Shoot / Don't Shoot

“Indications are,” Joanna answered, “but I prob­ably shouldn’t talk about that now. You never can tell when somebody might walk in.”

“Right,” Frank said. “Well, hang in there. It’s bound to get better. What about Jorge Grijalva?” he asked, changing the subject. “Did you have time to check on him?”

“I just came home from seeing him a few minutes ago.”

“What do you think?” Frank asked.

“I don’t know what to think. I’m doing some checking. I’ll let you know.”

“Fair enough. Should I tell Juanita you’re looking to it?”

“For right now, don’t tell anybody anything.”

“Sure thing, Joanna,” Frank Montoya answered. “You’re the boss.”

There was no hint of teasing in Frank Montoya’s voice now. Joanna knew that he really meant what he said.

“Thanks,” Joanna said. “And thanks for keeping an eye on things while I’m gone.”

Once off the telephone, Joanna headed for her room. In the breezeway outside, she almost col­lided head-on with Leann Jessup. The other woman was dressed in tennies, shorts, and a glow-in-the-­dark T-shirt. “I’m going for a run,” she said. “Care to join me?”

The idea of going for a jog carried no appeal. “No, thanks,” Joanna replied. “I’m saving myself for that first session of physical training tomorrow afternoon. I’m going to shower, hit the books, and then try to get some sleep.”

For a moment Joanna watched Leann’s stretching exercises, then she glanced at her watch. It was almost eleven-thirty. “Isn’t this a little late to go jogging?”

Leann grinned. “Not in Phoenix it isn’t. Most of the year it’s too hot to go out any earlier. Besides, I’m a night owl—one of those midnight joggers. Actually, this is early for me.”

Joanna laughed. “Where I come from, coyotes are the only ones who go jogging this time of night.

Back in her dormitory room, Joanna quickly stripped out of her clothing and headed for shower.

Standing under the torrent of pulsing hot water, Joanna marveled at the unaccustomed force of the water. Back on the High Lonesome, a private w ell, temperamental pump, and aging pipes all combined to create perpetual low pressure. Reveling in the steamy warmth, she stayed in the shower far longer than she would have at home.

When she finally emerged from the shower, she once again found her bathroom tinged with cigarette smoke. The bath towel she used to dry her face, the one she had brought from home, stank to high heaven.

Her nose wrinkled in distaste. Ever since she’d been forced to use high school rest rooms that had reeked of smoke, she had been bugged by the p­eople who hid out in bathrooms to smoke. Why the hell couldn’t they be honest enough to smoke in public, in front of God and everybody? She thought. Why did so many of them have to be so damned sneaky about it?

With the exhaust fan going full blast, the mirror cleared gradually. As the steam dissipated, Joanna’s body slowly came into focus. Back home, with Jenny bouncing in and out of rooms, standing naked in front of a full-length mirror wasn’t some­thing Joanna Brady did very often. Now she subjected her body to a critical self-appraisal—something she hadn’t done for years. In fact, the last time she had looked at herself in that fashion had been nine years earlier, just after Jenny’s birth. She had been concerned about whether or not she’d get her pre-pregnancy figure back.

She had, of course, within months, thanks more to genetics than to dietary diligence on Joanna’s part. Even in her sixties, Eleanor Lathrop remained pencil thin, and Joanna had inherited that tendency. Now, except for two faded stretch marks—one on each breast—there were no other physical indications that she had ever borne a child. Her breasts were still firm. Her small waist curved out into fuller hips. Her figure suffered some in com­parison with that of someone as elegantly tall as Leann Jessup. For one thing, Joanna was somewhat heavier. So be it. Joanna wasn’t a daily—or nightly—jogger. Her muscle tone came from real work on the ranch—from wrestling bales of hay and long-legged calves—rather than from a prescribed program of gym-bound weight lifting.

Moving closer to the mirror, Joanna examined her face. She still wasn’t sleeping through the night. She hadn’t done that regularly since Andy died, but she was getting more rest. Her skin was clear. The dark circles under her eyes were fading. The new hairdo Eleanor had badgered her into on the day of the election was an improvement over her old one. Even though she still wasn’t quite accustomed to the shorter length, Joanna had to admit it was easier to care for. She found herself using far less shampoo, and the time she was forced to waste waving her hairdryer around in the bathroom been reduced from ten minutes to five.

Standing there naked, Joanna Brady finally saw herself for the first time as someone else might see her, the way some man who wasn’t Andy might see her. A man who ...

With a start, she remembered Butch Dixon staring at the rings on her fingers. She saw him standing there talking to her, leaning against the bar obviously enjoying her company. She saw again the pleased look on his face when she had walked back into the Roundhouse after her trip down to the Maricopa County Jail. She remembered how quickly he had apologized when he’d inadvertently stumbled onto Andy’s death, and how he’d jumped down the throat of the poor guy he thought might have insulted her.

Certainly Butch Dixon wasn’t interested in her, was he?

Joanna barely allowed her mind time enough to frame the question.

“Nah!” she said aloud to the naked image staring back at her from the mirror. “No way! Couldn’t be!”

With that, pulling on her nightgown, Joanna headed for bed. She fell asleep much later with the light on and with the heavy textbook open on her chest—only thirty pages into Dave Thompson’s seventy-six-page reading assignment.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Because Jim Bob and Eva Lou were both early risers, Joanna had read another twenty pages and was down in the student lounge with the telephone receiver in hand by ten after six the next morning. Her mother-in-law answered the phone.

“Is Jenny out of bed yet?” Joanna asked.

“Oh, my,” Eva Lou replied. “She isn’t here. Your mother invited her to sleep over in town last night. I didn’t think it would be a problem. I know Jenny will be sorry to miss you. If you want, you might try calling over to your mother’s.”

“Except you know how Eleanor is if she doesn’t get her beauty sleep,” Joanna returned. “And by the time she’s up and around, this phone will be too busy to use. I’ll call back later this evening. Tell Jenny I’ll talk to her then.”

“Sure thing,” Eva Lou replied. “As far as I know, she plans on coming straight home from school.”

Relinquishing the phone to another student, Joanna poured herself juice and coffee and a toasted couple of pieces of whole wheat bread. Then she settled down at one of the small, round tables, flipped open Historical Guide to Police Science, and went back to her reading assignment of which she still had another twenty-six pages to go.

“Mind if I sit here?”

Joanna looked up to find Leann Jessup standing beside the table. She was carrying a loaded breakfast tray. “Sure,” Joanna said, moving her notebook and purse out of the way. “Be my guest. There’s plenty of room.”

Leann began unloading her tray. Toast, coffee, orange juice, corn flakes, milk. She set a still-folded newspaper on the table beside her food.

“Not much variety,” Leann commented. “By Christmas, the food in that buffet line could become pretty old. But I shouldn’t complain,” she added. ‘It’s food I don’t have to pay for out of my own pocket.

“How close are you to done with that stupid reading assignment?” Leann asked, nodding in the direction of Joanna’s textbook as she sat down.

Joanna sighed. “Twenty pages to go is all. History never was my best subject, and this stuff is dry as dust.” While she returned to the book, Leann Jessup picked up the newspaper and unfolded it. Moments later she groaned.

“Damn!” Leann Jessup exclaimed, slamming the palm of her hand into the table, rattling everything on its surface. “I knew it. As soon as she turned missing, I knew he was behind it.”

Joanna glanced up to find Leann Jessup shaking her head in dismay over something she had read in the paper.

“Who was behind what?” Joanna asked. “Is something wrong?”

Tight-lipped, Leann didn’t answer. Instead, she flipped the opened newspaper across the table. “It’s the lead story,” she said. “Page one.”

Joanna picked up the paper. The story at the top of the page was datelined Tempe.

The battered and partially clad body of a woman found in the desert outside Carefree last week has been identified as that of Rhonda Weaver Norton, the estranged and missing wife of Arizona State University economics professor, Dr. Dean R. Norton.

According to the Maricopa County Medical Ex­aminer’s Office, Ms. Norton died as a result of hom­icidal violence. The victim was reported missing last week by her attorney, Abigail Weismann, when she failed to show up for an appointment. When Ms. Weismann was unable to locate her client at her apartment, the attorney called the Tempe police saying she was concerned for Ms. Norton’s safety.

Two weeks ago Ms. Weismann obtained a no-contact order on Ms. Norton’s behalf. The court document ordered her estranged husband to have no further dealings with his wife, either in person or by telephone.

Reached at his Tempe residence, Professor Norton refused comment other than saying he was deeply shocked and saddened by news of his wife’s death.

The investigation is continuing, but according to usually reliable sources inside the Tempe Police De­partment, Professor Norton is being considered a person of interest.... see Missing, pg. B-4.

Instead of finishing the article, Joanna looked up Leann Jessup’s pained face.

“I took the missing person call,” Leann explained. “Afterward, I checked the professor’s address for priors. Bingo. Guess what? Three domestics reported within the last three months. The son of a bitch killed her. He probably figures since he’s a middle-aged white guy with a nice time and a good job, that the cops’ll let him off. And the thing that pisses the hell out of me is that he’s probably right.”

“Three separate priors?” Joanna asked. “When the officers responded each of those other times, was he ever arrested?”

“Not once.”

“Why not?” Joanna asked.

Leann Jessup’s attractive lips curled into a disdainful and decidedly unattractive sneer. “Are you kidding? You read what he does for a living.”

Joanna consulted the article to be sure. “He’s a professor at ASU,” she returned. “What difference does that make?”

“The university is Tempe’s bread and butter. The professors who work and live there can do no wrong.”

“Surely that doesn’t include getting away murder.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it if I were you,” Leann answered bitterly. As she spoke, she thumbed through the pages until she located the continuation of the article. “Do you want me to read aloud?” she asked.

Joanna nodded. “Sure,” she said.

Lael Weaver Gastone, mother of the slain woman, was in seclusion at her home in Sedona, but her husband, Jean Paul Gastone, told reporters that women like his stepdaughter—women married to violent men—need more than court documents to protect them.

“Our daughter would have been better off if she had ignored the lawyers and judges in the court system and spent the same amount of money on a .357 Magnum,” he said from the porch of his mountaintop home.

Much the same sentiment was echoed hours later by Matilda Hirales-Steinowitz, spokeswoman for a group called MAVEN, the Maricopa Anti-Violence Empowerment Network, an umbrella organization comprising several different battered women’s ad­vocacy groups.

“Handing a woman something called a protective order and telling her that will fix things is a bad joke, almost as bad as the giving the emperor his nonexistent new clothes and telling him to wear them in public. If a man doesn’t respect his wife—a living, breathing human being—why would he re­spect a piece of paper?”

Ms. Hirales-Steinowitz stated that crimes against women, particularly domestic-partner homicides, have increased dramatically in Arizona in recent years. According to her, MAVEN has scheduled a candlelight vigil to be held starting at eight tonight on the steps of the Arizona State Capitol building In downtown Phoenix.

MAVEN hopes the vigil will draw public attention not only to what happened to Rhonda Norton but also to the other sixteen women who have died as a result of suspected domestic violence in the Phoe­nix metropolitan area in the course of this year.

Michelle Greer Dobson, a friend and former classmate of the slain woman, attended Wicken­burg High School with Rhonda Weaver Norton. According to Dobson, the victim, class valedictorian in 1983, was exceptionally bright during her teenage years.

“Rhonda was always the smartest girl—the smartest person—in our class when it came to cracking the books. She went to Arizona State Uni­versity on a full-ride scholarship. As soon as she ran into that professor down there at the univer­sity, she was hooked. I don’t think she ever looked at another boy our age.”

According to Ms. Dobson, Rhonda Weaver met Professor Norton when she took his class in mi­croeconomics as an ASU undergraduate student nine years ago. Norton divorced his first wife the following summer. He married Rhonda Weaver a short time later. It was his third marriage and her first. They have no children.

Leann Jessup finished reading and put the paper down on the table. “This crap makes me sick. We should have been able to do more. I agree with what the man in the article said. The system let down, although I guess it’s not fair to second-guess the guys who took those other calls. After all, we weren’t there. If I had been, maybe I would have done something differently.”

“Maybe,” Joanna said. “And maybe not. In that shoot/don’t shoot scenario yesterday, I evidently pulled the same boner the responding officer did. If that had been a real life situation, I would have plugged that poor little kid, sure as hell.”

Folding the paper, Leann shoved it into her purse and then stood up. “It’s almost time for class,” she said. “We’d better get going.”

Joanna glanced around the room and was surprised to find it nearly empty. Only one student remained in the room, a guy from Flagstaff who was still talking on the telephone. He and his wife were having a heated argument over what she should do about a broken washing machine while he was away at school. The public nature of the lounge telephone made no allowances for domestic privacy.

Joanna and Leann cleared their table and head for class. Determinedly, Leann Jessup changed the subject. “It’s going to be a long day,” she said. “I’ve been up since four. The train woke me.”

“What train?” Joanna asked. “I didn’t hear any train.”

“You must have been sleeping the sleep of dead,” Leann said. “It was so loud that I thought we were having an earthquake.”

Outside the classroom a small group of smokers clustered around a single, stand-alone ashtray. Grinding out his own cigarette butt, Dave Thompson began urging the others to come inside. Other than the guy from Flagstaff, Joanna and Leann were the last people to enter.

Something about the searching look Dave gave her made Joanna feel distinctly uneasy. Leann ev­idently noticed it as well.

“Oops,” she whispered, as they ducked between other students’ chairs and tables to reach their own. “The head honcho looks a little surly today. We’d better be on our best behavior.”

Moments later, Dave Thompson closed the door behind the last straggler and marched forward to e podium. “I hope you’ve all read last night’s assignment, boys and girls,” he said. “We’re going to spend the morning discussing some of the material on the worldwide history of law enforcement as well as some additional material on law enforcement here in the great state of Arizona. I’m a great believer in the idea that you can’t tell where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.”

During the course of Dave Thompson’s long lecture, Joanna almost succeeded in staying awake by forcing herself to take detailed notes. As the midmorning break neared, she once again found herself counting down the minutes like a restless school kid longing for recess.

When the break finally came, Joanna raced out of the classroom and managed to beat everyone to the student lounge. She poured herself a cup of terrible coffee from the communal urn and then made for the pay phone and dialed her own office number first. Kristin Marsten, her nubile young secretary, answered the phone sounding perky and cheerful. “Sheriff Brady’s office.”

“Hello, Kristin,” Joanna said. “How are thing?”

Kristin’s tone of voice changed abruptly as the cheeriness disappeared. “All right, I guess,” she answered.

Kristin’s tenure as secretary to the Cochise County sheriff preceded Joanna’s arrival on scene by only a matter of months. Kristin started out the previous summer in the lowly position of temporary clerk/intern. Through a series of unlikely promotions, she had somehow landed the secretarial job. Joanna credited Kristin’s swift rise far more to good looks than ability. No doubt in the pervasively all-male atmosphere that had existed under the previous administrations, blond good looks and blatant sex appeal had worked wonders.

By the time Joanna arrived on the scene, Kristin had carved out some fairly cushy working conditions. Because Joanna’s reforms threatened the status quo, the new sheriff understood why Kristin might view her new female boss with undisguised­ resentment. Given time, Joanna thought she might actually effect a beneficial change in the young woman’s troublesome attitude. The problem was, between the election and now there had been no time—at least not enough. Kristin’s brusque, stilted replies bordered on rudeness, but Joanna waded into her questions as though nothing was out line.

“Is anything happening?” she asked.

“Nothing much,” Kristin returned.

“No messages?”

“Nothing happening. No messages. Joanna recognized the symptoms at once. Kristin was enjoying the fact that her boss was temporarily out of the loop. The secretary no doubt planned to keep Joanna that way for as long as possible.

“Something must be happening,” Joanna pressed. “It is a county sheriff’s office.”

“Not really,” Kristin responded easily. “I’ve been sling things along to Dick ... I mean, to Chief Deputy Voland, or else to Chief Deputy for Ad­ministration Montoya.”

“What kind of things?”

“Just routine,” Kristin answered.

Joanna had to work at keeping the growing annoyance out of her own voice. She knew there was no possibility of effecting a miraculous adjustment Kristin’s attitude over long-distance telephone lines. But if Kristin wanted to play the old I-know­-and-you-don’t game, it was certainly possible to II her bluff.

“Oh,” Joanna offered casually. “You mean like the prisoner petitions asking me to fire the cook or the domestic assault out at the Sunset Inn?”

“Well . . . yes,” Kristin stammered. “I guess so. How did you know about those?”

Hearing the surprise in Kristin’s voice, Joanna allowed herself a smile of grim satisfaction. She resented being drawn into playing useless power-trip games, but it was nice to know she could deliver a telling blow when called upon to do so. After all, Joanna had been schooled at her mother’s knee, and Eleanor Lathrop was an expert manipulator. The sooner Kristin Marsten figured that out, the better it would be for all concerned.

“A little bird told me,” Joanna answered, “but I shouldn’t have to check with him. Calling you ought to be enough.”

Bristling at the reprimand, Kristin did at last cough up some useful information. “Adam York called,” she said curtly.

Adam York was the agent in charge of the Tucson office of the Drug Enforcement Agency. Joanna had met him months earlier when, at the time Andy’s death, she herself had come under suspicion as a possible drug smuggler. It was due Adam York’s firm suggestion that she had enrolled in the APOA program in the first place.

“Did he say what he wanted?” Joanna asked. “Did he want me to call him back?”

“Yes.”

“Where was he calling from?” Joanna asked. “Did he leave a number?”

“He said you had it,” Kristin replied. “He said for you to call his home number. He has so fancy kind of thingamajig on his phone that tract him down automatically.”

Not taking down telephone numbers was another part of Kristin’s game. Joanna had Adam York’s number back in the room, but not with her. Not here at the phone where and when she needed it. Her level of annoyance rose another notch, but she held it inside.

“What else?” Joanna asked.

“Well, there was a call from someone named Grijalva.”

“Someone who?” Joanna asked impatiently. “A man? Woman?”

“A woman,” Kristin said. “Juanita was her name. She wouldn’t tell me what it was all about. She just said to tell you thank you.”

Joanna drew a long breath. There was very little point in lighting into Kristin over the telephone. What was needed was a way to make things work for the time being.

“I’ll tell you what, Kristin,” Joanna said. “From now on I’d like you to bag up all my correspondence and copies of all phone calls that come into your office. My in-laws are coming up here tomorro­w for Thanksgiving. Bundle the stuff up in a single envelope. I’ll have my father-in-law stop by the office to pick it up tomorrow the last thing before they leave town.”

“You want everything?”

“That’s right. Even if you’ve passed a call along someone else to handle, I still want to see a copy of the original message. That way I’ll know who called and why and where the problem went from ere.”

“But that’s a lot of trouble—”

Pushed beyond bearing, Joanna cut off Kristin’s objection. “No buts,” she said. “You’re being paid be my secretary, remember? To do my work. For as long as I’m gone, this is the way we’re going to handle things. After tomorrow’s batch, you can FedEx me the next one Monday morning. After at, I want packets from you twice a week for as long as I’m here. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now, is Frank Montoya around?”

“He’s not in his office. He’s over in the jail talking the cook. Want me to see if I can put you through to the kitchen?”

“No, thanks. What about Dick Voland?”

“Yes.” Joanna could almost see Kristin’s tight lipped acquiescence in the single word of her answer. Moments later, Dick Voland came on phone.

“Hello,” he said. “How are you, Sheriff Brady and what’s the matter with Kristin?”

“I’m fine,” Joanna answered. “Kristin, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be having a very go day.”

“I’ll say,” Dick returned. “I thought she was going to bite my head off when she buzzed me about your call. What can I do for you?”

Joanna listened between the words, trying to tell if anything was wrong, but Voland sounded cordial enough. “How are things?” she asked.

“Everything’s fine. Let’s say pretty much everything. The prisoners are all pissed off about quality of their grub, but Frank tells me he’s working on that. We’ve had a few things happening, but nothing out of the ordinary. How are your classes going?”

“All right so far,” Joanna answered.

“Is my ol’ buddy, Dave Thompson, still do’ the bulk of the teaching up there?”

“You know him?”

“Sure. Dave and I go way back. I’m talking years now. We’ve been to a couple national conferences together, served on a few statewide committees. He fell on a little bit of hard times after his wife divorced him. Ended up getting himself remoted.”

“Remoted?” Joanna repeated, wondering if she’d heard the strange word correctly. “What’s that?”

Voland chuckled. “You never heard of a remotion? Well, Dave Thompson was always a good cop. Spent almost his whole adult life working for the city of Chandler. But about the time he got divorced, while he was all screwed up from that, he worked himself into a situation where he was a problem. Or at least he was perceived as a problem. So they got rid of him.”

“You mean the city fired him?”

“Not exactly,” Dick answered. “The way it works is this. If the brass reaches a point where they can’t promote a guy, and if they don’t want demote him, they find a way to get him out of their hair. They send him somewhere else. The more remote, the better.”

“The gutless approach,” Joanna said, and Dick Voland laughed.

“Most people would call it taking the line of least resistance.”

Once she understood the process, Joanna’s first thought was whether or not remoting would work with Kristin Marsten. Where could she possibly send her? Out to the little town of Elfrida, maybe? Or up to the Wonderland of Rocks?

Dick Voland went right on talking. “Believe me, you can’t go wrong listening to Thompson. He knows what it’s all about. Of all the instructors the APOA has up there, I think he’s probably tops. You say your classes are going all right?”

Joanna took a deep breath. No wonder listening to Dave was just like listening to Dick Voland. They were two peas in a pod and old buddies besides. Bearing that in mind, it didn’t seem wise to mention that she was bored out of her tree, especially not now when the lounge was filled with most of her fellow students.

“The classes are great,” she answered after a pause. “As a matter of fact, they couldn’t better.”

For the next few moments and in a very businesslike fashion, Dick Voland briefed the sheriff the all latest Cochise County law-and-order issues including the Sunset Inn domestic assault. Try she might, Joanna couldn’t hear any ominous subtext in what Chief Deputy Voland was telling He seemed surprisingly upbeat and positive.

Joanna waited until he was finished before broaching the question she’d been toying with and on since leaving Jorge Grijalva and the Maricopa County Jail the night before. And when she did it, she tried to be as offhand as possible.

“By the way,” she said, “I’ve been meaning ask. I can’t remember exactly when it was, back early to mid-October, you helped a couple of out-of-town officers make an arrest down at the Paul Spur lime plant. Remember that?”

“Sure. That guy from Pirtleville—I believe name was Grijalva. Killed his ex-wife somewhere up around Phoenix. What about it?”

“What can you tell me about the detectives who were working the case?”

“I only remember one of them,” Dick Voland answered. “The woman. Her name was Carol Strong.”

“What about her?”

“I can only remember one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not sure you want to know.”

“Tell me.”

“Legs,” Dick Voland answered. “That woman had great legs.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

When Joanna hung up the phone, she saw Leann Jessup heading for the door on her way back to class.

“Wait up,” Joanna called after her. “I’ll walk with you.”

As they started down the breezeway toward the classroom wing, Joanna studied her tablemate. Since breakfast, Leann had said almost nothing. During class that day, there had been no hint of the previous day’s lighthearted banter or note passing. Leann had spent the morning, her face set in an unsmiling mask, staring intently at their instructor, seemingly intent on every word. Even now a deep frown creased Leann Jessup’s forehead.

“Are you getting a lot out of this?” Joanna asked

“Out of what?” Leann returned.

“Out of the class. It looked to me as though you devouring every word Dave Thompson said this morning.”

Leann shook her head ruefully. “Appearances can be deceiving. I hope you’ve taken good notes, because I barely heard a word he said. I was too busy thinking about Rhonda Norton and what happened to her. Her husband may have landed the fatal blow, but we’re all responsible.”

“We?” Joanna said.

Leann nodded. “You and me. We’re cops, part of the system—a system that left her vulnerable to a man who had already beaten the crap out of her three different times.”

“You shouldn’t take it personally,” Joanna counseled.

Even as she said the words, Joanna recognized the irony behind them. It took a hell of a lot of nerve for her to pass that timeworn advice along to someone else. After all, who had spent most of the previous evening tracking down leads in a case that was literally none of her business?

Leann shot Joanna a bleak look. “You’re right, I suppose,” she said. “After all, domestic violence is hardly a brand-new problem. It’s why my mother divorced my father.”

“He beat her?”

“Evidently,” Leann answered. “He knocked her around and my older brother, too. I was just a baby, so I don’t remember any of it. Still, it affected all of us from then on. And maybe that’s why it bothers me so when I see or hear about it happening to others. In fact, preventing that kind of dam­age is one of the reasons I wanted to become a cop in the first place. And then, the first case I have any connection to ends like this—with the woman dead.” She shrugged her shoulders dejectedly.

They were standing outside the classroom, just beyond the cluster of smokers. “I’ve been thinking about that candlelight vigil down at the capitol tonight,” Leann continued. “The one they mentioned in the paper. I think I’m going to go. Want to go along?”

The subject of the vigil had crossed Joanna’s own mind several times in the course of the morning. Obviously, Serena Grijalva would be one of the remembered victims. Joanna, too, had considered going.

“Maybe,” she said. “But before we decide one way or the other, we’d better see how much homework we have.”

Leann gave her a wan smile. “You’re almost too focused for your own good,” she said. “Has anybody ever told you that?”

“Maybe once or twice. Come on.”

Once again, the two women were among the last stragglers to find their seats. Dave Thompson was at the podium. “Why, I’m so glad you two ladies could join us,” he said. “I hope class isn’t interfering too much with your socializing.”

In the uncomfortable silence that followed Thompson’s cutting remark, Leann ducked into her chair and appeared to be engrossed in studying her notes, all the while flushing furiously. Joanna, on the other hand, met and held the instructor’s gaze. Of all the people in the room—the two women an ‘ their twenty-three male classmates—Joanna was the only one whose entire future in law enforcement didn’t depend in great measure on the opin­ion of that overbearing jerk.

With Dick Voland’s tale of Dave Thompson’s “remotion” still ringing in her ears, Joanna couldn’t manage to keep her mouth shut. “That’s all right,” she returned with a tight smile. “We were finished anyway.”

The rest of the morning lecture didn’t drag nearly as much. At lunchtime two carloads of students headed for the nearest Pizza Hut. Joanna had alre­ady taken a seat at one of the three APOA-occupied tables when the perpetual head-nodder from the front row paused beside her. “Is this seat taken?” he asked.

Joanna didn’t much want to sit beside someone she had pegged as a natural-born brown noser. Still, since the seat was clearly empty, there was no graceful way for Joanna to tell the guy to move on. His badge said his name was Rod Bascom and that he hailed from Casa Grande.

“Help yourself,” Joanna said.

Watching as he put down his plate and drink, Joanna was surprised to note that although he was naturally handsome, he was also surprisingly ungainly. While the conversation hummed around the table, Rod attacked his food with a peculiar intensity. When he glanced up and caught Joanna observing him, he blushed furiously, from the top of his collar to the roots of his fine blond hair. For the first time, Joanna wondered if Rod Bascom wasn’t an inveterate head-nodder in class because he was actually painfully shy? The very possibility made him seem less annoying. At twenty-five or -six, Rod

was close to Joanna’s age. In terms of life experience, there seemed to be a world of difference be­tween them.

“Are you enjoying the classes?” Joanna asked, trying to break the ice.

Once again Rod Bascom nodded his head. Joanna had to conceal a smile. Even in private conversation he couldn’t seem to stop doing it.

“There’s a lot to learn,” he said. “I never was very good at taking notes. I’m having a hard time keeping up. I suppose this is all old hat to you.”

“Old hat? Why would you say that?” Joanna returned.

“You’re not like the rest of us,” he said, shrugging uncomfortably. “I mean, you’re already a sheriff. By comparison, the rest of us are just a bunch of rookies.”

Joanna flushed slightly herself. No matter how earnestly she wanted to fit in with the rest of her classmates, it wasn’t really working. She smiled at Rod Bascom then, hoping to put him at ease.

“I’m here for the same reason you are,” she said “Some of this stuff may be boring as hell, but we all need to learn it just the same.”

He nodded, chewing thoughtfully for a moment before he spoke again. “I’m sorry about your husband,” he said. “It took me a while to figure out why your face is so familiar. I finally realized I saw you on TV back when all that was going on. It must have been awful.”

Rod’s kind and totally unexpected words of condolence caught Joanna off guard, touching her in a way that surprised them both. Tears sprang to her eyes, momentarily blurring her vision.

“It’s still awful,” she murmured, impatiently brushing the tears away. “But thanks for mentioning it.”

“You have a little girl, don’t you?” Rod asked. How’s she doing?”

Joanna smiled ruefully. “Jenny’s fine, although she does have her days,” she said. “We both know it’s going to take time.”

“Are you going home for Thanksgiving?”

“No, Jenny and her grandparents are coming up here.”

Rod Bascom nodded. “That’s probably a good idea,” he said. “That first Thanksgiving at home after my father died was awful.”

He got up then and hurried away, as though worried that he had said too much. Touched by his sharing comment and aware that she’d somehow misjudged the man, Joanna watched him go.

What was it Marliss Shackleford had said about people in the big city? She had implied that most of the people Joanna would meet in Phoenix were a savage, uncaring, and untrustworthy lot.

So far during her stay in Phoenix, Joanna had met several people. Four in particular stood out from the rest. Leann Jessup—her red-haired note-w­riting tablemate; Dave Thompson, her loud-mouthed jerk of an instructor; Butch Dixon, the poetry-quoting bartender from the Roundhouse Bar d Grill; and now Rod Bascom, who despite his propensity for head nodding, gave every indication of being a decent, caring human being.

There you go, Marliss, Joanna thought to herself, as she stood up to clear her place. Three out of four ain’t bad.

The morning lectures may have dragged, but the afternoon lab sessions flew by. They started with the most fundamental part of police work—paper—and the how and why of filling it out properly. Joanna didn’t expect to be fascinated, but she was—right up until time for the end-of-day session of heavy-duty physical training.

Once the PT class was over, Joanna could barely walk. There was no part of her that didn’t hurt. It was four-thirty when she finished her last painful lap on the running track and dragged her protesting body back to the gym.

The PT instructor, Brad Mason, was a disgust­ingly fit fifty-something. His skin was bronze and leatherlike. His lean frame carried not an ounce of extra subcutaneous fat. Brad stood waiting by the door to the gym with his arms folded casually across his chest, watching as the last of the trainees finished up on the field. Running laps was something Joanna hadn’t done since high school. She was among the last stragglers to limp into the gym,

“No pain, no gain,” Mason said with a grin as Joanna hobbled past.

Her first instinct was to deck him. Instead, Joanna straightened her shoulders. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll try to remember that.”

After lunch Joanna had told Leann she’d be happy to go to the candlelight vigil, but by the time it she finished showering and drying her hair, she was beginning to regret that decision. She was tired. Her body hurt. She had homework to do, including a new hundred-page reading assignment from Dave Thompson. But it was hard to pull herself together and turn to the task at hand when she was feeling so lost and lonely. She missed Jenny, and she missed being home. The partially com­pleted letter she had started writing to Jenny the night before remained in her notebook, incomplete and unmailed.

Joanna went to her room only long enough to change clothes; then she took her reading assignment and hurried back to the student lounge. Naturally, one of the guys from class was already on the phone, and there were three more people waiting in line behind him. After putting her name on the list, Joanna bought herself a caffeine-laden diet coke from the coin-operated vending machine and sat down to read and wait.

The reading assignment was in a book called The Interrogation Handbook. It should have been interesting material. Had Joanna been in a spot more conducive to concentration, she might have found it fascinating. As it was, people wandered in and out of the lounge, chatting and laughing along the way while collecting sodas or snacks or ice. Finally, Janna gave up all pretense of studying and simply sat and watched. She tried to sort out her various classmates. Some of them she already knew by name and jurisdiction. With most of them, though, she had to resort to checking the name tag before she could remember.

Eventually it was Joanna’s turn to use the phone. Jenny answered after only one ring.

“Hullo?”

At the sound of her daughter’s voice, Joanna felt her heart constrict. “Hi, Jenny,” she said. “How are things?”

“Okay.”

Joanna blinked at that. After two whole days, Jenny sounded distant and lethargic and not at all thrilled to hear her mother’s voice. “Are you all packed for tomorrow?” Joanna asked.

“I guess so,” Jenny answered woodenly. “Grandpa says we’re going to leave in the afternoon as soon as school is out.”

“Aren’t you going to ask how I’m doing?” Joanna asked.

“How are you doing?”

“I’m tired,” Joanna answered. “How about you? Are you all right? You sound upset.”

“How come you’re tired?”

“It may have something to do with running laps and doing push-ups.”

“You have to do push-ups? Really?” Jenny asked dubiously. “How many?”

“Too many,” Joanna answered. “And I have a mountain of homework to do as well, but Jenny you didn’t answer my question. Is something wrong?”

“No,” Jenny said finally, but the slight pause before she answered was enough to shift Joanna’s maternal warning light to a low orange glow.

“Jennifer Ann . . .” Joanna began.

“It was supposed to be a surprise.” Jenny’s blurted answer sounded on the verge of tear. “Grandma said you’d like it. I thought you would too.”

“Like what?”

“My hair,” Jenny wailed.

“What about your hair?” Joanna demanded.

“I got it cut,” Jenny sobbed. “Grandma Lathrop took me to see Helen Barco last night, and she cut it all off.”

A wave of resentment boiled up inside Joanna. How like her mother to pull a stunt like that! She had to go and drag Jenny off to Helene’s Salon of Hair and Beauty the moment Joanna’s back was turned. Just because Eleanor Lathrop lived for weekly visits to the beauty shop Vincent Barco had built for his wife in their former two-car garage didn’t mean everybody else did. In Eleanor Lathrop’s skewed view of the world, there was no crisis so terrible that a quick trip to a beautician wouldn’t fix.

Joanna, on the other hand, held beauty shops and beauticians at a wary arm’s length. Her distrust had its origins in the first time her mother had taken Joanna into a beauty shop for her own first haircut. Eleanor had been going to old Mrs. Boxer back then, in a now long-closed shop that had been next door to the post office. Joanna had walked into the place wearing beautiful, foot-long braids. She had emerged carrying her chopped-off braids in a little metal box and wearing her hair in what Mrs. Boxer had called an “adorable pixie.” Joanna had hated her pixie with an abiding passion. All these years later, she still couldn’t understand how a place that had nerve enough to call itself a beauty shop could produce something that ugly.

“It’ll grow out, you know,” Joanna said, hoping offer to Jenny some consolation. “It’ll take six months or so, but it will grow out.”

“But it’s so frizzy,” Jenny was saying. “The kids t school all made fun of me, especially the boys.”

“Frizzy?” Joanna asked. “Don’t tell me. You mean Grandma Lathrop had Helen Barco give you a permanent?”

“It was just supposed to be wavy,” Jenny wailed. She really was crying now, as though her heart was broken. “But it’s awful. You should see it!”

Joanna had always loved the straight, smooth texture of her daughter’s hair, which was so like Andy’s. Had Eleanor been available right then, Joanna would have ripped into her mother and told her to mind her own damn business. As it was though, there was only a heartbroken Jenny sobbing on the phone.

“That’ll grow out, too,” Joanna said patiently. “Ask Grandma Brady to try putting some of her creme rinse on it. That should help. And remember, Helen Barco and Grandma Lathrop may call it

permanent, but it’s not. It’s only temporary.”

“Will it be better by Monday?” Jenny sniffed.

“Probably not by Monday,” Joanna answered. “But by Christmas it will be.” She decided to change the subject. “Are you looking forward to coming up tomorrow?”

“I am now,” Jenny answered. “I was afraid you’d be mad at me. Because of my hair.”

If there’s anyone to be mad at, Joanna seethed silently, it’s your grandmother, but she couldn’t say that out loud.

“Jenny,” she replied instead, “you’re my daughter. You could shave your hair off completely, for all I care. It wouldn’t make any difference. I’d sill love you.”

“Should I? Shave it off, I mean? Maybe Grandpa Brady would do it with his razor.”

Joanna laughed. “Don’t do that,” she said. “I was just teasing. Most likely your hair doesn’t look nearly as bad as you think it does. Now,” she added, “is Grandma Brady there? I’d like to talk to her.”

Moments later Eva Lou Brady came on the one. “Is Jenny right there?” Joanna asked.

“No. She went outside to play with the dogs.”

“How bad is her hair, really?”

“Pretty bad,” Eva Lou allowed. “Jim Bob says he could have gotten the same look by holding her finger in an electrical socket. Don’t be upset about it, Joanna,” Eva Lou added. “Your mother didn’t mean any harm. She and Jenny just wanted to surprise you.”

“I’m surprised, all right,” Joanna answered stiffly. “Now, is everything set for tomorrow?”

“As far as I can tell,” Eva Lou replied. “Kristin called and said you need us to bring along some papers from your office. We’ll pick them up on our way to get Jenny from school. We’ll leave right after ­that, between three-thirty and four.”

“Good,” Joanna said. “If you drive straight through, that should put you here right around eight o’clock.”

“That’s the only way Jim Bob Brady drives,” his wife said with a laugh. “Straight through.”

“How about directions to the hotel?”

“Jimmy already has it all mapped out. Do you want us to come by the school to pick you up? Jenny wants to see where you’re staying.”

“No, I’ll meet you at the hotel. It’s so close you can see it from here on campus. Jenny and I can walk over here Thursday morning so I can give her the grand tour.”

“Speaking of dinner, do we have reservations for Thanksgiving dinner yet?” Eva Lou asked.

“Yes. Right there in the hotel dining,” Joanna answered.

“Jim Bob needs to know if he should bring along a tie.”

“Probably,” Joanna answered. “From the outside, it looks like a pretty nice place.”

“I’ll tell him,” Eva Lou said. “I don’t suppose it’ll make his day, but since you’re the one asking, he’ll probably do it.”

Joanna put down the phone and left the lounge. Back in her own room, she realized she still hadn’t returned Adam York’s call, but she didn’t bother to go back down to the lounge. Instead, she lay on the bed in her room and thought about strangling her infuriatingly meddlesome mother.

Jenny’s long blond hair had been perfectly fine the way it was. Joanna remembered it floating in the wind as Jenny had waved good-bye.

Where the hell did Eleanor Lathrop get off?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Joanna Brady and Leann Jessup ate dinner at La Pinata, a Mexican restaurant near the capitol mall. Over orders of machaca tacos, the two women talked. In the course of a few minutes’ worth of conversation, they shared their life stories, giving one another the necessary background in the shorthand way women use to establish quick but lasting friendships.

“My mother divorced my dad when my brother was five and I was three,” Leann told Joanna. “The last time I saw my father was twenty years ago. He showed up at my sixth birthday party so drunk he could barely walk. Mom threw him out of the house and called the cops. He never came back.”

“You haven’t talked to him since?” Joanna asked.

Leann shook her head. “Not once.”

“Is he still alive?”

Leann shrugged. “Maybe, but who cares? He never called, never sent any money. My mother had to do it all. Most of the time, while Rick and I were little, she worked two jobs—one full-time and one half-time—just to keep body and soul together.

“In my high school English class, the teacher asked us to write an essay about our favorite hero. Most of the kids wrote about astronauts or movie stars. I wrote about my mom. The teacher made fun of my paper, and he gave me a bad grade. He said mothers didn’t count as heroes. I thought he was wrong then, and I still do.”

Joanna bit her lip. Thinking about her own mother and the flawed relationship between them, she felt a twinge of envy. “You like your mother then?” she asked.

“Why, don’t you?” Leann returned.

“Most of the time, no,” Joanna answered honestly. “I always got along better with my dad than did with my mother.”

She went on to tell Leann about her own folks, about how Sheriff D. H. “Big Hank” Lathrop died after being hit by a drunk driver while changing a tire for a stranded motorist and about the high school years when she and her mother had been locked in day-to-day guerrilla warfare. Joanna finished by telling Leann Jessup how, that very afternoon and from two hundred miles away, Eleanor Lathrop had been able to use Jenny’s hair to push Joanna’s buttons.

From there—from discussing mothers and fathers—the two women went on to talk about what had brought them into the field of law enforcement. For Joanna it had been an accident of fate. For Leann Jessup it was the culmination of a lifelong ambition.

Over coffee, Joanna got around to telling Leann about Andy’s death. Recounting the story always brought a new stab of pain. Telling Butch Dixon the night before, Joanna had managed to corral the tears. With Leann, she let them flow, but she was starting to feel ridiculous. How long would it take before she stopped losing it and bawling at the drop of a hat?

“What about you, Leann?” Joanna asked, mopping at her eyes with a tissue when she finished. “Do you have anyone special in your life?”

Pm a moment, the faraway look in Leann Jessup’s eyes mirrored Joanna’s own. “I did once,” she said, “but not anymore.” With that, Leann glanced at her watch and then signaled for the waitress to bring the check. “We’d better go,” she added, cutting short any further confidences. “It’s getting late.”

Joanna took the hint. Whatever it was that had happened to Leann Jessup’s relationship, the hurt was still too raw and new to tolerate discussion.

They paid their bill and left the restaurant right afterr that. Riding in Joanna’s county-owned Blazer, they arrived at the capitol mall well after dark and bare minutes before the vigil was scheduled to begin. Folding chairs had been set out on the lawn. A subdued crowd of two or three hundred people, augmented by news reporters, had gathered and were gradually taking their seats. After some searching, Joanna and Leann located a pair of vacant chairs near the far end of the second row.

The organizers from MAVEN had set the makeshift stage with an eye to drama. In the center of the capitol’s portico sat a table draped in black on which burned a single candle. Because of the enveloping darkness, that lone candle seemed to float suspended in space. Next to the table stood a spot-lit lectern with a portable microphone attached.

A woman who introduced herself as Matilda Hirales-Steinowitz, the executive director of MAVEN, spoke first. After introducing herself, she gave a brief overview of the Maricopa Anti-Violence Empowerment Network, a group Joanna had never heard of before reading the newspaper article earlier that morning.

“The people of MAVEN, women and men alike, deplore all violence,” Ms. Hirales-Steinowitz declared, “but we are most concerned with the war against women that is being conducted behind the closed doors of family homes here in the Valley. So far this year sixteen women have died in the Phoenix metropolitan area of murders police consider to be cases of domestic partner violence.

“We are gathered tonight to remember those women. We have asked representatives of each of the families to come here to speak to you about the loved ones they have lost and to light a memorial candle in their honor. We’re hoping that the light from those candles will help focus both public and legislative attention on this terrible and growing problem.”

Matilda Hirales-Steinowitz paused for a moment; then she said, “The first to die, at three o’clock on the afternoon of January third, was Anna Maria Dominguez, age twenty-six.”

With that, the spokeswoman sat down. Under the glare of both stage and television lights, a dowdy, middle-aged Hispanic woman walked slowly across the stage. Once she reached the podium, she gripped the sides of it as if to keep from falling.

“My name is Renata Sanchez,” she said in a nervously quavering voice. “Anna Maria was my daughter.”

As her listeners strained forward to hear her, Renata told about being summoned to St. Luke’s Hospital. Her daughter had come home from her first day at a new job at a convenience store. She had been met at the door by her unemployed husban­d. He had shot her in the face at point-blank range and then had turned the gun on himself.

“‘They’re both dead,” Renata concluded, dabbing at her eyes with a hanky. “I have had some time to get used to it, but it’s still very painful. I hope you will forgive me if I cry.”

Joanna bit her own lip. The woman’s pain was almost palpable, and far too much like Joanna’s own.

From that moment on, the evening only got worse. One by one the deadly roll was called, and one by one the survivors came haltingly forward to make their impassioned pleas for an end to the senseless killing that had cost them the life of a mother, sister, daughter, or friend.

Renata. Sanchez was right. Because the names were announced chronologically in the order in which the victims perished, the survivors who had lost loved ones earlier in the year were somewhat more self-possessed than those of the women who had died later. That was hardly surprising. The first survivors had had more time—a few months anyway—to adjust to the pain of loss. After speaking in each person took a candle from a stack on the table and lit it from the burning candle. After placing their newly lit candles on the table with the others, the speakers crossed the stage and sat in the chairs that had been provided for them.

Some of the grieving relatives addressed the listeners extemporaneously, while others read their statements hesitantly, the words barely audible through the loudspeakers. Several of the latter were so desperately nervous that their notes crackled in the microphone, rustling like dead leaves in the wind. Their lit candles trembled visibly in their hands.

Joanna could imagine how reluctantly most of those poor folks had been drawn into the fray, yet here they stood—or sat—united both in their grief and in their determination to put a stop to the killing. Listening to the speeches, Joanna was jolted by a shock of self-recognition. These people were just like her. The survivors were all ordinary folk who had been thrust unwillingly into the spotlight and into roles they had never asked for or wanted, compelled by circumstance into doing something about the central tragedy of their lives. And the men and women of MAVEN—the people who cared enough to start and run the Maricopa Anti-Violence Empowerment Network—had given those bereaved people a public forum from which to air their hurt, grief, and rage.

By the time Matilda Hirales-Steinowitz read the fifteenth name, that of Serena Duffy Grijalva, Joanna’s pain was so much in tune with that of the people sitting on the stage that she could barely stand to listen. Had she come to the vigil by herself, she might have left right then, without hearing any more. But Joanna had come with Leann Jessup, whose major interest in being there was the last of the sixteen victims—Rhonda Weaver Norton.

And so, instead of walking out, Joanna waited aIong with the silent crowd while a gaunt old man and a young child—a girl—took the stage. At first Joanna thought the man must be terribly elderly. He walked slowly, with frail, babylike steps. It was only when they turned at the podium to face the audience that Joanna could see he wasn’t nearly as old as she had thought. He was ill. While he stood still, gasping for breath, the girl parked a small, portable oxygen cart next to him on the stage.

“My name’s Jefferson Davis Duffy,” he wheezed finally, in a voice that was barely audible. “My friends call me Joe. Serena was my daughter—the purtiest li’l thing growin’ up you ever did see. Not always the best child, mind you. Not always the smartest or the best behaved, but the purtiest by far. When Miz Steinowitz over there asked us here tonight, when they asked us to speak and say somethin’ about our daughter, the wife and I didn’t know what to do or say. Neither one of us ever done nothin’ like this before.”

He paused long enough to take a series of gasping breaths. “The missus and I was about to say no, when our granddaughter here—Serena’s daughter, Cecilia—speaks up. Ceci said she’d do it, that she had somethin’ she wanted to tell people about what happened to her mama.”

With a series of loud clicks and pops, he managed to pull the microphone loose from its mooring. Bending over, he held the mike to his granddaughter’s lips. “You ready, Ceci, honey?” he asked.

Cecelia Grijalva nodded, her eyes wide open like those of a frightened horse, her knees knocking together under her skirt. Joanna closed her own eyes. How could the people from MAVEN justify exploiting a child that way, using her personal tragedy to make what was ultimately a political statement? On the other hand, Joanna had to admit no one seemed to be forcing the frightened little girl to appear on the stage.

“I have a little brother,” Cecelia whispered, while people in the audience held their breath in an effort to hear her. “Pablo’s only six—a baby really. Pepe keeps asking me how come our mom went away to wash clothes and didn’t come back. At night sometimes, when it’s time for him to go to to sleep, he cries because he’s afraid I’ll go away, too. I tell him I won’t, that I’ll be there in the morning when he wakes up, but he cries anyway, and I can’t him make stop. That’s all.”

Ceci’s simple eloquence, her careful concentration as she lit her candle, wrung Joanna’s heart right along with everyone else’s. When will this be over? she wondered. How much more can the people in this audience take?

While Joe Duffy and his granddaughter limped slowly across the stage to two of the last three unoccupied seats in the row of chairs reserved for family members, Matilda Hirales-Steinowitz stepped to the microphone once again. “The latest victim, number sixteen, is Rhonda Weaver Norton, thirty, who died sometime last week.”

Matilda moved away from the mike. Yet another mourner—a tall, silver-haired woman in an elegant black dress—glided to the podium. “My name is Lael Weaver Gastone,” she said. “The man who was my son-in-law murdered my daughter, Rhonda. I’m tired of killers having all the rights. I’ve been told that Rhonda’s killer is innocent until proven guilty. Everyone is all concerned about protecting his rights—the right of the accused. Who will stand up for the rights of my daughter?

The man who was here a moment ago, Mr. Duffy, is lucky. At least he has two grandchildren to remember his daughter by. I have nothing—nothing but hurt. I’ve never had a grandchild, and now I never will.

This afternoon, I went to my former son-in-law’s ­arraignment. Before I was allowed into the courtroom, I had to go through a metal detector. Do you believe it? They checked me for weapons! But now that I think about it, maybe it’s a good thing they did.”

With the implied threat still lingering in the air, Lael Gastone lit her candle and placed it on the table. Shaking her head, she strode across the stage to the last unoccupied chair. Meanwhile, the mistress of ceremonies returned to the microphone.

“Thank you all for joining us here tonight,” she said. “Many of us will be here until morning, until the sun comes up on what we hope will be the dawn of a new day of nonviolence for women in this state and in this country. Some, but not all, of the people who have spoken here tonight will be with us throughout the vigil. I’m sure it means a great deal to all of them that so many of you ca me here for this observance. Please stay if you can and visit with some of them. It’s important. As you have heard tonight, it truly is a matter of life death.”

“Shall we go?” Leann whispered to Joanna.

Joanna shook her head. “Just a minute,” she said. “Ceci Grijalva is a friend of my daughter’s. I shouldn’t leave without at least saying hello.”

They made their way through the surging crowd to the makeshift stage where little knots of well-wishers were gathering around each of the speakers. While Leann went to pay her respects to Rhonda Norton’s mother, Joanna headed for spot where she had last seen Joe Duffy and Cecilia Grijalva. Ceci’s grandfather was deep in conversation with Renata Sanchez, one of the other speakers. Meanwhile, unobserved by most of the adults, Ceci had slipped off by herself. In isolated dejection, she sat on the edge of the stage, dangling her legs over the side and kicking at the empty air.

“Ceci?” Joanna asked. “Are you all right?”

Without looking up, the child nodded her head but said nothing.

Joanna tried again. “I know you from Bisbee,” she explained. “I’m Joanna Brady, Jenny’s mother.”

This time Ceci did look up. “Oh,” she said,

Joanna winced at the pain in that one-word answer. Ceci Grijalva’s voice was weighted down with the same hurt and despair that had taken the laughter out of Jenny’s voice, too.

“I’m so sorry about your mother,” Joanna said.

“It’s okay,” Ceci mumbled, staring down at her feet once more.

It is not okay, Joanna wanted to scream. It’s aw­ful! It’s a tragedy! It’s horrible. Instead, she hoisted herself up on the stage until she was sitting next to Cecelia.

“Jenny wanted me to come see you,” Joanna began. “She wanted me to tell you that she knows how you feel.”

Cecelia Grijalva nodded. Joanna continued. “You know Ceci, Jenny didn’t lose her mom the way you did, because I’m still here. But she did lose her daddy. He died down in Bisbee, a few days before your mother died.”

Ceci’s chin came up slowly. Her dark eyes drilled into Joanna’s. “Jenny’s daddy is dead, too?”

Joanna nodded. “That’s right. Somebody shot him. Jenny thought you’d like to know that you’re not the only one going through this and if—”

“Ceci, come on!” a woman’s voice ordered from somewhere on the stage behind them. “We’ve got a long drive home.”

Ceci started to scramble to her feet. “But, Grandma,” she objected, “this is my friend Jenny’s mother. Jenny Brady’s mother. From Bisbee.”

“I don’t care who it is or where she’s from. We have to go,” Ernestina Duffy said stiffly, not even bothering to nod in Joanna’s direction. “It’s getting late. You have school tomorrow.”

Standing up at the same time Ceci did, Joanna turned to face Ernestina Duffy. She was a middle-aged Hispanic woman whose striking good looks were still partially visible behind an angry, bitter facade

Ignoring the woman’s brusque manner, Joanna held out her hand. “I’m Joanna Brady,” she explained. “Ceci and Jenny, my daughter, were in second grade and Brownies together back in Bisbee. I wanted to stop by, to check on Ceci, and to see if there’s anything I can do to help.”

“You can’t bring my daughter back,” Ernestina said coldly.

“No. I can’t do that. And I do know what you’re going through, Mrs. Duffy. My husband’s dead, too. Jenny’s father is dead. He was killed down in Bisbee the same week your daughter died.”

“I’m sorry,” Ernestina said, “but we’ve go to drive all the way home. Come on, Ceci.”

Joanna wasn’t willing to give up. “Jenny’s coming up for Thanksgiving tomorrow,” Joanna said hurriedly. “I was wondering if maybe the girls could get together on Friday for a visit.”

Ernestina shook her head. “I don’t think so. We live clear out in Wittmann. It’s too far.”

“What’s this?” Joe Duffy asked, breaking away from the people around him and dragging his oxygen cart over to where Joanna was standing with Ernestina and Cecelia.

“This is the mother of a friend of Ceci’s from Bisbee,” Ernestina explained. “Her daughter is coming up for a visit on Friday. They wanted us to bring Ceci into town to see her, but I told them—”

“My name’s Joanna Brady,” Joanna said, stepping forward and taking Jefferson Davis Duffy’s bony hand in hers. By then Leann had joined the little group. “And this is my friend Leann Jessup. We’ll be happy to drive up to Wittmann to get her,” Joanna offered. “And we’ll bring her back home that evening.”

The offer of a ride made no difference as far as Ceci Grijalva’s grandmother was concerned. Ernestina Duffy remained adamant. “I still say it’s too far and too much trouble.”

“Now wait a minute here,” her husband interjected. “It might be good for Ceci to be away for a while, to go off on her own and have some fun with someone her age. What time would it be?” he asked, turning to Joanna.

“Morning maybe?” Joanna asked tentatively. “Say about ten o’clock.”

Joe Duffy nodded. “What do you think, Ceci?” he asked, frowning down at the little girl. “Would you like to do that?”

Joanna’s heart constricted at the fleeting look of hope that flashed briefly across Ceci Grijalva’s trou­bled face. “Please,” she said. “I’d like it a lot.”

The old man smiled. “You call us then,” he said to Joanna. “We’re in information. The only Duffys in Wittmann. My wife manages a little trailer park if you call before you come, I can give you directions.”

Ernestina Duffy tossed her head and stalked off across the stage. She may not have approved of the arrangement, but she didn’t voice any further objections.

“Come on, Ceci,” Joe Duffy said, taking Ceci’s hand. “Bring Spot along, would you?”

Dutifully Ceci reached out and took the handle of the oxygen cart.

“Spot?” Joanna asked.

Joe Duffy gave her a grin. “The trailer park don’t allow no pets. So me an’ Ceci an’ Pepe decided that my cart here would be our dog, Spot. He don’t eat much, and he’s never once wet on the carpet. Right, Ceci?”

“Right, Grandpa,” Ceci said.

“And we’ll see you all on Friday morning,” he said to Joanna. “You won’t forget now, will you? I don’t approve of folks who’d let a little kid down.”

“We’ll be there,” Joanna promised. “Jenny and I both.”

“Good.”

“Whoa,” Leann said, once the Duffys and Cecilia, were out of earshot. “That woman is tough as nails. Those kids are lucky they have a guy like him for a grandfather.”

“For the time being,” Joanna said. “But from the look of things, I doubt he’ll be around very long.”

There were still people milling in the aisles as they started toward the car. Just beyond the back row of chairs, the lights of a portable television camera sprang to life directly in their path, almost blinding them.

“Sheriff Brady,” a disembodied woman’s voice said, as a microphone was thrust in front of Joanna’s face. “Sheriff Joanna Brady, could you please tell us why you came here tonight?”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“I missed the first part of the interview,” Leann said later, as they walked from the mall to the car. “Some creepy guy behind us was following so close that when the reporter stopped you, he ran right into me. Stepped on the back of my heel. Did you see him?”

“No,” Joanna said. “I missed that completely.”

“Then, when I turned around to look at him, he glared at me with these cold, ice-blue eyes as if it was all my fault that he ran into me. Whoever he was, he guy had a real problem. I’ve always wondered how dirty looks could cause drive-by shootings. Now maybe I know.”

The two women walked in silence the rest of the way to the car. “How did that reporter know it was you?’’ Leann asked, once they were inside Joanna’s Blazer.

Still somewhat stunned by her unexpected encounter with a television reporter, it was the same question Joanna had been asking herself all the way to the car.

Since deciding to run for office, Joanna had adjusted to the idea that she was no longer a private person in her own hometown, that down in Bisbee there would be people like Marliss Shackleford poking their noses into Joanna’s every move. Until that night, the fact that she was well known on a statewide basis hadn’t yet penetrated her consciousness.

“It is a little disconcerting,” she admitted at last. “That kind of stuff happens all the time in Bisbee, but Bisbee happens to be a very small pond. Phoenix is a lot bigger than that.”

Leann nodded. “By a couple million or so people. Why do you think the reporter singled you out like that?”

“It could be she covered either Andy’s death or else the election. The election’s more likely.’

Leann thought about that for a moment. “Doesn’t not having any privacy bother you?”

“It goes with the territory, I guess,” Joanna answered.

“Well,” Leann returned, “it’s never happened to me before. If they put the part with me in it on the news, it’ll be my first time. As soon as we get home, I’m going to call my mother. Maybe she can tape it.” Leann paused. “What about your mother? Won’t she want to tape it, too?”

“It’s a Phoenix station,” Joanna returned, “Their signals don’t get as far as Bisbee. With any kind of luck, my mother won’t see it.”

“Why do you say that? Will it upset her?”

“Are you kidding? The way I look on TV always her.”

Leann laughed. “Still, I’ll bet she’d like to see it. If Mom tapes it, I’ll have her drop the tape by campus tomorrow. Or else I’ll be seeing her sometime over the weekend. That way you can show it to your family if you want to.”

“Wait a minute,” Joanna said. “You said sometime this weekend. You mean you’re not going to your mother’s for Thanksgiving dinner?”

Leann shook her head.

“Why not?” Joanna continued. “She lives right town somewhere, doesn’t she?”

“Just off Indian School and Twenty-fourth Street,” Leann answered. “But there’s this little problem with my brother and sister-in-law. It’s better for all concerned if I don’t show up in person for holiday meals. That’s all right, though. Mom always saves me a bunch of leftovers.”

They drove in silence for the better part of a mile while Joanna considered what Leann had said. “So what are you doing for Thanksgiving dinner?”

Leann shrugged. “Who knows? There’ll be res­taurants open somewhere. I’ll have dinner. Maybe I’ll go to a movie. As a last resort, I suppose I could always study. I’m sure good of Dave Thompson isn’t going to let us off for the holiday without a hundred-or-so-page reading assignment.”

“Why don’t you come to dinner with us?” asked impulsively. “With Jenny and my in-laws and me. We’ll be staying at the Hohokam, right there on Grand Avenue. We have a five o’clock reservation in the hotel dining room. I’m sure we could add one more place if we need to. Where are you going to be for the weekend, then, back in Tempe?”

Leann shook her head. “I’m between apartments right now,” she said. “I figured that as long as the APOA was giving me a place to stay for the better part of six weeks, there was no need for me to pay rent at the same time.”

“That settles it, then!” Joanna said forcefully. “If you’re spending the whole weekend here on campus all by yourself, you have to come to dinner with us.”

“I shouldn’t,” Leann said. “I shouldn’t intrude on your family time.”

“Believe me, you won’t. Besides, you’ll love Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady. Unlike my mother, those two are dyed-in-the-wool SOEs.”

“S-O-E?” Leann repeated with a questioning frown. “What’s that, some kind of secret fraternal organization?”

Joanna laughed. “Hardly,” she said. “It means salt of the earth. They’re nice people. Regular people.”

After thinking about the invitation for a few seconds, Leann suddenly smiled and nodded. “Why not?” she said. “That’s very nice of you. I’ll come. It’ll give me something to look forward to when I’m locked up in my room doing my homework.”

A moment later she added, “I’m glad we went tonight. We both needed to be at the vigil, and dinner was fun. I feel like I made a new friend tonight.”

“That’s funny,” Joanna replied, flashing her own quick smile back in Leann Jessup’s direction. “I feel the same way.”

By then they had reached the entrance to the APOA campus. The Blazer’s headlights slid briefly across Tommy Tompkins’s broken-winged angel guarding the entryway. Basking in the glow of a newfound friendship, the angel seemed far less incongruous to Joanna now than it had the first time she saw it.

After parking in the lot, the two women started toward the dorm. “How about going for a jog later?” Leann asked.

“No way,” Joanna answered. “Look at me. I can barely hobble along as it is. This afternoon’s session of PT almost killed me.”

“You know what they say,” Leann said. “No pain, no gain.”

It wasn’t a particularly witty or clever comment. In fact, when Brad Mason had said the exact same thing earlier that afternoon as Joanna came crawling in from running her laps, she had been tempted to punch the PT instructor’s lights out. Now, though, for some reason, it struck her funny bone.

She started to laugh. A moment later, so did Leann. They were both still convulsed with giggles and trying to stifle the racket as they struggled to unlock their respective doors.

Joanna managed to open hers first. “Good night,” she called, as she stepped inside.

“Night,” Leann said.

Closing the door behind her, Joanna leaned against it for a moment. It had been a long, long time since she had laughed like that—until tears ran down her cheeks, until her jaws ached, and her sides hurt. It felt good. She was still basking in the glow of it when her phone began to ring.

Sure the call had something to do with Jenny, she jumped to answer it only to hear Adam York voice on the line.

“Joanna,” he said. “I’ve been trying to track you down all day. Didn’t you get my message?”

“I did, but I haven’t had a chance to call. Where are you?”

“The Ritz-Carlton. On Camelback.”

“Here in Phoenix?”

“Yes, in Phoenix. There may be streets named Camelback other places, but I don’t know of any.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I came in from the East Coast this afternoon for a meeting that’s scheduled for both tomorrow and Friday. I thought I’d check in and see how things are going for you before you head on down to Bisbee for Thanksgiving.”

“I’m not going,” Joanna said. “My in-laws are bringing Jenny up here for the weekend.” She paused for a moment. “It just seemed like a better idea for us to be here for Thanksgiving rather than at home. What about you?”

“I considered driving back to Tucson, but it would just be for one day. And I’ve been gone much that the food in my refrigerator has probably mutated into a new life-form. My best bet is to hang out here where, if I get hungry, I can always call for room service.”

“Room service for Thanksgiving dinner? Sounds pretty grim,” Joanna said. “If you don’t get a better offer, you could always join us. We’re all stay at a new place out here in Peoria, the Hohokam. Tomorrow I have to up our dinner reservation by one anyway. I could just as well add two.”

“I wouldn’t want to barge in . . .” Adam York objected.

“Look,” Joanna interrupted, “don’t think you’d be barging in on some intimate, quiet family affair. It’s not like that. One of my classmates from here school, Leann Jessup, will be joining us. And Eva Lou’s--my mother-in-law’s—watchword is that there’s always room for one more.”

“I’ll think about it,” Adam said. “Is tomorrow morning too late to let you know?”

“No. Tomorrow will be fine. I plan on checking in to the hotel after class tomorrow afternoon. In fact, you could leave me a message there, one way or the other.”

“In the meantime,” Adam said, “how about you? How’s your training going?”

“All right,” Joanna said. “It’s hard work, but I guess you knew that. And some of the instrucTors strike me as real jerks.”

Ai lam York laughed. “You know what they say. ‘Them as can, do. Them as can’t—’ “

“I know, I know,” Joanna interjected. “But still, I expected something better.”

“Joanna,” Adam York said, no longer laughing, “I know most of the APOA guys, either personally or by reputation. They know the territory. They’ve been out there on the front lines. They’ve been there done that, and got the T-shirt. But for one reason on or another, the world is better off with them out of doing active police work. They’ve got the training. They know the stuff backwards and forwards, but they should no longer be out interacting with the public on a regular basis.”

“Someone told me the process is called remoting.”

“You bet,” Adam answered. “I’ve used it myself on occasion, but that doesn’t mean green young cops can’t learn from them. Each one of those old crocodile cops has a lifetime’s worth of invaluable experience at his disposal. With the crisis in crime that’s occurring in this country, those guys are a national resource we can’t afford to waste.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Joanna replied. “You’re not stuck in the classes.”

“But I’ve had agents sit through some of the sessions. It sounds to me as though someone’s giving you a hard time. Let me take a wild guess. Dave Thompson.”

Joanna said nothing. Her silence spoke volumes.

“So it is Thompson. Look, Joanna, I won’t try to tell you Dave Thompson’s a great guy, because he isn’t. But I will say this—if you’re up here at school expecting to pick up an education that will stand you in good stead out in the real world, you’ll learn a whole lot more from someone who’s less than perfect than you will from Mary Poppins.”

“Thank you,” Joanna said, trying not to sound as sarcastic as she felt. “I’ll try to remember that.”

“Good,” Adam York said. “Thompson does the lecture-type stuff. What about the rest of it?”

“The lab work is great, but I had my first session of PT this afternoon, and I can barely walk.”

“Take a hot shower before you go to bed. Doctor’s orders.”

“I can do better than that,” Joanna answered. “I think I’ll hop in the hot tub.”

“They have a hot tub there on campus? That’s a big step up from when the facility used to be downtown. That place was nothing short of grim.”

“It’s not just a hot tub on campus,” Joanna returned. “I happen to have a hot tub right here in my room. It even works.”

“Amazing,” Adam York said. “I may be staying at the Ritz, but I sure don’t have a hot tub in my room.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Joanna said with a laugh. “Some people seem to have all the luck.”

While classes were in session, Dave Thompson tried to limit his drinking to the confines of his own apartment, but that Tuesday night he sought solace in the comforting din of his favorite neighborhood watering hole, the Roundhouse Bar and Grill.

Holidays were always tough, but Thanksgiving was especially so since that was when the problem with Irene and Frances had come to a head. Even more than Christmas, that was when he missed his kids the most, when he wished that somehow things could have turned out differently. Unfortunately, when it came to living happily ever after, Dave Thompson had ended up on the short end of the stick.

In his mind’s eye, he still saw the kids as they had been six years earlier when Irene took them and left town. At least he supposed they had left town. All Dave got to do was send his child support check to the Maricopa County court system on the first of every month. He didn’t know where it went from there. He wasn’t allowed to know. Irene’s lawyer had seen to that. She had been a regular ring-tailed bitch. So was the judge, for that matter. By the time that bunch of hard-nose women had finished with him, Dave had nothing left—not even visitation rights.

And maybe that was just as well. Truth be known, Dave didn’t want to know what kind of squalor Little Davy and Reenie were living in or what they were learning from Irene and that goddamned “friend” of hers. In fact, it was probably far better that he didn’t.

For months after that last big blowup—the one that had landed Dave in jail overnight—he had rummaged eagerly through his mail each day, hoping to receive a card or letter. Something to let him know whether or not his kids cared if he was dead or alive. But none ever came. Not one. All these years later, he had pretty much given up hope one ever would. In fact, he doubted he would ever see his children again, especially not if Irene had anything to do with it.

Of course, there was always a chance that eventually they might grow up enough to ignore her. If somebody else ever told the kids their father’s side of the story—if they ever got tired of all the lies and bullshit Irene had to be feeding them—they might even come looking for him one day. If and when that happened, Dave was prepared to welcome his children back home with open arms.

But that kind of thing was years away at best. Now the kids were only eleven and twelve. Davy was the older of the two, by sixteen months. Brooding over his beer, Dave wondered how tall the boy was and whether or not he still looked like his father and if, also like his father, Davy was any good at sports. As far as Reenie was concerned, Dave tried not to think about her very much. She had been a sweet-tempered, dark-haired cutey the last time saw her. But the problem with little girls was that they grew up and turned into women. And then they broke your heart.

Clicker in hand, Butch Dixon was surfing through the local news broadcasts. “Hey, Dave,” the bartender said, interrupting the other man’s melancholy reverie. “Isn’t that one of your students?”

Thompson turned a bleary eye on the huge tele­vision set. Sure enough, there was Joanna Brady being interviewed about something. Dave had come in on the story too late to catch what was going on, but Joanna was there. Next, Leann Jessup stepped forward and said something about how the system had to do better.

‘What the hell’s that all about?” he asked.

“Some kind of big deal down at the capitol,” Butch Dixon told him. “Something about this year’s domestic violence victims.”

“I wonder what those girls were doing there,” Dave Thompson muttered. “If my students have time enough to fool around with that shit, I must not be piling on enough homework. Give me another beer, would you, Butch? It’s mighty thirsty out tonight.”

Within minutes of hanging up the phone with Adam York, Joanna was lounging in the tub. By the time she crawled out and dried off, fatigue overwhelmed her. There was no point in even pretending to read the assignment in The Law Enforcement Handbook. Instead, she set the alarm for 5:00 A.M. and crawled into bed. The evening spent in Leann Jessup’s company and the chat with Adam York left Joanna feeling less lonely than she had in a long time. She was starting to forge some new friendships. She was learning how to go on with her life. Oddly comforted by that knowledge, she fell asleep within minutes.

The dream came later—an awful dream that invaded her slumber and shattered her hard-won sense of well-being. It began with Joanna driving her old AMC Eagle down Highway 80 from Bisbee toward the Double Adobe Road turnoff. A woman—a complete stranger—was riding in car with her. For some reason Joanna didn’t quite understand, she was taking this woman she didn’t know home to High Lonesome Ranch.

Behind the Eagle, another vehicle appeared out of nowhere, looming up large and impatient in the rearview mirror. Bright headlights flashed on and off in Joanna’s eyes. She tried to move out of the way, but that wasn’t possible. She was driving in a no-passing zone through one of the tall, red-rocked cuts that line Highway 80 as it comes down out of the mountain pass into the flat of the Sulphur Springs valley. There was no shoulder on either side of the roadway, only a solid rock wall some thirty feet high.

Ignoring the double line in the middle of the roadway, the vehicle behind Joanna swung out into the left-hand lane. It inched along, slowly overtaking the Eagle, driving on the wrong side of the road, even though there was no way to see around the curve ahead or to check for oncoming traffic.

“My God!” Joanna’s unknown passenger yelled. “What’s the matter with that guy? Is he crazy or what? He’s going to get us killed.”

Joanna was too busy driving the car to answer, although she did glance to her left, trying to catch a glimpse of the driver of the other car. But none was visible. All the windows were blacked out. An oncoming pickup came careening around the curve in the other lane. With only inches to spare, the other car ducked back into the lane directly in front of Joanna.

As Joanna clung to the steering wheel and fought to keep her car on the road, an awful sense of foreboding swept over her. Even without glimpsing any of the other vehicle’s occupants, Joanna knew instinctively that they were dangerous. Reflexively, Joanna reached for the switch to turn on the flash­ing lights on the light bar and to activate the siren, but they weren’t there. Then she remembered. She wasn’t in her county-owned Blazer. This was her own car. Those switches didn’t exist in her basic, stripped-down AMC Eagle.

There was a gas pedal, though. As the other car sped up and threatened to outrun her, Joanna plunged the accelerator all the way to the floor. The

Eagle leaped forward. Then suddenly, in the peculiar way things happen in dreams, Joanna was no longer in the car. Instead, she was standing outside her own back gate with the idling Eagle parked behind her. While she stood there watching helplessly, a hulking, hooded figure leaped out of the other vehicle, which was now parked directly in front of her back gate. As the frightening spector started up the walk, Joanna yelled at the dogs. “Sadie. Tigger. Get him.”

But the dogs lay panting and unconcerned in the shade of the backyard apricot tree Eva Lou had planted years earlier. Neither dog moved. Meanwhile, the intruder was almost to the door, running full speed. Joanna struggled to loosen Colt from under her jacket. It seemed to take forever, but at last she was holding it in her hand

“Stop or I’ll shoot,” she shouted.

But the hooded figure didn’t stop, didn’t even slow down. Joanna pulled back on the trigger only to find that instead of holding the deadly Colt 2000 she was aiming a plastic water pistol. The expected explosion of gunpowder never came. Instead, a puny stream of water shot out of the pistol and fell to the ground not three feet in front of her. The intruder, totally undeterred, raced into the house through the back door.

Enraged, Joanna threw down the useless water pistol and then headed toward the house herself just as she heard Jenny start to scream. Jenny! Joanna thought. She’s in there with him. I have to get her out!

She started toward the house, running full-out. Even as she ran, she could see a spiral of smoke rising up from the roof of the house, from a part of the roof where there was no chimney, a place where there should have been no smoke.

“Jenny!” Joanna screamed. “Jenny!”

The sound of Joanna’s own despairing voice awakened her. Heart pounding, wet with sweat, she lay on the bed and waited for the nighttime terror to dissipate.

When her breathing finally slowed, she glanced at the clock beside her bed. Twelve-fifteen. It wasn’t even that late. She turned over, pounded the pillow into a more comfortable configuration, and then tried to go back to sleep.

That’s when she realized that although the dream was long gone, the smell of smoke remained. Cig­arette smoke—as sharp and pungent as if the person smoking the cigarette were right there in the room with her.

Which is odd, she thought, closing her eyes and drifting off once more. Leann Jessup is my closest neighbor, and she doesn’t even smoke.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

On Wednesday before Thanksgiving, classes ended at noon. Within minutes, the parking lot was virtually empty. Since the Hohokam Resort Hotel was only a half mile away from campus, Joanna had no reason to pack very much to take with her from dorm to hotel room. If she discovered something missing over the weekend, she could always come back for it later. In fact, the dorm and the hotel were close enough that she and Jenny could easily walk over if they felt like it.

Hauling one of her suitcases down from the shelf in the closet, Joanna tossed in two changes of clothing, her nightgown, and a selection of toiletries. She sighed at the size of the next reading assignment and dropped her copy of The Law Enforcement Handbook on top of the heap before she zipped the suitcase. On her way to the parking lot, Joanna stopped by the student lounge long enough to call home and ask Eva Lou to please bring along Jenny’s extra bathing suit just in case Ceci Grijalva wanted to try swimming in the hotel pool.

“She’s the little girl whose mother died, isn’t she?” Eva Lou asked.

“That’s the one.”

“How’s she doing?”

“Medium,” Joanna answered, thinking about the less than friendly Ernestina Duffy and her frail, oxygen-dependent husband. “Not as well as Jenny,” Joanna added. “Unfortunately for her, Ceci Grijalva doesn’t have the same kind of support system Jenny does.”

“Poor little thing,” Eva clucked. “I’ll go hunt down that bathing suit just as soon as I get off the phone.”

For a change there wasn’t anyone else waiting in line to use the phone. Dialing the Sheriff’s Department number, Joanna savored the privacy. Trying to handle both her personal and professional life from an overused pay phone in an audience-crowded room was aggravating at best.

Once again, Kristin was chilly on the telephone, but she was also relatively efficient. “Chief Deputy Voland is out to lunch, and Chief Montoya’s still over in the jail kitchen.”

“What’s he doing over there?” Joanna asked. “Micromanaging the cook?”

“He’s been there all morning,” Kristin answered. “The last I heard he was supervising the crew of inmates who are washing all the walls.”

“Washing walls? Maybe you’d better try connecting me to the jail kitchen,” Joanna said. A few moments later, Frank Montoya came on the line.

“What’s my chief of administration doing was washing walls?” Joanna asked without preamble.

“Putting out fires,” Frank answered, “but I think we’ve got this little crisis pretty well under control.”

“What crisis?” Joanna demanded.

“The cook crisis,” Frank Montoya answered. “I wrote you a memo explaining the whole thing. Didn’t you get it?”

“Not yet. My father-in-law picked up the packet a little while ago, but I won’t get it until later on tonight. What’s going on?”

“As soon as the cook figured out I was on his case, he took off, but before he left, he cleaned out the refrigerator.”

“Good deal,” Joanna said. “He cleaned the refrigerator, and now you’ve got a crew washing the walls. Sounds like the place is getting a thorough and much-needed housecleaning.”

“Not really,” Frank Montoya returned wryly. “When I said cleaned out the refrigerator, I meant as in emptying it rather than making it germ-free. When I came in to work this morning, we almost had a riot on our hands. The cook didn’t show and the inmates were starving. I thought maybe he just overslept, but when I tried calling him, his landlady said he left.”

“Left. You mean he moved out? Quit without giving notice?”

“That’s right. Not only that, when I went home last night, there were a dozen frozen turkeys in the walk-in cooler waiting to be cooked for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. Today they’re gone, every last of them.”

“Gone? He took them?” Joanna asked in disbelief. “All of them?”

“That’s right, the turkey. He left town under the dark of night without leaving so much as a forwarding address. Nada.”

This was just the kind of crisis someone like Marliss Shackleford could turn into a major incident. “Somebody should have called me,” Joanna said. “That settles it. I’ll call Eva Lou and tell her not to come up. I can cancel the hotel reservations and be home in just over four hours.”

“No need to do that,” Frank reassured her. “I already told you. It’s pretty well handled.”

“What did you do, cook breakfast yourself?”

“Are you kidding? I don’t have a valid food handler’s permit. Besides, I’m a lousy cook. No, Ruby did the whole thing.”

“Who the hell is Ruby?” Joanna demanded crossly. “Did you already hire another cook?”

Frank paused momentarily before he answered. “Not exactly,” he said.

“What exactly does ‘not exactly’ mean?” Joanna asked.

“Ruby is Ruby Starr. I think I told you about her. She and her husband are the people who leased the Sunset Inn. She’s the one who did the actual cooking.”

“In other words, the lady who took after her hus­band’s windshield with a sledgehammer and deadly intent is the one who cooked breakfast in my jail this morning?”

“That’s right. When she went before Judge Moore, he set her bail at only five hundred dollars. I think everybody—including Burton Kimball, her lawyer—expected her to get bailed out, but she refused to go. She said if she left on bail that her husband would expect her to go to work and keep the restaurant open while he sits on his tail in his mother’s home over in Silver City. She said she’d rather stay in jail.

“So this morning, when I heard the cook had skipped, I drafted Ruby. Right out of the cell and into the kitchen. Seemed like the only sensible thing to do. Breakfast may have been a few hours late, but it drew rave reviews from the inmates. Great biscuits. After that, I asked Ruby if she’d consider cooking Thanksgiving dinner. She turned me down cold. Said she wouldn’t set foot in that filthy kitchen again until after it got cleaned up. That’s when the most amazing thing happened. Once word got out that their Turkey Day dinner hung in the balance, I had inmates lining up and begging for me to let them help clean and cook.

“Believe me, Ruby Starr’s a hell of a tough taskmaster. She’s been working everybody’s butts off all morning long, mine included.”

“So you’ve got an almost clean kitchen and a cook,” Joanna said. “But you’re missing the fixings.”

“I told you, Joanna, everything is under control.”

“So what’s on the revised menu?”

“Turkey, dressing, and all the trimmings,” Frank answered, sounding enormously pleased with himself.

“Wait a minute,” Joanna objected. “Where are you going to find a dozen unsold, thawed turkeys in Bisbee the day before Thanksgiving, and how are you going to pay for them twice without cutting into next month’s food budget?”

“That’s the slick thing. Ruby’s lawyer is taking care of all that.”

“Burton Kimball?”

“That’s right. He and his wife donated the whole dinner,” Frank answered smugly. “All of it.”

“How come?”

“He says with all the defense work he does, most of the inmates in the jail are clients of his, one way or the other, anyway. He said it was about time he and Linda did something for the undeserving poor for a change. As soon as Burton heard Ruby was willing to cook, he sent Linda to the store to buy up replacement turkeys. They both seemed to be getting a real kick out of it.”

Good-hearted people like Linda and Burton Kimball were part of what made Bisbee a good place to live. Part of what made it home.

“That’s amazing,” Joanna said, “especially considering all they’ve been through in the past few weeks.”

Two weeks earlier, Burton Kimball’s adoptive father and sister had both been killed. He had also been divested of whatever positive memories he might have cherished concerning his own biological father. In the face of that kind of personal trag­edy, Burton Kimball’s selfless generosity was all the more remarkable.

“All I can say is good work, Frank. That was an ingenious solution to a tough problem.”

Frank laughed. “That’s what you hired me for, isn’t it?”

“I guess it is.”

Just as Joanna was signing off, the door to the student lounge popped open, and Leann Jessup walked inside carrying a video. “There you are,” she said. “There wasn’t any answer in your room, but your Blazer was still in the parking lot so I figured I’d find you here somewhere. My morn just dropped off her tape of the news from last night. She says we’re both on it. She dropped it by in hopes your family could get a look at it over the weekend because she’d really like to have it back in time to take it to work next week.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Joanna said. “We’re booked into the Hohokam on a special holiday package that offers kids under sixteen the use of two free videos a day during their stay. That must mean there are VCRs available. If push come to shove, we could always come back here and ask Dave Thompson to let us use the one in his classroom.”

“Fat chance of that.” Leann laughed. She sobered a moment later. “How soon does your company show up?” she asked.

“Not until eight or later. They can’t even leave Bisbee until after Jenny gets out of school. It’s a four-hour drive.”

“How about some lunch, then?” Leann suggested. “I’m hungry.”

“So am I, now that you mention it,” Joanna said. “What do you want to eat?”

“I wish I knew somewhere around here to get a decent hamburger,” Leann moaned.

Joanna laughed. “Boy, do I have a deal for you,” she said. “Come with me.”

By then Joanna wasn’t particularly worried about going back to the Roundhouse Bar and Grill with Leann Jessup in tow. Of all the people Joanna knew, Leann was the one most likely to be sympathetic and understanding of Joanna’s more than passing interest in a case that was, on the face of it, none of her business. Besides, what were the odds that they would actually encounter Butch Dixon? Since he was evidently the nighttime bartender, he

probably wouldn’t be anywhere near his nighttime place of employment at one o’clock in the afternoon.

At least that was Joanna’s line of reasoning as she and Leann Jessup walked out to the Blazer and then drove north to Old Peoria. She was wrong, of course. Butch Dixon was the first person she saw once her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the dark­ened room. He was hunkered over the bar, eating a sandwich. A yellow legal pad with a pen on top of it lay beside an almost empty plate.

“Why if it isn’t the sheriff of Cochise, star of News at Ten.” He grinned in greeting when he saw Joanna. “And this must be your sidekick. You both looked great on TV.”

“You saw us?” Leann asked.

“That’s right. So what will Madam Sheriff have today, the regular?”

Joanna smiled as she sat down next to him. “You make me sound like a real barfly.”

“Aren’t you?” he returned. “Is your friend here a heavy drinker, same as you?”

Leann glanced questioningly in Joanna’s direction. “Not at one o’clock in the afternoon,” she protested. “I’ll have a Coke.”

“Pepsi’s all we have. Diet or regular?”

“Diet.”

“Hey, Phil,” Butch Dixon called to a bartender who was only then emerging from the door that evidently led to the kitchen. “How about bringing a pair of Diet Pepsis for the ladies.” He focused once more on Joanna. “You looked fine on the tube but I think you’re a lot better looking in person,’

She laughed. “Flattery will get you nowhere,” she said.

“Rats,” he returned.

Joanna laughed again. “Besides, not everybody liked our performances nearly as much as you did. Dave Thompson, the morning lecturer, climbed all over us about it this morning.”

“That’s right,” Leann put in on her own. “He seems to think he’s running a convent instead of a police academy. He wants his students to live cloistered lives with no outside distractions.”

“That would be a genuine shame.” Butch Dixon grinned, looking at Joanna as he spoke. “Not only is this lady good-looking, she’s a real mind reader, too. I was just about to finish my opus here and was wondering how to get it to her. The next thing know, she shows up on my doorstep.”

“This is Butch Dixon,” Joanna explained to Leann Jessup. “I asked him to write me a brief summary of what he could remember from the night Serena Grijalva died. Mr. Dixon here was one of the last people to see her alive.”

“When you say it that way, you make me sound like a prime suspect,” Butch Dixon returned darkly. “I hope I’ve remembered all the important stuff, although I don’t see what good it’s going to do. I gave the exact same information to that first homicide detective when she came around asking questions ­right after it happened. As far as I can tell, it didn’t make a bit of difference.”

“You didn’t tell me you were conducting your own independent investigation,” Leann said accus­ingly Joanna.

Joanna shrugged and tried to laugh it off. “I can’t afford to advertise it, now can I? And God knows I shouldn’t be doing it, especially since there’s more than enough going on in my own little bailiwick. One case in particular could be called the Case of the Missing Cook.”

“Are we talking about a real cook?” Leann asked. “It sounds like one of those Agatha Christie pries.”

“That’s ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook,’ “ Butch Dixon said in a casual aside without bothering to look up from his pen and paper.

“You read Agatha Christie?” Joanna asked.

“Among other things,” he replied.

“I’m talking about the jail cook, down in Bisbee,” Joanna continued, turning back to Leann. “He quit sometime between dinner last night and breakfast this morning. He took off without giving notice and without making any arrangements for breakfast this morning, either. Not only that, he stole all the Thanksgiving turkeys in the process.”

“I’ve been stung like that a time or two,” Butch Dixon put in sympathetically. “Fly-by-night cooks. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? It sounds to me like being a sheriff is almost as bad as running a bar and restaurant. What are you going to do about it?”

Phil arrived with the drinks. After Joanna and Leann gave him their lunch order, Joanna went on to explain about the Ruby Starr/Burton Kimball solution to the Cochise County Jail Thanksgiving dinner dilemma.

“Isn’t the term ‘undeserving poor’ from My Fair Lady?” Butch asked. “I think that’s what Liza Doolittle’s father calls himself.”

Joanna and Jenny sometimes watched tapes of musicals on the VCR. Since My Fair Lady was one of Jenny’s all-time favorites—right after The Sound of Music—Joanna knew most of the dialogue verbatim. Undeserving was exactly what Liza’s father had called himself.

Joanna looked at Butch Dixon with some surprise. Most of the men around Bisbee—Andy Brady included—didn’t sit around dropping either Agatha Christie titles or lines from plays into casual conversation, especially not lines from musicals,

“Agatha Christie? Lerner and Lowe? That’s pretty literary for a bartender, isn’t it? My mother always claimed that you guys were only marginally civilized.”

Dixon grinned. “Mine told me exactly the same thing. No wonder I’m such a disappointment to her.”

Once again Joanna returned to her story. “The upshot of all this is that one of the jail inmates—a lady who allegedly took after her husband wit sledgehammer on Monday—is currently serving as interim cook in the Cochise County Jail. Just wait until the media gets wind of that. There’s one particular local reporter, a lady of the press, who’ll have a heyday with it.”

Butch chuckled. “You might give her a friendly warning, just for her own protection. It sounds to me as though anybody who gets on the wrong side of your pinch-hitting cook does so at his or her own

Risk.”

Joanna and Leann both ended up laughing at that. They couldn’t help it. When their food came, Butch Dixon stood up. Tearing several sheets out of the yellow pad, he folded them and handed them over to Joanna, who tossed them into her purse. Then Dixon excused himself, leaving the two women to enjoy their meals.

When lunch was over, Joanna dropped Leann back at the APOA campus. Joanna felt a moment of guilt as Leann climbed out of the car. “This place looks really lonely. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to come over to the hotel and spend the afternoon there?”

Leann shook her head. “Thanks for the offer, but I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ve got plenty of homework to do. After the way Dave Thompson climbed all over us this morning, I want to be prepared for Monday morning. Thanks for suggesting the Roundhouse for lunch. That hamburger was great.”

Two was still an hour too early to show up at the hotel, but Joanna went there anyway.

The afternoon was perfect. With blue skies overhead and with the temperature hovering somewhere in the eighties, it was hard to come to terms with the idea that this was the day before Thanksgiving. Bisbee’s mountainous climate lent itself to more seasonal changes. November in Bisbee usu­ally felt like autumn. This felt more like summer.

Outside the automatic doors, huge free-standing pots and flower beds were ablaze with the riotous colors of newly planted bedding plants—marigolds, petunias, and snapdragons. Inside the lobby a totally unnecessary gas-log fire burned in a massive, copperfaced fireplace. Scattered stacks of pumpkins and huge bouquets of brightly colored mums and dahlias spilled out of equally huge Chinese pots. Looking around the festive lobby, Joanna allowed a little holiday spirit to leak into her veins. This wasn’t at all like High Lonesome Ranch at Thanksgiving, and that was just as well.

Surprisingly enough, when Joanna approached the desk, she discovered that her room was ready after all. Joanna checked in. Refusing the services of a bellman for her single suitcase, she took a mirror-lined elevator up to the eighth-floor room she and Jenny would share for the next three days. She put down her suitcase and walked over to the picture window overlooking Grand Avenue. Across a wide expanse of busy roadway and railroad track, Joanna had a clear view of the APOA campus.

Turning away from the window, Joanna surveyed the room. Although her dormitory accommodations and the main room at the Hohokam were similar in size, shape, and layout, there were definite differences. The hotel room had two queen sized beds instead of a single narrow one. In plan of a narrow student desk, there was a small round table with two relatively comfortable chairs on either side of it. The uniformly plastered walls of the hotel room were dotted with inexpensively framed prints. Except for the one mirrored wall in the dorm room, the walls there were totally bare.

It was in the bathroom, however, where the differen­ce between hotel and dorm was most striking and where, surprisingly, the Hohokam Resort Hotel came up decidedly short. The hotel bathroom contained a combination bathtub/shower rather than both shower and tub. Not only that, there were no Jacuzzi jets in the tub, although a guest brochure on the table did say there was a hot tub located in the ground-floor recreation area.

After unpacking what little needed unpacking, Joanna sat down at the table and completed the letter she had started writing to Jenny two days earlier. When that was finished, Joanna tore it out of her notebook, folded the pages together, and placed them into an official Hohokam Resort Hotel envelope. Writing Jenny’s name on the outside, Joanna left it on top of the pillows on one of the two beds. Then she lay down on the other and tried reading.

Her assignment in The Law Enforcement Handbook brought her fully awake only when the book slipped from her grasp and landed squarely on her face. That’s it, she told herself firmly. No more homework. Time to go downstairs and have some coffee.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was almost sunset when Joanna ventured downstairs, where cocktails were being served in the posh, leather-furnished lobby. Even though she wasn’t particularly cold, she dropped into a comfortably oversized chair within warming range of the glass-enclosed fireplace. For a while she simply sat there, alternately mesmerized by the flaming gas-log or watching holiday travelers come and go. Eventually, though, she flagged down a passing cocktail waitress who graciously agreed to bring her coffee.

Then, with coffee in hand, Joanna settled in to wait for Jenny and the Gs to arrive. She smiled, remembering Butch Dixon’s wry comment that Jenny and the Gs sounded like some kind of rock band. What an interesting man he was. With a peculiar sense of humor.

Guiltily, Joanna reached into her purse and ex­tracted the folded pages she had stowed there and forgotten after he handed them to her. Unfolding them, she found pages that were covered with small, carefully written lines that told the story of Serena Grijalva’s last visit to the Roundhouse Bar and Grill.

Jorge showed up here first that evening. I didn’t know his name then, although I had seen him a couple of times before and I knew he was Serena’s former husband. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the guy. He’d show up now and then and hand over money—child support presumably—and she’d give him all kinds of crap. That night she went off the charts about some truck he’d just bought.

With a circular bar, the Roundhouse doesn’t offer much privacy. I remembered Serena talking to one of the guys in the bar a few weeks earlier about getting a restraining order against her soon-to-be‑ex. I didn’t want any trouble, so I kept a pretty close watch on them that night. All Jorge kept talk­ing about was whether or not she’d let him take the kids home to his mother’s over Thanksgiving weekend. He offered to come pick them up, drive them to Douglas, and bring them back home again on Sunday, but she just kept shaking her head, saying no, no, no.

Things were fairly calm for a while, then she found out about the truck and all hell broke loose. She was screaming at him, calling him all kinds of names, and he just sat there and took it. Serena was the one causing the disturbance, so I finally eighty-sixed her and told her she’d have to leave.

He had already given her the money. She took it out of her purse, counted it, took some out—twenty bucks maybe—and threw it back down on the bar. “I’m worth a hell of a lot more than that,” she said, and stomped out.

He must have sat there for ten minutes just staring at the money on the bar. Finally he picked it and put it back in his shirt pocket. That’s the time a lot of guys will settle in and get shit-faced drunk. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had. In fact, I offered to buy him a drink, and he asked for coffee, It was fairly quiet with only a few of the regulars around, so Jorge and I talked some.

He told me about his kids, asked me if I knew them. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how much those poor kids were left to their own devices. Serena would leave them alone in the laundry while she came over here and spent the afternoon cadging drinks. On more than one occasion, when she was in here partying, I took sandwiches and soft drinks out to the kids because I knew they had to be hungry. I didn’t tell him that, either. After all, what good would it do for the poor guy to know about it? There wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, other than maybe calling child protective services and turning her in.

He must have stayed for another hour or so, drinking coffee. And I remember wondering why the hell Serena’s attorney had gone to all the trouble of swearing out a restraining order on the poor guy. He struck me as beaten down and heartbroken, both. There wasn’t anything violent about, him, not that night. And he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave. In fact, from the way he kept hanging around and watching the door, I think he was hoping Serena would change her mind, come back, and take him up on whatever that twenty was supposed to entail.

She didn’t though. He left around eleven-thirty. The next thing I knew, he’d been arrested for mur­der. When Detective Strong came around asking questions, I tried to tell her about Serena—about what she was like. It was no use. Seemed to me that the detective had already made up her mind and decided that Jorge was guilty, whether he was or not.

I’ve thought about him a lot since then, pitied him. Serena played the poor son of a bitch like a violin, giving him a piece of ass or not, depending on her mood at the time and whether or not he forked over.

Reading back over this, it sounds pretty lame. If being a sometime whore and a bad mother were capital offenses, there would be a whole lot more orphans in this world. Bad as she was, Serena didn’t deserve to die. However, I for one remain unconvinced that Jorge did it. All I can go by is the fact that he never raised either his hand or his voice under circumstances when a lot of men would have.

Thoughtfully, Joanna folded Butch Dixon’s handwritten pages and returned them to her purse. She knew that the way a man behaved toward a woman in a roomful of witnesses wasn’t necessar­ily an indication of how he would behave in private. By his own admission, there was at least one domestic violence charge on Jorge Grijalva’s rap sheet.

But in other respects, Butch’s observations and Jorge Grijalva came surprisingly close to Joanna own conclusions. Jorge despised Serena for her whoring and yet he hadn’t been able to let her go, hadn’t been able to stop caring.

The picture of Serena that emerged in the bartender’s story was far different from and more complex than the impression of near sainthood that had been part of the revivallike atmosphere at MAVEN’s candlelight vigil. There Serena had been cast as a beautiful, helpless, and blameless martyr to motherhood and apple pie. Butch Dixon’s vision conceded her beauty, but saw her as a troubled, manipulative young woman, as a chronically unfaithful wife, and as a less than adequate mother.

Butch’s essay stopped one step short of holding the dead woman partially responsible for her own murder. His sympathetic portrayal of Jorge was compelling. It played on Joanna’s emotions in exactly the same way the testimonies of the various survivors had caught up the feelings of all the attendees at the vigil. Sitting there reflecting, Joan could see why. Dixon’s editorializing on Jorge’s behalf would be of no more help to a homicide detective than the blatantly emotional blackmail of MAVEN’s dog-and-pony show. Both in their own right were convincing pieces of show business—full of sound and fury and not much else.

Joanna shook her head. MAVEN could rail that Jorge Grijalva was evil incarnate and his deceased wife a candidate for sainthood. Butch Dixon cool tell the world that Serena Grijalva was a conniving bitch. Depending on your point of view, both were victims.

For Joanna, the real victims were the kids who seemed destined to endure one terrible loss after another. And if the plea bargain ...

“Mom, we’re here!” Jenny crowed from the open doorway.

Lost in thought, Joanna hadn’t even noticed when Jim Bob Brady’s aging Honda Accord pulled to a stop under the portico. Joanna rose to greet her visitors. Jenny met her halfway across the room, tackling Joanna and latching onto her waist with such force that it almost knocked her down.

“Wait a minute,” Joanna said. “You don’t have to be that glad to see me.”

Bending to kiss the top of Jenny’s head, Joanna stopped short. One look at Jenny’s hair was enough to take her breath away. The smooth, long blond

tresses were gone. In their place stood a fuzzy white Little Orphan Annie halo, a brittle, tow‑headed Afro. Jenny’s assessment on the telephone had been absolutely right—her hair was awful. Joanna swallowed the urge to say what she was thinking.

“I missed you, sweetie,” she said. “How are you doing? How was the trip?”

“The trip was fine, and I missed you, too,” Jenny said breathlessly. “But is the pool still open? Is it too late to go swimming?”

So much for missing me, Joanna thought wryly. She glanced at her watch. “The pool doesn’t close for almost two hours yet, but don’t you want something to eat first?”

“We ate in the car,” Jenny answered. “Anyway, I’d rather swim.”

“Go help Grandpa with your luggage first,” Joanna urged. “Then we’ll talk about it. You need to check with the desk and order your videos.”

Jenny’s eyes widened. “Videos? Really?”

Joanna nodded. “They have some kind of special deal. Children under sixteen get to order videos from a place just up the street. Two for each day we’re here. They even deliver.”

Jenny grinned. “This is a nice place, isn’t it’?” She turned and raced back out to the car.

Eva Lou had entered the lobby as well, walking up behind Jenny. She smiled fondly after her granddaughter, then turned to Joanna and gave her daughter-in-law a firm hug. “I can’t believe all the flowers out there,” the older woman said, glancing back at the entrance. “How can that be when it’s almost the end of November?”

Looking after Jenny, Joanna wasn’t especially interested in flowers. “What I can’t believe is the permanent,” she grumbled. “How could my mother do such a thing?”

“Don’t be upset,” Eva Lou counseled. “Eleanor was just trying to help.”

“Help!” Joanna countered. “Don’t make excuses for her. She had no right to pull this kind of stunt the minute my back was turned.”

“It’s only hair,” Eva Lou said. “It’ll grow out. It was all an honest mistake. I think Helen and your mother got so busy talking that Helen forgot to set the timer for the solution. I know she felt terrible about it afterwards. She sent home three bottles of conditioner. Jenny’s gone through the better half of one of those, although I’ll admit it doesn’t seem to be doing much good.”

“Not much,” Joanna agreed. “But you’re right. The only thing that’s going to fix that mess is time.”

By then Jim Bob had unloaded an amazing stack of suitcases onto a luggage cart. He and Jenny came into the lobby with the bellman trailing in his wake, aiming for the registration desk. Joanna caught up with him before he got there. She planted a quick kiss on her father-in-law’s cheek.

“Registration’s already been taken care of,” she said, handing two keys over to the bellman. “Mr. And Mrs. Brady are in eight-twenty-seven. The little girl and I are in eight-ten. They’re not adjoining rooms, but at least they’re on the same floor.”

Jim Bob gave her a searching look. “You didn’t pay for the room already, did you? It looks to me like this place is probably pretty pricy.”

“Are you kidding?” Joanna returned with a laugh. “I’m getting six weeks of free babysitting out of this deal. If you stack that up against a three-night stay at the Hohokam, I’m still way ahead of the game.”

“I’m not a baby,” Jenny said firmly, frowning. “I’m nine and a half.”

“You’re right, Jenny. Excuse me,” Joanna agreed, then turned back to Jim Bob Brady. “Six weeks of child care then, but it’s still a bargain. Is anybody hungry?”

“I packed some sandwiches to eat on the way,” Eva Lou said. “We’re certainly not starving.”

Joanna nodded. “All right, then,” she said. “We’ll let Jenny swim for a while. We’ll go out later for dessert.”

“As in Baskin-Robbins?” Jenny asked eagerly.

“Probably.” At that Jenny clapped her hands in delight.

As the Bradys followed the bellman toward the elevator, Joanna turned to Jenny. “Did Grandma tell you that Ceci Grijalva is coming to town to see us on Friday?”

It was Jenny’s turn to nod. “That’s why we brought along an extra suit.” Jenny’s blue eyes filled with concern. “Did you tell her what I said?”

“Yes, but I thought she’d get more out of it if she heard it from you in person. We pick her up at ten o’clock on Friday morning.”

They stopped by the concierge desk long enough to make arrangements for Jenny’s videos. Joanna also increased the Thanksgiving dinner reservation from four to six.

“Who’s coming to dinner?” Jenny asked as they, too, headed for the elevator.

“Leann Jessup,” Joanna answered. “She’s a new friend, someone I met here at school. And Adam York, the DEA guy from Tucson. You remember him, don’t you?”

Jenny nodded. “He’s the guy who thought you were a drug dealer.”

“Well, he’s a friend now, and so is Leann.”

“Are you fixing the two of them up?” Jen asked.

Joanna was stunned. She wasn’t quite ready for Jenny’s inquiring mind to take on the world of male/female relations.

“What a strange thing to say. No,” Joanna declared firmly. “Nobody’s fixing anybody up.”

“So Mr. York isn’t her boyfriend?”

“No. He doesn’t even know her.”

“Is he your boyfriend, then?”

“Jenny,” an exasperated Joanna said. “As far as I know, Adam York isn’t anybody’s boyfriend. He’s a friend of mine and a colleague. What’s all this stuff about boyfriends?”

“But why does he want to have Thanksgiving dinner with us?” Jenny asked.

Jonnna shrugged. “It’s a holiday. Maybe he doesn’t want to be alone. Besides, I’ll be happy to see him again.”

“Why can’t he have dinner with his own family?” Jenny asked.

“Look,” Joanna said. “Adam York is one of the people who encouraged me to run for office. He’s also the one who suggested I come up here and take this course. He probably just wants to see how doing.”

“Are you going to marry him?” Jenny asked pointedly.

“Marry him!” Joanna exclaimed. “Jenny, for heaven’s sake, what in the world has gotten into you? Of course I’m not going to marry him. Whatever put that weird idea into your head?”

Jenny frowned. “That’s what happened to Sue Espy. Her parents got a divorce when we were in second grade. Her mother asked some guy named Slim Dabovich to come for Thanksgiving dinner last year. Now they’re married. Sue likes him, I guess. She says he isn’t like stepfathers you see on TV. I mean, he isn’t mean or anything.”

Joanna almost laughed aloud. “Just because Sue’s mom married the guy she asked to Thanksgiving dinner doesn’t mean I will. Now, do you want to go swimming or not?”

In advance of the holiday, Dave Thompson had stocked up on booze. Fighting a hangover from the previous night’s excess, he went looking for hair of the dog the moment the last of the students and instructors left campus. By nine-thirty that night, he had been drinking steadily for most of the afternoon and evening. And not just beer. Booze—the real hard stuff—was the only thing that could dull the pain on a night like this. Dave knew that if he drank long enough and hard enough, eventually he would pass out. With any kind of luck, by the time he woke up again, part of Thanksgiving Day would already be over and done with. He would have succeeded in dodging part of the holiday bullet, one more time.

For a real binge like this, he tried to confine his drinking to inside his apartment, but each time he needed a cigarette, he went outside. That was pretty funny, actually—that he still went outside to smoke. Irene had been a very early and exceptionally militant soldier in the war against secondhand cigarette smoke. She had never allowed him to smoke inside either the house or the car. Her prohibitions had stuck and turned into habit. Despite Irene’s betrayal—despite the fact that she had been gone all these years—Dave Thompson continued to smoke outside the house.

It would have surprised Irene Thompson to realize that over time her former husband had found some interesting side benefits to smoking out of doors that had nothing at all to do with lung disease. People didn’t expect someone to be standing outside in a yard or patio at night for long stretches of time. Dave Thompson had seen things from that vantage point, learned things about his neighbors and neighborhood that other people never even suspected. As a matter of fact, it was something he had seen through the kitchen window of their old house, back in Chandler that had signaled the be­ginning of the end of Dave’s marriage. If it hadn’t been for that one fateful cigarette, he might never have found out what was really going on with Irene. He might have gone right on being a chump for the rest of his life.

Dave didn’t look at his watch, but it must have been close to ten when he staggered outside for that one last cigarette. He knew he was drunk, but it was a fairly happy drunk for a change. He laughed at himself when he bounced off both sides of the doorway trying to get through it. Since he wasn’t driving, though, what the hell?

Dave lurched over to his smoking table—a cheap white resin table and matching chair. His one ashtray—a heavy brass one that had once belonged to his ex-father-in-law—sat there, waiting for him. Pulling the overflowing ashtray closer, he lit up and then leaned back in the groaning chair, gazing up at the sky.

Sitting there, he remembered how, when he was a little kid growing up in Phoenix, it was still pos­sible to see thousands of stars if you went outside in the yard at night. Some of his favorite memories stemmed from that time, standing in the front yard with his folks, staring up in the darkness, trying to catch a glimpse of the newly launched sputnik as it shot across the sky. Now the haze of smog and hundreds of thousands of city lights obscured all but the brightest two or three stars. And if there was space junk up there, as Discover magazine said there was, it was invisible to the naked eye from where Dave Thompson was sitting right that moment.

He was still smoking and staring mindlessly up into the milky white sky when a car pulled into the APOA parking lot. Headlights flashed briefly into the private patio that separated Dave’s quarters from the building that housed the dormitory.

Shit, Dave thought. Who’s that? Most likely one of the students. There was no law against being drunk on the patio of your own home, but finding the APOA’s head instructor in that kind of condition wouldn’t be great for trainee morale. He meant to get up and go inside, but as footsteps came toward him across the parking lot, Dave froze in his chair and hoped that not moving would render him invisible.

Within moments, he was sound asleep.

Joanna pried Jenny out of the pool a minute before the ten o’clock closing time. After a quick trip to the nearest 31 Flavors, it was ten-thirty by the time they made it back to their room, where Jenny was delighted to find that the covers on her bed had been turned back. On the pillow was a gold-foil-wrapped mint and a letter addressed to her in her mother’s handwriting. She tore open the envelope. Then, munching on the mint, she sat down cross-legged on the bed to read the letter. She looked at her mother who had settled on her own bed, textbook in hand.

When she finished Joanna’s letter, Jenny sighed, refolded the letter, and returned it to the envelope.

“Mom,” Jenny said. “Did you ever think your classes here would be this hard?” Jenny asked.

Welcoming the interruption, Joanna closed the book and put it down on the bedside table. “Not really.”

“And do they make you do push-ups and run laps, honest?”

Joanna smiled. “Girl Scout’s honor,” she said.

“That’s no fair,” Jenny grumbled. “I always thought that when you got to be a grown-up, peo­ple couldn’t make you do stuff you didn’t want to do.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Joanna agreed.

Suddenly Jenny scrambled off the bed and charged over to her suitcase. “I brought something along that I forgot to show you.”

After pawing through her clothing, Jenny came back and sat down on the edge of her mother’s bed. She was carrying two pictures. “Look at this,” she said, handing them over to Joanna. “See what Grandpa found?”

One was the picture of Joanna taken by her father, the one in her Brownie uniform. The second photo, although much newer and in color, was very similar to the first one. It was a picture of Jennifer Ann Brady, dressed in a much newer version of a Brownie uniform, and standing at attention near the right front bumper of her mother’s bronze-colored Eagle. In the black-and-white photo, a nine-year Joanna Lathrop posed in front of Eleanor Lathrop’s white Maverick. In both pictures the foreground was occupied by the same sturdy, twenty-five-year-old Radio Flyer, and in both pictures the wagon was loaded down with cartons of Girl Scout cookies.

As soon as she saw the two pictures side by side, Joanna burst out laughing. “I guess pictures like that are part of a time-honored tradition,” she said, handing them back to Jenny. “Where did you get the second one?”

“Grandpa Brady got it from Grandma Lathrop.”

“That figures,” Joanna said. “She probably has drawers full of them. I’ll bet somebody takes a new picture like that every single Girl Scout cookie season.”

Jenny didn’t seem to be listening. She was holding the two pictures up to the light, examining in them closely. “Grandma Brady thinks I look just like you did when you were a girl,” Jenny said. “What do you think?”

Joanna took the pictures back and studied them for herself. It was easy to forget that she, too, had been a towheaded little kid once upon a time. The red hadn’t started showing up in her hair until fourth or fifth grade—about the same time as that first traumatic haircut. This picture must have dated from third grade or so since Joanna’s hair still hung down over her shoulders in two long braids.

“Grandma Brady’s right,” Joanna said. “You can tell we’re related.”

“Yes, you can,” Jenny agreed.

“Did I ever tell you about the first time Grandma Lathrop took me out for my first haircut?” Joanna asked.

Jenny frowned and shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, get back in your bed,” Joanna ordered. “It’s about time you heard the story of your mother and the pixie.”

“I know all about pixies,” Jenny said confidently. “They’re kind of like fairies, aren’t they? So, is this a true story or pretend?”

“This is another kind of pixie,” Joanna said. “And it’s true, all right. Believe me, it’s not the kind of story I’d make up. And who knows, once you hear it, maybe it’ll make you feel better about what happened to you when Grandma Lathrop took you to see Helen Barco.”

Joanna told her haircut story then. “See there?” she asked as she finished. “It may not make you feel any better, but at least you’re not the only kid it’s ever happened to.”

“I still hate it, though,” Jenny said.

“I don’t blame you.”

Despite Jenny’s fervent pleading, Joanna nixed the idea of watching even one video that night. “Tomorrow morning will be plenty of time for E.T.,” she said, reaching up and turning out the lamp on the bedside table between them. “Right now we’d both better try to get some sleep.”

“Good night, Mom,” Jenny said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, Jenny. Sleep tight.”

And they did. Both of them, until the sounds of police and aid-car sirens brought them both wide awake sometime much later. Joanna checked the time—one o’clock—while Jenny dashed over to the window and looked outside.

“What is it?” Joanna asked. “A car wreck?”

Jenny peered down at the flashing lights and scurrying people far below. “I guess so,” she said, “but I can’t tell for sure.”

Joanna climbed out of bed herself to take a look. In the melee of emergency vehicles and flash lights, she caught a glimpse of a blanket-covered figure lying on the ground.

“It looks like someone hit a pedestrian,” she said, drawing Jenny away from the window. “Come on, let’s go back to bed.”

But instead of crawling into her own bed, Jenny climbed into her mother’s. “I don’t like sirens,” she said softly. “Whenever I hear them now, I think of Daddy. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” Joanna answered.

“Do they make you feel like crying?”

“Yes,” Joanna said again.

For some time after that, Jenny and her mother lay side by side, saying nothing. At last they heard another siren, that of an ambulance or aid car pulling away from whatever carnage had happened on the street below. As the siren squawked, Jenny gave an involuntary shudder and she began to cry.

Joanna gathered the sobbing child into her arms. When the tears finally subsided and Jenny breathing steadied and quieted, Joanna didn’t bother suggesting that Jenny return to her own bed. By then the mother needed the warmth and comfort of another human presence almost as much as the child did.

Soon Jenny was fast asleep. Joanna lay awake. The fact that Jenny associated sirens with Andy’s death jarred her, although it shouldn’t have. After all, would she ever be able to see a perfect apricot-colored rosebud or her diamond solitaire engagement ring without thinking of the University Hospital waiting room, without thinking about Andy dying in a room just beyond a pair of awful swinging doors?

Jenny was, after all, a chip off the old block. The resemblance between mother and daughter went far beyond the eerily striking similarity between those two photographs taken twenty years apart.

What was it Jim Bob was always saying? Something about the apple not falling far from the tree.

Remembering that last little proverb should have been reassuring, but it wasn’t. Not at all, because if it was true, then there was a fifty-fifty chance Joanna Brady would end up being just like her mother—tinted hair, lacquered nails, lifted face, and all.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It was probably only natural that since Eleanor Lathrop was the last person Joanna thought about before falling asleep, she was also the person who awakened them the next morning. When the phone rang, dragging Joanna out out of what had finally turned into a sound sleep, it was a real challenge to find the phone.

The room at the Hohokam was, after all, the third room she had slept in that week. Bearing that in mind, it wasn’t surprising that she came on the phone sounding a little disoriented.

“Hello, Mom.”

“Happy Thanksgiving,” Eleanor said.

“Same to you,” Joanna mumbled, stretching sleepily and glancing at the clock. It said 7:15. Jenny was still huddled under a pile of covers that was only then beginning to stir.

“It took so long for you to answer, I was afraid I had missed you altogether,” Eleanor Lathrop said. “I was about to try Jim Bob and Eva Lou’s room.”

“It’s late for them. They’re probably already down at breakfast.”

“I’m glad I caught you, then. You’re the one I wanted to talk to. I’ve changed my mind.”

“About what?”

“About coming up to Phoenix for Thanksgiving,” Eleanor announced. “Just for tonight, of course. I couldn’t stay any longer than that. What time are you planning on eating?”

“Five. Right here in the hotel dining room.”

“Good. If you’ll add two more places to your reservation, that’ll be fine. And we’ll need two rooms there as well. I’d prefer to be in the same hotel, but if they don’t have rooms, someplace nearby will be just fine.”

“Wait a minute,” Joanna interjected. “Two dinner reservations. Two rooms. Who are you bringing along, Mother?”

“I can’t tell you that. It’s a surprise.”

“Mother,” Joanna objected, “you know I don’t like surprises.”

“A surprise?” Jenny said, sitting bolt-upright in bed. “Grandma Lathrop’s coming and bringing a surprise? What kind of surprise, something to eat?”

“Jenny, hush. I can’t hear what Grandma is say‑

Jenny dove out of bed and began pulling on her clothes. “Of course, I’ll reserve the rooms, Mother. It’s just that ... No, the dining room is plenty large. I’m sure it won’t be any trouble to add two more places to the dinner reservation.”

Fully if hurriedly dressed, Jenny was already making for the door. “Wait a minute. No, Mother, not you. I was talking to Jenny.” Joanna held the mouthpiece at arm’s length. “Just where do you think you’re going?”

“Down to have breakfast with the Gs. The sooner I eat, the sooner I can go swimming.”

“Wait for me,” Joanna said. “We can go down together.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes, you have to.”

Sulking, Jenny switched on the television set, flipped through the channels with the remote, then settled on the floor in front of an old Roadrunner cartoon.

“Sorry, Mother,” Joanna said, returning to her phone conversation. “What were you saying? Yes, I’ll get on the room situation right away. But I’ll need a name, for the reservation. Hotels require names, you know.... All right. Fine. I’ll put both rooms under your name.”

In the interest of holiday spirit, Joanna tried to keep the irritation out of her voice. For weeks her mother had refused every suggestion that she come along on this Thanksgiving weekend outing. Now she was going to show up after all, at the very last minute, at a time when making room and dinner reservations was likely to be reasonably complicated.

Not only was Eleanor coming herself, she was bringing along an undisclosed guest. Read boyfriend, Joanna thought.

“What time do you think you’ll get here? Around three? We’ll try to be down in the lobby right around then. You shouldn’t have any trouble finding us. If we’re not in the lobby, try the pool. See you then.”

Joanna put down the phone and turned to her daughter. “The surprise is whoever Grandma is bringing along to dinner.”

“Who’s that?” Jenny asked, her eyes on the tele­vision set.

“She didn’t tell me. If she did, it wouldn’t be a surprise. But my guess is it’s a man.”

“You mean like a man who’s a friend, or a man who’s a boyfriend?”

“I don’t have any idea, but I do have a word of warning for you, young lady.”

“What’s that?”

“Just because this guy, whoever he is, is showing up for Thanksgiving dinner doesn’t mean Grandma Lathrop is going to marry him. In other words, you are not to mention the M word. Do you understand?”

Jenny nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Now can we breakfast? I’m starved.”

The Bradys were already at a table when Joanna and Jenny wended their way through the tables.

“Well, look here,” Jim Bob said. “We’ve already read the paper and had two cups of coffee. It’s about time you two slugabeds showed up. Where’ve you been?”

“Talking to Grandma Lathrop,” Jenny said, slipping into the chair next to her grandfather. “She’s coming here for Thanksgiving dinner after all, and she’s bringing somebody with her.”

“Really, who?” Eva Lou asked.

Jenny shook her head. “She wouldn’t tell us, not even Mom. She says it’s a surprise, but Morn thinks it’s a man.” Jenny added, rolling her eyes, “She’s afraid I’ll use the M word and embarrass everybody.”

“M word?” Jim Bob asked. “What’s an M word?”

“Never mind, Jimmy,” Eva Lou said. “I’ll tell you later. Will there be enough room for everybody, Joanna? You already said those two friends of yours would be joining us.”

“Remind me. After breakfast I need to stop by the concierge desk and add two more places to the dinner reservation.”

Just then a harried waitress stopped by the table slapping an insulated coffee carafe down on the table next to Joanna. Pulling out her pencil and tie pad, she focused on Jenny. “What’ll you have this morning, young lady?” she asked.

Once the waitress left with their orders, Joanna poured herself a cup of coffee and turned to her mother-in-law. “How’d you sleep?” she asked,

Eva Lou shook her head. “Fine, up until one o’clock or so. Then all those sirens woke me up.” The busboy appeared, bearing a pitcher of ice water. “What was that all about, anyway?” Eva Lou asked, turning a questioning eye on him. “All those sirens in the middle of the night?”

The busboy shrugged. “Some lady fell out of a truck right in front of another car. At least that’s what I heard. There were still cops outside when I came on shift this morning.”

“More than likely it’s a fatality accident, then,” Joanna put in. “They take a lot longer to investigate than nonfatal ones.”

The pained look on Jenny’s face at the mention of the accident caused Joanna to drop the subject. After breakfast and with both room and dinner reservations safely in hand, Joanna and Jenny set off on a walking excursion to the APOA campus.

From the sidewalk outside the hotel lobby, Joanna pointed directly across Grand Avenue. “See there?” she said. “That’s the running track right there on the other side of the railroad. And the first building you see on the other side—the long one—is the dorm.”

Jenny immediately headed for the street, but Joanna stopped her. “We can’t cross here. We’ll have to walk down to Olive and cross there.”

“How come?” Jenny asked, looking up and down the street. “There’s not that much traffic. We could make it.”

“Maybe we could, but we’re not going to. This must be right about where that accident happened last night. Let’s don’t tempt fate.”

They started up Seventy-fifth along the APOA’s outside wall. Jenny looked longingly back at the few strands of barbed wire that separated the back of the APOA campus from the railroad tracks. “Couldn’t we go that way?” she asked, pointing.

‘Why not?” Joanna returned, with a shrug. “It looks like a shortcut to me.”

Mother and daughter were both old hands at negotiating barbed wire. Moments later they were striding across the running track heading for the back of the dorm. Joanna had known there was a patio of some kind between the dorm building and Dave Thompson’s unit on the end of the classroom

building. What she hadn’t realized was that it was a walled fort. The only way to reach Joanna’s room was to go around the far end of the dorm.

Lulled into a sense of well-being, they ambled around the corner of the building. Once they could see the parking lot, Joanna was startled by the number of cars parked haphazardly just outside the student lounge at the dorm’s opposite end.

Joanna and Jenny had barely started down the breezeway when a woman, a stranger, erupted out of Leann’s room and marched toward them, tripping along on three-inch-high heels. She was tiny—five foot nothing, even counting the heels. Her small frame was burdened by a voluptuous figure that easily rivaled Dolly Parton’s, although a well-cut wool blazer provided some artful camouflage. Also like Dolly, this woman believed in big hair. A glossy froth of coal-black hair blossomed out around her head like a cloud of licorice-flavored cotton candy.

“I’m sorry,” she said, still moving forward. “No one’s allowed in here at the moment. You’ll have to leave.”

“Why?” Joanna asked. “I’m a student here. I know the campus is pretty well shut down for the holiday weekend. All I wanted to do was show the place to my daughter.”

The other woman was wearing a name tag of some kind fastened to her lapel. Only then did the distance between them close enough that Joanna could read what was printed there. DETECTIVE CAROL STRONG, CITY OF PEORIA POLICE DEPARTMENT.

A chill that had nothing to do with the weather passed through Joanna’s body. “What’s wrong?” Joanna asked. “Has something happened?”

“A woman was hurt earlier this morning in an automobile accident,” Carol Strong answered. “She was hit by a car.”

“Leann?” Joanna asked, feeling almost sick to her stomach. “Leann Jessup?”

Carol Strong frowned. “Do you know her well?”

“We’re friends,” Joanna began raggedly. “At least we’re starting to be friends. She was supposed to come to the Hohokam this afternoon to have Thanksgiving dinner with my family. Is she all right?”

“At the moment she’s still alive,” Carol answered. “She’s been airlifted to St. Joseph’s Hos­pital and admitted to the Barrow Neurological Institute. She should be out of surgery by now.”

As if not wanting to hear any more, Jenny slipped her hand out of Joanna’s and walked away. She stood on the grassy patch in the middle of the jogging track, watching a long freight train head south along the railroad tracks. Shaking her head, Joanna stumbled over to the edge of the breezeway and sank down on the cold cement.

“I warned her not to go jogging so late at night,” Joanna said miserably. “I tried to tell her it was dangerous.”

“What’s your name?” Detective Carol Strong asked, sitting down on the sidewalk’s edge close to Joanna but without crowding her.

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

“And you’re a student here?”

Joanna nodded, giving the detective a sidelong glance. “Leann and I are here attending the APOA basic training course. Classes for this session started last Monday.”

Carol Strong seemed to consider that statement for a moment. “And you’re also staying in the dorm?”

“My room’s just beyond Leann’s, between hers and the student lounge.”

A slight, involuntary twitch crossed Carol Strong’s jawline before she spoke again. “I see,” she said. “I suppose that figures.”

Then, after a pause and a brief look in Jenny’s direction, she added, “Is there anyone over at the hotel right now who could look after your little girl for a while?” she asked. “If so, I’ll be happy to give you a lift long enough to drop her off. Then we can go by my office to talk. I’m going to need some information from you. The sooner, the better.”

“Jenny’s grandparents are there, but I don’t understand why ... “

“Sheriff Brady,” Detective Strong began, and her voice was grave. “It’s only fair for you to know that we’re not investigating a simple traffic accident. Your friend Leann wasn’t injured while she was out jogging. She was hit by a car after falling of a moving pickup. She was naked at the time. Both hands were tied behind her back with a pair of pantyhose.”

That shocking news washed over Joanna with the same wintry impact as if she’d been splashed with a bucketful of ice-cold water. “You’re saying it’s attempted murder then?”

“At least.”

As the last train car rumbled past, Jenny turned back and waved at her mother. There was something trusting and wistful and heart-breaking in that wave, something that brought Joanna Brady face-to-face with her responsibilities, not only to her child, but also to her newfound friend.

She stood up. “Come on, Jenny,” she called. “We have to go now.”

Jenny came trotting toward them. “So I can go swimming?” she asked.

Joanna nodded. “Most likely, and so I can go to work.”

“But it’s Thanksgiving,” Jenny objected. “You never work on Thanksgiving.”

“I do today,” Joanna said.

But the plan to leave Jenny at the hotel with her grandparents fell apart back at the hotel, where Eva Lou and Jim Bob Brady were nowhere to be found. “You’ll have to come with me, then,” Joanna told her disappointed daughter.

“Couldn’t I just stay here by myself? I promise, I won’t go swimming until they get back, and I won’t get into any trouble. I could watch my tapes on the VCR and—”

“Why not bring the tapes along?” Carol Strong suggested. “There’s a VCR in the training room. You can watch a movie in there while your mother and I talk in my office. It’ll make it easier for her concentrate.”

“Should I go up to the room and get one?” Jenny asked.

Joanna nodded. As Jenny skipped off toward the elevator, Joanna shot Carol Strong a wan smile. “It won’t just make it easier for me to concentrate,” she corrected. “It’ll make it possible.”

They left the hotel minutes later and followed Carol Strong to her office. The Peoria Police Department was located in a modern, well-landscaped complex that included several buildings that seemed to have grown up out of recently harvested cotton fields.

“Why’s that statue giving God the finger?” Jenny asked, as Joanna guided the Blazer into the parking lot. Turning to look, Joanna almost creamed lumbering VW bus that was the only other vehicle in the city parking lot that holiday morning.

“What are you talking about?” Joanna demanded.

Looking where Jenny was pointing, Joanna saw a towering piece of metal artwork—a male nude figure with upraised arm fully extended—that dominated a central courtyard and fountain. Viewed from where the Blazer was situated in the parking lot, the statue did indeed appear to be making an obscene gesture.

“I’m sure he’s really reaching for the sky,” Joanna said. “And wherever did you learn about giving somebody the finger?”

“Second grade,” Jenny answered.

Pulling into a parking place, Joanna shook her head, sighed, and turned off the ignition. “Get your tape and come on.”

When Joanna opened her purse to toss the Blazer keys into it, she caught sight of the video Leann Jessup had given her the day before. That carefree exchange in the student lounge and their lighthearted lunch at the Roundhouse afterward seemed to have happened forever ago. Yesterday, Leann Jessup had been a vital young police officer and a dedicated if foolhardy midnight jogger. Today, she was a crime victim, a surgical patient at the Barrow Neurological Institute, fighting for life itself.

Swallowing the lump in her throat, Joanna pulled the out of her purse and handed it over to Jenny. “‘This was on the news the other night. You may want to see it. Leann said I was on it. We both were.”

Jenny stopped in mid-stride and looked her mother full in the face. “Do you think your friend is going to be all right?” she asked.

Joanna gave her daughter a rueful smile. “I hope so.” After a pause she added, “You’re a spooky kid sometimes, Jennifer Ann Brady. Every once in a while, it feels like you can read my mind.”

“You do it to me,” Jenny said.

“Do I?”

Jenny nodded. “All the time.”

“Well, I guess it’s all right, then,” Joanna said. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Cute kid,” Carol Strong said, leading the way down a long, narrow hallway. They had left Jenny in the Peoria PD training room, happily ensconced in front of the opening credits of E.T.

“Thanks,” Joanna replied.

“Your husband was the deputy who was killed a few months back, wasn’t he?”

Joanna nodded.

Carol turned into a small office cluttered with four desks. On entering, she immediately kicked off her shoes. Shrugging off her tweed blazer, she turned to hang it on a wooden peg behind her chair. Only then did Joanna note both the slight bulge of the soft body armor Carol wore under her cream-colored silk blouse as well as the Glock 19 resting discreetly in its small-of-back holster in the middle of the detective’s slender waist. Joanna had

considered purchasing an SOB holster for herself but had nixed the idea because she thought it would be too uncomfortable. The gun and holster didn’t seem to bother Carol Strong, however. Crossing one shapely leg over the other, she massaged the ball of first one foot and then the other.

“Pardon me,” she said apologetically to Joanna. “In this business somebody my size needs all the help she can get, but these damn shoes are killing my feet.”

For several moments, neither woman said anything while Joanna studied Carol Strong. Her age was difficult to determine. Her skin was generally smooth and clear, although dark circles under her eyes hinted at a world-weariness that went far beyond simple lack of sleep. Here and there a few strands of gray misted through the feathery cloud of black hair that surrounded her face. Her sharply tapered nails were lacquered several layers deep with a brilliant scarlet polish. Everything about the way she looked and dressed seemed to celebrate being female, but there was an underlying tough­ness about her as well. Joanna sensed that anyone who mistook Carol Strong for just another pretty face was in for a rude awakening.

“Dick Voland told me you had great legs,” Joanna said.

“Who the hell is Dick Voland?” Carol Strong asked in return. “And why was he talking about me.”

“He’s one of my chief deputies,” Joanna explained. “He was the one who helped you when you came down to Paul Spur to pick up Jorge Grijalva. I had planned to come talk to you about that.... “

Carol Strong’s easygoing manner changed abruptly. “About what?” she demanded.

“About Serena and Jorge Grijalva. I know Juanita Grijalva, you see. Jorge’s mother. She asked me to look into things.”

A curtain of wariness dropped over Carol Strong’s face. “And have you?” she asked. “Looked into things, that is?”

There was no sense in being coy about it. “I’ve done some informal nosing around,” Joanna admitted. “I went to see Jorge Monday night down at the Maricopa County Jail. And I picked this up from Butch Dixon, the bartender at the Roundhouse Bar and Grill.”

Taking the yellow pages of Butch’s essay out of her purse, Joanna handed them over to Carol and then waited quietly while the other woman scanned through them. “And?” Carol said finally when she finished reading and pushed the pages back across the desk to Joanna.

“And what?”

“Did you reach any conclusions?”

“Look,” Joanna said. “I’m leaning toward the opinion that Jorge didn’t do it. That’s based on nothing more scientific than intuition, but my conclusions don’t matter one way or the other. I’m not here to hassle you about Jorge. Let’s drop it for the time being. I want to know about Leann Jessup. I assuming I’m here because you think I could be of some help.”

Carol Strong closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, she focused directly on Joanna’s face. “We are discussing Leann Jessup,” she said wearily. “We have been all along.”

“But I ...” Joanna began.

Carol passed a weary hand across her forehead. “You’re a newly elected sheriff, but you’ve never been police officer before, right?”

“Yes, but ...”

“Do you know what holdbacks are?”

“Sure. They’re the minute details about a case that never get released to the media—the things that known only to the detectives and the killer. They’re helpful in gaining convictions, and they also help separate out the fruitcakes who habitually call in to confess to something they didn’t do.”

“Right.” Carol Strong nodded. She leaned forward across the desk, her smoky gray eyes crackling with intensity. “Sheriff Brady, what I’m about to tell you is in the strictest confidence. We had plenty of physical evidence in the Grijalva case. Jorge had a new secondhand truck, one he claimed his wife had never ridden in. But when the crime lab went over it, we found trace evidence that Serena had been in the car, including fibers that ap­pear to match the clothing Serena Grijalva was wearing the last time she was seen alive. We also found dirt particles that tested out to be similar to soil near where Serena’s body was found. The murder weapon was a tire iron. With paint particles and wear marks, we’ve managed to verify that the tire iron that was missing from Jorge’s truck at the time we arrested him was the same one we found at the murder scene. Sounds like a pretty open-and‑shut case, doesn’t it?”

This was the first inkling Joanna had of how extensive the case was against Jorge Grijalva. “I didn’t know about any of that,” Joanna admitted. “Certainly not the physical evidence part of it.”

“No, I don’t suppose you did,” Carol Strong agreed. “And there’s no reason you should. It wasn’t a big-name case, and Joe Blow domestic violence is old hat these days. The public is so inured to it that most of the time it doesn’t merit much play in the media. In this particular case, though, I did keep some holdbacks—one in particular was more to spare the children’s feelings than it was for any other reason.”

Carol Strong paused. “Serena Grijalva was naked when we found her. And she was bound with her own pantyhose, trussed with her arms and legs tied behind her in exactly the same way Leann Jessup was found this morning. I may be wrong, but the knots looked identical.”

The crowded little office was silent for some time after that. “How could that be?” Joanna asked finally. “Jorge Grijalva’s still being held in the county jail, isn’t he?”

Carol nodded. “Actually, it could mean any number of things. One of which is that Jorge had an accomplice. The most obvious possibility, however, is that we’ve arrested the wrong man.”

“But what about all the trace evidence?” Joanna asked. “Where did that come from?”

Detective Strong shrugged. “Either the evidence is real or it isn’t. Either we found it there because Serena was in the truck at some time or else the evidence is phony, and it was planted there to mislead us, to frame Jorge Grijalva—an innocent man—for the murder of his wife.”

“Planted,” Joanna echoed. “Who would plant evidence? How would they know how to go about it?”

“A trained police officer would know,” Carol Strong answered. “Here’s the recipe. You stir in some planted evidence, add in a plausible suspect, and sprinkle it liberally with public-dictated urgency for closing cases in a hurry.” She shrugged. “Add to that an ex-husband who’s willing to cop a plea, and there you go.”

“Jorge is willing to plead because he doesn’t want go to court,” Joanna said quietly.

“If he didn’t kill her, why would he do that?” Carol returned.

“Because he was afraid the prosecution would bring up Serena’s whoring around. He wanted to protect his kids from hearing about it.”

Carol shook her head. “The defense would have brought that up, not the prosecution. It’s a hell of a lot harder to convict someone of killing a known prostitute to than it is to convict them of killing a nun.”

There was a momentary lull in the conversation. “If, as you say, the evidence was planted by a cop, do you have any idea what cop?” Joanna asked. “One of yours?”

“Tell me what you know about Dave Thompson?” Carol said.

“From the APOA?” Joanna winced, aware her question made her sound like some kind of dunce.

Carol nodded. “One and the same.”

Joanna thought for a moment before answering. “He was a cop somewhere around Phoenix.... “

“Chandler,” Carol supplied.

“I heard a rumor that he got into some kind of hot water. That the Chandler city fathers dumped him by putting him on permanent loan to the APOA.”

“That’s pretty much right. I talked to the new chief in Chandler just this morning, right before you showed up on campus. The case against Thompson was a domestic. Never came to trial because Thompson’s ex refused to testify. She simply took the kids and left town. This was back in the good old days when there was still a certain tolerance for cops who beat up their wives, but there was enough of a stink that they had to get rid of him.”

“You’re saying Dave Thompson did this?”

“Did you ever hear of Tommy Tompkins?” Carol Strong asked.

Joanna nodded her head impatiently. Talking to Carol Strong was like being led through a maze of riddles. “I’ve heard of him,” she said. “Tommy Tompkins International. He’s the ex—TV evangelist who used to own the property the APOA now occupies, isn’t he? I heard he went to prison on some kind of tax evasion charge.”

“Right, but what most people don’t know is that the person who brought Tommy to the attention the IRS was a woman, one of his seminary students who claimed Tommy had broken into her room in the middle of the night and raped her. No charges were ever filed. TTI bought her off for a lot money, and that was what raised all the red flags. Randy revivalists are so prevalent these days that it’s become a cliché. These guys paid off so much so fast, that the IRS auditor figured they must hiding something. Turns out there was a whole lot more to it than just cooking the books, but I didn’t figure some of it out until tonight.”

Joanna waited without comment while Carol Strong drew a long breath. “Did you ever wonder about the mirrored tiles on that one whole side of your room?”

“Not particularly,” Joanna answered. “As part of a decorating scheme, I thought they were odd—a little cold.”

“They’re odd, all right,” Carol said. “What I dis­covered tonight is that some of them are two-way mirrors. Mirrors on your side, windows on the other. Someone could see in, but you couldn’t see out. If you go into that little private courtyard between Dave Thompson’s apartment and the dormitory, you’ll see what looks like the door to a storage shed of some kind built into the back of the building. It’s not a storage shed at all. There’s a long, narrow passageway back there that runs the whole length of the building and dead-ends on the far side . It’s only about twenty inches wide, so it’s not recommended for claustrophobics. It’s not big on comfort, and the ventilation stinks. But from the number of cigarette butts we found in there, I’d say Dave Thompson or someone else spent a good deal of his off-hours time in there.”

The sudden realization sickened Joanna. Of course, the cigarette smoke. Every time she had turned on the exhaust fan in her bathroom, there had been that sudden burst of smoke in the air, and now she knew why. Dave Thompson had been right there, almost in the same room, watching her.

“That son of a bitch!” Joanna murmured. “That dirty, low-down son of a bitch.”

“And that’s evidently how he gained entry to Leann Jessup’s room as well. There’s a hidden, half-sized access door into the closet of each of the rooms on the bottom floor. The crack at the top of the door is concealed right under the shelf. The only way to see it would be if you were down on your hands and knees on the floor.

“An alternate light source examination revealed dirty footprints leading from Leann’s closet to the bathroom. It looks as though he came in and surprised her while she was relaxing in the hot tub. She evidently put up quite a fight. He may have hit her over the head with her hair dryer. We found pieces of shattered hair dryer all over the bathroom including in the tub. My theory is that he knocked her senseless. He tied her up while she was out cold, and carried her out to his pickup. Do you know his truck?”

“No.”

“It’s a white Toyota SR Five, one of those small four-by-fours with a canopy. He tossed her into the back of it, probably planning on taking her elsewhere to finish the job. He left the campus with her in the back and ended up turning off Olive into Grand. My guess is he didn’t see the northbound car coming around the curve at the underpass south of Olive. He turned right on a red light and pulled out in front of a car driven by a bunch of high-school-aged kids coming home from a party.”

“In the meantime, Leann must have come to. I believe she was trying to get out of the vehicle while it was stopped for the light. She somehow managed to open the canopy, but when the Toyota accelerated, the sudden movement pitched her out of the truck. With her hands tied behind her, there was nothing to break her fall. She landed on her head and somersaulted at least twice. Her skin looks like it was run through a cheese grater.”

“That’s appalling!” Joanna murmured.

CaroI nodded and continued. “She came to rest directly in the front of that carload of kids. The other driver’s only seventeen. He left skid marks all over the road, but through some miracle, he managed to avoid hitting her. If he had clobbered her traveling at forty-five or so, she’d have been dead for sure. The kids stopped long enough for some of them to pile out of the backseat. Three of them stayed behind to do what they could for Leann while the driver and one of his buddies took off the Toyota. I have to give them credit for guts if not for brains. They followed the pickup and got close enough to get a partial license before they lost him somewhere out in Sun City. The kids came back to the scene and turned the number over to the officers on the scene. They called me.”

“Was she conscious?” Joanna asked. “Could she talk.”

“No.”

“If she was naked, how did you know it was Leann?” Joanna asked quietly.

“Bee stings,”

“Bee stings?”

“She’s allergic to them, so allergic that she wears an I.D. bracelet that warns medics that in case of a bee sting they should administer epinephrine to prevent her from going into anaphylactic shock. There were two phone numbers on it. One was evidently the apartment where Leann used to live. That one’s been disconnected. The other one belongs to Lorelie Jessup, Leann’s mother. The ambulance transported Leann to Arrowhead Community Hospital. From there, she was airlifted to St. Joseph’s. I picked Mrs. Jessup up at home and brought her to the hospital. She’s the one who gave us the positive I.D. and told us Leann was attending the APOA.”

“And how did you come up with the Dave Thompson connection?”

“We found the truck. About three o’clock, one of our patrol cars found a white Toyota pickup parked in front of a flooring warehouse a few blocks north of where we found Leann and within walking distance of the APOA. I think he abandoned it there and walked back to his place.”

“Where is he now?”

Carol Strong shook her head. “That’s anybody’s guess. He’s not in his apartment. We got a search warrant and went through that, and we’ve also put out an APB. No luck so far.”

“What can I do to help?”

“When was the last time you saw Leann Jessup?”

“Lunchtime. We went up to the Roundhouse and had a hamburger. That’s when I picked up that stuff from Butch Dixon.”

“What was she wearing?”

“A sweatshirt. An ASU Sun Devil sweatshirt. Yellow and black. Jeans. Tennis shoes. Nikes, I think, and white socks.”

There was a pause while Carol Strong scribbled a note in a notebook. “Panties?” she asked.

“Panties. How would I know if she was wearing panties?”

“Did you ever see her undressed?”

“Once, in the women’s locker room after PT on Tuesday afternoon, when we were both changing.”

“Was she wearing panties then?”

“Yes, but...”

“That was the other holdback,” Carol Strong said gravely. “We found the clothing Serena Grijalva was wearing when she left the bar that night­—everything but a pair of panties. I talked to Cecelia, her daughter. She told me that her mother always wore panties.”

“I don’t see—” Joanna began, but Carol Strong cut her off in mid-sentence.

“We found the clothes you mentioned in the bathroom. A sweatshirt, jeans, bra, tennies, socks. Everything was there except panties. There was a dirty clothes bag spilled on the floor of her closet. We found three sets of clothing in there, including pairs of panties. If she wore a clean set of underwear every day, that means one pair is missing.”

“What does that mean?”

Carol shook her head. “If Dave Thompson is the one who did it, what happened to Leann Jessup is my fault.”

“How can that be?”

“Thompson was one of the people at the Roundhouse the night Serena Grijalva was murdered.”

“He was?”

Carol nodded. “His name turned up when we questioned the bartender there. I don’t know Thompson personally. When I transferred back here from California, I did my probation duty, and that was it. I didn’t have to sit through any classes. But half the Peoria force came through Dave Thompson’s program at the APOA. When his name turned up, I didn’t see any connection or any reason to consider him a suspect. Now I can see that I should have. It looks as though Dave Thompson is a very troubled and dangerous man. How did he strike you?”

“As an unreconstituted male chauvinist pig,” Joanna replied. “Leann and I were the only women in the class. He didn’t like having us there, and he made sure we knew it.”

“You mean he was hostile? He picked on you?”

“That’s how it seemed.”

“Did he focus on Leann in particular?”

Joanna thought about that for a moment; then she shook her head. “No. It felt to me as though he was on my case far more than he was on hers, but that could have been an erroneous perception on my part. Leann was a lot more scared of him than I was. If she failed the course, her job was on the line. I’m an elected official. If I flunk, it might make for bad PR, but passing or failing the APOA class doesn’t make that much difference to me.”

“Did he make any off-color suggestions to either one of you?”

“As in sex for grades? No, none of that. Certainly not to me. If he made that kind of an offer to Leann, she never mentioned it to me.”

“Did he threaten either one of you in any way?”

“No, but I know Leann was worried about keeping up. After we attended the vigil on Tuesday, she was worried about falling behind in her reading. That was one of the reasons she didn’t come along to the hotel on Wednesday afternoon.”

“Vigil?” Carol Strong asked. “What vigil?”

“The sponsored by MAVEN down by the capitol. The one for the domestic violence victims. I went because of Serena Grijalva.”

“And Leann went along with you?”

“Not exactly. We went together. She had her own reasons for going. She was the officer who took the missing persons report on the ASU professor’s wife—ex-wife. I can’t remember her name, but they found her body up by Carefree on Monday.”

Carol Strong nodded. “I know which one you mean.”

“It hit Leann hard for some reason. Maybe it was too close to what happened to her own mother. Evidently, ­there was some problem with domestic violence in Leann’s family as well. Anyway, we went, and then we both ended up on TV. A female reporter was there. She spotted me and did an on‑the-spot interview. When the reporter discovered Leann was a cop, too, she interviewed her as well. Leann’s mother taped the news broadcast. I have a copy if you’d like to see it.”

“Eventually,” Carol said.

The question-and-answer process continued for some time after that. Finally, Carol Strong sighed and looked at her watch.

“No wonder I’m tired. It’s eleven o’clock—six hours after my usual bedtime, and I’m due in at six tonight. Will you be at the Hohokam all weekend if I need to get back to you?”

“Until Sunday.”

“I’ll call you there if I need to ask you anything else. Do you mind if I make a copy of what Butch Dixon wrote for you? It’s not that different from what he told me to begin with, but considering what’s happened, I’d better take a look at everything related to Serena Grijalva’s case and try to see what, if anything, I missed the first time through.”

“Go ahead. I’ll go disconnect Jenny from the VCR.”

Joanna had lost all track of time and was surprised by how much time had passed. When she went into the training room, she was surprised to hear her own voice coming from the VCR. Jenny was watching the tape.

“I just saw Ceci on TV,” Jenny said. “She looked real sad.”

“She was sad, but why are you watching that? I thought you were going to watch E.T.”

“I did. It’s over already. You were gone a long time.”

“I’m sorry, but we’re done now. Come on.”

Jenny expertly ejected the tape from the machine and put it back into the box. “Do you think Ceci got to see herself?”

“I don’t know,” Joanna answered. “You can ask her tomorrow. If not, maybe you can show her the tape.”

Carol Strong met them in the hallway, handed Joanna back her papers, and then showed them out of the building. “That lady isn’t very big to be a detective, is she?” Jenny asked. “With her shoes off, she’s not much bigger than me.”

“Than I,” Joanna corrected. “Am tall is understood. You wouldn’t say me am tall. But detectives use their brains a whole lot more than their muscles.”

“Well, she seems nice,” Jenny said, as they walked down the sidewalk toward the Blazer.

“She does to me, too,” Joanna replied.

But if Jorge Grijalva was innocent of killing Serena, Joanna could see why, tiny or not, he might think of Detective Carol Strong as a witch.

As they left the city parking lot, something was bothering Joanna. She couldn’t remember seeing Leann Jessup’s Ford Fiesta in the parking lot. It was possible that it had been there, parked invisibly among the collection of police vehicles. Just to make sure, Joanna took a detour past the APOA campus. Except for a single patrol car stationed near the gate, the parking lot was completely deserted. Joanna got out of her car long enough to speak to the uniformed officer.

“I’m Sheriff Joanna Brady,” Joanna introduced herself, flipping out both her badge and I.D. “I’m working with Detective Strong on this case. Can you me if there was a bright red Ford Fiesta here this morning when officers first arrived? I’m wondering if it’s missing or if maybe someone ordered it impounded.”

The patrol officer spent several minutes checking back and forth by radio before he finally came up negative.

“You might have Detective Strong add that to her APB on Dave Thompson. The vehicle is probable registered in Leann Jessup’s name. If he’s missing and the car is, too, chances are pretty good that they’ll turn up together.”

Again the officer returned to his radio. “Dispatch says Detective Strong’s gone home to get some sleep. Do you want them to wake her up to give her the message, or should they let her sleep?

“Tell them they can give it to her after she wakes up.”

Joanna returned to her Blazer. “What are we going to do now?” Jenny asked. “I still haven’t been swimming.”

“We have one more stop,” Joanna said. “I want to drop by the hospital just long enough say hello and to find out how Leann is.”

“Do we have to?” Jenny whined.

“Yes,” Joanna answered.

Something in her mother’s voice warned Jenny not to argue. The child sat back in the passenger seat and crossed her arms. “All right,” she said grudgingly. “But I hope it doesn’t take too long.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Shadowed by Jenny, Joanna wandered around the corridors of St. Joseph’s Hospital for some time before she finally located the proper waiting room. There were only two other people in the room when they entered. A woman sat on a couch, weeping quietly into a hanky. A grim-faced man in his late twenties stood nearby. Both people looked up anxiously when the door opened. Seeing a woman and a child, they both looked away

“Mrs. Jessup?” Joanna asked tentatively.

The woman pulled the hanky away from her face and stood up. “Yes,” she said. “I’m Lorelie Jessup, and this is my son, Rick. Is there any news?”

Lorelie didn’t at all resemble her tall, red-haired daughter. Anything but beautiful, she was short, squat and nearsighted. Her thinning, dishwater‑blond hair was disheveled, as though she had climbed out of bed and come straight to the hospital without pausing long enough to comb it.

Joanna remembered Leann saying that her mother was only in her late forties, but with her face blotchy and distorted by weeping, with her faded blue eyes red from crying, she looked much older than that. Wrinkles lined her facial skin, perhaps as much from sun as age. The corners of her mouth turned down in a perpetual grimace and there was a general air of hopelessness about her. She looked like someone Jim Bob Brady would have said had been “rode hard and put up wet.”

And most likely that was true. Joanna tried to recall how many years Leann Jessup had said her mother had worked two jobs in order to single-handedly support her two children. Years of unremitting labor had taken their toll.

“I’m sorry,” Joanna said, “I don’t know any news. I’m not with the hospital. My name’s Joanna. I’m a friend of Leann’s.”

“Not another one!” Rick Jessup groaned.

“Another what?” Joanna asked. Instead of answering, Rick Jessup rolled his eyes, stuffed both hands in his pockets, and then stalked off across the room. There wasn’t much physical resemblance between Leann and her brother, either; in terms of temperament, they were worlds apart.

“Rick, please,” his mother admonished. “Don’t be rude. This is Sheriff Brady from down in Bisbee. She and Leann were on that news program together the other night, the one I taped. You and Sherry haven’t had a chance to see it yet.”

“I’m sure it’s no great loss,” Rick said.

What is the matter with this guy? Joanna wondered, but she turned back to Lorelie. “How is Leann?”

“They keep telling me it’s too soon to tell. She’s heavily sedated right now. They’ve installed a shunt to drain off fluid to reduce pressure on her brain. She may be all right, but then again, she may...” Lorelie broke off, overcome by emotion and unable to continue.

“She brought it all on herself,” Rick Jessup groused from across the room. “God is punishing her. If you think about it, her whole life is an abom­ination.”

Lorelie Jessup rounded on her son. “God had nothing to do with the attack on Leann. If that’s the way you feel about it, why don’t you just leave? I don’t need you here spouting that kind of garbage, and neither does Leann.”

“What’s an abomina—?” Jenny began. Joanna squeezed her hand, silencing the child.

Lorelie crossed the room until she and her son were bare inches apart. For a moment, Joanna worried the war of words would escalate into a physical confrontation.

“Why would you say such awful things about your own sister?” Lorelie demanded. “How could you? I want you to apologize, both to her and to me.”

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Rick Jessup returned coldly. “After all, it’s true. Face it. Leann Jessup is nothing but a godless dyke who doesn’t just sin, she wallows in it. This is the Lord’s way of giving her a wake-up call. I’m sick and tired of making excuses for her, of even being related.”

“Whatever happened to the part of the Bible says ‘Judge not ...’?” Lorelie asked calmly, her voice turning to ice. “If being related to Leann is a problem for you, Rick, don’t worry about it. There’s an easy solution to that—stop being related. But if you decide to write Leann out of your life, remember one thing. If you don’t have a sister, you don’t have a mother, either. Get out of here. By the time I come home from the hospital, I want all of you out of my house.”

“Just like that? All of us? You’re throwing me out over her?” Rick’s face was tight with fury.

“Just like that!” Lorelie returned.

“But what about Junior?” Rick objected. “What about your grandson?”

“I guess I’ll just have to learn to take the bad with the good,” she said.

For a moment, Rick seemed bent on staring his mother down. When she didn’t look away, He backed toward the door. “I brought you over,” he said. “If I leave, who’ll drive you home?”

“I’ll walk if I have to,” Lorelie said determinedly. “The company will be better. Now go!”

Rick Jessup went, taking much of the tension from the room with him, while Lorelie turned back to Joanna. “I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s nothing like bringing your family feud right out in open.”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” Joanna said.

“What Rick said is partially true, although there’s no call for him to be so mean about it,” Lorelie continued. “Leann is a lesbian, but so what? That doesn’t make her some kind of freak. She’s also good hearted and caring. And, no matter what, she’s still my daughter.”

Joanna hadn’t guessed Leann’s secret, but Lore­lie’s matter-of-fact treatment made the whole topic seem less shocking, even with Jenny standing right there beside her. And that’s why you’re still Leann’s hero, Joanna thought.

Glancing at her watch, Joanna knew it was time to take Jenny and head back. “Is there someone you could call to come stay with you here at the hospital?” she asked. “I hate for you to be here alone.”

“I suppose I could always call Kim,” Lorelie said.

“Who’s Kim?”

“Kimberly George. Leann’s friend.” Lorelie paused, then added, “Her former friend, that is. Lover, really. The two of them had been together for five years at least. They only split up a month ago. They got in a big fight over Leann’s new job.”

“Why’s that?”

“Kim was afraid something might happen to Leann. That she’d get hurt at work . . .” Lorelie sighed. “Anyway, they broke up, and it’s just like someone getting a divorce. But still, I am going to call her. I know Kim would want to know what’s on, and she’ll be happy to give me a ride home if I need one.”

A nurse bustled into the waiting room. “The doc­tor you can go in for five minutes, Mrs. Jessup. But only one person at a time, and only immediate family.” She shot a meaningful look in Joanna’s direction. If the nurse was expecting an argument, it didn’t materialize.

“Right. We were just leaving,” Joanna said to the nurse, then turned to Lorelie. “If you can’t get in touch with Kim, or if you need anything else, please call me. I’m staying at the Hohokam in Peoria. I’ll be there all weekend.”

“Thank you,” Lorelie Jessup said. “And thank you for coming. I appreciate it far more than you’ll ever know.”

“What’s an abomination?” Jenny asked, once they were back in the corridor.

“Something that’s evil or obscene,” Joanna answered.

“Is your friend evil?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And neither does her mother.”

“Evidently not,” Joanna agreed.

“But her brother does.”

“It certainly sounds that way.”

Jenny and Joanna walked along in silence for several seconds. “I always used to want a little brother,” Jenny said. “But now that I’ve met that Rick guy, I think I’m glad I don’t have one.”

Joanna shook her head. “Maybe a brother of yours wouldn’t have turned into someone like Rick Jessup.”

Back at the hotel, Joanna was relieved to find a voice-mail message from Eva Lou Brady waiting on the phone in their room. “We’re back,” Eva Lou’s cheerful voice announced. “Call us.”

While Jenny headed for the bathroom to change into her swimming suit, Joanna called the Brady’s room. “Where were you?” she asked.

“I saw an announcement in the paper this morning saying that the Salvation Army needed volunteers to come help serve their holiday meal. You and Jenny were gone, and I couldn’t see Jim Bob and me just sitting around all day with him doing nothing hut watching football. We decided to go to help out for a little while. Now I’m going to take a little nap and let Jimmy watch one football game before dinner. What are you and Jenny up to?”

Briefly, Joanna brought Eva Lou up to date on what had happened to them. “I’d better get off the phone. Jenny has her suit on, finally. She’s champing at the bit to get in the pool. I’m going to go down and watch her, but I’m taking along that packet of mail you brought me. I’ll use the time to work on my correspondence.”

Once Jenny was happily paddling back and forth in the pool, Joanna emptied the contents of a large manila envelope onto a nearby patio table. The item pled on top of the pile was a second envelope, much smaller than the first. That one, with a Sheriff’s Department return address, was hand-addressed to Joanna. Inside she found a handwritten memo from Frank Montoya detailing the problem with the cook. Nothing to do about that one, she thought as she tossed it aside. As Frank had said, that one was handled.

An hour later, she had plowed through the whole collection. There wasn’t anything particu­larly exciting. A whole lot about being sheriff wasn’t more interesting than tracking a life insurance application or reading the proposed agenda for the next Board of Supervisors meeting, which was dutifully enclosed. It dawned on Joanna that she had signed up to do the nuts-and-bolts part of the job—the administrative part—as well as the more exciting ones. When she finished reading through the mail and jotting off answers to whatever required a reply, she felt better.

She wasn’t neglecting her duty by leaving home to learn what she needed to know to do the job better. Things at the department were going along just fine without her. She had delegated responsibilities in a way that was getting things done without allowing her absence to undermine her new position.

At ten to three she dredged a protesting Jenny out of the pool. “We need to be back in the room to answer the phone in case Grandma Lathrop calls. Do you want to shower first or should I?”

“You go first,” Jenny said.

Joanna was showered, had her makeup on, and was half through drying her hair when Jenny pushed open the bathroom door to say Joanna had a phone call.

“Who is it?” Joanna asked.

Jenny shrugged. “I dunno,” she said. “Some guy.”

“Hello,” Joanna answered.

“Sheriff Brady?”

The voice sounded vaguely familiar. “Yes,” she said warily.

“My name’s Bob Brundage. I’m down here in the lobby. I was wondering if you’d care to join me for a drink.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. . . . What did you say your name is?”

“Brundage,” he replied.

“I’m not in the habit of meeting strangers for drinks. Besides, I’m expecting company…”

“We have a mutual acquaintance,” Bob Brundage insisted. “I’m sure she’d be very disappointed if we didn’t take advantage of this little window of opportunity to get together.”

“This isn’t about Amway, is it?” Joanna asked.

Bob Brundage laughed so heartily at that question that Joanna found herself laughing as well. “I promise you,” he gasped at last. “This has absolutely nothing to do with Amway or with life insurance or with making a donation to your college alumni building fund, either.”

The clock on the bedside table said 3:30. There was a whole hour between then and the time Adam York was supposed to show up for dinner. If Eleanr called, Jenny would be right there in the room to answer the phone.

“All right,” Joanna agreed finally. “I’ll come down for a few minutes, although I can’t stay long because we’re due in the dining room for dinner at five. How will I know who you are?”

“I’ll recognize you,” he said. “I’ve seen your picture.”

“Who was that?” Jenny asked, as Joanna put down the phone.

“A man. His name is Bob Brundage. He wants me to meet him downstairs in the lobby to have a drink.”

“Are you going to go?”

“Yes, but if Grandma Lathrop calls while I’m gone, tell her that I’m away from the phone and that I’ll call her back just as soon as I can.”

Joanna returned to the bathroom. As she finished drying her hair, she began reconsidering her decision. The call had been vaguely unsettling, especially the part about Bob Brundage knowing so much about her while she knew nothing at all about him. Staring at her reflection in the mirror, Joanna shivered, remembering the bathroom of her dormitory room on campus, the one with the two-way mirrors. Carol Strong’s assumption was that Dave Thompson was most likely the only person who had availed himself of those two-way mirrors to spy on the female inhabitants of the dormitory’s lower-floor rooms.

But standing in the brightly lit bathroom of her room at the Hohokam, Joanna wondered about that. Dave Thompson might have shared the wealth with someone else—maybe even with several people. Some of the other instructors, perhaps, or maybe even some of Joanna’s fellow students. As the thought of a whole group of peeping toms crossed her mind, Joanna’s cheeks burned with indignation.

Who was to say Dave Thompson would limit invitees to people involved with the APOA? For all Joanna knew, he might have dragged people in of the street and charged admission. In fact, what if Bob Brundage turned out to be as much of a p as Dave Thompson was? Brundage claimed he had seen Joanna’s picture, but that might not true. What if he had actually seen her stark-naked in the presumed privacy of her own bathroom? That would explain his knowing her without her knowing him. And what if he was dangerous as well? There was no reason to assume that Dave Thompson had acted alone in the attack on Leann Jessup. If Bob Brundage turned out to be Dave Thorn partner in crime .. .

There was only one answer to all those questions and it came straight out of The Girl Scout Handbook: be prepared.

Joanna emerged from the bathroom wearing only her underwear and found Jenny totally engrossed in watching Beauty and the Beast. Taking advantage of the video diversion, Joanna dressed quickly and carefully, concealing from Jenny the Kevlar vest she put on under her best white blouse and the shoulder-holstered Colt 2000 she strapped on un­der her new boiled-wool blazer.

Downstairs, the lobby outside the elevator was crowded with a combination of hotel guests and holiday diners. Efforts to market the Hohokam’s Thanksgiving dinner had evidently been wildly successful. Formal seatings in the Gila Dining Room started as early as one o’clock in the afternoon.

Coming through the lobby, Joanna had planned on stopping by the dining room to let someone know Brady party with reservations at five would be reduced from eight diners to seven. After glancing at the crowded dining room door and at the harried hostess trying to seat parties, Joanna decided against it.