Paradise Lost

Putting the Civvie in gear, she began negotiating the series of one-way streets that would take her back down to Main Street. After several long minutes, Frank’s voice cane through the radio.

“Where are you?” he demanded. “I could hear your voice, but you kept breaking up.”

“I’m just now leaving Old Bisbee,” she told limn. “I’m on my way out to the ranch.”

“How did the ID go?”

“About how you’d expect. I just dropped the victim’s sister off at the Copper Queen Hotel for a medicinal Scotch to calm her nerves. I also rented her a room. I’ve got to go home to see Jenny. I told Maggie MacFerson that I’ll drive her back to Phoenix in the morning. The idea that there aren’t hourly Greyhounds running through Bisbee overnight was news to her.”

“So the ID is positive, then?” Frank asked.

“Yes,” Joanna said. “Constance Haskell is the victim all right. I trust the DMV information from that Encanto address has been broadcast to all units?”

“Absolutely—a Beemer and a Lincoln Town Car. Neither one of them were at the residence in Phoenix, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Good. I listed them both as possibly stolen and the perp presumed armed and dangerous. That way, if someone spots either one of ‘em, they’ll be pulled over. Where are you headed?”

“Out to the ranch to see Jenny,” Joanna replied.

“So you’ve heard about what happened to Dora then?” Frank asked.

“Some of it,” Joanna returned grimly. “Doc Winfield told me. I think I’ll stop by their house on my way home and wring my mother’s neck.”

“From what Jim Bob told me, I guess Jenny’s really upset about what happened.”

“Tell me,” Joanna urged.

“When Dora figured out what was going on—that we knew what her mother had been up to and that a caseworker was there to put Dora back into foster care—she lit out the back door and tried to make a run for it. The caseworker must have seen it coining. She took off out the front door and caught Dora as she came racing around the house. I mean she literally tackled Dora. They both went down in a heap. Dora fought tooth and nail all the way to the car. She was yelling and crying and screaming that she didn’t want to go, that she’d rather die. I’m sure it was traumatic for everybody concerned. If I’d been there, I’d be upset, too.”

So am I, Joanna thought grimly. But right at that moment, powerless to change what had happened, she did the only thing that might help her forge through the emotional maelstrom—she changed the subject. “Anything else happening?”

“Well, I have one small piece of good news,” Frank replied. “I managed to get through to the phone factory. It’s possible the missing message on that answering machine really did say Connie Haskell should meet her husband in Paradise. The call to the house in Phoenix originated from a pay phone outside the general store in Portal, which happens to be only eight miles or so from Par­adise—town of, that is. I told Ernie about the Portal connection. He and Detective Carbajal will head over there first thing in the morning and start asking questions.”

Mentally Joanna made some quick geographical calculations. Portal was located on the eastern side of the Chiricahua Mountains at the far southern end of the range. Apache Pass was at the north end and on the western side. To get to Apache Pass from Portal, one would have to go around the Chiricahuas, traveling on either the Arizona or New Mexico side, or else cross over the range itself, using a twisting dirt-and-gravel track that crossed at a low spot called Onion Saddle.

“You’re thinking that when Ron Haskell left his message, he was referring to having Connie meet him in the town of Paradise?”

“Makes sense to me, but we don’t have a clue as to where in town he’d he meeting her. I checked with Directory Assistance. I asked for any business listings with a Paradise address. The operator came up with a couple that sounded like bed-and-breakfast type places, and Ron Haskell might well be staying at one of those. The problem is, they all had phones, so I’m a little puzzled as to why he’d be using a pay phone at the general store. The operator hit on something else promising, a place called Pathway to Paradise. I just finished checking out Pathway to Paradise on the Internet. Their web site says it’s a rehab facility that specializes in gambling prob­lems.”

“That fits,” Joanna said. “A severe gambling problem could go a long way toward explaining how Connie Haskell’s money left her bank accounts and disappeared into thin air. You’ve told Ernie and Jaime to check that out as well?”

“Right.”

“Good job. So where are you right now?” Joanna asked.

“Standing across the street from Sally Matthews’s place up in Old Bisbee,” Frank said. “I’ve talked to a couple of the Haz-Mat guys. They said the house is a wreck inside. Aside from the chemical pollution, the house is so filthy that it’s totally uninhabitable. He said he was surprised people were still trying to live there.” Frank paused. “I feel sorry for Dora. She’s been through a really rough time. And don’t be too hard on your mother, either, Boss. The way I see it, compared to where she was living, foster care is probably the best thing that could happen to Dora Matthews.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” Joanna said.

“You’re staying overnight then?” Frank asked.

“‘That’s my plan at the moment.”

Signing off, Joanna headed for High Lonesome Ranch, seven miles east of town. On the way, she tried calling Butch once more. It was late enough that she hoped he might have returned from the dinner. This time, when she dialed, she had driven out from behind the signal-eating barrier of the Mule Mountains. But instead of reaching the Conquistador Hotel in Peoria, Joanna heard the recorded voice of a cell phone company operator from across the line in Old Mexico.

With the recent proliferation of cell phone sites across the bor­der, cell phone use in the Bisbee area had become more and more problematic. People attempting to make wireless calls within the sight lines of newly built Mexican cell sites often found themselves sidetracked into the Mexican system. And once a call was answered by the Mexican operator, the hapless U.S. customer could count on being billed a minimum of four dollars for the call despite the fact that it had gone no farther than a less than helpful Spanish-language recorded message.

“Damn!” Joanna muttered, and gave up trying.

When she pulled into the yard at High Lonesome Ranch, Tig­ger and Sadie came racing out to dance around the car in a gleeful greeting that made it look as though Joanna had been gone for weeks rather than mere days. By the time Joanna finished calming the two ecstatic dogs, Jim Bob Brady was standing next to the Civvie.

“You heard, I guess,” he said.

Nodding, Joanna let herself be drawn into her former father-in-law’s welcoming embrace. She stayed there, imprisoned against Jim Bob Brady’s massive chest, letting herself be comforted for the better part of a minute before she finally pulled away.

“Do you think Jenny’s asleep?” she asked.

“Could he, but I doubt it,” Jim Bob answered gravely. “She was mighty upset when she went to bed. Don’t seem too likely that she’d drop right off.”

Joanna hurried into the house through the back door and went directly to her daughter’s room. She tapped lightly on the closed door. “Jenny,” she said softly. “Are you still awake? May I cone in?”

“It’s open,” Jenny answered. It wasn’t exactly an engraved invitation, but Joanna opened the door and eased herself into the room. Guided by the shadowy glow of a night-light, Joanna crept over to the rocking chair that had once belonged to Butch’s grandmother.

Joanna settled herself in the old rocker, which emitted a loud squeak as she put her weight on it. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked softly.

“No.” Jenny flopped over on the bed. Even in the dim light, Joanna could see tears glistening on her daughter’s cheeks. “I hate Grandma Lathrop!” Jenny whispered fiercely. “I don’t care it I ever see her again!”

Joanna was taken aback by the ferocity in her daughter’s voice, by the burning anger tears hadn’t begun to extinguish. “I’m mad at her, too,” Joanna said quietly, “but I know Grandma Lathrop didn’t mean any harm. I’m sure she had no idea your friend would he hurt.”

Jenny sat up. “Dora Matthews is not my friend,” she declared. “I don’t even like her, but she doesn’t deserve to be treated like that. That woman grabbed her and threw her into the car. It was like an animal control officer dragging a stray dog of to the pound.”

It wasn’t the time to point out to Jenny that animal control offi­cers were only doing their thankless jobs the same way the (;PS caseworker had been doing hers. For once, Joanna managed to keep quiet and let her daughter do the talking.

“Why couldn’t Dora have stayed here with us?” Jenny de­manded. “She wasn’t bothering anybody or hurting anything. She did everything the Gs said, like clearing the table and emptying the dishwasher and even making her bed. All she wanted to do was go home and be with her mother, the same way I want to be with you. She said she’s already done the foster-care thing and would rather be dead than go through that again.”

“I don’t doubt that foster care can be pretty miserable at times,” Joanna agreed. “But surely Dora didn’t mean she’d rather be dead. She’ll be fine, Jenny. I promise. Girl Scout’s honor.”

Suddenly Jenny erupted out of her bed. In a single motion, she crossed the space between her bunk bed and the rocking chair. Jenny had shot up more than three inches in the last few months. There wasn’t enough room for Joanna to hold her daughter on her lap. Instead, Jenny knelt in front of the rocker and buried her face in her mother’s lap. For several minutes they stayed that way, with Jenny sobbing and with Joanna caressing her daughter’s tan­gled hair.

Finally, Jenny drew a ragged breath. “Why did Grandma have to go and do that?” she asked with a shudder. “Why couldn’t she leave well enough alone? We were doing all right. The Gs wouldn’t have let anything bad happen to Dora.”

Joanna had to wait a moment until her own voice steadied before she attempted an answer. “I don’t like what happened either, but there’s a good chance Grandma Lathrop was right,” she said carefully. “Dora’s mother has evidently been running a meth lab out of their house. Do you know what that means?”

Jenny shrugged. “Not really,” she said.

“It means that the house had illegal drugs and potentially dan­gerous chemicals in it. The people who are up there now, cleaning it up—the DPS Haz-Mat team—arc doing it in full hazardous‑material protective gear. Those chemicals are dangerously explosive, Jenny. II the house had caught lire, for example, Dora and her mother both might have been killed. They shouldn’t have been living in a place like that. It’s irresponsible for a mother to raise a child in such circumstances.

“That’s what society means when they say someone is an unlit mother. Considering what they found in Sally Matthews’s house, I think there’s a good chance that’s exactly what will happen she’ll be declared an unfit mother. She may even go to jail. In other words, Dora Matthews would have ended up in foster care anyway, sooner or later. Grandma Lathrop fixed it so it happened sooner, is all. I’m sorry it had to be tonight, and I’m terribly sorry that you had to be here to see it happen.”

“But even if Dora’s mother is a bad mother, Dora still loves her.”

“That’s right,” Joanna agreed. “And I understand exactly how she feels. When I first heard about Grandma Lathrop calling CPS, I was really upset, too—just like you are. But Eleanor’s still my mother, Jenny, and I still love her.”

“And I love you,” Jenny said.

For the next few minutes, as they sat together, with Jenny resting her head in her mother’s lap, Joanna was glad Jenny couldn’t see her face. If she had, Jenny would have seen that her mother was crying, too.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Joanna and Jenny might have sat there much longer, but Eva Lou knocked on the door. "Could I interest anyone in some cocoa and toast?" she asked.

“How about it?" Joanna asked.

Jenny nodded. "Okay," she said.

On her way to the kitchen, Joanna stopped at the telephone long enough to try calling Butch one more time. Once again, rather than reaching her husband, she found herself connected to the voice-mail system. "Mother called CPS, and they came out to the house and hauled Dora away like she was a criminal being arrested," she told the machine. "Naturally, Jenny is in a state about it, and I don't blame her. I'm out at the house now and planning to spend the night. I'm way too tired to try driving back to Phoenix again tonight. I'll come first thing in the morning. And, oh yes, I almost forgot. The woman I brought down, Maggie MacFerson, did turn out to be the murdered woman's sister after all. So we have our positive ID. Sorry I missed you. Hope you had fun at the dinner. I love you. It’s almost nine o’clock now. Call if you get this by ten or so. Any later, and you’ll wake people up. If I don’t hear from you tonight, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Out in the kitchen, Jim Bob was spreading toast while Eva Lou carried mugs of steaming cocoa over to the breakfast nook. Jenny settled herself at the far corner of the table, and Joanna slipped onto the bench seat beside her.

“I’m sorry you had to come all the way down from Phoenix just because of what happened to Dora,” Jenny said as she began using her spoon to target and sink the dozen or so miniature marshmallows Eva Lou had left floating on the surface of the cocoa.

Absorbed in her task, Jenny failed to notice the momentary hes­itation on her mother’s part. Jenny’s unquestioning belief in Joanna’s having responded in an entirely motherly fashion made Sheriff Brady feel more than slightly guilty. She had come to Bis­bee on departmental business rather than in response to Jenny’s crisis. It would have been easy to take credit where it wasn’t due, but Joanna didn’t work that way.

“I didn’t find out about Dora until I was already in Bisbee,” she admitted. “I brought a woman down from Phoenix with me. It was her sister, Connie Haskell, whose body you found in Apache Pass last night.”

“You know who the victim is, then?” Jim Bob asked.

Joanna nodded, looking at Jenny and trying to judge if having brought up the topic of the murdered woman was having any neg­ative effects. Jenny, meanwhile, continued to chase marshmallows. Her air of total detachment seemed to imply that the conversation had nothing at all to do with her.

“How are you doing on finding the killer, then?” Jinn Bob asked. Joanna’s former father-in-law had always taken a keen interest in Andy’s ongoing cases. Now, with Andy dead, he was just as vitally concerned with whatever cases Joanna was working on.

“Not very well,” Joanna responded. “The sister gave us a positive ID. She’s staying overnight at the Copper Queen. I’ll have to pick her up first thing in the morning and take her back to Phoenix.”

“So you’ll be there in time to see Butch be in the wedding?” Jenny asked. Having just been through her mother’s wedding to Butch, Jenny had been intrigued by the idea of Butch being the bride’s attendant and had teased him about whether he’d have to wear a dress.

“I had almost forgotten about the wedding,” Joanna said. “With everything that’s going on, maybe I should just turn around and come straight back home.”

“You’ll do no such thing!” Eva Lou exclaimed. “Jim Bob and I are here to look after things. Jenny’s fine. There’s no reason for you to miss it.”

Joanna glanced at Jenny. “Are you fine?” she asked.

Jenny nodded and spooned what was left of one of the marshmallows into her mouth. “Yes,” she said.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. I’m still mad at Grandma Lathrop, but I’m fine.”

“See there?” Eva Lou said. “If you miss the wedding, you won’t be able to use Jenny as an excuse. Now what time do you plan on leaving in the morning? And would you like us to go home, so you can sleep in your own bed? All you have to do is say the word. We can be back here tomorrow morning whenever you want us to be.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Joanna said. “I’m perfectly capable of sleeping on the couch. And I want to be up and out early, by seven or so.

“Not the couch,” Eva Lou objected. “I won’t hear of it.”

“Me, either,” Jim Bob put in. “Those hide-a-bed things are never comfortable. There’s always that danged metal bar that hits you right in the middle of your ribs.”

Jenny gazed at her mother from under a fringe of long blond eyelashes. “If you want,” she offered quietly, “you can sleep on the bottom bunk, and I’ll sleep on top.”

There was nothing Joanna Brady wanted more right then than to be near her daughter. “Thanks, Jen,” she said. “What a nice offer. I’ll be happy to take you up on it.”

Half an hour later, still warmed by the hot cocoa, Joanna lay in Jenny’s bed, peering up through the glow of the night-light at the dimly visible upper bunk. She was thinking about all that had hap­pened. In a little over twenty-four hours, Jenny had been through a series of terribly traumatic experiences and yet she really did seem fine.

They had both been quiet for such a long time that Joanna assumed Jenny had drifted off.

“Mom? Are you still awake?”

“Yes.”

“You never said anything to me about the cigarettes.”

Butch’s counsel came back to Joanna. What was it he had said? Something about not making a federal case of it. “Should I have?” Joanna asked.

“Well, I mean, you never bawled me out about them or anything. “

“You already apologized to me about the cigarettes,” Joanna said. “Remember last night on the phone? You told me then you were sorry about that. It’s true, isn’t it? You are sorry?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t plan on trying another one anytime soon, right?”

“Right.”

“Well then, I don’t guess there’s any reason to bawl you out.”

“Oh,” Jenny said. “Well, good night then.”

“Good night.”

Minutes later, Joanna was half asleep when Sadie crept onto the foot of the bed and flopped down between Joanna’s feet and the wall. She had long suspected that Sadie sneaked up onto Jenny’s bed once the bedroom door was safely closed behind them. Care­ful not to waken Jenny, Joanna shooed the dog off, only to have her clamber back on board just as Joanna herself was about to doze off. The third time it happened she gave up. The words Let sleeping dogs lie were drifting through her head as she finally fell asleep.

When Joanna awakened out of a deep sleep hours later, she was briefly disoriented by being in a strange bed and room. Then, gath­ering her faculties, she realized that what had roused her was the tantalizing smell of frying bacon and brewing coffee. The alarm clock on Jenny’s bedside table said six forty-three.

Joanna stumbled out of bed and hurried to the kitchen, where she found both Eva Lou and Jim Bob up and dressed and busily engaged in fixing breakfast. “You two!” she said, shaking her head. “You didn’t need to do this. I could have stopped off for breakfast somewhere along the way.”

Eva Lou looked back at her and smiled. “Yes,” she returned. “You could have, but you shouldn’t have to. Now come sit down and eat something. There’s no sense in waking Jenny this early.”

While Jim Bob left to do one more outside chore, Joanna settled into the breakfast nook.

“Oh, my,” Eva Lou said, as Joanna mowed through her very welcome bacon and eggs. “I forgot to tell you. Olga Ortiz called last night about Yolanda.”

Yolanda Ortiz Cañedo was one of two female jailers employed by the Cochise County jail. Only a month earlier, the young mother with two children in elementary school had been diag­nosed with cervical cancer. She had undergone surgery at University Medical Center in Tucson and was now involved in chemo­therapy.

“How is she?”

“Not well,” Eva Lou said. “Her mother says Yolanda’s back in the hospital. She’s having a bad reaction to the chemo. Olga didn’t come right out and say so, but I think she was hoping you might try to stop by the hospital.”

University Hospital was where Andy had been taken after being shot. It was also where he had died. It was one of the places Joanna Brady would cheerfully never have set foot in again. “I’ll try,” she said. “Maybe Butch and I can stop by there on our way back down tonight.”

“After the wedding? You’re planning to come back home tonight?”

“The wedding is late in the afternoon. I was thinking if we left at seven, maybe ...”

“Joanna,” Eva Lou said kindly. “You didn’t ask my advice, but I’m giving it too you all the same. Tomorrow’s Memorial Day, a holiday. You’ve made arrangements for the department to be cov­ered, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And we’re here to take care of Jenny and the ranch, right?”

“Right.”

“Then give yourself and that new husband of yours a break. Spend the time with him.”

Jim Bob returned to the kitchen just then. He looked from his wife’s face to Joanna’s. “What’s up?” he asked. “Is something wrong?”

“Just girl talk,” Eva Lou said with a smile as she handed him a cup of coffee. “Now sit down and eat before it gets cold.”

An hour later, Joanna was standing at the front desk of the Copper Queen Hotel. “I’m sorry.” The morning desk clerk was responding to Joanna’s request that he ring room 19. “Ms. MacFerson has asked that she not be disturbed.”

“But I’m here to take her back to Phoenix,” Joanna objected.

“There must be some mistake then,” he replied, riffling through the file of registration cards. “Ms. MacFerson has extended her stay for two and possibly three days.”

“Really,” Joanna said. “I believe I’ll go check on that. Since I’m the one who’s responsible for bringing her to town, I’m also the one who’s responsible for getting her back home.” With that, Joanna strode across the lobby and started up the carpeted stairway.

“Please, Sheriff Brady,” the clerk pleaded. “You shouldn’t ...”

By the time he completed his sentence, Joanna was out of earshot. At the door to room 19, Joanna took one look at the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from the doorknob and then knocked anyway. “Housekeeping,” she called.

“Housekeeping!” Maggie MacFerson croaked. “At this ungodly hour? What the hell kind of place is this, anyway?”

Remembering the bandages that had turned both of Maggie’s hands into useless fists, Joanna guessed correctly that she wouldn’t have locked the door.

“Oh, it’s you,” Maggie said, when Joanna let herself into the room. Maggie was still in bed, groaning and cradling her bandaged hands. “I told them I wasn’t to be disturbed. I finally managed to get some sleep, but now my hands hurt like hell.”

“Sorry to disturb you, but I thought I was taking you back to Phoenix this morning,” Joanna said.

“I changed my mind. I’m a reporter, remember?” Maggie replied. “There’s a story here, and the Reporter’s sending a team to cover it. I’m part of that team. I’m an investigative reporter, Sheriff Brady, which means I’m used to asking tough questions and getting answers. Which reminds me. I happen to have one of those ques­tions for you.”

“Like what?” Joanna asked.

“Like why, all the time you were telling me about what hap­pened to Connie, you never happened to mention to me that one of the two people who found the body was none other than your own daughter?”

“It wasn’t important,” Joanna said. “There was no reason to tell you.”

“There was no reason not to tell me,” Maggie retorted. “I wouldn’t know it even now if I hadn’t been chatting up the bartender last night. Just like I wouldn’t know that the local ME is a relative of yours. That strikes me as a little incestuous, Sheriff Brady. Taking all that into consideration, I’ve decided to hang around town for a while and ask a few more questions. No telling what I might turn up. Now go away!”

Without replying, Joanna started to leave the room. “One more thing,” Maggie added before the door could close. “You might want to check out the first story. It’ll be in late editions of the Reporter. I phoned it in last night, too late to make the statewide editions, but it’ll be in the metropolitan ones.”

“Great,” Joanna muttered, after slamming the door shut behind her. “I can hardly wait.”

Joanna left Bisbee seething with anger. Between there and Phoenix, she drove too hard and too fast. Twice she booted left-­lane-hugging eighteen-wheelers out of the way by turning on the Civvie’s under-grille lights. Several times along the way she tried phoning Butch, but now when he didn’t answer she hung up before the voice-mail system ever picked up the call. She was tired of leaving messages in the room since he evidently wasn’t bothering to pick them up. A call to Dispatch told her that Detectives Carpenter and Carbajal were on their way to Portal, where they hoped to locate and question Ron Haskell. She also learned that there was still no trace of Sally Matthews.

No surprises there, Joanna told herself.

A little past ten she pulled into the porte cochere at the Con­quistador and handed her car keys over to the parking valet. Joanna let herself into their twelfth-floor room to find that the bed was made and the message light was flashing. She assumed that the room had been made up after Butch left that morning, but a check of the messages disabused her of that notion. The messages were all her messages to Butch. There were none from him for her.

She felt a sudden tightening in her stomach. What if something’s happened to him? she wondered. What if he’s been in a car accident or was struck while crossing a street?

Turning on her heel, she hurried out of the room and lack down to the lobby, where she planned to buttonhole someone at the desk. By now it was verging on checkout time, so naturally she was stuck waiting in a long line. While there, she caught a glimpse of a copy of the Sunday edition of the Arizona Reporter held by a man two places in front of her. “Murder Strikes Close to Home,” the newspaper headline read. Beneath the headline was a black­-and-white photo of two women, one of whom was unmistakably a much younger version of Maggie MacFerson.

Leaving her place in line, Joanna went to the hotel gift shop and purchased her own copy of the paper and then sat down on one of the couches in the lobby to read it. There were actually two separate articles. Keeping an eye on the line at the front desk, she skimmed through the staff-written piece with three different reporters’ names listed in the byline. That one was a straightfor­ward news article dealing with the murder of Constance Marie Haskell, daughter of a well-known Valley of the Sun developer, Stephen Richardson, and his wife, Claudia. Maggie MacFerson, a longtime Arizona Reporter columnist and investigative reporter, was listed in the article as a sister of the victim. The other article carried a Maggie MacFerson byline and was preceded by an edi­tor’s note.

For years Arizona Reporter prizewinning staff member Maggie MacFerson has distinguished herself as one of the foremost investigative reporters in the nation. Now, after years of being on the reporting side of the news, she finds herself in the opposite camp.

The discovery late Friday night of Ms. MacFerson’s brutally slain younger sister and fellow heiress, Constance Marie Haskell, puts Maggie in the shoes of countless others who have suffered through the unimaginable horror of having a loved one murdered.

Ms. MacFerson’s reputation as a trusted investigative reporter allows her a unique position from which to write about the other victims of homicide—the relatives and friends of the dead—who have few choices to make and even less control in the aftermath of a violent death.

She has agreed to write a series of articles recounting her terrible journey, which began with the discovery of her murdered sister’s body two days ago in rural Cochise County. The first of those articles appears below.

Editor

Years ago I stood in a rainy, windblown cemetery in south Phoenix talking to a grieving mother whose sixteen-year--old son’s bullet-riddled body had been found iii the garbage-strewn sands of the Salt River four days earlier. Her son, a gang member, had been gunned down by two wannabe members of a rival gang as part of an initiation requirement. I’ll never forget her words.

“Cops don’t want to tell me nothin’,” she said. “Just what they think I need to know. Don’t they understand? I’m that boy’s mother. I need to know it all.”

That woman’s words came back to me today with a whole new impact as I tried to come to grips with the hor­ror that someone has murdered my forty-three-year-old sis­ter, Constance Marie Haskell.

I didn’t hear the news over the phone. The cops actually did that part right. Connie’s body was found Friday night in Cochise County, near a place called Apache Pass. Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady herself came to see me Satur­day to give me the terrible news. But somehow, in the pro­cess she neglected to tell me several things, including who it was who had found the body.

I suppose that oversight should be understandable since, in addition to being sheriff, Joanna Brady is also the mother of a twelve-year-old-daughter, and mothers—even mothers who aren’t sheriffs—are known to be protective, sometimes overly so.

Jennifer Ann Brady and an equally headstrong friend, Dora Matthews, slipped away from a Girl Scout camp-out on Friday night to have a smoke. It was while they were AWOL from their tent that they discovered my sister’s naked and bludgeoned body.

Most of the time juveniles who find bodies are interviewed and made much of in the media. After all, in report­ing a crime they’re thought to be doing the “right thing.” Sheriff Brady told me none of this, but the information was easy enough for me to discover, along with a possible expla­nation for Ms. Brady’s apparent reticence.

After all, what law enforcement officer wants to reveal to outsiders that his or her offspring is hanging out with the child of a known criminal? Because that’s exactly what Dora Matthews is—the daughter of an alleged dealer in illegal drugs.

The fact that convicted drug dealer Sally Lorraine Matthews was reportedly running a meth lab out of her home in Old Bisbee may have been news to local law enforcement authorities who called for a Department of Public Safety Haz-Mat team to come clean up the mess last night, but it certainly wasn’t news to some of Sally’s paying customers, the drug consumers who hang out in city parks or wander dazedly up and down Bisbee’s fabled Brewery Gulch.

With my sister’s chilled body lying in the Cochise County Morgue, all I had to do was ask a few questions to find out what was really going on. I suspect that Sheriff Brady could have discovered that same information earlier than yesterday—if she’d bothered to ask, that is. But then, maybe she thought what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, either.

Moving on to the Cochise County Morgue brings me to something else the sheriff failed to mention—the fact that Cochise County Medical Examiner Dr. George Winfield happens to he married to Sheriff Brady’s mother. I’m sure if I had asked her why she didn’t tell me that, her answer would have been the same—I didn’t need to know.

Which brings me back to that heartbroken mother stand­ing in that Phoenix cemetery. What all did police officers fail to tell her that she, too, didn’t need to know?

At this moment, the only thing I know for sure is that Connie, my baby sister, is dead. I can’t think about her the way she was as a sunny six-year-old, when I taught her how to ride a bike. I can’t think about how she almost drowned when I tried to teach her to swim in our backyard pool. I can’t think about how we sounded when our mother tried, unsuccessfully, to teach us to sing “Silent Night” in three-part harmony.

No, all I can think about is the way Connie looked tonight, lying on a gurney in the awful fluorescent lighting of the Cochise County Morgue. I am appalled by remem­bering her once beautiful face beaten almost beyond recog­nition.

There’s much more that I need to know that I haven’t yet been told—the why, the where, and the how of her death. Why, where, and how are the Holy Grails that keep all journalists and cops seeking and working and on their toes. But this time, I’m experiencing that search in an entirely differ­ent manner from the way it has been before both in my life and in my career. I’m seeing it through the eyes of that grieving mother, cloaked in her pain, standing in that lonely, desolate cemetery.

I’m not much of an expert on the grief process. I’m not sure which comes first, anger or denial. I can tell you that, right this moment, hours after learning about Connie’s death, I any consumed with anger. Maybe I’m taking that anger out on Sheriff Brady when I should be taking it out on Connie’s killer. The problem is, although I have my sus­picions, I don’t know who that person is yet. When I do, you’ll hear about it.

When my editor asked if I would be willing to chronicle my experiences and share this painful journey with you, my readers, I said yes immediately. Why? Because I understand that, no matter how hurtful it may be for all concerned, we will all learn things from it—things we all need to know.

Maggie MacFerson

Astonished by what she had read, Joanna was in the process of reading through it a second time when she heard Butch’s voice. “Why, look who’s here. Why aren’t you up in the room? Did you lose your key?”

Joanna looked up to see Butch walking across the spacious lobby accompanied by a tall, willowy blonde. Butch left the woman behind and hurried around a massive brass-and-glass coffee table. Reaching Joanna’s side, he bent over and planted a kiss on her cheek.

“This is my wife, Joanna Brady,” he said, turning back to the woman, who had paused uncertainly on the far side of the table. “I didn’t make her change her name, and she didn’t make me change mine,” he added with a grin. “Joey, this is a good friend of mine, Lila Winters. She used to live here, but she’s moving to Texas now. She came for the wedding, of course. We’ve been reminiscing about old times.”

Caught unawares, Joanna took a moment to gather her wits, stand up, and offer her hand. “Glad to meet you,” she said.

Blond, blue-eyed, and with palely luminescent skin, Lila Winters was beautiful in the same fragile, delicate way that expensive English porcelain is beautiful. She wore a blue denim pantsuit the top of which was decorated with a constellation of rhinestone outlined stars.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Lila said. “Including the fact that you’d been called out of town on some kind of official investigation.”

Simultaneously, Joanna Brady made several quick calculations. If Lila Winters was such a good friend of Butch’s, why hadn’t he ever mentioned her name before? And why hadn’t the name Lila Win­ters been on the guest list to Joanna and Butch’s own wedding back in April? There could be only one answer to those two damning questions. Butch and Lila had to have been far more than just “good friends.” And since Butch had evidently been away from his hotel room all night long, there could be little doubt that he had passed the time in the company of that selfsame “good friend” while Joanna had been stuck driving up and down freeways, doing her job, and looking after her daughter.

“Yes,” she said levelly. “I’ve had my hands full. And I guess Butch has been pretty busy, too.”

Lila gave Joanna an appraising look, then she nodded at Butch. “Thanks for breakfast, Butch,” she said. “And for everything eke, too,” she added. “See you at the wedding.”

With that, Lila Winters turned and walked slowly across the lobby. Meanwhile, Butch turned back to Joanna.

“What was that all about?” he asked.

She gazed at him in stony silence and didn’t answer for several long seconds. “What do you think it was about?” she demanded finally. “I come in after being out working all night—after trying to call you time and again—and find you haven’t slept in our room. And them I meet you with someone I don’t know, someone who obviously knows you very well. ‘Thanks for breakfast, Butch,’ ” Joanna mimicked sarcastically. “ ‘Thanks for everything.’ ”

“Joanna . . .” Butch began.

Flinging the newspaper down on the table, Joanna stalked away, leaving Butch standing alone in the lobby. At the hotel entrance she handed her parking receipt over to the parking attendant. “I need my car right away,” she said.

Butch picked up the newspaper from the table and hurried after her. “Joanna, what’s going on? Where are you going?”

“Out,” she snapped. “It’s getting a little stuffy in there. I need some air.”

Joey, it’s not what you think, really. I can explain everything.”

“I’m not interested in your explanations,” she said. “Now go away and leave me alone!”

By then the parking attendant had returned, bringing the Crown Victoria to a stop under the portico and opening the door. As Joanna got in, she handed the attendant his tip. “Will you be needing directions this morning?” he asked.

Not trusting herself to speak, Joanna shook her head mutely. Then she drove off without a backward glance, leaving Butch standing alone on the curb. She made it only as far as the first stop-light before she burst into tears. Sobbing so hard she could hardly see, she finally turned into a nearby parking lot, one belonging to the Peoria Public Library. Looking around, she was grateful to see that late on a Sunday morning the lot was completely deserted.

She had put the car in neutral and set the parking brake when her cell phone began to crow. She picked it up and looked at it. The readout said UNAVAILABLE, which meant her caller might pos­sibly be Butch calling from the hotel. It could also be someone else who needed to reach the sheriff of Cochise County. Sniffing to stifle her tears, she punched SEND, then sat there holding the phone in her hand but saying nothing.

“Joey?” Butch’s voice sounded frantic. She winced when she heard him utter his pet name for her. “Joey,” he repeated. “Are you there? Can you hear me? Where did you go?”

Still she said nothing. She couldn’t.

“Joey,” he pleaded. “Please talk to me. I can explain what hap­pened.”

Suddenly she could speak, but in that odd strangled way that was just above a whisper. It seemed as though the strength of her voice was somehow inversely proportional to whatever she felt. The stronger her emotions, the smaller her voice.

“I already told you,” she croaked. “I don’t want any of your damned explanations.”

She heard Butch’s sigh of relief, and that hurt her, too. The very sound of his voice—the voice she had come to love—made her whole body ache. “You are there, then,” he said. “You’ve got to come back to the hotel, Joey. You’ve got to give me a chance to tell you what went on.”

“I know what went on,” she snapped back at him. “And I’m not coming back.” With that, she punched the END button. Butch called back almost immediately. Eventually the ringing—that awful roosterlike crowing—stopped, only to begin again a moment later. He called five more times in as many minutes, but she didn’t answer. Each time the phone rang, and each time she didn’t answer it, Joanna Brady gathered a little more of her anger around her. Finally she switched the ringer to SILENT and flung the phone out of reach on the far side of the car.

Out of sight, out of mind, she thought. But that gave her pause, too. Wasn’t that exactly what had happened with Butch? Evidently, the moment Joanna had been out of sight, she had been out of his mind as well, enough so that Lila Winters had been able to walk in and make her move.

Just then a group of skateboarders and in-line skaters—bronzed, bare-chested teenagers oblivious to the scorching, one-hundred-­fifteen-degree sun—appeared at the far end of the parking lot. Not willing to let even strangers see her in such a state, Joanna put the Crown Victoria back in gear and drove away. For a while, she drove aimlessly through Peoria, Glendale, and North Phoenix. She could think of only one person who might be able to help her, only one who would understand her sense of betrayal and offer comfort—her best friend, pastor, and confidante, Marianne Maculyea. The problem was, Marianne was more than two hundred miles away, back home in Bisbee.

So distracted that she hardly noticed her surroundings, Joanna was brought up short by a blaring horn. To her dismay she discov­ered she’d gone through an amber light and had almost been broadsided by someone jumping the green. With her heart pound­ing in her throat, she turned right at the next intersection, a side street which led to the back entrance of one of Phoenix’s major shopping malls, Metrocenter.

Realizing it wasn’t safe for her to continue driving, she parked in the broiling parking lot. Her cell phone had slipped off the end of the seat. She had to walk around the car and open the passenger door in order to retrieve it. When she picked it up, the readout said she had missed fifteen calls, all of which were from UNAVAILABLE. All from Butch, no doubt, she told herself.

Slamming the car door shut, she made her way into the mall. Finding a bench near a noisy fountain, she glanced down at her watch. One o’clock was time enough for Jeff and Marianne to have finished up with both the church service and the coffee hour and to have returned home to the parsonage. Gripping the phone tightly, Joanna punched Marianne’s number into the keypad.

“Maculyea/Daniels residence,” Julie Erickson said. Julie was the live-in nanny who cared for Jeff and Marianne’s two children—their almost-four-year-old adopted daughter, Ruth Rachel, and their miracle baby—the one doctors had assured the couple they would never have—one-and-a-half-month-old Jeffrey Andrew.

For years, Marianne Maculyea had been estranged from her par­ents. A partial thaw had occurred a year earlier, when Ruth’s twin sister, Esther Elaine, had been hospitalized for heart-transplant surgery. Marianne’s father, Tim Maculyea, had unbent enough then to come to the hospital in Tucson. Later, when Esther tragically had succumbed to pneumonia, he had come to the funeral as well. Marianne’s mother, Evangeline Maculyea, had not. Only the birth of little Jeffy had finally effected a lasting truce. Julie Erickson, complete with six months’ worth of paid wages, had been Evange­line’s peace offering to her daughter. It was Julie’s capable presence that had made possible Marianne’s rapid post-childbirth return to her duties as pastor of Bisbee’s Tombstone Canyon United Methodist Church.

“Marianne,” Joanna gulped.

“Who’s calling, please?”

“It’s Joanna,” she managed to mumble. With that, she dissolved into tears.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Why, Joanna!” Marianne exclaimed, the moment she heard Joanna’s voice. “What on earth is the matter?”

“It’s Butch,” Joanna whispered.

“What about him?” Mari demanded. “Is he hurt? Has there been an accident?”

Joanna shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “No accident.”

“What is it, then? You’ve got to get hold of yourself, Joanna. Tell me what’s going on.”

“Oh, Mari,” Joanna sobbed. “What am I going to do? What am I going to tell Jenny? It’ll break her heart.”

“Tell her what? What’s happened?”

Joanna drew a shuddering breath. “Butch stayed out all night. He was with another woman. I saw them together, just a little while ago.”

Marianne was all business. “Where did this happen?” she asked.

“At a hotel up in Phoenix—Peoria, really. “There’s a wedding tonight ...”

“I remember now,” Marianne said. “Butch is the man of honor.”

“Right,” Joanna said. “The rehearsal dinner was last night. I was supposed to go, but I ended up having to work. I had to drive a homicide victim’s sister down to Bisbee to identify the body. Then there was a huge flap with my mother calling CPS and upsetting everyone out at the ranch. By the time things settled down, it was too late to drive back, so I spent the night and came back to Phoenix this morning. I had tried calling Butch to let him know. I left several messages on voice mail in the room, and they were all still there because he never came back to the room. He was with another woman, Mari. When I saw them, they had just finished having breakfast together.”

Like a wind-up toy running down, Joanna subsided into silence.

“Breakfast,” Marianne interjected. “You said they had break-fast. What makes you think there’s anything more to it than just that?”

“I saw them,” Joanna said. “I saw them together. And he intro­duced me to her. He said she was an old friend, Mari. But if she was such a good friend, why haven’t I ever heard her name before? Why wasn’t she invited to our wedding? Believe me, they’re more than good friends. And I can’t stand it. We’ve been married less than two months, and already Butch may have been unfaithful to me. I can’t believe it.”

“Do you know that for sure?” Marianne asked. “Did he tell you he’s been unfaithful?”

“No, but—”

“How do you know then?”

“I just know. I’m not stupid, Mari. I saw them together. I know what I saw.” In the silence that followed, Joanna heard Lila Winter’s voice once more. “Thank you for everything.”

“What you think you saw,” Marianne admonished. “Have you actually talked to Butch about this? Did you ask him?”

“No. Ever since I left the hotel, he’s been trying to call me. He says he wants to explain. Explain! As if there could be any explanation. But I won’t talk to him. He thinks all he has to do is give me some kind of lame excuse, and the whole thing will go away. I t won’t!”

“You still haven’t spoken to him?” Marianne asked.

“No. What’s the point? What’s tearing me up is what am I going to tell Jenny, Mari? She loves Butch almost as much as she loved her dad. What will happen to her if she loses Butch, too? And how am I going to face all the people in town, the ones who came to our wedding—the ones who told me I was jumping iii too soon? The ones who said I should have given myself more time? It turns out that they’re right and I’m wrong. How will I ever be able to live this down?”

“Where are you right now?” Marianne asked.

“Metrocenter,” Joanna answered. “When I left the hotel, I didn’t know where to go. I thought about coming home, but I was crying so hard that it wasn’t safe to drive. I stopped here at the im.ill because I was afraid I was going to kill someone.”

“Good decision,” Marianne said. “Nobody should try to drive when they’re crying their eyes out. So what are you going to do now?”

“Come home,” Joanna said in a small voice.

“Where’s Butch?” Marianne asked.

“Back at the hotel,” Joanna answered. “At the Conquistador, in Peoria. That’s where the wedding’s going to be held, the one where Butch is the man of honor. What a joke!”

“And how’s he getting home?”

“How should I know?” Joanna asked.

“Does he have a car?”

“No. We took my county car up to the Sheriffs’ Association Conference in Page. We stopped off in Phoenix for the wedding on the way back down.”

“How’s he getting back to Bisbee?”

“He can walk, for all I care.”

“I see,” Marianne said.

Around her, the mall was filling up with people while Joanna Brady had never felt so alone in her life. Families—mothers and fathers with young, boisterous children—walked through the mall. Some were just out shopping. Others, still dressed in their Sunday finery, were headed to the food court for an after-church lunch. There were throngs of teenagers, kids Jenny’s age, laughing and joking as though they hadn’t a care in the world. Everyone else seemed happy and glad to be alive while Joanna was simply deso­late. She noted that a few of the passersby aimed wary, sidelong glances in her direction.

They probably think I’m crazy, she thought self-consciously. Here I sit. Tears are dripping off my chin, and I’m holding on to my cell phone as though it’s a damned life preserver!

“I think you should go back,” Marianne Maculyea was saying when Joanna’s straying attention returned to the phone.

“I should do what?”

“When it’s safe for you to drive, you should go back to the hotel and talk to Butch.”

“Why? What’s the point?”

Marianne sighed, sounding the way she did when dealing with Ruth, her recalcitrant three-year-old. “Before we go into that, I want you to tell me what’s been going on. All of it, from the beginning.”

And so Joanna found herself relating all the events of the past several days, including how Jenny and Dora Matthews had found Constance Haskell’s body and how Joanna had ended up leaving Phoenix the previous afternoon in order to bring Maggie MatFer­son to Bisbee to identify her sister’s body. She explained how Eleanor had precipitated a crisis at home by dragging Child Pro­tective Services into an already overwrought situation. It was harder to talk about coming back to the hotel that morning and discovering Butch hadn’t been there. Finally she came to the part where Butch and Lila Winters had found her reading Maggie MacFerson’s article in the hotel lobby. As she recounted that, Joanna was once again struggling to hold back tears.

“So that’s it,” she finished lamely. “I got in the car, drove away, and eventually ended up here.”

“Tell me about the wedding,” Marianne said. “Whose wedding is it again?”

“Tammy Lukins,” Joanna answered. “She used to work for Butch. She was one of his waitresses at the Roundhouse Bar and Grill up in Peoria. She’s marrying a guy named Roy Ford who used to be a customer at the Roundhouse. Since Butch is the one who introduced them, they both wanted him to be in the wedding. Tammy wanted Butch to be her . . .” She started to say, “man of honor,” but the words stuck in her throat. “Her attendant,” she said finally.

A short silence followed. Marianne was the one who spoke first. “You told me a few minutes ago that the dead woman’s sister from Phoenix ...”

“Maggie MacFerson,” Joanna supplied.

“That Maggie MacFerson thought her brother-in-law ..”

“Ron Haskell.”

“That he was the one who had murdered his wife. That he had stolen her money and then murdered her.”

Joanna nodded. “That’s right,” she said.

“So what will happen next?” Marianne asked.

Joanna shrugged. “Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal were supposed to go out to Portal this morning to see if they could find him.”

“And what will happen when they do?”

“When they find him, they’ll probably question him,” Joanna replied. “They’ll try to find out where he was around the time his wife died and whether or not he has a verifiable alibi.”

“But they won’t just arrest him on the spot, toss him in jail, and throw away the key?”

“Of course not,” Joanna returned. “They’re detectives. They have to find evidence. The fact that the money is gone and the fact that Connie Haskell died near where her husband was staying is most likely all circumstantial. Before Ernie and Jaime can arrest Ron Haskell, they’ll have to have probable cause. To do that they’ll need to have some kind of physical evidence that links him to the crime.

“What if they arrested him without having probable cause?”

“It would be wrong,” Joanna answered. “Cops can’t arrest someone simply because they feel like it. They have to have good reason to believe the person is guilty, and they can’t simply jump to conclusions based on circumstantial evidence. It has to be some-thing that will stand up in court, something strong enough to con­vince a judge and jury”

“That’s true in your work life, Joanna,” Marianne said quietly. “What about in your personal life? Is it wise to allow yourself to jump to conclusions there?”

A knot of anger pulsed in Joanna’s temples. “You’re saying I’ve jumped to conclusions?”

“Criminals have a right to defend themselves in a court of law,” Marianne said. “You told me yourself that you didn’t listen to anything Butch had to say. That when he tried to talk to you, you didn’t listen—wouldn’t even answer the phone.”

“This is different,” Joanna said.

“Is it? I don’t think so. I believe you’ve tried and convicted the man of being unfaithful to you without giving him the benefit of a fair hearing. I’m not saying Butch didn’t do what you think he did, and I’m certainly not defending him if he did. But I do think you owe him the courtesy of letting him tell you what happened, of let­ting him explain the circumstances, before you hire yourself a divorce attorney and throw him out of the house.”

Joanna sat holding the phone in stunned silence.

“A few minutes ago you asked me what you should tell Jenny,” Marianne continued. “How you should go about breaking the news to her and how you’d face up to the rest of the people in town. Have you talked to anyone else about this?”

“Only you,” Joanna said.

“Good. You need to keep quiet about all this until you know more, until you have some idea of what you’re up against. It could be nothing more than bachelor-party high jinks. I’ve seen you at work, Joanna. When your department is involved in a case, you don’t let people go running to the newspapers or radio stations and leaking information so the public ends up knowing every single thing about what’s going on in any given investigation. You keep it quiet until you have all your ducks in a row. Right?”

Joanna said nothing.

“And that’s what I’m suggesting you do here, as well,” Mari­anne said. “Keep it quiet. Don’t tell anyone. Not Jenny, not your mother, not the people you work with—not until you have a better idea of what’s really going on. You owe it to yourself, Joanna, and you certainly owe that much to Butch.”

“But—”

“Let me finish,” Marianne said. “Since Butch came to town, Jeff and I have come to care about him almost like a brother. We feel as close to him as we used to feel to Andy. I also know that he’s made a huge difference in your life, and in Jenny’s, too. I don’t want you to throw all that away. I don’t want you to lose this sec­ond chance at happiness over something that may not be that important.”

Joanna was suddenly furious. “You’re saying Butch can do any-thing he wants—that he can go out with another woman and it doesn’t matter?”

“If something happened between him and this woman, this Lila, then of course it matters. But it’s possible that absolutely nothing happened. Before you write him off, you need to know exactly what went on.”

“You mean, I should ask him and then I should just take his word for it?” Joanna demanded. “If he tells me nothing happened, I’m supposed to believe him? He was out all night long, Mari. I don’t think I can ever trust him again. I don’t think I can believe a word he says.”

“In my experience,” Marianne said, “there are two sides to every story. Before you go blasting your point of view to the universe, maybe you should have some idea about what’s going on on Butch’s side of the fence. He’s been used to running his own life, Joanna. Used to calling the shots. Now he’s in a position where he often has to play second fiddle. That’s not easy. Ask Jell about It sometime. Things were rough that first year we were married, when I was try ing to be both a new bride and a new minister all at the same tin me. If fact, there were times when I didn’t think we’d make it.”

Joanna was stunned. “You and Jeff?” she asked.

“Yes, Jeff and I,” Marianne returned.

“But you never mentioned it. You never told me.”

“Because we worked it out, Joanna,” Marianne said. “We worked it out between us. Believe me, it would have been a whole lot harder if the whole world had known about it.”

“What are you saying?” Joanna asked.

“I’m saying you have a choice,” Marianne said. “It’s one of those two paths diverging in the woods that Robert Frost talks about. You can go home and tell Jim Bob and Eva Lou and Jenny that something terrible has happened between you and Butch and that you’re headed for divorce court. Do that, and you risk losing everything. Or, you can pull yourself together, drive your butt back to the hotel, go to that damned wedding with a smile on your face and your head held high, and see if you can fix things before they get any worse.”

“Swallow my pride and go back to the hotel?” Joanna repeated. “That’s right.”

“Go to the wedding?”

“Absolutely, and give Butch a chance to tell you what went on. What’s going on. If he wants to bail out on the marriage and if you want to as well, then you’re right. There’s nothing left to fix and you’d better come home and be with Jenny when her heart gets broken again. But if there is something to be salvaged, you’re a whole lot better off doing it sooner than later.”

“I thought you were my friend, Mari. How can you turn on me like this?”

“I am your friend,” Marianne replied. “A good enough friend that I’m prepared to risk telling you what you may not want to hear. A friend who cares enough to send the very worst. Some things are worth fighting for, Joanna. Your marriage is one of them.”

Soon after, a spent Joanna ended the call. Butch had evidently given up trying to call, since the phone didn’t ring again. Sitting in the mall, with the overheated but silent telephone still cradled in her hand, Joanna sat staring blindly at the carefree Sunday after-noon throng moving past her.

And then, sitting with her back to the noisy fountain, Joanna could almost hear her father’s voice. “Never run away from a fight, Little Hank,” D. H. Lathrop had told her.

Joanna was back in seventh grade. It was the morning after she had been suspended from school for two days for fighting with the boys who had been picking on her new friend, Marianne Maculyea.

“No matter what your mother says,” her father had counseled in his slow, East Texas drawl, “no matter what anyone says, you’re better off making a stand than you are running away “

“So other people won’t think you’re a coward?” Joanna had asked.

“No,” he had answered. “So you won’t think you’re a coward.”

The vivid memory left Joanna shaken. It was as though her father and Marianne were ganging up on her, with both of them telling her the exact same thing. They both wanted her to stop running and face whatever it was she was up against.

Standing up, Joanna stuffed the phone in her pocket and then headed for the mall entrance. Getting into the Crown Victoria was like climbing into an oven. The steering wheel scorched her fingertips, but she barely noticed. With both her father’s and Marianne’s words still ringing in her heart and head, she started the engine and went looking for the side road that would take her away from the mall.

As she drove, she felt like a modern-day Humpty Dumpty. She had no idea if what had been broken could be put back together, but D. H. Lathrop and Marianne were right. Joanna couldn’t give up without a fight. Wouldn’t give up without a fight. Maybe she didn’t owe that much to Butch Dixon or even to Jenny, but Joanna Brady sure as hell owed it to herself.

It was almost two by the time Joanna returned to the hotel. She pulled up to the door, where a florist van was disgorging a moun­tain of flowers. Dodging through the lobby, Joanna held her breath for fear of meeting up with some of the other wedding guests. In her current woebegone state, she didn’t want to see anyone she knew.

When she opened the door to their room, the blackout cur twins were pulled. Butch, fully clothed, was lying on top of the covers, sound asleep. She tried to close the door silently, but the click of the lock awakened him. “Joey?” he asked, sitting up. “Is that you?”

She switched on a light. “Yes,” she said.

“You’re back. Where did you go?”

“Someplace where I could think,” she told him.

Rather than going near the bed, Joanna walked over to the table on the far side of the room. Pulling out a chair, she sat down and folded her hands into her lap.

“What did you decide?” Butch asked.

“I talked to Marianne. She said I should cone back and hear what you have to say.”

“Nothing happened, Joey,” Butch said. “Between Lila and me, mean. Not now, anyway. Not last night.”

“But you used to be an item?”

“Yes, but that was a long time ago, before I met you. Still,” Butch added, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Joanna asked the question even though she feared what the answer might be. “If nothing happened, what do you have to be sorry for?”

“I shouldn’t have been with Lila in the first place,” Butch admitted at once. “After the rehearsal dinner, she offered me a ride back to the hotel. I should have come back with someone else, but I didn’t. I was pissed at you, and I’d had a few drinks. So I came back with Lila instead. At the time, it didn’t seem like that bad an idea.”

“I see,” Joanna returned stiffly.

“No,” Butch said. “I don’t think you see at all.”

“What I’m hearing is that your defense consists of your claim­ing that nothing happened, but even if it did happen, you’re not responsible because you were drunk at the time.”

“My defense is that nothing did happen,” he replied. “But it could have. It might have, and I shouldn’t have run that risk. She’s dying, you see.”

“Who’s dying?”

“Lila.”

“Of what?” Joanna scoffed derisively, remembering the willowy blonde who had accompanied Butch through the lobby. “She didn’t look sick to me.”

“But she is,” Butch replied. “She has ALS. Do you know what that is?”

Joanna thought for a minute. “Lou Gehrig’s disease?”

Butch nodded. “She just got the final diagnosis last week. She hasn’t told anyone yet, including Tammy and Roy. She didn’t want to spoil their wedding.”

“But, assuming it’s true, she went ahead and told you,” Joanna said. “How come?”

“I told you. Lila and I used to be an item, Joey. We broke up long before you and I ever met. She married somebody else and moved to San Diego, but the guy she married walked out on her two months ago,” Butch continued.

She got dumped and now she wants you back, Joanna thought. She felt as though she were listening to one of those interminable shaggy-dog stories with no hope of cutting straight to the punch line. “So this is a rebound thing for her?” Joanna asked. “Or is that what I was for you?” Her voice sounded brittle. There was a metal­lic taste in her mouth.

“Joey, please listen,” Butch pleaded. “What do you know about ALS?”

Joanna shrugged. “Not much. It’s incurable, I guess.”

“Right. Lila went to see her doctor because her back was both­ering her. She thought maybe she’d pulled a muscle or something. The doctor gave her the bad news on Thursday. Even though she’s not that sick yet, she will be. It’ll get worse and worse. The doctor told her that most ALS patients die within two to five years of diag­nosis. She’s putting her San Diego house on the market. She’s going to Texas to be close to her parents.

“Lila needed to talk about all this, Joey,” Butch continued. “She needed somebody to be there with her, to listen and sympathize. happened to be handy. We talked all night long. I held her, and she cried on my shoulder.”

“You held her,” Joanna said.

“And listened,” Butch said.

“And nothing else?”

“Nothing. I swear to God.”

“And why should I believe you?” Joanna asked.

Butch got off the bed. He came across the room to the table, where he sat down opposite Joanna. As he did so, his lips curved into a tentative smile. “Because I wouldn’t do something like that, Joey. I’m lucky enough to be married to the woman I love. She’s also somebody who carries two loaded weapons at all times and who, I have it on good authority, knows exactly how to use them. What do you think I am, stupid?”

Joanna thought about that for a minute. Then she asked another question. “You said you were pissed at me. Why?”

“That’s hard to explain.”

“Try me.”

“Tammy and Roy and the rest of the people at the wedding are all my friends,” he said slowly. “I had just finished spending the last three days up at Page being sheriff’s spouse-under-glass. Don’t get me wrong. Antiquing aside, I was glad to do it. But turnabout’s fair play, Joey. I really wanted you to be here with me last night at the rehearsal dinner. I wanted to show you off to my old buddies and be able to say, `Hey, you guys, lucky me. Look what I found!’ But then duty called and off you went.

“As soon as you said you were going, I knew you’d never make it back in time for the dinner, and I think you did, too. But did you say so? No. You did your best imitation of Arnold Schwarzenegger saying, `I’ll be back,’ which, of course, you weren’t. You left in the afternoon and didn’t turn back up until sometime in the middle of the night. I know you weren’t back earlier because I, too, was call­ing the room periodically all evening long in hopes you’d be back and able to join in the fun. Either you weren’t in yet, or else you didn’t bother answering the phone.”

“You didn’t leave a message,” Joanna said accusingly. “And you could have tried calling my cell phone.”

“Right, but that would have meant interrupting you while you were working.”

Joanna thought about that for a moment. They had both made an effort to reduce the number of personal phone calls between them while she was working. Still, she wasn’t entirely satisfied.

“That’s why you were pissed then?” she asked. “Because I missed the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner and wasn’t around for you to show me off to your old pals?”

“Pretty much,” Butch admitted. “I guess it sounds pretty lane, but that’s the way it was.”

A long silence followed. Joanna was thinking about her mother and father, about Eleanor and Big Hank Lathrop. How many times had Sheriff Lathrop used the call of duty to provide an excused absence for himself from one of Eleanor’s numerous social func­tions? How often had he hidden behind his badge to avoid being part of some school program or church potluck or a meeting of the Bisbee Historical Society?

Joanna loved her mother, but she didn’t much like her. And the last thing she ever wanted was to be like Eleanor Lathrop Winfield. Still, there were times now, when Joanna would be talking to Jenny or bawling her out for something, when it seemed as though Eleanor’s words and voice were coming through Joanna’s own lips. There were other times, too, when, glancing in a mirror, it seemed as though Eleanor’s face were staring back at her. That was how genetics worked. But now, through some strange quirk in her DNA, Joanna found herself resembling her father rather than her mother. Here she was doing the same kind of unintentional harm to Butch that ll. H. Lathrop had done to his wife, Eleanor. And Joanna could see now that although she had been hurt by her belief in Butch’s infidelity—his presumed infidelity—she wasn’t the only one. Butch had been hurt, too.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I called, too,” she said contritely. “I left messages on the room’s voice mail trying to let you know what was going on—that all hell had broken loose and I was going to have to go to Bisbee. You never got any of them. They were all still listed as new mes­sages when I came in.”

“This sounds serious,” Butch said. “Tell me now.”

And so Joanna went on to tell Butch about going to see Maggie MacFerson and finding the woman drunk in the unlocked house that belonged to her dead sister. Joanna told Butch about the loaded gun and the smashed glass and the bleeding cuts on Mag­gie’s hands that had triggered a trip to the emergency room. She told him about Eleanor’s blowing the whistle to Child Protective Services and how a zealous caseworker had wrested a screamingly unhappy Dora away from Jim and Eva Lou’s care at High Lone-some Ranch.

“What a mess!” Butch said when she finished. “How’s Jenny taking all this?”

“That’s why I stayed over in Bisbee. To be with Jenny, but she’s okay, I think. At least she seemed to be okay.”

“I read the article on the front page of the Reporter,” Butch said. “How can that woman—Maggie MacFerson—get away with putting Jenny’s and Dora’s names in an article like that? I didn’t think newspapers were supposed to publish kids’ names.”

“They usually don’t with juveniles who are victims of crimes or with juvenile offenders, either. In this case, Dora and Jenny weren’t either. They were kids who found a body. That means their names go in the papers.”

“It wasn’t exactly a flattering portrait of either one of them—or of you, either,” Butch added.

She gave Butch a half-smile. “I’m getting used to it.”

“Is Marianne the only person you talked to?” he asked. “Today, I mean. After the little scene down in the lobby.”

“She’s the only one.”

“That way, even though nothing happened, at least it won’t be all over town that I’m the villain of the piece. Marianne is totally trustworthy. She also seems to be of the opinion that you’re right and I’m wrong. She told me to get my butt in the car and head straight back here, to the hotel.”

Butch shook his head. “I think we were both wrong, Joey,” he said after a pause. “I’m a married man. No matter what, I shouldn’t have been spending all night alone with an unmarried ex-­girlfriend, sick or not. And I had no right to want you to take a pass on your job. Being sheriff is important, Joey—to you and to me as well as to the people who elected you. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be jealous on occasion.” He grinned then. “And the same goes for you. I mean, if you want to be jealous of me, have a ball.”

Which, of course, she had been, Joanna realized. More so than she ever would have thought possible.

“I still don’t understand why Lila had to talk to you about all that,” she said. “Doesn’t she have any other friends she could have talked to?”

Butch shrugged. “Bartenders are the poor man’s psychologists. We listen and nod and say uh-huh, and all we charge is the price of a drink or two.”

And Joanna realized that was true as well. One of the things she had always appreciated about Butch was that he was a good listener. He heard not only the words, but paid attention to the sub-text as well.

Just then, Butch glanced at his watch. “Yikes!” he said. “I’m due downstairs in five minutes for pictures. I’d better jump into that tux.” He started toward the bathroom, then stopped. “You will come, won’t you?” he asked. “To the wedding, I mean.”

Joanna nodded. “I’ll be there.”

His face broke into a smile. “Good,” he said, but then he turned serious again. “With everything that’s going on back home, do you want to head for Bisbee after the reception is over? It probably won’t be all that late. If you want to, we can.”

That kind of offer, made in good faith, was exactly what made Butch Dixon so damned lovable, and it made Joanna remember her former mother-in-law’s advice about spending time with her husband.

Joanna got up, went to over to Butch, and let him pull her into a bear hug. “Thanks,” she said. “But I don’t think we have to do that. Jenny’s fine. Jim Bob and Eva Lou have everything under control. Besides,” she added, smiling up at him, “it’s too late to check out without being charged for another night. It would be a shame to waste an opportunity to be alone together, wouldn’t it?”

He kissed her on the lips. “It would be a shame, all right. Now let loose of me, so I can get dressed.”

CHAPTER NINE

Once Butch had left for the photo session, Joanna stripped off her clothes and took a shower. When she came out of the bathroom, the message light was blinking on the phone. “There’s a package for Mr. Dixon waiting at the front desk,” she was told. Dialing the front desk, Joanna asked to have the package sent up. When it arrived, the package showed a return address of a place called Copy Corner. Ripping off the wrapping, Joanna found an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch-sized box that was about as thick as a ream of paper.

With trembling fingers, she lifted the cover. Inside was a com­puter disk. Lifting that, she then read what was typed on the top page. “To Serve and Protect,” it said. “By F. W. Dixon.” Beneath the author’s name were the words “To Joey.” Seeing that simple dedi­cation put a lump in Joanna’s throat.

Taking the open box with her, Joanna settled onto the bed and began to read. To Serve and Protect was a murder mystery, set in a fictional Arizona town, with a lady police chief named Kimberly Charles in charge of a tiny police department. That much of the story bore a certain familiarity to Joanna’s own life, but there the resemblance seemed to end. The story was told in a droll fashion that made what happened on the pages, complete with typical small-town politics, far more funny than serious.

Lost in the story, Joanna lost track of time. When she came up for air, it was twenty past four; there was just enough time to comb her hair, put on her makeup, dress, and make it to the wedding. She had brought along one of the outfits she had bought in Paris on her honeymoon. Next to her own wedding dress, the silk shirtwaist was the most expensive piece of clothing she had ever owned. She’d fallen in love with it on sight and had been forced to buy it because it came in her favorite color—the brilliant emerald-green hue of freshly sprouted cottonwood leaves, a color desert dwellers find hard to resist. It didn’t hurt that, with her red hair and light skin, that particular shade of green was, in Butch’s words, a “killer” combination.

The nuptials were scheduled to be held in one of the several ball-rooms on the Conquistador’s second floor. Joanna was already seated in one of the rows of chairs when Lila Winters entered the room. Blond and elegant, she wore a sapphire-blue suit. Watching her start down the aisle, Joanna couldn’t quite stifle the stab of jealousy that shot through her whole body. Watching closely, however, Joanna did detect the smallest trace of a limp as Lila made her way to a chair. That limp caused Joanna’s jealousy to change to compassion.

Only three people among the assembled guests—Butch, Joanna, and Lila Winters herself—knew that the strikingly elegant woman who looked so vibrantly alive was actually dying. What must it be like, Joanna wondered, to be given that kind of devastating diagnosis? Whom would I tell if that happened to me? In the end there was only one answer. Butch, she realized. He’d help me figure out what to do.

At that juncture the first strains of the “Wedding March” sounded. Joanna rose and turned with everyone else to watch the procession. Butch preceded the bride down the aisle, walking in the slow, halting manner dictated by the occasion. Catching Joanna’s eye as he passed, Butch winked. Tammy Lukins walked down the aisle on the arm of her adult son, who also gave her away. During the brief and joyful ceremony Joanna couldn’t help feeling a grudging respect for Lila Winters’s decision to keep her bad news away from the happy bride and groom.

After the ceremony, the wedding entourage moved to a second ballroom for the reception. While Butch was occupied with his attendant duties, Joanna sat down at one of the tables which offered a panoramic view of the entire reception. She was sipping a glass of champagne when someone said, “Mind if I join you?”

Joanna looked up to see Lila Winters in her sapphire-blue suit. “Sure,” Joanna said. “Help yourself.”

As Lila took a seat, Joanna noted the fleeting wince that crossed the woman’s face when her back came in contact with the chair. The expression passed so swiftly that only someone looking fir it would have noticed.

“You seemed upset earlier,” Lila began, once she was seated. “When Butch and I met up with you in the lobby, I mean. I didn’t want you to think anything untoward had happened.”

During that earlier encounter, Joanna Brady would willingly have scratched the woman’s eyes out. Now she simply said, “I know. Butch told me.”

They were interrupted by a roar of laughter from a group gathered across the room, where the groom had just tossed the bride’s garter high into the air, and several of the guests, graybeards all of them, scrambled to retrieve it.

“He told you about me, then?” Lila asked, once the laughter subsided. “About what’s going on?”

Joanna nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Please,” Lila said, cutting her off. “Let’s not discuss it. I’m still feeling pretty sorry for myself, and I don’t want to go into it here. Not now. Not yet. I just wanted to say that I think you’re very lucky—to have Butch, that is.”

“I know,” Joanna said. “Thank you.”

For the space of almost a minute they sat in silence while both sipped at their respective glasses of champagne. Across the room it was time for the bride to toss her bouquet.

“It doesn’t seem real,” Lila said quietly. “It wasn’t all that long ago when I was the one tossing the bouquet, and now ...”

Even though she had said she didn’t want to discuss her loom­ing illness, Joanna realized that’s what they were doing neverthe­less. “It must be very difficult,” she replied.

Lila nodded. “These are my friends,” she said, gazing around the room. “I’ve known these people for years. It was bad enough to have to come back and face them all at a wedding, of all things, after Jimmy walked out on me the way he did. But now that I know about—” She stopped short of naming her illness. “I don’t want to tell them, but . . . I don’t want to die alone, either.”

Law enforcement circles are full of heroes and acts of derring­-do—the kind that make for newspaper headlines and for riveting television newscasts. Lila Winters’s courage was far quieter than that, and far more solitary. In her life-and-death struggle, she couldn’t reach for a radio and call for backup.

“It was very kind of you not to upset the wedding plans,” Joanna said. “If I had been in your place, I don’t think I could have done it.”

Lila gave Joanna a quick, self-deprecating smile. “Don’t give me too much credit,” she said. “I think it’s really a case of denial. As long as nobody else knows about it—as long as I don’t say the actual words out loud—maybe it’s all a big mistake and it’ll just go away. But that’s not going to happen, and now that I’ve told Butch, I’m hoping I’ll be able to work up courage enough to tell the others—in good time, that is. But talking to Butch helped a lot. Thanks for sharing him with me.”

With that, Lila Winters excused herself and walked away. A few minutes later, Butch showed up at Joanna’s table. “Is everything all right?” he asked, a concerned frown wrinkling his forehead. “I mean, I noticed the two of you were ...”

Looking at him, the last vestiges of Joanna’s earlier anger melted away. “We were talking,” she said, smiling. “Comparing notes, actually”

Butch looked thunderstruck. His obvious consternation made Joanna laugh. “We both think you’re a pretty good listener,” she added. “For a boy.”

“Whew,” he said, mopping his brow in relief. “So I’m still alive then?”

“So far.”

The reception included a buffet dinner followed by cake and dancing to a swing band that lasted far into the night. Joanna surprised herself by having a delightful time. Rather than rushing out early to drive back to Bisbee, she and Butch stayed until eleven, when the party finally began to wind down. When they at last went back upstairs to their room, Butch stopped short at the mound of manuscript pages scattered across the bed.

“It came,” he said.

“And I opened it,” Joanna said. “I also started reading it.”

“How far did you get?” he asked.

“The first hundred pages or so,” she said.

“And?” he asked. “What do you think?”

“It’s funny.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you write it that way?”

He came across the room to her and gathered her into his arms. “I had to,” he said. “Because, if I wrote it the way things really are, it would be too hard.”

Joanna frowned and pushed him away. “What do you mean?”

“Because the truth of the matter is, the real job scares the hell out of me. Look at yesterday. You walked into a house to tell someone her sister died, and the woman at that kitchen table was sitting there drunk and with a fully loaded weapon within easy reach. If that isn’t scary, I don’t know what is. I decided to make it funny to preserve my own mental health.”

“I don’t mean to worry you,” Joanna said, nestling against his chest and staying there.

“But you do.”

Had Joanna had this same conversation with Deputy Andrew Brady before he was shot and killed? How many nights had she lain awake in her bed at High Lonesome Ranch worrying about whether or not he would make it home safely after his shift? And how often had Eleanor done exactly the same thing when Big Hank Lathrop had been sheriff?

Once again, she was struck by the sense of history repeating itself, but with the lines mysteriously crossed and with her some-how walking both sides of the street at the same time.

While Butch went to change out of his tux, Joanna retrieved the cell phone she had deliberately left upstairs when she went down to the wedding. There were five missed calls, two from the department and three from Frank Montoya’s cell phone. When she listened to the three messages, they were all from Frank—all of them asking that she call him back regardless of what time she got in.

“What’s up?” she asked when Frank came on the line.

“We’ve got a problem in Paradise,” he said.

“That sounds like the title of a bad novel.”

“I wish,” he said. “That place I told you about, `Pathway to,’ could blow up in our faces.”

“How so?”

“Ernie and Jaime went over there this morning and were met at the gate by an armed guard who wouldn’t let them inside to see anybody. In other words, if Ron Haskell is inside—which we don’t know for sure at this time—nobody’s going to be talking to him anytime soon.”

“Have them call up Cameron Moore and get a court order.”

“We tried. Judge Moore and his family are down in Guaymas, fishing. It’s Memorial Day Weekend, you know. He won’t be back from Mexico until late Tuesday.”

“Great,” Joanna said. “Did you say armed guard?”

“That’s right.”

“Shades of Waco?”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Frank said.

Joanna sighed. “Well, there’s not much we can do about it tonight. Anything else happening that I should know about? I here were a couple of other calls from the department.”

“No. They called me after they called you. Everything is under control.”

“Any word on Dora’s mom?”

“Not so far.”

“She’s bound to surface eventually,” Joanna said.

“Who?” Butch said, coming out of the bathroom.

“Dora Matthews’s mother,” Joanna said, covering the mouthpiece of the phone. “We still haven’t found her.” She uncovered the mouthpiece and spoke to Frank once more. “Tomorrow morning we’ll have to stay in Peoria long enough to drop off Butch’s tux, then we’ll head home.”

“Have you heard that Yolanda Cañedo is back in University Medical Center?” Frank asked.

“I did,” Joanna told him. “Her mother called out to the house and left a message with Eva Lou. If we have time, Butch and I will stop by the hospital on the way down. Do you have any idea how bad it is?”

“Pretty bad, I think.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. Talk to you tomorrow.” She signed off.

“What’s pretty bad?” Butch asked.

“Yolanda Cañedo is back in the hospital in Tucson.”

“She’s the jail matron with cervical cancer?”

Joanna nodded. “Her mother wants us to stop by the hospital to see her if we can.”

“I don’t see why not,” Butch said.

Joanna slipped out of her dress and took off her makeup. By the time she came to bed, Butch was sitting with the first pages of the manuscript on his lap. He was reading and making notations on the pages as he went. She slipped into bed and found her spot in the manuscript. She began reading with the best of intentions, but a combination of too much champagne and not enough sleep soon overwhelmed her. She fell asleep sitting up, with the lamp still on, and with the manuscript laid out across her lap. When she awak­ened, it was daylight. Butch was carefully retrieving pages of the manuscript, which had slipped off both her lap and the bed and lay in a scattered heap on the carpeted floor.

Joanna stirred and groaned. Her back was stiff. Her neck felt as though it had been held in a hammerlock all night long.

“It must have been exciting, all right,” Butch said as he sorted through the jumbled pages. “It put you out like a light.”

“Not until midnight,” she said. “I loved every minute of it, right up until I fell asleep.”

“Really?” he asked. “You really do like it?”

“I didn’t say I liked it,” she corrected. “I said I loved it. In my book, love is better than like.”

“Oh,” Butch said. “I see. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

After breakfast, Joanna and Butch had to hang around Peoria until the tux shop opened at ten, then they headed for Bisbee. With Joanna driving, Butch sat in the passenger seat and read his manuscript aloud, pausing now and then while he changed a word or scribbled a note. Joanna continued to be intrigued by the fact that the story was funny—really funny. There were some incidents that seemed vaguely familiar and no doubt had their origins in events in and around the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department, but just when she would be ready to point out that something was too close to the mark, the story would veer off in some zany and totally unpredictable fashion that would leave her giggling.

“This is hilarious,” Joanna said after one particularly laughable scene. “I can’t get over how funny it is—how funny you are.”

Butch looked thoughtful. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I was usually the smallest boy in my class. So I had a choice. I could either get the crap beaten out of me on a regular basis or I could be a clown and make everybody laugh. I picked the latter. Once I grew up and went into business, it was the same thing, I could let things get to me or have fun. I don’t like serious, Joey. I prefer off-the-wall.”

Joanna looked at him and smiled. “So do I,” she said.

Listening to him read the story made the miles of pavement speed by. Traffic was light because most Memorial Day travelers were not yet headed home. It was a hot, windy morning. The sum­mer rains were still a good month away, so gusting winds kicked up layers of parched earth and churned them into dancing dust devils or clouds of billowing dust. Near Casa Grande Joanna watched in amusement as long highway curves made the towering presence of Picacho Peak seem to hop back and forth across the busy freeway. They had sped along at seventy-five, and just before noon they pulled into the parking garage at University Medical Center in Tucson.

“Are you coming up?” she asked before stepping out of the car.

Butch rolled down his window. “I don’t think so,” he said. “You go ahead. If you don’t mind, I’d rather sit here and keep on proofreading.”

With her emotions firmly in check and trying not to remember that awful time when Andy was in that very hospital, Joanna made her way into the main reception area.

“Yolanda Cañedo,” she said.

The woman at the desk typed a few letters into her computer keyboard. Frowning, she looked up at Joanna. “Are you a relative?”

Joanna shook her head. “Ms. Cañedo works for me,” she said.

“She’s been moved into the ICU. You can go up to the waiting room, but only relatives are allowed into the unit itself.”

“I know the drill,” Joanna said.

“The ICU is—”

“I know how to get there,” Joanna said.

She made her way to the bank of elevators and up to the ICU waiting room, which hadn’t changed at all from the way she remembered it. Two people sat in the tar corner of the roost, and Joanna recognized both of them. One was Olga Ortiz, Yolanda’s mother. The other was Ted Chapman, executive director of the newly formed Cochise County Jail Ministry.

Ted stood up and held out a bony hand as Joanna approached. He was a tall scarecrow of a man who towered over her. After retiring as a Congregational minister, he had seen a need at the jail and had gone to work to fill it. His new voluntary job was, as he had told Joanna, a way to keep himself from wasting away retire­ment.

“How are things?” Joanna asked.

“Not good,” he said. “Leon’s in with her right now.” Leon Cañedo was Yolanda’s husband.

Joanna sat down next to Mrs. Ortiz, who sat with a three-ring notebook clutched in her arms. “I’m so sorry to hear Yolanda’s back in here,” Joanna said. “I thought she was doing better.”

Olga nodded. “We all did,” she said. “But she’s having a terri­ble reaction to the chemo—lots worse than anyone expected. And it’s very nice of you to stop by, Sheriff Brady. When I called to ask you to come, Yolanda wasn’t in the ICU. I thought seeing you might cheer her up, but then . . .” Olga Ortiz shrugged and fell silent.

“They moved her into the ICU about ten this morning,” led Chapman supplied.

“Is there anything I can do?” Joanna asked. “Anything my department can do?”

Olga Ortiz’s eyes filled with tears. She looked down at the notebook she was still hugging to her body. “Mr. Chapman brought me this,” she said. “I haven’t had a chance to show it to Yolanda yet. She’s too sick to read it now, but it’ll mean so much to her when she can.” Olga offered the notebook to Joanna, holding it carefully as though it were something precious and infinitely breakable.

Joanna opened it to find it was a homemade group get-well card. Made of construction paper and decorated with bits of glued-on greeting cards, it expressed best wishes and hopes for a speedy recovery. Each page was from one particular individual—either a fellow jail employee or an inmate. All of the pages were signed, although some of the signatures, marked by an X, had names supplied in someone else’s handwriting, Ted Chapman’s, most likely.

Joanna looked at the man and smiled. “What a nice thing to do,” she said.

“We try,” he returned.

Joanna closed the notebook and handed it back to Olga, who once again clutched it to her breast. “What about Yolanda’s boys?” Joanna asked. “Are they all right? If you and Leon are both up here, who’s looking after them?”

“Arturo,” Olga said. “My husband. The problem is, his heart’s not too good, and those boys can be too much for him at times.”

“Let me see if there’s anything we can do to help out with the kids,” Joanna offered. “We might be able to take a little of the pres­sure off the rest of you.”

“That would be very nice,” Olga said. “I’d really appreciate it.”

Just then Joanna’s cell phone rang. Knowing cell phones were frowned on in hospitals, she excused herself and hurried back to the elevator lobby. She could see that her caller was Frank Mon­toya, but she let the phone go to messages and didn’t bother calling back until she was outside the main door.

“Good afternoon, Frank,” Joanna said. “Sorry I couldn’t answer a few minutes ago when you called. What’s happening?”

“We found Dora Matthews,” Frank replied.

“What do you mean, you found her?” Joanna repeated. “I thought Dora Matthews was in foster care. How could she be missing?”

“She let herself out through a window last night and took on. Once the foster parents realized she had skipped, they didn’t rush to call for help because they figured she’d cone back on her own, No such luck.”

The finality in Frank Montoya’s voice caused a clutch of concern in Joanna’s stomach. “You’re not saying she’s dead, are you?”

Frank sighed. “I’m afraid so,” he said.

Joanna could barely get her mind around the appalling idea. “Where?” she demanded. “And when?”

“In a culvert out along Highway 90, just west of the turnoff to Kartchner Caverns. A guy out working one of those 4-H highway cleanup crews found her. Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal are on the scene here with me right now. We’re expecting Doc Win field any minute.”

“You’re sure it’s Dora?” Joanna asked. “There’s no possibility it could be someone else?”

“No way,” Frank replied. “Don’t forget, I saw Dora Matthews myself the other night out at Apache Pass. I know what she looks like. There’s no mistake, Joanna. It’s her.”

Joanna sighed. “I forgot you had met her. What happened?”

“Looks like maybe she was hit by a car and then dragged or thrown into the ditch.”

“What about skid marks or footprints? Anything like that?”

“None that we’ve been able to find so far.”

“What about Sally Matthews? Any sign of her yet?” Joanna asked.

“Negative on that. We’re looking, but we still don’t have a line on her.”

“Great,” Joanna said grimly. “When we finally get around to arresting her for running a meth lab out of her mother’s house, we can also let her know that the daughter we took into custody the other night is dead. ‘Sorry about that. It’s just one of those unfor­tunate things.’ “

“Dora Matthews wasn’t in our custody, Joanna,” Frank reminded her. “CPS took over. They’re the ones who picked her up from High Lonesome Ranch, and they’re the ones who put her in foster care.”

“You’re right. Dora Matthews may not have been our problem legally,” Joanna countered. “When all the legal buzzards get around to searching for a place to put blame for a wrongful-death lawsuit, Child Protective Services is probably going to take the hit. But that’s called splitting hairs for liability’s sake, Frank. Morally speak­ing, Dora was our problem. You know that as well as I do.”

Frank’s dead silence on the other end of the phone told Joanna he knew she was right. “Butch and I are just now leaving Univer­sity Medical Center,” she added. “Thanks for letting me know. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

She sprinted from the front door to the garage. “What’s wrong?” Butch demanded as she threw herself into the car. “Dora Matthews is dead.”

“No.”

“Yes. I just talked to Frank. Someone ran over her with a car. A Four-H litter patrol found her out on Highway 90 by the turnoff to Kartchner Caverns.”

“But I thought she was in a foster home,” Butch said. “How can this be?”

“That’s what I want to know,” Joanna returned grimly.

178

They drove through Tucson with lights flashing and with the siren wailing. They were passing Houghton Road before Hutch spoke again.

“What if they’re related?” he asked.

Turning to look at Butch’s face, Joanna ran over the warning strip of rough pavement that bordered the shoulder of the freeway. Only when she had hauled the car back into its proper lane did she reply. “What if what’s related?” she asked.

“Dora’s death and the murder of the woman Dora and Jenny found in Apache Pass. What if whoever killed Connie Haskell thinks Dora and Jenny know something that could identify hint? What if Dora’s dead because the killer wanted to keep her quiet?”

Without another word, Joanna picked up the phone and dialed High Lonesome Ranch. Eva Lou answered.

Joanna willed her voice to be calm. “Hi, Eva Lou,” she said casually. “Could I speak to Jenny, please?” she asked.

“She’s not here right now,” Eva Lou answered.

Joanna’s heart fell to the pit of her stomach. “Where is she?”

“Out riding Kiddo,” Eva Lou replied. “She was still really upset about Dora this morning. When she asked if she could go riding, I thought it would do her a world of good. Why? Is something the matter?”

“How long has she been gone?”

“I’m not sure. An hour or so, I suppose.”

“Do you have any idea where she was going?”

“Just up in the hills. Both dogs went with her. I understand she sometimes rides down toward Double Adobe to see . . . What’s that girl’s name again?”

“Cassie,” Joanna supplied. “Cassie Parks.”

“That’s right. Cassie. But as far as I know, Cassie’s still away on the camp-out. Joanna, are you all right? You sound funny.”

“Something’s happened to Dora Matthews,” Joanna said carefully.

“Not her again,” Eva Lou said. “What’s wrong now?”

“She’s dead.”

“Dead! My goodness! How can that be? What happened?”

“She evidently ran away from the foster home sometime overnight,” Joanna said. “She was hit by a car out on Highway 90, over near the turnoff to Kartchner Caverns.”

“Jim Bob’s outside messing with the pump,” Eva Lou said. “I’ll go tell him. We’ll take your Eagle and go out looking for Jenny right away to let her know what’s happened.”

“Go ahead,” Joanna said. “Butch and I will be there as soon as we can.

She ended that call and then dialed Frank Montoya again. “I’m not coming,” she said. “I’m going home instead. What if whoever killed Connie Haskell also killed Dora Matthews? What if they’re coming after Jenny next?”

There was a pause. “I can see why you’d be worried about that,” Frank replied at last. “If I were in your position, I’d be wor­ried, too. But remember, this could be just a hit-and-run. It wouldn’t be the first time a hitchhiker got run over in the dark.”

“If Jenny were your child, would you settle for believing Dora’s death was nothing but a coincidence?” Joanna demanded.

“No,” Frank agreed. “I don’t suppose I would. You go on home and check on her. We’ll handle things here and keep you posted about what’s going on at the scene.”

“Thanks, Frank,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

Joanna put down the phone. She drove for another five miles without saying a word. Once again it was Butch who broke the silence.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” he said.

Joanna gripped the steering wheel. “I am, too,” she said. “And what happened to Dora Matthews isn’t your fault.”

“I know it isn’t my fault,” Joanna said, “but just wait till I have a chance to talk to Eleanor.”

At two-fifteen they pulled into the yard at High Lonesome Ranch. Joanna’s Eagle was nowhere to be seen, which meant limn Bob and Eva Lou were probably still out searching. As Joanna and Butch stepped out of the car, Jenny came strolling out of the barn, with Sadie and Tigger following at her heels.

Joanna went running toward her and pulled Jenny into a smoth­ering hug. “Mom!” Jenny said indignantly, pulling back. “Let go. I’m all dusty and sweaty. You’ll dirty your clothes.” Then, catching sight of her mother’s face, Jenny’s whole demeanor changed. “Mom, what’s the matter? Is something wrong?”

“Dora’s dead,” Joanna blurted out.

“Dead,” Jenny repeated as all color drained from her trice. “She’s dead? How come? Why?”

“She must have run away from the foster home,” Joanna said. “Someone hit her with a car. When Grandma Brady said you were out riding Kiddo, I was so afraid . . . That’s where the Gs are now—out looking for you.”

“But, Mom, I was just out riding, why should you ...” Jenny drew back. “Wait a minute. You think the guy who killed Dora might come looking for me next, don’t you!”

Joanna and Jenny were mother and daughter. It wasn’t surprising that the thoughts of one should be so readily shared by the other, although, in that moment, Joanna wished it weren’t true. Saying nothing, she merely nodded.

“Why?” Jenny asked.

“Because of what happened in Apache Pass,” Butch said, stepping into the fray. “Your mother and I are afraid that whoever killed Connie Haskell may have targeted you and Dora.”

“But why?” Jenny repeated. “Dora and me didn’t see who did it or anything. All we did was find the body.”

For once Joanna resisted the temptation to correct her daugh­ter’s grammar. “You know that,” she said quietly. “And so do we. The problem is, the killer may believe you saw something even though you didn’t.”

Just then Joanna’s Eagle came wheeling into the yard, with Jim Bob Brady at the wheel. The car had barely come to a stop before Eva Lou was out of it. With her apron billowing around her, Eva Lou raced toward Jenny.

“There you are, Jenny,” she said. “I’m so glad to see you! When we couldn’t find you, I was afraid—”

“She’s fine, Eva Lou,” Joanna interjected. “Jenny’s just fine.”

That’s what she said, but with Dora Matthews dead, Joanna wasn’t sure she believed her own reassuring words. Neither did anybody else.

CHAPTER TEN

It was a grim family gathering that convened around the dining room table at High Lonesome Ranch. Joanna began by briefly summarizing what Frank Montoya had told her about Dora Matthews’s death.

“Supposing what happened to Dora and what went on in the Apache Pass case are connected,” Jim Bob began. “How would the killer go about learning the first thing about Jenny and Dora?”

In response, Butch retrieved a copy of Sunday morning’s Ari­zona Reporter from the car and handed it to Jim Bob Brady. Once he finished reading, Jim Bob sighed and shook his head. “‘That still doesn’t say for sure that the cases are connected.”

“That’s right,” Joanna agreed. “But we can’t afford to take any chances. As of now, Jenny, consider yourself grounded. You don’t go anywhere at all unless one of us is with you. No more riding off on Kiddo by yourself. Understand?”

A subdued Jenny nodded and voiced no objection.

“What about us?” Eva Lou asked. “1 )o you want us to stay on?”

Joanna glanced at Butch, who gave his head an almost imper­ceptible shake. “No,” Joanna said. “That’s not necessary. We’ve disrupted your lives enough as it is. You go on home. We’ll be fine.”

“All right,” Jim Bob said, “just so long as you all know you can count on us if you need to.”

“Has anybody found Dora’s mother?” Jenny asked.

Joanna shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Are you going to?”

“I’m sure we will.”

Jenny stood up and pushed her chair away from the table. “Then maybe you should go back to work,” she said, and left the room. At a loss, and not knowing what else to do, Joanna got up and followed her daughter into her bedroom, where she found Jenny lying facedown on the bed.

“Jen?” Joanna said. “Are you all right?”

“You said she’d be safe,” Jenny said accusingly. “You gave me Scout’s honor.”

“Jenny, please. I had no idea this would happen.”

“And now you’re saying that if I stay home, I’ll be safe?”

“Jenny, Butch and I—”

“Just go,” Jenny interrupted. “Go away and leave me alone. You let someone kill Dora. You’d better find out who did it before I’m dead, too.”

Stung by the anger and betrayal in Jenny’s voice, Joanna retreated. A few minutes later she was outside by the Crown Victo­ria, struggling to fasten her Kevlar vest, when Butch came out of the house.

“Jenny will be all right,” he assured her, once he had unloaded the luggage. “You go do what you have to. Don’t worry about her.”

Tears welled in Joanna’s eyes. “Jenny blames me for what happened. I told her last night that I was sure Dora would be safe, but I was wrong. She wasn’t safe at all, goddamn it! She’s dead.”

“No matter what Jenny said, Joey, and no matter what you may think, what happened to Dora Matthews isn’t your fault,” Butch said.

“I think you’re wrong there,” Joanna told him. “I’m not first in line for that; I’m second—right behind my mother.”

As soon as Joanna was back on the highway, she looked at her watch. Almost two hours had passed since she had last spoken to Frank Montoya. In the world of crime scene investigation, two hours was little more than a blip on the screen.

Picking up her radio microphone, she called in to Dispatch. “Is Chief Deputy Montoya still out at the crime scene on High way 90?” she asked.

“He sure is, Sheriff Brady,” Larry Kendrick told her.

“Good. Let him know I’ve left High Lonesome Ranch, and I’m on my way.”

As she drove, Joanna battled to control her churning emotions. Under most circumstances, where someone else’s crisis was concerned, Sheriff Brady could be calm and completely unflappable. To her dismay she was now learning that her law enforcement training counted for little when her own family was threatened.

It still shamed Joanna to recall how completely she had fallen apart in those first awful minutes when she had come home to High Lonesome Ranch to find her dogs poisoned and her own home virtually destroyed by the frenzied anger of a drug-crazed woman. Joanna had surveyed Reba Singleton’s rampage of destruction with her knees knocking, her heart pounding, and with her breath coining inn short harsh gasps. It had taken time for her to separate the personal from the professional before she could gather her resources and go out and deal with the troubled woman herself.

Driving from the ranch to the crime scene, Joanna once again had to make that tough transition. She had to put her own worries about Jenny aside and focus instead on finding Dora Matthews’s killer and Connie Haskell’s killer, knowing that once the perpetra­tor—or perpetrators—were found, Jenny—her precious Jenny—would no longer be in danger.

An hour later, as she approached the clot of emergency vehicles parked along Highway 90, she felt more in control. Slowing down, she noted a road sign announcing that Sierra Vista was twenty-three miles away. As she made her way through the traffic backup, Joanna found herself wondering how it was that Dora Matthews—a thirteen-year-old with no driver’s license—had made it more than twenty miles from her foster home in Sierra Vista to here. She sure as hell didn’t walk, Joanna told herself.

Minutes later, she parked behind Frank Montoya’s vehicle, a Crown Victoria that was a twin to hers. Deputies had coned the roadway down to one lane and were directing traffic through on that single lane while investigators clustered in the other lane and on the shoulder. Walking in the traffic-free left-hand lane, Joanna stopped beside Detective Ernie Carpenter, who stood staring off the edge of the highway.

“Hello, Sheriff,” Ernie said.

“What’s going on?”

“The victim’s still down there,” he said. “Jaime’s just finishing taking the crime scene photos. Want to take a look before they haul her out?”

The last thing Joanna wanted to see was a young girl’s lifeless body. “I’d better,” she said.

Had she tried, Joanna probably could have seen enough without ever leaving the roadway. Rather than taking the easy way out, though, she picked her way down the rocky embankment. At the bottom, standing with her back to the yawning opening of a culvert that ran under the highway, Joanna looked down at the sad, crumpled remains of Dora Matthews.

Totally exposed to the weather, the sun-scorched child lay faceup in the sandy bed of a dry wash. Her lifeless eyes stared into the burning afternoon sun. Her long brown hair formed a dark halo against the golden sand. She wore a pair of shorts and a ragged tank top along with a single tennis shoe and no socks. A knapsack, its contents scattered loose upon the ground, lay just beyond her outstretched fingertips. The ungainly positions of Dora’s limbs sickened Joanna and made her swallow hard to keep from gagging. Her twisted arms and legs lay at odd angles that spoke of multiple broken bones inside a savagely mangled body.

Breathing deeply to steady herself, Joanna turned away and joined Frank Montoya and George Winfield, who stood just inside the opening of the culvert, taking advantage of that small patch of cooling shade. “What do you think?” she asked.

“Looks like a hit-and-run to me,” Frank said. “I’ve had deputies looking up and down the highway in either direction. So far we’ve found no skid marks, no broken grille or headlight debris, and, oddly enough, no tennis shoe. Whoever hit her made no effort to stop. I wouldn’t be surprised to find we’re dealing with a drunk driver who is totally unaware of hitting, much less killing, someone”

Like a drowning victim, Joanna wanted to clutch at the drunk driver theory, one that would mean Dora’s death was an awful accident. That would mean Jenny wasn’t really in danger. But Joanna didn’t dare allow herself that luxury. Instead, she turned to George Winfield.

“What about you?” she asked.

“You know me,” George Winfield said. “Until I have a chance to examine the body, I’m not even going to speculate.” He looked at his watch and sighed impatiently. “Jaime Carbajal drives me crazy. He’s slower than Christmas. Even I could take those damn crime scene pictures faster than he does.”

It was Sunday. Joanna suddenly realized that George’s impa­tience with Jaime was probably due to the fact that this crime scene call was keeping Eleanor Lathrop’s husband from attending one of his wife’s numerous social engagements. Joanna’s simmering anger toward her mother, held in check for a while, returned at once to a full boil. Rather than lighting into George about it, Joanna simply turned and walked back up to the roadway. Frank Montoya, read­ing the expression on her face, followed.

“Something wrong, Boss?” he asked.

“My mother’s what’s wrong,” she said heatedly. “That little girl wouldn’t be dead right now if Eleanor Lathrop Winfield hadn’t opened her big mouth and gone blabbing around when she shouldn’t have.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“I don’t know it, but it’s a pretty fair guess. There are times when private citizens should mind their own damned business. Now, please bring me up to speed.”

“Don’t be too hard on private citizens,” Frank counseled. “One of them may have just saved our bacon.”

“What do you mean?”

“Someone found Connie Haskell’s car. The call came in from Tucson a few minutes ago.”

“Where was It?”

“At the airport in Tucson. Some little old lady, on her way to Duluth to see her daughter, made a 911 call on Saturday morning. She reported what she thought to be blood on the door of the car parked next to hers in the airport lot. The call got mishandled, and nobody bothered to investigate it until a little while ago. The woman’s right. It is blood, and it’s also Connie Haskell’s Lincoln Town Car. It’s being towed to the City of Tucson impound lot. I tried to get them to bring it down to Bisbee, but that didn’t fly. Casey Ledford is on her way to Tucson to be on hand when they open the trunk. She’ll be processing the vehicle for us. Not that I don’t trust the Tucson crime scene techs,” Frank added. “But they don’t have quite the same vested interest in that Town Car that we do.”

“Well, at least we’re making progress somewhere,” Joanna said. “Is it possible Connie Haskell’s killer could be the carjacker after all?”

Frank shook his head. “I doubt it. The UDAs who were picked up in the other hijacked cars sure weren’t heading for any airport.”

Joanna considered his answer for a moment. “All right then,” she said. “Let’s assume for the moment that whoever’s doing the carjackings isn’t involved with this. What do we know about Connie Haskell’s husband? Are we sure Ron Haskell is actually in residence at Pathway to Heaven? Or, if he was there, do we know if he still is?”

“It’s called Pathway to Paradise,” Frank corrected. “And we think he’s there. The guy who runs the general store in Portal says one of the residents came in on Thursday morning and hit him tip for some telephone change.”

“That could have been Haskell, all right,” Joanna said.

Frank nodded. “But when Jaime and Ernie tried to gain admittance to Pathway, there was an armed guard who wouldn’t let them inside. He also refused to verify whether or not Haskell was there. He said all patient records are confidential and that only authorized visitors are allowed on the grounds. In the process he made it abundantly clear that police officers aren’t authorized under any circumstances.”

“Unless they have a court order,” Joanna added.

“Right.”

“What about checking with the airlines to see if somebody named Ron Haskell flew out of Tucson between Thursday night and the time the car was found?”

“I’m sure we can check on that tomorrow,” Frank said.

Joanna thought for a minute, then made up her mind. “Let’s go then,” she said. “You’re with me, Frank. There’s no sense in our standing around second-guessing Jaime and Ernie. They both know what they’re doing.”

“What about the press?” Frank asked. “They’re going to want a statement.” Frank Montoya’s duties included serving as the depart­ment’s media-relations officer.

“For right now, forget them,” Joanna told him. “Until we locate Sally Matthews and notify her of her daughter’s death, you’ve got nothing to tell the media. Besides, the longer we keep Dora’s death quiet, the better.”

“Where are we going then?” Frank asked.

“To Paradise,” Joanna said.

“But why?” Frank asked. “We still don’t have a court order. Judge Moore won’t be back until tomorrow”

“We don’t need a court order,” Joanna said. “We’re not going there to question Ron Haskell. This is a humanitarian gesture—a matter of courtesy. We’re going there to notify the poor man of his wife’s death—assuming, of course, that he isn’t already well aware of it.”

“What makes you think we’ll be able to get inside Pathway to Paradise when Ernie and Jaime couldn’t?” Frank asked.

“For one thing, they weren’t wearing heels and hose,” Joanna said.

Frank Montoya glanced dubiously at Joanna’s grubby crime scene tennis shoes. “You aren’t either,” he ventured.

“No,” Joanna Brady agreed. “I may not be right now, but my good shoes are in the car. By the time we get to Paradise, I will be. Now how do we get there?”

Pointing at the map, Frank showed her the three possibilities. Portal and Paradise were located on the eastern side and near the southern end of the Chiricahua Mountains. One route meant tak­ing their Arizona law enforcement vehicles over the border and into New Mexico before crossing back into Arizona’s Cochise County in the far southeastern corner of the state. Potential jurisdictional conflicts made that a less than attractive alternative. Two choices allowed them to stay inside both Arizona and Cochise County for the entire distance. One meant traveling all the way to the southern end of the mountain range before making a lung U-turn and heading back north. The other called for crossing directly through the Chiricahua Mountains at Onion Saddle.

“It’s getting late,” Joanna said. “Which way is shorter?”

Frank shrugged. “Onion Saddle’s closer, but maybe not any faster. It’s a dirt road most of the way, although, since there’s been no rain, we shouldn’t have to deal with any washouts.”

“We can make it over that even in the Civvies?” Joanna asked.

“Probably,” Frank replied.

Joanna nodded. “I choose shorter,” she said. “We’ll go up and over Onion Saddle. Did Ernie or Jaime mention who’s in charge at Pathway to Paradise?”

Frank consulted a small spiral notebook. “Someone named Amos Parker. I don’t know anything more about him than his name and that he wasn’t interested in allowing Ernie and Jaime on the premises.”

“Let’s see if we have any better luck,” Joanna told him.

More than an hour later, with the afternoon sun slipping behind the mountains, Joanna stopped beside the guard shack at the gated entrance to Pathway to Paradise. The shack came complete with an armed guard dressed in a khaki uniform who pulled on an unnec­essary pair of wraparound mirrored sunglasses before strolling out-side. Joanna rolled down the window, letting in the hot, dusty smells of summer in the desert.

“Like I’ve told everyone else today,” he said. “We’re posted no hunting, no hiking, no trespassing. Just turn right around and go back the way you came.”

Joanna noted that the guard was middle-aged, tall, and lanky. A slight paunch protruded over the top of his belt. As he leaned toward Joanna’s open window, he kept one hand on the holstered pistol at his side. A black-and-white plastic name tag identified him as Rob Whipple.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Whipple,” Joanna said carefully, opening her identification wallet and holding it for him to see. “I’m Sheriff Joanna Brady,” she said. “Frank Montoya, my chief deputy, is in the next car. We’re here to see Mr. Parker.”

“Is Mr. Parker expecting you?” Rob Whipple asked. “Don’t recall seeing your names on this afternoon’s list of invited guests.”

Rob Whipple’s thinning reddish hair was combed into a sparse up-and-over style. A hot breeze blew past, causing the long strands to stand on end. The effect would have been comical if the man’s hand hadn’t been poised over his weapon.

“Chief Deputy Montoya and I don’t have an appointment,” Joanna said easily. “We’re here on urgent business. I’m sure Mr. Parker will be more than willing to see us once he knows what it is.”

Whipple’s eyes may have been invisible behind the reflective glasses, but Joanna felt them narrow. A frown wrinkled across the man’s sunburned forehead. “Does this have anything to do with those two detectives who were by here yesterday?” he asked “Like I already told them. This here’s private property. No one’s allowed inside unless Mr. Parker or his daughter gives the word. Mr. Parker’s last order to me was that no cops were to enter unless they had themselves a bona-fide court order.”

“We’re here to speak to Mr. Parker,” Joanna insisted. “And since he’s not a suspect of any kind, we don’t need a court order for that. Would you call him, please, and let him know we’re here? You can assure him in advance that we won’t take up much of his valuable time.”

“If you don’t mind, ma’am, you’d best tell me what this is in regard to,” Whipple countered.

“I do mind,” Joanna replied with an uncompromising smile. “My business with Mr. Parker is entirely confidential.”

Shaking his head, Rob Whipple sidled back into his guard shack. Joanna saw him pick up a small two-way radio and speak into it. What followed were several of what appeared to be increasingly heated exchanges. Finally, shaking his head in disgust, Rob Whipple slammed down the radio and then emerged from the shack, carrying a clipboard.

“Miss Parker says you can go in,” he growled. “Sign here.” Taking the clipboard, Joanna quickly scanned the paper. Blanks on the sheet called for date, time of entrance, time of departure, name, and firm, along with a space for a signature. Joanna noted that the first date mentioned on that sheet was May 22. Several of the listed firms were companies that delivered foodstuffs and other supplies to her department back in Bisbee, but of the names of the eighteen delivery people listed, Joanna recognized no one. Nowhere on the sheet was there any listing for Constance Marie Haskell. Ernie Carpenter’s and Jaime Carbajal’s names were also conspicu­ous by their absence.

“Are you going to sign in or not?” Whipple demanded. He was clearly angered by being countermanded. Joanna filled in the required information, signed her name, and handed Whipple his clipboard. As soon as she did so, the guard slapped a VISITOR sticker under her windshield wiper. “Wait right here,” he ordered. “Someone’s coming down to take you up.” Still brandishing his clipboard, he stomped back to have Frank Montoya sign in as well.

It was several long minutes before a sturdy Jeep appeared, mak­ing its way down a well-graded road. The vehicle was totally enclosed in dark, tinted-glass windows that allowed no glimpse inside. When the door opened, Joanna expected another uni­formed guard to emerge. Instead, the woman who stepped out wore a bright yellow sundress and matching hat. The ladylike attire stood in stark contrast to the rest of her outfit, which consisted of thick socks and heavy-duty hiking boots. Punching the button on an electronic gizmo, she opened the gate. Then, returning to her vehicle, she waved for Joanna and Frank to follow in theirs. They drove up and over a steep, scrub-oak-dotted rise and then down into a basin lined with a series of long narrow pink-stuccoed build­ings complete with bright red-tiled roofs.

The Jeep stopped near the largest of the several buildings, one that was fronted by a wooden-railed veranda. The wood may have been old, but it was well maintained with multiple layers of bright blue paint. Joanna’s first impression was that they had strayed into some high-priced desert resort rather than a treatment renter. On either side of the front entrance stood two gigantic clumps of prickly pear, both of them at least eight feet high. Joanna may not have heard of Pathway to Paradise until very recently, but it certainly wasn’t a new establishment. Those two amazing cacti had been there for decades.

The woman in the yellow dress led Joanna and Frank up onto the veranda. Once in the shade, she removed her hat. Without the hat brim concealing her face and hair, Joanna realized the woman was probably well into her fifties, but she was tan and fit with a farce whose fine lines and wrinkles revealed a history of too much time in the sun. The smile she turned on her visitors, however, was sur­prisingly genuine and welcoming.

“I’m Caroline Parker,” she said, holding out her hand iii greet­ing. “Amos Parker is my father. It’s before dinner siesta time, so he’s taking a nap at the moment, as are most of our clients. Is there something I can help you with?”

“I’m Sheriff Joanna Brady,” Joanna told her. “This is my chief deputy, Frank Montoya. We’re hoping to speak to a man named Ron Haskell who is thought to be staying here. Do you know it that’s the case?”

Caroline Parker frowned. “Didn’t someone come by yesterday looking for him as well?”

Joanna nodded. “That would have been my two homicide detectives, Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal. They were turned away at the gate and told not to come back without a court order.”

Caroline nodded. “I heard about that,” she said. “I was away at the time, and it did cause something of a flap. My father tends to be overprotective when it comes to our clients. He doesn’t like to have them disturbed, you see. It gets in the way of the work they’re here to do, which is, of course, paramount. Won’t you step inside?”

She opened an old-fashioned spindle-wood screen door and beckoned Joanna and Frank inside. They entered a long room that was so dark and so pleasantly cool that it almost resembled a cave. Once her eyes adjusted to the dim light, Joanna saw that the flag-stone floor was scattered with a collection of fraying but genuine Navajo rugs. The furnishings were massive and old-fashioned. The set of indestructible leather chairs and couches might once have graced the lobby of a national park hotel. At the far end of the room was a huge fireplace with its face covered by a beautifully crafted brass screen. The walls were lined with bookshelves whose boards sagged beneath their weighty loads. The room smelled strongly of wood smoke and furniture wax.

Caroline Parker walked across the room and switched on a lamp that cast a pool of golden light on the highly polished surface of a mahogany desk. Then she seated herself in a low, permanently dented leather chair and waved Joanna and Frank onto a matching leather couch.

“What kind of work do your clients do?” Joanna asked.

“As you may have surmised, Pathway to Paradise is a recovery center,” Caroline explained. “A Bible-based recovery center.”

“Recovery from what?” Joanna asked.

“Not alcohol or drugs, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Caroline responded. “We have a doctor on staff, but we’re not a medical facility. We specialize in treating addictions of the soul. In the past we’ve worked mostly with folks who have sexual and gambling difficulties. Now we’re seeing people who are addicted to things like the Internet or day-trading. Whatever the problem, we approach it with the underlying belief that people suffering from such disorders have handed their lives over to Satan. Pathway to Paradise helps them tied their way back.”

.’I’ve been sheriff here for several years,” Joanna said. “Until the last few days, I didn’t know you existed.”

“That’s exactly how we like it,” Caroline Parker returned. “We’ve been here for almost thirty years. We prefer to maintain a low profile, although the people in need of our services have an uncanny way of finding us.”

“Only thirty years?” Joanna questioned. “This room looks older than that.”

Caroline nodded. “Oh, the buildings are, certainly. In the thirties, the place was a dude ranch. It fell on hard times and was pretty much a wreck when Daddy and I bought it.”

“Why the armed guard?” Joanna asked.

“To keep out troublemakers. We set up shop here because we wanted privacy and affordability. The same holds true far any number of our neighbors who are looking for privacy and cheap land, too. The problem is, some of them aren’t necessarily nice people. We had a few unfortunate incidents early on. We found we were too far off the beaten path to ask for or receive timely help, so we created our own police force. That’s also part of our creed here: God helps those who help themselves.”

“That doesn’t explain what happened to my officers,” Joanna said. “They had a legitimate reason for coming here, and they were turned away.”

Caroline shook her head. “Over the years we’ve heard all kinds of stories,” she said. “You’d be surprised at the number of off duty police officers who turn out to be moonlighting process servers trying to get to our clients because a disgruntled spouse is trying to file for a divorce, for example. We’ve had to become very proactive in the area of looking out for our clients. They’re often in extremely vulnerable states, especially when they first arrive. We have an obligation to see to it that they’re not trampled on by anyone, be it angry ex-spouses or parents or even officers of the law. If our clients have legal difficulties, it’s our belief that they’ll be better able to deal with those problems after they’ve gotten themselves square with God.”

“Does that include withholding the timely notification that a client’s wife has died?” Joanna asked.

Caroline Parker’s eyes widened in alarm. “Are you telling me Ron Haskell’s wife is dead?”

“Yes,” Joanna answered. “I certainly am. Constance Marie Haskell was murdered over the weekend. She was last seen alive in Phoenix on Thursday. Our understanding, from her sister, is that Mrs. Haskell was on her way here to meet with her husband. Her body was found in Apache Pass Friday evening. Detectives Carbajal and Car­penter were here to notify Ron Haskell of what had happened.”

“Was my father aware of that?” Caroline asked.

“Was I aware of what?” a stern voice asked behind them.

Joanna turned in time to see a tall, stoop-shouldered man enter the room. In the dim light his wispy white hair formed a silvery halo around his head. Even in the gloom of that darkened room he wore a pair of sunglasses, and he made his way around the furniture by tapping lightly with a cane. Amos Parker was blind.

“Daddy,” Caroline said, “we have visitors.”

“So I gathered,” Amos Parker said, stopping just beyond the couch where Joanna and Frank were sitting. “And they are?”

Joanna stood up and went forward to meet him. “My name is Joanna Brady,” she said. “I’m sheriff of Cochise County. Frank Montoya is my chief deputy.”

Joanna held out her hand, but Amos Parker didn’t extend his.

Instead, he addressed his daughter. “What are they doing here, Caroline?” he demanded. You know nay position when it comes to police officers.”

“I’m the one who let them Caroline said. “‘They came to tell Ron Haskell that his wife is dead—that she’s been murdered. That’s why those two officers were here yesterday.”

“You know very well that Ron Haskell broke the rules and that he’s in isolation. Until his isolation period is over, he’s not to see anyone, including you, Miss Brady.”

“It’s Mrs.,” Joanna corrected.

“So you’re married, are you?” Amos Parker asked, easing himself into a chair that was off to the side from where the others had been sitting. “I should have thought a woman who would take on a man’s job and become sheriff wouldn’t have much use for men. I’d expect her to be one of those fire-breathing, cigar-smoking feminists who insists on wearing the pants in her family.”

“She’s wearing a dress, Daddy,” Caroline put in.

The fact that Caroline Parker felt constrained to defend Joanna’s manner of dress to this unpleasantly rude man was disturbing. Even so, whatever Sheriff Joanna Brady was or wasn’t wearing had nothing to do with the business at hand.

“The only part of my wardrobe that should matter to you, Mr. Parker, is the sheriff’s badge pinned to my jacket. Is Mr. Haskell still here?”

Amos Parker crossed his arms. “I have nothing to say,” he said.

“Oh, Daddy,” Caroline interceded. “Don’t be ridiculous. The man’s wife has been murdered. He needs to be told.”

Parker shook his shaggy head. “You know the rules,” he said. “Ron Haskell broke his contract. He’s in isolation until I say he’s ready to come out.”

“And I think you’re wrong.” Caroline blurted out the words and then looked stricken—as though she wished she could take them back.

Amos Parker turned his sightless eyes toward his daughter’s voice. “Caroline, are you questioning my authority?”

There was a moment of stark silence. As the brooding quiet lengthened, Joanna fully expected Caroline to cave. She didn’t.

“In this instance, yes,” Caroline said softly. “I believe you’re wrong.”

Another long silence followed. Finally, Amos Parker was the one who blinked. “Very well,” he conceded. “We’ll probably lose him now anyway. You could just as well bring him down.”

“From where?” Joanna asked.

“The isolation cabin is about a mile away,” Caroline said. “I’ll go get him and bring him here.”

Interviewing Ron Haskell in a room where Amos Parker sat enthroned as an interested observer seemed like a bad idea. Joanna glanced at Frank Montoya, who nodded in unspoken agreement.

“Why don’t we go with you?” Joanna suggested.

Caroline looked to her father for direction, but he sat with his arms folded saying nothing. “All right,” Caroline said, plucking her hat off a table near the door. “Come on then. Someone will have to ride in the back.”

“I will,” Frank volunteered.

Once they had piled into the Jeep, Caroline started it and drove through a haphazard collection of several buildings all of whose blinds were still closed. No one stirred, inside or out. Beyond the buildings, Caroline turned onto a rocky track that wound up and over an adjoining hillside.

“How did Ron Haskell break his contract?” Joanna asked.

“He was seen making an unauthorized phone call,” Caroline replied. “Clients aren’t allowed to contact their families until their treatment has progressed far enough for them to he able to handle it.”

“When was this phone call?” Joanna prodded.

“Thursday morning,” Caroline answered. “One of the kitchen help had gone to the store to pick up something. She saw him there and reported it to my father. Since Ron hadn’t asked for a pass, that meant two breaches of contract rather than one: leaving without permission and making an unauthorized phone call.”

The Jeep topped a steep rise. Halfway down the slope a tiny cabin sat tucked in among the scrub oak. “That’s it?” Joanna asked. Caroline Parker nodded. “And how long has he been here?”

“Since Thursday afternoon. When people are in isolation, we bring them up here and drop them off along with plenty of food and water. It’s our form of sending someone into the wilderness to commune with God. Even at Pathway, there’s so much going on that it’s hard for someone to find enough quiet in which to concentrate and listen.”

“No one has seen Ron Haskell since he was brought here last Thursday?”

“That’s what isolation is all about,” Caroline said. “You’re left completely alone—you and God.”

As the Jeep rumbled down the hill, Joanna fully expected that they would find the cabin empty, but she was wrong. As the Jeep rounded the side of the cabin, the door flew open and a stocky man hurried out, buttoning his shirt as he came. Ron Haskell was any-thing but the handsome Lothario that Maggie MacFerson’s acid descriptions had led Joanna to expect. He waited until the Jeep stopped, then he rushed around to the passenger side of the vehicle. As he flung open the door, his face was alight with anticipation. As soon as his eyes came to rest on Joanna’s face, the eager expression disappeared.

“Sorry,” he muttered, backing away. “I was hoping you were my wife.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It was long after dark when Joanna finally rolled back into the yard at High Lonesome Ranch to the sound of raucous greet­ings from Sadie and Tigger. She was relieved to find that Jim

Bob and Eva Lou’s Honda was no longer there. Lights behind curtains glowed invitingly from all the windows.

Weary beyond bearing, Joanna was frustrated as well. The meeting with Ron Haskell had left her doubting that he had been involved in his wife’s death. And if that was true, they were no closer to finding out who had killed either Connie Haskell or Dora Matthews, which meant that Jenny, too, was possibly still in grave danger.

As she got out of the car, Joanna heard the back door slam. Butch came walking toward her.

“How’s Jenny?” she asked over an aching catch in her throat. Butch shook his head. “About how you’d expect,” he said. Not good?”

Not good. She’s barely ventured out of her room since you left this afternoon. I tried cajoling her into coining out for dinner. No dice. Said she wasn’t hungry Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

Remembering that last difficult conversation with her daugh­ter, Joanna shook her head. “Don’t count on it,” she said.

“Hungry?” he said. Joanna nodded. “I don’t think Eva Lou trusts my cooking abilities,” Butch continued. “She left the refrig­erator full of leftovers and the freezer stocked with a bunch of Ziploc containers loaded with precooked, heat-and-serve meals. What’s your pleasure?”

“How about a Butch Dixon omelette?”

“Good choice.”

Inside the kitchen, Joanna noticed that the table was covered with blueprints for the new house they were planning to build on the property left to Joanna by her former handyman, Clayton Rhodes. “Don’t forget,” Butch said as he began rolling up the plans and securing them with rubber bands, “tomorrow night we have a mandatory meeting scheduled with the contractor.”

“I’ll do my best,” she said. “Right now, I’m going to change clothes and see if Jenny’s awake. I just talked to Ernie Carpenter. Jenny will have to come to the department with me tomorrow morning so the Double Cs can interview her.” Since both detec­tives had last names beginning with the letter C, that’s how people in the department often referred to Joanna’s homicide detective division.

“Because of Connie Haskell, because of Dora, or because Jenny herself may be in danger?” Butch asked.

Joanna sighed. “All of the above,” she said.

She went into the bedroom, removed her weapons, and locked them away. Thinking about the threat to Jenny, she briefly consid­ered keeping one of the Glocks in the drawer of her nightstand, but in the end she didn’t. As she stripped off her panty hose, she was amazed to discover that they had survived her crime scene foray. That hardly ever happens, she thought, tossing them into, the dirty clothes hamper.

Dressed in a nightgown and robe, she went to Jenny’s bedroom and knocked on the door. Her questioning knock was answered by a muffled “Go away.”

“I can’t,” Joanna said, opening the door anyway. “I need to talk to you.”

The room was dark, with the curtains drawn and the shades pulled down. Even the night-light had been extinguished. Joanna walked over and switched on the bedside lamp. At her approach, Jenny turned her face to the wall in her cavelike bottom hunk and pulled a pillow over her head.

“Why?” Jenny demanded. “Dora’s dead. What good will talk­ing do?”

“We’re not going to talk about that,” Joanna told her daughter. “We can’t. You’re a witness in this case. Tomorrow morning you’ll have to go to work with me so Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal can talk to you. They’ll want to go over everything that happened this weekend, from the time you went camping on Friday. They’ll question you in order to see if you can help them learn what happened to Dora and who’s responsible.”

“Grandma Lathrop is responsible,” Jenny insisted bitterly. “Why couldn’t she just mind her own business?”

“I’m sure Grandma Lathrop thought she was doing the right thing—what she thought was best for Dora.”

“It wasn’t,” Jenny said.

They sat in silence for a few moments. “I didn’t really like Dora very much,” Jenny admitted finally in a small voice. “I mean, we weren’t Friends or anything. I didn’t even want to sleep in the same tent with her. I was only with her because Mrs. Lambert said I had to be. But then, after Dora was here at the ranch that day with Grandpa and Grandma, she acted different—not as smart-alecky. I could see Dora just wanted to be a regular kid, like anybody else.”

Just like you, Joanna thought.

“Dora cried like crazy when that woman came to take her away, Morn,” Jenny continued. “She cried and cried and didn’t want to go. Is that why she’s dead, because Grandma and Grandpa Brady let that woman take her away?”

“Grandpa and Grandma didn’t have a choice about that, Jenny,” Joanna said gently. “When somebody from CPS shows up to take charge of a child, that’s the way it is. It’s the law, and the child goes.

“You mean if Grandpa and Grandma had tried to keep her they would have been breaking the law?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I wish they had,” Jenny said quietly.

“So do I,” Joanna told her. “God knows, so do I.”

There was another long silence. Again Jenny was the first to speak. “But even if I didn’t like Dora Matthews, I didn’t want her dead. And why do there have to be so many dead people, Mom?” Jenny asked, turning at last to face her mother. “How come? First Dad, then Esther Daniels, then Clayton Rhodes, and now Dora. Are we a curse or something? All people have to do is know us, and that means they’re going to die.”

Jenny lay on her back on the bottom bunk, absently tracing the outlines of the upper bunk’s springs with her finger. Meanwhile Joanna searched her heart, hoping to find the connection that had existed only two nights earlier between herself and her daughter, when Joanna had been the one lying on the bottom bunk and Jenny had been the one on top. The problem was that connection had been forged before Dora was dead; before Sheriff Joanna Brady—who had sworn to serve and protect people like Dora Matthews—had failed to do either one.

“It seems like that to me sometimes, too.” With her heart breaking, that was the best Joanna could manage. “But dying’s part of living, Jen,” she added. “It’s something that happens to everyone sooner or later.”

“Thirteen’s too young to die,” Jenny objected. “That’s all Dora was, thirteen—a year older than me.”

A momentary chill passed through Joanna’s body as she saw in her mind’s eye the still and crumpled figure of a child lying lifeless in a sandy wash out along Highway 90. “You’re right,” she agreed. “Thirteen is much too young. That’s why we have to do everything in our power to find out who killed her.”

“You said she was hit by a car and that maybe it was just an accident,” Jenny said. “Was it?”

“That’s how it looks so far,” Joanna said, although that answer wasn’t entirely truthful. Hours of searching the highway had filled to turn up any sign of where the collision might have occurred as well as any trace of Dora Matthews’s missing tennis shoe.

“When’s the autopsy?” Jenny asked.

Jennifer Ann Brady had lived in a house centered on law enforcement from the day she was born. As in most homes, dinner time conversation had revolved around what was happening in those two vitally important areas of their lives—school and work. In the Brady household, those work-related conversations had featured confrontations with real-life criminals and killers. There were discussions of prosecutions won and lost, of had guys put away or sometimes let go. Young as she was, Jenny knew far too much about crime and punishment. And, with Eleanor’s fairly recent marriage to George Winfield, discussions of autopsies were now equally commonplace. In that moment, Joanna wished it were otherwise.

“I believe he’s doing it tonight.”

Jenny absorbed that information without comment. “What about Dora’s mother?” she asked after a pause. “Does she know yet?”

Every question as well as every answer drove home Joanna’s sense of failure. “No,” she said. “And I can’t imagine having to tell her any more than I can imagine what I’d do if something terrible happened to you.”

“Will Mrs. Matthews have to go to jail even if Dora is dead?”

“If she’s convicted of running a meth lab,” Joanna conceded.

Heaving a sigh, Jenny flopped back over on her side, signaling that the conversation was over. “Come on, Jenny. We probably shouldn’t talk about this anymore tonight. Let’s go out to the kitchen. Butch is making omelettes.”

“I’m not hungry,” Jenny said.

I’m not now, either, Joanna thought. “Well, good night then.”

“Night.”

Joanna returned to the kitchen. Butch looked up from the stove where he was about to flip an omelette. “No luck?” he said. “None.”

“You look pretty down.”

Joanna nodded. “I talked to Connie Haskell’s husband. I don’t think he did it.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t be absolutely sure because he doesn’t have a real alibi. He was off away from everyone else in an isolation cabin that’s Pathway to Paradise’s version of solitary confinement. He was there from Thursday morning on. Still, Butch, you should have seen how he looked when we drove up. He was expecting his wife to get out of the car. He wasn’t expecting me. He’d have had to be an Academy Award–winning actor to fake the disappointment I saw on his face.”

“I see what you mean,” Butch agreed. “If he’d killed her, he wouldn’t have been expecting her to show up.”

“My point exactly”

“But what if he is that good an actor?” Butch said after a moment of reflection. “It’s possible, you know.”

Joanna nodded. “You’re right. It is possible, but he also volun­teered to come into the department tomorrow and let us take DNA samples. Innocent people volunteer samples. Guilty ones demand lawyers and court orders.”

Butch set Joanna’s plate in front of her and then sat down across the table from her. “What you’re really saying is, you don’t have the foggiest idea who the killer is and you’re afraid Jenny may still be a target.”

“Exactly,” Joanna said.

The omelette was good, but Joanna didn’t do much justice to it. The table was cleared and they were on their way to bed when the blinking light on the caller ID screen caught Joanna’s eye. Without taking messages off the machine, she scrolled through the listed numbers. Marianne Maculyea had called several times, as had Joanna’s mother, Eleanor. There were also several calls from penny’s friend Cassie Parks. The contractor who was working with Butch on plans for the new house had called once, as had Arturo Ortiz, Yolanda Cañedo’s father. Two of the calls were designated caller 11)–blocked. The only remaining listed name and number were totally unknown to Joanna—a Richard Bernard. He had called on Saturday morning at ten-fifteen.

Wondering if Richard Bernard had left a message, Joanna skimmed through the spiral-ringed message log that was kept next to the phone. In Eva’s neat handwriting was a note saying that Marianne Maculyea had called to remind Joanna that she and Butch were scheduled to be greeters at church the following Sunday morning. There was a written message for Butch to call Quentin Branch, the contractor on their new house. A separate note told Jenny to call Cassie, but there was nothing at all from a Richard Bernard.

Shrugging, Joanna picked up the phone. The broken beeping of the dial tone told her there were messages waiting in the voice-mail system—another one from Cassie to Jenny and one from Eleanor Lathrop Winfield. Again there was nothing at all from Richard Bernard. By then it was too late for Jenny to return Cassie’s call, and Joanna wasn’t particularly eager to call Eleanor back. Like Jenny, Joanna remained convinced that Grandma Lathrop’s actions had contributed to Dora Matthews’s death. Talking to Eleanor was something Joanna was willing to postpone indefinitely.

Putting down the phone, Joanna was halfway to the door when the telephone rang. Joanna checked caller ID before answering. When she saw her mother’s number listed, Joanna almost didn’t pick up the receiver, but then she thought better of it. Might as well get it over with, she told herself.

To her relief, she heard George Winfield’s voice on the phone rather than her mother’s. “So you are home!” he said.

“Yes,” Joanna told him.

“How’s Jenny?” George asked.

“She’s taking Dora’s death pretty hard,” Joanna said.

“So’s Ellie,” George said. “She’s under the impression that it’s all her fault Dora Matthews is dead—that if she hadn’t interfered by calling Child Protective Services, Dora would still be alive.”

This was news. For as long as Joanna could remember, Eleanor Lathrop had made a career of dishing out blame without ever accepting any of it herself. It was one thing for Joanna and Jenny to think Eleanor had overstepped the bounds as far as Dora Matthews was concerned. It was unheard of for Eleanor herself to say so.

“I tried telling her that wasn’t true,” George continued, “but it was like talking to a wall. She wasn’t having any of it. In tact, she took a sleeping pill a little while ago and went to bed. Her going to bed this early is worrisome. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so upset. That’s why I’m calling, Joanna. At least it’s one of the reasons. I’m hoping you’ll find time tomorrow to talk to Ellie. Maybe you’ll be able to make her see reason.”

Fat chance, Joanna thought. For once in our lives, it sounds as though Eleanor and I are in total agreement. “I’ll talk to her” was all she said. “Good.”

Joanna expected George Winfield to sign off. Instead, he launched into another topic. “I know it’s late, and this information will be at your office tomorrow morning in my official autopsy report. But I thought, because of Jenny’s involvement, you’d want to know some of this now. Dora Matthews was pregnant when she died, Joanna. And all those broken bones you saw, were broken postmortem.”

“You’re saying she was dead before she was hit by the car?”

“That’s right. I’m calling the actual cause of death asphyxiation by means of suffocation.”

“And she was pregnant?”

“At least three months along,” George replied.

‘‘But she was only thirteen years old, for God’s sake,” Joanna objected. “Still a child! How could such a thing happen?”

George sighed. “The usual way, I’m sure,” he said. “And that’s what’s happening these days—children having children. Only, in this case, neither child lived.”

“Will we be able to tell who the father is?”

“Sure, if we find him,” George replied. “I saved enough DNA material from the embryo so we can get a match if we need to. Sorry to drop it on you like this, Joanna, but under the circum­stances I thought you’d want some time to think this over before tomorrow morning when you’re reading the autopsy report.”

Joanna closed her eyes as she tried to assimilate the information. “So whoever killed Dora just left her body lying in the middle of the road for someone else to hit?”

“I didn’t say she was run over,” George corrected. “And she wasn’t. She was hit by a moving vehicle while she was fully upright. But she wasn’t standing upright under her own power. There were some bits of glass and plastic found on her clothing. There was also a whole collection of black, orange, yellow, and white paint chips on her body and what looks like traces of polypropylene fiber embedded in the flesh of both wrists. I believe her body was tied to something—a Department of Transportation sawhorse, maybe—while the vehicle crashed into her. The lack of bleeding and bruis­ing from those impact wounds would indicate that she was already dead at that point.”

“Whoever did it wanted us to believe Dora Matthews was the victim of an accidental hit-and-run,” Joanna surmised.

“Correct. And since there’s no evidence of a struggle or any defensive wounds, Dora may even have been sedated at the time of suffocation. I’m doing toxicology tests.”

“But toxicology tests take time—weeks, even,” Joanna objected.

“Sorry,” George said. “You’ll just have to live with it. In the meantime, on the chance that there may be some additional microscopic paint flecks, I’ve preserved all of Dora’s clothing. I sent them back to your department with Jaime Carbajal so your AFIS tech—what’s her name again?”

“Casey Ledford.”

“Right. So Casey can take a look at them. Whoever killed Dora obviously doesn’t know much about forensic science, so I’m guessing he or she wouldn’t have been all that sharp about not leaving fingerprints behind, either.”

“Thanks, George,” she told hint. “I think.”

“And you’ll be sure to give your mother a call tomorrow?”

“I promise.”

“Who was that on the phone?” Butch asked once Joanna walked into the bedroom. He was already in bed. Manuscript pages were stacked on top of the sheet while he alternately read and scribbled penciled notes in the margins.

“It was George,” Joanna answered dully. “Calling to give me the news that Dora Matthews was dead before the car hit her. Somebody suffocated her, most likely after drugging her first, and then tried to fake a hit-and-run. George also said that she was three months pregnant when she died.”

“Yikes,” Butch said. “Do you think Jenny knows who the father is?”

The question startled Joanna. “I doubt it,” she said.

“He’s probably some little smart-mouthed twerp From school,” Butch theorized.

That was another disturbing thought, that someone in Jenny’s sixth-grade class at Bisbee’s Lowell School—some boy who might very well be sitting next to Jenny in math or science—might also be the father of Dora Matthews’s unborn child.

“I don’t even want to think about it,” Joanna said.

“You’d better,” Butch returned grimly. “We’d all better think about it. If there’s some little shit in the sixth grade who can’t keep his pants zipped, somebody at the school had better wise up and do something about it—before an irate father does it for them.”

As upset as she was, Joanna couldn’t help smiling. “You sound like an irate father yourself,” she said.

“I am,” Butch returned.

Joanna went into the bathroom. When she emerged, the manuscript and pencil were both gone. It was only then, as she crossed the room to turn out the light, that she noticed the baseball bat leaning against the wall between Butch’s nightstand and the head of the bed.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing.

“It’s a baseball bat.”

“I can see that. What’s it doing here?”

Butch shrugged. “I ran a bar, remember? Some people believe in Glocks. I believe in baseball bats, and, believe me, I know how to use them. If somebody turns up here looking for Jenny, I’ll be ready.”

“You’d go after someone with a baseball bat?” Joanna asked. “Wouldn’t you?”

Shaking her head, Joanna switched off the light and climbed into bed beside him. He threw one arm over her shoulder and pulled her close. Joanna lay snuggled next to him, grateful to feel his solid bulk against her, for the sturdiness of his chest against her back, and for the strength in the arm that encircled her.

“Who’s Richard Bernard?” she asked a little later.

“Who?” Butch asked, and Joanna felt guilty when she realized he already must have dozed off.

“Richard Bernard. He called Saturday morning, but he didn’t leave a message. I saw his name on caller ID and figured he was someone you knew.”

“I have no idea,” Butch told Tier. “Never heard of him.”

“Neither have I,” Joanna said.

“Eva Lou and Jim Bob were here then. Maybe he’s a friend of theirs.”

“Could be,” Joanna said.

Within minutes, Butch was snoring lightly. Tired as she was, Joanna lay awake for what seemed like hours. She tossed from side to side, trying to find a comfortable position and hoping to quiet the paralyzing fear in her mind, the suspicion that a crazed killer was lurking somewhere outside in the dark, hiding and waiting and looking for an opportunity to make Jennifer Ann Brady his next victim.

Operating on a minimum of sleep, it was an edgy Joanna Brady who took her daughter to the Cochise County Justice Center at eight o’clock the next morning. They entered the department using the keypad-operated private entrance that led directly from the parking lot into Joanna’s office.

After having been gone for several days, Joanna knew she’d have mountains of paperwork to attend to. A day like this wasn’t the best time to bring her daughter to work, or to have to deal with the added complication of being present during the course of Jenny’s homicide investigation interview.

“Should I go get you a cup of coffee?” Jenny asked as Joanna dropped her purse onto her desk and eyed the stacks of correspondence awaiting her there.

Jenny had been so quiet on the ride in from High Lonesome Ranch that Joanna’s spirits rose at this hint of normalcy. “Sure,” Joanna said. “That would be great.”

Jenny darted out of the room while Joanna settled in behind her desk. Before she could reach for the first stack of correspondence, the door opened and Kristin Gregovich came into the office. The blond, blue-eyed Kristin greeted her returning boss with a cheerful smile.

“Welcome back,” she said. “Did you have a good trip?”

Kristin was newly married to Joanna’s K-nine officer, Terry Gregovich. She was also pregnant and due to deliver their first baby—a boy—in November. She had survived the first few months of fierce morning sickness and now was far enough along in her pregnancy that she no longer had to keep soda crackers and a glass of Sprite on her desk at all times. She glowed with a happi­ness and sense of well-being that Joanna usually found endearing. This morning, though, knowing what had happened to Dora Matthews and her unborn baby, Joanna felt a clutch in her gut at the sight of Kristin’s new but still relatively unnecessary maternity smock.

“It was fine,” Joanna told her. “Right up until people down here started dying left and right.”

“How did the poker game go?” Kristin asked.

“I won,” Joanna answered.

“Enough so Sheriff Forsythe noticed, I hope,” Kristin said.

That late-night poker game seemed aeons ago rather than mere days. “He noticed, all right,” Joanna said. “Now bring me up-to-date. Is there anything in particular I need to know before I go into the morning briefing?”

Over the next few minutes Joanna listened while Kristin gave her a rundown of the phone calls that had come in during the past several days. At eight-thirty, leaving Jenny in her office and deeply engrossed in the latest Harry Potter book, Joanna hurried into the conference roost. Drank Montoya was already there. So were Detectives Carpenter and Carbajal.

Joanna nodded in their direction. “I brought Jenny along,” she told them. “I’ll be sitting in on the interview.”

Both detectives nodded in unison. “Sure thing, Boss,” Ernie said. “I’d be surprised if you weren’t.”

There was a knock on the door and Casey Ledford, the finger print technician, poked her head inside. “You wanted to see me?” she asked uncertainly.

“Yes,” Frank said hurriedly. “I asked Casey to stop by. She has some information that I think will be of interest to everybody con­cerned. We’ll take care of that before we start on routine matters. “

Joanna nodded. “All right,” she said. “Go ahead, Casey. You’re on.”

Slipping into a chair, Casey Ledford smoothed her very short skirt and then placed a file folder in her lap. “As you know, I went up to Tucson yesterday to examine Connie Haskell’s vehicle, the blood-stained Lincoln Town Car that was left in the parking lot It Tucson International. The thing that surprised me was the minimal amount of blood showing on the outside of the car—not enough that an ordinary passerby was likely to notice it. Most of the blood was inside the trunk. And there’s a big difference between the two—between the blood on the Town Car’s exterior and that inside the trunk.”

“What difference?” Joanna asked.

“They’re two different types,” Casey responded. “Which means they came from two different people.”

“So maybe some of it is from the killer and some from the vic­tim?” Joanna suggested.

Casey Ledford nodded. “Possibly,” she said. “The evidence we found in the trunk is consistent with a body having been transported in it. The DPS crime lab is going over that for trace evi­dence.”

“Good,” Joanna agreed with a nod.

“I picked up a whole bunch of fingerprints,” Casey continued, “some of which belong to the deceased and some that don’t. I’m in the process of enhancing the ones I’ve found. So far I have no way of knowing whether or not AFIS will come up with a match, but I did find something odd.”

“What’s that?” Joanna asked.

Casey opened the folder and handed around pieces of paper. Each contained a typed transcript of the 911 call reporting the location of Connie Haskell’s vehicle. It seemed straightforward enough. A woman, giving her name as Alice Miller and her address as 2472 East Grant Road, had reported that on her way to Min­nesota to visit her daughter in Duluth she had parked next to a vehicle at the Tucson airport, a Lincoln Town Car with what looked like bloodstains on the car door.

Joanna read through the transcript. “So?” she inquired.

“Don’t you see anything that doesn’t fit?” Casey Ledford asked.

Joanna reread the transcript. “I still don’t see anything,” she said. “What’s the deal?”

“If, as Mrs. Miller claimed, she was on her way to Duluth, Min­nesota, at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, why did her 911 call originate from a pay phone on North First Avenue?” Casey asked. “Look at the address for the phone. When I saw it, I smelled a rat. If the woman who called really was on her way out of town by plane, wouldn’t she have called in the report either from the airport or from her daughter’s home in Minnesota once she got there? That struck me as odd, so just to be on the safe side, I drove past the address of the phone booth. It turns out to be inside a Target store on North First. Then I checked out the address she gave as her home address, the one on East Grant Road. It’s a vacant lot. Alice Miller doesn’t live there, and neither does anybody else.”

“Way to go,” Joanna breathed. “You wouldn’t be interested in putting in for detective, would you?”

“No, thanks,” Casey Ledford replied with a grin. “I’m perfectly happy being an AFIS tech. I have zero interest in watching autopsies. But there is one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Doc Winfield sent over Dora Matthews’s clothes. I found something interesting in the pocket of her shorts, something the Doc evidently missed.”

“What’s that?”

“A cash receipt from Walgreens in Sierra Vista. It was dated Sunday and contains two items—a Snickers bar and one Know Now Kit.”

“So?” Ernie Carpenter asked with a frown.

“Ever heard of Know Now?” she asked.

“Never,” he replied.

“It’s a home pregnancy test,” she said. “Gives you results in three minutes.”

“In our day, Rose had to go to the doctor to find out whether or not she was pregnant,” Ernie said.

Casey Ledford shook her head. “That may have been true in the good old days,” she told him with a laugh, “but not anymore.”

“Doc Winfield already told us she was pregnant,” Ernie said. “All that receipt means is Dora must have known, too.”

“It was dated Sunday?” Joanna asked.

Casey nodded.

“It gives us something else,” Joanna says. “It gives us one more bit of information about what happened after she left High Lonesome Ranch.”

Ernie nodded. “We’ll check into it,” he said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“So this Alice Miller must know something,” Joanna said to the others after Casey Ledford had returned to her lab and the group’s attention had veered away from pregnancy testing kits in favor of the mysterious 911 call.

“If that’s even the woman’s real name,” Ernie Carpenter grumbled. “After all, if she gave a phony address in making the report, what makes you think she’d give the 911 operator her real name?”

“Point taken. So how do we flush her out?”

“How about checking with the phone company and seeing if any other phone calls were made from that same pay phone about the same time?” Jaime Carbajal suggested. “Maybe she made more than just that single call. If we find any other numbers dialed right around then, they might give us a lead as to who she is.”

“Good thinking,” Joanna said.

She glanced in her chief deputy’s direction. Frank Montoya was the department’s designated hitter when it came to dealing with telephone company inquiries. Joanna was grateful to see that he was already making a note to follow up on it.

“What about this cabin at Pathway to Paradise where you say Ron Haskell was in isolation from Thursday afternoon on?” Ernie added. “Just how remote is it?”

“Pretty,” Joanna replied.

“But you said no one saw him from Thursday on. Isn’t there a chance he could have slipped away from the cabin, done one mur­der or maybe even two, and then come back again to his cozy little isolation booth without anyone at Pathway being the wiser?” the detective asked. “There may be an armed guard posted at the gate, but who’s to say someone coming and going on foot would have had to go anywhere near the gate?”

Joanna could tell Ernie was reluctant to drop Ron Haskell from his position as prime suspect in his wife’s murder investigation. Joanna didn’t blame Detective Carpenter for his reluctance. She didn’t want to drop Ron Haskell from prime suspect status, either. Without him, the investigation into who had killed Connie Haskell was still stuck at the starting gate.

“I suppose you’re right,” Joanna conceded. “It is possible that Haskell could have come and gone without being noticed, but don’t forget—he’s due in here this morning to allow us to collect DNA samples.”

“If he actually shows up, that is,” Ernie returned. “I wouldn’t bet money on it.”

“All right. Let’s go back to the Dora Matthews situation for a moment,” Joanna suggested. “What’s happening there?”

“I talked to the foster mother in Sierra Vista a few minutes ago,” Jaime Carbajal said. “She called to say one of the kids in the neighborhood reported seeing a girl in shorts getting into a car around midnight Sunday night. I have the kid’s name. We’ll interview him ASAP and see if he can give us a description of the car. I’ll also make it a point to check out that Walgreens store to see il anybody remembers seeing Dora Matthews there, either alone or with someone. If I were a drugstore clerk, I’d remember if a thirteen year-old kid stopped by to pick up a pregnancy test kit.”

“While I’m dealing with the phone factory,” Frank Montoya said, “I’ll check incoming and outgoing calls from the foster home as well.”

“Good call,” Joanna said. “Now, what about Dora’s mother?”

“Still no trace of her,” Jaime answered. “None at all.”

Joanna aimed her next question at her chief deputy. “What’s happening on the media front?”

“Because we can’t locate and notify Sally Matthews, we’re still not releasing Dora’s name to the press,” Frank replied. “The prob­lem is, I don’t know how long that line will hold. Word of Dora’s death has already spread all over town. Sooner or later some reporter is going to pick up on it and publish it. As you know, Jenny’s and Dora’s names have already been in the papers in connection with finding Connie Haskell’s body. Once the reporters find out Dora is dead as well, they’re going to go to press without giving a damn as to whether or not Sally gets news of her daughter’s death from us or from the media.”

Joanna nodded. “Let’s continue delaying the official release of Dora’s name for as long as possible,” she said. “But, bearing in mind that most people are murdered by people they know, what are the chances that Sally Matthews is somehow involved in her daughter’s death?”

“‘There’s nothing much on Sally Matthews’s sheet,” Frank said with a shrug. “My guess is she’s been slipping by the criminal justice system for a long time, doing drugs and probably manufacturing and selling, too, but without getting caught. The first time she really got busted was last summer. She got six months for possession and sale. It should have been more, but her public defender came through like a champ. Her current boyfriend, Mr. Leon ‘B. B.’ Ardmore, has a couple of drug-violation convictions as well. From what I’ve learned so far, I’d say he’s the mastermind behind the meth lab.

“But going back to Dora, it was while her mother was in the slammer that she ended up in foster care the first time—up in Tuc­son. From her reaction to the CPS caseworker out at High Lonesome Ranch the other night, I’d say she didn’t like it much. Maybe foster care made her feel like she was in jail, too.”

“What about Dora’s clothing?” Joanna asked. “Has Casey Ledford started processing them for possible fingerprints?”

“Not yet,” Frank Montoya said. “She agrees with Doc Winfield about the paint flecks, and there may be a whole lot more trace evidence on that clothing than just fingerprints and paint. Her sug­gestion is that we deliver all the clothing to the Department of Public Safety Satellite Crime Lab in Tucson and have their guys go over everything. The state has better equipment than we do, and a whole lot more of it, too. Needless to say, the sooner we get the clothing into the DPS pipeline, the better.”

“I’ll take care of that,” Jaime Carbajal offered. “Once we finish with Jenny’s interview, Ernie and I will take the clothing to Tucson.”

“Speaking of which,” Ernie said, peering at his watch, “Shouldn’t we get started?”

Joanna glanced questioningly at Frank. “Anything else of earth-shattering importance for the morning briefing?” she asked.

“All pretty standard,” Frank said, closing his folder. “Nothing that can’t wait until after the interview or even later.” He stood up. “Want me to send Jenny in on my way out?”

“Please,” Joanna murmured. She had dreaded bringing Jenny into the conference room for the interview, and she was more than happy to let Frank do the summoning. Jennifer entered the conference room clutching Harry Potter to her chest, as though having the book with her might somehow ward off the evil wizards. She paused in the doorway and surveyed the room. Joanna sensed that the conference room—a place Jenny knew well and where she often did her homework—had suddenly been transformed into alien territory. When Jenny’s eyes finally encountered her mother’s, Joanna responded with her most reassuring smile.

“You know both Detective Carbajal and Detective Carpenter, don’t you?” she asked.

Jenny nodded gravely.

“They’ll be the ones asking you questions and taping your answers. It’ll be important for you to tell them everything you know, down to the smallest detail. Sometimes it’s those tiny bits of information that provide investigators with their most helpful leads. Understand?”

Jenny nodded again.

“And you have to remember not to nod or shake your head,” Joanna added. “We may know what you mean, but your answer won’t show up on the tape.”

At that point, Ernie Carpenter stood up and took control of the proceedings. “Thanks for coming, Jenny,” he said, leading her to a chair. “Make yourself comfortable.”

For Joanna, the next hour and a half lasted an eternity. The process was excruciating for her. Motherly instinct made her want to prompt her daughter and encourage her, but the rules of interview procedure required her to keep still. There was too much likelihood that she might end up putting words in Jenny’s mouth. On the other hand, knowing how the game was played, it was difficult for Joanna to sit silently on the sidelines while Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal volleyed questions at Jenny. The process was designed to tell them which of the two had established a better rapport with the witness—which had succeeded in gaining her trust. As a police officer Joanna recognized and applauded the way the detectives manipulated her daughter; as a mother she hated it.

Ernie Carpenter’s children were grown and gone. Jaime Carba­jal still had young children of his own at home. Whether or not that made the difference, soon after the interview began, it was clear the younger detective would be doing most of the questioning.

“So tell me about your friend Dora, Jenny,” Detective Carbajal said, settling back into his chair and crossing his arms.

Jenny stuck out her lower lip. Joanna’s heart constricted at that familiar and visible sign of her daughter’s steadfast stubbornness. “I knew Dora,” Jenny answered. “But she wasn’t my friend.” “But you were tentmates on the camp-out.”

“That’s because Mrs. Lambert made us,” Jenny said. “She had us draw buttons—sort of like drawing straws. If two people got the same color button, they were partners for the whole camp-out. That’s how I got stuck with Dora.”

“Tell me about her.”

“What do you want to know?”

Jaime Carbajal shrugged. “Everything,” he said.

“She wasn’t very smart,” Jenny began.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because she had been held back—at least one grade and maybe even two. She was thirteen. Everybody else in our class is only twelve. Dora always looked dirty, and she smelled bad. She smoked, and she acted like she knew everything, but she didn’t. And she wasn’t very nice.”

“I can understand why Dora smelled funny and looked dirty,” Jamie Carbajal said quietly. “The place where she lived with her mother was filthy. The bathroom had been turned into a meth lab and the kitchen sink was bill of dirty dishes and rotten food. There was no place for Dora to shower or bathe.”

Jenny looked questioningly at Joanna. The idea of living with a mother who preferred manufacturing drugs to allowing her child to be clean must have seemed incomprehensible to her, just as it did to Joanna.

“There was some food in the house, but not much, and most of that wasn’t fit to eat,” Jaime Carbajal continued. “All in all, I don’t think Dora Matthews’s mother knew much about being a good mother. There’s a reason I’m telling you all this, Jenny. I understand why you may not have wanted to be Dora’s friend while she was alive, but I’m asking you to be her friend now. You can do that by helping us find out who killed her.”

“I don’t know how,” Jenny said in a subdued voice.

“Tell us whatever you remember,” Jaime urged. “Everything. Let’s start with Friday afternoon, when you went on the camping trip. What happened there?”

“Well,” Jenny began, “first we drove to Apache Pass. After we put up our tents, we ate dinner and had a campfire that wasn’t really a campfire—because of the fire danger. Mrs. Lambert had its use a battery-powered lantern instead of a regular fire. It was after that—after we all went to our tents—that Dora said we should go for a walk and ...”

Jenny paused and looked at Joanna. Sitting across the confer­ence table from her daughter, Joanna forced her expression to remain unchanged and neutral.

“And what?” Jaime prodded.

“... and have a cigarette.” Jenny finished the sentence in a rush. “I tried smoking one, only the taste of it made me sick—so sick that I threw up. It was after I barfed that we found that woman’s body—Mrs. Haskell’s body”

“Did you see or hear anyone nearby when you found the body?” Jaime asked.

Jenny shook her head. “No. There wasn’t anyone. She was lying there by the road, naked and all by herself.”

“Did you see a vehicle, perhaps?” Jaime asked. “Maybe there was one parked somewhere along the road.”

“No,” Jenny said. “There wasn’t, at least not that I saw.”

Next to Joanna, Ernie Carpenter stirred, like a great bear wak­ing from a long winter’s sleep. His thick black brows knit together into a frown. “You said a minute ago that Dora Matthews wasn’t nice. What did you mean by that, Jenny? Did she cuss, for instance, or beat people up?”

This time, instead of pouting, Jenny bit her lip before answer­ing. Lowering her eyes, she shook her head.

“By shaking your head, you mean she didn’t do those things, or do you mean you don’t want to answer?” Ernie prodded.

Jenny looked beseechingly at her mother. “Morn, do I have to answer?”

Joanna nodded and said nothing. Jenny turned back to Ernie and squared her shoulders. “Dora told lies,” she declared. “About what?”

Jenny squirmed in her seat. “About stuff,” she said.

“What stuff?” he asked.

“She said she had a boyfriend and that they like . . . you know.” Jenny ducked her head. A curtain of blond hair fell across her face, shielding her blue eyes from her mother’s gaze. “She said that they did it,” Jenny finished lamely.

“You’re saying that Dora and her boyfriend had sex?” Ernie asked.

“‘That’s what Dora said,” Jenny replied. “She said they did and that he wanted to marry her, but how could he? She was only thirteen. Isn’t that against the law or something?”

“Dora wasn’t lying, Jenny,” Jaime Carbajal said softly. “Maybe the part about getting married was a lie, but Dora Matthews did have a boyfriend and they were having sex. And that is against the law. Even if Dora was a willing participant, having sex with a juvenile is called statutory rape.” He paused. “What would you think if I told you Dora Matthews was pregnant when she died?” he asked a moment later.

Jenny’s eyes widened in disbelief. She turned to her mother for confirmation. Again Joanna nodded. “It’s true,” she said.

“So what I’m asking you now is this,” Jaime continued quietly. “Do you have any idea who the father of Dora’s baby might he?”

To Joanna’s amazement, Jenny nodded. “Yes,” she said at once. “His name is Chris.”

“Chris what?” Jaime asked.

“I don’t know his last name. Dora never told me. Just Chris. I tried to tell her not to do it, but Dora went ahead and called him—called Chris—from our house.”

“When was that?”

“Friday night, after Mrs. Lambert sent us home from the camp out. It was while we were at home and when Grandpa and Grandma Brady were taking care of us. Dora called Chris that night, after the Gs fell asleep. Then, the next morning, Chris called her back. I was afraid Grandma would pick up the phone iii the other room and hear them talking. I knew she’d be mad about it if she did, but she must have been outside with Grandpa. I don’t think she even heard the phone ring.”

“What time was that?” Jaime asked.

“I don’t know,” Jenny replied with a shrug. “Sometime Satur­day morning, I guess.”

“Could it have been about ten-fifteen?” Joanna blurted out the question despite having given herself strict orders to keep silent. Jenny looked quizzically in her mother’s direction. So did the two detectives.

“It may have been right around then,” Jenny said. “But I don’t know for sure.”

“I do,” Joanna said. “And I would guess that Chris’s last name will turn out to be Bernard,” she added, addressing the two detec­tives. “That name and a Tucson phone number showed up on our caller ID last night when I got home. Since neither Butch nor I know anyone by that name, I thought it had to be someone Jim Bob or Eva Lou Brady knew. Now I’m guessing it must have been Chris calling Dora.”

Jaime swung his attention from Joanna back to Jenny. “Did you happen to overhear any of that conversation?”

“A little,” Jenny admitted. “But not that much. Part of the time I was out of the room.”

“What was said?”

“Chris was supposed to come get her.”

“When?”

“That night,” Jenny murmured. “Saturday night. She said she’d be back at her own house by then, and that he should come by there—by her house up in Old Bisbee to pick her up. She gave him the address and everything. She told me later that they were going to run away and live together. She said Chris told her that in Mexico thirteen was old enough to get married.”

“Did you mention any of this to your grandparents?”

Jenny shook her head. “No,” she said softly.

“Why not?”

Jenny looked at Joanna with an expression on her face that begged for understanding. “Because I didn’t want to be a tattletale,” she said at last. “The other kids all think that just because my mother is sheriff that I’m some kind of a goody-goody freak or perfect or something. But I’m not. I’m just a regular kid like everyone else.”

For Joanna Brady it was like seeing her own life in instant replay, a return to her own teenage years, when, with a father who was first sheriff and then dead, she too had struggled desperately to fit in. To be a regular kid. To be normal. It distressed her to think Jenny was having to wrestle the same demons. As a mother she may have been wrong about a lot of things, but she had called that shot—from the cigarettes on to this: Jenny’s stubborn determination to keep her mouth shut and not be a squealer.

“I see,” Jaime Carbajal said. “You already said you didn’t know Dora was pregnant. Do you think Chris knew?”

Jenny shrugged. “Maybe,” she said.

“What kind of arrangement was made for hint to route get her?”

“I don’t know that exactly, either. Like I said, I heard Dora give him her address and directions so he could get here. She said she’d sneak out to meet him just like she used to do up in Tucson. She said her mother wouldn’t even notice she was gone. But then Grandma Lathrop called CPS. The next thing I knew, that awful woman was there at the house to take Dora away, and all the while Dora was yelling, ‘No, no, no. I don’t want to go. Don’t make me go!’ “

Jenny paused then. A pair of fat tears dribbled down her cheeks and dripped onto the surface of the table. “I should have told, shouldn’t I? If I had, would it have made any difference or would Dora still he dead anyway?”

Joanna wanted to jump up, rush around the table, take Jenny in her arms and comfort her. She wanted to tell Ernie and Jaime, “Enough! No more questions.” But she didn’t. Even though it killed her to do so, she sat still and kept her mouth shut. It was Detective Carbajal who reached over and laid a comforting hand on Jenny’s trembling shoulder.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said gruffly. “Child Pro­tective Services took Dora Matthews into their custody. They’re the ones who were ultimately responsible for safeguarding her once she left your grandparents’ care.”

There was a knock on the door. Ernie lumbered up from his chair. “I’ll tell whoever it is to get lost,” he said.

Just then the door opened. Kristin poked her head inside and beckoned to Joanna. “I have a phone call for you, Sheriff Brady,” she said. “It’s urgent.”

Joanna looked at Jenny. “Will you be all right? I can ask Detec­tives Carpenter and Carbajal to not ask any more questions until I get back.”

Jenny shook her head. “It’s all right,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

Joanna followed Kristin into the lobby. “Who is it?” she asked. “Burton Kimball,” Kristin replied.

Burton Kimball was Bisbee’s premier attorney. He did a fair amount of local defense work. He had also handled Clayton Rhodes’s will, the one in which Joanna’s former handyman had left his neighboring ranch to Joanna and Butch. Surely there was no lingering problem from that transaction that necessitated Joanna’s being yanked from Jenny’s interview.

“What does he want?” Joanna demanded. “I thought I told you we weren’t to be interrupted.”

“I’m sorry,” Kristin apologized. “Mr. Kimball insisted that it was vitally important that he speak to you. I offered to put him through to Chief Deputy Montoya, but he said you were the only one who would do.”

“All right then,” Joanna sighed. Shaking her head in frustration, she stomped into her office and unearthed her telephone from the mounds of papers that covered her desk. Then she sat down and took several deep breaths to compose herself. Finally she picked up the receiver and punched the “hold” button.

“Good morning, Burton,” she said as cordially as she could manage. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, sir,” Burton said in his mannerly drawl. “I’m sitting here in my office with my newest client, a lady by the name of Sally Matthews. I handled her parents’ estate, so she came to see me. Ms. Matthews is interested in turning herself in, Sheriff Brady. The City of Bisbee has passed this case along to the Multi-Jurisdiction Force, so in actual fact, she’ll be turning herself in to them. But, given what all has happened, she wants to talk to you first. Before Sally turns herself in to them, she wants to hear the straight scoop about what happened to Dora and what’s being done to find whoever’s responsible. That seems to me like a reasonable enough request.”

“She knows her daughter is dead?” Joanna asked.

“Yes, she does,” Burton replied. “She came back to town and heard it from an acquaintance—someone she ran into when she stopped to get gas. She took it hard, Sheriff Brady, real hard, but she’s had a chance to pull herself together now. If it wouldn’t he too inconvenient, I’d like to bring her out to see you as soon as possible. What do you think?”

There wasn’t much Joanna could say. “Sure,” she agreed. “Bring her right down.”

“I’m concerned that there might be reporters out front at your office due to that murder out in Apache Pass,” Burton Kimball continued. “Considering Dora’s previously publicized connection to that case, I’m afraid Sally’s appearance will cause quite a stir. Is there possibly a more discreet way of bringing her down to your place rather than just driving up to the front door and marching in through the main lobby?”

Joanna sighed. “Sure,” she said. “Come around to the back. There’s a door close to the west end of the building. That opens directly into my office. Knock on that, and I’ll let you in.”

“Thank you so much, Sheriff Brady,” Burton said. “You’re most kind. We’ll be there in a matter of minutes.”

As soon as Burton Kimball hung up, Joanna dialed Frank Mon­toya’s office. “What’s up?” her chief deputy asked. “Is the interview over already?”

“It’s about to be,” she said. “Burton Kimball just called. He has Sally Matthews in his office. She’s ready to turn herself in, and he’s bringing her here.”

“Why here?” Frank asked. “That meth lab was inside the city limits. It should be the City of Bisbee’s problem, not ours.”

“The city has passed the case off to MJF,” Joanna told him. “She’ll turn herself in to them, but Burton Kimball is bringing Sally Matthews here first so we can brief her about what happened to Dora. I’m calling to let you know that Sally Matthews now knows about her daughter’s death. That being the case, you can go ahead and officially release Dora’s name to the press. We shouldn’t put it off any longer.”

“Will do,” Frank said.

Before returning to the conference room, Joanna stopped long enough to call Butch at home. “Scroll through the caller ID screen,” she asked him. “I need the number of the guy named Richard Bernard who called on Saturday morning. I think we may have found the father of Dora Matthews’s baby.”

“The name is listed here as Richard Bernard, MD,” Butch said, once he’d read Joanna the number. “What is this, a doctor who’s some kind of pervert child molester?”

“I doubt it,” Joanna told him. “According to Jenny, Chris was the name of Dora’s boyfriend. They’re kids, so naturally there was no last name. I’m guessing Chris Bernard is a teenaged son or maybe even a grandson. Jenny also said that Dora talked to Chris a couple of times while she was staying out there at the house with The Gs. That means Ernie or Jaime will need to interview him in case she told Chris anything on the phone that could shed light on what happened later.”

“I wonder if Chris knew he was going to be a father,” Butch said.

“Maybe,” Joanna said. “On Sunday Dora bought one of those home pregnancy test kits. I’m guessing that once she knew the results, she probably told him as well. I need to have Frank check their phone records as well.”

“Whose?” Butch asked.

“The Bernards’,” she said. “Never mind. I’m just thinking aloud.”

“So Jenny’s interview is over then?” Butch asked, switching gears. “Do you want me to come pick her up?”

“It’s not over, although they’re probably close to finishing up. I got called out of the conference room to take the phone call from Burton Kimball about Sally Matthews turning herself in. They’re on their way here from Bisbee right now.”

“In that case, I’ll definitely come pick up Jenny,” Butch declared. “That’ll be one less thing for you to worry about.”

“Thanks,” Joanna said. “Once they’re done, I’m sure Jenny will be more than ready to go.”

“It was pretty tough then?”

“Yes, it was,” she replied. “For both of us.”

“Sorry about that, Joey. I’ll he there in a few minutes.”

“If you come too soon, Jenny might not be ready.”

“That’s all right. I’ll wait.”

Without touching any of the papers waiting on her desk, Joanna headed back to the conference room. She met Jenny and Ernie Carpenter in the lobby.

“Finished?” Joanna asked.

Ernie nodded. “For the time being.”

Joanna handed him the piece of paper on which she’d jotted down Dr. Richard Bernard’s name and number. “Good enough,” Ernie said. “I guess Jaime and I had better head up to Tucson. We’ll deliver the clothing to the crime lab so they can get started pro­cessing it. After that, we’ll track down Chris and talk to him.”

“Before you go, you need to know that Sally Matthews is about to turn herself in to MJF. Burton Kimball is bringing her in. They’ll be here in a few minutes. I told them to use the back door. She wants to know what’s going on with Dora’s case, and I’m going to tell her.”

“So she knows?”

Joanna nodded. “How much she knows remains to be seen.”

Ernie Carpenter left to find his partner. With a subdued Jenny following behind, Joanna returned to her office and made a futile attempt to straighten the mess on her desk. Meanwhile, Jenny slouched in one of the captain’s chairs. For several minutes, neither mother nor daughter said a word.