Joanna’s jurisdiction, Cochise County, was an eighty-miles-square block of territory as large as Rhode Island and Connecticut combined. On the south it was bordered by Mexico and on the east by New Mexico. Her office in the Justice Center was in the lower right-hand corner of the county. The crime scene was seventy miles straight north of there—except she couldn’t drive straight north. The roads didn’t run that way.
Along the highway, she was glad to see the signs of spring—the bright greens of newly leafed mesquite and the carpet of bright yellow flowers that lined either side of the roadway. Lost in thought, she had driven only a few miles when her phone rang.
“Sheriff Brady here,”she said.
“I found Bowie on my GPS,”Guy Machett said without preamble or greeting. “I can make it there just fine, but where the hell is the crime scene?”
His attitude grated on Joanna as much as his words did. He pronounced Bowie the outlander way, Bowie as in bow tie as opposed to the approved southeastern Arizona pronunciation.
“It’s pronounced boo-ee,”she told him.
“That’s not how it’s spelled in my BlackBerry,”he returned.
And obviously your BlackBerry couldn’t be wrong, Joanna thought to herself. “But it is how people around here say it,”she told him. And it’s how you’ll pronounce it, too, if you don’t want the locals laughing at you.
“The crime scene is northeast of there,”she said. “Some GPS receivers don’t cover those rural roads and areas very well.”
“I was scheduled to be at a continuing ed conference in Tucson all day today,”Machett said. “It bugs the hell out of me to miss it, but I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“If you’re leaving Tucson now, you should arrive in about an hour then,”Joanna said. “That’s about the time I’ll get there as well. Call me. I’ll help guide you in.”
“Make that three hours,”Machett grumbled. “They can’t expect me to drive around in that god-awful van wherever I go. I had to drive to Tucson in my personal vehicle. That means I’ll have to drive all the way back to Bisbee and pick up the van before I come to the crime scene.”
George didn’t mind driving around in the M.E.’s van, Joanna thought.
“What about Bobby?”she asked. “Couldn’t he drive the van over and meet you there?”
Bobby Short had spent the last two years working as George Winfield’s full-time assistant.
“Bobby quit,”Machett said, sounding offended. “Just like that. He came into my office last Friday morning. He told me he had two weeks of vacation coming. Said he was taking them both and that he wouldn’t be back. More’s the pity. He wasn’t a trained M.E. tech by any means, but I could have used him for some of the heavy lifting. The one I’d really like to see quit is Madge Livingston. She’s a joke.”
Bobby Short hadn’t been particularly long in the brains department, but he had been a cheerful, willing worker in a difficult job. Joanna had no idea what Machett had said or done that had provoked Bobby enough to quit his job, but apparently he had. Madge, the M.E. office’s other full-time employee, who served as both secretary and clerk, had been a fixture in the Cochise County administrative staff hierarchy for as long as Joanna could remember. She was an opinionated peroxide blonde who smoked unfiltered Camels out by the morgue’s Dumpsters and rode her Harley to work. George Winfield had gotten along with her just fine, but then George could get along with almost anyone, including Joanna Brady’s difficult mother, Eleanor.
Joanna understood that Madge wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but she was anything but a joke. If Guy Machett went after her, he would do so at his own peril—sort of like moving a big rock and uncovering a nest of baby rattlesnakes hidden underneath.
Joanna could have warned him about all that, but she didn’t. “I’ll see you at the crime scene then,”she said. “Whenever you get there.”
“Why are you going?”Machett asked.
She understood the implication. What he meant was that, as sheriff, she was far too important to show up at a run-of-the-mill crime scene.
I do it because it’s part of my job, Joanna thought. “It’s a possible homicide,”she explained.
“Don’t you trust your detectives to handle it?”he asked.
“I trust my detectives implicitly,”she returned. “But we do the job together.”
“That may be fine as far as you’re concerned,”he said. “If you’ve got nothing better to do and don’t mind showing up in person, bully for you. It’s a waste of valuable time and training for me to be expected to make a personal appearance whenever some hick from Cochise County decides to croak out in the middle of nowhere. I fully intend to get myself some decent help to handle situations like this, and it won’t be some untrained gofer, either.”
For years now, Joanna’s department’s hiring practices had suffered under the county’s notorious cost-containment policy of NNP—no new personnel—and it was still very much in effect. It was only through using one of Frank Montoya’s creative budgetary sleights of hand that she’d been able to add on Natalie Wilson as her new Animal Control officer. NNP allowed for replacement of lost employees. That meant Guy Machett would be able to hire someone to take over Bobby Short’s position, but she doubted he’d be able to add anyone else. Picking a fight with Madge Livingston was one thing. Taking on the Board of Supervisors over hiring issues would be downright foolhardy.
Good luck with that, Joanna thought.
“See you when you get there then. As I said, when you get as far as Bowie,”she added, forcefully pronouncing the word in the manner she regarded as the right way, “call me again. Either I’ll guide you from there or one of my deputies will.”With that, she ended the call.
Rolling north through the Sulphur Springs Valley toward Willcox, Joanna was left thinking about what an overbearing jerk Machett was and about how much she missed working with George Winfield on a day-to-day basis. They had been thrown together as M.E. and sheriff long before George had married Joanna’s mother, and afterward as well. Rather than appreciating George’s close working relationship with her daughter, Eleanor Lathrop had been jealous of it, but she’d been even more jealous of George’s job itself. Now that he was retired, the two of them were able to spend time off by themselves, traveling in the used Newell Coach they’d purchased. It was clear enough that this new Eleanor was happier and more contented than the mother Joanna had known all her life. It didn’t seem fair, however, that Eleanor’s new-found happiness came with the unfortunate trade-off that left Joanna working with Dr. Guy Machett.
Despite Joanna’s confidence about her own ability to locate the crime scene, she was forced to make two false starts after leaving Bowie before she finally pulled up at the wrought-iron gate that marked the main entrance to Action Trail Adventures. She stopped her Crown Victoria and rolled down her window. The entry gate was wide open. Just beyond her window stood a post equipped with both a telephone receiver and a keypad. On the first section of barbed-wire fence to the right of the gate was a hand-painted sign that read PRIVATE PROPERTY. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. CALL FOR ADMITTANCE. The fence post nearest the gate held the tangled remains of what might have been a surveillance camera. Fifty yards or so away from the gate sat a decrepit, dusty Airstream trailer with an equally disreputable F-150 pickup parked nearby.
“Looks like somebody tore that camera out by its roots,”someone said.
Joanna turned away from the trailer in time to see Natalie Wilson walking toward her. The ACO wasn’t any bigger than Joanna’s own five-foot-one frame, but she was tough as nails. Natalie had spent a couple of years on the professional rodeo circuit and had applied to work for Animal Control after turning in her spurs and saddle. Next to