Shoot / Don't Shoot

PROLOGUE

Lying hot and sleepless in the narrow upper bunk, nine-year-old Ceci Grijalva knew her mother was leaving long before she left, long before the outside door opened and closed. When it did, Ceci pulled back a corner of the sheet that served as a curtain and peered out at the weed-infested yard that separated their dingy duplex f mm the one next door. Moments later, Serena Grijalva’s pilfered grocery cart, stacked high with dirty laundry, rattled past the window toward the pot-holed gravel track that passed for a street inside the dreary complex known as Esperanza Village.

Hope Village. Even a little kid could tell that the name was a bad joke. Hopeless was more like it.

Ceci dropped back on her thin mattress and lay there hot and miserable. Back home in Bisbee where they used to live or down in Douglas with Grandma Grijalva, the weather would be cooler now. But not here in Phoenix. Peoria, really. The way her mother had talked about it, Phoenix was one huge, magical city—a wonderful place. Ceci had discovered that it was actually a bunch of places—Phoenix, Glendale, Peoria, Sun City. She could never tell where one stopped and another be­gan, although the kids who had always lived there seemed to know—and they made fun of Ceci when she didn’t.

Phoenix was hot. And the cooler didn’t work. Even when it was running, it didn’t do much good, and it smelled awful—like something green and moldy. Ceci hated that smell.

She lay on the bed, tossing restlessly. The knowl­edge that her mother was gone kept Ceci awake while her little brother, Pablo, snored peacefully in the bottom bunk. Out in the living room she heard the steady drone of the unwatched television set. Just before she left, Serena had turned on the TV.

She always did that. Ceci knew the blaring tele­vision set was a trick. Her mother thought if the kids woke up in the night and heard a mumble of voices from the other room, they’d think Serena was out there watching a program when in reality she’d probably been gone for hours, leaving the two children alone. Again.

Finally, careful not to disturb her brother, the sleepless child pulled her rosary beads out from under her pillow and climbed down from the top bunk. Clutching the beads close to her chest, she tiptoed out into the living room and turned off the TV.

There was no lamp in the sparsely furnished room, and Ceci didn’t bother to switch on the overhead light. With the room illuminated by the street‑light on the corner outside, she made her way to the sweat-stained armchair one of Serena’s pickup‑driving boyfriends had dragged home from a pile of unsold refuse after a Sun City estate sale. Moving the chair close enough to the window to see out, Cecelia curled up inside it. This was where she sat and waited when her mother went out late at night. This was where she sat and worried. And even though she tried to stay awake, she sometimes fell into a fitful sleep. Once Serena had come in and found her there, but usually Ceci managed to rouse herself. Serena’s cart clattering back through the yard would give the child enough warning to turn the TV set back on and scurry into her bed.

Ceci sniffed the air. Serena had been gone for some time, but the heavy scent of her perfume and hair spray still lingered in the room. Ceci shook her head. Even though the grocery cart had been full of dirty clothes when Serena left the house, Ceci wasn^’t fooled. The laundry was only an excuse—almost as much of a trick as the blaring television set. If washing clothes was all her mother had in mind, she could have used the laundry room right there in the complex. For that one—the one next to the manager’s apartment—she wouldn’t have needed hair spray or perfume.

Serena always said that the machines in the Es­peranza Village laundry room weren’t any good. She refused to use them, claiming that the clothes never came clean enough, and that the dryers were too slow. That’s why she always took the laundry four blocks down the street to the WE-DO-YU-DO Washateria. Ceci may have been only nine, but she understood that that story wasn’t the truth, either. Not the whole truth. The real answer lay in the business next door to the laundry—a place called the Roundhouse Bar and Grill.

Sometimes, on weekends, Ceci and Pablo would go along with Serena to do the wash. Usually the two children would be left on their own in the laun­dry while their mother went next door to get some change. That’s what she always told them—that she was going for change—even though Pablo had pointed out the change machine right there beside the soap machine. Once Serena disappeared into the bar, she’d be gone for a long time—for hours. When she came back, her hair would smell of cig­arette smoke, and her breath would smell like beer. By then Ceci and Pablo would already have removed the clothes from the dryers, folded them, and loaded them back into the waiting cart.

Often it would be late afternoon or even early evening by the time they started the four-block walk home. Ceci and Pablo would be hungry—grateful to munch on whatever treats Serena hap­pened to bring out to them from the bar—potato chips or peanuts or even hunks of tough beef jerky. Sometimes a nice man from the bar would come find them and bring them hamburgers with real french fries.

Chances were, as Serena pushed the cart along, she would be singing or giggling or both. She never really walked straight after she’d been inside the Roundhouse for an hour or so. Ceci would spend the whole trip home praying to the Holy Mother that they wouldn’t meet any of her friends from ‘hoot along the way.

Sitting in the stifling living room, waiting for her other to return, Ceci Grijalva felt incredibly lonely. She missed her father. Even though her mother and father used to fight a lot, she still missed him. And she missed her grandmother, too. The happiest hours of Ceci’s life had been spent at the rickety table in her Grandmother Grijalva’s tiny house watching the old woman make tortillas. Grandma was blind, from something Ceci could never remember, something that started with a g. But even blind, the old woman’s practiced hands still remembered how to make tortillas—how much flour and water to put into the bowl, how to pat the soft, white dough into perfect circles, how long to leave them on the hot griddle, and how to pluck them off with her thumb and finger without ever getting burned.

Waiting for her mother to return, Ceci ached for the comfort of her grandmother’s ample breast and wondered if and when she and Pablo would ever see their father’s mother again. Serena had said they might go down to Douglas at Christmastime, but Ceci didn’t see how that was possible. Douglas was more than two hundred miles away. They didn’t have a car. Two hundred miles was too far to push a grocery cart.

Blinking back tears of loneliness, Ceci fingered the beads that lay in her lap, the ones she usually kept hidden under her pillow. Grandmother Gri­jalva had given her the string of black beads last year when she made her first communion. Nana had told Ceci that saying Hail Marys would help her feel better, no matter what was wrong. In the months since Ceci’s mother had left her father and brought the children to Phoenix, Ceci had often used the hidden beads to put herself to sleep, slipping them out from under the pillow only after the lights were off and her mother had left the room.

Ceci didn’t really need to hide them from her mother. Serena was sort of a Catholic, even though she hadn’t been to mass since they moved. The real problem was Serena’s mother, Ernestina Duffy. Nana Duffy, as she liked the children to call her. Nana Duffy was a Baptist, Ceci could never remem­ber what kind, and she was always telling Ceci and Pablo that the pope was evil. Ceci didn’t believe it.

“Holy Mary, mother of God . . .” she whispered. As the beads slipped through her fingers, Ceci’s eyes grew heavy. Gradually she drifted off into a troubled sleep. Only this time the return of her mother’s clattering grocery cart didn’t wake her. Pablo did. He was standing in front of her in his underwear, frowning, both hands on his hips.

“How come you’re sleeping there?” he de­manded.

Ceci’s eyes popped open. It was morning. Where the street light had glowed hours before, now bright late-summer sunshine filled the window. She shifted stiffly in the chair. The foot that had been curled under her was sound asleep. As soon as she moved it, needles and pins shot up her leg.

“Where’s Mom?” she asked.

Pablo turned on the TV set and squatted in front of it. “I dunno,” he said. “Maybe she already went to work. I’m hungry.”

“She isn’t here?” Ceci asked.

Pablo didn’t answer. When the needles and pins went away enough so Ceci could walk, she limped into Serena’s bedroom. There was no sign of the laundry basket. Hurrying to the back door, she looked outside. The grocery cart wasn’t where it belonged, either. Dismayed, Ceci realized her mother had never come home from the WE-DO­-YU-DO Washateria.

Ceci felt sick, but there was no phone in the ‘ house; no way for her to call someone and ask for help. She did the only thing that seemed reasonable tit the time.

“Turn off the cartoons, Pepe,” she said. “Get dressed. We’ve got to get ready for school.”

CHAPTER ONE

“You never should have gone out with him in the first place,” Lael Weaver Gastone told her thirty-year-old daughter, Rhonda. “You should have figured out from the very beginning that a guy like that would be trouble, and you certainly shouldn’t have mar­ried him.”

Holding her hands in her lap, Rhonda Norton examined her tender fingertips. She was so on edge that she had chewed the nails off all the way down to the quick. “How was I supposed to know that?” she asked, trying her best not to cry.

Lael looked up from the thumbnail sketch she was working on. The bar of pastel stopped scratch­ing on the rough surface of the Sabertooth paper.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Rhonda. How dumb can you be?” Lad demanded. “If a married professor starts dating an unmarried undergraduate, you can pretty well figure the man’s a jackass. And so’s the girl for that matter.^”

Rhonda Weaver Norton’s cheeks reddened with anger. The tears retreated. “Thanks, Mom,” she plaid. “I always know I can count on you for sym­pathy.”

“You can always count on me for a straight an­swer,^” Lael corrected. “Now tell me, why exactly are you here?”

Rhonda looked around the spacious, well-lit stu­dio her stepfather, Jean Paul Gastone, had built as a place for his lovely new wife to pursue her artistic endeavors. Rhonda interpreted that cluttered but isolated work space as an act of self-serving gen­erosity on Jean Paul’s part. Lael had always been messy. If nothing else, the physical separation of the studio from the main house would help keep most of that mess localized. That way the main house—a breathtakingly cantilevered mountaintop mansion—could continue to look picture-perfect, as it the photographers from House Beautiful or Archi­tectural Digest were due at any moment.

The place where Lael and Jean Paul lived now was a far cry from the way Rhonda and her mother had lived when Rhonda was a child. She and the free-spirited, starving artist Lael Weaver had lived a nomadic existence that took them from place to place, from drafty furnished rooms to countless roach-infested apartments. This million-dollar-plus architectural wonder was perched on a steep hill-side overlooking one of Sedona, Arizona’s, most photographed red-rocked cliffs. The fourteen-foot floor-to-ceiling windows offered a clear and unob­structed view.

All the furnishings in both the house and studio had been tastefully chosen by someone with an eye for beauty. Rhonda didn’t have to look at any of the labels to know that all the assembled pieces were name brand, as were the clothes on her moth­er’s back. That was far different from the past as well. Rhonda had spent her school years living with the daily humiliation of wearing the second-hand clothing her mother had bought at thrift stores and rummage sales. She had endured the steady taunts from other children who somehow knew she ate the free lunches offered at school. And she recalled all too well how embarrassed she had been every time her mother sent her to the gro­cery store with a fistful of food stamps instead of money.

Lael’s life had taken a definite turn for the better. In the last few years, her oddball pastels had finally started to sell. She had met Jean Paul Gastone at a gallery opening when he had stopped by to say how much he admired her work. Now they were married—seemingly happily—and living a gra­cious and beautiful life together. Rhonda couldn’t help envying the idea of her mother living happily ever after. Too bad things hadn’t worked out nearly that well for Lael’s daughter.

In the course of a long, lingering silence, Lael returned to her sketch. With nothing more to say, Rhonda once more examined the room. She real­ized with a start that her mother’s studio—that one room, not counting either the private bath or the convenient kitchenette that had been built off to one side—was larger than her entire studio apart­ment.

She had moved into that god-awful, low-life complex only two days earlier. Already she hated it. But she had come face-to-face with stark eco­nomic reality. Rhonda Norton was a newly separated, unemployed woman, with no recent work history and only marginally salable skills. Her uni­versity work was sixteen credits shy of a bachelor’s degree with a major in American history, a curriculum that didn’t have much going for it in the world of business. As a consequence, that tiny upstairs apartment facing directly into the afternoon sun was all she could afford. In fact, it was more than she could afford.

Confronted with the obvious dichotomy between her mother’s newfound wealth and her own new-found poverty, Rhonda Norton felt doubly impov­erished. And defeated. It would have been easy to give up, to make like Chief Joseph, leader of the Nez Perce, and say to all the world, “I will fight no more forever.”

“Well?” Lael prompted impatiently, dragging Rhonda back to the present and to the real issue at hand.

She dropped her eyes once more. “I’m afraid,” she said softly.

“Afraid of what?”

Rhonda dreaded saying the words aloud, espe­cially since she didn’t think her mother had ever been afraid of anything in her whole life. As far as Rhonda was concerned, Lael had always seemed as brave and daring as the brilliant greens, blues, and reds she was swiftly daubing onto the paper.

“Afraid of what?” Lael asked again.

“Of him,” Rhonda answered. “Of Dean. He threatened me. He told me that if I went through’ with the divorce, he’d see me in hell before he’d pay me a single dime of alimony or give me a prop­erty settlement.”

“Oh, hell,” Lael said. “The man’s just pissed because he got passed over for department head and then they shipped him off to that other campus, wherever that is.”

“The ASU West campus is on Thunderbird, Mom,” Rhonda returned quietly. “But he’s not bluffing. He means it. He won’t give me a dime.”

Lael Weaver Gastone was incensed. “If it’s the money, don’t worry about it. He’s bluffing. Jean Paul and I could always help out if it came to that, but it won’t. You’ll see. The courts will make him pay.”

But Rhonda was no longer looking at her mother. She had dropped her gaze once more. “It’s not just the money, Mom. I don’t care about that.” She took a deep breath. “I’m afraid he’ll kill me, Mom.” She paused and bit her lip. “He hits me sometimes,” she added almost in a whisper.

“He what?” Lael asked. “I can’t hear you if you don’t speak up.”

“He hits me,” Rhonda repeated raggedly. “Hard.” A single tear leaked from her eye and slipped down her cheek. “And he told me the other day when I was packing that he’d kill me if I go through with it—with getting a divorce.”

Slowly, without looking directly at her mother’s ace, Rhonda Weaver Norton unbuttoned the top three buttons of her cardigan sweater; then she slipped the soft knit material down over her shoul­der. Under the sweater her bare shoulder and back were discolored by a mass of green-and-purple bruises. Lael gasped when she saw them.

“You let him do this to you?” she demanded. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

Blushing furiously, Rhonda pulled her sweater back up. “The first two times he promised he’d never do it again, so I dropped the charges. This time I haven’t... not yet.”

Lael tossed the piece of blue pastel in the general direction of her box, then slammed the lid shut. “And you’re not going to, either. Come on. We’ll to talk to Jean Paul. He’ll know what to do.”

He waited until midnight. Not that midnight had any special significance, other than the fact that it was the time of day he liked best—the time when he felt most at home.

He thought about what he was doing as a bridge—a ritual bridge—between the past and the future, between the women who had already died and the ones who soon would. Although he didn’t think of himself as particularly superstitious, he always performed the midnight ceremony in exactly the same way, starting with closing all the blinds. Only when they were all safely closed did he light the candle.

Once upon a time, he had used incense, but his damn fool of a landlady in Sacramento had reported him to the cops. She had turned him in because she thought he was smoking dope in her precious downstairs apartment. That was right af­ter Lois Hart, and he was nervous as hell. When the young cop showed up on the doorstep and knocked on his door, he’d been so scared that he almost peed his pants. He’d managed to talk his way out of that one—barely—but he’d also learned his lesson. No more incense. From that day on, he’ used only candles.

As the wick of the scented candle caught fire, he breathed in the sweet, cinnamon scent. He preferred cinnamon over all the others because they always reminded him of his grandmother’s freshly baked pumpkin pies. Cinnamon candles were easy to come by during the holidays, and he usually stocked up so he wouldn’t run out during the rest of the year.

After setting the burning candle in the center of his kitchen table, he went around the whole house and switched off all the other lights. Turning off the lights slowly, one by one, always added to his sense of anticipation. He liked finishing his prepa­rations in darkened rooms with the only light com­ing from the flickering glow of a single candle. Everybody always said candlelight made things more romantic. No argument there.

Next came the music. That was always the same, too—Mantovani. In her later years, his mother had kept only one Mantovani album, and she had played it over and over until he thought he would lose his mind. The record had worn out eventually, thank God. So had the record player, for that matter, but when he had wanted to play the familiar music once again, he’d had no trouble finding it.

Now he used a cassette player and cheap cas­settes that he picked up for a buck or two apiece at used-record stores. He himself didn’t care all that much for Mantovani, certainly not enough to pay full retail.

By the time he turned on the music, his eyes had adjusted to the dim light. With the soft strains of violins playing soothingly in the background, and with his whole body burning with anticipation, he would finally allow himself to go to the bottom right-hand corner of his closet to retrieve his precious faux alabaster jewelry box.

The box wasn’t inherently valuable. What gave it worth was where it came from, what it meant. Like that single scratched Mantovani album, the jewelry box had been one of his mother’s prized possessions. When he was twelve, he had bought it for her as a Mother’s Day present. He had paid for it with money he earned delivering newspapers.

His mother had loved the box, treasured it. When she died, though, the gift had reverted to the giver. He remembered how, on the day she unwrapped t, his mother had run her finger over the smooth, cool stonelike stuff, how she had admired the fig­ure of the young Grecian woman whose delicate image had been carved in transluscent relief on the hinged top.

He looked down now at the graceful young woman in the revealing, loosely flowing gown. His mother had thought her very beautiful. As a matter of fact, so did he. In a lifetime of quarreling with his mother, the Greek maiden’s virginal beauty was one of the few things the two of them had ever agreed upon. The girl’s obvious innocence was one of the reasons he used the box as an integral part of his midnight ritual. He liked the symbolism. The other reason for using it was equally satisfying in the same way Mantovani was—the box had belonged to his mother. Had she known the use he made of it, the knowledge would have made her crazy, if she hadn’t been already. That aspect of the ceremony always added a whole other dimension to his amusement. He had never loved his mother, never even liked her.

As he carried the box to the kitchen table, his hands shook with anticipation. His whole body quivered. But he held back. Instead of giving in to his growing physical need, he forced himself to sit down and wait. He calmed himself by staring into the flickering glow of the lighted candle, by watching its muted, soothing light reflected in the satiny finish of the jewelry box.

He liked knowing that he could control the urge, that he could turn it off and on at will. He prided himself on being able to go all the way to the edge and then pull himself back if he had to, although sometimes, like tonight, waiting was almost more than he could bear. It reminded him of the game he used to play with his mother’s old dog, Pru­dence. He’d dish up the food and put it on the floor, but instead of letting the dog eat it, he’d put her on a down stay and make her wait for it, sometimes for hours. And if she tried to sneak over to it without permission, he’d beat the crap out of her. It had been great training for Prudence. It had taught her the meaning of self-control. It had taught him the same valuable lesson.

So he sat at the table, in front of the flickering candle, and waited for however long it took for his breathing to slow, for his heart to stop pounding, and for the painful bulge in his pants to disappear. Only after he was totally under control did he al-low himself to lift the hinged lid and look inside at the folded treasures waiting there—six pairs of panties.

Each pair had its own size, shape, and color. He could have sorted through the box blindfolded and still known which was which because he knew them intimately, more by feel than looks.

Except for the beige ones, which he quickly laid aside, he always stored the underwear according to a LIFO (last in/first out) style of inventory—a system he had learned about way back in college. That when he was so naive that he had wanted to be accountant just like his daddy, when he was still growing up and all gung ho on following in his father’s footsteps. Screw that!

Even though the box was open, still he delayed, postponing for a few minutes longer the moment of gratification. It struck him as interesting that each pair was so different from all the others. But then, since the women were so different, that was only to be expected. Every time he sorted through collection, he felt like a decorated veteran examining his medals. Each trophy brought to mind name, a place, and a time. The sounds, the feelings, replayed themselves as vividly as if it were happening all over again. He was sure his memory did a better job at replaying the details than any of that virtual reality stuff he kept reading about in the newspaper.

Finally, satisfied that he had waited long enough, he picked up the first pair—white cotton briefs so worn that the material was see-through thin. Holding it to his face, he closed his eyes and breathed in and out through the soft folds of material. With each breath he remembered everything about that Mexican girl with long, dark hair and big tits. Serena was her name. She had been anything but serene out there on the mountain. He smiled again remembering her good looks and those soft, voluptuous breasts.

He didn’t usually target women he knew. He often had no idea what any of the women looked like when he first chose them. At the time he selected them, they were only names on paper. Due to the luck of the draw, some of them turned out to be whole lot better looking than others. In fact, one had been a real dog. In Serena’s case he had created the opportunity rather than waiting for it to pres itself. It had worked like a charm. Not only that, other than Rochelle, Serena Grijalva had been best looking of the bunch.

Laying Serena’s underwear aside, he picked u the next pair. Jockey, the label said. Whoever heard of Jockey for women? What a queer idea! And then he giggled because the thought itself was so funny. It figured. These had belonged to Constance Fredericks, and she was queer all right—as a three-doll bill. He had suspected her of being a lesbian just from the paperwork, and of course she was. When he followed her to ground down in Miami, Florid she and her partying friends had verified all worst suspicions. It didn’t bother him that Constance liked women. What she liked or didn’t like had no bearing on him. As a matter of fact, he ha enjoyed watching the way Constance and the others carried on. They did things to one another that, up to that time, he’d only read about in books, things that his uptight mother never would have believed possible.

He put down the jockeys and picked up the next pair. Black lace. Control top. These had belonged Maddy Piper, an aging showgirl-turned-stripper from Las Vegas whose figure was starting to go to seed. She would have been far better off if she hadn’t ended up getting into a big fight with her agent, an ex-middleweight boxer.

Next came the pink satin bikini briefs with the Frederick’s of Hollywood label. They had belonged to Lois Hart, a barmaid at the Lucky Strike bowling alley in Stockton, California. Lois had sold drinks during the day and dealt in other kinds of chemical mood enhancers by night. When she was found bludgeoned to death and tied to a snag on the banks of the Sacramento River, nobody had gone out their way looking for her killer. The cops had written Lois off as a drug deal gone bad and let it go that.

That brought him to the bright red pair at the very bottom of the box, the ones that had once be­longed to Rochelle Newton. Lovely, tall, and slender Rochelle from Tacoma, Washington. Years earlier, when he was up in Seattle, training to be an eager-beaver CPA, Rochelle had been the not-too-savvy hooker who had laughed at him when couldn’t perform. She had been his very first victim —an accident almost. He hadn’t really intended to kill her. It had just happened. But once he started hitting her, he had found he couldn’t stop himself. Afterward, when he knew she was dead and after he had carefully disposed of her body, he took the key to her apartment on Pacific Highway South, let himself in, and helped himself to a single pair of panties from her dresser drawer.

At that point, all he had wanted was a token—something that belonged to her, something to remember her by. The moment he had found the red parities in a drawer, a tradition was born.

Over the years, he had figured out how stupid he had been. It was a miracle nobody had seen him going to or coming from Rochelle’s apartment. Now he either took the panties at the time of killing—if he thought he could take them without investigators seeing it as a signature M.O.—or did without.

For years after killing Rochelle, he had lived terror—waiting for the knock on the door that would mean the cops had finally caught up wit him. The knock never came. And then one day Rochelle’s name had turned up on the list of missing persons who were thought to be the possible victims of one of the Northwest’s most notorious serial killers. The very night Rochelle’s killer read her name in the paper, he went to bed safe in the knowledge that the and slept like a baby, safe in the knowledge that the cops were no long looking for him. They were looking for someone else, someone they called a serial killer.

He had quit his father’s firm the next day and gone off on his own, working at two-bit jobs, but savoring the freedom. And knowing that his mother would always slip him a little something he got caught short.

Once on the road, he realized there was a world of difference between serial killers and recreational ones. The first kind kill because some evil compul­sion forces them to. The second ones do it for the fun of it—because they want to.

Breathing deeply, he fondled the swatch of bright red silk. Rochelle. She was the one who had shown him the rules and taught him how to play the tne. Once he knew how simple it was to fake the cops out and trick them into looking the other way, everything else was easy.

All six pairs of panties were out on the table now, laying there in full view. Allowing himself to become excited again, he studied them under the glow of the candle’s flickering light, stroking each one in turn. One at a time, he held five of the six up to his face once more, trying to make up his mind.

As he did so, his heartbeat quickened. Which would it be tonight? Which one should he choose? Other than Rochelle, he had never raped his victims, not at the time. He knew better than that. DNA tests were far too reliable these days, and some cops were a whole lot smarter than they looked. Besides, he didn’t want to pick up some kind of sexually transmitted disease. One way or another, all women were whores. When it came to that, he believed in the old adage, Better safe than sorry.

At the time he was doing it, he enjoyed killing them. That was satisfying in a way, but he took his real pleasure from them later on, over and over, in the privacy of his own home. There—with the doors carefully closed and locked, with the blinds pulled, and with a scented candle burning on the table—they offered him the relief he craved. No questions asked.

By then his breath was coming in short, sharp gasps. His pants were bulging so badly that it hurt. He breathed a sigh of relief when he finally opened the zipper and allowed the caged prisoner to roam free. A moment later his other hand settled on newest prize in his collection—Serena Grijalva’s thin white cotton briefs.

It didn’t take long. He grasped himself and masturbated into the soft material, groaning with pleasure when he came. Afterward, he hurried to bathroom and washed out the panties with soap and water before hanging them on the towel bar to dry. Then he went back to the kitchen table, turned on the overhead light, and blew out the candle.

Sitting down once more, he picked up a single piece of paper that had slipped out of sight temporarily under Maddy Piper’s black lace panties. The paper was a fragment hastily torn from the corner of a yellow legal pad. A few words had been noted on it in painstakingly careful printing. “Rhonda Weaver Norton,” it said. “Fourteen twenty-five Apache Boulevard, number six, Tempe, Arizona.”

Using a strip of tape, he fastened the piece of paper to the bottom of the box and then sat there for a moment, admiring his handiwork.

“Rhonda,” the man whispered aloud. “Rhonda, Rhonda, Rhonda. You’d better watch out, little girl. The big bad wolf is coming to get you.”

CHAPTER TWO

Joanna Brady zipped the last suitcase shut and then sat down on the edge of the bed. “Off you go,” she said to her daughter, who was sprawled crosswise on the bed, thumbing through a stack of family photos.

“I like this one best,” Jenny said, plucking one out of the stack and handing it to her mother. The picture had been taken by Joanna’s father, Big Hank Lathrop, with his Brownie Hawkeye camera. The irregularly sized, old-fashioned, black-and‑white snapshot showed an eight-year-old Joanna Lathrop, dressed in her Brownie uniform. She stood at attention in front of her mother’s old Maverick. In the foreground cartons of Girl Scout cookies were stacked into a Radio Flyer wagon.

Joanna was almost thirty years old now. Big Hank Lathrop had been dead for fifteen years, but as Joanna held the photo in her hand she missed her father more than she could have thought possible. She missed him almost as much as she missed her deputy sheriff husband, Andy, who had died a victim of the country’s continuing war on drugs only two months earlier.

It took real effort for her to speak around the word-trapping lump that mysteriously filled throat. “I always liked that one, too,” she managed.

Joanna usually thought of Jenny as resembling Andy far more than she did her mother’s side of the family, but studying the photo closely, she could see that Jenny and the little girl in the twenty-two-year-old picture might have been sisters.

“How come none of these are in color?” Jenny asked. “They look funny. Like pictures in a museum.”

“Because Grandpa Lathrop developed them himself,” Joanna answered. “In that room below the stairs in Grandma Lathrop’s basement. That was his darkroom. He always said he liked working in black and white better than he did in color.”

Carefully, Joanna began gathering the scattered photos, returning them to the familiar shoe box that had been their storage place for as many years she could remember. “Come on now,” she urged. “It’s time to go to bed in your own room.”

Jenny pouted. “Oh, Mom, do I have to? Can’t I stay up just a little longer?”

Joanna shook her head. “No way. I don’t know about you, but I have a big day ahead of me tomorrow. After church and as soon as dinner is over, I have to drive all the way to Phoenix—that’s a good four-hour trip. I’d better get some sleep tonight, or I’ll doze off at the wheel.”

Folding down the covers on what she still considered to be her side of the bed, Joanna crawled in and pulled the comforter up around her chin. Climbing into the double bed was when the now familiar ache of Andy’s absence hit her anew with soul-wrenching reality.

Instead of taking the hint and heading for her own bed, Jenny simply snuggled closer. “Do you have to go to Phoenix?” she asked.

“Peoria,” Joanna corrected, fighting her way through her pain and back into the conversation. “It’s north of Phoenix, remember?” Jenny said nothing and Joanna shook her head in exaspera­tion, “Jennifer Ann Brady, you know I have to go. We’ve been over this a million times.”

“But since you’re already elected sheriff, how come you have to take classes? If you didn’t go to the academy, they wouldn’t diselect you, would they?”

“Diselect isn’t a word,” Joanna pointed out. “But you’re right. Even if I flunked this course—which I won’t—no one is going to take my badge away.”

“Then why go? Why couldn’t you just stay home instead of going all the way up there? I want you here.”

Joanna tried to be patient. “I may have been elected sheriff,” she explained, “but I’ve never been a real police officer—a trained police officer—be­fore. I know something about it because of Grandpa Lathrop and Daddy, but the bottom line is I know a whole lot more about selling insurance than I do about being a cop. The most important job the sheriff does is to be the department’s leader. You know what a leader is, don’t you?”

Jenny considered for a moment before she nodded. “Mrs. Mosley’s my Brownie leader.”

“Right. And what does she do?”

“She takes us on camp-outs. She shows us how to make things, like sit-upons and buddy-burners and stuff. Last week she started teaching us how to tie knots.”

“But she couldn’t teach you how to do any of those things if she didn’t already know them herself, could she?”

Jennifer shrugged. “I guess not,” she said.

“Being sheriff is just like being a troop leader,” Joanna explained. “In order to lead the department, I have to be able to show the people who work under me that I know what’s going on—that I know what I’m doing. I have to know what to do and how to do it before I can tell my officers what I expect of them. And the only way to learn all those things in a hurry is to take a crash course like the one they offer at the Arizona Police Officers Academy.”

“But why does it have to start the week before Thanksgiving?” Jenny objected. “Couldn’t it start afterward? You won’t even be back home until two days before Christmas. When will we go Christmas shopping?”

Andrew Roy Brady, Joanna’s husband and Jenny’s father, had been gunned down in mid-September and had died a day later. After ten years of marriage, this was the first holiday season Joanna would spend without him. She couldn’t very well tell Jenny how much she dreaded what was coming, starting with Thanksgiving later that week.

After all, with Andy dead, what did Joanna have to be thankful for? How could she explain to her daughter that the little house the family had lived in on Lonesome Ranch—the only home Jenny had ever known—was the very last place Joanna Brady wanted to be when it came time for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner? How would she be able to eat a celebratory dinner with an empty place in Andy’s spot at the head of the table? How could make Jenny understand how much Joanna dreaded the prospect of hauling the holiday deco­rations down from the tiny attic or of putting up a tree? Some words simply couldn’t be spoken.

“Thanksgiving is already under control,” Joanna said firmly. “Grandma and Grandpa Brady will bring you up to see me right after school on Wednesday afternoon. We’ll have a nice Thanksgiving dinner in the restaurant at the hotel. I won’t have to be in class again until Monday. We’ll have the whole weekend together up until Sunday afternoon. Maybe we can do some of our Christmas shopping then. We might even try visiting the Phoenix Zoo. Would you like that?”

“I guess,” Jenny answered without enthusiasm. “Why isn’t Grandma Lathrop coming along? Didn’t you ask her?”

Good question, Joanna thought. Why isn’t my mother coming along? Eleanor Lathrop had been invited to join the Thanksgiving expedition not just once, but three separate times—by Joanna and by both Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady. Eleanor had turned down each separate invitation. She claimed she had some pressing social engagement that would keep her from spending even one night away from home, to say nothing of three. Joanna had no doubt that Eleanor would have been more enthusiastic about the trip had the idea been hers originally rather than Jim Bob and Eva Lou’s. That was something else Joanna couldn’t explain to Jenny.

“I asked her, but I guess she’s just too busy,” Joanna answered lamely. With a firm but loving shove, Joanna finally booted her daughter out of bed. “Go on, now. It’s time to get in your own bed.”

Reluctantly, Jenny made her way across the room. She stopped beside the three packed and zippered suitcases. She glowered at them as if they were cause rather than result. “I liked it better when Daddy was here,” she said.

Joanna knew part of the reason Jenny didn’t want to go to her own room—part of the reason she didn’t want her mother to be away from home—stemmed from a totally understandable sense of loss. The child was still grieving, and rightfully so. And although Jenny’s blurted words weren’t meant to be hurtful to her mother, they hurt nonetheless.

Joanna winced. “So did I,” she answered.

Jenny made it as far as the bedroom door before she paused again. “Come on, you dogs,” she ordered. “Time for bed.”

Slowly Sadie and Tigger, Jenny’s two dogs, rose from their sprawled sleeping positions on the bedside rug. They both stretched languorously, then followed Jenny out of the room. When the door closed, Joanna switched off her light and then lay there in the dark, wrestling with her own feelings of loneliness and grief.

She had been agonizingly honest when she told Jenny that she too had liked things better the way they were before Andy’s death. It was two months now since Joanna had found Andy lying wounded and bleeding in the sand beside his pickup. There were still times when she couldn’t believe he was gone, when she wanted to call him up at work to tell him about something Jenny had said or done. Times Joanna longed to have him sitting across from her in the breakfast nook, drinking coffee and talking over the day’s scheduling logistics. Times she wanted desperately to have him back beside her in the bed so she could cuddle up next to his back and draw Andy’s radiating warmth into her own body. Even now her feet were so distressingly cold that she wondered if she’d ever be able to get to sleep.

Minutes later, despite her cold feet, Joanna was starting to drift off when the telephone rang. She snapped on the light before picking up the receiver. It was almost eleven. “Hello?”

“Damn,” Chief Deputy for Administration Frank Montoya said, hearing her sleep-fogged voice. “It’s late, isn’t it? I just got home a few minutes ago, but I should have checked the time before I called. I woke you up, didn’t I?”_

“It’s okay, Frank,” Joanna mumbled as graciously as she could manage. “I wasn’t really asleep. What’s up?”

Frank Montoya, the former Willcox city marshal, had been one of Joanna’s two opponents in her race for he office of sheriff. In joint appearances on the campaign trail, they had each confronted the loud-mouthed third candidate, Al Freeman. Those appearances had resulted in the formation of an unlikely friendship. Once elected and trying to handle the department’s entrenched and none-too-subtle opposition to her new administration, Joanna had drafted fellow outsider Frank Montoya to serve as her chief deputy for administration.

“I had dinner with my folks tonight,” Frank said. “My cousin’s getting married two weeks from now, so my mother had one of her command performance dinners in honor of the soon-to-be newlyweds. I was on my way out the door when she pulled me aside and asked me what are we go to do about Jorge Grijalva. ‘Who the hell is Jorge Grijalva?’ I asked.” Frank paused for a moment. “Ever heard of him?”

“Who, me?” Joanna returned.

“Yes, you.”

Joanna closed her eyes in concentration. She ha been so caught up in her own troubles that it was hard to remember someone else’s, but it came her a moment later. “Ceci’s father,” she breathed.

“Ceci?” Frank asked.

“Ceci Grijalva. She was in school and Brownies with Jenny last year. I believe her parents must have gotten a divorce. The mother and the two kids moved to Phoenix right after school got out. The father worked at the lime plant down by Paul Spur until the mother turned up dead somewhere outside Phoenix. It happened about the same time Andy was killed, so I didn’t pay that much attention. As I understand it, Jorge is the prime suspect.”

“Only suspect,” Frank Montoya corrected.

Joanna sat up in bed so she could think better. “Didn’t the detectives on the case pick him up at work down in Paul Spur? A day or so after I was sworn in, I remember seeing a letter from the chief of police up in Peoria. He sent a note to the department, thanking us for our cooperation. Since it happened on Dick Voland’s watch, I passed the letter along to him. That’s all I know about it.”

“You know a lot more than I did, then,” Frank Montoya returned. “You’re right. The family had been living in Bisbee for a while, but Jorge is orig­inally from Douglas. Pirtleville, actually. And it turns out that Jorge’s mother, Juanita, is an old friend of my mother’s. They used to work together years ago, picking peaches at the orchards out in Elfrida. According to Mom, Juanita thinks Jorge is being sold down the river on account of something he didn’t do. She asked me if I...I mean, if we... could do anything to help.”

“Like what?” Joanna asked.

“I don’t know. All I can tell you is his mother swears he didn’t do it.”

“Mothers always swear their darlings didn’t do it.” Joanna countered. “Didn’t you know that?” “I suppose I did,” Frank agreed, “but if we could just…”

“Just what?”

“Listen to her,” Frank said. “That’s all Mom wanted us to do—listen.”

Joanna shook her head. “Look, Frank,” she said. “Be reasonable. What good will listening do? This case doesn’t have anything at all to do with Cochise County. In case you haven’t noticed, Peoria, Ari­zona, happens to be in Maricopa County, a good hundred and forty miles outside our jurisdiction.”

“But you’re going up there tomorrow,” Frank ar­gued. “Couldn’t you talk to her for a few minutes before you go?”

“It was a domestic, Frank,” Joanna said. “You know the statistics as well as I do. What could I say to Juanita Grijalva other than to tell her that the cops who arrested her precious Jorge are most likely on the right track?”

“Probably nothing,” Frank Montoya agreed som­berly. “But if you talk to her, it might help. If noth­ing else, maybe she’ll feel better. Jorge is her only son. No matter what happens afterward, if she’s actually spoken to someone in authority, she’ll at least have the comfort of knowing she did everything in her power to help.”

Frank Montoya’s arguments were tough to turn aside. Knowing she was losing, Joanna shook her head. “You should have been in sales, Frank,” she said with a short laugh. “You sure as hell know how to close a deal. But here’s the next problem—scheduling. I go to church in the morning. We fin­ish up with that around eleven-thirty or so, then we come rushing home because my mother-in-law is cooking up a big Sunday dinner. We’ll probably eat around two, and I’ll need to light out of here for Phoenix no later than three. When in all that do you think I’ll be able to squeeze in an appointment with Juanita Grijalva?”

“How about if I bring her by the High Lonesome right around one?” Frank asked. “Would that be all right?”

“All right, all right,” Joanna agreed at last. “But why do you have to bring her? Tell her how to find the place, and she can come by herself.”

“No, she can’t,” Frank said. “Not very well. For thing, Juanita Grijalva doesn’t have a car. For another, she can’t drive. She’s legally blind.”

Joanna assimilated what he had said. “There’s nothing like playing on a person’s sympathy, is there?”

Now it was Frank Montoya’s turn to laugh. “I had to,” he said sheepishly. “I’m sorry, Joanna, but if you hadn’t agreed to talk to Juanita, I never would have heard the end of it. Once my mother gets going on something like this, she can be hell on wheels.”

Joanna stopped him in mid-apology. “Don’t worry about it, Frank. It’ll be fine. I’ve never met your mother, but I have one just like her.”

“So you know how it is?”

“In spades,” Joanna answered. “So get off the phone and let me get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow. Around one.”

Joanna put down the phone. Once again she switched off the lamp on her bedside table. In the long weeks following Andy’s murder, sleeping properly was one of the most difficult things Joanna Brady had to do. Loneliness usually descended like a smothering cloud every time she crawled into the bed she and Andy had shared for so many years. Usually she tossed and turned through the endless nighttime hours, rather than falling asleep.

This time, Joanna surprised herself by falling asleep almost instantly—as soon as she put her head back down on the pillow. It was a much-needed and welcome change.

“Last call,” the bartender said. “Motel time.”

At ten to one on a Sunday morning, only the last few Saturday night regulars were still hanging out in Peoria’s Roundhouse Bar and Grill.

“Hit me again, Butch,” Dave Thompson said sagging over the bar, resting his beefy arms along the rounded edge. “The last crop of students for this year shows up this afternoon. Classes this session don’t end until a couple of days before Christmas. With the holidays messing things up, this on is always a bitch. You can’t get ‘em to concentrate on what they’re supposed to be doing. Can’t keep ‘im focused. Naturally, the women are worse than the men.”

“Naturally,” Butch Dixon agreed mildly, putting a draft Coors on the bar in front of Dave Thompson, the superintendent of the Arizona Police Officers Academy three quarters of a mile away. “By the way, you’ve had several, Dave,” Butch oh served. “Want me to call you a cab?”

“Naw,” Thompson replied. “Thanks but thanks. Before I decided to get snockered on my last night out, I asked Larry here if he’d mind giving me a ride home. Shit. Last thing I need is a damned DWI. Right, Larry?”

Larry Dysart was also a Roundhouse regular. These days his drink of choice was limited to coffee or tonic with lime. He came to the bar almost every night and spent long congenial evenings discussing literature with the bartender, arguing politics with everybody else, and scribbling in a series of battered spiral notebooks.

He looked up now from pen and paper. “Right, Dave,” Larry said. “No problem. I’ll be glad to give you a lift home.”

CHAPTER THREE

Even though Joanna was only going through the motions, she went to church the next morning. She sat there in the pew, seemingly attentive, while her best friend and pastor, the Reverend Marianne Maculyea, gave a stirring pre­-Thanksgiving sermon. Instead of listening, though, Joanna’s mind was focused on the fact that she would be gone—completely out of town—for more than a month. She was scheduled to spend five and a half weeks taking a basic training class at the Arizona Police Officers Academy in Peoria.

There was plenty to worry about. For instance, what about clothes? Yes, her suitcases were all zipped shut, but had she packed enough of the right things? This would be the longest time she had ever been away from home. She wasn’t terrifically happy about the idea of staying in a dorm. As much trouble as she’d had lately sleeping in her own bed, how well would she fare in a strange one?

But the bottom line—the real focus of her worry—was always Jenny. How would a protracted absence from her mother affect this child whose sense of well-being had already been shattered by her father’s murder? Had it not been for the generosity of her in-laws, Joanna might well have had to bag the whole idea and stay home. Putting their own lives on hold, Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady had agreed to come out and stay at High Lonesome Ranch for the duration of Joanna’s absence. Not only would they care for Jenny, getting her to and from school each day, they would also look after the livestock and do any other chores that needed doing.

Professionally, Joanna’s attendance at the academy was a thorny issue. Of course she needed to go. That was self-evident, even to Joanna. Her close call during an armed showdown on a copper-mine tailings dump a few days earlier had shown her in life-and-death, up-close-and-personal terms exactly how much she didn’t know about the world of law enforcement.

Joanna’s connections to law enforcement were peripheral rather than professional. Years earlier her father, D. H. “Big Hank” Lathrop, had served as sheriff of Cochise County. And Andy, her husband, had been a deputy sheriff as well as a candidate for the office of sheriff when he was gunned down by a drug lord’s hired hit man. Joanna’s work resume as office manager of an insurance agency contained no items of legal background or law enforcement training. Some of those educational gaps could be made up by reading and studying on her own, but an organized course of study taught by professional instructors would provide a more thorough and efficient way of getting the job done.

As the word job surfaced in Joanna’s head, so did a whole other line of concern—work. If a five-and-a-half-week absence could wreak havoc in her personal life, what would it do to her two-week-old administration at the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department? While she was gone, her two chief deputies Frank Montoya for administration and Dick Voland for operations—would be running the show. That arrangement—the possibly volatile combination of two former antagonists—would ei­ther function as a form of checks and balances or else it would blow up in Joanna’s face. Sitting there in church, not listening to the sermon, Joanna could worry about what might happen, but she couldn’t predict which way things would go.

Almost without warning, the people in surrounding pews rose to their feet and opened their hymnals as the organist pounded through the first few bars of “Faith of Our Fathers.” As Joanna fumbled hu­rriedly to find the proper page of the final hymn, she realized Reverend Maculyea’s sermon was over. Joanna hadn’t listened to a word of it. No doubt Marianne had figured that out as well. When she and her husband, Jeff Daniels, followed the choir down the center aisle to the door of the church, the pastor caught Joanna’s eye as they passed by. Marianne smiled and winked. Weakly, Joanna smiled back.

She had planned to skip coffee hour after church, but Jenny headed her off at the front door. “Can’t we stay for just a few minutes?” she begged.

Joanna shook her head. “I have so much to do....”

“But, Mom,” Jenny countered. “It’s Birthday Sunday. When I was coming upstairs from Sunday school, I saw Mrs. Sawyer carrying two cakes into the kitchen. Both of ‘em are pecan praline—my favorite. Please? Just for a little while?”

“Well, I suppose,” Joanna relented. “But remember, only one piece. Grandma Brady’s cooking dinner at home. It’s supposed to be ready to eat by two o’clock. If you spoil your appetite, it’ll hurt her feelings.”

Waiting barely long enough for her mother to finish speaking, Jenny slipped her hand out of Joanna’s grasp and skipped off happily toward the social hall. As Jenny thundered down the stairway, Joanna bit back the urge to call after her, “Don’t run.” The first caution, the one about Jenny not spoiling her appetite, sounded as though it had come directly from the lips of Joanna’s own mother, Eleanor Lathrop. And as Joanna stood in line, awaiting her turn to greet and be greeted by Jeff and Marianne, she told herself to cut it out.

As the line moved forward, Joanna found herself standing directly behind Marliss Shackleford. “I was surprised to find someone had chosen of ‘Faith Our Fathers’ as the recessional,” Marliss announced when she reached Marianne’s husband. “Isn’t that a little, you know, passe?” she asked with a slight shudder. “It’s sexist to say the least.”

Jeff Daniels cocked his head to one side, regarding the woman with a puzzled frown. “Really,” he said, pumping Marliss Shackleford’s outstretched hand. “But it doesn’t seem to me that ‘Faith of Our Parents’ has quite the same ring to it.”

Jeff’s comment was made with such disarming ingenuousness that Marliss was left with no possible comeback. Behind her in line, Joanna choked back a potentially noisy chuckle as Marliss moved on to tackle Marianne. When Joanna stepped forward to greet Jeff, they were both grinning.

“How’s it going, Joanna?” he asked, diplomati­cally removing the grin from his face. “Are you all packed for your six-week excursion?”

As is Bisbee “clergy couples” went, Jeff Daniels and Marianne Maculyea weren’t at all typical. For one thing, although they were officially, and legally, “man and wife,” they didn’t share the same last name. Marianne was the minister while Jeff served in the capacity of minister’s spouse. She was the one with the full-time career, while he was a stay-at-home husband with no paid employment “outside the home.”

In southeastern Arizona, this newfangled and seemingly odd arrangement had raised more than a few eyebrows when the young couple had first come to town to assume Marianne’s clerical duties at Canyon Methodist Church. Now, though, several years later, they had worked their way so far into the fabric of the community that no one was surprised to learn that the newly elected treasurer of the local Kiwanis Club listed his job on his mem­bership application as “househusband.”

“Almost,” Joanna answered. “And not a moment too soon. I’m supposed to leave the house at three. You and Marianne are still coming out to the ranch for Grandma Brady’s farewell dinner, aren’t you? She’s acting as though I’m off on a worldwide tour.”

Jeff shook his head. “Wouldn’t miss one of Eva Lou’s dinners for the world. What time are we due?”

“Between one-thirty and two.”

Finished with Marliss, Marianne stepped back to greet Joanna with a heartfelt hug. “We’re all going to miss you,” she said. “But everything’s going to be fine here at home. Don’t worry.”

Not surprisingly, Marianne’s intuitive comment went straight to the heart of Joanna’s problem. “Thank you,” she gulped, blinking back tears.

Marianne smiled. “See you downstairs,” she said.

Joanna glanced at her watch as she headed for the stairway. There wasn’t much time. She hurried into the social hall, scanning the tables for a glimpse of Jennifer. Initially seeing no sign of her daughter, Joanna made a single swift pass through the refreshment line and picked up a cup of coffee. With cup in hand, she finally spotted Jenny and one of her friends. The two girls were already seat at a table and scarfing down cake.

Not wanting to crab at her daughter in public, Joanna deliberately moved in the opposite direction. Too late she realized she was walking directly into the arms of Marliss Shackleford.

Joanna Brady had never liked Marliss Shackleford and for more than one reason. The woman had a real propensity for minding other people’s business. She thrived on gossip, and she had managed to find a way to turn that hobby into a job. Once a week Marliss held forth in a written gossip column called “Bisbee Buzzings” that appeared in the local paper, The Bisbee Bee.

To a private citizen, columnist Marliss Shackleford could be a bothersome annoyance. Now that Joanna was in the public eye, however, annoyance had escalated into something else. From the mo­ment Joanna Brady began making her bid for the office of sheriff, Marliss had chosen to regard everyth­ing related to Joanna and Jennifer Brady as possibly newsworthy material for her weekly column.

At first, Joanna hadn’t tumbled to her changed circumstances. Then one day, she was shocked to see her own words quoted verbatim in Marliss Shackleford’s column—words taken from a conversation with a third party in what Joanna had mistakenly assumed to be the relative privacy of an after-church coffee hour. Only in retrospect did she recall the reporter hovering in the background in the social hall during the conversation. Since then, Joanna had gone out of her way to avoid Marliss Shackleford.

Veering to one side, Joanna dodged the Marliss pitfall only to stumble into another one that proved almost equally troubling.

“Why, Joanna Brady!” Esther Brockner exclaimed, clasping the younger woman by the hand. “How are you and that poor little girl of yours doing these days?”

Two weeks after Andy’s death, Esther Brockner had been the first elderly widow who had felt free to advise Joanna that since she was so young and attractive, she wouldn’t have any trouble at all marrying again. That well-intentioned but tactless comment had left Joanna fuming. She had forced herself to bite back the angry retort that she didn’t want any other husband. Now, after being told much the same thing by several other thoughtless acquaintances, Joanna’s hide had toughened considerably.

Facing Esther now over a cup of coffee, Joanna had little difficulty maintaining her composure. “We’re doing fine, Esther,” she returned civilly. “How about you?”

“Every day gets a little better, doesn’t it?” Esther continued.

Not exactly, Joanna thought. It was more like one step forward and two back, but she nodded in reply. Nodding a lie didn’t seem quite as bad as telling one outright.

“Why, Sheriff Brady,” Marliss said, using her cup and saucer to wedge her way into the two-way conversation. “I guess you’re off to school in Phoenix this week.”

“Peoria,” Joanna corrected. “The Arizona Poll Officers Academy is based in Peoria, outside Phoenix.”

Marliss waved her hand in disgust. “What’s the difference? Peoria. Glendale. Tempe. Mesa. If you ask me, those places are all alike. From the outlet stores in Casa Grande on, there’s way too much traffic. I hear it’s almost as bad as L.A. All those people!” She clicked her tongue in disapproval. “It’s not like a small town. In a place like that, nobody cares if you live or die. In fact, I’ve heard it isn’t safe for a woman alone to drive around Phoenix. I wouldn’t go there if you paid me.”

Joanna felt a sudden urge to smile because she was, in fact, being paid to go to the Phoenix area. Not only that, some of Marliss Shackleford’s hard­-earned tax dollars were partially footing the bill.

“I’m sure most people in metropolitan Phoenix are just fine,” Joanna said.

Marliss drew herself up to her full five foot three. “I understand the course work at that school is pretty tough,” she said. “Aren’t you worried about that?”

“Why should I be?”

Marliss shrugged, in a vain attempt to look innocent. “If you didn’t pass for some reason, it might be a bad reflection on your ability to do the job, wouldn’t it?”

“I expect to pass all right,” Joanna replied.

“Speaking of doing the job, I need a picture of you.”

“What for,” Joanna asked, “the paper?”

“No. For the display in the Sheriff’s Department lobby. I’m on the Women’s Club facilities committee, and I’m supposed to get a glossy eleven-by-fourteen of you to put up along with those of all the previous sheriffs. I don’t need it this minute, but I will need it soon. I’ll have to have it framed lime for an official presentation at our annual luncheon in January.”

Looking around the room for Jenny, Joanna nodded. “I’ll take care of it as soon as I can.”

From across the room she succeeded in catching Jenny’s eye. Joanna motioned toward the door. In response, Jenny pointed toward her empty plate, then folded her hands prayerfully under her chin.

The gestured message came through loud and clear. Jenny wanted a second piece of Mrs. Sawyer’s cake.

Shaking her head, Joanna walked up to her daughter. “No,” she said firmly. “Come on. We’ve got to go.”

Scowling, Jenny got up to follow, but as they started toward the stairway, Cynthia Sawyer abandoned her spot behind the refreshment table and came hurrying after them. She was carrying a paper plate laden with several pieces of her rich, dark-brown pecan praline cake.

“I know this is Jenny’s favorite,” Cynthia said, smiling and carefully placing the loaded plate Jenny’s outstretched hand. “She mentioned that you folks were having a little going-away party this afternoon. We have more than enough for the people who are here. I thought you might want a piece or two for dessert.”

Joanna knew she’d been suckered. There was no way to turn down Mrs. Sawyer’s generous offer without making a public fool of herself.

“Why, thank you, Cynthia,” Joanna said. “That’s very thoughtful.”

Clutching the plate, Jenny scampered triumphantly up the stairway to safety while her moth stalked after her.

“Jennifer Ann Brady, you’re a brat,” Joanna muttered when she knew they were both safely out of Cynthia’s hearing.

“But, Mom,” Jenny protested. “I didn’t ask for it. Mrs. Sawyer offered. And not just because it’s my favorite. She asked me if you liked it, too. I said you did. You do, don’t you?”

Joanna laughed in spite of herself. “Oh, all right,” she said. “I suppose I do like it. Praline cake is one of those things that grows on you . . . in more ways than one.”

Juanita Grijalva sat at her wobbly Formica-topped kitchen table wearing only a bra and slip, waiting Lucy, her brother’s wife, to finish ironing her best dress. The starched cotton was so well worn it had taken on a satiny sheen. Juanita knew the dress was getting old. She could tell that from the gradually changing texture of the aging material, but glaucoma kept her from being able to see it.

Thee navy-blue dress—brand-new then and with all the stickers still pinned to the sleeve—had been a final, extravagant gift from the lady whose house Juanita had cleaned and whose washing and ironing she had done for twenty years before failing vision had forced her to stop working altogether. If Juanita had worked as a maid in the hotel or as a cook in the county hospital, she might have had a pension and some retirement income instead of just a blue dress. But it was too late to worry about that now.

Juanita had lain awake in her bed all night long, worrying about the coming interview. She had finally fallen asleep just before dawn when her brother’s rooster next door started his early-morning serenade. Now, as noon approached and with it time for Frank Montoya to come pick her up, Juanita found herself so weary that she could barely stay awake. Her sightless eyes burned. Her shoulders ached from the heavy weight of her sagging breasts. To relieve the burden, she heaved them up and rested them on the edge of the table,

“Who’s coming for you?” Lucy asked.

“Maria Montoya’s son. Frank. He used to be city marshal over in Willcox, but he works for the Sheriff’s Department now. He told me last night that he’d drive me up to Bisbee to see that new woman sheriff.”

Lucy plucked the dress off the ironing boar then held it up, examining the garment critic under the light of the room’s single ceiling fix Finding a crease over one pocket, she put the dr back on the board.

Lucy was quiet for some time, seemingly concentrating on eradicating the stubborn crease in Juanita’s dress. She and her husband, Reuben, had long since decided that their no-good nephew, Jorge, was a lost cause. He drank too much—at least he always used to. For years he had bounced from job to job, frittering away whatever money he made. Not only that; anyone his age who would mess around with a girl as young as Serena Duffy had been wasn’t worth the trouble.

Finally, Lucy set the steaming iron back down on the cloth-covered board. “I don’t know why you bother about him,” she said. “It’s not going to do any good.”

“I bother because I have to,” Juanita replied reproachfully, staring with unblinking and unseeing eyes in the direction of her sister-in-law’s voice. “Because Jorge’s my son. If I don’t stick up for him, who will?”

Nobody, Lucy thought, but she didn’t say it. She had already said far too much.

“Besides,” Juanita added a moment later, if Jorge to goes to prison, I’ll never see Ceci and Pablo again.”

Lucy nodded. “I suppose that’s true,” she said.

Lucy Gomez understood about grandchildren. She loved her own to distraction and spoiled them as much as she was able. Living next door, she saw had how it grieved Juanita when her daughter-in-law ­took Ceci and Pablo and moved to Phoenix. But then there had still been the possibility of seeing hem occasionally. With Jorge accused of Serena’s murder, things were much worse than that now.

Lucy plucked the carefully ironed but threadbare dress off the ironing board and handed it to Juanita. “You’re right,” Lucy said, shaking her head. “I feel sorry for the kids. They’re the only reason I’m here.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Eva Lou Brady shooed her daughter-in-law out of the kitchen at High Lonesome Ranch. “Get out of here, Joanna,” she ordered. “Either go load your things into the car or sit down and take it easy, but get out from under hand and foot. I’ve certainly spent enough time in’ this kitchen to know how to put a Sunday dinner, together.”

No doubt Eva Lou Brady knew Joanna’s kitchen, backward and forward. Joanna and Andy had lived’ in the house on High Lonesome Ranch for years now, but there were still times when Joanna felt: like an outsider—as though the kitchen continued to belong to her mother-in-law rather than to the new generation of owners. It was the house where she and Jim Bob had raised their son, Andrew.

A country girl born and bred, Eva Lou had loved the cozy Sears Craftsman bungalow, but the whole time she had lived there, she had harbored the secret dream of one day living in town. When Andy and Joanna were ready to start looking for a place of their own, Eva Lou was the one who had broached the radical idea of selling the ranch to the younger couple so she and Jim Bob could move into Bisbee proper.

Right that minute, though, with her face red and with a steaming pot on every burner of the stove, Eva Lou Brady was clearly in her element and back on her home turf.

Joanna lingered in the doorway for a moment, watching her mother-in-law’s efficient movements. Eva Lou cooked without ever wasting a single mo­tion. She never seemed hurried or rushed. Her skillful gestures and businesslike approach to meal preparation always left Joanna feeling like an inept home ec washout.

“At least I could set the table,” Joanna offered lamely.

“Jenny will help with that, won’t you?” Eva Lou asked, pausing with the rolling pin poised over the biscuit dough and raising a flour-dusted eyebrow in Jenny’s direction.

“How many places?” Jenny asked.

“Seven,” Eva Lou answered. “Grandma Lathrop phoned after church to say that she’s coming, too.”

“That’s a switch,” Joanna said. “If she changed her mind about coming to dinner, maybe she’ll change her mind about Phoenix as well.”

Eva Lou shook her head. “I doubt it. I asked her again, but she said no—that she’s meeting someone here in Bisbee over the weekend, but she wouldn’t say who.” Eva Lou shot Joanna an inquiring glance. “You don’t suppose Eleanor Lathrop has a boyfriend after all these years, do you?”

“Boyfriend?” Joanna echoed. “My mother? You’ve got to be kidding. Whatever makes you say that?”

Eva Lou shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Eleanor hasn’t been at all herself the last few weeks. She’s been acting funny—funnier than usual, I mean. It’s like she’s carrying around some secret that she can barely keep from spilling.”

“Spilling secrets is my mother’s specialty,” Joanna said shortly. “I don’t think she’s ever kept one in her life, certainly not anybody else’s. And a boyfriend? No way. It couldn’t be.”

“Your mother’s an attractive woman,” Eva Lou returned. “And stranger things than that have happened, you know.”

Joanna considered for a moment, then shook her head. “I agree,” she said, “It would be strange, all right.”

With that, banished from the kitchen, Joanne did as she’d been told. She retreated to her bedroom for one last check of her luggage to make sure she had packed everything she would need. When it came time to open the closet door, she hesitated, knowing that the sight of it would leave her with a quick clutch of emptiness in her stomach that had nothing at all to do with hunger.

At her mother’s insistence, Joanna had finally found the strength to take Andy’s clothing to a church-run used-clothing bank down in Naco, Sonora. Although half of the closet was now totally empty, Joanna’s clothing was still jammed together at end of a clothes rod while the other end held nothing but a few discarded hangers. Two months had passed, but Joanna could not yet bring herself to hang her own clothes on the other side of that invisible line that divided her part of the closet from that she still thought of as Andy’s. The time for claiming and rearranging the whole closet would come eventually—at least, she hoped it would—but for now, she still wasn’t ready.

As she turned away from the closet, there was a gentle tap on the bedroom door. “Joanna, Eva Lou says you may need some help packing your stuff out to the car,” Jim Bob Brady said. “Are you ready or do you want to do it later?”

“Why not now?” Joanna returned. “Things are pretty well gathered up.”

Her father-in-law carried two suitcases while Joanna took one. She also lugged along a briefcase crammed full of paperwork in need of her perusal. “I’ve never been away from home this long before. I’m probably bringing too much,” she said, as they e1 the luggage into her county-owned Blazer.

“Better to take too much than too little,” Jim Bob replied.

When all of the suitcases were stowed in the back, Jim Bob Brady closed the cargo gate, then looked at Joanna quizzically. “Seems to me like Peoria’s pretty much flat. And last time I was up in those parts, I do believe all the streets were paved. So how come you’re going up there in a Blazer, for Pete’s sake? You’d get a whole lot better gas mileage from that little Eagle of yours than you will from this gas-guzzling outfit.”

“It’s a requirement,” Joanna explained. “The academy suggests that, wherever possible, students bring along the vehicle they’ll actually be using once they’re out patrolling on their own. That way, when it comes time to practicing pursuit driving, not only will we be learning pursuit-driving techniques, we’ll also be learning the real capabilities of our own vehicles.”

“Oh,” Jim Bob said, scratching his almost bald head. “Guess it does make sense, after all. Need anything else hauled out?”

Joanna shook her head. “That’s it.”

“I’m gonna go on back inside, if you don’t mind,” he said. “Maybe I can watch a few minutes of pro football before Eva Lou makes me turn off the set to come eat dinner. She’s real stubborn that way. Fussy. To hear her tell it, you’d think food eaten in front of a television set is plumb wasted.”

“It does seem like a waste of good cooking to me,” Joanna said.

Jim Bob Brady squinted at her and then grinned. “You women are all alike, aren’t you?” he muttered. “Not a hair of difference.”

As he marched off toward the house, Joanna stayed behind, enjoying the warmth of the early-afternoon sunshine and the crystal-clear blue of the sky overhead. It had been a strange fall with unseasonably cold and wet weather in October. Now, the week before Thanksgiving, warm, shirt-sleeve temperatures had returned, even in the high desert country of southeastern Arizona.

Joanna stood near the Blazer and gazed off across the broad, flat stretches of the Sulphur Springs Valley toward the broken blue lines of mountain that surrounded it—the Chiricahuas and the Swisshelms to the north and east, the Dragoons directly to the north, and behind her, to the west, the steeply rising foothills of the Mules.

As clearly as if it were yesterday, she remembered the first time she had stood in almost that same spot with Andy while he had pointed out those same mountain ranges. Andy had loved High Lonesome Ranch when he had lived there as a boy with his parents. Because he had cared about the place so much and because it had been so much a part of him, Joanna had loved it, too—at least she had when she was sharing it with Andy. Now, though, she wasn’t so sure. Trying to run the place by herself seemed overwhelming at times.

The half-formed thought was interrupted when the dogs—Tigger and Sadie—scrambled out from under the empty swing, leaped off the porch, and came bounding through the gate, barking wildly. Ranch dogs traditionally earn their keep by functioning as noisy early-warning systems. Over the chorus of barking, Joanna couldn’t tell what kind of vehicle was making its way up the road, but knew for sure that someone was coming. Moments later Frank Montoya’s blue Chevy pickup rounded the corner, followed by the two noisy dogs.

“Quiet, you two,” Joanna ordered. “It’s okay.”

The dogs headed for the porch while Frank stopped the truck a few feet away from Joanna. “Some watchdogs you’ve got there,” he observed through a partially opened window. “Do they actually chase bad guys or just break their eardrums.”

“Maybe a little of both,” she answered. “How’s it going, Frank?”

Chief Deputy Frank Montoya climbed down out of the truck. He was a tall, spare, easygoing Hispanic. The youngest son in a family of no-longer migrant workers, he was the first person on either side of his family tree ever to attend college. Working full-time and taking mostly night courses, Frank had completed his associate of arts degree at Cochise College. Now, commuting back and forth to Tucson and taking only one or two classes a semester, he was slowly working away at attaining a B.A. in law enforcement.

Well into his mid-thirties, Frank’s neatly trimmed crew-cut hairline was showing definite signs of receding. Friends, including Joanna Brady, teased him, telling him that when he was finally ready to graduate, he wouldn’t have any hair left to wear under his mortarboard.

Frank hurried around his truck to the rider’s side. He opened the door to reveal a short but massive Mexican woman whose iron-gray hair had been plaited into a long, thin braid. It was wrapped into a dinner-plate-sized halo and pinned to her head. Her features were stolid, impassive. When Frank opened the door to help her out, she stepped ­down heavily and stood, splay-footed and unsmiling, with her hands folded across her broad waist as Joanna moved forward to greet her. An over-sized black purse dangled from the crook of one elbow. The other hand gripped a large manila envelope.

“You must be Mrs. Grijalva,” Joanna said, holding out her hand.

The older woman responded by turning toward the sound of Joanna’s voice, but she made no move to return the handshake. Cataracts leave visible signs of their damage. The glaucoma that had robbed Juanita Grijalva of her vision had left no apparent blemish on her eyes themselves. She looked past Joanna with a disconcerting, unblinking stare.

After a moment, Joanna reached out and grasped Juanita’s free hand. “I’m Sheriff Brady,” she said.

Juanita Grijalva frowned briefly in Frank’s direc­tion. “She sounds very young to be sheriff,” she said.

“Young, yes,” Frank put in hurriedly, “but she’s also very smart. After all, she hired me, didn’t she?”

“Your mother seems to think that was smart,” Juanita observed.

Frank’s face reddened slightly, and Joanna laughed aloud at his discomfort. The awkward moment passed, and Joanna took the woman’s arm. “Won’t you come into the house?” she asked.

A few steps into the yard, Juanita Grijalva stopped short, sniffing the air. “I smell cooking,” she said. “I think we are disturbing you. We should go and come back another time.”

“No,” Joanna insisted. “It’s all right. My mother-in-law is cooking dinner, but it isn’t quite ready yet. There’s time for us to talk. Come on inside.”

Unwilling to usher the newcomers into the house through the laundry room and kitchen, Joanna led Juanita Grijalva and Frank Montoya around to the seldom-used front door, which happened to be locked. Joanna rang the bell. Moments later, Jenny threw open the door.

“What are you doing out here?” the child asked.

“We have company, Jenny,” Joanna answered smoothly. “You know Mr. Montoya, and this is Mrs. Grijalva.”

As they came into the room, Jim Bob switched off the television set and retreated to the kitchen. Nodding to Frank, Jenny moved away from the door, but her piercing blue eyes remained focused on the older woman.

“I know you, too,” she said. “You’re Ceci’s grandmother. Last year you came to our Brownie meeting and taught us how to make tortillas.”

Juanita nodded. “One of the boys at school said that Ceci’s mother got killed up in Phoenix,” Jenny continued. “Is that true?”

“Yes,” Juanita said. “My daughter-in-law is dead.”

“Is Ceci going to come back to Bisbee, then? We both had Mrs. Sampson in second grade. Maybe we’d be in the same class again.”

Juanita shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Ceci and her brother are staying in Phoenix right now. With her other grandparents.”

“Jenny,” Eva Lou called from the kitchen. “You haven’t finished setting the table.”

Jenny started toward the kitchen, then turned back to Juanita Grijalva. “When you see Ceci, tell her hi for me, would you?”

Juanita nodded again. “I’ll be sure to tell her.”

Jenny left the living room without seeing the stray tear Juanita Grijalva brushed from her weathered cheek as Joanna eased the older woman down onto the couch. “I may not, you know.”

“May not what?” Joanna asked.

“Ever see Ceci again. Or Pablo, either. And that’s why I’m here,” she said. “Because I don’t want to lose them, too.”

Joanna had settled herself on the hassock. Jolted by Juanita’s last comment, Joanna leaned forward, her face alive with concern. “Has someone threatened your grandchildren?” she asked.

“If my son is convicted of killing Serena,” Juanita said, “I’ll never see them again. The Duffys—Serena’s parents—will see to it. Even now, they won’t let me to talk to them on the telephone. I got a ride all the way to Phoenix and back, but they wouldn’t even let me go to Serena’s funeral. Ernestina’s brother was there, and he told me to go away. They didn’t let me see the kids then, either.”

‘Mrs. Grijalva,” Joanna began, but Juanita hurried on, ignoring the interruption.

“Do you know anything about my son’s case?” asked.

Joanna shook her head. “Not very much. It was all happening right around the time my own hus­band died, and I’m afraid I wasn’t paying attention to much of anything else.”

“‘That’s all right.” Juanita picked up the bulging envelope she had dropped on the couch beside her and handed it to Joanna. “Here are all the articles from the papers. The ones we could find. Lucy, my sister-in-law, read them to me. And she made copies. You can keep those.”

“But, Mrs. Grijalva,” Joanna objected. “I don’t know what you expect me to do with them. You have to understand, this isn’t my case. It happened up in Phoenix, didn’t it?”

“Peoria.”

“Peoria, then. My department only has jurisdiction over things that happen in Cochise County. We have no business meddling in a case that happened that far away from here.”

“You don’t want to help me, then?”

“Mrs. Grijalva, please believe me. It’s not a matter of not wanting to,” Joanna said. “I can’t.”

“His lawyer wants him to plea-bargain,” Juanita Grijalva said.

Joanna nodded. ‘That probably makes sense. If he can plead guilty to a lesser charge, sometimes that’s better than taking chances with a judge and jury.

“But he didn’t do it,” Juanita insisted firmly. “No matter what they say, I know my Jorge didn’t kill Serena. She may have given him plenty of cause, but he didn’t do it.”

“Even so, there’s nothing I can do about it,” Joanna responded. “It’s not my case. I’m sorry.”

Juanita Grijalva rose abruptly to her feet. “We could just as well go, then, Frank. This isn’t doing any good.”

Frank hurriedly took Juanita’s arm and led her back out of the house. Still holding the unop­ened envelope, Joanna watched as Chief Deputy Montoya guided the grieving woman out the door, across the porch, and down the steps. Following behind them, Joanna resisted the temptation to say something more, to make an empty promise she had no power to keep. Even though her heart ached with sympathy, there was nothing she could do to help Jorge Grijalva. To claim otherwise would have been dishonest.

Frank was busy maneuvering his pickup out of the yard when Eleanor Lathrop’s elderly Plymouth Volare came coughing up the road. Seeing her daughter standing just inside the front door, Eleanor parked in an unaccustomed spot nearer the front door than the back.

“Who was that?” she asked, bustling up onto the porch. “Frank Montoya?”

“Yes,” Joanna answered. “Frank and a friend of his mother’s. Her name’s Juanita Grijalva. Her son has been accused of murdering his ex-wife up in Phoenix. Juanita thought I might be able to help him, but I had to tell her I can’t.”

“If it happened up in Phoenix, of course you can’t do anything about it,” Eleanor said huffily. “What a stupid idea! I can’t imagine why they’d even bother to ask. Frank certainly knows better than that.”

“Frank wasn’t the one doing the asking, Mother,” Joanna said.

“But he brought her here, didn’t he?” Eleanor returned. “And on your day off, too. I don’t know about him, Joanna. He just doesn’t seem all that sharp to me. And why you’d want to go out on a limb and make one of the men who ran against you your chief deputy ...”

This was ground Joanna and Eleanor had already covered. Several times over. “Never mind, Mother,” Joanna said, opening the door and herding Eleanor into the house. “Let’s go on out to the kitchen and see if Eva Lou needs any help.”

Just then, Marianne and Jeff’s sea-foam-green VW pulled into the yard and stopped at the back gate. When Joanna went out through the laundry room to open the door, she was still holding Juanita’s Grijalva’s envelope.

Joanna stood by the dryer for a moment, examining the still-sealed package. The best course of action would probably be to throw it away without ever knowing what was inside. Still, Jorge Grijalva’s mother had gone to a lot of trouble to bring her that material. Didn’t Joanna owe the woman at least the courtesy of reading it?

True, the case was 140 miles outside Joanna’s jurisdiction. And no, she couldn’t possibly do anything about it, but there was no law against her reading about it. What could that hurt?

Making up her mind, Joanna dropped the envelope onto the dryer next to her car keys and purse, then she hurried outside to greet the last of Eva Lou’s invited guests.

CHAPTER 5

The dinner went off surprisingly well, from the moment they sat down at the dining room table until the last morsel of Cynthia Sawyer’s praline cake had been scraped off the dessert plates.

AII through the meal, Joanna couldn’t help noticin­g that Eva Lou was right. Eleanor Lathrop wasn’t at all herself. After the initial wrangle about Frank Montoya, she had curbed her critical tongue. She was so uncommonly cheerful—so uncharacteristi­cally free of complaint—that Joanna found herself wondering if it was the same woman. Once, when Eleanor was laughing gaily—almost flirtatiously—at one of Jim Bob’s folksy, time-worn quips, Joanna found herself speculating for just the smallest frac­tion of a moment if there was a chance Eva Lou was right after all. Maybe there was a new man in Eleanor Lathrop’s life.

In the end, though, Joanna attributed her mother’s lighthearted mood to the fact that there were nonfamily guests at dinner. She reasoned that Jeff and Marianne’s presence must have been enough to force Eleanor Lathrop to don her company manners. Whatever the cause of her mother’s sudden transformation, Joanna welcomed it.

The festive dinner with its good food and untroubled conversation helped ease Joanna past her earlier misapprehensions about being away at school. Jenny and the ranch would be in good hands while Joanna was gone. There was no need for her to worry. She said her flurry of good-byes, to everyone else in the house; then Jenny alone walked Joanna out to the loaded Blazer.

“Ceci and I are almost alike, aren’t we,” Jenny said thoughtfully.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, my daddy’s dead, and her mom is. She’s staying with her grandparents. While you’re away, I’ll be staying with mine.”

The situations of the two girls weren’t exactly mirror images. Joanna was on her way to take a course that would help her be a better police officer, Jorge Grijalva was in jail, charged with murdering his former wife. Jenny’s surviving grandparents had just enjoyed a companionable meal with one another. Ceci Grijalva’s maternal grandparents had refused to allow Juanita Grijalva to attend her own daughter-in-law’s funeral. But Joanna didn’t mention any of that to Jenny.

“You’re right,” she said simply. “You have a lot in common.”

“Could we go see her?”

“Who?”

“Ceci. Next weekend when I come up for Thanksgiving?”

Joanna was carrying her purse and keys. Jenny was carrying Juanita Grijalva’s envelope. As far as Joanna could see, it hadn’t been opened. Joanna found herself wondering if Jenny had been hanging around the living room eavesdropping while Joanna had been talking to Juanita.

“Why would you want to do that?” Joanna asked guardedly.

Jenny shrugged. “Almost everyone else in Mrs. Lassiter’s class has two parents. There are two kids whose parents are divorced. I’m the only one whose dad is dead.”

“So?”

“At Daddy’s funeral, everybody said how sorry they were and that they knew how I felt. But they didn’t, not really. They weren’t nine years old when their fathers died. If I tell Ceci I know how she feels, it’ll be for real, ‘cause she’s nine years old and so am I. Maybe if I tell her that, it’ll make her feel better.”

They had reached the truck by then. Joanna wrenched open the door and tossed both her purse and Juanita’s envelope into the car. Now she leaned down and pulled Jenny toward her, grasping her in a tight hug while a sudden gust of wind blew a whisp of Jenny’s long, smooth hair across Joanna’s cheek.

“Did anyone ever tell you that you’re one special kid?” Joanna asked, holding Jenny at arm’s length so she could look the child in the eye.

“Daddy did sometimes,” Jenny answered wistfully.

“He was right,” Joanna said. “You’re right to be concerned about Ceci. And I’ll see what I can do. If I can find out where she’s staying, maybe we could take her out to do something with us while you’re there.”

“Like going to Baskin-Robbins?” Jenny asked.

“Just like,” Joanna said with a fond smile. Joanna had spent days and nights agonizing in advance about this leave-taking. Now the moment came and went with unexpected ease and without a single tear. “I’ll miss you, Mommy,” Jenny said hugging Joanna one last time. “I’ll miss you, but I’ll be good. I promise. Girl Scout’s honor.”

“I’ll be good, too,” Joanna replied.

“Promise?”

“I promise. I’ll see you Wednesday night.”

Jenny stepped away from Joanna’s grasp. “What’s the name of the place we’re stay’ again?”

“The Hohokam Resort Hotel.”

“Does it have a swimming pool?”

“It’s supposed to.”

“Come on, Sadie and Tigger,” Jenny said to the dogs. Then she looked innocently back up at h mother. “Me and the dogs’ll race you to the corn of the fence.”

Joanna’s grammar-correcting reflex was automatic. “The dogs and I will race you,” Joanna countered.

Jenny grinned up at her impishly. “Does that mean I get to drive?” she asked.

The nine-year-old humor was subtle. It took a moment for Joanna to realize she’d been had, that for the first time in months, Jennifer Ann Brady had actually cracked a joke. And then Joanna was grinning, too.

“Last one to the corner is a rotten egg,” she said, bounding into the Blazer and turning the key in the ignition. Jenny and the dogs took off running. Joanna let them win, but only just barely.

After passing them, Joanna glanced in the mirror. The last thing she saw as she drove away from High Lonesome Ranch was Jenny, standing on tip­-toe by the corner of the fence and waving her heart out. Her long hair blew in blond streamers behind her, while the two dogs danced around her in crazy circles.

“She’s going to be all right,” Joanna marveled to herself as the Blazer jounced across the rutted track that led out to High Lonesome Road.

A couple of stray tears leaked out the corners of her eyes as she drove, but they were welcome tears—not at all the kind she had expected.

Maybe it was trying to drive two hundred miles on a full stomach. Maybe it was the warm autumn sun slanting in on her through the driver’s window. By the time Joanna had driven as far as Eloy, she could barely stay awake. She stopped at a truck stop for coffee break. Reaching for her purse, she caught sight of Juanita Grijalva’s envelope and carried it along into the coffee shop. As she slipped into a booth, she tore open the flap.

Sipping coffee, she shuffled through the stack of copied newspaper articles. Even though most of the articles were undated, as soon as she started reading them, the chronology of events was clear enough.

The first article was little more than three inches long. It reported that the partially clad, badly beaten body of an unidentified woman had been found in the desert a few miles south of Lake Pleasant. The grisly remains had been discovered by a group of high school students ditching school for an afternoon keg party. Officers from the Peoria Police Department were investigating.

The next article identified the murdered woman as Serena Maria Grijalva, formerly of Bisbee. At age twenty-four, she was the divorced mother of small children.

Joanna stopped short when she read Serena’s age. Twenty-four was very young to have a nine year-old daughter. Joanna herself had been eighteen years old when she got pregnant and nineteen ­when Jenny was born. Serena had been four whole years—four critical years—younger than that.

The article noted that Peoria Police Detective Carol Strong, primary investigator in the case, indicated that detectives were following up on several leads and that they expected a break soon.

The third article was longer—more of a feature story. Because it was situated at the top of the page, the date showed, and Joanna’s eye stopped there. September 20. The day of Andy’s funeral. No wonder that two months later, most of this was news to Joanna. That nightmare week in September she had been far too preoccupied with the tragedy in her own life to be aware of anyone else’s. Still, the realization that Serena and Andy had died within days of each other put a whole new perspective on the words she was reading.

When Serena Maria Grijalva left her children home alone last Wednesday night to go four blocks down the street to the WE-DO-YU-DO Washateria, she had every intention of coming right back with a grocery dart loaded with clean laundry. Instead, the twenty-four-year-old single mother was bludg­eoned to death in a desert area a few miles north of Sun City.

The mother’s absence did not initially alarm the Grijalva children, nine-year-old Cecelia and six­-year-old Pablo. Ever since moving to Phoenix from Bisbee several months earlier, they had been latch-key kids. That morning, when they awoke and discovered their mother wasn’t home, they dressed themselves, fixed breakfast, packed lunches, and went to school. And when they came home that af­ternoon and their mother still hadn’t returned, the y helped themselves to a simple dinner of microwaved hot dogs and refried beans.

Almost twenty hours after she left home, Serena Grijalva’s supervisor from the Desert View Nursing Home stopped by the house, checking to see why Serena hadn’t reported for work. Only then did the resourceful Grijalva children realize something was wrong.

A call from the nursing home brought the chil­dren’s maternal grandmother into the case. A missing person report from her filed with the Pe­oria Police Department resulted in authorities making the connection between the two abandoned children and an unidentified dead woman found earlier that afternoon in the desert north of Peoria.

Joanna found herself blinking back tears as she read. She was appalled at the idea of those two little kids being left on their own for such a long time. They had coped with an independence and resourcefulness that went far beyond their tender years, but they shouldn’t have had to, Joanna thought, turning back to the article.

The tragedy of the Grijalva children is only one shocking example of an increasingly widespread problem of the nineties—that of latchkey kids. Cute movies notwithstanding, children in this country, are routinely being left alone in shockingly large numbers.

Most children who are left to their own devices don’t go to luxury hotels and order room service. The houses they live in are often squalid and cold. There is little or no food available. They play with matches and die in fires. They play with guns and die of bullet wounds. They become involved in the gang scene because gang membership offers a sense of belonging that they don’t find at home.

Sometimes the parents are simply bad parents. In some cases the neglect is caused or made worse by parental addiction to drugs or alcohol. Increas­ingly, however, these children live in single-parent, households where the family budget will simply not stretch far enough to include suitable day care ar­rangements. Divorce is often a contributing factor.’

Although Serena Grijalva’s divorce from her forty-three-year-old husband was not yet final, Ce­celia and Pablo Grijalva fall into that last category.

“Serena was determined to make it on her own,” says Madeline Bellerman, the attorney who helped Serena Grijalva obtain a restraining order against her estranged husband. “She had taken two jobs—one full-time and one part-time. She made enough so she didn’t have to take her kids and go home to her parents, but beyond food and rent there wasn’t room for much else. Regular day care was obvi­ously well outside her budget.”

Serena’s two minor children have now been placed in the custody of their maternal grandpar­ents, but what happened to them has forced the community to examine what options are available to parents who find themselves caught in similar circumstances. This is the first in a series of three articles that will address the issue of childcare for underemployed women in the Phoenix area. Where can they turn for help? What options are available to them?

“You want a refill?”

Joanna looked up. A waitress stood beside the booth, a steaming coffeepot poised over Joanna’s cup.

“Please.”

The waitress glanced curiously at the article on the table as she poured. “That was awful, waddn’t it, what happened to those two little kids? Whatever became of them anyway? Their father’s the one who did it, isn’t he?”

Joanna lifted the one page and glanced at the next one. EX-HUSBAND ARRESTED IN WIFE’S SLA the headline blared.

“See there?” the waitress said. “I told you.” She marched away from the table, and Joanna picked up the article.

Antonio Jorge Grijalva, age 43, was arrested today and booked into the Maricopa County Jail on an open charge of murder in connection with the bludgeon slaying of his estranged wife two weeks ago. He surrendered without incident outside his place of employment in southeastern Arizona. Sources close to the investigation say Mr. Grijalva has been a person of interest in the case since the beginning.

Two City of Peoria police officers, Detectives Carol Strong and Mark Hansen, traveled over four hundred miles from Peoria to Paul Spur to make the arrest. The Cochise County Sheriff’s Depart­ment assisted in collaring the suspect, who was placed under arrest in the parking lot of a lime plant as he was leaving work.

Court records reveal that the slain woman had sworn out a no-contact order against her estranged husband four days before her disappearance and death. The fact that the suspect was not at work on the night in question and could not account for his whereabouts caused investigators to focus in on him very early in the investigation.

Mr. Jefferson Duffy, father of the slain victim, when contacted at his home in Wittmann, ex-pressed relief. “We’re glad to know he’s under lock and key. The wife and I have Serena’s two kids here with us. With Jorge on the loose like that, there was no telling what might happen next.”

“Hey, good-looking, you’re working too hard. I’d be glad to buy you a piece of pie to go with that coffee.”

Joanna heard the voice and looked up, not sure the words were intended for her. An overall-clad, cigarette-smoke-shrouded man was leering at her fro m the booth next to hers in a section reserved for professional truck drivers.

“You look kind of lonesome sitting there all by yourself.”

“I was reading,” Joanna said.

“I noticed. So what are you, some kind of student?”

Joanna looked down at her left hand. She still wore her wedding ring and the diamond engagement ring she had received as a gift only after Andy was already in the hospital dying. Seeing them made the pain of Andy’s loss burn anew. She looked from her hand back to the man in the booth. If he had noticed either the gesture or the pain engendered by his unwanted intrusion, it made no difference.

“I’m not a student, I’m a cop,” she answered evenly.

“Sure you are.” He nodded. “And I’m a mon­key’s uncle. I’ve got me a nice little double bed in my truck out there. I’ll bet the two of us could make beautiful music together.”

For a moment, Joanna was too stunned by his rude proposition to even think of a comeback. Instead, she shuffled the stack of papers back into the envelope. “Which truck is that?” she asked.

“That big red, white, and blue Peterbilt out the in the parking lot.” He grinned; then he tipped the bill of his San Diego Padres baseball cap in her direction. “Peewee Wright Hauling at your service ma’am.”

“Where are you headed?”

Peewee Wright beamed with unwarranted confidence. “El Paso,” he said. “After I sleep awhile that is. It’d be a real shame to have to sleep alone, don’t you think?”

“I see you’re wearing a ring, Mr. Wright,” Joanna observed. “What would Mrs. Wright have to say about that?”

Peewee waved his cigarette and shook his head. “She wouldn’t mind none. Me and her have one of them open marriages.”

“Do you really?” Joanna stood up, gathering her belongings and her check. “The problem is, I don’t believe in open marriages.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out one of her newly printed business cards. She paused beside his table, fingering the card, looking at the words that were printed there: JOANNA BRADY, SHERIFF, COCHISE COUNTY, BISBEE, ARIZONA.

“And how will you be going to El Paso?” she asked.

“Interstate Ten from Tucson,” he said.

Joanna nodded. “That’s about what I figured,” she said, dropping the card on his table. “If I were you, I’d check my equipment for any violations before I left here. I’d also be very careful not to speed once I got inside Cochise County.”

She waited while he reached out one meaty paw to pick up the card and read it.

Because the Arizona Highway Patrol, not the Sheriff’s Department, patrols the segment of I-10 that slices through Cochise County from the Pima County line to the New Mexico border, Joanna knew her words to be nothing more than an empty threat. Still, when the man read the text on her business card, he blanched.

He was still holding the card as Joanna walked away. If nothing else, the experience would give him something to think about the next time he tried to pick up a lone woman minding her own business in a truck stop.

CHAPTER SIX

Had Joanna been going to the Hohokam Resort Hotel that evening instead of later on during the week, it would have been easy to find. The only high-rise for miles around, the twelve-story newly finished hotel towered over its low-rise Old Peoria neighbors, its layers of lighted windows glowing like beacons as Joanna made her way north on Grand Avenue.

The Arizona Police Officers Academy turned out to be directly across the street. It was also across the railroad tracks, however, and the only way to get there was to cross the railroad at Olive and then turn in off Hatcher.

The triangular site was located in an area that seemed to be zoned commercial. Along both Seventy-fifth and Hatcher, a high brick wall marked two sides of the property. Entry was gained through an ornate portal. Two cast-concrete angels stood guard on either side of the drive. An arched lintel rose up and over behind them. One of the angels had lost part of a wing—probably to vandals—while the other was still intact. The words GOD IS LOVE were carved into the lintel itself.

The verse wasn’t exactly in keeping with the mission of a police academy, but Joanna knew where it came from—a man named Tommy Tompkins. The Reverend Tommy Tompkins.

For years the APOA had limped along in the deteriorating classrooms of a decommissioned high school in central Phoenix. Only recently had the academy moved to its new home in Peoria. The APOA’s good fortune came as a result of Tommy’s fall from grace. He and his two top lieutenants had been shipped off to federal prison on income tax evasion convictions. As his religious and financial empire collapsed, the property he had envisioned as world headquarters of Tommy Tompkins International had fallen into the hands of the Resolution Trust Corporation.

On fifteen acres of donated cotton field, Tommy had planned to build not only a glass-walled ca­thedral, but also the dorms and classrooms that would have allowed him to indoctrinate a cadre of handpicked missionaries. By the time Tommy Tompkins International fell victim to the RTC, the planned complex was only partially completed. The classroom wing along with dormitories, a temporary residence for Tommy himself, as well as a few outbuildings were all that were or ever would be finished.

When the place went up for grabs, the state of Arizona had jumped at the chance to buy the property at a bargain-basement price since the site lay directly in the path of a proposed freeway extension. While awaiting voter approval of road-building monies, the state had leased the complex to the multijurisdictional consortium running APOA. The transaction was accomplished with the strict understanding that little or no money would be spent on remodeling. As a result, angels continued to guard the entrance of the place where police officers from all over the state of Arizona received their basic law enforcement training.

Maybe guardian angels aren’t such a bad idea, Joanna thought as she drove across the vast, patchily lit parking lot to the place where two dozen or so cars were grouped together near two buildings connected by breezeways and laid out in a long L.

The two-story structure built along one leg had the regularly spaced windows, doors, and lights that indicated living quarters. That was probably the dorm. Although lights were on in some of the rooms, there was no sign of life. The other building was only one story high. From the spacing of rooms, Joanna surmised that one contained classrooms. She parked the car and walked to the end of the dorm nearest the classroom building. There she found a wall-mounted plaque that said OFFICE along with an arrow that pointed toward the other building.

Past a closed wrought-iron gate, Joanna discovered that the last door on the classroom building was equipped with a bell. Even though no lights were visible inside, she rang the doorbell anyway.

“I’m out here on the patio. Who is it?” a male voice called from somewhere outside, somewhere vend that iron gate.

“Joanna Brady. Cochise County,” she answered. When she tried the gate, it fell open under her hand. Across a small patio between the two buildings, she could see a cigarette glowing in the dark.

“It’s about time you got here,” the man growled in return. “You’re the last of the Mohicans, you know. You’re late.”

Nothing like getting off on the right foot, Joanna ought. “Sorry,” she said. “My paperwork said suggested arrival times were between four and six. If whoever wrote that meant required, they should have said so.”

The man ground out his cigarette and stood up. In the dim light, she couldn’t make out his features, but he was tall—six four or so—and well over two hundred pounds. He smelled of beer and cigarettes, and he swayed slightly as he looked down at her.

“I wrote it,” he said. “In my vocabulary, suggested and required mean the same thing. Sug­gested maybe sounds nicer, but I wanted you all checked in by six.”

“1 see,” Joanna replied. “I’ll certainly know better next time, won’t I?”

“Maybe,” he said. “We’ll see. Come on, then,” he added. “Your key’s inside. Let’s get this over with so I can go back to enjoying the rest of my evening off.”

Instead of heading back through the gate, he stomped across the patio to a sliding door that opened into the office unit. Before entering, he paused long enough to drop his empty beer can into an almost full recycling box that sat just outside the door. Shaking her head, Joanna followed. This was a man who could afford to take some civility lessons from Welcome Wagon.

Joanna had expected to step inside a modest motel office/apartment. Instead, she found herself a huge but sparsely furnished living room that looked more like a semi-abandoned hotel lobby than it did either an office or an apartment.

Leaving Joanna standing there, the man headed off toward what turned out to be the kitchen. “I’ll be right back,” he said, over his shoulder, but he was gone for some time, giving Joanna a chance to examine the room in detail.

It seemed oddly disjointed. On the one hand, the ornate details—polished granite floors, high ceilings, gilt cove moldings, floor-to-ceiling mirrors and lush chintz drapes—seemed almost palatial, while the furnishings were Danish-modern thrift store rejects. Between the living room and kitchen was a huge formal dining room with a crystal chandelier. Instead of a polished dining table and chairs, the room contained nothing but a desk and chair. And not a fancy one, at that. The battered, gun-metal-gray affair, its surface covered with a scatter of papers, was almost as ugly as it was old.

The man emerged from the kitchen carrying a bottle of Coors beer. He paused by the desk long enough to pick up a set of keys. When he was barely within range, he tossed them in the general direction of where Joanna was standing. Despite his poor throw, she managed to snag them out of air.

“Good reflexes.” He nodded appreciatively. “You’re in room one oh nine,” he said. “It’s in the next building two doors down, just on the other side of the student lounge. The gold key is to your room. The silver one next to it opens the lounge door in case you need to go in after I lock it up for the night. The little one is for the laundry. It’s way down at the far end of the first floor, last door on left. There’s a phone in your room, but it’s only local calls. For long distance, there’s a pay phone in the lounge.”

‘Thank you ...” Joanna paused. “I don’t believe I caught your name.”

“Thompson,” he said. “Dave Thompson. I run this place.”

“And you live here?”

He took a sip of beer and gave Joanna an appraising look that stopped just short of saying, “You want to make something of it?” Aloud he said, “Comes with the job. They actually hired a dorm manager once, but she got sick. They asked me to handle the dorm arrangements on a tempo­rary basis, and I’ve been doing it ever since. It’s not that much work, once everybody finally gets checked in, that is.”

Another little zinger. This guy isn’t easy to like, Joanna thought. Stuffing the keys in her pocket, she started toward the door.

“Class starts at eight-thirty sharp in the morning,” Dave Thompson said to her back. “Not eight thirty-five or eight-thirty-one, but eight-thirty. There’s coffee and a pickup breakfast in the student lounge. It’s not fancy—cereal, toast, and juice is all—but it’ll hold you.”

Joanna turned back to him. “You’ll be in class?”

He raised the bottle to his lips, took a swallow, and then grinned at her. “You bet,” he said “I teach the morning class. We’ve got a real good-looking crop of officers this time around.”

Joanna started to ask exactly what he meant by that, but she thought better of it. Her little go-round with Peewee Wright at the truck stop earlier that afternoon had left her feeling overly sensitive. Thompson probably meant nothing more or less than the fact that the students looked as though they’d make fine police officers.

“Any questions?” Thompson asked.

Joanna shook her head. “I’d better go drag my stuff in from the car and unpack. I want to put everything away, shower, and get a decent night’s rest.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Wouldn’t do at all for you to fall asleep in class. Might miss some important.”

As Joanna hurried out the door and headed for her car, she was suddenly filled with misgivings. If Dave Thompson was indicative of the caliber of people running APOA, maybe she had let herself in for a five-and-a-half-week waste of time.

After lugging the last of her suitcases into the room and looking around, she felt somewhat better. Although the room wasn’t as large or as nice as Dave Thompson’s, it was done in much the same style with floor-to-ceiling mirrors covering one wall of both the room and the adjacent bath. The ceilings weren’t nearly as high as they were in the office unit, and the floor was covered with a commercial grade medium-gray carpet. The bathroom, however, was luxury itself. The floor and counter tops were polished granite. The room came complete with both a king-sized Jacuzzi and glass-doored shower. All the fixtures boasted solid brass fittings.

Looking back from the bathroom door to the modest pressboard dresser, desk, headboard, and nightstand, Joanna found herself giggling, struck by the idea that she was standing in a cross between a castle and Motel 6.

Joanna spent the next half hour emptying her suitcases and putting things away. Her threadbare bath towels looked especially shabby in the upscale bathroom. When she was totally unpacked, she treated herself to a long, hot bath with the Jacuzzi heads bubbling full blast. Lying there in the steaming tub, supposedly relaxing, she couldn’t get the Grijalva kids out of her mind. Ceci and Pablo. They were orphans, all right. Twice over. Their mother was dead, and their father might just as well be.

Sighing, Joanna clambered out of the tub into the steam-filled room and turned on the exhaust fan, hoping to clear the fogged mirrors. The first whirl the blades brought a whiff of cigarette smoke to her nostrils. A moment later it was gone. Ob­viously, her next door neighbor was a smoker.

After toweling herself dry, Joanna pulled on a robe. By then it was only nine o’clock. Instead of getting into bed, she walked over to the desk and picked up Juanita Grijalva’s envelope, which she had dropped there in the course of unpacking. Settling at the desk, she emptied the envelope and read through all the contents, including rereading i. articles she had read earlier that afternoon in the truck stop.

This time, she took pen and paper and jotted notes as she read, writing down names and addresses as they appeared in the various articles. The Grijalvas—Antonio Jorge, Ceci, and Pablo; Jefferson Davis and Ernestina Duffy of Wittmann; of Peoria Detectives Carol Strong and Mark Hansen; Butch Dixon, bartender of the Roundhouse Bar and Grill; Anna-Ray Melton, manager of the WE-DO-YU-DO Washateria; Madeline Bellerman, Serena’s attorney.

Those were the players in the Serena Grijalva case—the ones whose names had made it into the papers. If Joanna was going to do any questioning on her own, those were the people she’d need contact.

It was after eleven when she finally put the contents back in the envelope, climbed into bed, and turned off the light. As she lay there waiting for sleep to come and trying to decide what, if anything, she was going to do about Jorge Grijalva, another faint whiff of cigarette smoke wafted her room.

Her last thought before she fell asleep was that whoever lived in the room next door had to be a chain smoker.

Joanna woke early the next morning, dressed, and hurried down to the lounge, hoping to call Jenny before she left for school. Unfortunately there was a long line at the single pay phone. All her classmates seemed to have the same need to call home.

While she waited, Joanna helped herself to cof­fee, juice, and a piece of toast. A newspaper had been left on the table. She picked up the paper and read one of the articles. A power-line installation, crew, working on a project southwest of Carefree, had stumbled across the decomposing body of a partially clad woman. Officers from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department were investigating the death of the so-far unidentified woman as an ap­parent homicide.

Joanna’s stomach turned leaden. Some other as yet unnamed family was about to have its heart torn out. Unfortunately, Joanna Brady knew exactly that felt.

“You can use the phone now,” someone said.

Joanna glanced at her watch. Ten after eight. “That’s all right,” she said. “My daughter’s already left for school. I don’t need it anymore.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Within minutes of the beginning of Dave Thompson’s opening classroom lecture, Joanna was ready to pack her bags and go back home to Bisbee. Her first encounter with the bull-necked Thompson hadn’t left a very good impression. The lecture made his stock go down even further.

Listening to him talk, Joanna could close her eyes and imagine that she was listening to her chief deputy for operations, Dick Voland. The words used, the opinions voiced, were almost the same. Why had she bothered to travel four hundred miles round-trip and spend the better part of six weeks locked up in a classroom when she could have the same kind of aggravation for free at home just by going into the office? The only difference between listening to Dave Thompson and being lectured Dick Voland lay in the fact that after a day of wrangling with Dick Voland, Joanna could at least go home to her own bed at night. As far as beds were concerned, the ones in the APOA dormitory weren’t worth a damn.

The man droned on and on. Joanna had to fight lay awake while Dave Thompson paced back and forth in front of the class. Joanna had spent years listening to Jim Bob Brady’s warm southern drawl. Thompson’s strained down-home manner of speech sounded put on and gratingly phony. Wav­ing an old-fashioned pointer for emphasis, he delivered a drill-instructor-style diatribe meant to scare off all but the most serious-minded of the assembled students.

“Look around you,” he urged, waggling the pointer until it encompassed all the people in the room. “There’ll be some faces missing by the time we get to the end of this course. We generally expect a washout rate of between forty and fifty percent, and that’s in a good class.”

Joanna raised her eyebrows at that. The night before, Dave Thompson had said this was a good class. This morning, it evidently wasn’t. What had ringed his mind?

“You may have noticed that there aren’t any tele­vision sets in those rooms of yours,” Thompson continued. “No swimming pool or tennis courts, either. This ain’t no paid vacation, my friends. You’re here to work, plain and simple. You’d by God better get that straight from the get-go.

“There may be a few party animals in the crowd. If you think you can party all night long and then drag ass in here the next morning and sleep through the lectures, think again. Days are for classwork, and nights are for hitting the books. Do make myself clear?”

Careful not to move her head in any direction, Joanna kept her eyes focused full on Thompson’s beefy face. Peripheral vision allowed her a glimpse of movement in the front row where a young blond-haired man nodded his head in earnest agreement. The gesture of unquestioning approval was so pronounced it was a wonder the guy’s teeth didn’t rattle.

“Over the next few weeks, you’ll be working with a staff made up from outstanding officers who have been selected from jurisdictions all over the state,” Thompson was saying. “These are the guys who, along with yours truly, will be conducting most of the classroom instruction. We’ll be overseeing some of the hands-on training as well as evaluating each student’s individual progress. All told, the instructors here have a combined total of more than a hundred twenty years of law enforcement experience. Try that on for size.”

He paused and grinned. “You know what they say about experience and treachery, don’t you? Wins out over youth and enthusiasm every time. Count on it.”

The room was quiet. No doubt the comment had been meant as a joke, but no one laughed. While Thompson consulted his notes, Joanna noticed the young guy in the front row was busily nodding once again.

“That brings us to the subject of ride-alongs.” Thompson resumed. “When it comes time for those, you’ll be doing them with experienced on-duty officers from one or more of the participating agencies here in the Valley. By the way, be sure to sign the ride-along waivers in your packet and return them to me by the end of the day.

“This is particular class—procedures—is my baby. It’s also the backbone of what we do here. As you all know, the academy is being funded partially by state and federal grants and partially by the tuition paid by each participating agency. Tuition doesn’t come cheap. The state maybe picked up this fine facility for a song from the folks at the RTC, but we’ve gotta pay our way. Here’s how it works, folks. Listen up.

“Each person’s whole tuition and room rent is due and payable on the first day of class. In other words, today. The minute you all walked through our door this morning, that money was gone. The academy doesn’t do refunds. You quit tonight? Too bad. The guy who hired you—the one who sent you here in the first place—doesn’t get to put that money back in his departmental budget. That means anybody who drops out turns into a regular pain in the bottom line.

“In other words, boys and girls, if you blow this chance, you end up outta here and outta law enforcement, too. Nobody in his right mind’s gonna give a quitter another opportunity.

“For those of you who don’t blow it, for those of don’t who make the grade, when you go back to your various departments, you’re more than welcome to do things the way they do them there. Here at the academy, we have our own procedures, and we do things our way. The APOA way. In other words, as that great American hero, A. J. Foyt, has been quoted as saying, ‘my way or the highway.’

“It’s like you and your ex-wife own this little dog, and the doggie spends part of the time at her house and part of the time at yours. Maybe your ex doesn’t mind if the dog climbs all over her damn furniture, but you do. When the dog goes to her house, he does whatever the hell he damn well pleases, but when he’s at your house, he lives by your rules. Got it?”

Joanna didn’t even have to look to know that guy in the front row was nodding once again. Disgusted by what she’d heard, and convinced the whole training experience was destined to be nothing more than five weeks of hot air, Joanna folded her arms across her chest, sighed, and sank down in her seat. Next to her at the table sat a tall, slender young woman with hair almost as red as Joanna’s

Using one hand to shield her face from speaker’s view, the other woman grinned in Joanna’s direction then crossed both eyes. Wary that Thompson might have spotted the derogatory gesture, Joanna glanced in the speaker’s direction, he was far too busy pontificating to notice the humorous byplay. Relieved, Joanna smiled back. Somehow that bit of schoolgirlish high-jinks made Joanna feel better. If nothing else, it convinced that she wasn’t the only person in the room who regarded Dave Thompson as a loudmouthed, over-bearing jerk.

“Our mission here is to turn you people into police officers,” Thompson continued. “It’s not easy, and it’s gonna get down and dirty at times. If you two ladies think you’re going to come through course looking like one of the sexy babe lawyers t used to be on L.A. Law, you’d better think again.”

The redhead at the table next to Joanna scribbled a hasty note on a yellow notepad and then pushed it close enough so Joanna could read it. “Who has time to watch TV?” the note asked.

This time Joanna had to cough in order to suppress an involuntary giggle. She had never watched the show herself, but according to Eva Lou, L.A. Law had once been a favorite with Jim Bob Brady. Eva Lou said she thought it had something to do with the length of the women’s skirts.

Thompson glowered once in Joanna’s direction, but he didn’t pause for breath. “Out on the streets it’s gonna be a matter of life and death—your life or your partner’s, or the life of some innocent bystander. Every department in the state has a mandate to bring more women and minorities on board. Cultural diversity is okay, I guess,” he added, sounding unconvinced.

“It’s probably even a good thing, up to a point—as long as those new hires are all fully qualified people. And that’s where the APOA comes in. The buck stops here. The training we offer is supposed to help separate the men from the boys, if you will. The wheat from the chaff. The people who can handle this job from the wimps who can’t. We’re going to start that process here and now. Could I have a volunteer?”

Pausing momentarily, Thompson’s gray eyes scanned the room. Naturally the guy in the front row, the head-bobber, raised his hand and waved it in the air. Thompson ignored him. Tapping the end of the pointer with one hand, he allowed his gaze to come to rest on Joanna. A half smile tweaked the corners of his mouth.

“My mother always taught me that it was ladies before gentlemen. Tell the class your name.”

“Joanna,” she answered. “Joanna Brady.”

“And where are you from?”

“Cochise County,” Joanna answered.

“And how long have you been a police officer now?” he asked.

“Less than two weeks.”

Thompson nodded. “That’s good. We like to get our recruits in here early—before they have time to learn too many bad habits. And why, exactly, do you want to be a cop?”

Joanna wasn’t sure what to say. Each student in the class wore a plastic badge that listed his or her name and home jurisdiction. The badges gave no indication of rank. Hoping to blend in with her classmates, Joanna wasn’t eager to reveal that, although she was as much of a rookie as any of the others, she was also a newly elected county sheriff.

“Well?” Thompson urged impatiently.

“My father was a police officer,” she said flatly. “So was my husband.”

Thompson frowned. “That’s right,” he said. “I remember your daddy, old D. H. Lathrop. Good man. And your husband’s the one who got shot in the line of duty, isn’t he?”

Joanna bit her lip and nodded. Andy’s death well as its violent aftermath had been big news back in September. Both their pictures and names had been plastered in newspapers and on television broadcasts all over Arizona.

“And unless I’m mistaken, you had something to do with the end of that case, didn’t you, Mrs. Brady? Wasn’t there some kind of shoot-out?”

“Yes,” Joanna answered, recalling the charred edges of the single bullet hole that still branded the pocket of her sheepskin-lined jacket.

“So it would be safe to assume that you’ve used a handgun before—that you have some experi­ence?” The rising inflection in Dave Thompson’s voice made it sound as if he were asking a question, but Joanna understood that he already knew the answer.

A vivid flush crept up her neck and face. The last thing Joanna wanted was to be singled out from her classmates, the other academy attendees. Dave Thompson seemed to have other ideas. He focused on her in a way that caused all the other people in the room to recede into the background.

“Yes,” she answered softly, keeping her voice level, fending off the natural urge to blink. “I suppose it would.”

Thompson smiled and nodded. “Good,” he said. “You come on up here then. We’ll have you take the first shot, if you’ll excuse the pun.” Visibly ap­preciative of his own joke, he grinned and seemed only vaguely disappointed when Joanna didn’t re­spond in kind.

Unsure what the joke was, Joanna rose resolutely from her chair and walked to the front of the classroom. Her hands shook, more from suppressed an­ger at being singled out than with any kind of nervousness or stage fright. Weeks of public speak­ing on the campaign trail had cured her of all fear of appearing in front of a group of strangers.

The room was arranged as a formal classroom with half a dozen rows of tables facing a front podium. Behind the podium stood several carts loaded with an assortment of audiovisual equipment. As he spoke, Thompson moved one cart holding a video console and VCR to a spot beside the podium. He knelt for a few moments in front of the cart and selected a video from a locked storage cabinet underneath. After inserting the video in the VCR, Thompson reached into another locked storage cabinet and withdrew a holstered service revolver and belt.

“Ever seen one of these before?”

The way he was holding the weapon, Joanna wasn’t able to see anything about it. “I’m not sure; she said.

“For your information,” Thompson returned haughtily, “it happens to be a revolver.”

His contemptuous tone implied that he had misread her inability to see the weapon as total ignorance as far as guns were concerned. “It’s a thirty-eight,” he continued. “A Smith and Wesson Model Ten military and police revolver with a four inch barrel.”

He handed the belt and holstered weapon to Joanna. “Here,” he said. “Take this and put it on. Don’t be afraid,” he added. “It’s loaded with blanks.”

Removing the gun from its holster, Joanna swung open the cylinder. One by one, she checked each of the rounds, ascertaining for herself that they were indeed blanks, loaded with paper wadding, rather than metal bullets. Only after reinserting the rounds did she look back at Dave Thompson, who was watching her with rapt interest.

“So you do know something about guns.”

“A little,” she returned with a grim smile. “And you’re right. They are all blanks. I hope you don’t mind my checking for myself. My father always taught me that when it comes to loaded weapons, I shouldn’t take anybody else’s word for it.”

There was a rustle of appreciative chuckles from a few of Joanna’s fellow classmates. Dave Thomp­son was not amused. “What else did your daddy teaich you?” he asked.

“One or two things,” Joanna answered. “Now what do you want me to do with this pistol?”

“Put it back in the holster and strap on the belt.”

The belt—designed to be used on adult male bodies—was cumbersome and several sizes too large for Joanna’s slender waist. Even fastened in the smallest hole, the heavy belt slipped down until it rested on the curve of her hips rather than staying where it belonged. Convinced the low-slung gun shade her look like a comic parody of some old-time gunfighter, Joanna felt ridiculous. As she struggled with the awkward belt, she barely heard what Thompson was saying.

“You ever hear of a shoot/don’t shoot scenario?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re about to. Here’s what we’re gonna do. Once you get that belt on properly, I want you to spend a few minutes practicing removing the weapon from and returning it to the holster. No matter what you see on TV, cops don’t spend all their time walking around holding drawn sidearms in their hands. But when you need a gun, you’ve gotta be able to get it out in a hell of a hurry.”

Joanna attempted to do as she was told. By th­en the belt had slipped so far down her body, she was afraid it was going to fall off altogether. Each time she tried to draw the weapon, the belt jerked up right along with the gun. With the belt sliding loosely around her waist, she couldn’t get enough leverage to pull the gun free of the holster. It took several bumbling tries before she finally succeeded in freeing the gun from the leather.

“Very good,” Dave Thompson said at last. “Now, here’s the next step. I want you to stand right here beside this VCR. The tape I just loaded is one of about a hundred or so that we use here at the academy. In each one, the camera is the cop. The lens of the camera is situated at the cop’s eye level. You’ll be seeing the incident unfold through the cop’s eyes, through his point of view. You’ll see what he sees, hear what he hears.

“Each scenario is based on a real case,” he added. “You’ll have the same information available to you as the cop did in the real case. At some point in the film—some critical juncture in the action—you will have to decide whether or not to draw your weapon, whether or not to fire. It’s up to you. Ready?”

Joanna nodded. Aware that all eyes in the room were turned on her, she waited while Thompson checked to be sure the plug was in and then switched on the video.

For a moment the screen was covered with snow, then the room was filled with the sound of a mumbled police radio transmission. When the picture came on, Joanna was seeing the world through though the front windshield of a moving patrol car, one that was following another vehicle—a Ford Taurus—down a broad city street. Moments after the tape started, the lead vehicle, carrying two visible occu­pants, signaled for a right-hand turn and then pulled off onto a tree-lined residential side street. Seconds later the patrol car turned as well. After it followed the lead vehicle for a block or two, there was the brief squawk from a siren as the officer signaled for the other car to pull over.

In what seemed like slow motion, the door of the patrol car opened and the officer stepped out into the seemingly peaceful street. The camera, posi­tioned at shoulder height, moved jerkily toward the topped car. In the background came a steady murmur of continuing radio transmissions. Standing just to the rear of the driver’s door, the camera bent down and peered inside. Two young men were seated in front.

“Step out of the car please,” the officer said, speaking over the sound of loud music blaring from the radio in the Taurus.

The driver hesitated for a moment, then moved to comply. As he did so, his passenger suddenly slammed open the rider’s door. He leaped from the car and went racing up the toy-littered sidewalk of a nearby home. For a moment, the point of view toyed beside the door of the stopped Taurus, but the scene on screen swung back and forth several times, darting between the passenger fleeing up the sidewalk and the driver who was already raising his hands in the air and leaning over the hood of his vehicle.

“How come you stopped us?” the driver whined. “We wasn’t doin’ nothin’.”

By then Joanna had lost track of everything but what was happening on the screen. A sudden knot tightened in her stomach as she was sucked into the scene’s unfolding drama. She felt the responding officer’s momentary but agonizing indecision. His hesitation was hers as well. Should he stay with the one suspect or go pounding up the sidewalk after the other one?

Joanna’s mind raced as she tried to sort things out. As the fleeing suspect ran toward the house she caught a glimpse of something in his right hand. Was it a stick or a tire iron? Or was it a gun? From the little she had seen, there was no way to know for sure, but if one suspect carried a gun, chances were the other one did, too.

The kid with his hands in the air couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen. He wasn’t a total innocent. No doubt he’d been involved in previous run-ins with the law. He knew the drill. Without being ordered to do so, he had automatically raised his hands, spread his legs, and bent over the hood of the car. Most law-abiding folks don’t react quite that way when stopped for a routine traffic violation. They are far more likely to start rummaging shakily through glove compartments, searching frantically for elusive insurance papers and vehicle registrations.

As the camera’s focus switched once more from the driver back to the fleeing suspect, Joanna again glimpsed something in his hand. Again she couldn’t identify what it was, not for certain.

“Stop, police!” the invisible officer bellowed. “Drop it!”

The shouted order came too late. Even as the voice thundered out through speakers, the fleeing suspect vaulted up the steps, bounded across the porch, flung open the screen door, and shouldered his way into the house.

At once the camera started moving forward, jerking awkwardly up and down as the cop, too, raced up the sidewalk and onto the porch. Taking a hint from what was happening on-screen, Joanna began trying to wrest the Smith & Wesson out of the holster. Once again, the gun hung up on the balky leather while the belt and holster twisted loosely around her waist. Only after three separate tries did she manage to draw the weapon.

When she was once more able to glance back at the screen, the cop/camera had taken up a defensive ­position on the porch, crouching next to the wall of the house just to the right of the screen door. “Come out,” the cop yelled. “Come out with your hands up!”

Just then Joanna heard the sound of a woman’s voice

coming from inside the house. “Who are you?” the rising female voice demanded. “What are you doing in my house? What do you want? What…”

Suddenly the voice changed. Angry outrage aged in pitch and became a shriek of terror. “No. Don’t do that. Don’t please! No! Oh, no! Nooooooooo!”

“Come out,” the officer ordered again. “Now!”

By then Joanna had the gun firmly in hand. She read her feet into the proper stance and raised the revolver. The Smith & Wesson seemed far heavier than the brand-new Colt 2000 she owned personally, the one she was accustomed to using in daily target practice. Even holding the gun both hands, it wasn’t easy to keep her aim steady.

Suddenly the screen door crashed open. The first thing that appeared beyond the edge of the door was an arm holding the unmistakable silhouette of a drawn gun followed by the dark figure of the man who was carrying it.

As the suspect burst out through the open doorway, Joanna bit her lip. Aiming high enough for a chest shot, Joanna eased back on the trigger. At once the classroom reverberated with the roar of the blank cartridge. Immediately the room filled with the smell of burned cordite, and the video screen went blank.

Holding the VCR’s remote control, smiling and nodding, Dave Thompson stood up and looked around the room. “The lady seems to know how to shoot,” he said. “But the question is, did she do the right thing?”

The guy in the front row was already waving hand in the air. “The officer never should have left the vehicle,” he announced triumphantly. “He should have stayed where he was and radioed for backup.”

That same sentiment was echoed in so many words by most of the rest of the class. While debate over Joanna’s handling of the incident swirled around her, she resumed her seat.

The main focus of the discussion was what the officer should have done to take better control the situation. “He for sure should have called for backup,” someone else offered. “What if the other guy was armed, too? While the officer was chasing the one guy, the other one could have turned on him as well.”

The consensus seemed to be that, in the heat of the moment, the officer may not have done everything in his power to avert a possible tragedy. The same held true for Joanna.

Finally Dave Thompson called a halt to any further discussion. “All right, boys and girls,” he said. “That’s enough. Now we’re going to see whether or not Officer Brady’s response was right or wrong.”

With a flick of the remote, the video came back to life. The man in the video image stepped out from behind the screen door. His right hand was fully extended, and the gun was now completely visible. He let the door slam shut behind him and then turned directly into the lens of the camera. As soon as he did so, there was a collective gasp from the entire room.

To her horror Joanna saw that he was holding something in his left hand, something else in addition to the gun in his right—a baby. A screaming, diaper-clad baby was clutched in the crook of his left elbow. As he moved toward the camera, the suspect held the frightened child chest high, using baby as a human shield.

A wave of goose bumps swept down Joanna’s body. Sickened, she realized she had deliberately aimed for the suspect’s chest when she fired off her round. Had this been a real incident—had that been a real bullet—it would have sliced through the child. The baby would have died.

From the front of the classroom Dave Thompson looked squarely at Joanna. A superior, knowing grin played around the corners of his mouth.

“I guess you lose, little lady,” he said, tapping the pointer in his right hand into the palm of left. “Better luck next time.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

That whole first day was spent on lectures. By the time class was out for the evening, Joanna was more than ready. On the way back to her room, Joanna stopped by the lounge long enough to buy a diet Coke from the vending machine and to make a few phone calls from the pay phone.

The soda was more rewarding than the phone calling was. No one was available to talk to her, not at home and not at the office, either. Both Frank Montoya and Dick Voland were out of the office, and the answering machine out at the High Lonesome clicked on after the fourth ring. Joanna hung up without leaving a message.

Back in her room, Joanna settled herself at the desk and tried to wade into the seventy-six pages of text Dave Thompson had assigned to be read prior to class the following day. It didn’t work. Chilling flashbacks from the shoot/don’t shoot scenario kept getting in the way of her concentration. Finally, exasperated, she tossed the book aside, picked up her notebook, and began scribbling a hasty letter:

Dear Jenny,

I’m supposed to be studying, but I can’t seem concentrate. Claustrophobia, I think. You do know what that is, don’t you? If not, ask Grandpa Brady to explain it.

The only windows in this place are right up almost at the ceiling. They’re called clerestory windows—the kind they have in church. They let light in, but they’re too high for someone inside to see out. It reminds me of a jail....

As soon as Joanna wrote the word “jail,” she remembered Jorge Grijalva. And his two children.

Turning away from the letter, Joanna paged back through her notebook beyond the day’s lecture notes until she found the page of notations she had written down based on the articles in Juanita Grijalva’s envelope. For several moments, she sat staring at the names that were written there. Then, making up her mind, she opened the nightstand drawer and pulled out the phone book. After all, since this was Peoria, a call to the Peoria Police Department ought to be a local call.

But when she dialed the number, Carol Strong wasn’t available, and Joanna didn’t have nerve enough to leave a message. Instead, she looked the other two businesses that were mentioned there. At the WE-DO-YU-DO Washateria, Anna‑Ray Melton wasn’t expected in until seven the fol­lowing morning, and none of the white page listings for Melton gave the name Anna-Ray. Next, Anna tried asking for Butch Dixon at the Roundhouse Bar and Grill. Raucous country/western music wailed in the background.

‘Who do you want? Butch?” the person who answered the phone shouted into the receiver. “Sure, he’s here, but he’s busy. It’s Happy Hour, you know. Can I take a message?”

“No, thanks,” Joanna said. “I’ll call back later.”

She put the phone down. Then, while she was still looking at it, it rang, startling her. “Joanna?” a man’s voice said. “I’ll bet you’re cracking the books, aren’t you.”

“Not exactly. Who is this?”

“Leann Jessup,” she said. “Your tablemate in class. And unless I’m mistaken, we’re next-door neighbors here in the dorm, too. Do you have plans for dinner? Most of the guys are going out for Italian but I’m not wild about pasta. Or the men in the class, either, for that matter. How about you?”

The unexpected invitation of going off to dinner with Leann Jessup was tempting. Maybe Joanna should take the call as a hint and drop the whole idea of stopping by the Roundhouse. Maybe Joanna’s tentative plan of questioning Butch Dixon, the bartender there, was a fruitcake notion that ought to be dropped like a hot potato.

For only a moment Joanna considered inviting Leann to come along with her, but the words never made it out of her mouth. If she went to the bar, talked to Butch, and ended up making a botch of things, why bring along a relative stranger to witness her falling flat on her face?

“Sorry,” Joanna said. “I wish you had called ten minutes ago.”

Leann seemed to take the rejection in stride. “No problem,” she said. “I’ll figure out some alternative. See you tomorrow.”

Joanna put down the phone and pulled on jeans and a sweater. Armed with an address from the phone book and her notes, she headed for downtown Peoria and the Roundhouse Bar and Grill. Based on the name, she expected the address would take her somewhere close to the railroad track. Instead, Roundhouse derived from the shape of the building itself, which was, in fact, round. The railroad part had been grafted on as an afterthought in the form of an almost life-size train outlined in orange neon tubes along the outside of the building.

This must be the place, Joanna thought to herself, pulling into the potholed and vehicle-crowded parking lot. As she parked the Blazer, she could almost hear Eleanor Lathrop’s sniff of disapproval. Women in general and her daughter in particular weren’t supposed to visit bars to begin with. And they certainly weren’t supposed to venture those kinds of places alone. “A woman who goes into bars without an escort is asking for trouble,” Eleanor would have said.

So are women who run for the office of sheriff, Joanna thought with a rueful smile. Squaring her shoulders, she climbed out of the truck and headed for the entrance. Just inside the door, she paused to get her bearings, allowing her ears to adjust to thee noisy din and her eyes to become accustomed to the dim light.

The joint was divided almost evenly between dining area and bar. The smoke-filled bar was jammed nearly full while the restaurant was largely empty. In both sections, railroad memorabilia—from fading pictures and travel posters to crossing signs—decorated every inch of available wall space. A platform, dropped from the ceiling, ran around the outside of the room and supported the tracks for several running electric trains that hummed overhead at odd intervals. One wall was devoted to a big-screen television where a raucous group of sports-minded drinkers were jockeying for tables in advance of a Monday-night football game. Above the din of the pregame announce­ments, a blaring jukebox wailed out Roger Miller’s plaintive version of “Engine, Engine Nine.”

The semicircular bar in the dead center of the room was jammed with people. Seeing the crowd, Joanna’s heart fell. She had hoped that by now the Happy Hour crowd would have gone home and the Roundhouse would be reasonably quiet. A slow evening would give her a chance to talk to the bartender. Under these busy circumstances, that wouldn’t be easy.

With a sigh Joanna made for the single unoccu­pied stool she had spotted at the bar. If she sat there, she might manage to monopolize the bartender long enough for a word or two. He was a short, round-shouldered man with a shaved head, heavy black eyebrows, and a neatly trimmed, pencil-thin mustache. The name tag pinned to his shirt said BUTCH.

Butch Dixon appeared in front of Joanna almost before she finished hoisting herself onto the seat, shoving a wooden salad bowl overflowing with popcorn in her direction. “What’ll it be?” he asked.

“Diet Coke,” she said.

“Diet Pepsi okay?”

“Sure.”

He went several steps down the bar, filled two glasses with ice, and then added liquid using a push-button dispenser. When he returned, he s both glasses in front of Joanna. “That’ll be a buck,” he said.

Joanna dug in her purse for money. “I only asked for one,” she said.

Butch Dixon grinned. “Hey, don’t fight it, lady,” he said. “It’s Happy Hour and Ladies’ Night both. You get two drinks for the price of one. You new around here?”

Joanna nodded.

“Well, welcome to the neighborhood.”

A cocktail waitress with a tray laden with empty glasses showed up at her station several seats away. While Butch Dixon hurried to take the used glasses and fill the waitress’s new orders, Joanna sipped her Diet Pepsi and surveyed the room. On first glance the Roundhouse appeared to be respectable enough, and, unlike the truck stop, no one tried to proposition her. She had finished one drink and was started on the other before Butch paused in front of her again.

“How’re you doing?” he asked.

“Fine. Is the food here any good?”

“Are you kidding? We were voted Best Bar Hamburgers in the Valley of the Sun two years in a row. Want one? I can bring it to you here, or you could move to the dining room.”

“Here,” she said.

“Fries? The works?”

After fighting sleep all morning, Joanna had skipped lunch at noontime in favor of grabbing a nap. Hungry now, she nodded.

“Have the Roundhouse Special then,” Butch said, writing her order down on a ticket. “It’s the best buy. How do you want it?”

“Medium.”

He nodded. “And seeing as how you’re new, I’ll throw in the Caboose for free.”

“What’s a Caboose?” Joanna asked.

“A dish of vanilla ice cream with Spanish peanuts and chocolate syrup. Not very imaginative, hut little kids love it.”

He came back a few moments later and dropped a napkin-wrapped bundle of silverware in front of her. “Just move here?” he asked.

There seemed to be a slight lull among the cus­tomers at the bar right then, and Joanna decided it was time to make her move. For an answer, Joanna shook her head and then pulled one of her business cards from her jeans pocket. She handed it to him.

“I’ll only be here for a few weeks. I’m attending police academy classes at the APOA just down the road,” she said.

“Oh, yeah?” he said, shoving the card into his pocket without bothering to look at it. “Some of those folks show up here now and then. For din­ner,” he added quickly. “Most of ‘em hang out in the dining room rather than in the bar, if you know what I mean. I guess they’re all afraid of what people will think.”

Joanna took a breath. “Actually, I came here today to talk to you.”

“To me?” Butch Dixon echoed with a frown “How come?”

“It’s about Serena Grijalva,” Joanna said quietly

Butch Dixon’s eyes hardened and the engaging grin disappeared. From the expression on his face, Joanna expected him to tell her to get lost and forget the Roundhouse Special. Just then someone a few stools down the bar tapped his empty beer glass on the counter.

“Hey, barkeep,” the impatient customer muttered. “A guy could thirst to death around here.”

Dixon hurried away. Thinking she had blown her chances of gaining any useful information, Joanna sat forlornly at the bar with her half-empty glass in front of her and wondered if there would have been a better way to approach him. Eventually, he came back with a platter laden with food.

“How come the sheriff of Cochise County is interested in Serena Grijalva?” he asked. “And why bother talking to me instead of Carol Strong, the detective on the case? Besides, you won’t want to hear what I have to say any more than she did.”

“This isn’t exactly an official inquiry,” Joanna answered. “I just wanted to check some things out.”‘

“Like what?”

“According to what it said in the paper, you were one of the last people to see Serena alive.”

“That’s right,” Butch Dixon answered. “Me and Serena’s ex-husband and a whole roomful of other people. Serena and her ex were having themselves a little heart-to-heart. We all heard them. You can see how private it is in here.”

Once again Butch was called down the bar while Joanna bit into her hamburger. That one bite told her that the Roundhouse Special lived up to its glowing advance billing.

Butch came back to stand opposite Joanna’s stool “How’s the burger?”

“It’s great. But tell me about Serena and Jorge Grijalva. They were having a fight?”

“Do you ever read Ogden Nash?” Butch asked.

Joanna was taken aback. “No. Why?”

“If you’d ever read ‘I Never Even Suggested It,’ you’d know it only takes one person to make a quarrel.”

“Only one of them was fighting? Which one?”

“Serena was screaming like a banshee. I guess she had a restraining order on him or something, hut he acted like a gentleman. Didn’t threaten her or anything. Didn’t even raise his voice. I felt sorry for the poor guy. All he was asking was for her to let the kids come to his mother’s for Thanksgiving dinner. It didn’t seem all that out of line to me.”

Again Butch was summoned away, this time by the cocktail waitress again. When he finally returned, Joanna was done with her hamburger. He picked up the empty platter and stood holding it, eyeing Joanna.

“I don’t care what the detectives and prosecutors say, I still don’t think he did it. After she stomped out the door, he sat here for a long time, all hunched over. He had himself a couple more drinks and both of those were straight coffee. He said he had to drive all the way back to Douglas to be there in time to work in the morning. Does that sound like someone who’s about to go knock off his ex-wife?”

Thoughtfully, Butch Dixon shook his head. “I’ll go get your ice cream,” he added. “You want coffee or something to go with it?”

“No. I’m fine.”

He walked away, carrying the dirty dishes. Joanna watched him go. That made two different people who were convinced of Antonio Jorge Grijalva’s innocence—a poetry-quoting bartender and the accused’s own mother.

Butch Dixon returned with the dish of ice cream. “Did the prosecutor’s office talk to you about any of this?” Joanna asked.

Dixon shook his head. “Naw. Like I said, the detective just brushed me off. She claimed that she had enough physical evidence to get a conviction.

“Like what?”

“She didn’t say. Not at the time. Later I heard about a possible plea bargain, and it pissed me off I wanted to see him fight it. I even called up his public defender and offered to testify. He wasn’t buying. I hate plea bargains.”

Thoughtfully, Joanna carved off a spoonful of ice cream. “There are two primary reasons for so many plea bargains these days. Are you aware of what they are?”

Butch rolled his eyes. “I have a feeling you’ going to tell me.”

“The first one is to keep the system moving. If the case is reasonably solid, the prosecutors may decide to go for a lesser sentence just to spare themselves the time and aggravation of going to trial.”

“And the second reason?”

“If the case is so weak they don’t think they’ll be able to get a conviction, they may go for a plea bargain as the best alternative to letting the guy walk. Maybe that’s what’s happened here.”

“Wait a minute,” Butch said. “Do you think that’s possible? Maybe the case is weak and that’s why they’re going for a plea bargain?”

“It isn’t really my case, but that’s what I’m trying find out,” Joanna said. “If it’s a strong case or if it isn’t.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Butch Dixon exclaimed, beaming at her. “I figured you were just like all the others. You let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, you hear?”

Joanna nodded. “Sure thing.”

He had paused long enough that now he was behind in his duties. Joanna finished her ice cream nil waited for some time, hoping he’d drop off her check. Finally, she waved him down. “Could I have my bill, please?”

“Forget it,” he said. “It’s taken care of.”

“What do you mean?”

“You ever been divorced?”

Joanna shook her head.

“I have,” Butch Dixon said. “Twice. Believe me, no matter what, the man is always the bad guy. I get sick and tired of men always getting walked on, know what I mean?”

“What does that have to do with my not paying for my hamburger?”

“Any friend of Jorge Grijalva’s is a friend of mine.”

CHAPTER NINE

Walking from the bar into the parking lot, Joanna was surprised by how warm was. Bisbee, two hundred miles to the south and east, was also four thousand feet higher in elevation. November nights in Cochise County had a crisp, wintery bite to them. By comparison, the evening air in Phoenix seemed quite balmy.

Once in the Blazer, Joanna sat for some time, not only considering what she had heard from Butch Dixon, but also wondering about her next move. Obviously, Butch was no more a disinterested observer than Juanita Grijalva was. Something in the bartender’s own marital past had caused him to be uncommonly sympathetic to Jorge Grijalva’s plight. Had he, in fact, called the man’s public defender with an offer to testify on Jorge’s behalf? That’s what Dixon claimed. In an era when most people don’t want to get involved, that in itself was rema­rkable.

So, in addition to his mother, Jorge Grijalva has at least one other partisan, Joanna thought. Despite Butch Dixon’s professed willingness to do so, how­ever, he would never be called to a witness stand to testify. Plea bargain arrangements don’t call for either witnesses or testimony. There would be no defense, and that seemed wrong. Somehow, without Joanna quite being able to put her finger on the way he had done it, Butch Dixon had caused the smallest hairline crack to appear in her previous conviction that Juanita Grijalva was wrong. Maybe her son was about to plead guilty to a crime he hadn’t committed.

It was only seven o’clock. The sensible thing to do would have been to head straight back to the dorm and put in a couple of hours reading the next day’s assignment. Instead, Joanna reached into the glove compartment and pulled out the detailed Phoenix Thomas Guide Jim Bob Brady had insisted she bring along. Even as she did it, Joanna knew what was happening. She was wading deeper and deeper into the muck. Inevitably. One little step at a time. Just like the stupid dire wolves at the La Brea tar pits, she thought.

Switching on the overhead light, she studied the map until she located the Maricopa County Jail complex at First and Madison. Then, she turned on the Blazer’s engine and pulled out of the parking lot, headed for downtown Phoenix.

Accustomed to Cochise County’s almost nonexistent traffic, Joanna was appalled by what awaited her once she turned onto what was euphemistically referred to as the Black Canyon Freeway. Even that late in the evening, both north and southbound traffic was amazingly heavy. And once she crossed under Camelback, southbound traffic stopped altogether. From there on, cars moved at a snail’s pace due to what the radio traffic reports said was a rollover semi, injury accident at the junction I-10 and I-17. That wreck, along with related fender-benders, had created massive tie-ups all around the I-17 corridor, the exact area Joanna had to traverse in order to reach downtown.

Continuing to try to decode the traffic reports, Joanna was frustrated by the way the information was delivered. The various freeways were all referred to by name rather than number, and most of them seemed to be named after mountains—Superstition, Red Mountain, Squaw Peak. If an out-of-town driver didn’t know which mountains were which and where they were located, the traffic ports could just as well have been issued in code.

Most of Joanna’s experience with Phoenix came from an earlier, less complicated, non-freeway era. At Indian School she left the freeway, resorting to surface streets for the remainder of the trip. She navigated the straightforward east-west/north-south grids with little difficulty once she had escaped the freeway-related gridlock.

She reached the jail late enough that there was plenty of on-street parking. After locking her Colt 2000 in the glove compartment, she stepped out of the Blazer and looked up at the lit facade of an imposing building.

Had Joanna not been a police officer, she might have liked it better. The Maricopa County Jail had received numerous architectural accolades, but for cops the complex’s beauty was only skin deep. The portico and mezzanine above the lighted entrance were eminently attractive from an aesthetic point view. Unfortunately, they were also popular with a number of enterprising inmates, several of whom had used those selfsame architectural details as a launching pad for well-planned escapes. Using rock climbing equipment that had been smuggled into the jail, they had rappelled down the side of the building to freedom.

Joanna stood on the street, eyeing the building critically and knowing that her own jail shared some of the same escape-prone defects. Old­-fashioned jails—the kind with bars on the win­dows—may not have been all that aesthetically pleasing, but at least they did the job.

Shaking her head, she walked into the building. Immediately upon entering, she was stopped by a uniformed guard seated behind a chest-high counter. “What can I do for you?” he asked, shoving his reading glasses up on top of his head and lowering his newspaper.

“I’m here to see a prisoner,” Joanna said.

The guard shook his head, pulled the glasses back down on his nose, raised the paper, and resumed reading. “Too late,” he said without looking at her. “No more visitors tonight. Come back tomorrow.”

Joanna removed both her I.D. and badge from her purse. She laid them on the counter and waited for the guard to examine them. He didn’t bother.

He spoke from behind the paper without even looking at them. “Like I said. It’s too late to see anybody tonight.”

“What about the jail commander?” Joanna said quietly. “You do have one of those, don’t you?

The guard lowered the paper and glanced furtively down at the counter. When his eyes focused on the badge lying in front of him, he frowned. “The commander went home already.”

“Then I’ll speak to whoever’s in charge.”

When he spoke again, the guard sounded exasperated. “Lady, I don’t know what’s the matter with you, but—”

“The matter,” Joanna interrupted, keeping voice firm but even, “is that I want to see a prisoner, and I want to see him tonight.”

With a glower, the guard folded his newspaper and tossed it into a cabinet under the counter. “What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t say,” she said, “because you didn’t ask. But it’s Brady. Joanna Brady. Sheriff Joanna Brady from Cochise County.”

The word sheriff did seem to carry a certain amount of weight, even with a surly, antagonistic guard. “And who is it you want to see?” he asked grudgingly.

“Antonio Jorge Grijalva,” she answered. “He’s charged with murdering his wife.”

“Even if you get in, the guy won’t see you,” the guard said. “Not without his attorney present.

“I believe he will,” Joanna answered. “All you have to do is tell him his mother sent me.”

Shaking his head and muttering under his breath, the guard reached for the phone and dialed a number. Less than ten minutes later, with the help of the jail’s night watch commander, Joanna was seated in a small prisoner interview room. Peering through the scratched Plexiglas barrier, she watched as Jorge Grijalva, dressed in orange inmate rails and soft slippers, was led into the adjoining room.

Joanna had studied all the articles in Juanita’s envelope. She knew that Serena had been twenty-four when she died and that her husband was almost twenty years older. At first glimpse, the man in the next room seemed far older than forty-three. His face was careworn. He was small, bowlegged, and slightly stooped, with the spareness that comes from years of hard labor and too much drinking. Dark, questioning eyes sought Joanna’s as he edged way into the plastic chair.

Who are you?” he demanded, picking up the phone on his side of the barrier. “What do you want?”

Joanna didn’t hear the questions. He had asked them before she had a chance to pick up the re­ceiver on her phone, but she knew what he wanted to know.

“I’m Joanna Brady,” she answered. “I’m the new sheriff down in Cochise County.”

“What’s this about my mother? Is something wrong with her?”

“No. Your mother’s fine.”

“Why are you here, then?”

“She wanted me to talk to you.”

Jorge leaned back in his chair. For a moment no thought he might simply hang up and ask to be returned to his cell. “Why?” he said finally.

“Your mother says you didn’t do it,” Joanna answered. “She says you’re innocent, but that you’re going to plead guilty anyway. Is that true?”

Jorge Grijalva’s face contorted into a scowl. “Go away,” he said. “I don’t want to talk to you. My mother’s a foolish old woman. She doesn’t know anything.”

“She knows about losing her grandchildren,” Joanna answered quietly. “If you go to prison for killing Serena, the Duffys will never let your mother see Ceci and Pablo again.”

In the garish fluorescent light, even through the scarred and yellowed Plexiglas window, Joanna could see the knuckles of his olive-skinned fingers turn stark white. For a long time, Jorge stared the table, gripping the phone and saying nothing. Then, after a time, he raised his gaze until his troubled eyes were staring directly into Joanna’s.

“My wife was a whore,” he said simply. “She sold herself for money and for other things as well. When I found out about it, I was afraid the same thing would happen to Ceci, to my daughter. I was afraid she’d turn Ceci into a whore, too. So I got drunk once and beat Serena up. The cops put me in jail.” He paused for a moment and studied Joanna before adding, “It only happened once.’

“And when was that?”

“Last year in Bisbee. Before she and the kids moved to Phoenix. Before she filed for a divorce.”

“What about now? What about this time?”

“I wanted the kids to come to Douglas for Thanksgiving. My mother hasn’t seen them since last spring. She misses them.”

“That doesn’t seem all that unreasonable. Why was Serena so angry then that night in the bar?”

Jorge looked surprised. “You know about that?”

Joanna nodded.

He shrugged. “She saw my truck.”

“Your truck?”

“I bought a new truck. A Jimmy. Not brand-new, but new to me. Serena said it wasn’t fair for me to have a new truck when she didn’t have any transportation at all, when she was having to walk to work. I tried to tell her that the other truck needed a new engine and that if I couldn’t get to work, I couldn’t pay any child support. It didn’t make any difference.”

“Speaking of kids. Did you see Ceci and Pablo that night?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Jorge Grijalva hung his head and didn’t answer.

“Why not?” Joanna repeated.

“Because I didn’t want them to know I was in town,” he said huskily. “Because Serena didn’t,” he added. “She said if the kids saw me there, they’d think we were getting back together, but we weren’t.”

“So you and Serena met at the bar to discuss ar­rangements for Thanksgiving?”

Jorge Grijalva shook his head. “Not exactly.”

“What then?”

“Serena was very beautiful,” he answered. “And she was much younger.... But you knew that, didn’t you?”

He paused and looked at Joanna, his features screwed into an unreadable grimace.

“Yes,” she said.

“I used to be good-looking, too,” Jorge said. “Back when I was younger.”

Again he stopped speaking. Joanna was having difficulty following his train of thought. “What difference does that make?” she prompted.

He looked at her then. The silent, soul-deep pain in his dark eyes cut through the cloudy plastic between them and seared into Joanna’s own heart. Slowly both his eyes filled with tears. “So beautiful,” he murmured. “And me? Compared to her, I was nothing but an old man. But sometimes ...”

He stopped yet again. Despite the plastic barrier between them, an unlikely intimacy had sprouted between Joanna Brady and Jorge Grijalva as they sat facing each other in the harsh glare of fluorescent light in those two equally grim rooms.

“Sometimes what?” Joanna whispered urgently.

Jorge Grijalva’s head stayed bowed. “Sometimes she would go with me. If I brought her something extra along with the child support. Sometimes she would...” His voice faded away.

“Would what?” Joanna asked. “Go to bed with you? Is that what you mean?”

Jorge nodded but didn’t speak. His silence now gave Joanna some inkling of the depth of Jorge Grijalva’s shame, and also of his pride. Serena Duffy Grijalva had been a whore, all right. Even with him. Even with her husband.

“So you came to see her,” Joanna said, after a long pause. “Did you bring both the child support and . . . the extra?”

He nodded again.

“But after she found out about the truck—about your new truck—then she refused to go with you and you killed her. Is that what happened?”

“That’s what the bruja thinks,” Jorge answered sullenly. For the first time, there was something else his voice, something besides hurt.

“What witch?” Joanna asked.

“The black-haired one. The detective.”

“The detective from Peoria? Carol Strong?”

“Yes. That’s the one, but it didn’t happen the way she thinks. I didn’t kill Serena. She left the bar first. After a while, so did I.”

Joanna leaned back in her chair and regarded Jorge speculatively. “Your mother is right then, isn’t she, Jorge? You’re going to plead guilty to a crime you didn’t commit”

With effort, Jorge Grijalva pulled himself together. He sat up straighter in his chair. His gaze met and held Joanna’s. “I told you my wife was a whore,” he said quietly, “but I will not go to court to prove it. Serena’s dead. Ceci and Pablo don’t need worse than that.”

“But you’re their father. If you go to prison for murdering the children’s mother, isn’t that worse?”

“Pablo is mine,” he said softly. “But I’m not Ceci’s father. She doesn’t know that. Serena was already pregnant when I met her.”

That soft-spoken, self-effacing revelation came like a bolt out of the blue and stunned Joanna into her own momentary silence. “Still,” she said finally, “you’re the only father she’s ever known. Think what it will be like for her with you in prison.”

“Think what it would be like for her with me dead,” Jorge countered. He shrugged his shoulders. “Manslaughter isn’t murder. You’re an Anglo. Why would you understand?”

“Understand what?”

“Supposing I go to court, say all those things about Serena to a judge and jury and then they find me guilty anyway. Of murder. They’ve got themselves one more dirty Mexican to send to the gas chamber. This way, if I take the plea bargain, maybe I’ll still be alive long enough to see my kids grow up. By the time they’re grown, maybe I’ll be out. Maybe then Ceci will be old enough so I can tell her the truth and she’ll be able to understand.”

“But ...” Joanna began.

Jorge shook his head, squelching her objection. “If you see my mother, tell her what I told y That way, maybe she’ll understand, too. Tell her me that I’m sorry.”

With that, Jorge Grijalva put down his phone and signaled to the guard that he was ready to go. He got up and walked away, leaving Joanna sitting on her side of the Plexiglas barrier, sputtering to herself.

As he walked out of the room, Joanna was filled with the terrible knowledge that she had heard the truth. Juanita Grijalva was right. Her son, Jorge, hadn’t killed Serena, but he would accept the blame. In order to protect his children from hearing an awful truth about their mother, he would willingly go to prison for a crime he hadn’t commit. Meanwhile, the real killer—whoever that was—would go free.

Sitting there by herself, all those separate reali­zations came to Joanna almost simultaneously. They were followed immediately by a thought was even worse: There wasn’t a damn thing she could do about any of them.

Drained, Joanna pressed the buzzer for a guard to come let her out. As she was led back to the jail’s guarded entrance, through a maze of electronically locked gates that clanged shut behind her, Joanna realized something else as well.

M r. Bailey, her high school social studies teacher, had done his best to drum the words into the heads each Bisbee High School senior who came through his civics class. “We hold these truths to self-evident,” he had read reverently from the textbook, “that all men are created equal.... “

For the first time, as clearly as if she’d heard a pane of glass shatter into a thousand pieces, Joanna Brady understood with absolute clarity that those words weren’t necessarily true, not for everyone. Certainly not for Jorge Grijalva.

And not for his mother, either.

CHAPTER TEN

Joanna left the jail complex and headed north with her mind in a complete turmoil. What should she do? Drop it? Forget everything she had heard in that grim interview room and go on about business as usual as if nothing had happened? What then? That would mean Jorge would most likely go to prison on a manslaughter charge while Serena’s killer would be on the loose, carrying on with his own life, free as a bird. Those two separate outcomes went against everything Joanna Brady stood for and believed in, against her sense of justice and fair play.

Joanna Lathrop Brady had grown up under her mother’s critical eye with Eleanor telling her constantly, day after day, how headstrong and hard to handle she was, how she never had sense enough to mind her own business or leave well enough alone. Maybe what was about to happen to Jorge Grijalva’s already shattered life wasn’t any of her business, but if she didn’t do something to prevent a terrible miscarriage of justice, who would? Carol Strong, the local homicide detective on the case, the one Jorge had called the bruja? No, if the prosecutors and defense attorneys were negotiating a plea bargain, that meant the case was officially closed and out of the hands of police investigators.

If it is to be, it is up to me, Joanna thought with grim humor as she drove north through much lighter traffic. It would give her one more opportunity to live up to her mother’s worst expectations.

She made it back to Peoria in twenty minutes, which seemed like record time. When she came to the turnoff that would have taken her home to the APOA campus, she kept right on going across the railroad tracks and right on Grand, returning once more to the Roundhouse Bar and Grill. Instead of going back to the dorm and her reading assign­ment, she was going back to see Butch Dixon, her one and only slender lead in this oddball investigation. Even Joanna was forced to acknowledge the irony. She would be enlisting the bartender in a possibly ill-fated and harebrained crusade to save someone who wasn’t the least bit interested in be­ing saved. Who was, in fact, dead set against it.

By ten o’clock, Monday Night Football was over. With only local news on TV, the bar was nearly deserted when she stepped inside. Butch waved to her as she threaded her way across the floor through a scatter of empty tables. There was only one other customer seated at the bar. Even though she could have taken any one of a number of empty seats, she made directly for the same spot she had abandoned several hours earlier.

“The usual?” Butch Dixon asked with a pleasant grin as she hoisted herself up onto the stool. Joanna nodded. Moments later, he set a Diet Pepsi on the counter in front of her. While she took a tentative sip from her drink, he began diligently polishing the nearby surface of the bar even though it didn’t look particularly in need of polishing.

“I suppose you get asked this question all time,” he said.

“What question?”

“What’s a nice girl like you doing in this line of work? I mean, how come you’re sheriff?”

“The usual way,” she answered. “I got elected.”

“I figured that out, but what did you do before the election? Is being a cop something you always wanted to be, or is it like me and bartending? I sort of fell into it by accident, but it turns out it’s something I’m pretty good at.”

Joanna considered before she answered. Butch must be one of the few people in Arizona who had somehow missed the media blitz about Andy’s death and about his widow being the first-ever elected female sheriff in the state. If he had seen some of the news reports or read the newspaper articles, he had long since forgotten. It was all far enough in the past that for him there was no connection between those events back in September, and Joanna’s name and title on the business card she had given him.

So what should she do? Tell Butch Dixon the painful story about what had happened to Andy? Or should she just gloss over it? After a moment’s hesitation, she decided on the latter. If she was going to try to enlist Butch Dixon’s help, it would be tier to approach him as a professional rather than play on his sympathies as some kind of damsel in stress.

“Fell into it by accident, I’d say,” she replied. “I used to sell insurance.”

“And what are you doing over at the academy, teaching classes?”

“I wish,” she answered. “No, I’m taking them. I’m there as a student, not as an instructor.”

When Butch stopped polishing the counter, his towel was only inches from Joanna’s hand. For a moment he seemed to be staring at it. Then he looked up at her face. “What does your husband do?”

Joanna’s gaze had followed his to where the diamond on her engagement ring reflected back one of the lights over the bar. No matter how hard she tied, there didn’t seem to be any way to avoid telling this inquisitive man about Andy.

“He’s dead,” Joanna said at last, feeling both re­lieved that she had told him and surprised by how easy it was right then to say the words that placed Andrew Roy Brady’s life and death totally in the past tense.

“Andy was a police officer,” she added. “He died in the line of duty.” She told the story briefly mild dispassionately, without giving way to tears.

Hearing what had happened, Butch Dixon was instantly contrite. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I didn’t mean to pry. It’s just that—”

Joanna held her hand up. “I know. The rings. I suppose I ought to take them off and put them away, but I’m not ready to do that yet. I’m used to wearing them. I may not be married anymore, but I still feel married.”

Butch nodded. “When did it happen?” he asked.

“Two months ago, back in the middle of September.”

“So it wasn’t all that long ago. Do you have kids?”

Joanna nodded. “Only one, a girl. Her name Jennifer. Jenny. She’s nine.”

“That’s got to be tough.”

“It’s no picnic.”

“Who’s taking care of her while you’re here going to school?”

“Her grandparents. My in-laws. They’re from Bisbee, too. They’re staying out at the ranch and looking after things while I’m away.”

“Ranch?” Butch asked.

Joanna laughed. “Not a big ranch. A little one. It’s only forty acres, but it does have a name. The High Lonesome. It’s been in Andy’s family for years. Right now it belongs to me, but it’ll belong to Jenny someday.”

“Hey, Butch, my margarita’s long gone. I know the broad’s good-looking, but how about paying a little attention to this part of the bar?”

A look of annoyance washed over Butch Dixon face as he turned toward the complaining customer. “Keep your shirt on, Mike,” he growled. “And keep a civil damn tongue in your mouth or go on down the road.”

Joanna watched as Butch mixed Mike’s drink. It was difficult to estimate how old he was. He looked forty but that could have been the lack of hair. He was probably somewhat younger than that. Butch wasn’t particularly tall—only about five ten or so but what there was of him was powerfully and compactly built. As soon as he dropped off the margarita and rang the sale into the cash register, Butch came back to where Joanna was sitting. Resting his forearms on the counter, he leaned in front of her.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “Mike’s one of those guys who gets a little out of line on occasion.”

“Compared to some of the things I’ve been called lately, broad’s not all that bad,” Joanna reassured him with a smile. “And I can see why you make a good bartender. You’re very easy to talk to.”

Butch didn’t seem entirely comfortable with the compliment. In reply he picked up her empty glass. “Want another?”

“No. Too much caffeine. When I go home to bed, I’m going to need to sleep. But I did want to discuss something with you. I’m just now on my way home from the Maricopa County Jail. I went down there talk to Jorge Grijalva.”

“Really? Did you manage to talk him out of that plea bargain crap?”

“No. He’s still hell-bent for election to go through with it. Even so, talking to him has convinced me that you may be right. Some of the things he said made me think maybe he didn’t kill her after all.”

“What are you going to do, go to the cops?”

Joanna shook her head. “I am a cop, remember?” he said. “But since this happened in Peoria PD’s jurisdiction, I wouldn’t be able to do anything bout it, not officially. And even if I tried, that case is closed as far as homicide cops are concerned cause they’ve already turned it over to the prosecutor.”

“What’s the point, then?”

“The point is I’m going to do a little nosing around on my own. Unofficial nosing around. Do you still have my card?”

Butch reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out Joanna’s business card. She jotted a number on the back and returned it to him. “That’s the number of my room over at the academy. There’s no answering machine, so either you’ll get me or you won’t. You won’t be able to leave a message.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to write down everything you can remember about the night Serena Grijalva died. I’m sure you’ve already given this information to the investigating officers, but since mine isn’t an official inquiry, I most likely won’t have access to those reports. There’s no real rush. I’ll come by tomorrow or the next day and pick it up.”

“Wednesday’s the day before Thanksgiving Butch said, pocketing the card once more. “I suppose you’ll be going home for the holiday?”

Joanna shook her head. “No, Jenny and the Gs are coming up here for the weekend. We’ve a got super-duper holiday weekend package at that brand-new hotel just down the street.”

“The Hohokam?” Butch asked. “It’s only been open a couple of months. I’ve never been inside. It’s supposed to be very nice.”

“I hope so,” Joanna said.

“And who all did you say is coming, Jenny and the Gs? Sounds like some kind of rock band.”

Joanna laughed. “That’s my daughter and her grandparents, my in-laws. Ever since she was able spell, Jenny’s called them the Gs.” She paused for a moment. “Speaking of names, where did Butch come from?”

Running one hand over the bare skin on his shiny, bald skull, Butch Dixon grinned. “My real we was Frederick. People called me Freddy for short. I hated it; thought it sounded sissy. So when as six, my uncle started teasing me about my new haircut, calling me Butch. The name stuck. I’ve been Butch ever since, and I wore my hair that way for years, back when I still had hair, that is. When it started to disappear, I gave Mother Nature a little shove in the right direction. What do you think?”

Joanna smiled. “It looks fine to me. I’d better be heading back,” she said, standing up. “I’m taking you away from your other customers.... “

“Customer,” Butch corrected, holding up his hand.

“And I’ve got a reading assignment to do before class in the morning.”

“And I’ve got a writing assignment,” he said patting his shirt pocket. “I’ll start on it first thing tomorrow morning. Do you want me to call you when it’s finished?”

“Please. And in the meantime, if anything comes up that you think is too important to wait, give me call.”

“Sure thing,” Butch Dixon said. “You can count n it.”

By the time Joanna drove back into the APOA parking lot, it was past eleven. Checking the clerestory windows on both the upper and lower breezeways, she saw that some were lit and some weren’t. It was possible some of her classmates were still out. Others might already be in bed and asleep.

Stopping off at the lower-floor student lounge, Joanna found the place deserted. She made straight for the telephone. It was far too late to phone High Lonesome, but Frank Montoya had told her that he never went to bed without watching The Tonight Show.

“How are things going?” she asked, when he answered. “I tried calling earlier, but neither you nor Dick Voland could be found.”

“Well,” Frank said slowly, “we did have our hands full today.”

“How’s that?”

“For one thing,” he replied, “somebody sent a petition signed by sixty-three prisoners as that you fire the cook in the jail.”

“Fire him? How come?”

“They say the food’s bad, that they can’t eat and that he cooks the same thing week after week.”

“Is that true?” Joanna asked. “Is the jail food ally as bad as all that?”

“Beats me.”

“Have you tried it?”

“No, but ...”

“These guys are prisoners,” Joanna said. “We supposed to house and feed them, but nobody said it has to be gourmet cuisine. You taste the food, Frank, and then you decide. If the food’s fit to eat, tell the prisoners to go piss up a rope. If the food’s as bad as they say, get rid of the cook and find somebody else.”

“You really did hire me to do the dirty work, didn’t you?” Frank complained, but Joanna heard the unspoken humor in his voice and knew he was teasing.

‘What else is going on down there today?”

‘The big news is the fracas at the Sunset Inn out over the Divide.”

The Mule Mountains, north of Bisbee, effectively cut the town off from the remainder of the state. In the old days, the Divide, as locals called it, was a formidable barrier. Now, although modern highway engineering and a tunnel had tamed the worst of the steep grades, the name—the Divide—still remained.

The Sunset Inn, an outpost supper club on the far side of the Divide, had changed ownership and identities many times over the years. It had reopened under the name of Sunset Inn only two months earlier.

“What happened?” Joanna asked.

“From what we can piece together this is a pair of relative newlyweds, been married less than a year. It turns out the husband’s something of a slob who tends to leave his clothes lying wherever they fall. His wife got tired of picking up after him, so she took a hammer and nailed them all to the floor wherever they happened to fall. He tore hell out of his favorite western shirt when he tried to pick it up. Made him pretty mad. He went outside and sliced up the tires on his wife’s Chevette.”

“Thank God it was only the tires,” Joanna breathed. “I guess it could have been worse.”

Frank laughed. “Wait’ll you hear the rest. One of our patrol cars happened to drive by in time to see her taking a sledgehammer to the windshield of his pickup truck—unfortunately with him still inside. She’s in jail tonight on a charge of assault with intent, drunk and disorderly, and resisting arrest. The last I heard of the husband, he took his dog and what was left of his truck and was heading back home to his mother’s place in Silver City, New Mexico.”

The way Frank told the story, it might have sounded almost comical, but Joanna was living too close to what had happened in the aftermath of similar violence between Serena and Jorge Grijalva. Right that minute, she couldn’t see any humor the situation.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Joanna said. “Especially with a young couple like that. It’s too bad they didn’t go for counseling.”

“Did I say young?” Frank echoed. “They’re not young. He’s sixty-eight. She’s sixty-three or so, but hell on wheels with a sledgehammer. The whole time the deputy was driving her to jail, she yelling her head off about how she should have known better than to marry a bachelor who was also a mama’s boy. Mama, by the way—the one he’s going home to—must be pushing ninety if she’s a day.”

Joanna did laugh then. She couldn’t help it. “I thought people were supposed to get wise when they got that old.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Frank advised. “So that’s what’s happening on the home front. What about you? How’s class?”

“B-O-R-I-N-G,” Joanna answered. “It’s like being thrown all the way back into elementary school. I can’t wait for Thanksgiving vacation.”

“And is Dave Thompson still the same sexist son of a bitch he was when I was there a couple of years ago?” Frank asked.