t they? Or else maybe Ron had merely forgotten to transfer money from one of the investment accounts into the household bill—paying account.

By then, the answering machine had clicked off, leaving the light blinking to say there was a message, which Connie had already heard and had no need to hear again. The solution was per­fectly simple. All Connie had to do was call Ken Wilson back and tell him to make the necessary transfer. Once she did that, every-thing would be fine. Connie could return to her lonely vigil of waiting for Icon himself to call or for some police officer somewhere to call and say that Ron was dead and ask her to come and identify the body.

Taking a deep breath, Connie grabbed the phone. She punched in *69 and let the phone redial Ken Wilson’s number. I le answered on the second ring. “Ken Wilson here.”

“Ken, it’s Connie,” she said, keeping her tone brisk and businesslike. “Connie Haskell. Sorry I missed your call. I was in the shower. By the time I found the phone, your call had already gone to the machine. I can’t imagine what’s going on with the checking account. Ron is out of town at the moment. He must have forgotten to make a transfer. I’d really appreciate it if you could just han­dle that for us—the transfer, I mean. I’m not sure what checks are outstanding, so I don’t know exactly how much is needed.”

“Which account do you want to use to transfer funds?” Ken asked.

Connie didn’t like the guarded way he said that. It sounded wary and ominous. “You know,” she said. “We always transfer out of that one investment account. I can’t remember the number exactly. I think it’s nine-four-something.”

“That would be account number nine-four, three-three-three, two-six-two. Is that right?”

Connie could barely contain her relief. “That’s right,” she breathed. “I’m sure that’s the one.”

“But that account was closed two months ago,” Ken Wilson returned.

Suddenly Connie felt her pulse pounding in her throat. “Closed?” she stammered. “It was?”

“Why, yes. I thought you knew that. Mr. Haskell came in and closed all your accounts except for the checking. He said that you had decided to go with another banking institution, but since you had all the automatic withdrawals scheduled front that account, he’d leave .just that one as is for the time being. He closed all the investment accounts, as well as taking all the CDs. I advised against it, of course, especially the CDs, but ...”

“He closed them all?” Connie asked incredulously.

“Yes. After all the years I’d been looking after your family’s accounts, I was personally very disappointed. I thought we’d done a good job of handling things for you and your parents both, but I didn’t feel it was my place to argue with your husband.”

The kitchen seemed to swirl around her. Connie closed her eyes in an effort to stop the spinning. “Which checks?” she asked woodenly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Which checks are overdrawn?” she asked. Connie knew that she hadn’t written any checks since Ron had disappeared. Unless he had the checkbook with him and was still writing checks, the overdrafts most likely had come from some of those automatic deductions.

“One to Blue Cross, one to Regency Auto Lease, and the third is to Prudential,” Ken told her.

Connie nodded. Their health insurance premium, the lease on Ron’s car—his new BMW 740i—and their long-term care. After years of being the unpaid maid-of-all-work for her ailing and eventually bedridden parents, Connie Haskell had been determined to have the wherewithal to pay for long-term care for both herself and her husband should they ever reach a point where their own declining health required it. It was the one purchase she had insisted she and Ron make as soon as they returned from their honeymoon.

“How much?” she asked.

“The total outstanding?” Ken returned. Connie nodded wordlessly, although her private banker couldn’t see that.

“Let’s see,” he said. “‘That’s eighteen hundred forty-six dollars and seventy-two cents, including the service charges. Under most circumstances I’d be happy to waive the service charges, but since we no longer have any of your other business ...”

He let the rest of the sentence hang in the air. Meanwhile Con­nie, grappling with finding a way to fix the problem, wrote down the amount he had mentioned.

“What about my credit card?” she asked. “Can we transfer the money in from my VISA?”

Ken Wilson cleared his throat. “There’s a problem there, too, Connie,” he said apologetically. “Your VISA account is over the limit right now, and the payment was due yesterday. That’s another seventeen hundred sixty dollars and forty-three cents. That would just bring the balance down to where you wouldn’t be over your limit.”

As Ken Wilson spoke, Connie was remembering how Ron had encouraged her to sign application forms for several other credit cards—ones that evidently weren’t with First Bank. “Even if we never touch them,” Ron had told her, “we’re better off having them available.” And indeed, if any of those applications had been approved, the resulting credit cards had never made it into her hands or purse. And if her VISA at First Bank was maxed out, what about balances on the other cards—ones Connie had no record of and no way to check?

I won’t think about that right now, Connie told herself firmly as she wrote down the second figure. After adding that one together with the first, she arrived at a total of $3,607.15. Swallowing hard, ( ;mini. drew a circle around it.

“Your office is still on Central, isn’t it?” she asked.

“That’s right,” Ken Wilson replied. “Central and Camelback.”

“And how long will you be there?”

“I have an appointment out of the office this afternoon, but that won’t be until one o’clock. I’ll need to leave here around twelve-thirty.”

“All I have to do is dry my hair and throw on some clothes,” Connie told him. “I should be there with the money within forty-five minutes.”

She heard Ken Wilson’s sigh of relief. “Good,” he said. “I’ll be looking forward to seeing you.”

Connie hung up the phone. Then, with her whole body quak­ing and unmindful of her still-dripping hair, she walked back through the house. She went to the room which had once been her mother’s study—the green-walled cozy room which had, after her mother’s death, become Connie’s study as well. With trembling hands she opened the bottom drawer of the dainty rosewood desk and pulled out her mother’s frayed, leather-bound Bible. One by one she began to remove the old-fashioned but still crisp hundred-dollar bills that had been concealed between many of the thin pages. Claudia Armstrong Richardson had told her daughter the story so many times that even now Connie could have repeated it verbatim.

Claudia had often related how, as an eleven-year-old, her idyllic life had been shattered when she awoke that fateful morning in October of 1929 to learn that her once affluent family was affluent no longer. Her lather had lost everything in the stock market crash. There had been a single payment of three hundred dollars due on the family home in Columbus, Ohio, but without sufficient cash to make that one payment, the bank had foreclosed. Months later, the day they were scheduled to move out of the house, Claudia’s father had gone back inside—to make sure the back door was locked, he had told his wile and daughter. Instead, with Claudia and her mother waiting in a cab outside, Roger Armstrong had gone back into the empty room that had once been his book-lined library and put a bullet through his head.

“So you see, Constance,” Claudia had cautioned her daughter over and over, “you must keep some money set aside, and not just in banks, either, because many of the banks were forced to close back then, too. The only people who were all right were the ones who had cold, hard cash put away under their mattresses or hidden in a sock. You have to keep the money someplace where you can get your hands on it when you need it.”

Over the years, long after Claudia had married Stephen Richardson and long after there was no longer any valid need for her to be concerned about such things, Claudia Armstrong Richardson had continued to put money in the Bible, right up until her death, insisting that Connie put the money there for her once Claudia herself was no longer able to do so.

There were times Connie had argued with her mother about it. “Wouldn’t it be safer in a bank?” she had asked.

“No!” Claudia had declared heatedly. “Absolutely not.”

“What if the house burns down?”

“Then I’ll get a new Bible and start over,” Claudia had retorted.

After her mother’s death, Connie had left Claudia’s Bible as it was and where it was—in the bottom drawer of the desk. It had seemed disrespectful to her mother’s memory to do anything else. Now, as Connie counted some of those carefully hoarded bills into a neat pile, she was glad she had abided by her mother’s wishes. She had told no one of her mother’s private stash—not her father, not her sis­ter, and not even her new husband.

When Connie had counted out enough money to cover her debt, she started to put the Bible back in the drawer. Then, thinking better of it, she took it with her. In the kitchen, she stuffed the Bible into her capacious purse. After hurriedly drying her hair and slathering on some makeup, she dressed and headed off for her meeting with Ken Wilson. Twenty minutes later she was standing in the foyer of the private banking offices of First Bank of the Southwest. At that point, Connie had her involuntary quaking pretty well under control.

Ken Wilson himself came out to greet her and take her back to his private office. “I hope this hasn’t troubled you too much, Con­nie,” he said kindly.

She gave her banker what she hoped passed as a supremely con­fident smile as he showed her to a chair. “Oh, no,” she said, willing her face not to reveal the depth of her humiliation. “It’s no trouble at all. I’m sure this is nothing more than an oversight on Ron’s part. He was called out of town on business and ended up being gone longer than either of us intended. I expect to speak to him later on today, and we’ll get this whole thing straightened out. In the meantime, I brought along enough cash to dig us out of the hole.”

Carefully she counted out thirty-seven hundred-dollar bills. As she pushed them across the smooth surface of Ken’s desk, the banker cleared his throat. “I took the liberty of looking at your account again,” he said. “There’s another four hundred dollars’ worth of life insurance premiums that will be deducted within the next two days. Do you want to deposit enough to cover those as well?”

Grateful she had brought along the Bible, Connie extracted four more bills and shoved them over to Ken Wilson. “Good,” he said. “Very good.” He stood up. “If you’ll wait just a moment, I’ll be right back with your change and a receipt.”

Connie nodded and then sat staring out the window at traffic rushing by until he returned. He handed her the receipt and tale hilly counted out the change.

“If you’ll forgive my saying so,” he said hesitantly, “it sounded as though you had no idea these monies were being transferred from First Bank. I trust there isn’t some kind of problem. I mean, your family—you and your parents—have been good customers for a very long time—since long before First Bank became First Bank, as a matter of fact. I’d hate to think we had allowed something untoward to happen, although, since the accounts were all joint accounts—”

“Oh no,” Connie interrupted, answering too quickly and too brightly. She wanted to ask where the funds had gone, but she fought that one down. She didn’t want to admit to Ken Wilson that she had been kept totally in the dark. She didn’t want to admit to being that irresponsibly stupid. “If Ron decided to move the funds, I’m sure he must have had a good reason,” she continued. “As soon as I talk to him, we’ll have the whole thing ironed out.”

“Good, then,” Ken Wilson said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

Connie grabbed her purse and fled Ken Wilson’s office. She dashed through the marble-floored bank lobby and sank gratefully into the overheated leather of her mother’s oversized Lincoln Town Car. Although it was not yet the end of May, the Valley of the Sun had been sweltering in triple-digit temperatures for almost two weeks. Even so, Connie felt chilled. When she switched on the engine, she quickly turned off the air conditioner and opened the window, letting in a blast of broiling outside air.

Joint accounts! she chided herself. She had done that on purpose, too. In a fit of defiance, Connie had put Ron on as a signatory to all her accounts just to spite people like her sister Maggie and the other naysayers who had told her Ron was only after her money. Had she listened? Had she paid any of them the slightest bit of heed? No. Her father had been right after all. She was stupid—unbelievably stupid. She had taken everything Ron Haskell told her as gospel, and he had betrayed her. Other women might have railed and cried and blamed their betrayers. Driving back home, her eyes dry and gritty with unshed tears, Constance Marie Richardson Haskell blamed only herself.

Once in the house, Connie saw the blinking light on the answering machine as soon as she put her car keys and purse down on the kitchen counter. Hurrying to the machine, she punched the play button. First came Ken Wilson’s message, which she had already heard but had failed to erase. She fast-forwarded through that one. Then, after a click, she heard Ron’s voice, and her heart leaped in her throat.

“Connie,” he said. “It’s Ron. I don’t know if you’re there or not. If you are, please pick up.” There was a pause, then he contin­ued. “I guess you’re not. I don’t know where to start, Connie, honey. I’m so sorry. About everything. I’m at a place called Pathway to Paradise. I thought these people could help me, and they are—helping me, that is. It’s going to take time, and I want to talk to you about it, Connie. I want to explain. Maybe you’ll be able to forgive me, or maybe not. I don’t know.

“I can’t leave here, because I’ve made a commitment to stay for the full two months, but it would mean so much to me if you would come here to see me. That way I can be the one to tell you what happened instead of your having to hear it from somebody else. Please come, Connie. Please, preferably this evening. Pathway to Paradise is at the far end of the Chiricahua Mountains, just out-side Portal on the road to Paradise. It’s north of town on the right-hand side of the road. You’ll see the sign. Wait for me along the road, sometime between nine and ten, and—”

At that point an operator’s voice cut in on Ron’s. “If you wish to speak longer you’ll have to deposit an additional one dollar and sixty-five cents.”

“Please,” Ron added.

And then the answering machine clicked off. For almost a minute afterward, Connie stood staring blankly at the machine, then she began to quake once more.

Connie Richardson Haskell was a woman who had always prided herself on keeping her emotions under control. Her father had expected it of her. After all those years under her father’s tute­lage, Connie had come to expect it of herself. The whole time she had cared for her aging and at times entirely unreasonable parents, she had never once allowed herself to become angry.

But now anger roared through her system with a ferocity that left her shaken. It filled her whole being like an avalanche plunging down the throat of some narrow, rock-lined gorge. How dare he! After disappearing for two weeks without a word, after taking my money without permission, now he calls and expects me to come running the moment he crooks his finger and says he’s sorry?

Finally she nodded. “I’ll be happy to join you in Paradise, you son of a bitch,” she muttered grimly. “But I’m going to bring along a little surprise.”

With that, she turned and walked into the bedroom. There, behind one of her mother’s vivid watercolors, was Stephen Richardson’s hidden wall safe. Inside the safe was her father’s well-oiled .357 Magnum. Connie didn’t need to check to see if the gun was loaded. Stephen Richardson had always maintained that hav­ing an unloaded weapon in the house was as useless as having a plumber’s helper with no handle.

Not taking the time to shut the safe or rehang the painting, Connie walked back to the kitchen, where she stuffed the pistol into her purse right next to her mother’s Bible. Then, without a backward glance and without bothering to lock up the house, turn on the alarm, or even make sure the door was firmly closed, Con­nie went back out to Claudia’s Town Car. Her father had always insisted on keeping a Rand McNally Road Atlas in the pocket behind the seat. Connie pulled out the atlas and studied the map of Arizona until she located the tiny dots that indicated Portal and Paradise. After charting a route, she put the atlas back in its spot and climbed into the driver’s seat.

This time, when she switched on the engine, she turned on the air conditioner as well. Until that moment, Connie Richardson Haskell had thought the term “heat of anger” was only a figure of speech.

Now she knew better.

Slamming the big car into reverse, she tore out of the garage and headed for Pathway to Paradise to find her husband. As she drove down the citrus- and palm-tree-lined street and away from the house that had been her home her whole life, Connie didn’t bother to look back, and she didn’t notice that the garage door had tidied to close. There was no reason to look back. It was almost as though she knew she was finished with the house and the neigh­borhood, and they were finished with her. No matter what hap­pened, Connie Richardson Haskell wouldn’t be returning. Ever.

CHAPTER ONE

At one o’clock Friday morning, Sheriff Joanna Brady let herself back into the two-room suite at the Marriott Hotel in Page, Arizona. Butch Dixon, her husband of a month and a little bit, lay sound asleep on the bed with his laptop computer sitting open in front of him. The laptop was evidently sleeping every bit as soundly as Butch.

Joanna kicked off her high heels and then stood still, gratefully wiggling her cramped toes in the plush carpet. Butch had the room’s air conditioner turned down as low as it could go, and the room was pleasantly cool. Joanna took off her jacket and sniffed it. Wrinkling her nose in distaste, she tossed it over the back of the desk chair. It reeked so of cigar and cigarette smoke that she’d need to dry-clean the suit before she could wear it again. But, after an evening spent playing cutthroat poker with fellow members of the Arizona Sheriffs’ Association, what else could she expect?

Peeling off her skirt and blouse, she draped those over the chair as well, hoping that hanging out in the air-conditioned room overnight would remove at least some of the stale-smelling smoke. Then, going over to the dresser, she peered at herself in the mirror. There was an impish gleam in her green eyes that even the lateness of the hour failed to dim. Reaching into her bra, she plucked a wad of bills, along with some change, from one of the cups. After counting the money, she found the total amounted to a little over two hundred dollars. Those were her winnings culled from all but one of her poker-playing opponents and fellow Arizona sheriffs. Leaving that money on the dresser, she removed a much larger wad from the other cup of her bra. That was the money she had won from one poker player in particular, Pima County Sheriff William Forsythe. That sum came to just under five hundred dollars, $488.50, to be exact. Over the course of the evening, the other players had dropped out one by one until finally it had been just the two of them, Joanna Brady and Bill Forsythe, squaring off. It had done Joanna’s heart good to clean the man’s clock.

For the first two years of her administration, Joanna had kept a low profile in the Arizona Sheriffs’ Association. She had come to the annual meetings, but she had stayed away from the camaraderie of the association’s traditional poker party. This year, though, fresh from yet another slight at the hands of the obnoxious Sheriff Forsythe and his department, she had gone to the meeting intent on duking it out with the man over beer, cards, and poker chips.

Joanna Lathrop Brady had learned to play poker at her father’s knee. Cochise County Sheriff D. H. “Big Hank” Lathrop had been a skilled player. Lacking a son with whom to share his poker-playing knowledge, he had decided to pass that legacy on to his daughter. To begin with, Joanna hadn’t been all that interested. Once her mother, Eleanor, began voicing strenuous objections, however, Joanna had become far more enthusiastic. She had, in fact, turned into an apt pupil and an avid devotee. Now, years alter Big Hank’s death, his patiently taught lessons were still paying off.

Quietly casing the door shut behind her, Joanna hurried into the bathroom, stripped off the remainder of her clothing, and then stepped into a steaming shower. When she returned from the bath room with a towel wrapped around her head and clad in one of the hotel’s terry-cloth robes, Butch had closed the laptop, stripped off his own clothes, and was back in bed.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I wasn’t really asleep. So how’s my redheaded dynamo, and what time is it?”

“Your redhead is great, thank you,” she told him crisply. “And the time is just past one.”

“How’d you do?”

Smiling smugly, Joanna walked over to the dresser and retrieved both wads of money. She handed Butch the smaller of the two, giv­ing him a brief peck on his clean-shaven head in the process. “Whoa,” he said, thumbing through the money. “There must be two hundred bucks here.”

“Two hundred eleven and some change,” Joanna replied with a grin.

“Not bad for a girl.” Butch Dixon smiled back at her. He had been only too aware of the grudge-match status behind his wife’s determination to join the poker game. “How much of this used to belong to Sheriff Forsythe?” Butch added.

“Some of that,” Joanna told him triumphantly. “But all of this.” She plunked the other chunk of money down on Butch’s chest. ‘Then she went around to her side of the bed, peeled off the robe, and crawled in. Sitting with her pillow propped against the head board, she began toweling her hair dry.

On his side of the bed, Butch started counting the money and then gave up. “How much?” he asked.

“Four eighty-eight.”

Butch whistled. “And all of this is his?”

Joanna dropped the towel. Naked and still damp, she lowered her pillow and snuggled up against Butch’s side. “He deserved it, too,” she said. “Bill Forsythe was drunk. He was showing off and making stupid bets. Eventually everybody but the two of us dropped out, but they all hung around to watch the fireworks. The drunker Bill got, the worse he played. I wound up wiping the floor with him.”

“Beating the pants off Sheriff Forsythe isn’t going to do much for interdepartmental relations, is it?” Butch asked.

Joanna giggled. “He never was a fan of mine to begin with. This isn’t likely to make things any worse. They were already in the toilet anyway.”

“You just added salt to the wound.”

“He shouldn’t have said I was hysterical,” Joanna said, referring to an incident that had occurred a good two months earlier.

“And some people shouldn’t pack grudges,” Butch replied. “So now that you’ve won all this cash, what are you going to do with it? It’s almost seven hundred dollars.”

“I was thinking about that while I was in the shower,” Joanna said. “I think I’ll do something Bill Forsythe wouldn’t be caught dead doing. I think I’ll donate the whole amount to the Girl Scouts. Jenny’s troop is trying to raise enough money for a trip to Disneyland at the end of the summer, just before school starts. Seven hundred dollars that they weren’t expecting would give them a big leg up.”

“Speaking of Scouts, Eva Lou called.”

Eva Lou and Jim Bob Brady, Joanna’s former in-laws and her daughter’s paternal grandparents, were staying out at High Lonesome Ranch to look alter the house and the animals during Joanna’s and Butch’s absence at the Sheriff’s Association conference and for the remainder of the weekend as well.

Joanna raised herself up on one elbow. “Is something the matter with Jenny?” she asked, as a note of alarm crept into her voice. Being away from her daughter for extended periods of time still made her nervous.

“Nothing’s the matter,” Butch reassured her. “Nothing to worry about, anyway. It’s just that because of the severe drought conditions, the Forest Service has posted a statewide no-campfire restriction. They’re closing the public campgrounds. No fires of any kind will be permitted.”

“Great,” Joanna said glumly. “I suppose that means the end of penny’s camp-out. She was really looking forward to it. She said she thought she’d be able to finish up the requirements on two separate badges.”

“Surely you can give Faye Lambert more credit than that.”

Faye Lambert, wife of the newly appointed pastor of Bisbee’s First Presbyterian Church, had stepped into the vacuum left by two departing leaders. After recruiting one of the mothers to be assis­tant leader, she had succeeded in infusing new life into Jenny’s floundering Girl Scout troop.

“According to what Eva Lou said, the camp-out is still on. They dust won’t be cooking outdoors, and they won’t be staying in regu­lar campgrounds, either. Faye has managed to borrow somebody’s 1W. They’ll camp out on private land over near Apache Pass. The girls will be doing their cooking in the motor home, and they’ll have indoor bathroom facilities to boot. All they’ll be missing is the joy of eating food that’s been incinerated over open coals. No s’mores, I guess,” he added.

“Oh,” Joanna said. “‘That’s a relief then.”

And Eva Lou said something else,” Butch added. “She said to tell you she managed to find Jenny’s sit-upon. What the hell is a sit-upon?”

“Jenny will kill me,” Joanna said at once. “The girls made them years ago when they were still in Brownies. Jenny wanted me to throw hers away the minute she brought it home, but I insisted on keeping it. Because it was up on the top shelf of Jenny’s closet, it didn’t get wrecked along with everything else when Reba Singleton did her job on the house.”

Days before Joanna and Butch’s wedding, a distraught woman who blamed Joanna for her father’s death had broken into the house on High Lonesome Ranch, leaving a trail of vandalism and destruction in her wake. Although Reba had wrecked everything she could lay hands on in the rest of the house, she had left Jenny’s bedroom entirely untouched—including, as it turned out, Jenny’s much despised sit-upon.

“You still haven’t told me what a sit-upon is,” Butch grumbled.

“The girls made them—as part of an arts-and-crafts project—by sewing together two twelve-by-twelve-inch squares of vinyl. Jenny’s happens to be fire-engine red, but there were several other colors as well. The girls used white yarn to whipstitch the two pieces of vinyl together. Once three sides were sewn together, the square was stuffed with cotton batting. Then they closed the square by stitching tap the last side. And, voila! The next time the girls go out into the woods, they have a sit-upon to sit upon.”

“I see,” Butch said. “So what’s the matter with Jenny’s? Why did she want you to get rid of hers?”

“You know Jenny, how impatient she is—always in a rush. She did tine with the stitches on the first side. They’re really even and neat. On the second side the stitches get a little longer and a little more ragged. By the third side it’s even worse. On the last side, there were barely enough stitches to hold the batting inside.”

“In other words, it’s pug-ugly.”

“Right. That’s why she wanted me to throw it away. But I maintain that if I’m going to keep mementos for her, I should keep both good stuff and bad. It’s what Eleanor did for Inc. I knew Faye Lambert had put sit-upons on the list of required equipment for the camp-out. Knowing Jenny’s feelings on the matter, I had planned to just ignore it, but Eva Lou isn’t the kind to ignore some-thing if it happens to be on an official list of required equipment.”

“That’s right,” Butch agreed with a laugh. “Eva Lou Brady’s not the ignoring type.”

He wrapped an arm around Joanna’s shoulder and pulled her five-foot-four frame close to him. “The poker game was obviously an unqualified success. How did the rest of your day go?”

Joanna sighed. “I spent the whole afternoon in a terminally boring meeting run by a nerdy little guy who’s never been in law enforcement in his life. His job—as an overpaid ‘outside’ consul­tant from someplace back East—Massachusetts, I think—is to get us to sign up our departments for what his company has to offer.”

“Which is?”

“They do what he calls ‘team building’ workshops. For some exorbitant amount of money, everyone in the department is cycled through a ‘rigorous outdoor experience’ where they learn to ‘count’ on each other. What the hell does he think we do out there day after day, sell lollipops? And what makes him think I can afford to pay my people to go off camping in the boonies instead of patrolling the county? He claims the experience ‘creates an atmo­sphere of trust and team spirit.’ I felt like telling him that I’m a sheriff, not a cheerleader, but some of the other guys were really gung-ho about it.”

“Bill Forsythe’s such a cool macho dude,” Butch offered. “‘That program sounds like it would be right up his alley.”

“You’re on the money there,” Joanna said. “He and a couple of the other guys are ready to write the program into their budgets the minute they get back home. Maybe their budgets can handle it. Mine can’t. I’ve got my hands and budget full trying to deal with the ten thousand Undocumented Aliens who come through Cochise County every month. What about you?”

Butch grinned. “Personally speaking, I don’t have a UDA problem.”

Joanna whacked him on the chest. “You know what I mean. What did you do today?”

She glanced at the clock. In anticipation of the late-night poker session, she had drunk several cups of coffee during dinner. Now, at almost two in the morning, that dose of late-in-the-day caffeine showed no signs of wearing off.

“Nothing much,” Butch replied.

“You mean you didn’t go antiquing with the wives?”

Butch shook his head. “Nope. You know me and antiques. I opted out of that one.”

“Golfing, then? I heard somebody raving about the golf course here.”

Butch shook his head. “No golfing,” he said.

“Did you go someplace then?” Joanna asked.

“We drove up to Page in a county-owned vehicle,” Butch reminded her. “‘That makes it a vehicle I’m not allowed to drive, remember?”

Joanna winced. “Sorry,” she said. “I forgot. So what did you do?”

“I finished.”

“Finished what?”

“The manuscript.”

For over a year Butch had been working on his first novel, hanging away at it on his Toshiba laptop whenever he could find time to spare. He had even taken the computer along on their honeymoon trip to Paris the previous month. He had spent the early morning hours working while Joanna had reveled in the incredible luxury of sleeping in. Shy about showing a work in progress, Butch had refused to allow anyone to read the text while he was working on it, and that had included Joanna. Over the months she had come to regard his work on the computer as one of those things Butch did. In the process, she had lost track of the idea that eventu­ally his book might be done and that she might actually be allowed to read it.

Joanna sat up in bed. “You finished? You mean the book is really finished? That’s wonderful.”

“The first draft is done,” Butch cautioned. “But that doesn’t mean the book is finished. I doubt it’s what an agent or editor would call finished. I’m sure there’s a lot of work still to do.”

Joanna’s green eyes sparkled with excitement. “When do I get to read it?”

Butch shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’d rather you read a printed copy. That way, if you have any comments or suggestions, you can make note of them in the margins on the hard copy”

Joanna brimmed with enthusiasm. “But I want to read it now. Right away.”

“When we get home,” Butch said, “I’ll hook up the computer and run you off a copy.”

“But we won’t be home until Monday,” Joanna objected.

With Jenny off on a three-night camp-out with her Girl Scout troop, Joanna and Butch had some time to themselves, and they were prepared to take till advantage of it. They were scheduled to stay over in Page until Saturday morning. Leaving there, they would drive back only as far as Phoenix, where Butch was sched­uled to be a member of the wedding of one of his former employ­ees, a waitress from the now-leveled Roundhouse Bar and Grill up in Peoria. Drafted to stand up for the bride, Butch had been appointed man of honor, as opposed to the groom’s best man. The rehearsal dinner was set for Saturday evening, while the wedding itself would be held on Sunday afternoon.

“I want to read it now,” Joanna wailed, doing a credible imita­tion of a disgruntled three-year-old’s temper tantrum. “Isn’t there some way to have it printed before Monday? I’m off work the whole weekend, Butch. You’ll be busy with the wedding and man­-of-honor duties tomorrow and Sunday both. While you’re doing that, I can lie around and do nothing but read. I haven’t done something that decadent in years.”

“You’re quite the salesman,” Butch said, laughing. “No wonder Milo Davis had you out hawking insurance before you got elected sheriff. But maybe we could find a place in Phoenix that could run off a copy from my disk, although I’m sure it would be a lot cheaper to do it on our printer at home.”

“But I won’t have a weekend off when we get home,” Joanna pointed out. “As soon as we cross into Cochise County, I’ll be back in the soup at home and at work both, and you’ll be tied up work­ing on plans for the new house. We won’t even have time to sit down and talk about it.”

Between Joanna’s job and Butch’s project of herding their pro-posed house design through the planning and permit stage, the newlyweds didn’t have much time to spend together.

“All right, all right,” Butch agreed with a chuckle. “I know when I’m licked. Now look. It’s almost two o’clock in the morn­ing. What time is your first meeting?”

“Eight,” she said.

“Don’t you think we ought to turn off the light and try to get some sleep?”

“I’m not sleepy. Too much coffee.”

“Turn over then and let me rub your back. That might help.”

She lay down and turned over on her stomach. “You say you’ll rub my back, but you really mean you’ll do something else.”

He nuzzled the back of her neck. “That, too,” he said. “I have it on good authority that works almost as well as a sleeping pill.”

“Maybe you’re the one who should have been selling insur­ance,” she told him.

It turned out he was right. Before long, caffeine or not, Joanna was sound asleep. When the alarm went off at six-thirty, she reached over and flicked it off. She was still in bed and dozing when a room service attendant knocked on their door at seven-fifteen, bringing with him the breakfast Butch had ordered the night before by hanging a form on the outside of their door.

While Joanna scrambled into her clothing and makeup, Butch settled down at the table with a cup of coffee and USA Today.

“I really like this man-of-leisure stuff,” he said, when she came out of the bathroom and stood shoving her feet into a pair of heels. Like everything else in Joanna Brady’s wardrobe, the shoes were new—purchased as replacements for ones destroyed by Reba Sin­gleton’s rampage through Joanna’s house. The shoes looked nice, hut they were still a long way from being comfortable.

“Don’t rub it in,” she grumbled. “If you’re not writing, what are you planning to do while I’m in meetings?”

“Today the wives are scheduled to take a trip out to the Navajo Reservation,” Butch answered. “Since I’m done writing, I thought I’d tag along with them on that. I’m especially interested in Indian-made turquoise and silver, jewelry.”

“In other words, while I’m stuck listening to one more dreary speaker, you’ll be spending the day on a bus loaded with a dozen or so women I don’t know.”

Butch lowered the paper and looked at her. “You’re not jealous, are you?”

Joanna shrugged. “Maybe a little,” she admitted.

“Have you seen any of those other women?” he asked. “They’re all a lot older than you are, Joey, and not nearly as good-looking. In addition, I’m short and bald. That doesn’t make me what you’d call the sexy leading-man type.”

“Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas were both bald,” Joanna coun­tered. “And so is Andre Agassi. Nobody says any of them aren’t sexy.

She sat down at the table and took a tentative sip of her coffee. He reached across the table and touched her hand. “But I’m in love with you, Joey,” he said. “And you’re in love with me, so don’t go around worrying about the competition. There isn’t any”

She smiled back at him. “Okay,” she said.

Just then Joanna’s cell phone rang. She retrieved it from the bedside table where she’d left it overnight, recharging. The display said the call was coming from High Lonesome Ranch.

“Good morning, Jenny,” she said. “How are things?”

“Do I have to go on the camping trip?” Jennifer Ann Brady whined.

Joanna felt a stab of worry. Maybe Jenny was sick. “Are you feeling all right? You’re not running a fever, are you?” she asked.

“I’m not sick,” Jenny answered. “I just don’t want to go is all. Mrs. Lambert told us last night at the troop meeting that we won’t he able to cook over a campfire because we can’t have any fires. Some dork at the Forest Service decided it’s too dry for campfires. Without cooking, I probably won’t be able to earn any of the badges I thought I was going to earn. I’d rather stay home.”

“You know that’s not an option, Jenny,” Joanna said firmly. “You said you were going when you signed up. Now you have to keep your word.”

“But I hate it. I don’t even want to be a Girl Scout anymore. It’s dorky.”

The word “dork” is certainly getting a workout this morning, Joanna thought. But the idea of Jenny wanting to quit Girl Scouts was news to Joanna. From the moment her daughter had been old enough to join Daisies, Girl Scouting was something Jenny had loved.

“Since when?” Joanna asked. “Is it because you have a new leader? Is that it?”

“No. Mrs. Lambert is nice and so is the new assistant leader. I like them both, but it’s still dorky”

“I’m a little tired of things being dorky at the moment,” Joanna said. “Could you maybe think of some other word to use? As for the subject of quitting, if that’s what you decide to do, fine, but only after we have a chance to discuss it as a family. Right now, you’ve made a commitment to go on a camp-out, and you need to keep that commitment. Mrs. Lambert has made arrangements for food and transportation and all those other details. It wouldn’t be fair for you to back out now. You need to live up to your word, Jenny. Besides, Grandma and Grandpa Brady agreed to look after the ranch for the weekend. They didn’t agree to look after the ranch and you as well.”

“That’s another thing,” Jenny said crossly. “Grandma Brady found my stupid sit-upon. She says I have to take it along because it was on the list Mrs. Lambert gave us. You know, the sit-upon I made back when I was in Brownies? I always thought you threw it away. I asked you to throw it away. It’s so ugly. When the other girls see it, they’re going to laugh at me.”

“No, they won’t,” Joanna countered. “You girls were all in Brownies when you made those. I think there’s a good chance that some of theirs are every bit as ugly as yours is. Remember, Mrs. Lambert said you’re going to be listening to lectures from those young interns from the history department at the University of Arizona. You’ll need something to sit on during those lectures, and a sit-upon is just the thing. Would you rather come home with sandburs in your butt?”

“That means I have to take it?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not fair,” Jenny said. “You’re all just being mean to me. I don’t even want to talk to you anymore. Good-bye.” With that she hung up.

Joanna turned to Butch. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “My daughter just hung up on me.”

Butch didn’t seem overly dismayed. “Get used to it,” he said.

“Jenny’s twelve, going on twenty. She’s about to turn into a teenager on you, Joey. It goes with the adolescent territory.”

“Since when do you know so much about adolescents?”

“I was one once.”

“And now she wants to drop out of Girl Scouts,” Joanna con­tinued.

“So I gat I lewd, and maybe she should,” Butch said, from behind his newspaper. “It that’s what she really wants to do. Just because you stayed in Scouting as long as you did doesn’t mean your daughter has to.”

“You’re going to take her side in all this?” Joanna demanded.

“I’m not taking sides,” Butch said reasonably. “But if Jenny really wants to drop out of Girl Scouts, I think we should let her do what she wants to do.”

“What if she wanted to drop out of school?” Joanna returned. “Would you let her do that, too, just because it was what she wanted?”

Butch looked exasperated. “Joanna, what’s gotten into you?”

“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “I seem to be having a had morning.” With that, she grabbed her purse, stuffed her phone into it, and then stomped out of the room, slamming the door shut behind her. The loud bang from the closing door reverberated up And down the hallway. Two doors away, Pima County Sheriff Bill Forsythe turned and glanced back over his shoulder.

“My, my,” he murmured, clicking his tongue. “Sounds like a lovers’ spat to me.”

Before Joanna could reply, her phone rang again. Considering the fact that she was about to tell Bill Forsythe to mind his own damned business, the ringing phone was probably a lifesaver. There were two more roosterlike squawks before she managed to retrieve the distinctively crowing cell phone from the bottom of her purse. As soon as she picked it up, Joanna saw her chief deputy’s number on the phone’s digital readout.

“Good morning, Frank,” she said, walking briskly past Bill Forsythe as she did so.

Frank Montoya hailed from Willcox, Arizona, in northeastern Cochise County. He came from a family of former migrant work­ers and was the first member of his family to finish both high school and college. Years earlier he had been one of Joanna’s two opponents running for the office of Cochise County sheriff. After she won and was sworn into office, she had hired him to be one of her two chief deputies. Now Frank Montoya was her sole chief deputy. He was also the person Joanna had left in charge of the department during her absence.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“Are you all right?” Frank asked. “Your voice sounds a little strained.”

“I’m fine!” she told him. “Just not having a smooth-running morning today. Now what’s up? I’m on my way to the meeting. Anything happening that I should know about?”

“We had another carjacking on I-10 yesterday afternoon, over near Bowie.”

Joanna sighed. This was the sixth carjacking along the Cochise County stretch of the interstate in as many weeks. “Not again,” she said. “What happened?”

“A guy named Ted Waters, an elderly gentleman in his eighties, had pulled over on the shoulder to rest because he was feeling a lit­tle woozy. Some other guy came walking up to the car and knocked on the window. Waters rolled it down. As soon as he did, the young punk reached inside, opened the door, and pulled Waters out of the car. He threw Waters down on the side of the road and drove off. Border Patrol stopped Waters’ vehicle this morning at their check-point north of Elfrida. It’s a late-model Saturn sedan. At the time it was pulled over, it was loaded with seven UDAs. My guess is that the people in the car this morning had no idea it was stolen.”

“Coyotes again?” Joanna asked.

People who bring drugs and other contraband across the border are called mules. For a price, coyotes smuggle people. Since vehicles involved in smuggling of any kind are subject to immediate confiscation and impoundment, it had suddenly become fashionable for coyotes to use stolen cars for transporting their human cargo. That way, when the vehicles were impounded, the coyotes were out nothing. They had already been paid their exorbitant smuggling lees, and someone else’s main wound up in the impound lot. “What time did all this happen?” Joanna asked.

“The carjacking? Four in the afternoon.”

“Good grief!” Joanna exclaimed. “The carjackers have started doing it in broad daylight now?”

“That’s the way it looks,” Frank said.

“How’s the victim doing? What’s his name again?”

“Waters, Ted Waters. He’s from El Paso. He was on his way to visit his daughter who lives up in Tucson. He was banged up a lit­tle, but not that much. Had some cuts and bruises is all. He was treated at the scene and released. We called his daughter. She took him home with her.”

“Was Mr. Waters able to describe his assailant?”

“Not really. The first thing the guy did was knock off the old luau’s glasses, so he couldn’t see a thing. Waters said he thought he was young, though. And Anglo.”

“The border bandits are hiring Anglo operatives these days?”

“It doesn’t sound too likely,” Frank replied. “But I suppose it could be. We’re asking Border Patrol to bring the car to our impound yard instead of theirs, so Casey can go over it for prints later this morning.”

Casey Ledford was the Cochise Sheriff’s Department’s latent fingerprint expert. She also ran the county’s newly installed equip­ment loaded with the AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) software.

“Let me know if she comes up with something,” Joanna said. “I’ll put the phone on buzz instead of ring. That way, if you call during a meeting, I’ll go outside to answer or, if necessary, I’ll call you back. What’s DPS doing about all this?”

“After the first couple of carjackings, the Department of Public Safety said they were heeling up patrols on that sector, but so far as I know, that still hasn’t happened,” Frank told her. “We’re the ones who took the 911 call on this latest incident, and our guys were the first ones on the scene. By the time the first DPS car got there, it was all over.”

“Who is it at DPS who’s in charge of that sector?” Joanna asked.

“New guy,” Frank answered. “Name’s Hamilton, Captain Richard Hamilton. He’s based up in Tucson.”

“Do you have his number?”

“No, but I can look it up,” Frank offered.

“I’ll do it,” Joanna told him. “But I won’t have time to call him until later on this morning, when we take our break. Anything else going on down there that I should know about?”

“Just the usual,” Frank said. “A couple domestic violence cases, three DWIs, and another whole slew of UDAs, but that’s about it. The carjacking was the one thing I thought you should be aware of. Everything else is under control.”

“Right,” Joanna told him with a sigh. “Sounds like business as usual.”

CHAPTER TWO

It was late on a hot and sunny Friday afternoon as the four-vehicle caravan turned off Highway 186 and took the dirt road that led to Apache Pass. In the lead was a small blue Isuzu Tracker, followed by two dusty minivans. A lumbering thirty-five­-foot Winnebago Adventurer brought up the rear.

Sitting at the right rear window in the second of the two mini-vans, twelve-year-old Jennifer Ann Brady was sulking. As far as she was concerned, if you had to bring a motor home complete with a traveling bathroom along on a camping trip, you weren’t really camping. When she and her father, Andrew Roy Brady, had gone camping those few times before he died, they had taken bedrolls and backpacks and hiked into the wilderness. On those occasions, she and her dad had pitched their tent and put down bedrolls more than a mile from where they had left his truck. Andy Brady had taught his daughter the finer points of digging a trench for bathroom purposes. Jenny’s new Scout leader, Mrs. Lambert, didn’t seem like the type who would be caught dead digging a trench, much less using one.

The Tracker was occupied by the two women Mrs. Lambert had introduced as council-paid interns, both of them former Girl Scouts and now history majors at the University of Arizona. Because the assistant leader, Mrs. Loper, was unavailable, they were to help Mrs. Lambert with chaperone duties. In addition, they would be delivering informal lectures on the lifestyle of the Chir­icahua Apache, as well as on the history and aftermath of Apache wars in Arizona.

History wasn’t something Jenny Brady particularly liked, and she wondered how much the interns actually knew. What she had noticed about them was that they both wore short shorts, and they looked more like high school than college girls. But then, she reasoned, since they were former Girl Scouts, maybe they weren’t all bad.

Behind the little blue Tracker rolled two jam-packed minivans driven by harried mothers and loaded to the gills with girls and their gear—bedrolls, backpacks, and the sack lunches that would be that evening’s meal. Once the mothers finished discharging their rowdy passengers, both they and their empty minivans would return to Bisbee. They were due back Monday at noon to retrieve a grubby set of campers after their weekend in the wilderness.

Behind the minivans, Mrs. Lambert and one of her twelve charges lumbered along in the clumsy-looking Winnebago. The motor home belonged to a man named Emmet Foxworth, one of Faye Lambert’s husband’s most prominent parishioners. Upon hearing that the U.S. Forest Service had closed all Arizona campgrounds time to extreme fire danger, most youth-group leaders had canceled their scheduled camp-outs. Faye Lambert wasn’t to be deterred. She simply made alternate arrangements. First she had borrowed the motor home and their, since public lands were closed to camping, she petitioned a local rancher to allow her girls to use his private rangeland.

Even Faye Lambert had to admit that borrowing the motor hone had been nothing short of inspired. She might have taken on the challenge of being a Girl Scout leader, but she had never slept on the ground in her life. Having the motor home there meant she could keep her indoor sleeping record unblemished. Also, since the ranch obviously lacked camping facilities, the motor home would provide both rest-room and cooking facilities in addition to the luxury of running water.

Cassie Parks, seated in the middle row of the second minivan, turned around and looked questioningly at Jenny through thick red-framed glasses. “Who’s your partner?” Cassie asked.

Cassie was a quiet girl with long dark hair in two thick braids. Her home, out near Double Adobe, was even farther from town than the Bradys’ place on High Lonesome Ranch. Cassie’s parents, relative newcomers who hailed from Kansas, had bought what had once been a nationally owned campground that had been allowed to drift into a state of ruin. After a year’s worth of back-breaking labor, Cassie’s parents had completely refurbished the place, turn­ing it into an independent, moderately priced RV park.

When school had started the previous fall, Cassie had been the new girl in Jenny’s sixth-grade class at Lowell School. Now, with school just out, the two girls had a history that included nine months of riding the school bus together. Much of that time they had been on the bus by themselves as they traveled to and from their outlying Sulphur Springs Valley homes. They also belonged to the same Scout troop. In the course of that year, the two girls had become good friends.

If Jenny had been able to choose her own pup-tent partner for the Memorial Day Weekend camp-out, Cassie would have been it. But Mrs. Lambert, who didn’t like cliques or pairing off, had decided to mix things up. She had shown up in the church parking lot with a sock filled with six pairs of buttons in six different colors. While the twelve girls had been loading their gear into the mini-vans, Mrs. Lambert had instructed each one to pull out a single button. To prevent trading around, as soon as a button was drawn, Mrs. Lambert wrote the color down on a clipboard next to each girl’s name. Jenny had already drawn her yellow button when she saw Cassie draw a blue one.

The last girl to arrive in the parking lot and the last to draw her button was Dora Matthews. Glimpsing the yellow button in Dora’s fingers, Jenny’s heart sank. Of all the girls in the troop, Dora Matthews was the one Jenny liked least.

For one thing, Dora’s hair was dirty, and she smelled bad. She was also loud, rude, and obnoxious. She couldn’t have been very smart because she was thirteen years old and was still in a sixth-grade classroom where everybody else was twelve. Mrs. Lambert usually brought Dora to troop meetings and was always nice to her, even though Dora wasn’t nice back. Two months before school was out, Dora and her mother had returned to Bisbee and moved into the house that had once belonged to Dora’s deceased maternal grandmother, Dolly Pommer. All their lives, the elder Pommers had been movers and shakers in the Presbyterian Church. Out of respect for them, Faye Lambert had done what she could for their newly arrived daughter and granddaughter. That also explained why Dora Matthews was now the newest member in Jenny’s Girl Scout troop.

Not that Dora was even remotely interested in Girl Scouts—she was far too mature for that. She was into cigarettes. And boys. She bragged that before she and her mother had moved back to Bisbee, she’d had a boyfriend who had “done it” with her and who had wanted to marry her. Dora claimed that was why her mother had left Tucson—to get her daughter away from the boyfriend, but Jenny didn’t think that was the truth. What boy in his right mind would ever want to marry someone like Dora?

“Guess,” Jenny muttered dolefully in answer to Cassie’s question.

Behind her thick glasses, Cassie Parks’s brown eyes widened in horror. “Not Dora,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

“You’ve got it,” Jenny replied and then lapsed into miserable silence. She hadn’t wanted to come on the camping trip to begin with. It was bad enough that Grandma Brady had insisted she bring her stupid sit-upon, but having to spend the weekend with Dora Matthews was far worse than anything Jenny could have imagined. After three whole nights in a pup tent with stinky Dora Matthews, Jenny would be lucky if she didn’t stink, too.

Slowly the four vehicles wound up the dusty road that was little more than a rutted track. On either side of the road, the parched desert was spiked with spindly foot-high blades of stiff yellowed grass. Heat shimmered ahead and behind them, covering the road with visible rivers of mirage-fed water. At last the Tracker pulled off the narrow roadway and into a shallow, scrub-oak-dotted basin. Kelly Martindale and Amber Summers leaped out of the Tracker and motioned the other vehicles to pull in behind them. By the time the motor home had maneuvered into place, all the girls had piled out of the minivans and were busy unloading. Dora, who had been accorded the honor of riding along with Mrs. Lambert in the motor home, was the last to arrive. She hung back, letting the other girls do the work of unpacking.

“All right, ladies,” Mrs. Lambert announced as soon as the minivans drove away. “You all know who your partner is. Take tents from the luggage compartment under the motor home. Then choose your spots. We want all the tents up and organized well before dark. Let’s get going.”

Each pair of girls was required to erect its own tent. Of all the girls in the troop, Jenny had the most experience in that regard. While Mrs. Lambert and the two interns supervised the other girls, Jenny set about instructing Dora Matthews on how to help set up theirs.

When it came time to choose a place for the tent, Dora selected a spot that was some distance from the others. Rather than argue about it, Jenny simply shrugged in agreement. “Fine,” she mut­tered. Without much help from Dora, Jenny managed to lay the tent out properly, but when she asked Dora to hold the center support pole in place, Dora proved totally inept.

“Don’t you know how to do anything right?” Jenny demanded impatiently. “Here, hold it like this!”

Instead of holding the pole, Dora grabbed it away from Jenny and threw it as far as she could heave it. The pole landed in the dirt and stuck up at an angle like a spear.

“If you’re so smart, Jennifer Brady, you can do it yourself.” With that, Dora stalked away.

“Wait a minute,” Mrs. Lambert said, picking up the pole and walking toward the still unraised tent. “What seems to be the prob­lem, girls?”

“Miss Know--It-All here thinks I’m stupid,” Dora complained. “And she keeps telling me what to do. That’s all right. If she’s so smart, she call have the stupid tent all to herself. I’ll sleep outside.”

“Calm down, Dora,” Mrs. Lambert said reasonably. “These aren’t called two -man tents just because they hold two people. It also takes two people working together to put them up. Now come over here and help.”

Dora crossed her arms and shook her head. “No,” she said.

“Look here, Dora,” Mrs. Lambert cajoled. “The only reason Jenny knows so much more about this than you do is that she and her dad used to go camping together sometimes. Isn’t that right, Jenny?”

Jenny thought about her father often, but hearing other people talk about him always brought the hurt of his death back with an intensity that made her throat ache. Jenny bit her lower lip. She nodded but said nothing.

“So come over here and help, Dora,” Mrs. Lambert continued. “That way, the next time, you’ll know what to do.”

“I don’t want to know how to pitch a tent,” Dora stormed. “Why should I? Who needs to learn how to pitch tents anyway? ‘These days people live in houses, not tents.”

Rather than waste any more time in useless discussion, Mrs. Lambert turned to Jenny. “Never mind. Here, Jenny. Let me help. We’ll have this up in no time. Besides, we’re due at the evening campfire in twenty minutes.”

“Campfire!” Jenny exclaimed. “It’s too hot for a campfire. And it isn’t even dark.”

“In this case, campfire is only a figure of speech. With the desert so dry, it’s far too dangerous to have one even if there aren’t any official restrictions here. We won’t be having a fire at all. I brought along a battery-powered lantern to use instead. When it comes tome for after-dinner storytelling, we can sit around that.”

“Storytelling is for little kids,” Dora grumbled. “Who needs it?”

Mrs. Lambert didn’t respond, but Jenny heard her sigh. For the first time it occurred to her that maybe her troop leader didn’t like Dora Matthews any more than the girls did.

It was almost dark before all the tents were up and bedrolls and packs had been properly distributed. As the girls reassembled around their makeshift “campfire,” Jenny welcomed the deepening twilight. Not only was it noticeably cooler, but also, in the dim evening light, no one noticed the mess she had made of’ her sit-upon.

Once all the girls were gathered, Mrs. Lambert distributed the sack lunches followed by bags of freshly popped microwave popcorn and a selection of ice-cold sodas, plucked from the motor home’s generator-powered refrigerator. Taking a refreshing swig of her chilled soft drink and munching on hot popcorn, Jenny decided that maybe bringing a motor home along on a camping trip wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

“First some announcements,” Mrs. Lambert told them. “As you can probably guess, Mr. Foxworth’s motor home has a limited water-storage capacity for both fresh water and waste water. For that rea­son, we’ll be using the rest room as a number-two facility only. For number one, you can go in the bushes. Is that understood?”

Around the circle of lantern light, the girls nodded in unison.

Jenny raised her hand. “What about showers?” she asked.

“No showers,” Mrs. Lambert said with a smile. “When the Apaches lived here years ago, they didn’t get to take showers every day. In fact, they hardly took showers at all, and you won’t either. Unless it rains, and that doesn’t appear to be very likely. The rea­son, of course, is that since we don’t have enough water along for showers for everybody, no one will shower. That way, when we go home, we’ll all be equally grubby.

“As for meal preparation and cleanup, we’re going to split into six teams of two girls each. Because of limited work space in the motor home, two girls are all that will fit in the kitchen area at any given time. Tomorrow and Sunday, each tent will do preparation for one meal and cleanup for another. On Monday, for our last breakfast together, Kelly, Amber, and I will do the cooking and cleanup honors. Does that sound fair?”

“What if’ we don’t know how to cook?” Dora objected. She had positioned herself outside the circle. Off by herself, she sat with her back against the trunk of a scrub oak tree.

“That’s one of the reasons you’re here,” Mrs. Lambert told her, “To learn how to do things you may not already know how to do. Now,” she continued, “it’s time for us to hear from one of out interns. We’re really lucky to have Kelly and Amber along. Not only are they both former Girl Scouts themselves, they also are well-versed in the history of this particular area.

“When I first came to town two years ago, one of the things I offered to do was serve on the textbook advisory committee for the school board in Bisbee. In my opinion, the classroom materials give short shrift to the indigenous peoples in this country, including the ones who lived here before the Anglos came, the Chiricahua Apache. It occurred to me that there had to be a better way to make those people come alive for us, and that’s why I’ve invited Kelly and Amber to join us on this trip. Kelly, I believe we should start with you.”

Kelly Martindale stood up. She had changed out of her shorts into a pair of tight-fitting jeans and a plaid long-sleeved shirt. Her dark hair was pulled back into a long ponytail.

“First off,” she said, “I want you to close your eyes and think about where you live. I want you to think about your house, your room, your yard, the neighbors who live on your street. Would you do that for me?”

Jenny Brady closed her eyes and imagined the fenced yard of High Lonesome Ranch. In her mind’s eye, she saw a frame house surrounded by a patch of yellowing grass and tall shady cotton-woods and shorter fruit-bearing trees. This was the place Jenny had called home for as long as she could remember. Penned inside the yard were Jenny’s two dogs, Sadie, a long-legged bluetick hound, and Tigger, a comical-looking mutt who was half golden retriever and half pit bull. Tied to the outside of the fence next to the gate, equipped with Jenny’s new saddle and bridle and ready to go for a ride, was Kiddo, Jenny’s sorrel gelding quarter horse.

Kelly Martindale’s voice imposed itself oil penny’s mental images of hone. “Now, just suppose,” she said, “that one morning someone showed up at your house and said that what you had always thought of as yours wasn’t yours at all. Supposing they said you couldn’t live there anymore because someone else wanted to live there instead. Supposing they said you’d have to pack up and go live somewhere else. What would you think then?”

In times past, Jenny would have been the first to raise her hand, the first to answer. But she had found that being the sheriff’s daughter came with a downside. Other kids had begun to tease her, telling her she thought she was smart and a show-off, all because her mother was sheriff. Now, in hopes of fitting in and going unnoticed, she tended to wait to be called on rather than volunteering. Cassie Parks suffered no such qualms.

“It sounds like what the Germans did to the Jews,” she said with a shudder.

Kelly nodded. “It does, doesn’t it? But it’s also what the United States government did to Indian tribes all over this country. And the reason I know about it is that very thing happened to my great-great-grandmother when she was just a little girl—about your age. Her people—the Apaches—had lived here for genera­tions right here in the Chiricahuas, the Dos Cabezas Moun­tains, and In the surrounding valleys. When the whites came and the Apaches tried to defend their lands, there was a war. The Apaches lost that war and they were shipped off to a place called Fort Sill, Oklahoma. My great-great-grandmother was sent there, too. Although she and her family were prisoners, she somehow fell in love with one of the soldiers guarding the camp. They got mar­ried, and she went to live with him in Arkansas. But that’s why I’m here in Arizona. It’s also why I’m a history major. I’m trying to find out more about my people—about who they were, where they carte from, and what happened to them.

“For example, this place.” Kelly raised her hand and swept it around the tree-dotted basin where they were camped. “During the Apache Wars, this place was the site of a good deal of fighting, mostly because up there—in that canyon—there’s a spring. Wagon trains came through here for that very reason—because of the availability of water. In the 1850s, Nachi, Cochise’s father, attacked one of those trains. Thirty people were killed and/or mutilated. Two of the women were sold down in Mexico. But you have to remember, as far as the Apaches were concerned, they were defend­ing their homeland from unwelcome invaders.

“In later years, the dirt road we followed coming up here from the highway was the route for the Butterfield Stage Line. There were several fierce battles waged around the Apache Pass Stage Stop. During one of those battles, Mangas Coloradas, another Apache chief whose name in English means Red Sleeves, was shot and seriously wounded. In the next few days, as we explore this area, I want you to remember that, to some of us, Apache Pass is just as much a sacred battlefield as places like Gettysburg in Penn­sylvania or the Normandy beaches in France are to other people.”

“Will we find arrowheads?” Dawn Gaxiola asked.

“Possibly,” Kelly replied. “But arrowheads won’t necessarily be from the time of the Apache Wars. By then, bows and arrows were pretty much passe. The U.S. soldiers had access to guns and gunpowder, and so did the Indians.”

“What about scalping?” Dora Matthews asked. For the first time she seemed somewhat interested in what was being said. “Did the Indians do a lot of that?”

“‘There was cruelty and mutilation on both sides,” Kelly answered. “A few minutes ago, I mentioned Mangas Coloradas. When Red Sleeves was finally captured, the soldiers who were supposedly guarding him tortured him and then shot him in cold blood. Mangas was big—six foot six. After he was dead, the soldiers scalped him, cut off his head, and then boiled it so they could send his skull to a phrenologist back east, who claimed his head was big­ger than Daniel Webster’s.”

“Yuck!” Dawn said with a shudder. “And what about that other thing you said—a friendologist or something. What’s that?”

“Phrenologist, not friend,” Kelly corrected. “Phrenology was a supposed science that’s now considered bogus. During the eigh­teen hundreds, phrenologists believed they could tell how people would behave by studying the size and shape of their heads.

“But getting back to the Apaches, you have to remember that history books are usually written by the winners. That’s why Indi­ans always end up being the bad guys while the U.S. soldiers who turned the various tribes out of their native lands are regarded as heroes or martyrs.”

“You mean like General Custer?” Cassie asked.

Kelly smiled. “Exactly,” she said. “Now, tomorrow Amber and I will be leading a hike up to the ruins of Fort Bowie. But wher­ever you go tomorrow or later on, when you visit places like the Wonderland of Rocks or Cochise Stronghold, I want you to bear in mind that Anglos weren’t the first people here. I’d like you to look at the land around here and try to see it through some of those other people’s points of view.”

Abruptly, Kelly Martindale sat down. After that, Mrs. Lambert saw to it that the evening turned into the usual kind of campfire high jinks. There were games and songs and even an impromptu skit. Finally, a little after ten, she told the girls it was time for lights-out and sent them off to their tents.

“It’s too early to go to bed,” Dora muttered, as she and Jenny approached their tent. “I never go to bed at ten o’clock. I’m going for a walk.”

“You can’t do that,” Jenny said. “You’ll get it in trouble.”

“Who’s going to tell?” Dora demanded. “You? Besides, I need a cigarette. If I smoke it here, Mrs. Lambert or those two snooty college girls who think they’re so rad might smell the smoke and make me put it out because I might start a fire or something. You wanna come along?”

Jenny was torn. On the one hand, she didn’t want to get into trouble. On the other hand, she wasn’t ready to go to sleep yet, either. Not only that, their tent seemed to be far enough away from the others that it was possible no one would notice if they crept out for a little while.

“I’ll go,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “But first we’d better climb into our bedrolls and pretend like we’re going to sleep.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ll bet Mrs. Lambert will come around to check on us, that’s why.”

“Okay,” Dora grumbled. “We’ll do it your way.”

It turned out Jenny was right. Ten minutes after they lay down on their bedrolls, they heard the stealthy rustle of shoe leather approaching through dry grass. Moments later, the light from a flashlight flickered on the outside of the tent..

“Everybody tucked in?” Faye Lambert asked.

“Tucked in,” Jenny returned. With the tent flap closed, the stench of Dora’s body odor was almost more than Jenny could bear. She could hardly wait for their leader to go away so they could slip back out into the open air.

“Well, good night then,” Mrs. Lambert said. “I’ve made out the duty roster. The two of you will be cleaning up after breakfast. Is that all right?”

“It’s fine,” Dora told her. “I’m better at cleaning up than I am at cooking.”

The flashlight disappeared. Jenny listened to the sound of Mrs. Lambert’s retreating footsteps and then to the slight squeak as the door to the motor home opened and closed. Kelly Martindale and Amber Summers were sleeping in their own two-man tent. Mrs. Lambert would spend the night in the motor home.

“Shall we go then?” Dora demanded.

“Wait a few minutes longer,” Jenny cautioned.

Ten minutes later, the two girls stealthily raised the flap on their tent and let themselves out. Walking as silently as possible, they slipped off through the scrub oak. While waiting in the tent, their eyes had adjusted to the lack of light. Once outside, they found the moonlight overhead surprisingly bright. Walking in the moon’s sil­very glow, they easily worked their way over the near edge of the basin. Within minutes they were totally out of sight of the other campers. At that point, Dora sank down on a rock and pulled two cigarettes out of the pocket of her denim jacket.

“Want one?” she asked.

Jenny shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said.

“Come on,” Dora urged. “What are you, chicken? Afraid your mom will find out and put you in jail?”

For the second time that evening, Jenny was aware of the burden of being the sheriff’s daughter. She wanted nothing more than to be accepted as a regular kid. This dare, made by someone she couldn’t stand, was more than Jennifer Ann Brady could resist. “Okay,” she said impulsively. “Give me one. Where do you get them?” she asked, as Dora pulled out a lighter. She lit her own cigarette first, then she lit Jenny’s.

“I steal them from my mother’s purse,” Dora admitted, inhaling deeply. “She smokes so much that she never misses them as long as I only take a few at a tine.”

Jenny took a few tentative puffs, holding the smoke in her mouth and then blowing it out again. Even that was enough to make her eyes water.

“That’s not how you do it,” Dora explained. “You’re supposed to inhale—breathe the smoke into your lungs—like this.”

She sucked a drag of smoke into her lungs, held it there, and then blew it out in a graceful plume. Jenny’s game effort at imita­tion worked, but only up to a point. Moments later she found herself bent over, choking and gagging.

“You’re not going to barf, are you?” Dora Matthews demanded.

“I think so,” Jenny managed.

“Well, give me your cigarette, then. Don’t let it go to waste.”

Jenny handed over the burning cigarette. Embarrassed, she stum­bled away from where Dora sat, heaving as she went. Twenty yards farther on, she bent over a bush and let go. In the process she lost the contents of her sack lunch along with the popcorn and Orange Crush from the campfire. Finally, when there was nothing left in her system, Jenny lurched over to a nearby tree and stood there, leaning against the trunk, gasping and shivering and wishing she had some water so she could get the awful taste out of her mouth.

“Are you all right?” Dora asked from behind her. She was still smoking one of the two cigarettes. The smell of the smoke was enough to make Jenny heave again, but she managed to stave off the urge.

“I’m all right,” she said shakily.

“You’ll be okay,” Dora told her. “The same thing happened to me the first time I tried it. You want an Altoid? I always keep some around so my mom can’t smell the smoke on my breath.”

With shaking hands, Jenny gratefully accepted the proffered breath mint. “Thanks,” she said and meant it.

The two girls stood there together for some time, while Jenny sucked on the breath mint and Dora finished smoking the rest of the remaining cigarette. When it was gone, Dora carefully ground out the butt with the sole of her shoe. “I wouldn’t want to start a fire,” she said with a laugh. “Somebody might notice. Then we would be in trouble.”

They were quiet for a time. The only sound was the distant yip of a coyote, answered by another from even farther away. Then, for the first time that evening, a slight breeze stirred around them, blowing up into their faces from the valley floor below. As the small gust blew away the last of the dissipating cigarette smoke, Jenny noticed that another odor had taken its place.

“There’s something dead out there,” she announced.

“Dead,” Dora repeated. “How do you know?”

Jennifer Ann Brady had lived on a ranch all her life. She recog­nized the distinctively ugly odor of carrion.

“Because I can smell it, that’s how,” Jenny returned.

The slight softening in Dora’s voice when she had offered the Altoid disappeared at once. “You’re just saying that to scare me, Jennifer Brady!” Dora declared. “You think that because they were saying all that stuff about Apaches killing people and all, that you can spook me or something.”

“No, I’m not,” Jenny insisted. “Don’t you smell it?”

“Smell what?” Dora shot back. “I don’t smell anything.”

Jennifer Brady had seen enough animal carcasses along the road and out on the ranch that she wasn’t the least bit scared of them, but she could tell from Dora’s voice that the other girl was. It was a way of evening the score for the cigarettes--a way of reclaiming a little of her own lost dignity.

“Come on,” Jenny said. “I’ll show you.”

Without waiting to see whether or not Dora would follow, Jenny set off. The breeze was still blowing uphill, and Jenny walked directly into it. After watching for a moment or two, Dora Matthews reluctantly followed. With each step, the odor grew stronger and stronger.

“Ugh,” Dora protested at last. “Now I smell it, too. It’s awful.”

Their path had taken them up and over the ridge that formed one side of the basin where the troop had set up camp. Now the girls walked downhill until they were almost back at the road that had brought them up into the basin. And there, visible in the moonlight and at the bottom of the embankment that fell down from the graded road, lay the body of a naked woman.

“Oh, my God,” Dora groaned. “Is she dead?”

Jenny’s neck prickled as the hair on the back of it stood on end. “Of course she’s dead,” she said, wheeling around. “Now come on. We have to go tell Mrs. Lambert.”

“We can’t do that,” Dora wailed. “What if she finds out about the cigarettes? We’ll both be in trouble then.”

Jenny was worried about the same thing, but the threat of get­ting in trouble wasn’t enough to stop her. Neither was Dora Matthews.

“Too bad,” Jenny called over her shoulder. “I’m going to tell anyway. Somebody’s going to have to call my mom.”

CHAPTER THREE

It was after eleven when the vibrating of Dr. George Winfield’s tiny pager jarred him awake. Next to him in bed his wife, Eleanor, let loose a very unladylike snore. The Cochise County Medical Examiner tiptoed across the room and silently pulled the door shut behind him before he switched on the light and checked the number on the digital readout. He was used to being rousted out of bed by middle-of-the-night calls from various law enforcement agencies, but the number showing on the screen wasn’t one he instantly recognized.

To make sure the sound of conversation wouldn’t awaken Eleanor, he went all the way to the kitchen and used that phone to return the call. “Chief Deputy Montoya,” a voice answered after less than half a ring. “Doc Winfield?”

“That’s right,” George answered, rubbing his eyes. He hadn’t been asleep for long, but his eyes were gritty, and he was having a hard time pulling himself out of the fog. “What’ve you got, Frank?”

“A problem,” Frank replied.

“Someone’s dead, I assume,” George said, tuning up with a hint of sarcasm. “If that weren’t the case, you wouldn’t be calling me. What’s the deal?”

“White female,” Frank Montoya answered. “A Jane Doe. From the looks of her, I’d say she’s been dead for a day or two. On the other hand, it’s been so hot lately that maybe it’s less than that.”

“Where was she found?”

“On the road to Apache Pass. Looks like someone threw her out of a vehicle and let her roll down an embankment. She’s naked. No identification that we’ve been able to find so far, but we’ll have to wait until morning to do a more thorough search.”

Something about Apache Pass niggled in the back of George Winfield’s consciousness, but right then he couldn’t quite sort it out. Still, there was no denying the underlying urgency in Frank Montoya’s voice. Even half asleep, George noticed that and assumed Frank had found something deeply disturbing about the condition of the body. Maybe the woman had been mutilated in some unusually gruesome way.

“I’ll get dressed and be there as soon as I can,” George Winfield said. He was relatively new to the area, a transplant from Min­nesota, so his grasp of southeastern Arizona geography was still somewhat hazy, forcing him to make copious use of his detailed topo guide to get wherever he needed to go. “How far is Apache Pass from here and where is it exactly?”

“Off Highway 186. From Bisbee it’s about an hour’s drive,” Frank answered, his native-son knowledge apparent in the casual ease of his answer. “Depending on how fast you drive, of course.” Deputies around the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department didn’t call the new county medical examiner “Doc Lead Foot” for nothing.

“Good,” George replied. “I’ll be there as close to that as I can manage. See you then ...”

“Wait,” Frank interrupted. “Before you come, there’s something else you should know. Jennifer Brady is the one who found the body—she and one of her friends, a girl named Dora Matthews.”

By virtue of having married Eleanor Lathrop, Dr. George Winfield was stepfather to Sheriff Joanna Brady and stepgrandfather to Joanna’s daughter, Jenny. It came to him then that the something that had been niggling at the back of his mind throughout his conversation with Frank Montoya was something Eleanor had mentioned in passing: Jenny and her Girl Scout troop would b camping on a ranch in the Apache Pass area over Memorial Day Weekend.

“How did they manage that?” he asked.

“According to Jenny, after lights out, she and Dora took off on an unauthorized hike. They were going off by themselves to have a cigarette—”

“Jenny was smoking cigarettes?” a disbelieving George Winfeld demanded. “She’s twelve years old, for cripes’ sake! How the hell did she get hold of cigarettes?”

“Beats me,” Frank answered. “I’m just passing along what Faye Lambert, the troop leader, told me. Faye’s royally pissed at the two girls, and I don’t blame her. I would be, too. She wants to send them home.”

Concerned that Eleanor might have awakened and stolen out of the bedroom, George glanced over his shoulder before resuming his conversation. “What about Joanna?” George asked, lowering his voice. “Have you called her?”

“Not yet,” Frank admitted. “I’m about to, but first I wanted to have some game plan in place for getting those two girls back to town. It’s already after eleven, and Page is six hundred miles from here. It doesn’t make sense having Joanna drive hell-bent-for leather from one end of the state to the other in the middle of the night so they could come pick them up.”

“What about the other girl’s mother?” George Winfield asked. “Couldn’t she come get them?”

“Negative on that. I tried calling Dora Matthews’s house up in Tombstone Canyon. There’s no answer.”

“You’re not asking me to bring them home, are you?” George Winfield asked warily. “They can’t very well ride home in my minivan along with a bagged-up body.”

“You’re right,” Frank agreed. “It’s totally out of the question, but I am asking for suggestions.”

“Why can’t you do it?”

“Because Jenny’s the sheriff’s daughter,” Frank said. “It’ll look like she’s being given special treatment. Assuming Joanna decides to stand for election to a second term, you can imagine how that would play if it fell into the hands of her opponent.”

“I suppose you’re right about that,” George Winfield agreed. “What about calling Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady?” he asked after a short pause. “As I understand it, they’re staying out at High Lonesome Ranch to look after things while Joanna and Butch are out of town. When it comes to Jenny, I’m sure they’ll do whatever needs doing.”

“Good idea,” Frank Montoya replied, sounding relieved. “So who’s going to call them, you or I?”

“I’ll make you a deal,” George said. “Since you’re the one who’s going to have to deal with Joanna, I’ll be happy to call Jim Bob and Eva Lou.”

“Thanks,” Frank said. “That’ll be a big help.”

“Are you going to tell her about the cigarettes?” George asked.

“Not it I don’t have to,” Frank said. “I’d as soon leave that chore to someone else—like Faye Lambert, for instance. The murder investigation is my responsibility. The cigarettes aren’t.”

“Good luck,” George said with a laugh.

Once Frank was off the line, George located the speed-dial number for High Lonesome Ranch that Eleanor had coded into their phone. Jim Bob Brady answered on the third ring. “Hey, Jim Bob, it’s George.”

“I figured that out by looking at the caller ID.”

“Hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Naw,” Jim Bob said. “Eva Lou’s in the bedroom getting ready for bed. I’m sitting here watching Jay Leno. Why? What’s going on?”

In as few words as possible, George Winfield outlined the prob­lem. “Whoa!” Jim Bob exclaimed once he’d heard the whole story. “Joanna’s going to pitch a fit.”

“I don’t doubt that,” George agreed.

“Does she know yet?”

“Frank will be calling her in a few minutes, but he’s waiting to make sure you’ll go out to Apache Pass and bring Jenny and the other girl home. Otherwise, he’s afraid Joanna will light out of Page and drive all night to get here.”

“Give me Frank’s number,” Jim Bob said. “As soon as I give him a call, Eva Lou and I will head right out to go get them.”

“You don’t think Eva Lou will mind?”

“Good grief, no! When it comes to handling ornery kids, there’s nobody better than Eva Lou.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” George Winfield agreed. Much as he loved his own wife, he had no doubt that in this kind of crisis Eleanor Lathrop Winfield would be far less help than Jenny’s other grandmother. “See you there,” he added.

“Will do,” Jim Bob said. “Drive carefully.”

George put down the phone. Barely breathing, he crept back into the bedroom and retrieved his clothing, wallet, and keys. Despite his caution, the clatter of lifting his keys from the glass-topped dresser was enough to waken his wife.

“George?” Eleanor asked. “Is that you?”

“Yes,” he returned. “I’ve been called out on a case. Go back to sleep.”

“Will you be long?”

“You know how it goes,” he said. Leaning down, he kissed her lightly on the top of her forehead. “If I’m not home by breakfast, save me a place.”

“Will do,” she said sleepily. Then she rolled over, sighed, and immediately resumed snoring.

George stood there feeling that he had somehow dodged a bul­let. Only for the time being, of course. Once Eleanor found out about Jenny and the body and the cigarettes and once Eleanor fig­ured out that George had known about the situation without immediately telling her, then there would be hell to pay, but George was used to that. He and his first wife had hardly ever quarreled. In this new life and in his second marriage, he was learning to enjoy his almost daily sparring matches with the perpetually volatile Eleanor. George got a kick out of the daily skirmishes and even more enjoy­ment out of making tip again afterward.

Makes life more interesting, George thought to himself as he once again let himself out of the bedroom and silently pulled the door shut behind him. It helps keep us young--or at least not as old as we would be otherwise.

Joanna Brady was asleep and dreaming that she was driving her Blazer across a bone-dry wash bed. Halfway through the wash, the engine stalled. Time and again, Joanna twisted the key in the ignition, but the engine refused to turn over. Hearing a rumbling sound coining from outside, Joanna looked up in time to see a wall of flash-flood-swollen water bearing down on her. She was reaching for the door handle when the phone rang. She grabbed up the receiver of the hotel phone, but still the persistent racket continued. On the second try she located her cell phone.

“Hello?” she said, without even bothering to check the caller-ID readout as she did so.

Beside her, Butch rolled over and groaned. “What now?” he muttered.

“Morning, Boss,” Frank Montoya said. “Sorry to wake you.”

“What time is it?” Joanna asked.

“Almost midnight.”

“What’s up?”

“A homicide,” Frank replied. “Out in Apache Pass. Jenny and one of her friends, Dora Matthews, discovered the body.”

Joanna sat straight up in bed. “Jenny?” she demanded. “Is she all right? Is she in any danger?”

“No,” Frank said. “I’m sure she’s fine, although I haven’t actu­ally seen her myself. I’m still at the crime scene. She and the other girl are back at camp. Faye Lambert is here with me. We’ll be going up there as soon as Ernie Carpenter and Doc Winfield show up to take charge of the crime scene.”

Holding the phone with one hand, Joanna scrabbled out of bed and began gathering clothing. “It’ll take some time to get checked out,” she said. “But if we leave within the next half hour, we can probably be there by eight-thirty or so.”

“Slow down, Boss,” Frank was saying. “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

“What do you mean, it isn’t necessary?” Joanna returned. “If my daughter is involved in a homicide—”

“I didn’t say she was involved,” Frank corrected. “I said she found a body. From the looks of it, the woman’s been dead for a while, so it isn’t as though Jenny actually witnessed a crime in progress. Not only that, I just now got off the phone with Jim Bob Brady. He and Eva Lou are on their way out to Apache Pass to bring Jenny and the other girl, Dora Matthews, back into town.”

“I still think we should get dressed and head out just as soon as—”

“Why?” Frank interrupted. “What difference is it going to make if you get here at eight o’clock in the morning or at two o’clock in the afternoon? Jenny’s fine, and she’ll be in good hands with the Bradys taking care of her. As for the homicide investiga­tion, we have that under control. Ernie Carpenter and Doc Winfield are both on their way and should be here in a matter of minutes. As soon as one of them shows up, I’ll go check on Jenny, but from what Faye Lambert said, I think she’s fine. Jenny and her friend found the body, and they reported it to Mrs. Lambert right away.

“But where was it, right there where they’re camping?”

“Not exactly,” Frank said. “It seems that after lights-out, Jenny and the other girl, Dora Matthews, snuck off by themselves to smoke a cigarette—”

“‘They did what?”

“Went to smoke a cigarette. Jenny evidently got sick to her stomach and barfed her guts out. It was sometime after that they found the body. I’m at the crime scene now. I’d say it’s a good half mile from where the girls are camping.”

“What’s going on?” Butch asked in the background. “Has something happened to Jenny?”

“Cigarettes!” Joanna exclaimed, waving aside Butch’s question. “Jenny was smoking cigarettes? I’ll kill her. Put her on the phone.”

“I can’t. I already told you, she isn’t here right now,” Frank said. “She’s back at camp and that’s a good half a mile from the crime scene. Faye left the girls in a motor home back at the campsite and gave them strict orders not to budge until we get there, which shouldn’t be all that long now.”

“As soon as I can get dressed and out of here, we’ll be on our way,” Joanna said.

“Come on, Boss,” Frank returned. “Page is at least an eight-hour drive from here, even the way you drive. It’s also the middle of the night. The last thing we need is for you to take off at midnight to drive home. You’ll end up in a wreck somewhere between here and there. I’ve got things under control as far as the investigation is concerned, and your in-laws are coming to take care of Jenny. I suggest that you try to get a decent night’s sleep right where you are and then drive home in the morning.”

Joanna had been pacing back and forth across the room with the phone in one hand and a fistful of clothing in the other. Now she stopped pacing and took a deep breath. Even in her agitated state she could see there would be plenty of time for her to deal with Jenny and her experimentation with cigarettes. The real point of Frank’s middle-of-the-night phone call was the homicide in Joanna’s jurisdiction. That meant she needed to switch off her motherly outrage and put on her sheriff persona.

“You’d better tell me what you know about the victim,” she said. “Any idea who she is?”

“No,” Frank answered. “She’s naked. No ID, nothing.”

“And no vehicle?”

“Not that we’ve been able to find so far. I’d say she was killed somewhere else and then dumped here. Of course, Doc Winfield will be able to tell us more about that.”

“You’ll cast for tire tracks?” Joanna asked.

“Yes, but depending on how long ago she was brought here, I doubt if tire casts will do us any good.”

By then, Butch had switched on his lamp and was sitting up on his side of the bed. “Do I get dressed or don’t I?” he asked.

Joanna knew Frank Montoya was right. Driving through the night on less than two hours’ sleep made no sense. “No,” she said to Butch. “Not yet.”

“Not yet what?” Frank asked.

“I was talking to Butch. You’re right. We probably shouldn’t leave until morning, but I’d like to talk to Jim Bob and Eva Lou before I make a final decision. And to Jenny,” she added.

“All right,” Frank said. “Since I’ve got a decent cell-phone sig­nal here, it’ll probably work at the camp, too. As soon as we’re all in one place, I’ll give you a call back.”

“Thanks,” Joanna said. “Sounds good.”

She ended the call and then crawled back into bed.

“So what’s the deal?” Butch asked.

“Jenny and Dora Matthews snuck out of camp after lights-out to smoke cigarettes,” she answered. “While they were doing that, they stumbled upon a homicide victim. Jim Bob and Eva Lou are coming to pick the girls up and take them home to Bisbee.”

“But the girls are both all right?”

“Fine,” Joanna answered testily. “At least they will be until I catch up with them. I can’t believe it. Jenny smoking! What do you suppose got into her?”

“She’s twelve,” Butch said, stifling a yawn. “She’s growing up, trying her wings. Don’t make a federal case out of-it.”

Joanna turned on him, mouth agape. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean stay cool,” he said. “It’s only cigarettes. The more you overreact, the worse it’ll be. Think about you and your mother. What about all the things Eleanor used to tell you not to do?”

“I couldn’t wait to go out and try them,” Joanna conceded. “Every single one of Eleanor’s thou-shalt-nots, right down the line, turned into one of my must-dos.”

Butch reached over and wrapped an arm around Joanna’s shoulder, pulling her toward him. “There you are,” he said with a grin. “I rest my case. Now tell me all about our daughter finding a body. Cigarettes be damned, it sounds to me as though Jenny’s try­ing her damnedest to follow in her mother’s footsteps.”

Jennifer Ann Brady sat miserably on the leather couch of Mr. Foxworth’s surprisingly spacious motor home and waited to see what would happen. Jenny’s mother got angry sometimes, but when she did, her voice was really quiet—a whisper almost. When Mrs. Lambert was angry, she yelled, loud enough for everyone in camp to hear every word. She had yelled about what an incredibly irre­sponsible thing it had been for Jenny and Dora to run out like that. And how unacceptable it was for them to smoke cigarettes! Furthermore, Mrs. Lambert said, since Jenny and Dora had proved themselves to be untrustworthy, she was in the process of notifying their parents to come get them. They wouldn’t be allowed to stay in camp for the remainder of the weekend.

For Jenny, who wasn’t used to being in trouble, Mrs. Lambert’s red-faced tirade was uncharted territory. Because Jenny knew she deserved it, she had taken the dressing-down with her own flushed tic e bowed in aching embarrassment.

Dora, on the other hand, had casually shrugged of the whole thing. As soon as Mrs. Lambert finished yelling at them, grabbed her cell phone, and marched outside, Dora had stuck her tongue out at Mrs. Lambert’s retreating back as the door closed.

“What does she know?” Dora demanded. “The hell with her! I’m going to go take a shower.”

“A shower!” Jenny yelped. “You can’t do that. You heard what Mrs. Lambert said. No showers. There isn’t enough water. If you use too much, the other girls may run out of water before the weekend is over.”

“So what ?” Dora asked with a shrug. “What do I care? She’s going to send us home anyway.”

“But we’ll get in even more trouble.”

“So what?” Dora repeated with another shrug. “Who cares? At least I’ll be clean for a change.” With that, she flounced into the bathroom and locked the door behind her.

Jenny, alone in the living room, was left wondering. She had always thought Dora was dirty because she liked being dirty and that her body odor was a result of not knowing any better. Now, as Jenny listened to the shower running for what seemed like endless minutes, she wasn’t so sure.

There was a knock on the door. Jenny jumped. She started to get up to answer it, but then thought better of it. “Who is it?” she asked. Since the shower was still running, she prayed whoever was outside wouldn’t be Mrs. Lambert, and her wish was granted.

“It’s Frank Montoya, Jenny,” the chief deputy said. “I need to talk to you.”

Relieved to hear a familiar voice, Jenny raced to the door and flung it open. Then, embarrassed, she stepped away. “Hello,” she said in a subdued voice.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She nodded. “I guess so,” she said. “Did you call my mom?”

“Yes.

“Is she coming home?”

“Not tonight. She’ll he home tomorrow.”

Jennifer Brady heaved a sigh of relief. She wasn’t yet ready to face her mother.

“Your grandparents are coming to get you,” Frank Montoya continued.

Jenny’s stomach did a flip-flop. “Which ones?” she asked.

“Mr. and Mrs. Brady. They’ll be here soon.”

Jenny swallowed hard and offered Frank Montoya a tentative smile. Grandpa and Grandma Brady would be far easier to deal with than Grandma Lathrop Winfield would be. Her mother’s mother had a way of always making things seem far worse than they were, although, in this case, having things get worse hardly seemed possible.

“What about Dora’s mother?” Jenny asked. “Is she coining, too?”

“So far we haven’t been able to contact Mrs. Matthews,” Frank Montoya explained. “We may have to ask your grandparents to take Dora into town as well. If Mrs. Matthews still isn’t home by the time you arrive, maybe your grandparents can look after Dora until we’re able to notify her mother.”

“No,” Dora said, emerging barefoot from the bathroom. She was wearing the same dirty clothing she’d worn before, but her clean wet hair was wrapped in a towel. “I can go home even if my mom isn’t there. Just have them drop me off at our house. I’ll be tine.”

“I’m sorry, Dora. We can’t do that. Your mother expects you to be on the camp-out until Monday morning. She also expects you to be properly supervised. We can’t drop you off at home without an adult there to look after you. Mrs. Lambert would have a liability problem if we did that, and so would the sheriff’s department.”

“I don’t know why,” Dora said. “I stay alone by myself a lot. It’s no big deal.”

“You’re sure you don’t know where your mother is?”

Dora shrugged. “She has a boyfriend,” she said offhandedly. “They probably just went off someplace. You know, for sex and stuff. I’m sure that’s why she was so set on my going on the camp­out—so she could be rid of me for a while.”

Taken aback by Dora’s matter-of-fact manner, Frank looked at her and frowned. “Does your mother do that often, leave you alone?”

“I can take care of myself,” Dora retorted. “It’s not like I’m going to starve to death or anything. There’s plenty of food in the house. I can make sandwiches and stuff.”

Frank’s radio crackled, announcing Dr. Winfield’s arrival at the crime scene. “Before you head back to town, I need to ask you a few questions,” Deputy Montoya said. “You girls didn’t see anyone around when you found the body, did you?”

Both girls shook their heads in unison.

“Or see anything that seemed odd?”

“No,” Jenny answered.

“What about picking something up or moving it?”

“I know enough not to mess with evidence,” Jenny put in. “As soon as we saw the body, we came running straight back here and told Mrs. Lambert.”

“But the body’s a long way from camp, almost half a mile. What made you go so far?”

“As soon as we put out the cigarettes, I could smell it—the body, I mean. I told Dora something was dead, but she thought I was just making it up, so I had to show her. I thought we’d find a dead deer or a cow or a coyote, not a woman. Not a person. Do you know who she is?”

“Not yet,” Frank replied. “We’ll figure it out eventually.”

Before Frank had a chance to back out the motor home, there was another knock from outside. As soon as Frank opened the door, Eva Lou Brady darted inside. She wrapped both arms around Jenny and pulled her granddaughter into a smothering bear hug. “Are you all right?” she demanded.

Trapped between Eva Lou Brady’s ample breasts, all Jenny could do was nod.

Her grandmother loosened her grip on Jenny and turned to Dora. “And you must be Sally Pommer’s little girl. I knew your grandmother,” Eva Lou added kindly. “Dolly and I used to volun­teer together out at Meals on Wheels. I understand someone brought your backpacks and bedrolls up from your tent. Jim Bob’s loading them into the car right now. Are you ready to go?”

Dora unwrapped the towel and dropped it on the floor. “I am,” she said. Jenny was surprised to see that Dora’s usually dingy brown hair was shining in the glow cast by the motor home’s generator-powered fluorescent light fixture.

Eva Lou bent over, picked up the wet towel, and handed it back to Dora. “I’m sure you didn’t mean to leave this lying on the floor. As soon as you hang it up, we’ll be going.”

For a moment Jenny thought Dora was going to say something smart. Instead, without a word, she stomped back into the bathroom and jammed the wet towel onto a wooden towel bar. “If that’s okay, maybe we can go now.”

“Yes,” said Eva Lou, guiding Jenny and Dora past Frank Mon­toya, who still stood in the open doorway. “I’m sure that will he just tine.”

The girls and their gear were both in the back of the Bradys’ Honda when Frank Montoya handed his phone to Grandma Brady. With a sinking feeling, Jenny knew at once that the person on the phone had to be her mother. Sliding down in the car seat, Jenny closed her eyes and wished she were somewhere else. A minute or so later, Eva Lou tapped on the window and motioned for Jenny to get out of the car.

“It’s for you,” Grandma Brady said. “Your mother wants to speak to you.”

Reluctantly, Jenny scrambled out of the car and took the phone, but she walked around to the far side of the motor home before she answered it. There were flashlights flickering in the other tents. Jenny knew that in the stillness, all the other girls in the troop were watching the excitement and straining to hear every word.

“Hello, Mom,” Jenny said.

“Are you all right?” Joanna demanded.

Hot tears stung Jenny’s eyes. “I guess so,” she muttered.

If Joanna had been ready to light into Jenny about her misbe­havior, the faltering, uncertain sound of her daughter’s subdued voice was enough to change her mind and melt her heart. “What happened?” she asked.

Jenny’s tears boiled over. “I got into trouble, Mom,” she sobbed. “I didn’t mean to do it . . . trying the cigarette, I mean. It was like an accident, or something. Dora asked me and I said yes, even though I knew I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry, Mom. Really I am.”

“Of course you’re sorry, Jenny,” Joanna said. “Grandma and Grandpa are there now to take you home, right?”

“Yes,” Jenny murmured uncertainly with a stifled sob, her tears still very close to the surface.

“We’ll talk about this tomorrow,” Joanna said. “But in the meantime, I want you to know I love you.”

“‘Thank you.”

“Grandma told me that you reported finding the body even though you knew you’d probably get in trouble. That was brave of you, Jenny. Brave and responsible. I’m really proud of you for doing that.

“Thanks,” Jenny managed.

“You go with the Gs now. I’ll see you tomorrow when I get home. Okay?”

“‘kay, Morn.”

“Bye-bye.”

“Bye.”

“I love you.”

Jenny switched off the phone and then blundered back toward Grandma and Grandpa’s Honda. At the far end of the state, Sheriff Joanna Brady turned to her new husband.

“How’d I do?” she asked.

“Cool,” he said. “Understated elegance. Now come back to bed and let’s try to get some sleep. I have a feeling we’re going to need it.”

CHAPTER FOUR

It was only a little past seven when Joanna and Butch, packed and breakfasted, left the Marriott in Page for the five hour drive to Phoenix. After the flurry of late-night phone calls, Joanna had had difficulty in falling asleep. She had lain awake for a long time, wondering if the dead woman in Apache Pass might be connected to the epidemic of carjackings that had invaded Cochise County. True, the previous crimes hadn’t been that vicious. None of the other victims had been badly hurt, but that didn’t mean whoever was doing it hadn’t decided to do the crime of carjacking one better.

Leaving Page, Joanna was still thinking about the dead woman and whether or not finding the body would leave any lingering emotional scars on either Jenny or Dora. Lost in her deliberations Joanna hardly noticed the miles that passed in total silence.

Butch was the one who spoke first. “No matter how long I live in Arizona,” he said, “I’ll never get over how beautiful the desert is.”

For the first time, Joanna allowed herself to notice the scenery. On either side of the endless ribbon of two-lane blacktop, the sur­rounding desert seemed empty of human habitation—empty and forbidding. Early-morning sunlight and shadows slanted across the red and lavender rock formations, setting them in vivid relief against an azure sky. High off against a cloudless horizon, a solitary buzzard drifted effortlessly, floating in graceful, perfectly drawn cir­cles. Just inside a barbed-wire fence a herd of sheep, their wool stained pink by the dust raised by their dainty hooves, scrabbled for bits of life-giving sustenance. Joanna drove past a meager trading post and a line of run-down makeshift clapboard sales stands where Native American tradesmen were starting to lay out their jewelry, baskets, and rugs in hopes of selling them to passing tourists.

As a lifelong desert dweller, it was difficult for Joanna to see the stark landscape through the eyes of a Chicago area transplant. What Butch saw as wonderfully weird and exotic struck her as simply humdrum.

“I keep thinking Cochise County is sparsely populated,” Joanna said with a laugh. “I suppose that compared to this, it’s a metropolis.”

Butch reached over and took her hand. “Speaking of Cochise County,” he said, “have you made up your mind about whether or not you’re going to run again?”

Joanna heaved a sigh. With the wedding and everything else going on, Joanna had kept sidestepping the issue. But now, three years into her term of office, she was going to have to decide soon.

“I can’t quite see myself going back to selling insurance for Milo Davis,” she said with a rueful laugh.

“No,” Butch agreed. “I can’t see that either.”

“But I lived with my dad when he was running for office,” Joanna continued. “It was hell. When it was time for an election campaign, we hardly ever saw him—he was either at work or out politicking. What do you think?”

“I can’t imagine seeing you less than I do now,” Butch replied, “but I also know better than to get into this. It’s totally up to you, Joey. Since I’m currently a kept man, I don’t think I should actually have a vote. If I say, ‘Go for it!’ people might think I was just inter­ested in your paycheck. If I say, ‘Give it up,’ they’d say I was boss­ing you around and stifling you—not letting you live up to your full potential.”

“You’re not a kept man,” Joanna objected. “The income that comes in each month from the sale of the Roundhouse isn’t to be sneezed at. You’re serving as the general contractor on the con­struction of our new house and you just finished writing a book. You also cook and look after Jenny. How does that make you a kept man?”

“Maybe not in your eyes,” he said. “But I doubt the rest of the world gives me the same kind of break. Still, when it comes to running for office, I’m serious when I say I’m leaving that up to you. I’ll back you either way, but you’re going to have to decide for yourself. You like being sheriff, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Joanna admitted.

“And you’re doing a good job.”

“As far as I know, although the final decision on that score will have to be up to the voters.”

“Is there anything you’d want to do more than what you’re doing now?”

“Nothing that I can think of,” she answered.

“Well, then,” Butch said with a shrug, “as tar as I’m concerned, it really is up to you. Have you discussed it with Marianne?”

The Reverend Marianne Maculyea had been Joanna’s best friend since junior high. She was also pastor of the Tombstone Canyon United Methodist Church, where Joanna was a faithful member. Marianne and her stay-at-home husband, Jeff, were in much the same position Joanna and Butch were—with Marianne being the primary breadwinner while Jeff took care of their two small children and worked on the side refurbishing old cars. In the old days, Joanna had asked Marianne for advice on almost everything.

“With the new baby and going back to work, she hardly ever has time to talk anymore,” Joanna said.

“What about Jenny?” Butch asked. “Have you talked to her about it?”

Joanna shook her head. “Not really.”

“Maybe you should ask her opinion,” Butch persisted. “Your decision is going to have a lot bigger impact on her than it will on anyone else.”

“Even you?” she asked.

“I’m a big boy,” Butch said.

In the silence that followed, Joanna thought about what had been said. She couldn’t remember her father ever asking for her opinion about whether or not he should run for office. Fathers did what they did. Discussion from outsiders was neither solicited nor accepted. Joanna had always idolized her father and been slightly embarrassed that her mother had never “worked outside the home” or had what Joanna would have considered a “real” job. Instead of being grateful for having a stay-at-home mother, Joanna had chafed under Eleanor’s ever-vigilant attention.

“I’ll ask her,” Joanna agreed finally.

The miles flew by on the almost deserted roadway. As they neared Flagstaff, fiat desert gave way to mountains and forest. As soon as they were within range of a signal, Joanna’s cell phone began to squawk. Butch plucked it off the seat.

“Who is it?” she asked.

Butch examined the caller ID. “It says Winfield,” he answered, “so it’s either George or your mother.”

“I’m voting for George,” Joanna said, as she took the phone, but it wasn’t.

“Has your phone been turned off, or what?” Eleanor Lathrop Winfield demanded when she heard her daughter’s voice. “I’ve been trying to reach you for over an hour.”

“We’re between Page and Flagstaff, Mother,” Joanna replied. “The signal’s just now strong enough for the call to come through. What’s up?”

“What in the world were Jim Bob and Eva Lou thinking! For all they knew, Dora Matthews is a juvenile delinquent who could have stabbed them to death while they slept.”

“Dora spent the night?” Joanna asked.

“You mean you haven’t talked to them yet?”

“We’re driving, and we left the hotel bright and early. If anyone’s been trying to call me, they’ve had the same luck you have. The last I heard, Jim Bob and Eva Lou were taking Dora home because no one could locate her mother.”

“And they still haven’t!” Eleanor huffed. “The woman went oil without telling anyone where she was going or when she’d be back, so Jim Bob and Eva Lou kept Dora overnight, which I think was completely unnecessary—and at your house, too,” Eleanor pointed out. “That’s why this county has foster homes, you know—licensed foster homes—to care for just those kinds of children. And what kind of influence do you suppose that little hooligan is exerting on Jenny? Cigarettes! Why, of all things!”

“Mother,” Joanna managed, “Jenny and Dora found a body. Someone had been murdered. When you think of what might have happened to them, trying a cigarette loses some of its impact, don’t you think?”

“I don’t think anything of the kind,” Eleanor returned. “And I don’t care if Dora’s grandparents were pillars of the Presbyterian Church up in Old Bisbee. The daughter and granddaughter are totally out of control. A child like that shouldn’t be associating with our sweet little Jenny and leading her astray. You don’t put a good apple in with a bunch of bad ones in order to make the bad ones better, now do you? Life doesn’t work that way.”

As Eleanor continued to rail about the cigarettes, Joanna’s own temper began to rise. “Mother,” she said, trying to sound unflap­pable. “There’s no use trying to blame the whole thing on Dora Matthews. Jenny has some culpability in this situation, too. Dora didn’t exactly force Jenny to take that cigarette. Dora offered it, and Jenny took it of her own volition. She told me that herself.”

“But the point is, Dora should never have had cigarettes at a Girl Scout camp-out in the first place,” Eleanor continued. “That isn’t the way Girl Scouts worked when I used to be involved. What kind of a soft-headed leader is Faye Lambert anyway?”

“She happens to be the only person who stepped up and volun­teered for the job,” Joanna returned. “She’s the one person in town who was willing to say she’d take over the troop when it was about to be dissolved for lack of a leader, remember? She’s also someone who’s volunteering because she thinks Girl Scouting is important and not because she happens to have a girl of her own in the troop.”

“That’s my point exactly,” Eleanor said. “Faye Lambert doesn’t have a daughter. As a matter of fact, she doesn’t have any children at all. How much can she possibly know about girls Jenny’s age? What makes her think she’s qualified?”

74

I’/\It/U )I’.1 I ( As usual when dealing with I{Iearlor, Joanna Zell iici temper I is

ing. On occasions like this it seemed as though Eleanor never heard a word Joanna said.

“Mother,” Joanna countered, “if you’re talking about parenting skills here, let’s put the blame where it really belongs--on me. I’m where you should be pointing the finger. IfJenny and Dora are 0111 of line, haul me on the carpet, and Dora’s mother, too. But it’s not Faye Lambert’s fault that our children misbehaved any more than it’s yours or Eva Lou’s.”

“I should hope not!” Eleanor sniffed. “Faye Lambert isn’t the only one I’m ticked off at either,” she continued. “I’m disgusted with George, too. He knew all about this last night—knew that Jenny was in some kind of trouble. He should have told me about it at the time and had me go along out to pick those girls up instead of calling on Jim Bob and Eva Lou. I can tell you for sure, if I’d been the one in charge, a girl like Dora Matthews would never have spent the night at High Lonesome Ranch!”

Luckily for her you weren’t in charge, Joanna thought. “How did you find out about it then?” Joanna asked mildly.

“Jenny called a few minutes ago,” Eleanor said. “I’m sure Eva Lou made her call. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known a thing about it. All I can say is, I certainly hope you’re coming home today to get this mess straightened out.”

That, of course, had been Joanna’s intention—to drop Butch off in Peoria and head for Bisbee, but now, with her mother issuing orders, Joanna’s first instinct was to balk. “Now that the phone is working, I’ll be talking to the department and to both Jenny and Eva Lou before I make any decisions,” Joanna said.

Across the car, Butch Dixon smiled tolerantly to himself and shook his head. He was growing accustomed to the ongoing battles waged between his new wife and her overbearing mother.

“Aren’t you even concerned about this?” Eleanor continued. “It doesn’t sound like it. Here’s your own daughter spending time with the wrong kinds of friends and most likely headed for trou­ble, but you’re totally blasé. I don’t think you’re even worried about it.”

“Of course I’m worried,” Joanna began. “It’s just ...” Then, as though she’d been blindsided, Joanna had an inkling of what was going on with her daughter. When Jenny had agreed to sneak away after lights-out and when she’d tried that fateful cigarette, she had simply been trying to fit in—to be one of the regular kids. The same thing had happened to Joanna when she herself had been Jenny’s age and when Joanna’s own father, former copper miner and deputy sheriff, D. H. Lathrop, had been elected sheriff of Cochise County.

In the tight-knit and socially stratified community of Bisbee, where what your father did dictated your social milieu, Big Hank Lathrop’s change of job and elevation to the office of sheriff had dropped Joanna out of her old familiar social context and into another—one in which she hadn’t been especially welcome. Her former friends felt she was too stuck-up to play with them, while kids with white-collar parents didn’t think she was good enough to be included in their activities and cliques. Some of her discipline troubles at school—like the fierce fistfight that had cemented her lifelong friendship with Marianne Maculyea—grew out of Joanna’s efforts to fit in, of trying to find a place where she would be accepted.

Before Eleanor could say anything more, the phone beeped in her hand. “Look, Mom,” Joanna said, knowing Homicide Detec­tive Ernie Carpenter was on the line. “One of my detectives is try­ing to reach me. I have to hang up now.”

“Tell me one thing,” Eleanor demanded. “Are you coming home today or not?”

“I’ll have to call you back on that,” Joanna replied, ending the call. After dealing with Eleanor, getting on board a homicide investigation sounded like a relief.

“Good morning, Ernie,” Joanna said. “What’s up?”

“I’m working the Jane Doe from Apache Pass.”

“What about her?”

“Doc Winfield says it looks like she’s been dead for a day or two. He thinks what killed her is blunt-force trauma. He’ll know more about that when he does the autopsy this morning. But believe me, Sheriff Brady, there’s a lot more to it than just being whacked over the head. The woman was tortured before she died. It was ugly—really ugly.”

Joanna closed her eyes and wondered how much of that Jenny and Dora Matthews had seen and how much of it they would carry with them, waking and sleeping, for the rest of their lives.

Meanwhile, Ernie continued. “We’ve had a crime scene team out there since first light this morning, and that’s why I’m calling you. They may have found something important. It’s one of those medical ID warning bracelets that says no penicillin and no mor­phine. It gives a name and address in Phoenix. One of the links was broken, so there’s no way to tell for certain whether or not it belonged to our victim, but I think the odds are good that it did because it doesn’t look like it’s been out baking in the weather tin very long. Frank tells me you’re going to be in Phoenix today. I was wondering if you’d be interested in trying to track down this address and see if you can find someone named Constance Marie Haskell. Otherwise, either Jaime or I will have to do it.”

Joanna’s homicide detective division consisted of two officers—Ernie Carpenter and Detective Jaime Carbajal. It was silly for one or the other of them to make a seven-hour round-trip drive to and from Phoenix in order to do something Joanna could handle without having to go more than a few miles out of her way.

“Do you have an address and phone number?” she asked. Motioning to the notepad on her dashboard, Joanna pantomimed to Butch that she needed him to write something down. Ernie read off the name from the bracelet as well as the phone number and an address on Southeast Encanto Drive. Joanna repeated the information for Butch’s benefit so he could jot it down.

“Anything else I should know about this?” Joanna asked when they finished.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Ernie said. “Just what I said a minute ago. The bracelet could belong to our victim, but we don’t know that for sure.”

“In other words, you don’t want me bouncing up to the front door and saying, ‘Does Constance Marie Haskell live here and, if so, would you mind letting me talk to her because I need to find out whether she’s alive or dead’? I should be able to come up with something a little more appropriate than that.”

“But if you’d like me to ask someone from Phoenix PD to han­dle it . . .” Ernie began.

“No, no,” Joanna told him. “It’s no trouble. What’s Frank up to this morning? I haven’t heard from him yet.”

“I’m not surprised. He was out at the crime scene most of the night. He’s most likely home grabbing some shut-eye.”

“Probably a good idea,” Joanna said. “But I’m curious about something. Did you two discuss the possibility that this latest homicide might be related to our carjacker?”

Ernie Carpenter gave a hearty chuckle. “You sure you didn’t already talk about this with Chief Deputy Montoya or Doc Winfield?”

“No,” Joanna said. “I never discussed it with either one of them.”

“Well, then it’s a case of great minds thinking alike. The three of us were talking it over last night out at the scene. The problem is, there haven’t been any fatalities before this, but our guy could be turning up the heat. My understanding was that Frank was alerting all deputies and Border Patrol agents to be on the lookout lot another stolen car. But we have no idea what kind of car we’re looking for. That’s where checking out that address up in Phoenix comes into play.”

It made Joanna feel good to realize that the theory she had dreamed up on her own during a relatively sleepless night was the one her investigators had come up with as well.

“What’s the scoop on Dora Matthews? My mother just told me that she’s still out at the ranch.”

“You know who she is, don’t you?” Ernie asked.

“Eva Lou told me last night. Her mother used to be Sally Pommer. I know of her, but not all that much. She was a couple of years ahead of me in school. You still haven’t found her?”

“That’s right. We sent a deputy up to the house last night and again this morning, but there’s still no sign of her.”

“That’s not so surprising,” Joanna said. “If Sally Matthews thought Dora would be out camping the whole weekend, maybe she decided to do something on her own—go on a trip up to Tucson or Phoenix, for example. Single mothers are allowed a little time to themselves on occasion.”

“That may well be,” Ernie agreed, “but something Dora told Frank last night has been weighing on my mind. Let me ask you this. You and Butch don’t go off and leave Jenny by herself, do you?”

“No. Of course not. Why?”

“From the way Dora talked, she expected someone to just drop her off at home whether or not we could locate her mother. It sounds like she’s been left alone a lot. She claimed it was no big deal, and maybe it isn’t. All the same, Frank says we should keep trying until we reach Sally. In the meantime, as long as Jim Bob and Eva Lou don’t mind looking after Dora, we’re planning on leaving her there. Have you spoken to either one of them about it?”

“Not yet, but I will,” Joanna assured him. “Now, is there anything else?”

“Not that I can think of.”

“Good enough, Ernie,” she answered. “I’d say you guys have things pretty well under control. Keep me posted.”

After ending the call and putting the phone down, she glanced in Butch’s direction. He was studying her from across the Crown Victoria’s broad front seat. “I guess you’re working today,” he said glumly.

“It won’t take long,” she assured him. “Ernie thinks he’s got a line on identifying the homicide victim from Apache Pass. He wants me to try locating her next of kin. With that phone number and address, it shouldn’t take any time at all.”

“What about going to Bisbee?” he asked.

With a sigh, Joanna picked her phone back up and punched in the memory-dial number for High Lonesome Ranch. Jenny answered after only one ring. “Hello, Mom,” she said.

“How are things this morning?” Joanna asked, forcing herself to sound cheerful.

“Okay.”

“I hear you talked to Grandma Lathrop,” Joanna said.

“I didn’t want to, but Grandma Brady made me,” Jenny replied “She said Grandma Lathrop needed to hear it from me instead of from someone else.”

“That seems fair,” Joanna said without mentioning that she was relieved that she herself had been spared being the bearer of the bad news. “What did she say?”

“You know. That I was a disappointment to her. That people judge me by the kind of company I keep. All that stuff. Why does Grandma Lathrop have to be that way, Mom?” Jenny asked. “Why does she have to make me feel like I can’t do anything right?”

Good question, Joanna thought. She makes me feel the same way. She resisted the temptation to ask how Jenny really was. Jenny sounded fine. If she had achieved some kind of emotional even keel, Joanna was reluctant to make any mention of the body the girls had discovered in Apache Pass. Instead, she contented herself with asking about Dora.

“She’s fine, too,” Jenny said. “Grandma has her helping with the dishes right now. Do you want to talk to her?”

“No,” Joanna replied. “If you don’t mind, put Grandma on the phone.”

As Eva Lou came on the line, Joanna could almost sec her dry­ing her hands on her ever-present apron. “How are things?” Joanna asked.

“We’re all doing just fine,” Eva Lou reported briskly. “I told that nice Frank Montoya that Dora is welcome to stay as long as she needs to. I’m sure her mother will turn up later on today. When she does, we’ll take Dora home where she belongs. In the meantime, I have Dora and Jenny doing some little chores around here—vacuuming, dusting, and so forth. As a penance, if you will. Nothing like using a little elbow grease to help you contemplate your sins.”

“I was thinking about dropping Butch off in Phoenix and then coming home ...”

“Don’t you do anything of the kind,” Eva Lou said. “Isn’t Butch supposed to be in a wedding or something tonight?”

“Yes, tonight and tomorrow, but I thought—”

“Think nothing,” Eva Lou declared. “If you have to come home because of something related to work, that’s fine, but don’t do it because of the girls. Jim Bob and I are more than happy to look after them. It isn’t as though the two of us don’t have some experience in dealing with kids,” she added. “You maybe didn’t know Andy back when he was twelve and thirteen, but I can tell you he was a handful at that age—a handful, but still not smart enough to put much over on us, either. You just go to your wedding, have fun, and don’t worry.”

“All right,” Joanna said. “I’ll think about it.”

“Good. Do you want to talk to Jenny again?”

“No,” Joanna said. “That’s probably not necessary.”

She put down the phone and was amazed to realize they were almost in Flagstaff.

“Well?” Butch asked.

“Typical,” Joanna said. “My own mother gives me hell. Eva Lou tells me everything is fine and not to worry.”

“Should I call now and tell them that you’ll probably miss the rehearsal dinner?”

Bolstered by her back-to-back conversations with Ernie and High Lonesome Ranch, Joanna Brady shook her head. “You’ll do no such thing,” she said. “I’ve made up my mind. Things sound like they’re under control at home. There’s no need for me to go racing back there. I’ll do the next-of-kin interview and be back in plenty of time for the rehearsal dinner.”

“Good enough,” Butch replied, with a dubious shake of his head. “If you say so. Are you going to call Eleanor and let her know?”

Joanna shook her head. “I think I’ll let sleeping dogs lie,” she said.

They stopped for gas in Flagstaff. After leaving Flag, Butch leaned over against the passenger-side door and fell sound asleep. For a change, the cell phone remained blissfully silent, leaving Joanna some time alone to mull over her thoughts.

If Jenny was suffering any ill effects from her experience on Friday night, it certainly wasn’t apparent in anything she had said just then on the phone. So, even though Joanna was relieved on that score, she still wondered about how much having a mother who was a sheriff had contributed to Jenny’s walk on the wild side. That immediately brought Joanna back to the discussion she and Butch had been having about whether or not Joanna should run for reelection.

Three years earlier, when she had agreed to stand for election the first time, it had been in the stunned and awful aftermath of Andy’s death. A Cochise County deputy at the time as well as a candidate for sheriff in his own right, Andrew Roy Brady had been murdered by a drug dealer’s hit man. Refusing to accept the officially proffered theory that Andy had taken his on life, Joanna had forged ahead with an investigation of her own that had even­tually revealed a network of corruption in the previous sheriff’s administration.

Joanna’s key role in bringing that corruption to light had even­tually resulted in her being encouraged to run for office in Andy’s stead. When she won, Joanna had taken her election to mean that the voters of Cochise County had given her a mandate to go into the sheriff’s department and clean house. Which was exactly what she had done. But that departmental housecleaning had come at a sleep personal price, one that had been paid by Juanita and by Jenny and now, to a smaller extent, was being paid by Butch Dixon as well.

At the moment Butch was fine about it, but Joanna wondered how he would feel months from now if she was still doing the job of sheriff and running for reelection at the same time. Would their marriage withstand that kind of pressure? What if Butch decided he wanted a family of his own? He loved Jenny, and he was good with her, and he had said that as far as the two of them having chil­dren together went, he was content to abide by Joanna’s wishes. Maybe that was fine for the short term, but what if he changed his mind later on?

Joanna’s thoughts strayed once again back to what Jenny had said the previous night. She claimed she had taken the cigarette by accident, that she had done it without really intending to. Joanna was struck by the similarity between Jenny’s misadventure with Dora’s cigarette and the way in which Joanna herself had become sheriff. It had happened almost by accident. But now she was up against decision time—the same place Jenny would be if ever she was offered another cigarette. Joanna was at the point where, as Big Hank Lathrop would have said, it was time to fish or cut bait.

Which meant it was time to ask herself what she, Joanna Brady, really wanted. If she wasn’t sheriff, what would she do instead? She was an indifferent cook and had never been much of a house-keeper. In that regard, Butch made a far better stay-at-home spouse than she did. Did she want to go back to managing an insurance agency for Milo Davis? No. That no longer spoke to her, no longer challenged her the way it once had. Joanna had to admit that she liked being sheriff; liked working the good-guy side of the bad-guy street. She liked the challenge of managing people and she felt that she was doing a good job of it. But the election was a stumbling block. She might feel she was doing a good job, but What about the voters? Did they feel the sane way? And what if she stood lot reelection and lost? What then?

Eventually the Civvie—as she preferred to call the Crown Victoria—emerged from the cool pine forests and dropped off the Mogollon Rim into a parched desert landscape where the in dash digital display reported a temperature of 118 degrees.

There’s too much on my plate for me to even think about this right now, Joanna told herself. When the time’s right, I guess I’ll know.

CHAPTER FIVE

A little after two that afternoon, Joanna drove into the shaded porte cochere of the new Conquistador Hotel in downtown Peoria. A doorman in white shirt and tie approached the driver’s door and opened it, letting Joanna out of air-conditioned comfort into a stifling and breath-robbing heat even though overhead mist ejectors were futilely trying to provide evaporative cooling. Looking at the doorman, Joanna was grateful that he was the one wearing a tie while she was dressed in the rel­ative comfort of a T-shirt and shorts.

“Checking in today?” the doorman asked.

Joanna nodded. As she and Butch stepped out of the car, Butch looked around and whistled in amazement. It had taken less than a year for a fully landscaped, twelve-story resort hotel to sprout on the property that had once contained Butch’s Roundhouse Bar and Grill, along with any number of other small morn-and-pop-style businesses. The gentrification process had left behind no trace of the old working-class neighborhood’s funk or charm.

“There goes the neighborhood,” Butch said with a grin. “It’s so upscale now, I’m not sure they’ll let us in.”

“Will you need help with your luggage?” the doorman asked. Joanna nodded. “And we have valet parking,” he added. “Just leave your keys in the car.”

He handed Joanna a ticket. Once a bellman had loaded their luggage onto a cart, a valet attendant started to drive the Crown Victoria away. Joanna stopped him.

“I’ll just be a couple of minutes,” she said. “I have an errand to run. If you don’t mind leaving the car here ...”

“Sure,” he replied, stepping back out. “But we’ll have to keep the keys.”

Butch glanced at his watch. “It’s two now. The dinner starts at six. Why don’t you leave from here? I can handle getting us checked in. That way you’ll be finished that much sooner.”

Joanna looked down at the wrinkled shorts and T-shirt that had already done five hard hours in the car. “I have to change,” she told him. “I can’t very well do a next-of-kin notification dressed like this.”

Butch nodded. “You’re right about that,” he said. “But I’m betting you won’t make it back in time for dinner.”

“I will, too,” Joanna declared.

While Butch followed the luggage inside, Joanna used her cell phone to contact the department in Bisbee where, despite its being Saturday, Frank Montoya was nonetheless hard at work. “How are things?” she asked.

“Doc Winfield completed the Jane Doe autopsy. According to him, the woman was beaten to a pulp, tortured, raped, and had her head bashed in—not necessarily in that order.”

Joanna cringed at the litany of violence. “Sounds like the carjacker is out of the picture.”

“I’d have to agree there,” Frank said. “‘This perp is a whole other breed of cat. Or, if he is the carjacker, the rules of engagement just changed for the worse.”

“Even if the Apache Pass murder isn’t connected to the carjackings, both incidents have happened at almost the same time, and they pose a serious threat to public safety. Can we schedule extra patrols along I-10?” Joanna asked.

“I don’t know,” Frank said. “Our resources are already stretched pretty thin.”

“What about moving units away from the southern sector and putting them up north?”

“Considering the situation along the border, is that wise?” Frank asked.

Joanna knew what he meant. For months now, Cochise County’s eighty miles of international border had been deluged with an unprecedented flood of illegal immigrants. Increased INS enforcement in Texas and California had led to an influx of illegals throughout Joanna’s jurisdiction. Even with additional help from the U.S. Border Patrol and INS, things along the border were still out of control. All the extra enforcement made her county resem­ble an armed camp.

“What about the guys who were picked up driving the Saturn?”

“UDAs again. The guy driving it was an illegal with no license and no insurance. He may have known the vehicle was stolen, but I doubt it. Lots of fingerprints, but so far, Casey Ledford’s found nothing useful.”

“Tell you what, Frank,” she said. “Let’s beef up patrols in the northern sector of the county and along our portion of I-10. Since the feds have brought all those extra Border Patrol agents, we’ll let theist take up some of our slack for a change. God knows we’ve been doing plenty of their work.”

Moments later, Frank was giving Joanna computer-generated driving directions that would take her from the Conquistador Hotel in Peoria to Southeast Encanto Drive near downtown Phoenix. By the time she finished up with her phone call, Butch was coming back across the driveway carrying a pair of room keys, one of which he handed to her.

“We’re in room twelve fourteen,” he said. Looking at her closely, he frowned. “You’re upset. What’s wrong?”

“The autopsy’s in on the Apache Pass victim,” Joanna said. “It’s pretty bad.”

“Does that mean you want to head home and go to work on it?” Butch asked. “If that’s the case, I can rent a car to do what I need to do here.”

“No,” Joanna assured him. “As they told us in one of the ses­sions up in Page, we sheriffs need to learn to delegate. From what Frank and Ernie have both told me, I think they have things under control. Besides, I have a part of the job that needs doing right here in Phoenix, remember?”

Up in the room, Joanna changed into a skirt, blouse, and lightweight microfiber jacket. At home in Bisbee and in order to save wear and tear on her own newly recreated wardrobe, she had often taken to wearing a uniform to work. For the Sheriffs’ Associ­ation Conference, she had brought along mostly business attire, and for next-of-kin notifications, that was the kind of clothing she pre­ferred. Out of respect for the victim, she always felt she needed to show up for those heart-rending occasions wearing her Sunday best—along with her small-of-back holster.

“Be careful,” Butch told her, giving her a good-bye hug. “And, case you’re interested, I think changing clothes was the right thing to do.”

Even though the car had been parked in the shade, the Crown Victoria felt like an oven. The route Frank had outlined took her down the Black Canyon Freeway as far as the exit at Thomas. On Thomas she drove east past Encanto Municipal Golf Course to Seventh Avenue. There she turned south. Southeast Encanto Drive wasn’t a through street, but as soon as Joanna turned of Seventh onto Monte Vista, she knew she was in one of the old-money neighborhoods in Phoenix. The houses were set back from the street on generously sized lots. Around the homes were the kinds of manicured lawns and tall, stately trees that thrived in the desert only with careful attention from a professional gardener and plenty of irrigation-style watering.

The address turned out to be an ivy-covered two-story red brick house with peaked-roof architecture that revealed its pre World War II origins. Joanna pulled into the driveway and parked the Crown Victoria behind a bright-red Toyota 4-Runner. Turning off the ignition and dropping the car keys into the pocket of her blazer, Joanna felt the same kind of misgiving she always experienced when faced with having to deliver the kind of awful news no family ever wants to hear.

Just do it, Joanna, she told herself firmly. It’s your job.

Letting herself out of the car, she walked up the well-groomed sidewalk. Here in the center of Phoenix, surrounded by grass and shaded by trees, it didn’t seem nearly as hot as it had on the shiny new blacktop that graced the driveway at the Conquistador Hotel. Reaching for the doorbell, Joanna was startled to see that the door was slightly ajar. A steady stream of air-conditioned air spilled from inside out. She hesitated, with her finger reaching toward the bell. Then, changing her mind, she pushed the door open a few inches.

“Hello?” she called. “Anybody home?”

There was no answer, but deep within the house she heard the sound of murmuring voices. “Hello,” she called again. “May I come in?”

Again no one answered, but Joanna let herself in anyway. Inside, the house was cool. Drawn curtains made it almost gloomy. The furniture was old and threadbare, but comfortably so—as though whoever lived there preferred the familiarity of top-of-the-line pieces from a bygone era to newer and sleeker steel-and-glass replacements. The voices seemed to emanate from the back of the house. Following them, Joanna made her way through an elegantly furnished dining room. Only when she reached a swinging door that evidently opened into the kitchen did she finally realize that the voices came from a radio program. On the other side of the door a loud boisterous talk-show host was discussing whether or not it might be possible for this year’s Phoenix Cardinals to have a winning season.

Joanna eased open the swinging door. On the far side of the kitchen, a woman sat at a cloth-covered kitchen table, her head cra­dled in her arms. The woman was so still that for a moment Joanna thought she might be dead. On the table beside her, arranged in a careful row, were three separate items: a half-empty bottle of John­nie Walker Red Label, a completely empty tumbler-sized crystal glass, and a handgun—a small but potentially lethal Saturday-night special.

Holding her breath, Joanna waited until a slight movement told her the woman was alive. The droning voices of the talk-show host and his call-in guests had drowned out the sound of Joanna’s own entrance. Standing there, Joanna battled a storm of indecision. If she spoke again, this near at hand, what were the chances that the startled woman would react by reaching for her gun? Wakened out of a sound sleep and probably drunk besides, she might shoot first and ask questions later. It was then, with her heart in her throat, that Joanna Brady came face-to-face with the realization that she had come on this supposed mission of mercy without one of the Kevlar vests she insisted her officers wear whenever they were on duty.

Joanna hesitated, but not for long. Still using the noisy radio program for cover, she tiptoed across the room and retrieved the handgun. She slipped it into the pocket of her blazer along with her keys and phone. As she did so, the woman issued a small snort that sent Joanna skittering back across the room and safely out of reach. Only when she had regained the relative safety of the door way did she turn around. The woman had merely changed her position slightly, but she was still asleep. Joanna allowed herself a single gasp of relief. At least the still-sleeping woman was no longer armed.

Once Joanna had regained control of her jangled nerves, she tried speaking again. “Hello,” she said, in a more conversational voice. “Are you all right?”

This time the woman stirred. She sat up and stared uncomprehendingly around the room. Once her bleary eyes settled on Joanna, the woman groped for her missing gun. The fact that it was no longer there made tingles of needles and pins explode in Joanna’s hands.

“Who are you?” the woman demanded. “What are you doing here? Who let you in?”

“I’m Sheriff Joanna Brady from Cochise County. Who are you?”

“Maggie,” the woman said flatly. “Maggie MacFerson.”

“Do you live here?” Joanna asked.

Maggie MacFerson glared belligerently at Joanna from across the room, but before she answered, she reached for the bottle and poured a slug of Scotch into the glass. “Used to,” Maggie said after downing a mouthful of it. “Live here, that is. Don’t anymore.”

“Who does?”

“My sister and that worthless shit of a husband of hers. He’s the one I’m waiting for—that no-account bastard. One way or another he’s going to tell me what he’s done with Connie’s money.”

“Connie?” Joanna asked. “That would be Constance Marie Haskell?”

Maggie nodded. “She never should have changed her name. I told her not to. You’d think she’d be able to learn from somebody else’s mistake. I did,” she added bitterly. “Took old Gary MacFer­son’s last name, that is. Look what it got me.”

“Where’s your sister now?” Joanna asked.

“Beats me. Probably dead in a ditch somewhere if the message on the machine is any indication. ‘Meet me in paradise,’ the son of a bitch says to her on the phone. Meet me in paradise, indeed! I’m here to tell you that if that SOB has killed my sister, I’m going to plug him full of holes. Where’s my gun, by the way? Give it back. I’ve got a license to carry, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s right over there on the counter in my purse. Check it out for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

“You’re saying you think your sister’s dead?” Joanna asked. “Why’s that?”

“The neighbors called me because Connie took off sometime on Thursday. They noticed she left the garage door open. When it was still open . . . What day is it?”

“Saturday,” Joanna answered.

“When it was still open on Friday, they were worried enough to call, and I came to check things out after work. That’s when I heard the message on the machine. You can listen to it too, it you want to.”

An answering machine sat on the kitchen counter next to a large black satchel-style purse. Joanna pressed the message button. “You have no new messages,” a recorded voice told her.

“Damn,” Maggie MacFerson muttered, taking another swig from her glass. “Must have punched ‘erase’ without meaning to. But that’s what he said. ‘Meet me in paradise.’ The dumb broad was so completely enthralled, so totally besotted with the weasely little shit that if he had said ‘Jump in the lake,’ Connie would have done it in a minute even though she can’t swim a stroke. There’s no fool like an old fool.”

“You said something about her money. What about that?”

“There was another message on the machine as well—from Ken Wilson. He’s Connie’s personal banker, but he’s also mine. He was our parents’ private banker before that. I heard that message, too. He said Connie had bounced a check. Which wouldn’t hap­pen—never in a million years. Connie never bounced a check in her life—unlike some other people I could mention.”

Maggie grinned ironically and took another mouthful of Johnnie Walker. “I, on the other hand, have never balanced a checkbook in my life, and I’m still here to tell the tale. But I did call Ken Wilson. I nailed his feet to the ground and made him tell me what the hell was going on. That bastard Ron Haskell has cleaned Connie out, lock, stock, and barrel, just like I said he would. Except it doesn’t feel all that good to say I told you so. It’s gonna break Connie’s heart, as if she hasn’t had enough heartbreak already.”

Standing at the counter, Joanna glanced into the purse. A small wallet lay at the top. “Your license to carry is in this?” she asked, lilting the wallet.

Maggie MacFerson glanced away trout pouring herself another drink. “It’s there,” she said. “Help yourself.”

Joanna opened the wallet and thumbed through the plastic card holders. One of the first things she saw was a press credential that identified Maggie MacFerson as a reporter for Phoenix’s major metropolitan newspaper, the Arizona Reporter. As soon as the woman had mentioned her name, it had sounded familiar. Only now did Joanna understand why.

That Maggie MacFerson, Joanna thought. The investigative reporter.

Behind the press credentials was indeed an embossed concealed-weapon license. Joanna put down the wallet and then reached into her pocket to remove the weapon. “Is this thing loaded?” she asked.

“Sure is,” Maggie replied. “My father used to say that having an unloaded weapon in the house was about as useful as having one of those plumber’s whaddaya-call-its without a handle. I can’t think of the name for the damned thing now. You know what I mean, one of those plunger things.”

“You mean a plumber’s helper?” Joanna offered.

“Right,” Maggie agreed. “A plumber’s helper without a han­dle. Dad wasn’t big on telling jokes. That’s about as good as his ever got. And that’s gone, too, by the way.”

“What’s gone?”

“Dad’s gun. From the bedroom. The safe is open and the gun is gone. I’ll bet the jerk took that, too.”

Gingerly Joanna opened Maggie MacFerson’s gun and removed the rounds from the cylinder. If Maggie wasn’t still drunk, then she was well on her way to being drunk again. Joanna had already heard the woman threaten to shoot her hapless brother-in-law. Under those circumstances, handing Maggie a loaded weapon would be outright madness. Joanna dropped the nine bullets into her blazer pocket before placing the gun in Maggie’s purse.

“So what are you doing here anyway?” Maggie asked, peering at Joanna over the rim of her raised glass. “What’d you say your name was again?”

“Joanna. Joanna Brady. I’m the sheriff in Cochise County.”

“Tha’s right; tha’s right,” Maggie said, nodding. “I ‘member you. I came down to cover the story when you got elected. So whaddaya want?” With every word spoken, Maggie’s slurred speech grew worse.

“I’m here because a body was found last night in Apache Pass down in the Chiricahuas,” Joanna said quietly. “A medical identi­fication bracelet was found nearby with your sister’s name on it. We need someone to come to Bisbee and identify the body.”

Maggie slammed her empty glass onto the table with so much force that it shattered, sending shards of glass showering in all directions.

“Goddamn that son of a bitch!” she swore. “I really am going to kill him. Just let me get my hands on him. Where is he?”

She sat there with her eyes wide and staring and with the palms of both hands resting in a spray of broken glass. From across the room, Joanna saw blood from Maggie MacFerson’s lacerated hands spreading across the otherwise snow-white tablecloth. Maggie didn’t seem to notice.

“Come on,” Joanna said calmly. “Come away from the broken glass. You’ve cut your hands.”

“Where’s the body?” Maggie demanded, not moving. “Just tell me where Connie’s body is. I’ll go right now. I’ll drive wherever it is. Just tell me.”

Watching the blood soak unheeded into the tablecloth, Joanna knew Maggie MacFerson was in no condition to drive herself anywhere. Walking over to the table, Joanna gently raised Maggie’s bleeding hands out of the glass.

“I’ll take you there,” she said quietly. “Just as soon as we finish cleaning and bandaging your hands.”

Several hours later, after opening the car door and fastening Connie MacFerson’s seat belt, Joanna finally headed out of Phoenix for the three-and-a-half-hour drive to Bisbee while Mag­gie slept in the Civvie’s spacious front seat. Once out of heavy city traffic, Joanna reached for her phone and asked information for the Conquistador Hotel. Rather than speaking to Butch, she found herself dealing with an impersonal voice-mail system.

“There’s been a slight delay,” she told him in her message. “I’m on my way to Bisbee to do a positive ID. I’m just now passing the Warner Road Exit going southbound, which means you’re right. I am going to miss that rehearsal dinner. I’m so sorry, Butch. I’ll call later and let you know what time I’ll be back at the hotel. Give me a call on the cell phone when you can.”

What she didn’t say in her message was that she had spent the better part of two hours in the ER at St. Joseph’s Hospital while emergency room doctors and nurses removed dozens of tiny pieces of crystal from Maggie MacFerson’s glass-shredded hands and put stitches in some of the longer jagged cuts. Both hands, bandaged into useless clubs, now lay in Maggie’s lap. Even had the woman been stone-sober—which she wasn’t—Joanna knew Maggie wasn’t capable of driving herself the two hundred miles to Bisbee to make the identification—not with her hands in that condition.

Joanna settled in for the trip. She generally welcomed long stretches of desert driving because they provided her rare opportu­nities for concentrated, uninterrupted thinking. With Maggie MacFerson temporarily silenced, Joanna allowed herself to do lust exactly that think.

Weeks earlier, as Joanna sat in her mother’s living room, she had thumbed through George Winfield’s current copy of Scientific American. There she had stumbled upon a column called “Connections.” The interesting content had tumbled back and forth across the centuries showing how one scientific discovery was linked to another and from there bounded on to something else. At the time, Joanna had recognized that the solutions to homicide investigations often happened in much the same way, through seemingly meaningless but nonetheless critical connections.

Was the death of Constance Marie Haskell linked to the outbreak of carjackings that had plagued Cochise County? If Maggie MacFerson’s version of events was to be believed, Connie Haskell had an absent, most likely estranged, and quite possibly dishonest, husband. Once Ron Haskell was located, he would no doubt be the first person Joanna’s detectives would want to interview. Still, rape, torture, and a savage beating were more in keeping with a random, opportunistic killer than they were with a cheating spouse. And so, although Ron Haskell might well turn into the prime suspect, Joanna wasn’t ready to dismiss the idea of a crazed carjacker who, upon finding a lone woman driving on a freeway late at night, might have veered away from simple carjacking into something far worse.

Picking up her cell phone, Joanna dialed Frank Montoya’s num her. “What are you doing calling me?” he asked. “You’re supposed to be at a wedding rehearsal and dinner.”

“Think again,” she told him. “I’m on my way to Bisbee bring­ing with me a lady named Maggie MacFerson. We have reason to believe she’s the sister of Constance Marie Haskell, the Jane Doe from Apache Pass. I’m bringing her down to George’s office so she can ID the body.”

“On your weekend off?” Frank objected. “What’s the matter? Doesn’t Maggie know how to drive?”

“Knows how but can’t,” Joanna replied. “She hurt her hands.”

She discreetly left out the part about probable blood alcohol count in case Maggie MacFerson wasn’t sleeping as soundly as she appeared to be.

“How about calling Doc Winfield and having him meet us at his office uptown,” Joanna continued. “It should be between eight-thirty and nine, barring some unforeseen traffic problem.”

“Wait a minute,” Frank said. “I’m the one who’s supposed to tell your mother her husband has to go in to work on Saturday night? Is that so you don’t have to do it?”

“That’s right,” Joanna returned evenly. “You’re not Eleanor Lathrop Winfield’s daughter. She can’t push your buttons the way she does mine.”

“Okay, Boss,” Frank said. “But I’m putting in for hazardous-duty pay.”

Joanna smiled sadly. It hurt to know that Eleanor Lathrop Winfield’s reputation for riding roughshod over everybody was com­mon knowledge around the department.

“What else?” Frank asked.

“According to Maggie MacFerson, Connie’s husband, Ron Haskell, emptied his wife’s bank accounts before he took off for parts unknown. He left a message on his wife’s answering machine Thursday sometime. Ms. MacFerson inadvertently erased it, so I don’t know exactly what it said. Something about seeing Connie in paradise, which Ms. MacFerson seems to have concluded was a death threat.”

“You want me to trace the call?”

“You read my mind.”

“Okay. Got it.”

Frank, an inveterate note-taker, may have balked at having to deal with Eleanor Lathrop Winfield, but he had no concern about tackling telephone-company bureaucracy. As far as Joanna was concerned, that left Eleanor in a league of her own.

“Next?” Frank prodded through the momentary silence.

“Did you get a list from the DMV on vehicles registered to that Encanto Drive address?”

“Yes, ma’am. I have it here somewhere. A Lincoln and a BMW, if I remember correctly.”

Joanna listened as he shuffled through loose papers. “Once you find them,” she said, “I want those vehicle descriptions posted with all of our patrol units and with the folks from Border Patrol as well.”

“So you’re still thinking this might be just another carjacking?” Frank asked.

“Until we know otherwise, I’m not dismissing any possibilities,” she replied. “A single woman traveling alone at night might be eas­ier pickings for a carjacker than that little old guy in his Saturn.”

“We don’t know for sure Connie Haskell was coming to Cochise County,” Frank objected.

“We sure as hell know that’s where she ended up!” Joanna responded. “And since she didn’t fly from Phoenix to Apache Pass, that means she must have driven.”

“I see your point,” Frank conceded. “I have that DMV info. It was buried on my desk. I’ll have Dispatch put it out to the cars right away.”

“Good, but before you do, let’s go back to that carjacked Saturn,” Joanna added. “You said it was picked up at a Border Patrol checkpoint. How many other stolen or carjacked vehicles have ended up in Border Patrol impound lots? Has anybody ever men­tioned that particular statistic to you?”

“Not that I remember,” Frank said. “But I can try to find out.”

“Okay. Now, what’s happening on the Dora Matthews front?”

“Not much,” Frank said. “As far as I know, she’s still out at the High Lonesome, and there hasn’t been a peep out of Sally. The last time I checked, the note we left for her was still pinned to the screen door on her house up Tombstone Canyon.”

Joanna groaned inwardly. “When I asked The Gs to look after the place while Butch and I were gone, they were supposed to look after the animals. Now they’re having to deal with two adolescent kids as well.”

“I’m sure they can handle it,” Frank returned.

“I’m sure they can, too,” Joanna said. “But they shouldn’t have to.”

“Where are you now?” Frank asked.

“I just passed the first Casa Grande turnoff, so I’m making progress,” Joanna said.

“I should probably get on the horn to Doc Winfield and let him know you’re on your way. Do you want me to meet you at the ME’s office?”

“No,” Joanna said. “Don’t bother. It’s Saturday night. You’re a good-looking single guy, Frank. Don’t you have anything better to do on a Saturday night besides work?”

“Not so as you’d notice,” Frank told her.

They signed off after that, and Joanna continued to drive. Still accustomed to the time the trip had taken under the old fifty-five­ miles-per-hour speed limit, Joanna was amazed at how fast the miles sped by. At last Maggie MacFerson groaned and stirred.

“Where am I?” she demanded. Using one other clubbed lists, she brushed her lank brown hair out of her face. “What happened to my hands, and who the hell are you?”

Joanna looked at her passenger in surprise. “I’m Joanna Brady,” she said. “I’m the sheriff in Cochise County. Don’t you remember my coming to the house?”

“I’ve never seen you before in my life,” Maggie answered. “And if you’re a cop, am I under arrest, or what? I demand to talk to my lawyer.” She squinted at an approaching overhead freeway sign. “Cortaro Road!” she exclaimed. “That’s in Tucson, tier God’s sake. Where the hell are you taking me? Let me out of this car!”

She reached for the door handle. With the car speeding down the road at seventy-five, it was fortunate that the door was locked. As Maggie struggled to unlock it with her clumsy, bandaged hands, Joanna switched on her emergency lights, pulled over to the shoul­der, and slowed to a stop.

“Ms. MacFerson, please,” she said reassuringly. “You’re not under arrest. Don’t you remember anything?”

“I remember going to Connie’s house and waiting for that son of a bitch of a brother-in-law of mine. I listened to the messages, talked to Ken Wilson, and after that . . . nothing.” She stopped struggling with the door and turned to look at Joanna. “Wait a minute. Is this about Connie?”

Joanna’s mind reeled. She had gone through Constance Haskell’s next-of-kin notification once, but it evidently hadn’t taken. Maggie MacFerson remembered none of it. Joanna had heard of alcoholic blackouts, but this was the first time she had ever dealt with someone who had been functioning in one. Maggie MacFerson may have been able to walk and talk. She had seemed aware of what was going on around her, kit apparently her brain had been switched off. For all she remembered, Maggie might as well have been asleep.

Joanna took a deep breath. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you,” she said. “A woman’s body was found in Apache Pass last night. This morning my officers found a broken medical identifica­tion bracelet nearby, a bracelet with your sister’s name and address on it. I came by your sister’s house this afternoon and found you there. I told you what had happened, and you agreed to come with me to identify your sister’s body. That’s what we’re doing now. We’re on our way to Bisbee.”

Maggie turned and stared at Joanna, who waited for an outburst that never came.

“Then what are we doing sitting here talking about it?” Maggie demanded at last. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

Joanna nodded. Checking in the mirror for a break in traffic, she eased the idling Crown Victoria back onto the roadway. Once they reached highway speed, she switched off the flashing lights.

“You still haven’t told me what happened to my hands,” Maggie said. “Did I get in a fight and punch somebody’s lights out?”

“You broke a glass,” Joanna told her. “A crystal glass. The ER folks at Saint Joe’s took out as much glass as they could find and stitched up the worst of the cuts. You’re supposed to go see your own doctor next week to have the bandages and stitches removed. The doctor also said there’s a good chance he may have missed some of the glass. The pieces were small and difficult to see.” Joanna paused. “How are you feeling?” she added.

“Hungover as hell,” Maggie admitted. “But I’ve had worse. I’m thirsty. My mouth tastes like the bottom of a birdcage. Can’t we stop and get something to drink?”

“As in a soda?” Joanna asked. “Or as in something stronger?”

“A Coke will be tine,” Maggie MacFerson said. “Hell, I’d even drink straight water if I had to.” And then, after all that, she started to cry.

CHAPTER SIX

After stopping at a Burger King long enough to get a pair of Cokes, Joanna once again headed down the freeway. then Maggie MacFerson had stopped weeping. She sat up straight and wiped her nose on the back of one of her bandaged hands and sipped her soda through a straw.

“I’m sure you told me all of this before,” she said, stifling a hiccup, “but I don’t remember any of it. Tell me again, please. From the beginning.”

Joanna did. When she finished, Maggie continued to stare out through the windshield in utter silence. “You said earlier you thought your brother-in-law was responsible,” Joanna added at last. “Any particular reason?”

“Connie met Ron Haskell during our mother’s final illness,” Maggie answered quietly. “He was a CPA working for the accounting firm that handled our parents’ affairs, Peabody and Peabody. Connie had Mother’s power of attorney so she could handle finances, pay bills and all that. Ron Haskell knew everything about Mother’s affairs, right down to the last penny. I think he saw that my sister was a vulnerable old maid who would even­tually be well-to-do. He set out on a single-minded quest to grab Connie’s half of our mother’s estate. I don’t know what the hell Ron did with the money, but according to Ken Wilson, it’s gone. Ron closed all the accounts and then disappeared. If Connie’s dead, it’s probably a good thing. Finding out that Ron had stolen the money would have killed her. For her, being dead is probably preferable to being betrayed, cast off, and dirt-poor besides, or, even worse, having to come crawling to me for help.”

“At the house, you said something about a message from your sister’s husband, one that was on the machine. Something about him wanting to meet your sister in paradise.”

Maggie nodded. “Right,” she said. “Something like that. I was off work. I’m afraid I’d already had a couple of drinks before I got there. Ron said, ‘Meet me in paradise. Join me in paradise.’ Something like that. I don’t remember exactly, but it sounded to me like he meant for her to be dead. Maybe he was planning one of those homicide/suicide stunts. Connie was so stuck on the guy that she would have done whatever he asked, even if it killed her.”

After that, it was painfully quiet in the car. The sun had set com­pletely. Once they exited the freeway at Benson, traffic grew sparse. “I wish I still smoked,” Maggie said. “I could sure use a cigarette about now, and something a whole lot stronger than soda.”

“Sorry about that,” Joanna said. “Cop cars aren’t meant to be cocktail lounges.”

“I suppose not,” Maggie said.

When they came through the tunnel at the top of the Divide, Joanna was surprised to see the flashing glow of emergency lights just to the right of the highway. They danced and flickered off the steep mountainsides, making the whole canyon look as it had had caught fire. From the number of lights visible, there were clearly lots of emergency vehicles at the scene. Something big had happened at the top end of Old Bisbee. Joanna reached over and switched on her radio.

“Hey, Tica,” she said, when Tica Romero, the night shift dispatcher, came on the air. “Any idea what’s happening at the upper end of Tombstone Canyon?”

“That would be the Department of Public Safety’s Haz-Mat team,” Tica advised her. “Bisbee PD called DPS in to clean up a meth lab they found in a house just above the highway. Since it’s inside the city limits and not our jurisdiction, I didn’t bother with all the details. Want me to find out for you?”

“No, never mind,” Joanna told her. “I have a possible relative of the presumed Apache Pass victim with me. We’re meeting with Doc Winfield for an ID. When we finish with that, I’ll most likely go back to Phoenix.”

“So Chief Deputy Montoya is still in charge?” Tica asked.

“That’s right. Ever since Dick Voland left, Frank’s been itching to run an investigation. Looks to me like he’s doing a good job of it.”

Minutes later, Joanna wheeled the Civvie in under the portico of the office of the Cochise County Medical Examiner. The building, a former grocery store turned mortuary turned morgue, still bore a strong resemblance to its short-lived and unsuccessful mortuary incarnation, a connection Maggie recognized at once.

“They’ve already sent Connie to a funeral home?” she asked. “You told me we were going to the morgue.”

“This is the morgue. It used to be a funeral home,” Joanna explained, pulling in and parking under the covered driveway. “A company called Dearest Departures went out of business several years ago. Some bright-eyed county bureaucrat, intent on saving the local taxpayers a bundle of money, bought the building out of bankruptcy and remodeled it into a new facility for our incoming medical examiner. His name is George Winfield, by the way,” she added. “Dr. George Winfield.”

Joanna got out of the car. Then, remembering Maggie’s ban­daged hands wouldn’t allow her to operate the door handle, Joanna hurried around the Crown Victoria to let her passenger out. Once on her feet, Maggie leaned briefly against the side of the car, as if she wasn’t quite capable of standing on her own. Concerned, Joanna reached out and offered to take Maggie’s arm. “Are you all right, Ms. MacFerson?” she asked.

Maggie bit her lip. “Maybe it won’t be her after all,” she said, as tears welled in her eyes. “Connie’s only forty-three, for God’s sake. She turned forty-three in March. That’s too young.”

“You’re right,” Joanna said gently. “It’s far too young. Will you be all right with this?”

As she watched, Maggie MacFerson nodded, straightened her shoulders, and drew away from both the car and Joanna’s proffered assistance. “I’m a reporter,” she said determinedly. “This isn’t the first dead body I’ve ever seen, and it won’t be the last.”

Joanna led the way to the door. Because George Winfield’s Dodge Caravan was parked in its designated spot, she knew her stepfather was already there. She also knew that after hours, when George worked alone, he usually kept the outside door locked, buzzing visitors in only after they rang the bell and identified themselves over an intercom.

Joanna did so. George Winfield came to the door looking capa­ble and handsome in his white lab coat. “Good evening, Sheriff Brady,” he said.

By mutual agreement, when meeting in a work setting, Joanna and her stepfather addressed each other by their formal titles. Maintaining a strictly business approach made it simpler for all concerned.

Joanna nodded in return. “This is Maggie MacFerson,” she said. “And this is Cochise County’s medical examiner, Dr. George Winfield.”

George held out his hand in a solicitous, gentlemanly fashion, then, noticing the bandages on Maggie’s hands, he withdrew it at once. “Connie is ... was my sister.” She faltered.

“I’m so sorry—” George began, but Maggie pulled herself together and cut him off in mid-sentence.

“Don’t,” she said, holding up one hand in protest. “Let’s get this over with.”

“Of course,” he said. “This way, please.”

He led the two women into a side room that must have once served as a small chapel. George had had a window installed along one wall. Opening a curtain on that allowed grieving family members to view their loved ones without having to venture into the brightly lit, sterile chill of the morgue itself. Joanna and Maggie MacFerson waited for several minutes in a silence softened only by the muted whisper of an air-conditioning fan.

Eventually George pulled the curtain open, revealing the loaded gurney that he had rolled up beside the window. Winfield reap geared on the other side of the window after he had pulled aside the curtain. Maggie stood up and leaned against the double-paned window. Slowly George Winfield drew back a corner of-the sheet, revealing a stark-white face.

Standing next to Maggie, Joanna felt the woman’s body sullen and heard her sharp intake of breath. “It’s her,” she whispered. “It’s Connie.”

With that, Maggie turned and fled the room. Joanna stayed long enough to nod in George’s direction, then she followed Maggie out into the reception area, where she had dropped into a chair.

“Are you all right?” Joanna asked.

“What on earth did he do to her? Dying’s too good for the son of a bitch!” Maggie growled. “Now take me someplace where I can have a drink.”

Joanna understood at once that this time a Burger King soda would hardly suffice. “Really, Ms. MacFerson,” Joanna began. “Don’t you think—”

“I think I need a drink,” Maggie interrupted. “If you won’t take me to get one, then I’ll find one myself.” With that, she got up and marched out the door. George Winfield entered the reception room just in time to hear the last of that exchange.

“What was that all about?” he asked.

“Maggie wants a drink,” Joanna explained. “Which, if you ask me, is the last thing she needs about now. She was so drunk earlier this afternoon that she didn’t remember my telling her that her sis­ter was dead, and she didn’t remember cutting her hands with pieces from a broken glass, either.”

“She was functioning in a blackout?” George asked.

“Must have been,” Joanna replied. “That’s the only thing I can figure.”

“How long has it been since she’s had a drink?”

“A couple of hours,” Joanna replied with a shrug. “Several, actually.”

“If I were you, then,” George said, “I’d get her the drink she wants right away. If she’s enough of a problem drinker that she’s suffering blackouts, I’d advise not cutting off her supply of alcohol. She could go into DTs and die on you.”

Joanna was stunned. “Are you serious?”

“Absolutely. Her body is most likely accustomed to functioning with a certain level of booze in it. If you take the alcohol away suddenly, without her being under a doctor’s care, you risk triggering a case of DTs that could possibly kill her.”

“In that case,” Joanna said, “I’d best go buy the lady a drink. I’ll have Maggie call you later to give you all the relevant information, date of birth and all that. Before I go, I have to ask. Frank gave me the high points on your autopsy results—that Connie Haskell was beaten, raped, and tortured. Anything else?”

George Winfield shook his head. “Isn’t that enough? Whoever did this is a real psycho.”

“DNA evidence?” Joanna asked.

“Plenty of that. Either the guy didn’t think he’d get caught or else he didn’t care. Whichever the case, he sure as hell didn’t use a condom. And you’d better catch up with him soon,” George added. “If you don’t, I’m guessing he’ll do it again.”

On that grim note, Joanna started to leave. Before she made it to the door, George stopped her. “There’s something else I need to tell you,” he said. “Not about this,” he added hurriedly. “It’s another matter entirely.”

“Something about Mother?” Joanna asked.

“Well, yes,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “In a manner of speaking.”

“Look, George,” Joanna said. “I’m in a bit of a hurry here. Could you stop beating around the bush and tell toe what’s going on?”

“Eleanor called CPS early this afternoon.”

“She did what?”

“Ellie called Child Protective Services. She was concerned about Dora being out at the ranch, so she called CPS. An investigator went to Sally Matthews’s house up in Tombstone Canyon. No one was home, but she went nosing around in the backyard, where she saw enough telltale debris to make her suspicious. She tracked down a judge. This evening she cane back with a search warrant and reinforcements.” George paused.

In her mind’s eye, Joanna once again saw the pulsing emergency lights flashing off the sides of the canyon as she drove through the Bisbee end of the Mule Mountain Tunnel. “Don’t tell me Sally Matthews is dead, too,” Joanna breathed.

“No, I don’t suppose so,” George said. “Nothing like that. At least not as far as we know.”

Joanna wanted to shake the man to stop his hemming and haw­ing. “What do we know?” she demanded.

“It looks like Sally Matthews has been running a meth lab in her house, the old Pommer place up Tombstone Canyon. The Department of Public Safety Haz-Mat guys are up there right now, trying to clean it up.”

“What about Dora?” Joanna asked.

“That’s the part I didn’t want to tell you.” George Winfield shook his head sadly. “Jim Bob called me a few minutes ago. That same CPS caseworker just showed up out at the ranch and demanded that Jim Bob and Eva Lou hand Dora over to her. Which Jim Bob and Eva Lou did, of course—hand her over, that is. The caseworker told them they didn’t have a choice in the matter. Dora’s headed for a foster home out in Sierra Vista. I guess both Dora and Jenny were pretty upset.”

“I should think so,” Joanna said. “Wouldn’t you be?”

“Yes,” George Winfield admitted. “I’m afraid I would.”

Joanna turned on her heel and started away. Then she stopped and turned back. “There are times when that wife of yours is a meddlesome—” She bit off the rest of the sentence.

George Winfield sighed. “I know,” he said. “Believe me, I know.”

Coming out of George Winfield’s office, Joanna sat in her Civvie for a moment, calming herself and catching her breath. The anger she felt toward her interfering mother left her drained and shaken. She wanted to grab her telephone, call Eleanor up, and rail at her for not minding her own business, but yelling at her mother wouldn’t change a thing. Farther up the canyon, emergency lights still flashed and pulsed off the steep hillsides. Somehow, seeing those lights and knowing that the Haz-Mat team was still at work and probably would be for hours propelled her out of her anger-induced paralysis. It was time to focus on a course of action.

There was no question about what had to be done. Not only had Jenny found a body, she had also been traumatized by seeing one of her friends—someone who had done no wrong—taken into what must have seemed like police custody. Joanna had to go to Jenny, the sooner the better. If the choice was between comforting her daughter and attending a wedding with Butch, there was no contest.

But what about Maggie MacFerson? Joanna was the person who had brought Maggie to town, and it was her responsibility to take the woman—drunk or sober—back to Phoenix. The thought of Maggie wandering through a strange town on her own was enough to make Joanna start the engine and put the Crown Victoria in gear.

She caught sight of Maggie several blocks away, trudging determinedly downhill. The white bandages on her hands caught in the beams of passing headlights and glowed like moving, iridescent balloons. Joanna pulled up beside the walking woman and rolled down her window. “Where are you headed?” she asked.

Maggie MacFerson stopped walking and turned to glare at Joanna through the open window. “I didn’t see any watering holes as we came into town. I figure if I go downhill far enough, I’m bound to run into something.”

“Get in,” Joanna urged. “I’ll give you a lift.”

“No lectures?”

“No lectures.”

Joanna got out, went around the car, and let Maggie in. Then she fastened her seat belt.

“Thanks,” Maggie said grudgingly. “That was a bitch!”

Joanna knew Maggie didn’t mean getting in and out of the car. She was talking about the ordeal of identifying a murdered loved one. “Yes,” Joanna said. “I know”

“Do you?” Maggie asked sharply.

Joanna nodded. “You interviewed me when I was elected, after my first husband was shot and killed, remember?”

“Oh, that’s right,” Maggie said as the anger drained from her voice. “I forgot. Sorry.” She fell silent then as Joanna struggled to ignore her own rampaging emotions while she drove the narrow winding thoroughfare called Tombstone Canyon. That one exchange had been enough to catapult Joanna back into the unimaginable pain she had lived with immediately after Andy’s murder. She knew too well how much that kind of violent death hurt and the kind of impact it had on the people left behind. Andy’s murder was now three years in the past, but Joanna doubted the pain of it would ever go away entirely.

Maggie ducked her head to look up at the glowing lights from houses perched on the steep hillsides on either side of the street. “The people who live in those places must be half mountain goat,” she said.

Grateful for Maggie’s attempt to defuse the stricken silence, Joanna responded in kind. “If I were you,” she said, “I wouldn’t bother challenging any of them to a stair-climbing contest.”

Coming into the downtown area, Joanna drove straight to the Copper Queen Hotel and pulled up into the loading zone out front. Once again, she went around the car and opened both the door and the seat belt to let Maggie out.

“The bar’s right over there,” Joanna said, nodding her head toward the outside entrance to the hotel’s lounge. “Why don’t you go on inside. I need to check on something.”

While Maggie headed toward the bar, Joanna hurried to the desk. “Do you have any vacancies tonight?” she asked the young woman behind the counter.

“We sure do. What kind of a room?”

“Single. Nonsmoking.”

“For just one night?”

Joanna nodded. The clerk pushed a registration form across the counter. Joanna filled it out with Maggie’s name, and paid for the room with her own credit card. Once she had the key her hand she went into the bar, where Maggie was sitting in front of a glass filled with amber liquid. Out of deference to her bandaged hands, the bartender had put a long straw in the cocktail glass.

“Something’s happened at home,” Joanna said, settling on the stool next to Maggie. “I’m going to have to spend some time with my daughter. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve booked a room lilt you here at the Copper Queen, courtesy of the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department. Here’s the key. Tomorrow morning, First thing, I’ll take you back to Phoenix. I hope that’s all right.”

“Can’t you put me on a bus?”

“There isn’t a bus.”

“A taxi, then?”

“There isn’t one that’ll take you as far as Phoenix.”

“Well, then, I guess it’ll have to be all right, won’t it?” Maggie replied after slurping a long swallow through the straw. “Was it something I said, or are you just opposed to riding around with drunks in your car?”

Joanna ignored the gibe. “Here’s my hone phone number,” she added. Next to the key on the counter, Joanna placed a busi­ness card on which she had scribbled her number at High Lonesome Ranch. Maggie peered at the card but made no effort to collect it or the key. When Maggie said nothing more, Joanna left the lounge, stopping back by the front desk on her way out.

“Maggie MacFerson, the guest in room nineteen, is in the bar,” she told the desk clerk. “You’ll recognize her right away. She’s got bandages on both hands and probably won’t be able to manage a key. It’s probably not going to take much Scotch to put her back under, either. Would you please be sure she makes it to her room safely?”

“Sure thing, Sheriff Brady,” the desk clerk said. “I’ll be glad to. Does she need help with her luggage?”

Joanna didn’t recognize the young woman, but by now she was accustomed to the idea that there were lots of people in Cochise County who knew the sheriff by sight—or maybe by credit card—when she had no idea who they were. “She doesn’t have any luggage,” Joanna returned. “But thanks. I appreciate it.”

As Joanna climbed into the Civvie, her cell phone began to ring. She could see her caller was Chief Deputy Montoya. “Hello, Frank,” she said.

Unfortunately Old Bisbee existed in a cleft in the Mule Moun­tains into which no cell phone signal could penetrate. The only sounds emanating from Joanna’s receiver were unintelligible sput­terings. Hanging up in frustration, she reached for the radio.

“Tica,” she said to Dispatch. “Can you patch me through to Chief Deputy Montoya? He tried to call me on the cell phone a minute ago, but I’m up in Old Bisbee in a dead zone.”