Tombstone Courage

Linda Kimball bit her lower lip while a pair of fat tears squeezed out of her eyes and ran down both cheeks, leaving behind twin tracks of dark brown mascara.

One-handed, Linda fumbled in her massive purse long enough to extract a packet of tissues. After dabbing her eyes and blowing her nose, she forged ahead.

“Do you ever go to yard sales?” she asked.

“Not often,” Joanna answered. “I usually don’t have either the time or the money.”

“I shouldn’t go to them myself, but I do,” Linda said. “It’s one of those things that drives Burton crazy. He really disapproves. He says it’s not dignified for people in our position to go around buying other people’s cast-off junk, but I can’t help it. One of my hobbies is refinishing antiques, and going to those private sales is how I’ve found some of my very best pieces. Do you remember when Grace Luther died?”

Joanna nodded. At the time ninety-six-year-old Grace Luther passed away, her death had been the talk of the town. Since it happened while Hank Lathrop was still sheriff, Joanna knew more of the gory details than she probably should have. Every one in town had thought Grace was up in Tucson visiting her niece, but it turned out the niece had brought her back to Bisbee and left her off at home. Somehow word of her return didn’t get passed along to Grace’s at-home caretaker.

While everyone in Bisbee continued to believe that Grace was out of town, the old lady was actually dead as could be, lying flat on her back in her own bed with the thermostat cranked up to eighty-some degrees. The corpse was three weeks old and pretty well cooked by the time people realized something was wrong and broke into the house. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Or smell. After investigating the scene, Hank Lathrop had come home and burned all the clothes he had been wearing.

Afterward, there was a protracted battle among a bunch of feuding heirs, including the scatter brained niece who had dropped the old lady off at home without letting anyone know. For years, while lawyers battled back and forth, the house sat vacant-boarded up but crammed full of a century’s worth of junk.

“I went to that estate sale,” Linda Kimball continued. “The house was a shamble stacked with trash from floor to ceiling. But there were some treasures buried in there as well. In fact, I found that wonderful ivory-inlay table I still have in my living room. And down in the basement, I found everything from her husband’s office.”

“That’s right,” Joanna said. “I remember that, too. Wasn’t Dr. Luther a dentist with an office somewhere in Upper Lowell?”

Linda nodded. “Right where the open-pit mine is now. Doc Luther was already dead in the early fifties when they tore the building down to make way for Lavender Pit. Grace had Phelps Dodge haul all her husband’s equipment and everything else from his office down to her house in Warren. They loaded it into her garage and basement, chairs, drills, and everything-and there it stayed. I don’t think that woman ever in her life threw anything away.”

Once again Linda Kimball reached for her purse.

This time she extracted a small white envelope.

“This is the part that’s so embarrassing,” she said, “I still can’t believe I did it. Promise me you won’t tell Burton. He’d have a fit.”

“Tell him what?”

“While I was down in the basement that day, the day of the sale, I was rummaging around looking for antiques when I came across a huge stack of Dr. Luther’s old files that had been dumped out of a file cabinet. I knew he was the dentist Burton had gone to as a young child. I thought it might be fun to have his earliest dental records, just as sort of a keepsake. But while I was looking, I found this-and I stole it.”

With visibly trembling fingers, Linda Kimball handed the envelope over to Joanna, who hesitated only a second before ripping it open. Inside was a yellowed three-by-five card. The cardboard was stiff and brittle and turning brown around the edges. Printed on both sides were old-fashioned dental records, complete with predrawn diagrams of human teeth. Handwritten comments as well as arrows pointing to fillings and cavities had been added to the margins.

As she looked at the diagram, it was a moment before Joanna noticed the name written at the top of the card.

“Thornton W. Kimball’s dental records!” Joanna exclaimed.

“I know it’s not like modern X rays or any thing,” Linda Kimball was saying, almost apologetically, “but I thought it might help.”

“It’ll help, all right. If you don’t mind, I’ll go to work on it right away.” Joanna reached out and punched the button on her intercom.

“Yes?” Kristin was still all ice.

“Have Dispatch raise Ernie Carpenter on the radio. Find out where he is and tell him to stay there. Tell him I’m bringing him something important.”

Even though Joanna considered the interview over, when she looked back at Linda Kimball, the other woman had not yet moved.

“Is there something else?” Joanna asked.

Linda nodded. “I’ve tried all afternoon to put myself in Burton’s shoes. Which do you think is worse?” she asked.

“Which what?” Joanna returned.

“Knowing or not knowing? Is he better off thinking his father is still alive somewhere and that he deserted his wife and his unborn son? Or is he better off knowing for sure his father is dead? That he left and didn’t come back because he didn’t have a choice, because he was lying dead in a glory hole on Harold Patterson’s ranch?”

Joanna pondered carefully before she answered. “That’s a tough call,” she said finally, “but I think most people would rather know the truth, how ever painful it might be.”

Linda Kimball groped for her purse and hefted it into her lap. “That’s what I decided, too,” she said. “This afternoon. But that’s why I wanted to bring the envelope today. I wanted someone else to have it, before I had a chance to change my mind.”

As Linda left the room, the intercom buzzed.

“Ernie’s down working in the glory hole on the Patterson ranch. He wants to know can it wait?”

“It can’t wait. Tell him to keep on doing what he’s doing. I’ll come find him. What about a car, Kristin? Did you get one for me?”

“All that’s available today is a five-year-old Blazer. Body’s good; engine’s a little rough. That’s what Danny from Motor Pool says.”

“I only want to know two things. Does it run, and is it equipped with a working radio?”

“Danny says yes.”

“Good. Tell him to bring it around as soon as he can. I’d like to have it here in under five minutes, with the engine running and a full tank of gas. And, Kristin?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks for taking care of the car,” Joanna said. “Good job.”

WHEN Joanna rushed out of the office in search of Ernie Carpenter, she grabbed the stack of un opened mail and took it along with her.

The Blazer with the Sheriff’s Department insignia on the door was a long way from new, but that didn’t bother her After all, it was several years newer than her old Eagle.

Once on the Rocking P, she drove straight to the glory hole without turning off at the house.

As she went past, though, she caught a glimpse of Ivy’s truck parked by the front gate. Seeing it made her wonder if Ivy would really go through with her hasty wedding plans. By getting married within days of her father’s death, Ivy would be committing one of those breaches of small-town etiquette that would expand into legend with countless retellings.

Where hasty marriages were concerned, Joanna Brady was one of the few people in town prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to Yuri Malakov and Ivy Patterson’s late-blooming, whirlwind romance. After all, Joanna and Andy had raised eyebrows years earlier with their own rushed wedding. That union had certainly worked out fine in the long run.

A rushed marriage was probably fine, but the possibility of murder was not. Personally, Joanna wanted to believe in the idea of two people living happily ever after, but a determination on whether or not the newlyweds would ride off into the sun set on a honeymoon or end up in prison at florence would have to be left in Ernie Carpenter’s capable hands. It was up to him and to a judge and jury.

This time when Joanna arrived at the glory hole, there was a whole collection of vehicles parked around it. She had to leave the Blazer a fair distance away and then tiptoe over the rocky ground in her city-slicker black pumps. High heels that were only marginally safe on flat sidewalk surfaces were downright dangerous on the splintery shale.

Three young deputies lounged around the hole. Ostensibly, they were running spotlights and lugging equipment, but mostly they leaned on fence posts with their hands in their pockets and chewed the fat. As soon as Joanna drove up, they all made an obvious pretense of looking busy.

“Hey, Detective Carpenter,” one of them called down into the hole. “Sheriff Brady’s here.”

“What are you waiting for then?” Ernie grumbled back. “Winch me up so I can talk to her and get it over with.”

While Joanna watched, a filthy, mud-caked specter rose up out of the glory hole. The bandbox detective who had sat taking notes in her office only hours earlier now looked and smelled like a battle weary infantryman in night camouflage.

Once out of the harness, he strode over to the van where a makeshift washbasin had been set up on the tailgate. Cursing her wretched shoes, Joanna tripped after him.

“How do you do it?” she asked irritably.

“Do what?” he asked, bending over and care fully soaping his hands, then sloshing the dirt off his grubby face.

“One minute you look like you just stepped out of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. The next you look like you haven’t changed clothes in years.”

“Oh, that,” Ernie Carpenter said with a short laugh. “It’s a trick I learned from my wife. When ever she was expecting, she always kept a packed suitcase by the front door. I keep two changes of clothes in my car at all times, because in this line of work, you never know what’s going to turn up. Speaking of which, I take it something did.”

Joanna nodded and pulled the white envelope out of her pocket. “Look what someone brought to my office earlier this afternoon. I thought you’d want to see it.”

Drying his hands on a paper towel, Ernie took the offered envelope, opened it, and removed the three-by-five card. He read it without comment, then slipped the card back in the envelope.

“That’s fine,” he said without showing more than minimal interest. “It’s bound to make the coroner’s identification job that much easier.”

“You think it’s him then?” Joanna asked, disappointed that Ernie’s level of excitement didn’t match her own.

“I’m sure of it,” he answered, opening a nylon fanny-pack that was strapped around his waist.

“As soon as I saw these, I was pretty sure that’s who it was.”

He removed something from the bag, dunked it in the water, and then dried it with a towel. “Look at this,” he said.

Joanna held out her hand, and Ernie dropped something into it. At first she thought it was the beaded brass pull chain from some old light fixture. Despite the rinsing it was still green and crusted over with muck. Eventually, she realized it was actually two chains, a larger one and a smaller, with the small one strung through the larger. Each chain held a single rectangular piece of metal. A sharp notch had been cut in the long side of one of the pieces.

“What is it?” Joanna asked.

“Look closer,” Ernie said.

Holding the tarnished metal up to her eyes, Joanna was barely able to make out the faint letters that had been etched into the metal: THORNTON WILLIAM KIMBALL, along with a series of numbers. “His World War II military dog tags?” Joanna asked.

She looked down at the muddy pieces of metal in her hand. Sadly, she rubbed one finger along the sharp notch that, in wartime, would have been jammed between a dead soldier’s lower front teeth to serve as identification. Just as Linda Kimball feared, this was the pitiful ending of Burton Kimballs long-cherished dream of one day being reunited with his runaway father.

“What are you going to do about it?” she asked.

Ernie rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Conceivably, somebody else could have been wearing Thornton Kimball’s dog tags, but I doubt it. And with those dental records, it’ll be a piece of cake to confirm.” He glanced back toward the glory hole where his assistants were beginning to dismantle the winch and lights. “I’m about done here,” Ernie continued. “After I clean myself up, do you want me to notify Burton Kimball about what’s going on, or would you rather do it?”

Joanna’s energies were stretched thin. Too much had happened in too short a time. “No,” she said, “you do it.” Feeling suddenly tired, she started back toward the Blazer.

“By the way,” Ernie called after her. “I did what you suggested. I tried running Yuri Malakov past the Multi-Jurisdiction guys and INS with their fancy-schmancy computer.”

“Did they have any information?”

“Yes, evidently, but it’s off-limits. I found that very interesting.”

“What do you mean, ‘interesting?”

“It means Yuri Malakov is in their goddamned database for some reason or another, but nobody’s allowed to ask about him. Or, if they do, they’re not to be given a straight answer.”

Joanna frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. Aren’t we all working the same side of the fence?”

Ernie Carpenter looked down on her and shook his head sadly, as if surprised by her naiVete’.

“No ma’am,” he said. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. As a matter of fact, I’d say we haven’t even gotten around to agreeing on a survey for the fence line, to say nothing of building the damn thing and settling which side everybody’s on.”

Joanna wasn’t sure if Ernie’s round-about answer was simply patronizing or if it was meant to make fun of her. Either choice made her hackles rise.

“Get to the point,” she snapped irritably.

“The point is,” Ernie answered, “if Yuri Malakov’s name is punched into that computer but no body’s willing to talk about him or say why he’s in there, then I sure as hell wouldn’t want my daughter to marry the sonofabitch, and I’ll bet money Harold Patterson didn’t want Ivy to tie the knot with him, either.”

Burton Kimball sat brooding in his darkened and deserted office. Everyone else had gone home, Even the ever-loyal, ever-vigilant Maxine had readily abandoned ship at six o’clock. Linda had called twice to check on him and to ask when he was coming home. He kept telling her soon now, that he was working on an important project that had to be finished before court the next day.

That was an outright lie. The surface of his desk was empty except for a sheen of blank despair.

Burton felt as though his life was whirling out of control. As the gold hands on his watch edged closer to seven, his depression deepened. He had deliberately stayed around the office all afternoon, hoping Ivy would call, hoping she would relent and invite him to the wedding. But she hadn’t and it was too late now.

In a few minutes Ivy Patterson would marry that Russian nobody, and Burton Kimball wouldn’t even be there to see it.

How do you go about losing your best friend? he wondered. Things had changed once he and Linda had married and come back to Bisbee to live and establish his practice. Aunt Emily was already a total invalid by then, and Ivy had been charged with her mother’s day-to-day care. He and Linda had tried to help out, but there wasn’t that much they could do. The old, loving Aunt Emily had been replaced by a stranger, an irascible tyrant who yelled orders from her hospital bed.

She hurled insults as well as physical objects; vases; books; glasses-at anyone foolish enough to venture near her.

Ivy had carried that whole burden and it had worn her down, changed her, aged her. And today Burton was feeling the weight of his own responsibility in that regard. He should have done more to help; should have paid more attention.

Burton had grieved over Aunt Emily during her illness and rejoiced at her death, when she was finally released from her dreadful physical and mental incapacities. And he had thought some how, that after it was all over, he and Ivy would go back to being best friends, the way they had been before. That hadn’t happened. They had drifted along for years, still all right, not quarreling, but not as close as they had once been, either. All that had changed once Holly Patterson had reappeared on the scene.

Somehow, logically or not, Ivy seemed to hold Burton responsible for her sister’s sudden return. At first, Ivy and Burton had been united once again, going nose-to-nose with Harold over how best to handle the complexities of the Holly situation. Ivy had seemed satisfied with Burton’s strategy until two days earlier when the whole thing had blown up in his face and Harold had gone off to make his fateful offer. Burton now felt that Ivy was holding him entirely responsible. For everything.

A discreet knock on Burton’s outside window made him jump. Looking through the darkened glass, he saw Ernie Carpenter standing there, motioning to be let into the building.

“What’s going on?” Burton asked, as he opened the entryway door.

“I just talked to your wife,” Ernie explained, “She said you were working late. I hope you don’t mind the interruption.”

Burton led Ernie back to his private office. Switching on the light revealed his damningly empty desktop. It was clear Burton wasn’t really working and that he hadn’t been.

“I was actually just finishing up and about to go home,” he said lamely, going over to his door and making a show of taking his jacket off the hanger. He draped his tie around the back of his neck. “I have a few minutes. What can I do for you?”

“Sheriff Brady told me you were out at the Rocking P earlier today,” Ernie said.

Burton nodded. “That’s right. Why?”

“You already know about the other body in the glory hole?”

“Yes. Unfortunately, I do. I think the shock of finding out about that pretty much unhinged Ivy. It’s probably some poor old wetback who fell into the hole before Uncle Harold got around to fencing it up.”

“I doubt it’s a wetback,” Ernie Carpenter said firmly. “In fact, I expect to have a positive I.D. within days.”

Burton Kimball’s eyes blinked in surprise. “No kidding. Good work. Anyone I might know?”

Refusing to accept Burton’s hints about leaving, Ernie Carpenter settled into a chair. “How old were you when your father left home?” he asked.

Kimball seemed more than a little taken aback by the detective’s blunt question. A pained expression flashed across his face. “Me? I wasn’t even born yet. My mother was pregnant with me when my father went off to California looking for a job and never came back.”

“Who told you that story? That your father went to California, I mean.”

“Uncle Harold and Aunt Emily, I suppose. I don’t understand. Why are you asking about my father? What’s going on?” Dropping his jacket onto the surface of the desk, Burton Kimball sank back down in his chair.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, Burt,” Ernie said kindly. “Your father never made it to California. Or, if he did, he must have come back home sometime later on.”

“He came back? …” Burton began, but then comprehension slowly dawned. “You can’t mean it! Surely, you’re not saying it’s him! The skeleton in the glory hole is my father?”

Ernie Carpenter nodded. “I’m sorry to have to break it to you like this.”

Burton’s ruddy complexion paled. “But how can you know that? How can you tell for sure?”

Ernie reached in his pocket and pulled out the newly cleaned dog tags, which he dropped lightly on the desk in front of Burton Kimball. For a moment, the other man stared at them without moving. Then, carefully, gingerly, as though the metal might be red-hot, he picked up the chain and held it up to the light.

“We also have dental records to go by,” Ernie said. “Those should cinch it. I thought you’d want to know.”

Abruptly, Burton spun his chair around. He sat with his back turned to Ernie Carpenter. Staring up at the soothing water-color garden scene Linda had given him last Christmas to hang on the bland wall behind his desk, he tried unsuccessfully to blink back tears. Ernie waited through the silence. “I always secretly hoped he was dead,” Burton Kimball croaked at last. “As a little kid, that was the only way I could cope. His being dead was the only reason I knew that justified his going off and leaving me alone like that. I wondered what was wrong with me that he’d do a thing like that And how could he tell something was wrong with me before I was even born?”

“Burton,” Ernie began.

But the younger man continued, ignoring the interruption. “And late at night I’d tell myself stories about him, about how he’d been run down by a train somewhere or how he’d drowned in the ocean and been washed out to sea. But deep in side, I always figured he was alive somewhere, living with a beautiful new wife and new children.

I always hoped he’d come back for me someday, like a knight on a white charger, and that he’d take me to live with them. He never did.”

Burton Kimball fell silent. It was a long time before Ernie Carpenter spoke again. “Was there any bad blood between your father and your uncle Harold?”

“Bad blood?” Burton repeated. “What’s that supposed to mean? And why would there be? Uncle Harold was my mother’s brother. After my mother died, from the time I was a baby, he and Aunt Emily took care of me. As far as I know, that’s all there was to it.”

Burton turned back around and faced the detective, a concerned frown etching his face. “Why are you asking?”

“Because,” Ernie answered simply, “they both ended up in the same place, dead in the bottom of a glory hole. From what I saw today, I’d say they were both murdered. Fifty years apart, but the same way. The killer or killers heaved rocks down at them from above.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Burton Kimball said. “What would the connection be?”

The room grew very still. “You,” Ernie Carpenter said softly.

“Me!”

“I’ve heard from several people that you and your uncle quarreled shortly before noon on Tuesday. I understand you stormed out of your office that afternoon and didn’t show up again until you came to the Election Night party looking for Harold Patterson.”

“That’s right. I saw his car in the parking lot and…”

“Where did you go when you first left your office?”

Burton Kimball stiffened under Ernie Carpenter’s suddenly chilly gaze. “Why do you want to know?”

“Just answer the question.”

“I went drinking.”

“Where?”

“Up the Gulch. The Blue Moon.”

“How long did you stay there?”

“Awhile. I don’t know exactly. I don’t remember.”

“And where did you go after that?”

As soon as Burton Kimball realized he was actually under suspicion, he snapped. “That’s none of your damn business, Ernie. Now get the hell out of here. And the next time you open your big mouth around me, you’d better either be apologizing or reading me my damn rights. Understand?”

Without another word, Ernie Carpenter scooped up the dog tags and beat it for the door. Burton sat frozen at his desk until the heavy outside door slammed shut behind the retreating detective.

Only after it closed did Burton get up. He staggered around the desk and pushed the knob that locked his office door from the inside.

Then, like a dazed sleepwalker, he groped his way blindly back to his desk. He dropped heavily into the chair and sat there, staring straight ahead while his fingers clung desperately to the polished edge of his desk. It was almost as if his white knuckled grip was all that was keeping him from being flung far into lifeless, timeless space.

Eventually, the all-enveloping, childlike whimper he had been trying so desperately to suppress managed to work its way to the surface. Forty-five years after the fact, the little boy who had never once cried aloud over his father’s desertion or his mother’s death put his arms on the desk, laid his head on his arms, and sobbed.

Afterward, he just sat there, dry-eyed and with out moving, totally unaware of the passage of time. Finally, an unexpected knock on the door startled him out of his painful reverie.

“Go away, Maxine,” he growled. “I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

“It’s me,” Linda Kimball replied tentatively.

“Maxine called to see if you’d come home yet. She said she thought something was wrong. I decided to come see for myself. Can I come in?”

“Come ahead.”

“I can’t. The door’s locked.”

Burton got up and stumbled around the desk.

Even though he hadn’t had a drop of liquor since Tuesday at the Blue Moon, he felt as though he’d been drinking. As though he were drunk.

When Linda Kimball saw her husband’s ray aged face, she put her hand to her mouth. “Burton!” she exclaimed. “What is it? What’s wrong?

Burton shook his head and blundered back to his desk. “You won’t believe it,” he said. “Never in a million years.”

“Yes, I will,” Linda insisted. “Tell me.”

Joanna PICKED up Jenny from the Bradys’ house at six and drove straight home. She couldn’t wait to strip out of her good clothes and the cumbersome bulletproof vest that had rubbed the skin under her arms until it was raw.

While Jenny went to her room to do homework, her mother set about cooking dinner. It seemed strange to look forward to an entire evening at home, an evening with no speeches to write or give, no campaign strategy meetings to oversee.

The sudden sense of decompression was almost palpable. For the first time in months, Joanna Brady had only one job to do instead of two.

While searching the refrigerator for leftover vegetables to put in the roast-beef hash, she discovered two forgotten Tupperware containers shoved into the far back corner of the bottom shelf. One contained a few desiccated and no-longer-green peas. The second, filled with some kind of mystery food, sported a brilliant layer of fuchsia-colored mold and exuded a powerful odor that somehow reminded her of the glory hole. And at that moment she didn’t want to think about the glory hole or Harold Patterson or Thornton Kimball.

Firmly shutting the lids on the two containers, Joanna tossed them into the sink, promising to clean both them and the refrigerator right after dinner. It was time to start paying attention to the little things again, to catch up on some of the domestic housekeeping chores that-in the after math of Andy’s death-had been allowed to fall victim to disinterest and neglect.

Jenny came to dinner promptly when called and slipped silently into her usual place in the breakfast nook. “How was school today?” Joanna asked cheerfully, trying to bridge mealtime’s now-customary silence as she filled Jenny’s plate.

“Okay, I guess,” the child answered, ducking her chin and not meeting her mother’s questioning gaze. “How was work?”

What should she answer? Joanna wondered Should she talk about finding Harold Patterson’s body? Should she tell Jenny the old man had possibly been murdered or protect her from that knowledge? Harold had always been one of the kind old men who bought Girl Scout cookies from Jenny’s makeshift stand in front of the post office. He wouldn’t be doing that anymore. Ever. Was Jennifer Brady tough enough to deal with the awful details of one more violent death in her small circle of acquaintances?

“It was okay, too,” Joanna answered finally, choking on the distancing words and pained by the strained formality between them. Would she and her daughter ever be easy with one another again?

They both picked at their food. The hash had smelled so enticing to Joanna as she cooked it, but in her mouth the food turned to tasteless sand.

Finally, giving up, she put down her fork. “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Joanna ventured tentatively. “About what would happen to you if something happened to me.”

Jenny, too, put down her fork and regarded her mother through unblinking china-blue eyes. “You mean if you died?” she asked.

Joanna, dismayed by the child’s directness, struggled on.

“If a man has two eyes, he doesn’t have to worry that much about going blind. If he loses one, then he starts worrying about losing the other as well. If he worries about it too much; if he lets that fear of going blind become the whole focus of his life, he may stop enjoying the things he can still see with that one good eye. He ends up forgetting that even if the worst happens, even if he loses the sight in that second eye, it doesn’t mean his life is over.”

“He could always get a guide dog,” Jenny suggested helpfully. “Erin Wallace, one of the girls in my class, is training one of those. A golden retriever puppy. It’s her 4-H project.”

Joanna smiled. “It’s the same thing with us,” she continued. “You’re so scared about what might happen next, about what might happen to me, that it’s keeping you from enjoying life around you. I don’t think you’d be nearly as worried about me and my new job if you still had both parents. But you don’t. You only have one. It’s a problem, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Jenny agreed, almost in a whisper.

“So, I’ve been trying to find a solution; a way so that if something really did happen to me, you’d have a place to go and someone dependable to take care of you.”

“Not Grandma Lathrop,” Jenny protested at once, giving her long blond hair a defiant toss “She treats me like a baby. She still thinks I should be in bed by seven o’clock.”

“And not Grandma and Grandpa Brady, either,” Joanna added. “They’re wonderful, and they love you. But they’ve already raised one child, and that’s enough. They shouldn’t have to raise another. It’s a lot of work.”

Jenny nodded in agreement, chiming in with another surprisingly apt observation. “They’re nice but they’re too old.”

“What would you think about Jeff and Marianne?” Joanna asked carefully. “I haven’t spoken to them about it yet, because I wanted to check with you first, to see what you thought of the idea.”

“Do Jeff and Marianne even want kids?” Jenny asked.

“I’m sure they do.”

“Why don’t they have any, then?”

“Maybe they can’t,” Joanna replied, knowing from things Marianne had told her in confidence that it was the truth. “Maybe they’ve tried, and they just aren’t able to.”

“You could ask them,” Jenny suggested.

“No, that’s private, something to be discussed just between them.”

Jenny picked up her fork and began drawing aimless lines through the remaining hash that was turning to a ketchup-laden crust on her plate. For once, Joanna managed to stifle the overwhelming urge to tell Jenny not to play with her food.

“So what do you think of the idea?” Joanna asked. “Of asking Jeff and Marianne?”

“Would they let me keep my dogs?”

“I don’t know. That would be up to them when the time came, something you three would have to talk over and decide on.”

For some time, Jenny sat thinking. Finally, she shrugged. “I guess it would be okay. That way, I’d have parents to take care of me, and they’d have a child, even if I wasn’t their very own. We’d be like each other’s guide dog, right?”

“Right.” Joanna nodded.

Just then Sadie, the bluetick, sprang to her feet and hurried to the door, growling low in her throat while the hackles rose on the back of her neck. Tigger, the pit bull, whose hearing wasn’t as keen, quickly followed suit. It was several minutes before the vehicle Sadie had evidently heard crossing the cattle guard bounced into the yard.

Joanna was waiting on the back porch when Linda Kimball’s Jeep Cherokee stopped in front of the gate. Dressed in high heels, Linda climbed down and made her way over the uneven side walk to where Joanna was standing.

“I apologize for just showing up like this, but I couldn’t call before I left home,” Linda said as Joanna ushered her inside. “I told Burt I was going to a PTA officer’s planning meeting.”

It was one of the ironies of Joanna’s Craftsman home that most guests, even strangers, arrived through the side yard and back door while the front porch and official entryway remained virtually unused. Embarrassed by piles of unwashed laundry, Joanna led her visitor through the laundry room and kitchen and on into the living room. “Can I get you anything?” Joanna asked. “Coffee, tea?”

“You wouldn’t happen to have any Postum, would you?”

“No.”

“Well, nothing then. I just need to talk to you.

I need to talk to somebody.”

“What about?”

“About Burton. Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Ernie Carpenter came by the office and showed Burton his father’s dog tags. Said they’d found those with the skeleton up in the glory hole. Ernie mentioned the dental records, I guess, but he didn’t talk about them very much.”

“What’s the problem then?” Joanna asked. “I thought that’s what you wanted, for someone to figure out for sure whether or not the body belonged to Burton’s father and to tell Burton with out letting on that some of the information came from you.”

“That’s true, but it’s not all,” Linda said. She sat down on the couch but remained stiffly upright, nervously running her good hand back and forth across the already smooth material of her skirt.

“What else?” Joanna asked.

Linda Kimball took a deep breath. “Ernie Carpenter seems to think Burt may have had some thing to do with Uncle Harold’s death. He asked Burt where he was on Tuesday afternoon. They had a big fight, you know.”

“Who did?”

“Burt and Uncle Harold. Earlier in the day. Over Uncle Harold’s proposed settlement with Holly.”

“So where was Burt? Did he tell you?”

Linda sighed. “He went to a bar. He hasn’t done that in years, not since the night before we got married. He says he stayed there most of the afternoon.”

“Which bar?”

“The Blue Moon. Up the Gulch. But now you’re asking about it, too. I’m telling you, Burton Kimball didn’t kill his uncle Harold. Surely, you believe that, don’t you?”

“Linda,” Joanna cautioned, “what I believe and what I don’t believe aren’t important. Homicide detectives like Ernie always ask questions. It’s their job. The mere fact that they’re asking some one questions doesn’t necessarily mean they think that person is guilty of any crime. By talking to lots of people, interviewing them and asking questions, they get to the bottom of what really happened.”

“That’s exactly what I want Ernie to do,” Linda Kimball declared. “I want him to get to the bottom of it and find out what really happened, because if he doesn’t…”

Sobbing, she broke off. Unable to continue, she went searching in her purse for that same thin packet of tissues, just as she had done earlier that same afternoon.

“Linda,” Joanna said kindly. “I don’t under stand. What’s wrong?”

Linda shook her head. “I’ve been married to Burton Kimball for a long time. I know him almost as well as I know myself, but I’ve never seen him the way he was tonight. I can’t stand seeing him like that.”

“Like what?”

“Afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of himself,” Linda answered. “He’s afraid he did it.”

“Did what?”

“He thinks he murdered Uncle Harold and that he doesn’t remember it because he was drunk. Of course, that’s just ridiculous. Burton would never do such a thing. He’s the kindest man in the world. I can’t stand seeing him so upset.”

“Upset about his father? Upset about being a possible suspect in a homicide investigation?”

“Both, I’m sure,” Linda assented. “Finding out about his father has been a terrible shock, but I don’t think that’s the real problem.”

“What is?”

Linda Kimball’s double chins trembled dangerously. “I’m afraid he’s making this whole thing up, building a case and blaming himself in order to save Ivy.”

“How and why would he do that?” Joanna asked.

The other woman stared vacantly off into space for several long seconds. “We met while Burt was in law school, and I was still an undergraduate. Burt refused to get married until after he was out of law school and on his way to having a practice. We’ve had a very good marriage, but I’ve always known about the competition.”

“Competition?” Joanna frowned, offended by the idea that someone as seemingly upstanding as Burton Kimball might be two-timing his wife.

“Ivy,” Linda Kimball answered simply. “He’s always worried about her more than anyone else in the whole world. He’s always tried to take care of her, to protect her.”

“You don’t mean…?”

“Oh, no,” Linda answered quickly. “Nothing nasty or improper-nothing like that. If he hadn’t cared about her so much, I’m sure he wouldn’t have blabbed to her about Harold wanting to make a settlement. And then, abracadabra, before Harold can make good on what he said, before he can change any of his other arrangements, Harold Patterson is murdered. And who benefits from those changes not being made? Ivy, that’s who! No one but Ivy.”

“You think your husband is lying about what happened? You think he’s deliberately shifting blame to himself in order to protect her?”

“No,” Linda Kimball returned somberly. “I think he really believes he did it. He was drunk and doesn’t remember, so now he thinks he was functioning in a blackout. No, he’s absolutely convinced of his own guilt. If I’d been smarter, I would have seen it coming a long time ago.”

“Seen what coming?” Joanna asked, still in the dark.

“Don’t you understand?” Linda Kimball pleaded, her voice cracking with suppressed tension. “I’m afraid. Scared to death. And I don’t know what to do.”

“Please, Linda,” Joanna said, shaking her head. “You must be leaving something out. I don’t understand what you’re talking about, what you’re afraid of.”

“That if it comes to a choice between Ivy and me, he’ll choose her.”

“Come on, be serious. That’s ridiculous. You’re married to the man, for God’s sake. You’re the mother of his children. Ivy is just Burt’s cousin. How could he possibly choose her over you?”

“If Ernie arrests him, if Burt… How is it they say that on TV? Fall? Rap? That’s it, the rap. If Burt takes the rap, Ivy is home free. And if it came to that, I don’t think Burt would lift a finger to help himself. He as good as told me so tonight in his office. And what happens then? Whoever really murdered Harold Patterson gets away with it, and all because Burton is looking out for his precious Ivy!”

“Linda,” Joanna began, “believe me, that’s not going to happen.”

“Oh, yeah? I can even tell you how. Burton says that since he was blind drunk at the time it happened, the worst any judge in the state would give him is probably second degree. He’s sure he’ll be able to plea-bargain that down to simple manslaughter.”

“You’re serious about this, then, aren’t you?” Joanna said, with sudden understanding.

Linda nodded. “I’m serious all right, and so is Burt. He loves the kids and me, I’m sure of it. Being abandoned when he was a baby. Feeling like, except for Ivy Patterson, he was all alone in the world. Those things that happened to him when he was a child still have a powerful hold on him. I’m afraid he’d sacrifice Chris and Kim and me in a minute to save her. We wouldn’t starve, I suppose. I could always go back to teaching school, and the church would help us. But still…”

They sat quietly for a few moments while the draining dishwasher whirred noisily in the kitchen. Jennifer had long since loaded the dishes and disappeared into her own room.

“Why did you come to me with this?” Joanna asked finally. “Ernie Carpenter is the detective on the case. Why didn’t you go straight to him?”

Linda shrugged. “I don’t know. I already talked to you about it this afternoon. It just seemed easier. I thought maybe another woman would understand better. A man might jump to the wrong conclusion. He might think something awful was going on between Ivy and Burton. It’s just not like that. My husband is a very honorable man. After what’s…”

Linda glanced at her watch, then hurriedly rose to her feet. “I’d better get going,” she said. “Those meetings hardly ever last much over an hour. I don’t want him being suspicious.”

“You still haven’t said what you expect me to do.”

“I thought if I could get you to see through to what’s really going on, then maybe you could help keep Ernie on track. I wonder if maybe that boy friend of Ivy’s has anything to do with it. Maybe they’re getting married in such a hurry so they can’t be forced to testify against one another.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Joanna said.

“Well, I did,” Linda Kimball returned grimly “And I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand still and let them get away with it.”

“Ernie Carpenter’s a pro,” Joanna said reassuringly. “A real pro. If anyone can find out what really happened, Ernie can do it.”

Linda Kimball straightened her shoulders.

“Good,” she said, sounding somewhat heartened. “I’d better be going then.”

After Linda left, Joanna forgot her intention to clean the refrigerator. Instead, she returned to the living room, where she sat alone for some time, wondering about the complicated relationship between Burton Kimball and his cousin Ivy. What was the tie between them that would make Linda afraid her husband would sacrifice his whole life, his career and his family-to protect Ivy Patterson? Was it nothing more than an innocent brotherly-type love, or was it something much more malignant?

Around nine Jenny slipped out of her room and sat down on the couch next to her mother. The child was wearing her flannel nightgown, one Grandma Brady had made for her at Christmas the previous year. At the time the gown was new, it had been so long that the hem had skimmed the floor with every step. Now it barely covered the child’s bony ankles. It was a shock for Joanna to realize how much her daughter had grown in such a short time.

For the first time in weeks, Jenny snuggled close and let her mother wrap one arm around her.

“Who was that lady?” she asked.

“A woman from town,” Joanna answered, pulling Jenny closer. “Her name is Linda Kimball.”

“What did she want?”

“She’s worried about her husband. She’s afraid he’s going to say he did something he didn’t do, just to keep someone else from getting in trouble.”

“But why did she come here?” Jenny asked.

“I guess she came to talk to me because she didn’t want to talk to Ernie Carpenter. There were things she had to say that were upsetting to her; things she wanted to talk over with another woman instead of with a man.”

“She wanted a woman detective instead of a man?” Jenny asked.

Joanna smiled. “So far Cochise County doesn’t have any women detectives.”

“But they do have a woman sheriff,” Jenny commented thoughtfully.

“That’s right,” Joanna agreed. “Cochise County does have one of those.”

Jenny nodded and then got up. “It’s late. I’d better go to bed. Good night, Mom.” Jenny leaned over and kissed her mother on the cheek.

“Sleep tight,” Joanna managed to reply.

She was glad Jenny didn’t turn and look back at her from the bedroom door, glad she didn’t see that her mother’s eyes had filled with tears of gratitude. Which were very nice for a change….

IT WAS ten o’clock before Joanna sat down at the dining room table to look at the stack of mail Kristin Marsten had dumped on her desk early that afternoon.

One of the first pieces of paper Joanna picked up happened to be her own typed statement-the one concerning the election-night traffic incident, the one she had gone to the Justice Center to sign on Wednesday morning. That seemed so long ago now-so much had happened in between-as to be almost ancient history. To say nothing of unnecessary.

Alvin Bernard, Bisbee’s chief of police, had left Joanna a message earlier that afternoon telling her that a decision had been made to cite Holly Patterson for driving without a license and negligent driving rather than vehicular assault. Joanna didn’t care to contemplate why the decision had been made that particular way, or how it could have been made at all in view of the fact that her own statement had never been taken into consideration by the investigators, but she decided that wasn’t her problem. She tossed the statement aside and went back to the mail.

As Sue Rolles had indicated, Martin Sanders letter of resignation was concealed in among all the rest, sandwiched between an inner-office memo listing the jail menus for the following week and a notice of the next board of supervisors meeting, which, as a county administrator, Joanna would now be required to attend. She read through the letter of resignation twice. It said very little, only that for personal reasons he was resigning immediately. For the next week and a half, he would be taking the remainder of his accrued vacation.

“Thanks a lot, Martin,” she muttered, “maybe I can do you a favor sometime.”

She took out her calendar and made a note of the supervisors’ meeting. On the bottom of that notice, someone had hand-changed the routing crossing out R. Voland and replacing his name with J. Brady.

At the very bottom of the stack was one of those eagle decorated overnight mail packages that bore a Washington, D.C postmark and no return address. Joanna tore it open.

Inside she found a full-color catalog called Women Officers’ Mandatory Accessories and Notions of Santa Monica, California. WOMAN. Cute. In it she found pictures of stunning women with no subcutaneous fat and flawless teeth and nails. They looked as though they had never done a day’s work in their lives, but they were all outfitted in everything from female-proportioned Kevlar vests to lightweight weapons and listening devices. Most of the latter seemed designed to be concealed and carried on various female foundation garments.

None of the price tags could be considered cheap, but Joanna conceded that the possibility of a comfortable Kevlar vest might be an important, lifesaving investment.

In addition to the catalog, Adam York’s CARE package contained two other items. One was a well-worn, doggeared copy of a clearly outdated book. Entitled Officer Down, Code Three and written by someone named Pierce Brooks, the blue volume wasn’t a book Joanna had ever seen or heard of before. The ragged dustcover, complete with a picture of 1970s-era cops, showed its age, as did the original publication date of 1975.

Puzzled as to why Adam York had sent her the book, but putting it aside for a moment, Joanna picked up the last item-Adam York’s DEA business card with a hand-scrawled note of congratulations on the back. She dialed the number listed on the card. After a strange series of clicks, the phone finally rang, and Adam York himself answered.

“At this hour of the night, I was expecting an answering machine,” Joanna said with a laugh.

“You got lucky. Through the wonders of phone factory engineers, you can dial me in Tucson and speak to me in D.C. Isn’t technology wonderful?”

“D.C” Joanna echoed. “That’s East Coast time, so it really is late. Sorry.”

“Time’s relative. What’s up?”

“I called to thank you for the package. I can see that a proportioned-to-fit vest is definitely in order. The one I wore today is way too long for my ribs. It rubs me raw in all the wrong places, But why the book?”

“It’s used as a manual in police-officer-safety courses. Before you go take that class in Peoria, I want you to sit down and read the whole thing from cover to cover. It’s important.”

“All right. I’ll do it, just as soon as things settle down a little bit around here.”

“Do it sooner than that,” Adam York growled.

“Until you get some training, you’re an accident waiting to happen. Now, how was your first full day?”

“Let’s see now, two homicides, one old, one new-and one of my chief supervisors gave notice, but he’s on vacation for the duration. Other than that, I guess it was a pretty normal day.”

“They didn’t give you much time to get your sea legs, did they?”

“I’ll manage,” Joanna said, “but I do have a question for you. What, if anything, do you know about ex-cons from Russia?”

Adam York’s voice suddenly turned serious. “Me, personally? Not that much. What do you want to know?”

“I’ve evidently got one living right here in Cochise County,” Joanna said. “His name is Yuri Malakov. He’s been here for some time as an apparently law-abiding citizen, but he’s romantically involved with the daughter of one of my two victims.”

“What makes you think he’s a Russian ex-con?”

“He is from Russia, for one thing. I already knew that about him, but this morning I happened to see him without his shirt. He has tattoos all over his upper body, mostly a cowboys and Indians motif. ‘Cowboy Sam’ is the only thing on it that’s written in English well enough so I could make it out.”

“What else?”

“What do you mean, what else?”

“I mean what else can you remember about the tattoos?”

“There were a couple of rattlesnakes, a hang man’s noose, a rodeo rider, and, I think, a rose. There may have been some other things, but I don’t necessarily remember them. Why? What’s so important about that?”

“With all the problems we’ve been having with the Russian mafia, somebody over at the FBI is a known expert at decoding Russian prison tattoos,” Adam York answered shortly. “Let me check this out with him and see what he has to say. I’ll also get in touch with some guys I know at INS.”

“I don’t think that’ll work,” Joanna said. “My guys already tried it that way from this end and were told hands off. So if you nose around about him, don’t say I sent you.”

“And don’t you go wandering into any dark alleys with this character,” Adam York warned. “Those Russian mafiosi are dangerous as hell. And if he’s walking around wearing a hangman’s noose on his chest, you can pretty well figure he didn’t get sent up for stealing chicken feed.”

When Joanna got off the phone, she retreated to her bedroom, taking both Officer Down and the People magazine along with her. She glanced at the book but put it aside. She was too tired for any thing but the most mindless of articles.

After hearing all the local fuss about the People story, Joanna was disappointed when she finally read it. There was some discussion of Holly Patterson, but the article focused more on Hollywood hypnotherapist Amy Baxter and several of her clients, all of whom had taken on their once abusive parents with sometimes greater and sometimes lesser degrees of financial success.

Joanna’s last thought, as she put the magazine down and drifted off to sleep, was that some career choices were stranger than others.

In the morning, she overslept. She was still sawing logs at seven when Jenny tapped on her bed room door, poked her head inside, and said, “Mom, aren’t you awake yet? It’s late.”

In a mad scramble, Joanna raced outside to feed and water the animals, then dived into the shower.

She was still drying her hair when Jenny came back into the bathroom.

“Do you want me to ride my bike down to catch the bus this morning?”

“That would be a big help,” Joanna said. “It’s not going to look good if the new boss starts out by coming to work late.”

Once again she wore one of Andy’s old T-shirts under the bulletproof vest. Then, expecting to spend most of the day in her office, she did pull on Eleanor Lathrop’s favorite, the pearl-gray skirt and blazer.

The outfit gave her a dignified, businesslike look, and the blazer was roomy enough that both the Kevlar vest and Andy’s shoulder holster disappeared beneath it.

Careful not to speed, Joanna drove to the Cochise County Justice Center and parked in her own designated spot. Armed with a newly assigned, push-button door code she had unearthed in the mail, she let herself into her office through the private back entrance. Propping the outside door open, she went back to the Eagle and retrieved her box of treasured office mementos. She had barely started unpacking them when the door to the reception area opened, and Dick Voland entered her office.

Startled, he stopped short when he saw her. “I didn’t know you were here,” he said.

“I came in the back way and decided to un pack,” she explained, holding Jenny’s Bible-school hand print plaque up to the light and rubbing some accumulated dust out of the ends of the tiny finger impressions. “What can I do for you?”

Voland had lumbered into the room carrying an envelope, which he now attempted to shove into his shirt pocket. Pausing in the doorway, he seemed embarrassed, unsure of what to do next.

“Did you need something?” Joanna prodded.

He fumbled the envelope back out of his pocket and handed it over to Joanna. Her name was the only thing typewritten on the outside. “What is it?” she asked.

“My letter of resignation,” Dick Voland answered. “Effective immediately.”

Without opening it, Joanna dropped the envelope onto her desk.

Stunned, she backed up far enough to find her way into the leather chair behind her. “Why?” she asked.

“Have you read your mail yet?”

Joanna glanced at the new stack of mail Kristin had placed on her desk. “Not yet. I wanted to unpack first. Why? What’s in there now that I should have read?”

Voland reached out, pawed through the pile on her desk, pulled out a newspaper, and tossed it down in front of her. “You probably ought to read this,” he said gruffly.

Joanna glanced down at a copy of that day’s Arizona Sun. “The whole paper?” she asked. “Or some article in particular?”

He thumbed the paper open to the second section, the one that focused on statewide news. With the paper folded in half, Joanna could only see the bottom half of the page. Just below the fold was a two-column wide, two-line headline that read, OLD cops vs. NEW SHERIFF/NO CONfiDENCE, by Arizona Sun staff writer Sue Rolles.

Joanna quickly scanned the article: “The people of Cochise County may have elected Arizona’s first ever female sheriff on Election Day last Tuesday, but that doesn’t mean longtime law-enforcement veterans of the County Sheriff’s Department are happy with the outcome.

“In a move many regard as a vote of no confidence for incoming sheriff Joanna Brady, Martin Sanders, Cochise County’s deputy for administration, yesterday submitted his resignation amid widespread speculation that other well-respected and long-term departmental employees may soon follow suit.

“Although Sanders was a political appointee who served at the pleasure of the sheriff, he had nonetheless functioned in that capacity for two separate administrations and had been expected to play a pivotal part in the orderly transition to the administration of the new sheriff who was elected this week.

“One departmental employee who spoke only on condition of anonymity said, ‘I’m afraid a woman is just going to cave in under the pressure.

I mean, she’s been in office two days, and already we have two homicides.” (See above article.)” Joanna turned the paper over enough to see that the headline at the top of the page dealt with the two separate Cochise County slayings. But that wasn’t the article Dick Voland had handed her, so she turned back to the other one and resumed reading.

“Chief Deputy Richard Voland, another political appointee, actively campaigned for Al Freeman, the former chief of police from Sierra Vista who also ran for the position of sheriff. Citing Joanna Brady’s lack of law-enforcement experience, Voland emphasized that the county needed a professional law-enforcement officer to take charge of the Sheriff’s Department.

“‘Joanna Brady’s a nice lady,” Voland says, ‘but she’s never been a cop. And that’s what this county needs more than anything right now. someone who knows the score.’”

Joanna glanced at Dick Voland over the top of the newspaper and found him regarding her anxiously.

“That quote’s from one of your campaign speeches, isn’t it? The one about me not being a cop?”

Dick Voland nodded glumly. “That’s right,” he said, “but the woman who wrote the article makes it sound as though I said it yesterday, as though I’m out on the streets right this minute trying to undermine you.”

Without reading any more, Joanna closed the paper, folded it back up, and placed it on her desk.

She left the unopened envelope lying where it fell.

“Mr. Voland,” she said, “I think it’s only fair for you to know that this article is written by Sue Rolles, a reporter I personally threw out of my office late yesterday afternoon. Now tell me why you’re leaving. Are you really convinced that I’ll never be able to hack it in this job?”

“No. That’s not it at all.”

“What is it then?”

“With this kind of crap showing up in the media, I’m worried about a total breakdown in the chain of command, and that could put officers lives in jeopardy. It seems to me you might be better off with a slate of people of your own choosing. Out with the old, in with the new.”

“Are you saying you don’t think you can work with me?”

“No, but that may be the public perception. Especially after people read this. And anything that causes confusion; anything that makes one officer second-guess another, undermines the efficiency as well as the safety of the department.”

Joanna considered what he was saying. “Let me ask you a question, Dick. Considering I’m a rookie, was there anything about my behavior at the crime scene yesterday that was out of order?”

“No, you did fine, but…”

“But if there had been, would you have let it pass, or would you have pointed it out to me so I wouldn’t look quite so dumb the next time?”

Dick Voland met Joanna’s searching gaze and didn’t look away. “If something had been way out of line, I believe I would have told you.”

“That’s good.” Joanna picked up the envelope, tapped edge of it on the desktop, but still made no move to open it. “I’ll take this matter under advisement,” she said. “I’ll give it some thought, but for the time being, you need to understand that I have not yet accepted your resignation. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now, then, aren’t I supposed to have some kind of early-morning briefing about what went on in the county overnight?”

“Two brothers got all drunked up at a birthday party over in Kansas Settlement and beat the crap out of one another with wooden baseball bats. One of them is in the county hospital down in Douglas. There were two domestics in the county overnight, one out in Elfrida and the other in Miracle Valley. Three one runaway juvenile from Pirtleville, and a carload of illegals who ran out of gas between Tombstone and St. David. The deputy held them long enough for the Border Patrol to show up and take them into custody.”

“That’s all?”

“Isn’t that enough?” Voland replied.

“What about Ernie Carpenter? Any developments there?”

“Nothing new overnight that I know of, except that Ivy Patterson and that Russian of hers did go ahead and tie the knot. I can tell you that one’s raised a few eyebrows around town. Other than that, things are pretty quiet.” Voland headed for the door.

“Wait, Dick,” Joanna said. “There’s one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you have any suggestions about who to get to fill Martin Sanders’ position?”

Voland shook his head. “Not right offhand. It’s a funny situation, neither fish nor fowl. It would be a big promotion for most of the guys out on patrol, but that person essentially functions in a staff capacity, totally cut off from any direct con tact with the public.

“Not only that, it’s a paper-intensive job. The person who takes it is agreeing to serve as point man for every ugly can of worms that walks in the door-from pet cruelty complaints to wrangling with the board of supervisors over budget cuts.”

“You’re saying most of the people currently in the department would take one look at the job description and run like hell in the opposite direction?”

“That’s right.”

“Including you, I presume?” Joanna asked.

“Most definitely,” Voland answered. “I wouldn’t have that job on a bet.”

He left then. For some time afterward, Joanna stared at the closed door, then she went back to the newspaper article. This time she read it all the way through. Going over the story, she realized why it was Sue Rolles had seemed so familiar to her. She didn’t remember her from any kind of meeting at the hospital in Tucson the day Andy died. She could barely remember anything at all about that awful day. But she had seen Sue Rolles here and there as she traveled the campaign trail around the county, attending various civic meetings in advance of the election.

Sue Rolles must have been following every twist and turn of the campaign for months. Reading the article carefully, Joanna could tell that some of the quotes from disgruntled departmental employees were new and legitimate. There were bound to be others besides Kristin Marsten who were actively provoked at having a new female boss. But most of the quotes attributed to Richard Voland were fragments of things she recognized as campaign rhetoric, sound bites taken out of context and written to seem like up-to-the-minute, post-election bitching.

It was easy to see now how the pieces fit together. Joanna realized that the article might have had an entirely different slant and focus if she hadn’t summarily thrown Sue Rolles out of her office. The reporter was plainly pissed, and she was seeing to it that Joanna Brady paid dearly for her little tactical error.

From out of her past, she could almost hear D. H. Lathrop’s New Mexican drawl telling Joanna and her mother, “Newspaper reporters are Just like rattlesnakes. You’re better off keeping them out in the open where you can see what they’re doing.”

Live and learn, Joanna told herself, and don’t make the same mistake twice.

Joanna SPENT the next half hour studying every word of the articles in the Sun that had anything to do with her department, including the one that dealt with the two Cochise County homicides.

That story was primarily a harmless recitation of the facts as they were known and disseminated at the time of Dick Voland’s early-afternoon press conference. News about the tentative identification of Thornton Kimball’s remains hadn’t made it into Tucson prior to press time.

One for them, one for us, Joanna thought.

She turned then to the rest of the mail. There, among that day’s collection of memoranda and bulletins, she found a copy of that morning’s Bisbee Bee. That one did contain news of the Thornton Kimball I.D. Not only that, some enterprising reporter had managed to track down copies of old Bisbee High School yearbooks. Pictures of Harold Patterson and Thornton Kimball, both as much younger men and both dressed formally in white shirts, jackets, and ties, stared out from the front page of the newspaper.

Seeing them together like that, dressed in the outdated attire of an earlier era, it was interesting to note how much Burton Kimball took after his mother’s side of the family. He looked far more like a much younger version of Harold Patterson than he did his own father.

“Miss Kellogg to see you,” an abrupt Kristin announced over the intercom.

When Angie sauntered into Joanna’s office, she headed straight over to the window where she stood looking out. “You need to put a bird feeder in that mesquite tree and a ground feeder for the quail underneath,” she said.

In two short months, Angie’s knowledge of and devotion to Bisbee’s native wild-bird population had become encyclopedic. The yard of her house in Bisbee’s Galena neighborhood had become a bird-feeding emporium and looked to outsiders like an aviary. Armed with her treasured copy of Birds of North America, she spent her time off work happily watching and cataloging her feathered visitors.

“I haven’t exactly had time to think about birds,” Joanna replied with a laugh. “What brings you here?”

Angie turned toward Joanna, her face suddenly somber. “I almost didn’t come at all,” Angie said, “I wanted to, but when I got as far as the parking lot, I almost chickened out and didn’t come inside. My whole body started to shake. I’ve never walked into a place like this on my own before or without having my hands cuffed behind my back. It brought back lots of bad memories.”

“I’m sure it did,” Joanna said.

Angie left the window and stood briefly behind one of the chairs as if still too nervous to sit down.

“The girls in L.A. would never believe it. I can hardly believe it myself.”

The fact that Angie could count a county Sheriff and a Methodist minister among her friends was, in a word, unbelievable. Nothing in Angie’s troubled past as a runaway teenager who survived by her own wits would have pointed toward that possibility.

“I came to show you something,” she said.

Reaching into the back pocket of her pants, she pulled out a credit-card-sized piece of plastic.

“Here,” she said, handing it over. “Look at this.”

The plastic card was an Arizona driver’s license. Angie Kellogg’s first driver’s license ever, complete with one of the best-looking driver’s I.D. photos Joanna had ever seen.

“You passed,” she said. “Congratulations, and it’s a good picture, too. Must be beginner’s luck.”

Angie smiled smugly. “And I passed on the first try, she said. “In fact, I just came from there. I was afraid I might end up having to take the driving part more than once, but the guy who rode with me was great.”

Looking at the lush, blond Angie, Joanna thought it wasn’t surprising to think that a driving examiner might have somehow overlooked a minor miscue or two. An early loss of innocence had robbed Angie of the ability to see her own physical beauty. What was lost on her most likely hadn’t been missed by the male licensing official.

Joanna was often perplexed by Angie’s odd mixture of toughness and naiVete. She was at once both young and old; innocent and jaded. How could someone who had made her living by prostitution be so seemingly unaware of her own beauty and of the physical impact she made on those who met her?

Angie was experiencing some difficulty in making the transition from an economy in which her body had been the sole medium of exchange to one in which her paycheck paid the bills. With help from people like Bobo Jenkins and Jeff Daniels, she was only now learning that it was possible to have male friendships that didn’t automatically lead to sex, and that real freedom existed in the privilege of saying no.

“So would you like to go for a ride? Maybe have lunch?” Angie asked, her face alive with disarming enthusiasm. “Today’s my morning off. I don’t have to be at work until six.”

It was still early. With two homicides hanging over her head, Joanna felt as though there was something she should be doing besides going to lunch. The only trouble was, right that minute she had no idea what it was. In the end, she went With considerable pride.

Angie escorted Joanna outside to where her cream-colored 1981 Oldsmobile Omega was parked in front of the building. They ate an early lunch at Daisy’s, leaving well before the noontime crowd started arriving. Afterward, Joanna asked Angie to help her ferry the Eagle back home to the ranch so she’d have only one vehicle parked at the office rather than two. Angie was glad to help out. They stopped by the Justice Center long enough to pick up the car.

The trip out to the ranch didn’t take more than twenty minutes in one direction and ten back, although to a white-knuckled passenger, the ride back seemed much longer. Angie might have passed her driving exam with flying colors, but she was still a very inexperienced driver. The Omega tended to first cling to the shoulder of the highway as she met approaching vehicles and then to meander back to ride the centerline as soon as the road ahead was clear.

Joanna gripped the armrest and tried to keep her mouth shut. She remembered all too well how much she had resented Eleanor’s backseat driving, but after years in the insurance business, she also understood why it is that inexperienced drivers have to pay much higher premiums for auto insurance.

“So how’s it going?” Angie asked suddenly. “Is being sheriff what you thought it would be?”

If Angie Kellogg had ever given much thought to possible career choices, a position in law enforcement would never have crossed her mind.

“It’s hard work,” Joanna said. “With two homicides on the books since Tuesday night, I could do with a whole lot less excitement.”

“I heard about those,” Angie said. “The people in the bar hardly talk about anything else.”

“By the way, has Detective Carpenter been by to talk with you about those?” Joanna asked.

Startled, Angie turned to stare at her passenger.

During the momentary lapse of attention, the wheels on the rider’s side of the Olds veered off the road. As a cloud of rock and gravel spewed up behind them, she managed to wrestle the car back onto the pavement.

“About the murders?” she managed, while the color drained from her face. “I don’t like detectives. Why would one of them want to talk to me?”

Clearly Angie’s old life carried some bad experiences into her new one. Joanna hastened to reassure her.

“You haven’t done anything wrong,” Joanna said. “It’s just that a person of interest in one of the murders supposedly spent the better part of Tuesday afternoon in the Blue Moon. I know you were scheduled to work on Tuesday, so I thought you might have seen him.”

“One of my customers is a suspect?” Angie asked, still bewildered. “Which one?”

“I didn’t say that. He’s just someone we need to check on. His name is Burton Kimball,” Joanna went on. “He’s a lawyer.”

“Oh, him,” Angie said suddenly contemptuous as she switched on the turn signal to turn into the Justice Complex. “What about him?”

“His uncle was murdered sometime that after noon or evening. Burton Kimball isn’t known to be that much of a drinker, but he evidently got himself plastered on Tuesday. In a murder case, you always look at people close to the victim and note anything unusual, including uncharacteristic behavior.”

“You’re right,” Angie agreed. “He’s not much of a drinker. That’s why it was so easy to get him drunk. Couldn’t hold his liquor worth a damn.”

“You got him drunk? On purpose?”

“You bet.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted him so smashed that he wouldn’t be able to drag his ass out of bed the next day to go defend that dirty old man of his.”

“Wait a minute here, Angie. How do you know Burton Kimball? For that matter, what makes you think Harold Patterson was a dirty old man? Did you even know him?”

“I know about him,” Angie replied. “I know enough. He was a child molester, wasn’t he? One of those creeps who fucks his own kids. Those guys always find some slick lawyer to get them off!”

Angie’s voice trembled with suppressed rage. “You’re damn right I got him drunk, and I’d do it again in a minute. I wanted the son of a bitch so blind drunk that he wouldn’t be able to hold his head up, but he left too soon. Just got up and walked out.”

“You’re lucky he wasn’t involved in an accident, Angie,” Joanna said. “Bartenders can be held accountable, you know. You could have lost your job.”

“I didn’t think about that,” Angie insisted stubbornly. “Still I’d do it again if I had a chance.”

By then the Omega was parked and idling in the front parking lot of the Justice Center, sitting astraddle a white line, occupying half of two full spaces.

“But why would you do such a thing?” Joanna asked. “Why run that kind of risk?”

Angie sat with her hands gripping the wheel and with her eyes focused on some invisible middle distance. She didn’t answer for such a long time that Joanna wondered if she’d even heard the question.

“How could a man defend someone like that?” Angie asked at last. “How could he try to get him off? As far as I’m concerned, that makes the lawyer as bad as the father. Maybe even worse. The father could be sick or crazy, but the lawyer is just doing it for money, working for the person who has all the cards. The little girls are the ones who have nothing, no one to turn to. They’re the ones who need someone to defend them, to help them.”

As Joanna watched in dismay, Angie Kellogg’s face seemed to splinter into a thousand pieces. The words she had never been able to muster in her own behalf had suddenly erupted in defense of someone she didn’t even know, in defense of Holly Patterson.

While Angie sobbed brokenly beside her, Joanna finally recognized the linchpin of Angie’s past, a piece that had, until that very moment, eluded her.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered, horrified. “The same thing happened to you, didn’t it?”

Angie nodded. “And my mother wouldn’t even help me. Maybe she didn’t know at first, although she must have. But even when I told her, she didn’t lift a finger, didn’t make him stop.”

Since mid-September, Joanna had struggled to pull together the stray pieces of Angie’s history.

There had been a blank spot. She could never understand what had forced Angie out onto the streets from the time she was a child only a few years older than Jenny was now. And now that Joanna knew, now that she understood, she almost wished she hadn’t.

“Are you going to be all right?” she asked, reaching out to touch the distraught young woman’s arm.

Gradually, Angie regained her composure. The sobs diminished to hiccups and sniffles. “I’ll be okay,” she managed.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Angie,” Joanna said awkwardly, “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

Angie looked at Joanna with a questioning, side line glance.

“You mean you believe me?”

“Well, of course I believe you,” Joanna replied indignantly. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because, Angie said in a hushed, hesitant way. “The only other person I ever told was my mother and she called me a liar. Said I made the whole thing up. But I didn’t, I swear to God. And that woman whose father is dead, she probably didn’t make it up, either. I wanted her to win in court, that’s all. That’s why I got the lawyer drunk. You do understand that, don’t you, Joanna?”

“Yes,” Joanna said quietly, getting out of Angies car. “I believe I do.”

BURTON KIMBALL came to work that morning out of habit, because he had no idea what else to do with himself. He sat numbly in his office with the door closed, staring without comprehension at the stack of routine correspondence Maxine had left on his desk. No matter how long he looked at the top letter on the pile, he was unable to make sense of a single paragraph. It could just as well have been written in a foreign language.

It was as though the connections in Burton’s brain had been short-circuited by the knowledge that his father was dead, that he had been dead all Burton’s life. The whole time, the forty-odd years Burton had been waiting for his father to show up, longing for him to come home and reclaim his son, Thornton Kimball had been within ten miles of him, lying dead in the bottom of a hole with his skull crushed to pieces by a chunk of smoothed creek-bed rock.

Burton was living through his first morning without the comfort of his cherished childhood illusion. Burton Kimball was an orphan, had always been an orphan, but with the unveiling of that long-skeletonized corpse, his loss and grief was as new as if his father had died yesterday. In Burton Kimball’s heart, that was the truth.

It should have fallen to him, as the closest surviving kin, to plan whatever funeral service Norm Higgins deemed appropriate, but Burton was too emotionally paralyzed. He simply couldn’t cope.

Instead, he turned the whole thorny issue of arrangements over to Linda and fled to his office, where he sat in his chair and hid out.

Other things that should have commanded his attention barely seeped into his consciousness. The fact that Ernie Carpenter had dared question him with regard to Harold Patterson’s murder was driving Linda crazy, but it hardly mattered to Burton.

He was sorry about the death of Harold Patterson, the only “father” he had ever known. But what he was shaken by today was the sudden loss of that second, unknown father. He was amazed by the depth of the grief he felt. How could that old, scarred-over wound hurt so much?

When the phone on his desk rang, Burton jumped as though someone had just lobbed a rock through the window beside his desk. With a suddenly trembling hand, he picked up the receiver.

“Yes?” he said uncertainly, aware of the sudden catch in his throat.

“Sorry to disturb you,” Maxine Smith said softly, “but Rex Rogers is on the phone. He insists on speaking to you personally.”

“Rex Rogers. What does he want?”

“He didn’t say. Do you want me to put him through or take a message?”

“Take a message. I don’t want to talk to any body this morning, especially not Rex Rogers.”

“You want me to hold all your calls?”

“Please.”

A few moments later, Maxine tapped on Burton’s door. “What did he say?” Burton growled.

“He wanted to let you know that they’ll be filing a brief to amend the suit so it goes against Mr. Patterson’s estate. That is, unless Ivy is interested in negotiating a settlement now, without any more courtroom proceedings whatsoever.”

Burton buried his face in his hands. “I should have known,” he said. “That’s Holly through and through, always more than happy to kick some body when they’re down.”

He got up and took his coat off the hanger.

“Where are you going?” Maxine demanded.

“To see my client.”

“I thought your client was dead.”

“I’ve got a new one now,” he answered grimly.

“She may not realize she needs me yet, but she does. How are the gossip mills working around town?”

“Fine, I suppose. Why?”

“Does anyone know where the honeymooners spent the night?”

“I suppose if anyone did, Helen Barco would be the one.”

“I’m going down the hall to wash my face. Get on the horn and see if you can find out where Ivy and her groom spent the night. It’ll be a whole lot easier to track them down if I have some idea where I’m going.”

As usual, the fact that something threatened Ivy -was enough to jar Burton Kimball out of his funk.

The same kind of lifetime habit that had brought him to his office that morning now propelled him to action. If Ivy was threatened, he had to do something about it.

Even as she dialed Helen Barco’s number, Maxine didn’t understand what had gotten into him all of a sudden. Linda Kimball would have under stood, if she had known about it. Her husband was like that where Ivy Patterson was concerned, always had been.

When Isabel Gonzales finished dusting and straightening the living room, she took the mornings paper out to the kitchen, where she sat down long enough to drink a cup of coffee and read the paper.

Isabel had lived a quiet and fairly sheltered life.

This was the first time a violent death of any kind had touched her life so closely. She tried to imagine how she would feel that morning if she were Holly Patterson.

It was bad enough for Holly to come back home after all those years to bring such awful charges against her own father. Isabel had no idea what had gone on during that stormy afternoon session in the library on Tuesday. Isabel herself had ushered Harold Patterson into the room for the scheduled conference while Miss Baxter and Miss Patterson were still upstairs. She supposed they were some of the last people to see the old man alive. That saddened her, made her feel some how responsible.

Mr. Patterson had been sitting there waiting when Holly came into the room, accompanied by Amy Baxter. Isabel had closed the door behind them and had gone on about her business, doing her best not to eavesdrop, but even in that huge house, she hadn’t been able to avoid the sound of raised and angry voices. When you’re used to a house being peaceful and quiet, it’s hard not to notice when people are yelling.

Isabel had prepared a casserole and a salad for dinner, and she had left the house early -promptly at five-thirty-so she and Jaime could go vote. She had no idea how the library battle had ended, and she hadn’t seen Holly make off with Mr. Rogers’ fancy red car either. But she had certainly witnessed the awful aftermath.

Holly’s appetite had been bad before. After the incident with the car, it was almost nonexistent. She had virtually quit eating altogether. Some times she drank something, but the food on the trays remained almost untouched. Isabel worried about it, but she didn’t mention it to either Miss Baxter or Mr. Rogers. As a Mexican-American housekeeper, Isabel Gonzales knew her place. She kept her mouth shut and tried not to listen to the noise of the rocker creaking away in Holly’s room directly over the kitchen.

Someone would have to be crazy to rock that much, Isabel thought, to sit there rocking and staring out the window at nothing but the dump for hour after hour after hour. Of course, Miss Baxter would never use the word “crazy” or even “loco.”

She said Miss Patterson had “emotional problems.” Poor thing.

And then, just as those thoughts ran through her head, Isabel realized she was no longer hearing the rocker.

Moments later, the kitchen door swung open, and a disheveled Holly Patterson stood there in her robe, leaning weakly against the doorjamb. “I want some more coffee,” she said.

Isabel Gonzales had cared for a number of invalids in her life who were ill enough to require looking after, but not sick enough to need a nurse. She knew that after even a few days of bed rest, the transition from bed to walking around is a tricky one that requires careful negotiation.

“You should sit down,” she said, hurrying to Holly’s side. “You shouldn’t be up walking like this.”

Holly waved her away. “I’m fine,” she announced. “I’m really fine.” Nevertheless, she did totter over to the table and chairs just inside the door.

While Isabel hurried to pour a cup of coffee from a fresh pot, Holly sank down at the kitchen table. Her eyes were drawn at once to the pictures on the front page of the paper that was lying there in front of her.

The moment she saw the picture, a lifetime’s worth of forgotten memories boiled to the surface, threatening to drown her in a head-crushing wave.

- The hours of careful probing sessions with Amy, the hazy, hypnotic, dreamlike questions and answers, had never come near this terrible, searing pain, had never cast a light on Holly Patterson’s interior darkness. Or her horror.

She grabbed the newspaper and stuffed it into the pocket of her robe, thinking that perhaps if she could no longer see that smiling face, the pain would diminish enough so she could at least breathe. But even with his visage squashed in her hand like an unwary cockroach, she could still see his face. She could still remember.

And then, in a moment of terrifying clarity, she caught a single glimpse of her own danger. Bolting upright, she knocked over the kitchen chair behind her.

Isabel started at the sound of the falling chair.

Thinking Holly had fainted, she spun around, almost spilled the full cup of coffee she had just poured. When she caught sight of Holly’s stricken face, she nearly dropped it altogether.

Was the woman having some kind of seizure? a heart attack perhaps? Her mouth gaped open.

She seemed to be trying to speak, or maybe even scream, but no sound came out of her open mouth.

Slamming the cup back down on the counter, Isabel hurried to Holly’s side. “Miss Patterson,” she said. She pulled out one of the remaining chairs and pushed it in Holly’s direction. “What’s the matter? Sit down. Sit down right here. You look like you’re going to faint.”

“She’s going to kill me!” Holly whispered hoarsely.

“Miss Patterson, please. No one’s going to kill anybody. You’re imagining things. Please sit down.”

With surprising agility, Holly Patterson dodged out of Isabel’s reach and made for the stairway.

Isabel stood there listening as heavy feet pounded down the long overhead corridor that led back to her room.

Isabel’s first impulse was to follow the woman.

It was clearer to her now than ever before that Miss Baxter was right. In Isabel’s world, Holly Patterson’s “emotional problems” meant the woman was crazy as she could be.

Upstairs, the bedroom door slammed shut, and Isabel breathed a sigh of relief. If Miss Patterson had tried to go outside or run away, she would have been far more worried.

Instead, she had gone back to her room, back to where she was supposed to be.

As soon as Miss Baxter and Mr. Rogers came back from their ride, Isabel would have to report the incident, although she still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened.

Miss Patterson had been looking at the paper. Whatever she saw there, it had upset her terribly at a time when she had already been through too much. Remembering the look on the fleeing woman’s face, Isabel knew she had gone over the edge.

Isabel stood waiting, expecting to hear the sound of the rocking chair resume, and finally it did. Isabel crossed herself and breathed a small prayer. “Let the poor soul alone,” she said to her self ‘Just let her be.”

Burton was less surprised by the fact that Maxine had been able to locate Ivy and Yuri Malakov than he was by where they were found. They had stayed at the Lodge, a grade-B motel on the far side of Tombstone.

The very look of the place offended him. Certainly, Ivy deserved a better honeymoon suite than this. He called their room from a house phone in the lobby. It was almost noon, but when Ivy answered, she sounded as though the phone had awakened her out of a sound sleep.

“You’re where?” Ivy demanded, finally coming to her senses.

“i’m in the lobby. I’ve got to talk to you, to both you and… Yuri. It’s important.”

“Burt, I’m on my honeymoon. I’ve waited for it for forty years, and this is the only one I’ll ever have. Whatever you need, it can wait until tonight. We have to come back to the ranch then to do the chores. We’ll take on the funeral arrangements this evening.”

“This isn’t about your father,” Burton said. “It’s about Holly.”

“What about her?”

“Her attorney called my office just a little while ago.”

“Why?”

“She intends to continue to fight you, Ivy, to file against the estate unless you want to negotiate now. Her lawyer will go to Judge Moore and amend the suit.”

There was a long pause. “Holly can’t do that, can she?”

“Yes.”

“What do we do about it?”

“That’s what I need to talk to you about.”

There was a pause. “All right,” Ivy said finally.

“Wait there in the coffee shop. We’ll be down in a few minutes.”

Burton went into the coffee shop, sank into a booth, and ordered himself a cup of coffee. He noticed Dave Hollicker come in a few minutes later, and Burton casually waved at the deputy as he went by.

It didn’t occur to Burton Kimball that Dave’s appearance had anything to do with him, or that by interrupting his cousin’s honeymoon, he might be adding fuel to the fire of Ernie Carpenter’s growing conspiracy theory. Because by then, the Cochise County homicide detective was hot on the trail of the possibility that Burton Kimball, Ivy Patterson, and Yuri Malakov might all be in it together.

Detective Carpenter was growing more and more convinced that the three of them, acting in concert, had murdered Harold Lamm Patterson.

FOR A while after she went back up to her room, Holly sat on the bed barely allowing herself to breathe. No wonder people thought she was crazy. She really was crazy. In her mind’s eye, it was as though two parallel videotapes were running in tandem, the one from long ago and the other from Tuesday. The old one was horrifying and real. Although the colors had turned to sepia like the rusty shades of old pictures in a museum collection, the faces were still recognizable. Holly knew now who those people were. All of them.

The other was in living color, although the clouds overhead had covered the dark red cliffs of Juniper Flats in a misty gray wool blanket. First there was her father telling her the real story, while from deep inside her came the first faint rustlings of recognition and remembrance. And then the tape ended, abruptly, as though cut off in mid-sentence. After that vivid mountaintop scene there was nothing but the warm, sweet, comfortable oblivion of forgetting. After that came an unreasoning anger that her father hadn’t come as he had said he would, that he had once again betrayed her.

But that was silly. This time, she realized he hadn’t let her down at all. He had been there in the library, just as he had said he would be. He had offered to make amends, to make things right.

And she had forgotten it somehow. That was the part that didn’t make any sense, unless she had been made to forget it.

As she sat there, she tried her best to convince herself that she was wrong, that the sudden shock of panic that had overwhelmed her in the kitchen had to be some kind of horrible mistake. But it wasn’t. As much as it hurt, it was no mistake.

She knew now that no chance meeting had caused Holly and hypnotherapist Amy Baxter to stumble across one another’s paths months earlier.

Amy must have targeted her, come looking for her deliberately.

Holly’s fall from grace as well as her intermittent drug-use woes had been well publicized among Hollywood insiders. Amy’s offer of help and much-needed counseling had been a precious lifeline to someone whose telephone calls were no longer returned and whose longtime agent had just cut her loose.

And after hearing about Holly’s rocky relation ship with her family, after learning about the Rocking P, Amy had been only too eager to put Holly in touch with Rex Rogers. Of course, those two weren’t exactly mere nodding acquaintances.

As the People article had pointed out, they had worked together on several separate cases and won monetary settlements in most of them.

When she had first seen the magazine piece, Holly had been naively proud that Amy and Rex had been able to find so many other people to help other people just like her. She had thought that, with Amy as a partner and with the Rocking P as the site for a treatment center, she, too, would be able to make a contribution to their pioneering work.

But now, for the first time, she saw it for what it really was-a scam. How many of the families mentioned in the article had paid damages for something that wasn’t necessarily true? How many of the supposed memories were being artificially augmented, Holly wondered, and how much had each of their families payed up to bury the past?

Amy Baxter may have started out in life as a scholarship/charity case from the wrong side of the tracks, but she was well on her way toward amassing a fortune from a very lucrative practice, especially with Rex as her sidekick. If she happened to turn up a family with enough money to make it worthwhile, some of that money was bound to find its way to their treatment center; she and Rex could soon settle into partnership with a self-sustaining cottage industry of counseling the victims and suing the perpetrators.

The silence of the house nudged its way through Holly’s solitary musings. Rex and Amy must still be out somewhere, maybe together, maybe separately. But when one or the other of them came back, Isabel was bound to tell them what had happened in the kitchen. If Amy once realized Holly knew the truth…

The sense of her own danger came back again, as strong or stronger than when it first struck her in the kitchen. But if her friend Amy was really the enemy, where in God’s name could Holly turn for help?

In the end, she was forced to beg for aid from the least likely source, her cousin Burton Kimball. Maybe he was a wimp, but she didn’t know anyone else to ask.

Standing by the old-fashioned dial-type phone on the table in Cosa Viejo’s upstairs corridor, and keeping her voice low lest she be overheard, Holly tried calling Burton’s office. His secretary told her he was out, most likely for the rest of the after noon. Could she take a message? No, no message.

Even more frightened, Holly tried to think of another solution. Was it possible, with everything that was going on, that Burton might have taken the day off? Pulling open the drawer in the table, she searched through the phone book until her trembling fingers finally located the Kimball’s home number. A woman answered after only one ring.

“Who is this?” Holly asked.

“Linda Kimball. Who’s this?”

Holly had never met the woman Burton had married, but this was bound to be Burton’s wife.

“Is your husband there?” Holly asked, rushing on in a strangled whisper.

“Ivy?” Linda said. “is that you? Are you all right? You sound strange.”

Ivy! Holly had both envied and hated Ivy all her life. Ivy was the good girl, the favorite, the one who never got her clothes dirty; who never made mud pies out of eggs from the henhouse, who never thought up practical jokes to pull on other people. And yet, until Linda Kimball mistook Holly’s voice for Ivy’s, it had never dawned on Holly how much they were alike, how much they sounded alike.

“I “I’m not Ivy; I’m Holly,” she managed. “I’ve got to talk to your husband. Right away.

“What about?”

“About his father; about mine.”

“Burton isn’t home,” Linda said, her voice suddenly closed and flat. “He isn’t here, and I have no idea when he’ll be back.”

“Where did he go? I’ve got to see him now It’s important.”

“As soon as he gets back, I’ll have him call you.”

“Don’t do that. He can’t call here.”

“How can he get back in touch with you then?

“I don’t think he can,” Holly Patterson said “because by then it’ll be too late. By then I’ll be dead.”

With that, she hung up the phone. She looked up and down the hall. The house was still unnaturally silent, but even then she heard the crunch of tires on the gravel drive outside.

Panicked, Holly knew she had to get out. Now.

That was the only way to save herself. Holding her breath, she crept back down the stairs, grateful for the strip of carpeting that covered the hard wood risers.

Pausing on the ground floor, she heard Isabel working industriously in the kitchen, chopping something, singing under her breath, but there were voices outside. Rex and Amy were walking up to the back door from the garage. They’d be there any moment.

Still wearing her nightgown, robe, and fur-lined bedroom slippers, Holly tiptoed across the slate entryway and let herself out the front door. She walked bent over, hoping that, by staying close to the ground, she could avoid being seen by anyone, including Isabel’s gardener husband. She crept around the far side of the building and made for the ivy-covered terraces at the back of the house where she had once tried to seduce poor Bobby Corbett.

Without looking back, she scrambled down the four-foot drops between levels of terrace. At every step, the thick, straggly vines reached out to entangle her feet and send her tumbling, but she kept on. At last she came to the far end of the property, where a barbed-wire fence barred her way. Beyond that lay the first few far-flung boulder massive hunks of rock waste that had bounced high and fallen wide as they tumbled down the steeply angled flanks of the dump.

As Holly tried to wiggle through the fence, sharp wire barbs caught on threads of her terry cloth robe. Unable to free it at once and intent only on reaching the dump, Holly slipped out of the robe and went on, leaving the white cloth dangling on the fence behind her like a June bug’s discarded shell.

It was desperately cold that day, but even with nothing on but her nightgown, Holly didn’t notice.

She had eyes only for the massive multicolored dump with the achingly blue sky arching far above it. All her life, that dump had exerted a strange, inexplicable pull on Holly Patterson.

When she reached the bottom, she hesitated, but only for a moment. For all her life, she had wondered what was on top of that dump. Today, to save her life, she was going to find out.

She was halfway up when Amy’s voice found her. “Holly! What are you doing? Come down! Come down right now before you hurt yourself!”

Holly closed her eyes, trying to resist the inescapable pull of that beckoning voice.

“Come… down… right… now!”

Holly wanted desperately not to hear that voice, not to respond, but she did. Without even having to leave the bottom level of the terrace, Amy began to count.

“Ten,” her voice called out in that powerfully soothing cadence. “Nine, eight, seven…

Slowly, the numbers worked their inevitable way down to zero. They burrowed their way deep into Holly’s consciousness like so many writhing worms, devouring both her will and her new found memories.

When Amy’s commanding voice stopped Holly’s ascent, she had been near the lip of the two hundred-foot-high dump, climbing fearlessly Halfway down, she happened to glance at the desert floor one hundred feet below her. She gasped with shock to see how high she was, how far she had climbed. Trembling with fear in every limb, she had all she could do to continue down.

Somehow, for a few moments at least, Holly Patterson had forgotten that she was desperately afraid of heights.

Joanna came back from lunch to a world of pandemonium. The two brothers from Kansas Settlement who had tried to murder one another with baseball bats the night before were once again on a friendly basis. Despite the fact that one of the two was still hospitalized with injuries, they were ready to be ruled by brotherly love. Their mother, who had not attended the birthday fracas, had negotiated a peace treaty and hired a lawyer.

When Joanna picked up her messages, one was from a Wilcox attorney letting her know that his Kansas Settlement clients were prepared to sue the county and the two deputies who had arrested them with false arrest and police brutality. A second message, from the county attorney, related to that same issue.

“What am I supposed to do about this?” Joanna asked.

Kristin shrugged.

“Who usually handles this kind of thing?”

“Mr. Sanders, usually. But he’s on vacation,” Kristin added with only the smallest of smirks.

“Who takes care of those problems when Mr. Sanders isn’t available?”

“Nobody else that I know of. He’s been doing it ever since I got here. He also usually attends the Multi-Jurisdictional meetings, and there’s one of those starting at two. Are you going?”

“There isn’t a note about that MJ meeting on my calendar,” Joanna said, pointing to the noted wall calendar she had posted in order to keep track of where she was supposed to be and when. There was no Magic Marker notation in the afternoon slot.

“I must’ve forgotten,” Kristin said. “Sorry.”

“Like hell you did,” Joanna muttered to herself after the door closed. It was going to take time to either shape Kristin up or get rid of her, but Joanna couldn’t afford to launch into something like that when she was already up to her neck in current-crisis management.

Sitting back in the chair, Joanna closed her eyes for a moment. She felt isolated and alone. It was fine to go have lunch with Angie or Marianne, but within the department she was on her own. It was hard not to envision that she had stumbled into a den of vipers, all of them waiting for her to make the smallest misstep.

She realized that having Martin Sanders leave without even bothering to discuss the situation constituted a real blow to her credibility. She had tried to talk Dick Voland into staying, because, with one supervisor out the door, she realized the need of maintaining experienced officers around her to give the department the appearance of continuity. But she also needed an ally, someone on her side who wasn’t going to be eagerly awaiting or even engineering her first public tumble.

The only problem was, she couldn’t think of anywhere to turn for help. Voland would work with her, but only grudgingly, and only so long as he perceived her to be holding up under pressure. At the first sign of weakness, he’d be all over her like flies on crap. The same held true for Ernie Carpenter.

For right now, her only choice was to trudge along as best she could. Until she could forge some in-house alliances, it was important to cover all the necessary bases, wear all the hats.

She picked up the intercom and buzzed Kristin.

“Call the MJ folks and let them know I’ve changed my mind. I’ll be sitting in on their Multi-Jurisdictional meeting after all.”

Without complaint, Linda Kimball had spent all morning doing what she regarded as her wifely duty. That was her job. She made one phone call after another, working her way through the con founding layers of bureaucracy, finding out when the two bodies were likely to be released for burial, making arrangements with Norm Higgins for a private service for Thornton Kimball, and politely dodging Norm’s questions about services for Uncle Harold.

Norm Higgins had hinted that it would be a lot simpler for all concerned and a lot less expensive to have one joint service for both men, but Linda had nixed that harebrained idea. The funeral for Thornton Kimball would be absolutely private for family members only. Anyone who tried to turn her husband’s grief into some kind of spectacle would have Linda herself to deal with. As for questions about Uncle Harold’s service, she told Norm, in no uncertain terms, that she was sure Ivy would be in touch to take care of those matters just as soon as she possibly could. If Norm Higgins knew about Ivy’s inappropriate wedding arrangements, he had the good sense not to broach that touchy subject with Linda Kimball. When the phone rang between calls, Linda was taken aback to find Holly Patterson on the line In fact, once she realized who it was, Linda’s first instinct was to hang up. After all, hadn’t Holly Patterson already caused enough trouble for everyone concerned? But Linda’s overall courtesy and good nature won out. Instead of hanging up, she listened.

When the call was over, she stood with her hand on the receiver for only a moment or two while she made up her mind. A sincere request for help was something Linda Kimball was almost physically incapable of ignoring.

Without giving herself a chance to change her mind or back out, she combed her hair, put on lipstick and a jacket, and headed for Cosa Viejo.

She presented herself at the front door at precisely half-past two and smiled pleasantly at the uniformed Mexican woman who opened the door.

“Why, Isabel Gonzales. I haven’t seen you since your mother passed away in the hospital three years ago. I had no idea you worked here.”

Isabel nodded. “For almost a year now. Jaime and me both. It’s a good job.”

“I’m looking for Holly Patterson. Is she here?

Another woman appeared over Isabel Gonzales shoulder. “Who is it, Isabel?”

“Mrs. Kimball,” Isabel answered. “To see Miss Patterson.”

“I’m Holly’s therapist, Amy Baxter,” the other woman said, moving fully into Linda’s view and easing Isabel aside. “Is there something I can do for you?”

“I came to see Holly.”

“I’m afraid Holly isn’t up to seeing anyone just now. She hasn’t been feeling well, with what happened to her father and all. I’ve prescribed total bed rest.”

“But she called me,” Linda Kimball protested. She called earlier this afternoon and asked me to stop by.”

A look of seeming dismay flickered briefly across Amy Baxter’s countenance and then disappeared, replaced by a determined shake of her head. “That can’t be,” Amy said.

But it is,” Linda returned civilly. “I came as soon as I could.”

“I’m afraid you don’t understand, Mrs. Kimball. The woman is seriously ill. It simply isn’t possible for her to see you or anybody else.”

Linda Kimball was an experienced mother whose finely honed instincts warned her whenever one or both of her children was even tempted to tell a lie. Although the reason for it eluded her, she felt the blind panic Linda’s unexpected appearance at the door of Cosa Viejo had engendered in the other woman’s supposedly composed expression.

What’s going on? Linda wondered.

“I’ll be dead by then.” That’s what Holly Patterson had said on the phone not threateningly, as if dying were something within her own power.

She wasn’t crying out with the plaintive voice of someone contemplating suicide and hoping for a last-minute rescue.

No, she spoke with the fatalistic, matter-of-fact despair of someone caught in the middle of a railroad trestle with an oncoming train speeding toward her.

This was Bisbee, a small and supposedly safe community, a town where general wisdom assumed that murders weren’t supposed to happen.

But murders do happen here, Linda thought grimly, more often than she liked to believe possible.

Astute enough to realize that forcing her way into the house would do nothing to help the situation, Linda backed off at once. She donned her best hospital-volunteer mask-the one she used to comfort the grieving relatives and friends she often found huddled outside sickrooms in the polished corridors of Copper Queen Hospital.

“Just let Holly know I stopped by to see her, would you?” Linda said with a sincerely concerned smile. “I’ll be glad to drop by later on this evening if she’s feeling up to it by then.”

“I’ll do that,” Amy Baxter said.

With her knees knocking under her, Linda Kimball marched back to the car. She was frightened Without knowing quite what it was, she realized she had uncovered something important. Whom should she tell about all this? she wondered. She had to tell someone.

As soon as she was outside the swinging electronic gates of Cosa Viejo, instead of going home, she turned right and headed straight for the Sheriff’s office out on Highway 80.

THE MJ meeting was dull as watching grass grow.

Max Foster, a vice detective from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, was the ranking officer for the Cochise County Multi-Jurisdictional Unit. Foster might have been a fine detective, but he was an incredibly poor public speaker. The meeting droned on and on. Even though the information was vitally important, Joanna wasn’t the only one fighting to stay awake. She was relieved when Kristin poked her head in the door and crooked a finger at her.

Probably the Kansas Settlement boys acting up again, Joanna thought, as she gathered her note pad and followed Kristin out the door.

“What is it?” she asked, as soon as they were in the corridor.

“Linda Kimball to see you,” Kristin said.

“Again.”

Linda was waiting and pacing the confines of the reception area. “I’m doing it again.” She smiled apologetically. “You’re probably getting pretty tired of me by now.”

“Come on in,” Joanna said, gesturing Linda into her corner office. “What seems to be the problem?”

Linda barely waited for the door to finish closing behind them.

“I’ve just come from Cosa Viejo,” she said, “and I have a funny feeling something isn’t right over there. Something’s the matter with my husband’s cousin Holly.”

Joanna suppressed a smile. “Considering what all’s gone on this past week,” she replied, “the idea that something’s the matter with Holly Patterson is hardly news.”

But by the time an anxious Linda Kimball finished recounting her story, even Joanna had to agree that what was happening at Cosa Viejo sounded disturbing.

“Someone should look into this, all right,” Joanna agreed. “If for no other reason but to ask a few questions.”

“Maybe it’s nothing,” Linda said. “Burton always says I’m forever jumping to conclusions, but the whole thing gave me a very bad feeling, an edgy feeling. What my mother used to call the willies.”

“Don’t worry,” Joanna said. “I’ll have someone check it out.”

When Linda left her office, Joanna went looking for both Richard Voland and Ernie Carpenter. Voland was in Wilcox talking to the two deputies involved in the Kansas Settlement problem. Carpenter had gone to Sierra Vista to make arrangements for shipping evidence off to the state crime lab for processing.

So much for delegating tasks to her second-and third-in-command, Joanna thought. She briefly considered sending one of the deputies by to check on Holly Patterson, but she thought better of it. A deputy would need to have some idea what to look for, what questions to ask. Unfortunately, Joanna had no idea what directions to give to any one else. In the end, she decided, like the Little Red Hen, to do it herself.

Picking up the intercom, Joanna buzzed Kristin.

“I’ll be out for a while,” she said. “If you hear from either Dick Voland or Ernie Carpenter, tell them I went to Cosa Viejo to see Holly Patterson.

Leave a message for both of them to get in touch with me as soon as they get back to town.”

It pleased her to be able to go in and out of her office by way of her own private entrance. Climbing into the county-owned Blazer, she felt as though she was beginning to have a handle on the scope of the job, both the pitfalls and the responsibilities.

There was plenty of hard work ahead and lots to learn, but she was a quick study. In her third full day on the job, Joanna Brady was actually beginning to feel like a sheriff.

She turned into the gates at Cosa Viejo, buzzed for admittance, and then parked outside. This time she went directly to the front entryway and rang the bell. Amy Baxter herself came to the door. “Why, Sheriff Brady,” she said, “I don’t believe we were expecting you.”

“Actually, I came to see Holly Patterson,” Joanna responded.

“Holly is resting right now,” Amy said, smiling and cordial, but firm. “She really isn’t in any condition to entertain visitors.”

“I’d still like to see her. I understand she seems to think herself in some kind of danger.”

“Holly in danger? Here? That’s absurd! She’s up in her room, safe as can be.”

“Let me see her then, just to set my mind at ease.”

Amy sighed and looked exasperated. “Well, I don’t suppose it can hurt anything, but I’m afraid Rex will insist on being in attendance. Wait here.”

“That’s fine,” Joanna said.

Moments later, she was led up to the second floor and back to Holly Patterson’s room, where a man who introduced himself as Rex Rogers was waiting in the hallway. He led her inside.

Once more the heavy curtains were pulled almost shut, and once again the room was shrouded in drapery gloom. Dressed in a sweat suit and bedroom slippers, Holly sat rocking back and forth in her old-fashioned rocking chair. Her hands rested limp and open in her lap. Her face was lax and expressionless.

“Holly,” Rex Rogers said, gently shaking her shoulder. “There’s someone here to see you.”

As if she were waking from a drug-induced stupor, Holly Patterson’s eyes fluttered open.

“What?” she asked vaguely.

“Someone to see you,” Rogers repeated. “The sheriff. I believe she wants to ask you some questions.”

“How are you?” Joanna asked. “I heard you were under the weather.”

“I’m fine,” Holly answered unconvincingly.

“What happened to your hands?”

Holly looked down at the hands that lay in her lap. Joanna had noticed the heel of the palm on both hands was badly skinned, as though she had taken a bad fall and had used her hands to cushion herself. The damage was new enough that the abrasions were still leaking fluid, but Holly looked down at the injuries with surprised dismay.

“I don’t know,” she said tentatively. “They hurt but I don’t know what happened to them.”

“She fell down,” Rex supplied brusquely. “Holly’s always falling down like that. She’s easily distracted.”

“Where did she fall?”

“Outside,” Rex answered again. “Off one of the terraces.”

“Isn’t she capable of answering questions on her own?” Joanna asked. “Where did you fall, Holly? : How did it happen?”

Rex Rogers grimaced with annoyance while Holly Patterson looked at Joanna with strangely vacant eyes. “I don’t know,” she said, without ever stopping rocking. “I don’t remember.”

“But it happened just a little while ago,” Joanna insisted. “Look. Your hands are still bleeding.”

“I don’t know,” Holly repeated hopelessly. “I just don’t know.”

Joanna turned back to Rex Rogers. “What kinds of medication is this woman on?” she asked.

“How should I know?” Rex Rogers answered sharply. “I’m her lawyer, not her doctor.”

“What seems to be the problem?” Amy Baxter asked from the doorway of the room.

“Holly has hurt herself,” Joanna answered. “Recently enough that the palm of her hands are still seeping serum, but she can’t remember how it happened. Is she on medication of some kind, or has she maybe suffered an injury, a concussion perhaps?”

“I tried to tell you downstairs that she wasn’t in any condition to receive visitors. You were the one who insisted on seeing her.” The phone rang out in the hall, interrupting her statement.

“I believe she should be examined by a physician,” Joanna said.

“That’s ridiculous. I’m telling you she’s fine.”

Isabel Gonzales appeared behind Amy Baxter in the corridor. “The phone’s for you, Mr. Rogers,” she said. “Burton Kimball.”

Amy nodded to Rex. “You take care of that; I’ll handle this.”

Rex Rogers dodged out of the room, leaving the three women there together. For some time, the only sound was the creaking of Holly’s rocker on the polished hardwood floor.

“Is she being held here against her will?” Joanna asked suddenly.

“Against her will? Of course not! What kind of preposterous idea is that?”

Joanna bent her head close to Holly’s. “Look at your hands,” she said kindly. “You’ve hurt your self. Don’t you think you ought to see a doctor about them?”

She held Holly’s limp hands up in the air. In the dim light, Holly examined them as though they were strange appendages having nothing at all to do with her own body.

“How did I hurt my hands, Amy?” Holly asked in a strangely disembodied voice. “Do you know?”

“You fell, Holly,” Amy answered firmly. “You fell down outside, just a little while ago.”

“Why can’t I remember then?” Holly asked, still studying her hands. “It’s weird not to be able to remember.”

“Maybe you hit your head when you fell, and that’s why you can’t remember,” Joanna suggested. “The hospital is only a few blocks away. It wouldn’t be any trouble at all for me to take you there and have a doctor take a look at you.”

“Oh, go if you want to,” Amy said with sudden irritation. “I won’t stand in your way.”

“No,” Holly said, doubtfully at first but then with stronger conviction. “I think I’m okay. It’s okay. I’ll just stay here.”

Amy Baxter smiled at Joanna in triumph. “See there?” she said.

Joanna reached in the pocket of her blazer and located a business card, one of her old ones from the Davis Insurance Agency. On the back of it, she scrawled her home phone number as well as the word “sheriff.”

“Feel free to call me anytime,” she said.

Holly Patterson took the card but dropped it into her lap without even glancing at it.

“Is that all, Sheriff Brady?” Amy Baxter prompted.

Joanna nodded. “Yes,” she said. “For the time being.”

“Good,” Amy said, settling onto the edge of Holly’s bed. “Mrs. Gonzales can show you out.”

Isabel, waiting in the hall, led the way down the stairs. “What’s going on up there?” Joanna asked.

The Hispanic woman shook her head. “I don’t know. If it had been up to me, I would have let her go. She only wanted to see what was up on the dump. She’s been sitting in her room staring at it and worrying herself sick about it for days. She was already that far. What would it have hurt to let her go the rest of the way?”

“Holly wanted to see what was on top of the dump?” Joanna asked. “Why?”

“Who knows? She keeps on asking me about it. What’s up there? What’s it like? I told her I didn’t know.”

“But she climbed up it?”

“Yes.”

By then they were outside the house. “Where?”

Isabel walked far enough to see the dump around the corner of the house. “There,” she said, pointing. “She was almost up at the top, just above that little mesquite halfway up.”

Joanna shaded her eyes, but she saw nothing.

The dump was a dangerous and barren wasteland that had barely changed for as long as she could remember. Why would Holly Patterson want to climb it?

“What’s wrong with her, Isabel?” Joanna asked.

Isabel Gonzales shook her head. “She’s been bad all along, ever since she’s been here; not eating very much; barely sleeping. All she does is sit in that chair of hers, rocking and rocking. But she’s been worse these last few days, ever since her dad came to see her.”

“Harold Patterson came here?” Joanna demanded. “When?”

“Tuesday afternoon,” Isabel answered. “He got here just before I left to go vote.”

Joanna instantly recognized the discrepancy.

Holly’s lawyer had claimed she tried to kill Burton because he had talked Harold out of settling and out of keeping the scheduled appointment with Holly. But the old man had kept that appointment after all.

“Did Ernie Carpenter ever talk to you about that? Does he know Harold Patterson stopped by here that day?”

“Nobody’s talked to me about it at all.”

He should have, Joanna thought. “But go on with your story,” she said.

“Well, this morning I thought things were better. Miss Patterson even came down to the kitchen for coffee. But as soon as she saw the paper, she fell all to pieces. I thought for a minute she was having a heart attack. It scared me to death. You saw her. Now she’s back to rocking again.”

“You said something about a paper,” Joanna said. “What paper?”

“Today’s Bisbee Bee,” Isabel answered.

“What happened then?”

Isabel shrugged. “She looked at the paper, and then she went all weird. After a minute, she went running back upstairs. I thought she was fine. I went back to work. A few minutes later, Mr. Rogers and Miss Baxter came back from lunch. I told Miss Baxter what happened. She went up to talk to Miss Patterson. A few minutes later, I heard the commotion outside. I saw it all from the kitchen window. Miss Patterson was up on the dump, and Miss Baxter was trying to get her to come down.

That’s when she fell. I was afraid she’d break her neck, but I guess she only skinned her hands.”

“Where exactly did she fall?”

“When she was climbing back down the dump. A rock must have slipped out from under her foot.”

“She fell on the dump, not the terraces?”

“She wasn’t anywhere near the terraces.”

Joanna felt the skin prickle on the back of her neck. For a long moment, she stood looking at the somber brown facade of Cosa Viejo. Linda Kimball was right. Something was definitely wrong inside those brown stuccoed walls, and Holly Patterson was in danger.

“Isabel,” Joanna said, “I need to drive out of here because they’re expecting me to leave. But if I came back on foot, could you let me in and get me up to Holly’s room without anyone seeing me?”

“Sure,” Isabel answered. “Why don’t you park down by my house? Take that little dirt road just outside the gate. It goes around the wall to the back. Park down there and then come up the stairs through the terraces. That’s the way I come to work. I’ll meet you at the basement door and take you up the inside back stairway.”

Joanna nodded. “Good,” she said. “I’ll be right back. Don’t tell anyone I’m coming.”

“Oh, no,” Isabel Gonzales agreed. “I wouldn’t think of it.”

By THE time Joanna parked the Blazer on the far side of the Cosa Viejo caretaker’s cottage, she had reached only one firm decision-she would attempt to lure Holly Patterson out of the house so she could talk to her. If Holly was in mortal danger, as she had hinted to Linda Kimball, then the source of that danger had to be the people who were there in the house with her.

Other than the fact they were liars, Joanna had no other concrete charges to lay at the door of either Amy Baxter or Rex Rogers, but Rex’s lie about Holly falling off the terrace had been a direct falsehood.

Amy’s was more subtle. She had simply gone along with the idea that Harold Patterson had never showed up for his scheduled appointment with Holly when in fact he had. Both times. Holly’s attempt at vehicular manslaughter-regardless of whether or not the city of Bisbee called it negligent driving-had been based on that erroneous premise, Holly’s mistaken belief that her father had once again let her down.

Halfway up the cracked flagstone steps that led through the terraced backyard, Joanna pulled off her pumps and stuck them in the pockets of her blazer. Within three steps, she felt the distinctive crackle of a run that started at the back of her heel and stopped somewhere midthigh. So much for the brand-new pair of panty hose she had put on that morning.

She could see now the very real wisdom behind Ernie Carpenter’s system of stashing a selection of extra clothing wherever it might be needed. As soon as she had a chance and as soon as she had that many extra clothes-she’d have to follow his example with a suitcase of her own.

When Joanna reached the highest level of terraces, she saw Isabel standing beside what was evidently a basement door, beckoning her to hurry. “This way,” she mouthed.

“They’re in the front room talking,” she whispered, as soon as Joanna was close enough. “Arguing, really. If we go up this back way, they won’t hear a thing.”

The back stairs were long, steep, and uncarpeted. They had to walk close to the ends of the risers in order to keep the boards from squeaking noisily underfoot. At the second landing, Isabel paused to catch her breath. In the otherwise-silent house, the only sound was an eerie rhythmic creaking, a sound Joanna eventually recognized as coming from Holly’s rocking chair. It was there in the background, like the steady but annoying dripping of a constantly leaking faucet.

“I’m glad someone is helping Miss Patterson Isabel Gonzales gasped between breaths. “I feel sorry for her.”

“Why?”

The older woman shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s like something is weighing her down and crushing the life out of her.”

“Maybe it is,” Joanna replied.

They climbed on then, coming out through a door in the upper corridor just across from Holly Patterson’s room. “I can handle it from here,” Joanna said.

“You go on back downstairs. Hope fully, they won’t know you helped me.”

Isabel nodded and started back down at once.

She didn’t care much for either Rex Rogers or Amy Baxter, but it would be a shame if she and Jaime lost their jobs with that nice Mr. Enders.

Cosa Viejo provided them both with a living wage as well as a free place to live. In a one-horse town like Bisbee, where mining had disappeared and jobs were scarce as hen’s teeth, that wasn’t some thing to throw away lightly.

Unsure how Holly would react to her sudden reappearance, Joanna waited several minutes before she emerged from the landing and crossed the hallway. She wanted to give Isabel plenty of time to distance herself from any difficulty that might arise.

And all the time she stood there waiting, the eerie rocking continued.

Finally, after checking the corridor, Joanna darted across the hallway. To her surprise, when she tried turning the knob, she found the door was locked. That gave some validity to the theory that Holly Patterson was indeed being held against her will.

A skeleton key lay on a nearby oak hall table.

Joanna tried it, and the door swung open, revealing a room in which nothing had changed. Joanna’s business card still lay exactly where it had fallen. Holly hadn’t moved at all. Her two scraped hands still lay hopelessly in her lap, while her Vacant eyes stared through the small opening in the otherwise-drawn drapes.

“Holly,” Joanna said softly, her voice barely rising above the incessant racket of the rocker.

Slowly, like a television camera doing a gradual pan around a room, Holly Patterson’s face and eyes swung away from the window. Her questioning gaze settled on Joanna’s face with a puzzled frown. “Who are you?” she asked.

The question startled Joanna. She had been in that very room scant minutes earlier, speaking to this same woman, asking her questions. But now Holly obviously had no memory of it. Joanna was as much a stranger as if she had never laid eyes on her. Joanna felt with rising certainty that chemicals of some kind were responsible for Holly Patterson’s faulty memory.

“I’m Joanna Brady,” she answered, speaking calmly, trying to instill confidence. “I’m the new sheriff. I came to talk to you, to see if there was anything I could do to help. Would you like to go for a walk?”

“A walk? No!” Holly shook her head vigorously. “Amy wouldn’t want me to do that. She doesn’t like it when I go for walks.”

“Amy wouldn’t have to know,” Joanna said conspiratorially. “We could just walk down the back stairs and out the door. She wouldn’t have any idea we were gone.”

“No, I’d better not. I’d get in trouble.”

Holly’s voice was plaintive, like that of a child who, while already being punished for one misdeed, fears the additional retribution of another.

As Joanna watched, two tears squeezed out of the corners of Holly Patterson’s eyes and ran down her sunken cheeks. There is something seriously out of whack here, Joanna told herself, but she still couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was.

There were no visible restraints on the rocking chair, but there could just as well have been. Holly refused to budge, but her tearful refusal did nothing but strengthen Joanna’s determination to somehow entice Holly out of the house.

Suddenly, she remembered what Isabel had told her earlier, about Holly wanting to see the top of the dump. Maybe that would serve as enough of a temptation. “Would you like to go up on the dump?” Joanna asked.

Joanna’s educated guess was right on the money. Holly’s rocking ceased abruptly. A look of heartbreaking eagerness settled over her face.

“You could take me up there? Really?”

“Yes. And you wouldn’t have to climb, either,” Joanna answered quickly. “That’s too dangerous. I could take you in my car, in my Blazer. I’m sure, if I called ahead and asked, the P.D. watchman would give us a tour.”

“Yes, please,” Holly Patterson said avidly, staggering to her feet and then swaying back and forth as though about to black out from the sudden effort. “I’d like that very much.”

“Then we have to move quickly,” Joanna cautioned. “Down the back stairs. I’ll lead the way.

Follow me, and stay close to the wall so the stairs don’t creak so much.”

Once Holly was out of the room, Joanna relocked the door and returned the key to its place on the table while Holly stood in the middle of the hallway, watching her in a state of confused bewilderment.

“This way,” Joanna said, taking her by the arm. “Hurry.”

As they started down the stairs, Joanna realized the whole house now echoed with sudden, deafening silence. The ever-present sound of the rocker was stilled. In its absence, the creaking floors, many times amplified, seemed to echo off the 4walls and ceilings.

What if we’re caught? Joanna wondered worriedly. It was bad enough to have two of her deputies charged with false arrest in the Kansas Settlement case. It would be far worse to have the new sheriff herself up on similar charges.

When they stepped outside, Joanna was shocked by how cold it seemed. Running up and down the stairs had left her overheated and winded, but she at least had the wool blazer. Holly had been sitting in a very warm room, and she was wearing nothing but loose-fitting sweats and a pair of bedroom slippers. They were barely out the door when Holly shivered and hunched her thin shoulders against the cold.

“Here,” Joanna said, shrugging off her blazer.

“Put this on. The car’s this way.”

But instead of heading in the way Joanna pointed, Holly Patterson set off determinedly in the other direction, winding her way down through the terrace, heading toward the towering dump, gliding along like a sleepwalker, drawn forward by some invisible and inexplicable force. Joanna darted after her. “The car’s over here,” she insisted.

When Holly still ignored her, Joanna grasped her arm and tried to turn her bodily in the right direction. It was no use. Holly Patterson, headed straight for the dump, was as unstoppable as a loaded freight train on rails. She shook off Joanna’s grasp and continued forward with single minded focus.

“Where are you going?” Joanna asked.

“I’ve got to see if he’s up there,” Holly answered with surprising animation. “I’ve got to know.”

“If who’s up there?” Joanna demanded.

Behind them, a door to the house slammed open, then closed. “Hey!” Amy Baxter shouted. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Come back.”

The sound of that distinctive voice seemed to galvanize Holly Patterson. Her eyes widened. She leaped forward like a startled hare. Joanna was momentarily left behind by Holly’s first sudden burst of speed.

Part of Joanna’s difficulty lay in her bare feet.

Holly Patterson’s house slippers, poor as they were, gave her somewhat better mobility and traction.

Joanna’s feet were cold and bleeding. The rough surface of every bit of gravel cut painfully into her soles. She whimpered with every step.

She considered stopping and giving up, but Holly Patterson was still hurrying forward, and Amy Baxter was coming across the backyard toward them at a dead run.

Joanna turned and limped after Holly. She caught her when they reached the tightly strung fence at the bottom of the dump. Holly stood there, tugging desperately on what seemed to be a bathrobe that had somehow become entangled in the tightly strung wire.

“Go on through,” Joanna urged. “Hurry. If you want the robe, I’ll bring it.”

With the familiarity of a country-raised child, Holly wiggled through the fence. Naturally, one barb caught on Joanna’s blazer and left a jagged rip down the center of the back, but that barely slowed Holly’s forward motion. And as Joanna wormed her way through the fence, she tore her own blouse in the process. As promised, she wrenched the robe loose from the fence and pulled it on over her shoulders, grateful for some covering to ward off the bone-chilling cold.

By the time Joanna reached the bottom of the dump, Holly was already scrambling up the steep incline. Conscious once more of her painful, bleeding feet, Joanna paused, but only for a moment before she, too, began the difficult ascent.

“Holly!” Amy Baxter’s voice commanded from behind them, from the other side of the fence.

“Come back!”

Joanna saw it happen. It was as though an invisible choke chain were being pulled taut around Holly’s neck. She slowed her desperate flight.

Slowed first, and then stopped.

“Come back down!”

Joanna had been scrabbling along behind Holly, picking her way as best she could over and around the huge boulders, trying not to dislodge anything, and trying not to think about what would happen if one of those huge stones came loose and rolled back down the steeply angled incline.

They were only a third of the way up the slope now. Joanna had seen no sign of a weapon on Amy Baxter’s person, but Holly’s fear was palpable absolutely real and overwhelmingly contagious. Joanna didn’t have to see a gun to understand they were both in terrible danger, that they had to get away.

“Come on, Holly,” Joanna urged, overtaking the no-longer-moving woman. “Don’t stop now.” But Holly was already making the first hesitant motions toward retracing her steps.

“Don’t you want to see what’s up here?” Joanna taunted, trying her best to counter the almost magnetic effect Amy Baxter’s voice seemed to have on Holly Patterson.

“She already kept you from doing this once,” Joanna continued. “You’re not going to let her take it away from you again, are you? Not when you’re this close.”

Holly looked at Joanna, as though trying to make sense of what she was saying, but now she stopped and didn’t move in either direction. Joanna dared to look back down, wondering why Amy’s shouting had suddenly stopped. On the far side of the fence, Amy Baxter and Rex Rogers seemed to be standing and arguing.

“Come on, Holly,” Joanna urged again, knowing the respite wouldn’t last long. “Why won’t she let you climb up here? What’s Amy Baxter afraid of?”

And then, miraculously, Holly was moving in the right direction again, climbing slowly uphill with Joanna scrambling along at her side. Off in the distance, she could hear the sound of a wailing siren, of some siren, but Joanna didn’t know the sounds well enough to differentiate between one emergency vehicle and another. She couldn’t tell whether what was coming was a police car of some kind or one of Bisbee’s fire trucks.

And even if it was a police vehicle, Joanna thought despairingly, it wouldn’t be coming for her. How could it? She had told Kristin where she was going, but she hadn’t expected this kind of difficulty.

“Holly!” Amy was shouting again. “Are you listening to me?”

Joanna looked down. Rex Rogers was no longer visible, but Amy was. She had crawled through the fence and even now was at the base of the dump and starting to climb.

“Holly,” she ordered. “I told you to stop! Come back! I want to talk to you.”

Holly slowed once more. “Don’t listen to her,” Joanna urged. “Shut her out! Sing something.”

Already, Holly’s eyes were starting to glaze over. The pull of Amy Baxter’s voice was so strong as to be almost irresistible. In desperation, Joanna Brady began to sing the only song she could remember at a moment’s notice. A hiking song, from her days in the Girl Scouts. She sang it at the top of her panting, air-starved lungs.

“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, Ninety-nine bottles of beer. You take one down and pass it around, Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall.”

And to her amazement, Holly Patterson miraculously began to climb once more.

By then Joanna was slightly in the lead, and by then the top of the dump was only a few feet away. Joanna was first over the top, pulling herself up over a steep lip and then falling down the far side into what was evidently a rough roadway.

On the other side of the road was a raised ridge, a bern, that formed an inner boundary along the entire length of road as far as the eye could see.

Staying low and slipping her automatic out of the shoulder holster, Joanna belly-crawled back to the edge and looked down. Holly had stopped again, cowering in an eroded dip behind a precariously perched boulder only inches from the top.

Below them Amy Baxter was climbing steadily.

“Come on down, Holly,” Amy was grunting between breaths. “I won’t hurt you.”

“She’s lying,” Joanna yelled. “Don’t listen to her. Come on! Up here!”

But once more Holly seemed frozen, unable to move.

“Give me your hand!” Joanna ordered. “Now!”

When Holly failed to budge, Joanna reached down and grasped Holly’s wrist. With a surge of strength Joanna had no idea she possessed, she hauled Holly up and over the edge. She tumbled down the lip and landed with a breathless thump.

Joanna tumbled after her and lifted the fallen woman to her feet.

“Go,” Joanna urged, pointing toward the ridge and drawing the Colt. She wasn’t sure whether or not Amy was armed but if there was a possibility weapons would be involved, Joanna wanted Holly behind her, out of the line of fire. The ridge on the other side of the road seemed to offer the only possible cover. But Holly seemed incapable of in dependent action. She stared at Joanna uncomprehendingly and didn’t move.

“Come on, then,” Joanna said, grabbing Holly’s hand again and dragging her forward. As they started up and over the side of the bern, there was a clatter of dislodged rock from the side of the dump. At that critical instant, Joanna glanced back over her shoulder.

Rather than being just a bern, the ridge was actually the outside of a retaining wall for one of the series of rectangular copper leaching ponds that covered most of the surface of the dump. On the outside, the retaining wall was simply a rocky ridge, but the inside was covered with a slick layer of slimy, greaselike silt.

In desperation to reach safety and to protect the seemingly helpless woman who was now in her charge, Joanna had been moving as fast as possible. Now, as they topped the bern, there was nothing at all to break their forward momentum.

Staggering like a pair of inept skiers, they skidded down the slippery bank and into the water, where they landed, floundering and sputtering, in the chemically saturated water of a Phelps Dodge leaching pond.

THE FIRST shock of landing in frigid water took Joanna’s breath away. For a moment, she was too stunned to move. When she tried, her hands and knees slipped and slid on the oozy, slime-covered bottom. Finally, though, she managed to pull her self out of the evil-smelling water and back up onto the bern.

Grabbing Holly’s arm, she dragged her out as well and up onto the bank where they both lay gasping and spent. As soon as her head cleared she realized her gun was gone. Her brand-new First Edition Colt 2000 was lost somewhere in the whitish slime at the bottom of the coppery colored pool.

If Joanna had paused long enough to think about how cold the water was or how filled with God-knows-what kinds of chemicals, she never would have plunged back into the pond. But the semi-automatic was essential. Without a backup coming, she had to have a weapon.

Holding her breath against the assault of cold Joanna plowed back into the icy water, splashing through the mud in her numbed bare feet, using them to dredge through the thick sludge on the murky bottom. The harsh leaching chemicals burned fiercely in the lacerations on the bottoms of her bleeding feet, but she was grateful for the burning sensation. At least she could feel her feet again, and she used them to good advantage dragging them through the water.

Although it seemed much longer, it was only a matter of seconds before she smashed the end of her big toe on the grip of the missing weapon, and once she had it in her hand, it was all she could do to hold on to the slippery, slime-covered metal.

With fingers stiff and awkward with cold, she pulled the relatively clean tail of her blouse free of her skirt and used that to wipe off the muck from the Colt.

Her hands were shaking violently with the cold.

How long before hypothermia sets in? she wondered.

“Where are you, Holly?” Amy Baxter’s voice came again, calling from much closer now, from somewhere on the other side of the bern.

At the sound of her voice, Holly moaned like someone in desperate pain. She dropped to the ground and didn’t move.

“Come here,” Amy continued. “I only want to talk to you.”

“What’s going on?” Joanna demanded, falling down on the bern beside Holly, urging the woman to lower her head so it would be out of sight. “Why was she keeping you locked up? Why doesn’t she want you to get away?”

But Holly didn’t answer. She huddled next to Joanna, quaking with cold and saying nothing.

“Holly,” Joanna snapped. “Answer the damn question!”

“This has to be where it was,” Holly muttered through chattering teeth. “Right here. below where we are right now.”

“What was here?” Joanna asked, raising her head an inch or so, trying to peer over the top of the bern without being seen herself.

“His house,” Holly answered. “Not a house really. Just a Cuonset hut with a bare concrete floor. I remember that now. I remember seeing the green trees of Cosa Viejo from there, the trees and the terraces.”

“Holly,” Amy’s disembodied voice called.

“Where are you? Come out so I can see you, so we can talk.” She spoke her words slowly, putting a peculiar weight behind each and every syllable.

“Come here.”

At once Holly’s eyes began to glaze, and she started to rise to her feet. With a grunt of effort, Joanna jerked her back down.

“I’ve got to go,” Holly said. “Amy wants me.

“Why?” Joanna demanded. “Just tell me why.”

“I don’t know.” Holly began sobbing. “She sounds mad at me. I must have done something wrong.”

It was becoming more and more clear to Joanna that the sound of Amy’s voice exerted some kind of hypnotic mental hold on Holly, and the only way to counter it was to keep her too occupied to fall under Amy’s spell. Joanna moved closer to the weeping woman, until their faces were mere inches apart.

“You haven’t done anything wrong, Holly. They had you locked in your room. Getting away from people like that isn’t bad, believe me. Why didn’t they want you to come up here?”

“They were afraid I’d remember.”

“Remember what?”

“His face,” Holly whispered. “I saw it for a while. I think I saw it on a piece of paper, but it went away again, and now I can’t remember.”

“Holly,” Amy Baxter said. “Where are you? We have to talk.”

“Whose face?” Joanna asked. “I don’t under stand.”

“The man’s face… the man who…” Holly’s voice faded into nothing.

“The man who what?” Joanna demanded.

“The man who hurt me. A long time ago.”

Joanna remembered Isabel talking about Holly looking at the paper, the Bisbee. She had seen a copy of the paper that morning herself. There had been two pictures on the front page: Harold Lamm Patterson’s and Thornton Kimball’s.

“You saw the man’s face in the newspaper?”

“Yes.”

“Your father?”

“No, not him. The other one.”

“It was, too, your father,” Amy Baxter said, appearing over the ridge of the bern. “You’re confused, Holly. You’re making things up.”

There was no sign of a weapon on Amy’s person, but with that voice of hers, she was none the less armed. Joanna held up the Colt. “Stay where you are, Amy. Don’t come any closer. This is loaded. I’ll use it if I have to.”

“Don’t threaten me. You can see I’m not armed.

I came to get Holly and take her back to bed before she freezes to death. You had no business bringing an invalid out into weather like this.

You’re soaked, Holly. Come along.”

“She’s staying with me until I get to the bottom of all this,” Joanna countered. “Why did you have her locked in her room?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” Amy asked. “Twice, now, so far today, she’s taken off on her own and run to this dump. She could fall and hurt herself. Or worse.”

“What’s here on the dump?” Joanna demanded. “Or else under it. She said something about a house, a Quonset hut.”

“There’s nothing here.”

“Yes, there was.” Holly insisted suddenly, “Don’t you remember, Amy? My father told us all about it. About where Uncle Thorny and Aunt Bonnie were staying when it happened. When it happened the first time.”

“Be quiet, Holly,” Amy ordered sharply “You’re confused and making things up. He didn’t say any such thing.”

Slowly, the picture was beginning to shift into focus. Of course. Uncle Thorny. Thornton Kimball, The other picture in the paper along with Harold Patterson’s.

“Is Uncle Thorny the one who hurt you when you were little?”

Holly didn’t answer. Instead she collapsed face down on the bern, weeping.

“Look what you’ve done,” Amy Baxter said, taking a step toward them.

“I said don’t move, and I meant it!” Joanna ordered through chattering teeth. She was so cold now, she wasn’t sure she could pull the trigger if she had to, but Amy Baxter took her at her word and stayed where she was.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Joanna said. “You fingered the wrong man.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amy returned.

“Yes, you do. I know about you and your forgotten-memory program. I read the article in People. You correctly identified Holly as someone who had been molested as a child, but when you went through the forgotten-memory process, you dredged up the wrong man, didn’t you?”

Amy Baxter’s face grew stony. “Come on, Holly. It’s time to go. We’ll go back down to the house and put you to bed.”

“Why?” Joanna taunted. “So you can make her remember what you want her to remember and forget what you want her to forget?”

“Holly, come!”

But the cord had frayed too much. The choke chain of Amy’s voice didn’t work as it must have in the past. Holly Patterson didn’t move.

“She’s not a dog, Amy,” Joanna said. “She doesn’t have to obey you just because you issue an order. What else have you made her forget?”

“I remember the rocks,” Holly said softly, almost to herself. “Rocks that were so big, I could barely lift them.”

“Holly!” Amy warned, but her voice had no effect.

“I carried them for her one at a time. Carried the rocks over to the hole. I could hear him the whole time. He was down there in the hole, crying and begging her to stop, please stop. But she wouldn’t. Mother kept right on throwing the rocks down there…”

“Holly!” The tears had stopped. Holly’s voice had taken on a strange, dreamlike quality. It was as though she wasn’t telling a story that had happened almost half a century ago, but reporting something she was watching right then, the action being replayed on the indelible screen of a much younger mind.

“…and crying and saying he’d never do it again. He’d never hurt anyone ever, ever again. And then Father was there. He grabbed her by the arms. He held her and made her stop. I remember now. He held us both. And he said it was going to be okay.”

The whole time Holly was speaking, Joanna never took her eyes off Amy. For some time after Holly finished, they were all three quiet.

“You’re finished, aren’t you?” Joanna said at last to Amy Baxter. “This shoots your credibility right down the toilet.”

“You think someone’s going to believe her?” Amy said contemptuously. “If she remembered one thing wrong, the rest of it may be wrong as well. People will just call her a liar.”

“I’m not lying!” Holly said. “I’m telling the truth. Why did you do it?”

Amy shook her head. “This is stupid. It’s too cold to stand outside arguing like this. I’m leaving.”

She turned and started back toward the edge of the dump. If she was walking away with no further threat, it seemed as though the confrontation was over. In the sudden quiet, Joanna could hear sirens now. A whole flock of them, so perhaps backup help was on its way.

Meanwhile Holly was pulling herself up onto her hands and knees. “Why did you?” she said again. “Why did you make me throw those rocks again, just like I did before. You said it was Uncle Thorny and that I was finally going to get rid of him. But it wasn’t. It was my father. My God, Amy! I killed him, didn’t I? You made me kill my own father!”

As she spoke, Holly’s voice keened up in pitch, rising on the cold air like the howl of a wounded wild thing. And the sound of that desperate voice acted like a string on her body, pulling her collapsed form up from the ground the way a puppeteer gives life to a limp marionette.

Amy didn’t pause or look back. Holly, on her feet now, lurched after Amy.

Joanna, watching Amy over the top of the bern, making sure she intended no further harm, saw too late that Holly was flailing after Amy.

Afterward, there was never any clear way to tell exactly what happened-whether Holly Patterson reached out for Amy to grab her and stop her or whether she pushed her over the edge. For a moment, the two of them grappled there together tottering on the brink, hanging in space.

And then they both disappeared.

Two separate and distinct screams floated back up to the top of the dump. Joanna Brady heard them both, heard the clatter of falling rocks and boulders that were jarred loose as they fell. And then there was silence.

A moment later, Dick Voland’s voice floated up to her. “Sheriff Brady,” he shouted. “Sheriff Joanna Brady! Where the hell are you?”

“Here,” she called back. “Up here on top!”

Huffing and puffing, out of breath from a mad scramble up the side of the dump, Chief Deputy Dick Voland was the first person to reach Joanna’s side.

“Are you all right?” he demanded, throwing his own jacket around her quaking shoulders.

“I’m okay.”

“The hell you are.” He stomped away from her to the top of the bern. “We need another ambulance up here,” he shouted. “Now! And blanket& On the double!”

Voland came back. Somehow Joanna’s legs gave way, and she sank back to the ground. Dick Voland knelt beside her. “The city ambulance is down below. I’ve got cars and an ambulance coming here, but they’ll have to come by way of the main gate with a P.D. watchman escort.”

Joanna nodded through chattering teeth that made speech impossible.

“Lie down,” Dick Voland urged. “Lie down before you fall down!”

Joanna did her best to obey. The two hands that eased her down to the ground were both strong and amazingly gentle.

“Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. “Just… co……. cold!”

Two deputies and a pair of emergency medical technicians scrambled over the top of the bern.

Blankets appeared out of nowhere. One of the EMTs slapped a blood-pressure cuff around Joanna’s arm, while the other helped wrap her in the blanket. “How are the other two?” Voland asked.

The EMT shook his head and didn’t answer.

Which, in itself, was answer enough.

Voland knelt in front of Joanna and examined her stained and bleeding feet, watching her face anxiously while the medics went to work. As it became clear Joanna wasn’t badly injured, his anxiety turned to anger.

“If you were one of my deputies,” he growled, “I’d fire your ass in a minute! What the hell do you mean trying to pull some kind of rescue stunt without a damn word? If that lawyer hadn’t lost his nerve and yelled for help, it could have been much worse.”

Joanna tried to answer but couldn’t. Right then talking was out of the question.

“Forget it!” Voland barked. “And by the way, forget about that letter I gave you. If you want to fire me, fine. But if you’re going to pull this kind of damn-fool stunt, you need me too damned bad for me to quit.”

Things BECAME hazy after that. Gradually, Joanna realized there were emergency lights coming toward them on the road that ran along the out side edge of the dump. The ambulance that arrived was an old one that Phelps Dodge still maintained on its own property.

The next thing Joanna remembered was arriving at the hospital. An emergency-room nurse approached the gurney. Brandishing a pair of scissors in one hand, she had a determined businesslike look on her face, but she spoke like an effusive kindergarten teacher.

“I’ll just help you out of those wet things,” she said, starting to peel off the wet layers. “We’ll get you wrapped up in some nice warm blankets.”

Joanna looked down at what was left of her torn blouse and once-good wool skirt. The material on both was a yellow, mottled brown. “Don’t cut off my clothes,” Joanna said. “I can take them off my self. This is an almost new outfit. I’ll have it cleaned.”

“Forget it, honey,” the nurse told her. “What ails these clothes no dry cleaner in the world is going to fix.”

With that, she started with what was left of Joanna’s panty hose and began working her way up.

Only when she got as far as the bulletproof vest and shoulder holster, was the nurse stymied enough to let Joanna remove them under her own steam.

Jenny arrived at the emergency room, big-eyed and frightened, as the doctor finished cleaning and bandaging Joanna’s stained and lacerated feet.

“Mom, are you okay? What happened?”

Two more people were dead - Amy Baxter and Holly - in addition to Harold Patterson. Joanna was struggling to figure what part of the responsibility for those two additional deaths was hers alone.

“It’s a new job,” Joanna said. “I think it’s going to take a while to learn how to do it.”

Eva Lou Brady appeared and said she was taking Jenny home with her and that she’d make sure the dogs got fed. “Thank you,” Joanna told her.

The phone in Joanna’s room rang almost before the nurses lifted her off the gurney and loaded her into the bed. “How long are you in for?” Adam York asked.

“Just overnight I think. How did you know to call me here?”

“I tried to call you about Yuri Malakov’s prints. He checks out, by the way. According to my sources, there’s nothing to worry about as far as he’s concerned. When I called your office to let you know, they told me there’d been a problem with you. What the hell happened?”

Joanna told him.

“Tombstone Courage,” he said when she finished. “Not a fatal case, at least not for you, but all the same.”

“What’s that?”

“Have you started reading that book I sent you?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Where is it?”

“Back at the house.”

“Have someone go get it and bring it to you. You read every word of that book before you leave that hospital. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

Marianne Macula brought the book to the hospital later that evening along with a suitcase of toiletries. Despite the disapproval of the nurses, Joanna read Officer Down all the way through. It was an awful book. An appalling book. One at a time, it listed and gave horrifying examples of the ten fatal errors police officers make.

Number eight was Tombstone Courage. Failure to call for backup. Adam York was right. Sheriff Joanna Brady had been guilty as charged.

It was Wednesday of the following week when Joanna had her appointment with Burton Kimball to make arrangements to draw up the guardian ship. Once she had asked Jeff and Marianne and they had agreed to serve, she didn’t want any time to pass before getting the details ironed out. Joanna knew now that lightning did strike the same place on occasion, and she wanted to be prepared.

She was due to leave for Peoria the following Monday to take her six-week county-paid training course, and she didn’t want Jennifer’s guardian ship hanging fire while she was gone.

When Joanna looked up from signing the last documents, she caught Burton Kimball staring at her. “I’m glad you weren’t hurt worse than you were,” he said.

Joanna blushed and looked down at her feet.

She was still clunking around with bandages covered by rubber-soled splints.

“I never saw Holly going after Amy Baxter until it was too late. If I had seen her in time, maybe I could have stopped her.”

“No,” Burton said. “Don’t blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault, any more than it was anyone else’s. Everyone did the best they could under terrible circumstances.”

“Was it deliberate, do you think?” Joanna asked. “Or was it an accident?”

“It doesn’t really matter, does it?” Burton Kimball said. “What does matter now is that it’s over.”

“Is a tragedy like that ever over?” Too many people were dead, Joanna thought. Too many lives were changed.

Burton Kimball sighed and opened his desk drawer. “I think such things can come to an end,” he said. “Ivy gave me this. It’s a letter she found in Uncle Harold’s safety-deposit box. She told me it was up to me whether or not I showed it to you.”

He put it on the desk, but Joanna made no effort to pick it up. “What is it?” she asked.

“It’s Aunt Emily’s confession,” he said. “To my father’s murder. She didn’t want anyone else to be blamed. She caught my father…” He broke off and couldn’t continue.

Joanna picked the letter up and read it. Afterward she gazed thoughtfully out Burton Kimball’s window at the gray mountainside. Finally she put the letter back in the envelope. “I don’t think anyone else needs to see that letter, Burton,” she said quietly. “You never mentioned it, and I never saw it. Understand?”

He nodded. “Thank you,” he said, and put the letter away.

“How is Ivy, by the way?” Joanna asked.

For the first time, the somber look on Burton Kimball’s face lightened. “She’s having a hell of a time with morning sickness. Linda says it’ll most likely be a boy. She says morning sickness is always worse with boys.”

Joanna was genuinely surprised. “I don’t believe it. Ivy Patterson pregnant? I thought she was tutoring Yuri in English!”

Burton grinned. “It is something, isn’t it?” he said. “You’d think someone her age would know better than to let that happen, wouldn’t you? But I guess she just got carried away. Sowing her wild oats, as they say. Uncle Harold would be thrilled if he knew it. In fact, if it is a boy, I hope they name it after him.”

“So do I,” Joanna said.

The following Friday morning, Frank Montoya, formerly the Wilcox city marshal and now the newly appointed chief deputy for Administration, was present for his first-ever Cochise County Sheriff’s Department briefing.

With Joanna going off to class for six weeks the following Monday morning, she had wanted to fill that position as soon as possible. She wanted someone who was on her side keeping an eye on things in her absence.

She knew now that she could pull her own weight around the department, but in choosing a right-hand man, she had decided on Frank Montoyo, her old opponent.

When Dick Voland and Ernie Carpenter left Joanna’s office after the briefing, Frank stayed on for a few minutes. “Are you sure Dick Voland won’t shoot me in the back while you’re gone?” Frank asked with a grin.

“As long as you don’t do anything stupid,” she told him. “Both Dick Voland and Ernie Carpenter are real hard on stupidity. That’s why those two guys have been around so long. That’s why we need them.”

“Whatever you say, Chief,” Frank said.

He went out and closed the door. Joanna leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she opened them and looked down at the worn buffalo-head nickel she was holding in her hand.

All during the meeting, she’d been holding Andy’s nickel concealed in the palm of her hand, holding it for luck.

After a moment, she opened her top desk drawer and dropped the nickel back inside. She wasn’t going to take that to Peoria to class with her. She’d leave it there in Bisbee in the sheriff’s cherrywood desk.

She’d leave it where it belonged.