“I should have gone on the teacups with her,” Kelly said as we walked toward the monorail. “Jeremy won’t set foot on one of those on a bet, but rides like that don’t bother me. They never have. And Kayla loves them so much. She rode the teacups three more times after you left. She didn’t want to ride on anything else.”
I stopped cold. Kelly turned back to look at me. “Are you all right?” she asked.
It took me a minute to figure out what to say. I now knew something about Kelly and her mother and her daughter, and it was something she didn’t know about me. As I said already, I was mostly AWOL when Kelly and Scott were little—drinking and/or working. Karen was the one who took them to soccer and T-ball and movies. She was also the one who “did the Puyallup” with them each fall. When it’s time for the Western Washington State Fair each September, that’s what they used to call it—“doing the Puyallup.” It was Karen instead of me who walked them through the displays of farm animals and baked goods; who taught them to love eating cotton candy and elephant ears; and who took them for rides on the midway.
“You’re just like your mother,” I said, over the lump that rose suddenly in my throat and made it difficult to speak. “And Kayla’s just like you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kelly asked. She sounded angry and defensive. It was so like her to take offense and to assume that whatever I said was somehow an underhanded criticism.
“Did your mother ever tell you about the first time I took her to the Puyallup?”
“No,” Kelly said. “She never did. Why?”
“She wanted to ride the Tilt-a-Whirl, and I knew if I did that, I’d be sick. Rides like that always make me sick. So I bought the tickets. Your mother and I stood in line, but when it came time to get on, I couldn’t do it. She ended up having to go on the ride with the people who were standing in line behind us. Here I was, supposedly this hotshot young guy with the beautiful girl on his arm, and all I could do was stand there like an idiot and wait for the ride to end and for her to get off. It was one of the most humiliating moments of my life. We never talked about it again afterward, but she never asked me to get on one of those rides again, either.”
Kelly was staring up into my face. She looked so much like her mother right then—was so much like her mother—that it was downright spooky. It turns out DNA is pretty amazing stuff.
“So why did you do it?” she asked.
Now I was lost. Yes, I had been telling Kelly the story, but her question caught me off guard. I didn’t know what “it” she was asking about.
“Do what?” I asked.
“If you already knew it would make you sick, why on earth did you get on the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party with Kayla?”
“I thought maybe I’d grown out of it?” I asked lamely.
Kelly shook her head as if to say I hadn’t yet stumbled on the right answer. “And?” she prompted.
“Because my granddaughter wanted me to?” I added.
The storm clouds that had washed across Kelly’s face vanished. She reached up, grabbed me around the neck, and kissed my cheek.
“Oh, Daddy,” she said with a laugh. “You’re such a dope, but I love you.”
See what I mean about Mel Soames? The woman is a genius.
THE CALL came in just after the morning briefing ended and as Sheriff Joanna Brady was about to tackle that day’s bushel basketful of paperwork.
“Sorry to disturb you,”Larry Kendrick, her lead dispatcher, had said. “We’ve had a call about a possible homicide north of Bowie at a place called Action Trail Adventures.”
“Never heard of it,”Joanna said.
“I’m not surprised. It’s an all-terrain vehicle hot spot. They keep a fairly low profile, probably to avoid coming up against planning and zoning restrictions. I’ve dispatched Detectives Carpenter and Howell to the scene, and I’ve asked Jeannine to send out an Animal Control officer. She has Natalie Wilson coming over from Willcox. She should be on the scene within the next twenty minutes or so.”
Ernie Carpenter was Joanna’s senior homicide detective, a guy who had put in his twenty years and was verging on being ready to pull the plug and put himself out to pasture. Debra Howell had been working homicide for the better part of two years, partnering with Ernie as often as possible as she gradually learned the ropes. Jeannine Phillips, on the other hand, was Joanna’s head of Animal Control. Animal Control had been stuffed into Joanna’s area of responsibility years earlier, supposedly on a temporary basis, which had now turned permanent. Natalie Wilson was Jeannine’s new hire.
“What’s going on?”Joanna asked. “Why an ACO?”
“A concerned citizen called it in. He was out on his ATV when he saw buzzards circling overhead. He went there and saw what he thinks is a body, but he can’t get close enough to tell for sure. There’s a dog there with the victim, and he’s fierce as hell. The dog is keeping the vultures away, but he’s doing the same thing to everyone else, acting like he’s ready to tear them limb from limb. With the dog there, no one has been able to get close enough to the victim to check on him. He looks dead, but maybe he’s not.”
“Any idea what happened to him?”Joanna asked.
“The guy who called it in on his cell phone says it looks like he was run over by something. It could be an accident, but it could be something else, too.”
Five years earlier, when Joanna Brady had first run for office as sheriff of Cochise County, it had been in the aftermath of her first husband’s death. Deputy Andrew Roy Brady had been gunned down by a drug trafficker’s hit man while he himself had been standing for election. People had encouraged Joanna to run in Andy’s place. When she was elected, many people had assumed it was a gesture of sympathy more than anything else. She may have been the daughter of one law enforcement officer and the widow of another, but she had never been a cop herself, and no one really expected that she would be.
Once she took office, Joanna had assumed the administrative duties that came with the office, but she had also set herself the task of becoming a real cop. She had enrolled in and graduated from the same police academy course of training that was required of all her new recruits. She did enough range work to keep her weapons skills at proper levels, and rather than hiding out in her office and behind her desk, she had insisted on going to the scene of every homicide that had occurred on her watch and in her jurisdiction. If this possible homicide turned into a real one, Joanna knew she would go there as well.
“Thanks for keeping me posted, Larry,”she told him. “When you know more details, let me know or tell Ernie to call me.”
As soon as Joanna put down the telephone, she returned to the stack of paperwork—the never-ending stack of paperwork—that was the bane of her existence. It had always been bad, but now it was worse. Her longtime chief deputy and second in command, Frank Montoya, had been wooed away from her department when he was offered the chief of police job in the nearby city of Sierra Vista. She missed him more than she could say.
Frank had been one of her opponents in her original race for sheriff. After winning the election, she had chosen him to serve as one of her two chief deputies. Turning a major opponent into a loyal ally had been a stroke of genius on Joanna’s part. Frank’s attention to detail had been a major asset to her. He had kept an eagle eye on budgetary issues and had handled the complex job of shift scheduling with a casual flair that had made it seem easy. He had also been at the forefront of bringing Joanna’s department into the world of twenty-first-century information/technology.