t size="4">
Chapter 9

TOMMY RETURNED TO THE ROOM THROUGH THE SWINGING DOOR beside…

Chapter 10

IN ACTUAL FACT, MOST OF THE PLAYERS WERE ALREADY ASSEMBLED…

Chapter 11

I CAUGHT UP WITH MEL IN FEDERAL WAY IN TIME…

Chapter 12

ABOUT THE TIME BUTCH STEPPED OUTSIDE TO GRILL THE STEAKS,…

Chapter 13

WHEN THE NEXT-OF-KIN NOTIFICATIONS HAD BEEN MADE, JOANNA asked Deputy…

Chapter 14

JOANNA PLACED THE CALL TO ERNIE WHILE PULLING INTO A…

Chapter 15

FOR SEVERAL LONG SECONDS AFTER BUTCH TURNED OFF THE ignition,…

Chapter 16

AS BEST MAN, JOANNA WAS DUE AT THE CHURCH FOR…

Chapter 17

WHEN JOANNA CHANGED CLOTHES, HER FIRST WARDROBE CHOICE that early…

Chapter 18

I WAS SURPRISED WHEN JAIME CARBAJAL ASKED IF I WOULD…

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

NOVEMBER

DRIVING EAST ON 1–90, TOMAS RIVERA WAS SURPRISED TO SEE THE

snow spinning down out of a darkened sky in huge fat flakes that threatened to overwhelm the puny efforts of the 4-Runner’s hardworking windshield wipers. It was only the sixth of November. Snow this heavy didn’t often come to the Cascades so early in the season. Beyond Eastgate and North Bend electronic signs flashed a warning that traction devices were required in the pass.

The signaled warnings didn’t concern Tomas all that much. He was sure the stolen SUV’s four-wheel drive would get him through any snow on the roadway. Overworked cops would be so busy dealing with multiple fender-benders that he doubted they’d be on the lookout for stolen vehicles. It also seemed likely that it was too soon for the Department of Transportation to be doing avalanche control, but what if they were? What if he got stopped at the pass and had to wait for snowplows or ended up being stuck at the chain-up area for an hour or two? What if the girl on the floor in the far back of the SUV woke up suddenly and started making noises—thumping, bumping, or groaning? If people were standing around outside in the waiting area, he worried they might hear her or see her or start asking questions.

Despite the cold, Tomas found he was sweating. His armpits were soaked, and so were his hands inside the gloves, but he didn’t dare take them off.

“Wear gloves,” Miguel had warned him. “Whatever you do, wear gloves.”

Since it wasn’t a good idea to cross Miguel, Tomas wore gloves.

The poor woman had already been bound, presumably gagged, wrapped loosely in a tarp and dumped in the back of the 4-Runner when Miguel delivered the vehicle to him. Miguel didn’t say where she was from or why she was there, and Tomas didn’t ask. The less he knew about her, the better.

“Take her out in the woods and get rid of her,” Miguel had said. “There’s a full gas can in the back. Use that. Throw her out, pull her teeth, douse her with gasoline, and light a match. When you’re done, ditch the car somewhere far away. Understand?”

Tomas had nodded. He understood all right. And he understood what would happen if he didn’t. Tomas also understood Miguel and the men he worked with. They were rich and powerful, dangerous and ruthless. They were the kin hand it off to some poor dope who owed them and owed big; or to someone like Tomas who didn’t dare step out of line for fear of what would happen to him—or to his family.

Yes, Tomas thought. Someone just like me.

He understood what it meant to commit a mortal sin. If he didn’t get to confession and died, he’d go straight to hell. And if he didn’t do what he’d been told, he’d be living in hell. In a way, he already was. He had paid good money—money earned doing backbreaking, dangerous delimbing work out in the woods—to have Lupe and the boys smuggled across the border and brought north. But having paid a small fortune to Miguel’s coyotes didn’t mean Tomas and Lupe were home free. Miguel had made it clear that if Tomas didn’t do what was required of him, what might happen to Little Tomas and Alfonso would be worse than death. For the thousandth time Tomas wished he had left well enough alone. Things weren’t necessarily pleasant or comfortable in the little tin-roofed shack where Lupe and the boys had lived in Cui-dad Obregon. But he’d had no idea about the real price of bringing his little family to the United States of America.

So Tomas kept driving. He turned off the freeway at Cabin Creek Road and headed off into the maze of National Forest roads that carried loggers and logging equipment off into the wilderness. That’s why Miguel had come looking for him to do this particular job. Tomas knew all those roads like the back of his hand—because he had driven them himself, ferrying crews in and out of the woods. With severe winter weather setting in, the logging crews were out of the picture for the time being—until the snow melted in the spring. Or summer.

Even though it made it hard to see, Tomas was grateful for the deepening snow. There would be no tire tracks left for the cops to trace. And no footprints, either. By morning, all tracks would be nothing more than slight dents. And in weather like this, no one would be out there watching, either. Only the dumbest of cross-country skiers would venture this far off the main roads.

As Tomas drove, he wondered what the woman had done that merited this death sentence, but he didn’t wonder too hard. That was Miguel’s business, not his.

Tomas stopped the SUV a mile or so short of Lake Kachess at a spot where yet another road wandered away from the one he was on. The intersection created a small clearing that was barely big enough for him to swing the 4-Runner in a tight circle without running the risk of getting stuck. When he turned off the engine, he was dismayed to realize that his prisoner was awake and moaning. Miguel had told him she was out for good, but clearly that wasn’t true.

Shaking his head, Tomas punched the button that unlocked the hatch, then got out and walked through swirling snow to the back of the vehicle. Opening the cargo bay, he reached in and grabbed the tarp-wrapped bundle. As he pulled it toward him, the woman inside struggled and tried to roll away. Grabbing for her a second time, his hand caught on what was evidently a cowboy boot, one that came off in his hand. It surprised him and bothered him somehow. He didn’t want to know she wore cowboy boots. He didn’t want to know anything about her at all.

When he finally had her free of the floorboard, he let her drop to the ground. The force of the fall knoisting roads were cleared, he traded the snowplow for either a road grader, which he used to carve even more roads, or a front-end loader, which could be used to accumulate slash— the brush and branches left behind after the logs had been cut down, graded, and hauled away.

As long as he was riding his machinery, Ken didn’t have to listen to anyone else talk. He could be alone with his thoughts, which ranged from the profound to the mundane. Just being out in the woods made it pretty clear that God existed, and knowing his ex-mother-in-law, to say nothing of his ex-wife, made it clear that the devil and hell were real entities as well. Given all that, then, it made perfect sense that the world should be so screwed up—that the Washington Redskins would probably never win the Super Bowl and that the Seattle Mariners would never win the World Series, either.

The fact that Ken liked the Mariners was pretty self-explanatory. After all, he lived in North Bend—outside North Bend, really—and Seattle was just a few miles down the road. As for why he loved the Redskins? He’d never been to Washington—D.C., that is. In fact, the only time he’d ever ventured out of Washington State had been back in the 1980s, when his then-wife had dragged him up to Vancouver, B.C., for something called Expo. He had hated it. It had rained like crazy, and most of the exhibits were stupid. If he wanted to be wet and miserable, all he had to do was go to work. He sure as hell didn’t have to pay good money for the privilege.

As for the Redskins? What he liked about them most was that they hadn’t bowed to public opinion and changed their name to something more politically palatable. And when he was watching football games in the Beaver Bar in North Bend, he loved shouting out “Go, Redskins!” and waiting to see if anyone had balls enough to give him any grief over it. When it came to barroom fights, Little Kenny Leggett, as he was sometimes called despite the fact that he was a bruising six-five, knew how to handle himself—and a broken beer bottle.

So here he was sending a spray of snow flying off the road and thinking about the fact that he was glad to be going back to work. Early. A whole month earlier than anyone had expected. When winter had landed with a knock-out punch early in November, everybody figured snow was going to bury the Cascades with record-shattering intensity. The ski resorts had all hoped for a memorable season, and that turned out to be true for the wrong reason—way too little snow rather than too much.

That first heavy snowfall got washed away by equally record-shattering rains a few days later. For the rest of the winter the snow never quite got its groove back and had proved to be unusually mild. It snowed some, but not enough for skiers really to get out there. And not enough for the bureaucrats to stop whining about it, either. In fact, just that morning, on his way to work, Ken had heard some jerk from the water department complaining that the lack of snowfall and runoff might well lead to water rationing in the Pacific Northwest before the end of summer.

Yeah, Ken thought. Right. That makes sense, especially in Washington, where it rains constantly, ten months out of twelve.

Ken glanced at his watch. The switch to daylight saving time made for longer afternoons, but it was nearing quitting time, and that meant he was also nearing the end of that day’s run. His boss wasn’t keen on paying overtime, and Ken wasn’t interested in working for free, so he needed to be back at the equipment shed ght="0%" width="5%">It was a long way back—a long slow way—and the thermos of coffee he had drunk with his lunch had run through the system. After turning the plow around in a small clearing, he set the brake. Then, shutting off the engine, he clambered down and went to make some yellow snow.

After the steady roar of equipment, the sudden stillness was a shock to his system. He knew that old saying about if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it…He wondered sometimes about what happened if you took a leak in the woods and no one heard you or saw you, did it exist? Chuckling at that private joke, he headed for a tree that was a few feet off the road to do his business. Better here where there was little chance of being seen. Close to civilization, somebody might be out there. Ken didn’t exactly think of himself as shy, but still…

Spring was coming. The snow had melted away completely in some spots, but under the trees it was still thick enough. Once he was out of sight of the road, he spotted what appeared to be a small boulder sticking up out of the snow. He unzipped and took aim at that. As the stream of steaming yellow urine hit the rock, the remaining snow melted away and a series of odd cracks became visible in the rock’s surface. Squinting, Ken bent to take a closer look. Only after a long moment did what he was seeing finally register. When it did, the horrible realization hit him like the surge of a powerful electric shock. That boulder wasn’t a boulder at all. It was a skull, a gaping human skull, sitting at an angle, half in and half out of a batch of melting yellow snow.

Staring at the awful visage in astonishment, Ken staggered backward, all the while trying desperately to zip up his pants as he went. Unaware of where he was going, he stumbled over something—a root, he hoped—and fell to the ground. But when he looked back to see what had tripped him, he realized that it wasn’t a root at all. He had stumbled over a length of bone that his fleeing footsteps had dislodged from a thin layer of melting snow.

That was when he lost it. With a groan he ducked his head and was very, very sick. At last, when there was nothing left to heavieve shrinks call it a fear of commitment—that made it difficult for me to move on. Mel Soames was the one who finally changed all that.

She and I met while working for the S.H.I.T. squad. (Yes, I agree, it’s an unfortunate name, but we’re stuck with it.) Originally we just worked together, then it evolved into something else. Mel is someone who is absolutely cool in the face of trouble, and she’s watched my back on more than one occasion. And since this whole idea of having a “three-day family-bonding vacation at Disneyland” had been her bright idea, it was only fair that she should watch my back now.

She didn’t come racing up to see if I was all right because she could see perfectly well that I wasn’t. Instead, she went looking for help in the guise of a uniformed park employee, who dropped the broom he was wielding and led me to the first-aid station. It seems to me that it would have made sense to have a branch office of that a lot closer to the damned teacups.

So I went to the infirmary. Mel stayed long enough to be sure I was in good hands, then bustled off to “let everyone know what’s happening.” I stayed where I was, spending a good part of day three of our three-day ticket pass flat on my back on an ER-style cot with a very officious nurse taking my pulse and asking me questions.

“Ever been seasick?” she wanted to know.

“Several times,” I told her. I could have added every time I get near a boat, but I didn’t.

“Do you have any Antivert with you?” she asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Antivert. Meclizine. If you’re prone to seasickness, you should probably carry some with you. Without it, I can’t imagine what you were thinking. Why did you go on that ride?”

“My granddaughter wanted me to.”

She gave me a bemused look and shook her head. “That’s what they all say. You’d think grown men would have better sense.”

She was right about that. I should have had better sense, but of course I didn’t say so.

“We don’t hand out medication here,” she said. “Why don’t you just lie there for a while with your eyes closed. That may help.”

When she finally left me alone, I must have fallen asleep. I woke up when my phone rang.

“Beau,” Ross Alan Connors said. “Where are you?”

Connors has been the Washington State Attorney General for quite some time now, and he was the one who had plucked me from my post-retiremen 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.

CHAPTER 2

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 . 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 infor-hunting search firm. Instead, after several months of deliberation, she had promoted from within. Tom Hadlock, her jail commander, who had a master’s degree in public administration, had seemed a reasonable choice. Two months into his new and greatly expanded role, however, Tom was still struggling, and so was Joanna. Tom may have had a university degree to his credit, but on the job he was stiff and inexperienced and lacking the easygoing confidence and competence that had made working with Frank such a pleasure.

Staring at a paper copy of the next month’s shift schedule that had finally made it to Joanna’s desk a day later than it should have been, she shook her head regretfully and recalled the words to that old Bob Dylan song: “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”

Of course, Frank wasn’t completely gone. He had asked her to stand up with him and be his “best man”—Joanna liked to think of it as “best person”—at the wedding that was scheduled to happen on Saturday morning of this very week. Joanna had been honored to accept, but the hoopla surrounding the wedding and Joanna’s expected participation in all of it added more complications to a week that was already busy even before Larry Kendrick’s Monday morning phone call.

Joanna signed off on the scheduling paperwork and had started making progress on her mound of correspondence when her direct line rang again. This time the caller was Ernie.

“Sorry to bother you, boss,” Ernie said. “Natalie finally corralled the dog—a Doberman-looking mutt—and hauled him out of the way so someone could check on the guy. He’s dead, all right. Looks to me like he’s been that way for some time—several hours at least.”

“Have you called the M.E.?” Joanna asked.

“You know Dr. Machett,” Ernie said sourly. “Remember? We’re not allowed to call him directly. I talked to Madge Livingston. She said she’d send him a text message and that he’d call when he can. I guess she’s not allowed to call him directly, either. Makes me miss the hell out of Doc Winfield.”

Joanna missed him, too. Dr. George Winfield, the previous Cochise County medical examiner and, coincidentally, Joanna’s stepfather, had announced his retirement at almost the same time Frank Montoya had given Joanna his notice. Giddy as a pair of teenagers, George and her mother, Eleanor, had headed off on their first snowbird adventure in a newly purchased but used motor home. They were currently gearing up for their second summer’s worth of RVing. In the meantime, Joanna couldn’t help feeling that she had been left holding the bag.

Losing two valued members of her team—George Winfield and Frank Montoya—at once had come as a severe body blow to Joanna’s administration, and the constant readjustment uproar inside her department since then had left her reeling. For months, Joanna’s officers had been plagued by having to work with a series of contract M.E.s who had filled in on a temporary basis. A month earlier, the Board of Supervisors had finally gotten around to hiring George’s permanent replacement. They had given the M.E. nod to Dr. Guy Machett, a newcomer to Cochise County, and to Arizona as well, who had earned both his medical degree and his pathology specialty from Johns Hopkins University.

t="0%" width="5%">“Sand dunes?” Joanna repeated. Driving to California, she remembered being impressed by the glorious red sand dunes west of Yuma along I-8. She had lived in Cochise County all her life. The idea that there might be sand dunes much closer to home came as something of a shock. “I didn’t know we had any of those,” she said.

“You do now,” Ernie told her. “And believe me, tracks that are left in sand like what’s here aren’t remotely castable.”

“What about identification?”

“None on the body,” he said, “at least none that we’ve found so far.”

“What about the dog? Does it have tags?”

“Maybe so. He was wearing a collar and it looks like he has tags, but no one can get close enough to read them. Natalie’s working on him now, trying to get him into her truck. Once she does that, maybe she’ll be able to tell us something. When I get off the phone with you, I’ll ask her.”

“All right then,” Joanna said. “I’m on my way.”

“Good,” Ernie said. “I’m glad to hear it. Dave Hollicker is headed here as well.”

Most of the time, Joanna’s CSI unit was a two-person team made up of Dave and Casey Ledford, Joanna’s latent fingerprint tech. Unfortunately, Casey was currently out of town attending a training conference on the latest upgrades in AFIS—the nationwide Automated Fingerprint Identification System. With Casey unavailable, Dave Hollicker was reduced to being a one-man show.

Joanna put down her phone and donned her Kevlar vest, then opened the door to her office and spoke to her secretary, Kristin Gregovich.

“How long will you be gone?” Kristin wanted to know.

“It’s a crime scene,” Joanna told her. “I’ll be back eventually; I just don’t know when.”

Relieved to have an excuse to leave her paperwork jungle behind, Joanna hurried out her private back entrance and into her Crown Victoria parked a few steps from her door. A few minutes later, she was driving east on U.S. Highway 80, heading for Double Adobe, Elfrida, and ultimately Bowie.

Joanna’s jurisdiction, Cochise County, was an eighty-square-mile 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 Bowieget 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 rolle told the dog. “Let’s go for a walk.” She didn’t say “far away from this jerk,” but she might as well have. Her meaning was abundantly clear.

Natalie Wilson turned on her heel and marched away with Miller walking placidly beside her.

“Where on earth did Jeannine Phillips find that piece of work?” Ernie Carpenter wanted to know.

“I believe she fell off the rodeo circuit,” Joanna replied. “She used to be a barrel racer.”

“Figures,” Ernie said disapprovingly. “Women like that are always a handful.”

That parting remark might have been a lot funnier if Joanna hadn’t taken it so personally. Not only did she suspect it was absolutely true, there was something else that bothered her. Her very own daughter, fourteen-year-old Jenny, had her own heart set on the world of rodeo. Being sheriff was hard work, but it was easier for Joanna to discuss murder and mayhem than it was to consider her daughter’s plans for the future.

“Come on,” Joanna said, climbing into the Yukon’s passenger seat, where she immediately fastened her seat belt. “Let’s go take a look at that dead body.”

CHAPTER 3

AS THEY DROVE AWAY FROM THE GATE, JOANNA WAS STILL THINKING

about Jenny and her rodeo-riding ambitions when Ernie brought her back to the case.

“I left Deb with the witness,” Ernie said.

“What witness?” Joanna asked. “The man who found the body?”

“Seems like a pretty squared-away guy. His name’s Maury Robbins. He’s a 911 operator from Tucson, and he’s also an all-terrain vehicle enthusiast. He comes down here on his days off whenever he can. What he told me is that he drove down late last night after his shift ended. He got here about three A.M. The gate was open, but he didn’t think that much about it. He drove on in, set up his Jayco—”

“His what?” Joanna asked.

“His Jayco. It’s one of those little pop-up camper things. He carries his ATV in the bed of his pickup truck and drags the camper along behind.”

“So there’s an actual campsite here?”

“Yes, but it’s pretty primitive,” Ernie replied. “No concrete pads, no running water. People have to haul in their own water and the only facilities turn out to be a few strategically located Porta Pottis. Maury’s camper has its own facilities. News to me. The Jayco I had years ago sure as hell didn’t.”

Joanna smiled to herself. When she had first arrived on the scene, Ernie had apologized whenever he used a bad word around her. She liked the fact that the"0%">

“So this is private property?” she asked. “Action Trail Adventures isn’t situated on state or federally owned land?”

“Yes,” Ernie said. “That’s my understanding. It’s privately owned. Robbins told me he pays an annual fee that gives him access through a card-activated gate. That way he can let himself in or out as needed. There’s also a keypad where you can punch in an entry code to open the gate.”

“Anyway,” Ernie continued, “Robbins got in last night. This morning, when he took his ATV out for a ride, he found the body lying facedown in the sand with the dog standing guard over it. Once we finally managed to drag the dog away, Robbins was able to take a closer look at the victim and give us a tentative ID. He says the guy’s first name is Lester. He had no idea about his last name, or any next of kin, either.”

“Lester’s last name is Attwood,” Joanna said, but she was thinking about the number of times so-called good citizens calling in reports of a homicide turned out to be perpetrators.

“Do you think Mr. Robbins might be involved in whatever happened here?” she asked.

Ernie shook his head. “Not to my way of thinking. At any rate, as you said, the name we got back from Animal Control on the dog’s license is Lester Attwood. According to Records, Attwood’s driver’s license is suspended. His rap sheet shows six DUIs, two criminal assaults, two driving without a license.”

“So we’ve got a photo then?”

“On the computer,” Ernie said. “Not one I can print right now. Any idea when Dr. Machett will bother getting his butt out here?”

“All I can tell you is that he’s on his way,” Joanna said.

“I’m not holding my breath,” Ernie grumbled. “He always takes his own sweet time about getting to a crime scene, and we’re left standing with one foot in the air until he does.”

Following a fairly smooth gravel road, the Yukon wound down into a steep wash. When they roared up the far side, they came out on the boundary of a breathtaking landscape. Even though Joanna had been warned about them in advance, seeing the tawny-colored dunes in person took her by surprise. Starting with a line of demarcation just to the left of the gravel, the dunes stretched off into the distance in a series of rounded hills. Here and there the rippled surface of the sand was marred by a series of tire tracks.

Gripping the steering wheel with both hands, Ernie swung the Yukon off the road and into the dunes along a course that included several of those tracks. Even with four-wheel drive, he had to maintain a fair amount of speed to keep from getting bogged down.

As they jolted along, Joanna checked her seat belt and then held on to her armrest. “How can this be?” she said over the laboring sound of the engine. “I’ve lived here all my life and never knew these dunes were here!”

“Think about Kartchner Caverns,” Ernie replied. “Lots of people knew about that before it ever came out in public. This is all on private property. As far as I know, it’s only been open to ATVers in the last cold-blooded,” Joanna said.

Ernie nodded. “It was cold-blooded. I suspect he died from internal injuries. Machett should be able to tell us for sure, if and when he bothers to show up.”

Despite being in agreement with Ernie’s disparaging remark about Dr. Machett, Joanna let it pass. “What about that single track?” she asked, pointing to a track in the sand that disappeared over the top of the next dune. “The one that leads off to the right from the body?”

“Looks to me like the dog made that one, either going or coming or maybe both,” Ernie said. “The bad guys probably ran him off, but he came back as soon as the coast was clear. I have to give the damned dog credit,” the detective added grudgingly. “Even though he’d been shot, he was downright fierce about not letting any of us near that body. After he offered to tear me limb from limb, I was a little surprised to see Natalie Wilson with him on a leash, walking around just as nice as you please.”

Which is why you work homicide and she’s animal control, Joanna thought.

She studied the expanse of disrupted sand around the body. “You said you thought one of the vehicles had dual tires. How do you know that?”

“This isn’t the shortest way to and from the gate, but it’s the most passable. If you look carefully, you can see the dips left in the sand by the dual wheels even though you can’t make out the treads on the tire.”

Joanna looked down and saw that he was right. The tracks were there, but the fine grade of the sand left behind no visible tread.

“The victim didn’t bother following the road when he came here, and he didn’t take a direct route from the gate, either,” Ernie said. “It looks to me like he approached the scene by zigzagging in and out between the dunes.”

“Trying to stay out of sight, maybe?” Joanna asked.

Ernie nodded. “Could be,” he said.

“In other words,” Joanna said, “it’s possible the victim realized something was amiss and came out to investigate.”

“Maybe,” Ernie agreed.

“What about the trailer back by the gate?” Joanna asked. “Any sign of breaking and entering?”

“Lots,” Ernie said. “The front door is smashed and the inside is a mess. No way to tell from looking at it if anything was taken. We’ll need to dust it for prints, but with Casey away at that conference, that’s problematic. Jaime said he can collect the prints, but we won’t be able to run them through AFIS until Casey gets back.”

Jaime Carbajal was Joanna’s third homicide detective. It was unusual to have Joanna’s entire homicide unit focused on only one case, but for right now she was glad that was possible.

“By the way, where is Jaime?” Joanna wanted to know.

“I asked him to stop off and pick up a search warrant for the trailer.”

“I know, I know,” Ernie replied. “But what if he isn’t the owner? What if the trailer actually belongs to Action Trail? The owners of that might have an objection.”

“What are you thinking?” Joanna asked.

“Look,” Ernie said, “I know this is all supposition on my part, but what if Action Trail Adventures is being used as a cover for a drug-smuggling operation? Maybe the victim was in on it; maybe he wasn’t. But supposing we end up finding out that the owners of Action Trail Adventures are somehow involved in what went on. We’d better be damned sure we have a valid search warrant in hand before we ever set foot inside that trailer. Otherwise, whatever we find there could end up being ruled as inadmissable.”

“Good point,” Joanna said.

“And I noticed what looked like the remains of a surveillance camera near the gate,” Ernie added. “The killers probably took that down as they were leaving.”

“Makes sense to me,” Joanna said. “But if there’s a camera, there’s probably also a tape. We need to find that, too.”

“Yes, we do,” Ernie asked. “Seen enough?”

“I think so,” Joanna said. “Let’s go talk with your witness.”

I’m just an ordinary guy, and it’s taken me a lifetime to learn that we all exist in a world of unintended consequences. For me that’s more than just a slogan. It’s life itself. My unmarried mother had no intention of getting pregnant with me, but she did. And when her fiancé, my father, died in a motorcycle accident prior to my birth, my mother had choices. Even though abortions were illegal back then, she could probably have found a way to make one happen, but she didn’t. And she could have given me up for adoption, but she didn’t do that, either. In spite of her family’s opposition, she had me and raised me and, if you ask me, she did a damned fine job of it, too.

I lost Karen, my first wife, twice. The first time was as a result of the divorce and that was an unintended consequence of my years of drinking. I usually claim it was caused by working and drinking, but you need to consider the source. That’s how alcoholics work. Even when we finally sober up, we try to rationalize things away and minimize the impact our love affair with the bottle had on ourselves and the people around us. When I lost Karen the second time, it was to cancer. Not my fault. I didn’t cause it, and I like to think that, before she died, I managed to make amends for some of the heartache I caused her, and I’m very fortunate to have lived long enough to have a chance to get back in my kids’ lives.

And then there’s Anne Corley, my second wife. When I think of Anne now, I can still see her, striding purposefully through that cemetery on Queen Anne Hill in her bright red dress. And that’s pretty much all I remember, and maybe it’s better that way. Of course, I was still drinking then, so a lot of my forgetfulness may be due to booze, but there’s no arguing with the fact that what happened between us in the course of those next few dizzying days was astonishing—both astonishingly good and astonishingly bad. Thrown together, we were a fire that burned too hot and bright to last—like the brillianworked too hard—that you were too serious and too driven. She wanted to lighten your load. Instead, you’ve kept right on working too hard and amassing a fortune. It’s time that changed. You can either sit around like some modern King Midas, or you can get off your dead butt (she didn’t say butt, actually) and have some fun with that gift while you’re still young enough to enjoy it. I don’t need to be a rich widow. We’re both alive and healthy. Let’s have fun now!”

Our trip to Disneyland was a direct result of that conversation. The only bad unintended consequence of that, of course, had been my ride on the teacups.

It turns out that Mel has lots of good ideas for spending my money. Sometime earlier, Mel had become involved with a group of high-flying Seattle-area women who had introduced her to the miracle of private jets, or “Business Aviation,” as they call it in the literature. It turned out that the women had been up to no good, but the private-jet lesson had stuck.

Mel liked using them, and now so do I. It’s nice to travel on your own schedule and to get off and on planes with your luggage and dignity intact. It’s slick that you don’t have to remove your belt or your shoes or your jacket. All you have to do is show your ID, get on the plane, and off you go. If you want to take along a brand-new ten-ounce container of toothpaste? Fine. If you want to take along a twelve-ounce container of mouthwash or baby formula? That’s fine, too. And if you happen to carry a stray 9-mm with you? That’s not a problem, either. You don’t have to walk through any metal detectors. You show the pilots your government-issue ID and away you go.

Being able to do all these things doesn’t come cheap, as I had learned when I flew all my nearest and dearest to Las Vegas for Mel’s and my wedding. It was expensive but a fun first crack at flying private aircraft. Once I actually tried it and found out “how the other half lived,” I had zero interest in ever getting back into one of those slow-moving TSA security check lines at Sea-Tac airport. And that’s how Mel and I had flown to Anaheim, on board a Hawker 400XP. And that’s how we were flying home as well.

When Ross Connors had talked about the chances of my being able to get my luggage back in time to make it over to Ellensburg for the Jane Doe autopsy, I didn’t come right out and say that I knew good and well that getting my luggage wasn’t going to be a problem. And so, although I didn’t mention any of that to Ross, I did place a call to Owners’ Services and let them know that we’d like to leave an hour earlier than our originally scheduled departure time of 10:30 A.M.

“So what do you think?” Mel asked, once we were buckled into our seats and drinking our coffee while we taxied to the end of the runway. “Was it a success?”

I reached across the aisle, took her hand, and kissed the back of it. “Unqualified,” I told her. “Everybody had fun. There were no major blow-ups. Kelly was on speaking terms with me the whole time. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

Mel, whose relationship with her own father isn’t exactly trouble-free, has been more of a helpgive us a heads-up, but it took this long to relay the message.”

When Animal Control had been folded into Joanna’s department on a “temporary” basis, she had soon discovered that the two radio systems involved were incompatible. Requests to replace Animal Control’s system with new and compatible equipment had been disallowed on the grounds that the situation was “temporary.” Permanently temporary. Relaying messages back and forth was cumbersome, time-consuming, and, in this case, pointless. By the time Joanna knew someone was coming, she was pretty much there.

The three officers watched as an antique jeep careened over the top of the dune behind them. Ernie moved forward to flag down the vehicle. For a time it appeared that the jeep was going to plow right into him. The female driver stopped only a couple of feet from where Ernie was standing. The woman, tanned and weather-beaten, wore a man’s Western shirt and a faded baseball cap. A foot-long gray ponytail stuck out through the hole in the back of the cap. Looking at her, Joanna estimated the woman to be in her late sixties or early seventies. There was no need to guess about her state of mind. She was mad as hell.

“Where’s my brother?” she demanded. “What’s happened and what have you done with him? That’s Lester’s ATV over there. It looks like it’s been wrecked.” She pointed at the fallen ATV. “Is he all right? And who the hell are all of you?”

Since Ernie was right in front of the bumper, he was closer to the newly arrived vehicle than anyone else. Producing his badge and ID wallet, he held them up. “I’m Detective Ernie Carpenter with the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department. That’s Sheriff Brady and Detective Howell,” he added, pointing in their direction. “I’m afraid there’s been an accident.”

“I can see that!” the woman snapped. “What do you think I am, blind or something? Now get the hell out of my way.”

The engine was still idling. She gunned it determinedly, as though she fully intended to hit the gas and barge right past him. Or over him.

“You can’t go there, miss,” he insisted. “It’s a crime scene.”

“Don’t you ‘miss’ me…” she began, but before she could pull away, Ernie reached across her, switched off the ignition on the steering column, and took possession of the keys. In the momentary quiet, the woman gave Ernie a piercing look.

“Wait a minute. Did you say crime scene?” she asked. It seemed as though she had only then internalized his words.

Ernie nodded again. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “It’s a possible homicide.”

A shocked expression flitted across the woman’s face. “You’re saying someone’s dead—that they’ve been murdered?” she asked.

“There’s been a fatality,” the detective told her, keeping his voice neutral. “We don’t know yet if it’s a homicide. That’s what we’re investigating right now.”

“My brother lives out here,” the woman said forcefully. “ghtly in Dave Hollicker’s direction. Before anyone could stop her, the woman bolted from the jeep. With an unexpected burst of speed she dodged past Ernie and sprinted toward Dave, heading straight off across the sand. Without pausing to confer, Joanna and Deb Howell leaped forward to head the woman off. Each of them managed to lay hands on an arm and together they jerked the woman to a stop.

“Let me go,” she shouted, trying to extricate herself. “What if that’s my brother over there? I saw Lester’s dog back at the gate with another cop. She wouldn’t tell me what was going on, either, but Miller wouldn’t have left Les’s side unless something was terribly wrong.”

“Our victim may very well be your brother,” Joanna agreed calmly, trying to reason with the still struggling woman. “But you can’t go there. As Detective Carpenter told you, this is a crime scene. We need to preserve it. We have to keep it the way it is in hopes of figuring out what happened.”

“Let me go!”

“No!” Joanna told her. “Not until you calm down. You can’t just go tearing off across the sand. What if the victim does turn out to be your brother? The only way we’ll be able to find out what really happened to him is by examining every detail of the crime scene so we can figure out what went on.”

As suddenly as the struggle had started, it ended. The woman dropped her arms and stopped pulling. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

Joanna let go of the arm she was holding. As a precaution, Debra continued to hold on to hers.

“Who are you?” Joanna asked. “What’s your name?”

The woman took a deep breath. “Margie,” she said. “My name’s Margie Savage.”

“You said you think this man—the victim—may be your brother?” Joanna asked.

“My baby brother,” Margie answered. “His name is Lester—Lester Attwood. He lives in that camper back by the gate. His truck’s there, but he’s not. I was afraid something bad had happened to him.”

“What made you think that?” Joanna asked. “Is that why you came here today?”

Margie nodded. “I work at the post office in Bowie. One of the neighbors from up the road stopped by a little while ago and told me something strange was going on up here. He said he’d seen an Animal Control truck turn in here and a cop car, too, one that took off over the dunes. I couldn’t figure out why Animal Control would be here. I know Miller’s licensed. I took care of that myself. So I headed out here on my lunch hour to see what happened. I followed the tracks and they led me right here. So what did happen? Did he come down that dune too fast and take a spill? I kept telling him to stay off that ATV, that the damned thing would be the death of him.”

That jeep doesn’t look much safer, Joanna thought, but what she said was “We don’t think what happened was an accident. That’s why Detectives Carpenter and Howell are here. They’re homicide detectives, and that man you see working over there…” She pointed at Dave. “He’s my crime scene investiventuring off Dave Hollicker’s plastic-grid trail. By the time Margie reached the side of her jeep, she sank down on her knees next to it, buried her face in her hands, and wept. Joanna realized then that Margie Savage had put on a good front of being tough, but it was only that—a front. Joanna caught up with her in time to hear her sob, “I’m sorry, Mama,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“None of this is your fault,” Joanna said consolingly, “unless you did this. Did you?”

Margie shook her head. “But I promised our mama that I’d look after him, that I’d keep him safe. Once he sobered up, I helped him get this caretaker’s job so’s I could keep an eye on him. Now he’s dead.”

She pulled a red hankie out of the pocket of her jeans and blew her nose into it. Then she straightened her shoulders and looked back at the ATV. “They ran him down, didn’t they?” she said.

“That’s what it looks like,” Joanna agreed. “We won’t know for sure until we finish our investigation.”

“And who did it?”

“We don’t know that, either. Is there a chance your brother got involved with some unsavory characters?”

“Les has been involved with ‘unsavory characters’ all his life,” Margie replied. “He didn’t hardly know any other kind. I thought he’d left all that behind him—those kinds of friends, but maybe he had a slip.”

“A slip,” Ernie said, latching on to the sobriety lingo. “Are you saying he’d been through drug or alcohol treatment?”

“Alcohol,” Margie answered. “Three times, to be exact, but this last time it finally took. Les had been sober for a little over a year. Fourteen months, to be exact. Said the only kind of booze he still had around the house was Miller.”

“Miller High Life?” Ernie asked. “You mean he still drank beer?”

“Not that kind of Miller,” Margie said. “His dog. Les was still drinking two years ago when somebody dumped an almost dead puppy out by the garbage cans at the trailer court in Tucson where Les used to live. The puppy was a tiny little thing. To begin with, Les fed him with an eyedropper and later with a toy baby bottle. He finally managed to nurse him back to health. Les named the dog after his favorite beer—Miller—and even taught him to bring him a cold one from the fridge. He thought that was funnier ’an a rubber crutch. ‘Hey, Miller,’ he’d say, ‘bring me a Miller.’ And that dog would do it just as cute as can be. Truth be told, Les let that dog drink some of his beer as well. But finally Lester went through treatment and sobered up. It turns out that when Les stopped drinking, so did Miller. But when Les wanted a soda from the fridge, he’d still say the same thing—for Miller to bring him a beer. Les told me it was just too much trouble to try teaching that dog a new command. Besides, Les liked it. He said asking the dog to bring him a soda didn’t have quite the same ring to it; wasn’t as funny.”

Margie paused and looked around. “Les loved that dog to distraction,” she added. “What’s going to happen to him now?”

“Come on,” Machett said. “That homicide cop of yours has four-wheel drive. I’ve seen it. Couldn’t you just send him over here with a tow chain?”

And get Ernie stuck, too? Joanna thought. Not on your life.

“He’s interviewing a witness right now,” she said. “And I don’t think our insurance covers DIY towing. If something happened to your vehicle or ours, the damage wouldn’t be covered.”

“Have a heart, Sheriff Brady,” he wheedled. “Help me out here.”

But on this matter, Joanna’s mind was made up. “I’ll get you the number,” she said.

She called Dispatch, got the names and numbers of several towing companies, and relayed them back to Guy Machett. Then Joanna called in to Animal Control and spoke to Jeannine Phillips. It was easier and faster to call on the phone than to work with the nonworking radio system.

“Have Officer Wilson take the homicide victim’s dog into custody and bring him back to Bisbee.”

“To the pound?” Jeannine asked. “Does that mean none of the relatives want him?”

“Not so far.”

“Natalie already asked me about this,” Jeannine said. “According to her, Miller seems to be a great dog. He’s been neutered, has all his shots, and is properly licensed. Instead of bringing him to the pound, she was wondering if she could foster him until we find out if the relatives give a final yea or nay. If they don’t want him, Natalie might take him permanently.”

Joanna felt a slight lightening in her chest. In the course of that tough afternoon, not having to lock up a grieving dog seemed like a good thing—a small but good thing.

“Great,” she said. “If you don’t have a problem with that arrangement, far be it from me to interfere.”

Call waiting buzzed, and Joanna switched over to another call. “I just talked to towing company number three,” Guy Machett complained. “They can’t be here in anything less than an hour. What the hell am I supposed to do in the meantime—waste my whole day?”

Of course Guy Machett wasn’t the only one wasting time. Until he made his appearance to examine the victim, Joanna’s detectives were also stuck in a holding pattern.

Joanna covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “The tow truck’s at least an hour away,” Joanna told Ernie. “Want to try pulling him out with the Yukon?”

“What’s the matter?” Margie interrupted before Ernie had a chance to answer. “Who’s stuck?”

“The medical examiner,” Joanna said. “He’s bogged down in the sand somewhere between here and the gate.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Margie Savage said. &#n’t mind?” Joanna asked.

“Hell, no,” Margie said. “Why would I mind?”

With that, she headed for her jeep. Ernie moved as if to stop her, but Joanna held up her hand.

“Let her go,” she said. “There’s nothing Dr. Machett will hate more than being rescued by an old lady.”

And nothing I’ll like better.

CHAPTER 5

BY THE TIME I GOT BACK TO THE KITTITAS COUNTY COMPLEX, I HAD

no intention of going another few rounds with the receptionist. Instead, I prowled the parking lot. You’ve heard the old adage: Rank hath its privilege? In the world of bureaucrats, no privilege counts for quite as much as having your very own reserved parking place. It didn’t take long to find the spot that was marked: RESERVED MEDICAL EXAMINER.

I kept circling the parking lot until someone finally left a parking place that gave me a clear view of the M.E.’s precious spot. That way, when she finally showed up, I’d be the first to know. I put the seat all the way back, opened my computer, logged on, and indulged myself. For a long time, I had resisted doing online crossword puzzles. Doing them on a computer rather than in a banged-up folded newspaper had seemed sacrilegious somehow.

But I’m over it. That was another change Mel had instituted in my life. Despite her love of fast, powerful cars—she adores the Porsche Cayman I gave her as a wedding present—she’s a greenie at heart. She has managed to convince me to give up on newsprint altogether, including crosswords, which were the only thing I thought papers were good for to begin with.

Just because it was raining in Seattle and snowing in Snoqualmie Pass didn’t mean it was raining or snowing here. Ellensburg is right at the edge of Washington State’s unexpected stretch of desert. So I sat in the clear cold sunlight, squinting at my dim computer screen, and worked the New York Times puzzle. In a little over five minutes. That’s the problem with Monday and Tuesday puzzles these days. Most of the time they’re way too easy.

A few minutes later and an hour and a half after the receptionist had given me the brush-off, a bright red Prius pulled into the M.E.’s reserved spot. A young woman with long dark hair and wearing an enormous pair of sunglasses got out of the car and then turned to retrieve a briefcase. I put down the computer and scrambled to intercept her.

“Dr. Hopewell?” I asked tentatively.

Peeling off the glasses, she swung around and faced me. I was surprised to see a pair of almond-shaped dark eyes, angry dark eyes, staring back at me. “Yes,” she said. “I’m Dr. Hopewell. That was certainly quick. Where is it?”

Excuse me? She seemed to be in the middle of a conversation I hadn’t yet started.

“Where’s w0;My suitcase. The airline called while I was still in the pass. They said they had found the missing luggage and they were dispatching someone to deliver it to me. I thought maybe the airline finally got around to doing something right for a change.”

That seemed unlikely, but rather than telling her so, I managed to fumble my ID out of my pocket and hand it over. “Sorry,” I said. “Special Investigator J. P. Beaumont. I’m here for the autopsy.”

“Oh,” she said. She glanced at my ID and handed it back. “Sorry about that,” she said. “As you can see, there’s been a slight delay. Come on in. I’ve been out of town. I’ve heard about the case, but so far I haven’t seen anything about it. As soon as I get suited up, we can start. You can wait in my office if you like.”

She led me through the lobby. I waltzed past the evil-eyed receptionist without being hit by any incoming missiles and hurried on into the relative safety of the morgue’s nonpublic areas. The first office beyond the swinging doors was labeled DR. HOPEWELL. She ushered me into that and offered me one of two visitors’ chairs. Then she set the briefcase down behind a suspiciously clean and orderly desk.

“Wait here,” she instructed. “I’ll be right back.”

I find that women in positions of authority have a tendency to be at one extreme or the other. Either they’re comfortable with themselves and easy to get along with—like Mel, for instance—or they can be a royal pain in the butt. I had no idea where Dr. Hopewell would stand on the particular dividing line. To be on the safe side, I did exactly as I’d been told and sat where she’d left me.

While I waited, I examined her small but exceptionally neat office in some detail. Eventually my eyes were drawn to a framed photo on the wall—a graduation photo with a smiling cap-and-gown-clad Laura Hopewell standing between a very non-Asian middle-aged couple, a man and a woman. I was still studying the photo when Dr. Hopewell returned.

“Those are my parents,” she said. “They adopted me from China when I was three.”

“They look like nice people,” I said.

She nodded. “They are.”

“And you must make them very proud.”

She shrugged and sighed. “Maybe not so much,” she said. “My mother would rather I was curing cancer or delivering babies instead of solving murders.”

That made me laugh. “Some things never change,” I said. “When I told my mother I was going to be a cop, she felt the same way.”

That broke the ice. “Come on,” Dr. Hopewell said. “Let’s go get this done.”

Which we did.

Standing in on autopsies is tough, but it’s part of my job. Bereaved family members go to funerals. They remember the dearly departed in eulogies and they start the process of saying good-bye. For homicide cops, autopsies are a way of saying hello. What the M.E. uncovers in an autopsy is usually a starting point. By learning everything we can about the victims at the moment of death, we begin trying to find out nd removed the skull. As soon as she did so, I saw the other huge difference Ross Connors had already mentioned. This skull still had teeth. The teeth of all the other victims had been removed, if not prior to death, then at least prior to the time the corpse had been set on fire.

Dr. Hopewell examined the skull for a long time before she spoke again. “Lots of signs of blunt trauma here,” she said. “It looks like any number of them could have been fatal.”

“What about strangulation?” I asked. “Any sign of that?”

Dr. Hopewell shook her head. “None,” she said.

That was a point this victim had in common with the others. They hadn’t been strangled, either.

“Look at this,” Dr. Hopewell said. She used a hemostat to pluck a long strand of blackened material out of the box and held it up to the light.

“Rope, maybe?” I asked.

She nodded. “Restraints. Bag, please, Mr. Craft.”

Her assistant stepped forward with an open evidence bag and she dropped the strand of burned rope into it.

“What about hair?” I asked.

“Some,” she said.

“Enough for DNA testing?”

Dr. Hopewell’s eyes met mine. “We don’t do DNA testing,” she said. “And we don’t order it, either. Too expensive. My office can’t afford it.”

“Mine can,” I said with some confidence. It was reassuring to know that I worked for a guy who would spare no expense when it came to doing the job. “Forward what you have to the Washington State Patrol Crime lab. Tell them it’s a Ross Connors case.”

Dr. Hopewell nodded again and returned to her work and her narrative. “The victim was evidently lying on her back when she was set on fire. You’ll notice that the charring is far more pronounced on the top portions of the body than it is on the bottom,” she continued. “I would assume that whoever did this probably expected that the body would burn down to mere ashes, thus erasing all trace evidence. Unfortunately for him, the fire went out prematurely.”

“Due to weather conditions?” I asked. In the Cascades in November, it’s either raining or snowing.

“The weather could be partly responsible in putting the fire out,” Dr. Hopewell conceded. “But remember, most of the people who turn to crime do so because they don’t have many other career options. They aren’t smart and didn’t pay attention in school. The guy who did this—and I’m pretty sure it was a guy—obviously had no idea that the human body is more than fifty percent water. He may have poured on all the gasoline he had, but it wasn’t nearly enough to do the job completely. Unfortunately for us, when the fire was out, there was still enough flesh on the bones to attract carrion eaters. That’s why the bones were scattered around the way they were.”

Suddenly the door to the morgue swung open. A woman her know the M.E. had returned to her office. I had an idea that Ms. Whitman’s receptionist’s passive-aggressive behavior wouldn’t be limited to her gatekeeping responsibilities. I also doubted she would favor one law enforcement entity over any other.

Detective Caldwell must have arrived at the same conclusion. She didn’t say a word to me until after we had stopped off at Connie’s desk and given her our e-mail information. Once we were outside, however, it was a different story.

While we had been involved with the autopsy, the coming storm had blown over the Cascades and was making its presence known. Clear skies had been replaced by lowering clouds. It was cold as hell and spitting a combination of snow and sleet. None of that did anything to cool Detective Lucinda Caldwell’s temper.

“So,” she said, turning on me, “I suppose since you work for the attorney general, you think you’re some kind of big deal?”

I had already figured out that when genes were being passed out, Detective Caldwell had missed out entirely on having a sense of humor. In our kind of work, however, that can leave you at a distinct disadvantage.

“I’m no kind of big deal,” I replied earnestly. “I actually work for S.H.I.T.”

I deliberately didn’t spell it out, and Detective Caldwell’s resulting confusion was a delight to see. She hadn’t been paying attention before and she was clearly unfamiliar with the bureaucratic faux pas that had resulted from calling our unit the Special Homicide Investigation Team. And the way she rose to the bait was gratifying. It wasn’t easy to keep a straight face, but I managed.

“I’ll have you know,” she said, “I won’t be spoken to that way. I want the name of your immediate supervisor.”

That was almost too good. Hilarious, even. “That would be Harry I. Ball,” I said in all seriousness. “Would you like his number?”

She flushed with anger. “Go to hell,” she said, and stalked away.

I hurried after her. “That’s Harry Ignatius Ball,” I told her. “He’s the commander of the attorney general’s Special Homicide Investigation Team’s second unit. We’re based in Bellevue, and we’re investigating a series of homicides that are similar to this one, deaths that may or may not be related.”

Detective Caldwell may not have had a sense of humor, but she was listening. It finally dawned on her that there might be something more to what I was saying—that I wasn’t just giving her a hard time, although I have to confess that I had enjoyed that part of our conversation immensely.

She stopped and turned back to face me. “What homicides?” she demanded.

Detective Caldwell had me there. This was a simple question that I didn’t much want to answer. I felt like a politician who thinks he can get away with saying something in one part of the country without having it go over like a pregnant pole-vaulter everywhere else. The cases in question had come from several different jurisdictions, and Ross Connor>

“Only one,” Detective Caldwell said. “Let’s go. How about if you follow me back to the department. I’ll give you a look at what else we have. Who knows? Maybe you’ll come up with an idea or two.”

Her grudging acceptance wasn’t exactly a heartfelt apology, but it was as close to one as I was going to get.

“Great,” I said, turning on the ignition. “Lead the way.”

As far as Joanna was concerned, sending Margie Savage to rescue Guy Machett from the sand was well worth the price of admission. He had been ripped before. He arrived at the crime scene in a state of high dudgeon and without Margie Savage, who had pulled him out and then gone on her way. Considering the M.E.’s state of mind, that was probably a good thing.

“That woman’s a nutcase,” he complained as he opened the cargo door and hauled out a bag of equipment. “She absolutely floored it. She yanked me out of the sand like it was some kind of grudge match. It’s a wonder I don’t have whiplash, and look at what she did to my bumper.”

Machett was right. The minivan’s front bumper had been mangled beyond all recognition. What was left of it was rubbing up against the right front tire and would most likely have to be removed before the vehicle could be driven back to town.

“No doubt she thought you were in a hurry,” Joanna said. Just beyond Guy Machett and outside his vision, Ernie Carpenter favored Joanna with a wink and a very small grin.

“Now where the hell’s this damn body?” Machett continued.

“Out there,” she said, pointing. “Dave Hollicker laid down a trail of click-together pavers to make it easier to walk out to the body while preserving the crime scene as much as possible.”

Machett gave Dave’s plastic path a disparaging look. “You expect me to run a gurney across that?”

As a matter of fact I do, Joanna thought, but she was done. She’d had enough of Guy Machett’s temper tantrums for one day, and she didn’t need any more.

“You do whatever you need to do,” she said. “I’m sure you and Dave will be able to work it out. In the meantime, Detective Carpenter, how about if you give me a ride back out to my vehicle. I’ll leave the rest of you to it.”

“That guy’s no Doc Winfield,” Ernie said, once they had climbed into the Yukon and driven out of earshot.

The understated elegance in Ernie’s comment was enough to make Joanna smile. “No, he’s not,” she agreed.

“And he’s not going to last,” Ernie added.

That unequivocal statement was enough to make Joanna sit up and take notice. Maybe something was going on that she hadn’t heard about.

“What makes you say that?” she asked.

“Because he’s a balloon full of hot air and somebody needs to pop it—somebody who’s got his twenty years in and doesn’t sten here, Lucy,” Gary interrupted. “If the attorney general says jump, we’d by God better jump.”

His tone was so patronizing I was surprised Lucy didn’t haul off and slap him upside the head. I would have, but she didn’t. She let him get away with it.

“But, Gary…” she began earnestly.

Detective Fields dismissed her objection with a wave of his hand. “Let’s just be sure that when we check things out to him, we do it the right way. We’ll sign off on all the paperwork, preserve the chain of evidence, and all that. As long as we cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s, it won’t come back and bite us in the butt. So go get me the damned forms.”

After giving Gary one final look that should have turned him into a pillar of salt, Lucy marched out of the cubicle.

“Just ignore her,” Gary advised me with a grin. “She’s a little more emotional than usual. It’s probably that time of month.”

In the world of Seattle PD, where political correctness is the name of the game, a sexist comment like that would probably have been enough for Detective Fields to find himself brought up on charges of creating a hostile work environment. The social culture here was evidently a little different.

Lucy returned, bringing with her a set of forms that would release the evidence to my care and keeping. She slapped it down on the table.

“You fill it out then,” she told Gary. “I’m not going to.”

She left again. Gary turned his hand to the paperwork with an amazingly cheerful attitude. “There you go,” he said at last, signing off on the bottom of the last form with a considerable flourish. “It’s all yours,” he said. “Let us know what you find out, as I’m sure you will.”

“Yes, I will,” I agreed. “Absolutely.”

Of course, Fields hadn’t mentioned the budget problem to me or that his department was operating in a world of hurt. How could he? I’m a fellow officer and a guy. And of course he signed off on the request. It was his way of throwing his weight around and showing me that he was the big bad boss and poor little Detective Caldwell had to do things his way. Right. Of course she did.

I took charge of both the paperwork and the evidence box. As I emerged from the cubicle, Lucy Caldwell was waiting just outside. She stood with her arms crossed, her eyes shooting daggers at me and at her partner as well. She didn’t crack a smile, and neither did I, but we both knew she’d won.

Detective Fields had been screwed—without a kiss—and he didn’t even know it; didn’t have a clue.

Which, if you ask me, was exactly what he deserved.

Leaving the crime scene, Joanna headed back to the department. Her mind was still grappling with the apparent murder of Lester Attwood when her phone rang.

“I had some help,” Butch told her. “Jenny packed your bag, Kristin cleared your calendar, and Tom Hadlock said he’ll hold down the fort.”

“Thank you,” she said. “You’re really thoughtful.”

He grinned. “And you’re lovely,” he returned. “I’m really lucky.”

“We both are.”

“Would you care to go to dinner?”

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s.”

By the time I made it back to North Bend, it was late afternoon, and the snow had turned to rain—not the usual steady drizzle we’re accustomed to in Seattle but a kind of torrential downpour that can melt snow too fast and send rivers pouring up and over their banks. I went to the address I had jotted down for Ken Leggett, the guy who had found the body.

North Bend has a bucolic sound to it, but it’s a burg that seems more than a little schizophrenic. There’s the “new” North Bend, which is essentially a cluster of outlet stores and fast-food joints, and the “old” North Bend, which is…well…old. Ken Leggett lived on a potholed excuse for a street in a neighborhood of mostly down-at-the-heels bungalows that had probably been built in the twenties or thirties—back in the old days when logging was king. Between then and now, no one had done much about routine maintenance.

Leggett’s place was far and away the worst of the lot. It looked as though someone had painted it white with a cheery kind of red trim once, but most of the paint had either peeled or faded away, take your pick. The roof had far more moss showing than shingles. A tiny covered front porch sagged to one side, suggesting that it wouldn’t take much to knock it down. At the end of a rutted drive, an older-model Toyota Tundra sat huddled under the roof of a carport, which, like the porch, didn’t look like it was long for this world.

There were no lights or signs of movement showing from inside the place, but I parked out front and started up the short walkway, getting drenched in the process. As I stepped onto the crumbling front porch, the planking groaned beneath my feet, but it didn’t give way.

As I raised my hand to knock, someone spoke to me. “He’s not home.”

The male voice came from the house next door, one on the far side of Leggett’s driveway. There, under a similarly decrepit carport, stood another equally dilapidated pickup truck—an old Dodge Ram. The hood was open and a guy with a single Trouble Light dangling over his shoulder was actually working on it. Shade-tree mechanics may be a thing of the past in downtown Seattle, but not at the low-priced end of North Bend. Just looking at the scene I understood that the man wasn’t working on his aging truck because he was spiffing it up for some antique car show. The vehicle was what he counted on for wheels, and he was keeping it running with do-it-yourself know-how and probably, given the truck’s age, mostly junkyard parts.

“Any idea where I could find Mr. Leggett?” I asked.

The man straightened up, pushed a pair of reading glasses up onto the top of his headiv height="0%">

“Come on, fella,” I said to him. “It’s raining outside. How about I give you a lift home.”

CHAPTER 7

HAVING SPENT THE BETTER PART OF THE DAY DEALING WITH MURDER

and mayhem in Ellensburg, it was difficult to remember that I had started the day in, as they like to say in Disneyland, “the happiest place on earth.” I’ve always been under the impression that jet lag happens when you fly east or west across time zones rather than north and south. I also think I read somewhere that men are less likely to be affected by jet lag than women are. It turns out I was wrong—on both counts.

When I got home to Seattle that night, I was bushed, and I chose to blame it on jet lag rather than anything else. I barely managed to finish telling Mel about my adventures east of the mountains when I conked out, sound asleep in my recliner. Sometime after the news and Jay Leno, Mel woke me up long enough to herd me into bed.

When I woke up the next morning and stumbled out of the shower and into the kitchen for coffee, I could tell from the clock that I had overslept and most likely would be late getting into the office. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” I asked.

Mel was up and her usual perky, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed self. To my surprise, however, she wasn’t dressed for work.

“Good morning to you, too, Mr. Grumbly Bear,” she told me, reaching out to hand me a computer printout. “Maybe you should go back into hibernation.”

Of course she said it with a smile. The robe and gown she was wearing made a very fetching concoction—enough to make me wish that I hadn’t gotten dressed quite so fast. When I made a tentative suggestion in that direction, she shook her head and returned her attention to the laptop on her lap. With my coffee cup in one hand and the paper in the other, I squinted at the impossibly vague printing on the page. Finding my arms far too short, I wondered where the hell I’d left my reading glasses.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“A missing persons report,” she said. “From November twelfth of last year. I think she’s your victim.”

One of the tasks Ross Connors had handed over to his Special Homicide Investigation Team was keeping track of missing persons investigations from all over the state. Someone reported missing in Vancouver, for example, wasn’t likely to be noticed if he or she turned up in Bellingham either living or dead. By focusing on those cases and compiling all the information from various jurisdictions and agencies together in one spot, including dental records wherever possible, S.H.I.T. had already managed to solve several previously unsolvable cases. Among those were cases from several different people who, for one reason or another, had gone missing deliberately and wanted to stay that way. Mel’s fint for a little while when we go by to pick up your car…” Butch offered.

Joanna shook her head. “Nope, you were right the first time. We’ll just pick up the car and go. I won’t even poke my head inside. Taking a whole day off now and then is the right thing to do.”

The guy who came up with that saying about the war’s not won until the paperwork is done was probably a cop in his other life. I believe most law enforcement officers would agree with me when I say that paperwork is the bane of our existence. The fact that it’s done mostly on computers these days as opposed to on paper may be good for saving trees, but it’s still a pain in the neck and takes inordinate amounts of time. As far as Team B is concerned, since Harry hates computers, everything has to be printed out for him, which means that the poor trees lose anygh to let us do our jobs even when investigations step on high-profile toes. That’s also why voters are smart enough to reelect him time after time.

“So maybe this is identity theft then?” I asked, going back to the situation of the two Marinas.

“At the very least,” Mel said. “Maybe our victim is an illegal immigrant posing as someone else. What I’m wondering is whether or not the fiancé knows about it.”

I was wondering the same thing. “Me, too,” I said.

People who talk about perpetually rainy Seattle forget about one important mitigating factor—afternoons. Around here, even in the winter, things tend to dry out a little during the day, but they hardly ever do that until after the morning rush hour. This was only early afternoon, closing in on two. As we turned off I-5 at Federal Way, one of Seattle’s ex-burbs, the rain stopped, the skies cleared, the pavement turned into a shining strip of sunlight.

Mel had located an address for Mason Waters, and the Cayman’s slick nav system led us there without a hitch. We drove to the end of a house-lined cul-de-sac. There, on one of the pie-shaped end lots, sat a neat little fifties rambler that had been painted a garish maroon. A hulking maroon-colored Kenworth was parked next to the carport. Inside the carport and dwarfed by its oversize neighbor sat a maroon Honda sedan.

“Looks like Mr. Waters is home,” Mel said as she put the Cayman in park. “And maroon seems to be his favorite color.”

I remembered that Mel had said Mason Waters was a long-haul trucker and that he’d been out on the road on a trip, but that afternoon the oversize tractor-trailer literally sparkled in the sunshine. There wasn’t a dead bug to be seen anywhere. It had obviously just had a thorough detailing. On the driver’s door, stenciled in gold letters, were the words: WATERS TRUCKING, INC. FEDERAL WAY, WA. DRIVE SAFE. ARRIVE ALIVE.

Stepping out of a vehicle driven by the death-defying Mel Soames, I couldn’t help but notice those last few words—and take them personally. Someday a state patroller with more nerve than I have will give her a ticket and slow her down. In the meantime, as her husband, I find it works best if I keep my mouth shut, my eyes closed, and my seat belt securely fastened.

Mel led the way down the short walkway and onto a small covered porch. As she stepped onto it, the front door and screen door slammed open and a huge man wearing a wild-patterned green and yellow Hawaiian shirt barreled out onto the porch.

“Oh my God!” he exclaimed as both Mel and I leaned back in alarm. “Are you cops? Did you find Marina? Where is she? Is she all right? Please tell me she’s all right.”

That kind of anguish can be faked, but not at the drop of a hat. Even on stage, actors have to have some time before they can psych themselves up for a performance like that. My first impression was that Mr. Waters was the real deal. Mel appeared to agree.

“Yes, we’re police officers,” she answered, producing her ID and badge. “We need to ask you a few questions.”

“So you’re saying the driver is actually her bodyguard?” Mel asked.

Donita nodded again. “That and maybe her boyfriend. I don’t think they’re married, but he carries a gun, and he acts like he knows how to use it. I think he used to be a cop,” she added, “but I don’t know where.”

I didn’t ask how she knew that. In the wild, crooks recognize cops. Cops recognize crooks. It’s part of the natural order of things—a variation on a theme of survival of the fittest.

“Does the driver have a name?” Mel asked.

Donita shrugged. “Tommy something or other. I don’t think I’ve ever heard his last name, and I don’t pay that much attention to him. After all, I’ve only seen him a few times when they’ve come by to pick up the rent.”

“How many residents live here?”Mel asked.

“One hundred and ten,” Donita answered.

“Are all the units occupied?”

“Yes. Like I said before. No vacancy.”

“How do you keep track of that many people?”

Donita reached in a drawer and pulled out a clipboard. On it was a computer-generated printout several pages long, with names and unit numbers. Once again my distant-reading skills gave me a distinct advantage. From the far side of the counter I could read the printout plain as day. Every name was followed by two numbers. The one on the left, running in consecutive order, was evidently the unit number. The second number was far more random. It didn’t take long to guess that one would turn out to be an abbreviated form of the tenant’s arrival date. One was 20305. Another was 20406.

The computer printout told us something else as well. Mama Rose might be dealing in cash, but somewhere there was a computer that was keeping careful records of all moneys coming in and going out. Once we talked to the person behind the computer, we’d be able to find out exactly when Marina had moved in and when she had disappeared. We’d also be able to track down some of her near neighbors to see if they had seen anything out of the ordinary—any loud arguments or stray people coming and going at odd hours.

“Anything else you can think of?” I asked Mel.

When she shook her head, Donita looked enormously relieved.

“We’d better head out then,” I suggested. “It’s starting to get dark, and I don’t know my way around Black Diamond very well.” This was not entirely true on two counts. For one thing, I had spent some time in Black Diamond years earlier. For another, the GPS navigation system knows its way around, regardless of whether it happens to be day or night.

Mel gave me an exasperated look, but she restrained herself from giving me the full verbal blast until we were safely inside the Cayman and well out of Donita Mack’s earshot.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Mel asked as she waited on the phone to see what could be learned about Mama Rose’s address. “If this Brotsky woman has anything to hide, once Donita lets her know we’re on our way there,ably be lawyered up before we can drive from here to there.”

“Exactly,” I said. “ And if she does, we’ll know for sure she has something to hide.”

Shaking her head, Mel fed some address information into the navigation system and handed the phone over to me. “Call Records,” she added. “Mama Rose sounds like a piece of work.”

That turned out to be something of an understatement. Mama Rose Brotsky had what could only be referred to as a colorful past. Her record included more than a dozen arrests for prostitution and drug dealing in the late eighties. But all activity on her rap sheet stopped in 1990, with the exception of a speeding ticket in 1992.

When prostitutes go out of business, it’s seldom due to old age. They usually wind up on drugs first, followed by jail and/or death. The speeding ticket—fifty-five in a thirty-five-mile-an-hour zone—meant she was alive and out of the slammer two years after she had supposedly started walking the straight and narrow.

“Maybe she wised up and stopped getting caught,” Mel said as she weaved her way onto 1–5. “Or maybe she found something more profitable.”

“I’ll say,” I agreed, thinking that drug dealing was Mama Rose’s most likely post-hooking career choice. “As far as I can see, dealing drugs would be the shortest distance between walking the mean streets in Tacoma twenty years ago and owning that much prime property along I–5 right now.”

“It’s not prime property,” Mel reminded me. “It’s a trailer park.”

“It’s a trailer park where everybody pays their rent in cash,” I countered. “She may not be dodging the Vice Squad anymore, but I’d be willing to bet she’s cheating on her income taxes.”

“Great,” Mel said. “If I were Mama Rose, I’d prefer duking it out with the Vice Squad to tangling with the IRS.”

After that we didn’t talk much. Mel was driving. I kept quiet and let the woman’s voice from the nav system do all the talking.

Now that Mel and I are married, I find it works better that way.

That afternoon, by the time Butch and Joanna got home from Tucson and had the groceries unpacked and put away, it was almost time for dinner. Fortunately, Carol had that end of things handled. The food—meat loaf and baked potatoes—was cooked. All they had to do was put it on the table. Once dinner was over, Joanna moved on to overseeing Dennis’s bath. She had just rinsed the shampoo out of his hair when Butch came into the bathroom holding the telephone.

“You’d better take this,” he said. “It’s Tica.”

Tica Romero was Joanna’s nighttime dispatcher. Leaving Butch in charge of Dennis, Joanna stepped out of the bathroom. “What’s up?” she asked.

“We’ve got a missing person,” Tica said. “A ninety-three-year-old woman, Philippa Brinson, walkeight="0%" width="5%">“How long has she been gone?”

“Since three o’clock,” Tica said. “There was a communications error of some kind. No one figured out she was missing until dinnertime, and they didn’t call us right away even after they realized she was gone. I’ve dispatched a deputy and the K-9 unit to the scene along with Chief Deputy Hadlock. He’s the one who wanted me to call you. He also asked for a homicide detective. Howell is on call.”

Hadlock’s request for a homicide detective was worrisome, but he was showing initiative here, so Joanna let that pass. “Patch him through,” she said. “What’s going on, Tom?” she asked once Hadlock was on the line.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your day off, but there’s this missing person…” he began.

“Yes. Ms. Brinson. Tica told me. She said there was some kind of communication problem at the facility where she was staying.”

“It’s not much of a facility, if you ask me,” Tom answered. “A private house that’s been converted into a group home for Alzheimer’s patients. The daytime nurse took the day off. As near as I can tell, the attendant who was supposed to be on duty until four left around two, and the one who was supposed to arrive at four had car trouble and didn’t get there until five. The place is a mess. I think it should be shut down. If my mother or father were living here, that’s what I’d do—call in the health department and have them pull the plug. But I’m just the chief deputy, Sheriff Brady. And the way things stand between Ms. Whitehead and me, you’re the one who should make that call.”

Peggy Whitehead was the head of the Cochise County Health Department. Joanna gave Tom high marks for understanding that what should have been a simple interdepartmental transaction could blow up into something far more complicated.

Peggy had long been jealous of Joanna’s position in the county’s administrative hierarchy. The sheriff’s department had far more personnel than hers did, which meant that Joanna controlled a larger piece of the annual budget.

In the past year or so, Peggy had used her inspectors to keep the jail’s kitchen facilities and even the department’s break room under constant scrutiny. Tom, in his former position as jail commander, had borne the brunt of the criticism. The minor infractions that had been found there had little to do with inmate or employee health and well-being and everything to do with Peggy’s being able to put Joanna in her place. Well-placed notices in the Bisbee Bee that had focused on jail-kitchen health department infractions had served to turn the feud between two competing heads of departments into public fodder.

There was the potential for the same kind of drama playing out here as well. Unless Joanna proceeded carefully, the situation might turn into yet another political football. Rather than simply shutting down an underperforming facility and protecting vulnerable patients, Peggy Whitehead was liable to keep it open just to spite Joanna.

“You were right to call me,” Joanna assured Tom. “I’m the one who needs to make the call, and I can’t do that without assessing the situation firsthand. I’ll be there as soon as I can. In the meantime, what are we doing to find Ms. Brinson? Do we know

“Not really,” Tom said. “Like I said, she disappeared while the place was unsupervised, sometime between when the one attendant left and when the other one arrived.”

“No surveillance cameras?”

“None. Deputy Gregovich and Spike got here just a few minutes ago. I’m hoping they’ll be able to track her.”

Terry Gregovich and his German shepherd constituted Joanna’s K-9 unit.

“I’ll get the address and directions from Tica once I’m on the way,” Joanna said. “How far is the house from the highway?”

“Half a mile at least.”

“And how cold is it supposed to get tonight?”

“Upper thirties,” Tom replied grimly. “Which is pretty cold if you’re in your nineties and out wandering around with nothing more than a sweater on.”

“That’s all she’s wearing—a sweater?”

“We don’t know that for sure, but it’s likely. Sylvia Cameron, the nurse who was supposed to be here all day, finally turned up a little while ago. Someone must have called her. When she got here, she smelled like a brewery.”

“You mean she’s drunk?”

“Seems like it to me,” Tom answered. “Anyway, she claims Ms. Brinson only had a sweater here at the home, not a coat, and the sweater’s not here now.”

“But it’s been cold these past few months,” Joanna objected. “Why wouldn’t she have a coat?”

Tom paused a moment before he answered. “You need to see this place for yourself, boss,” he said. “It reminds me of what they used to say in that old commercial about the roach motel: They check in but they don’t check out.”

“Have you spoken to any of Ms. Brinson’s family members?”

“We have a phone number for a grandniece who lives in the Phoenix area. We’re trying to reach her. So far that’s a no-go.”

“I’m on my way then, Tom. Thanks for the call.”

As she closed the phone, Butch came out of the bathroom carrying Dennis. His hair was still damp. When Joanna leaned over to kiss him good-bye, he smelled of baby shampoo.

“Bye-bye,” she said. “Mommy has to go to work.”

Dennis smiled and waved.

“Be careful, Joey,” Butch said, leaning across Dennis to kiss Joanna as well.

“I will,” she told him. “But don’t worry. It’s just a missing persons case.”

“I always worry,” Butch said, and Joanna knew that was true.

“I know,” she said. “So do I.”

“On our right where?” I asked the question of Mel as much as the disembodied voice emanating from the dashboard.

As far as I was concerned, we were in the middle of nowhere on the Maple Valley/Black Diamond Highway. It was well after dark by then and raining again.

On either side of the road, Douglas fir and lodgepole pines loomed like towering black shadows against a slightly lighter sky where the undersides of lowering clouds were lit by reflected light from the megalopolis behind us.

“Right here, I guess,” Mel said. She turned onto an almost invisible dirt track that led off into the woods. From my point of view, it didn’t look promising. There was no gate, and no visible sign of security. If Mama Rose was running an all-cash business, I wondered about that.

“Why would a slumlord live out here in the sticks like this?” I asked.

“Slumlady,” Mel reminded me. “And maybe because she can.”

Several hundred yards into the forest, the trees disappeared. Before us, set on a slight rise in the middle of a clearing, stood an eye-popping, brightly lit two-story house with an illuminated fountain spouting water in the middle of a circular driveway. The lower level of the house was lined with a series of French doors that opened out onto a long veranda.

“I’m guessing Mama Rose doesn’t spend a lot of money fussing around with eco-green fluorescent lights,” Mel muttered.

Just as she said that, all around the house several blindingly bright motion-activated lights flashed on. Although we hadn’t passed through a gate, we had obviously just encountered Mama Roses’s first line of homeland security. The second one appeared a moment later, when an immense dog, a German shepherd, came careening out of the darkness, barking fiercely and charging at the car as if wanting to take a bite out of it.

Mel stopped at once. The dog didn’t. Instead of backing off, the dog threw himself at her window, where he rose up on his hind legs, still barking and snapping. If the window hadn’t been shut, he might have bounded straight through it. Then suddenly, in response to something Mel and I couldn’t hear or see, the dog stopped barking. Dropping to all fours, he turned and trotted off toward a spot at the side of the house where yet another light had just switched on.

Hoping the dog was gone for good, I risked cracking open my window. “Hello,” I called. “Anybody here?”

“Beaumont?” a man’s voice said as a figure materialized next to what seemed to be a garage. “Is that you? It’s Tom.”

His reply told me two things. Just as Mel had thought, Donita had called Mama Rose the minute we left the trailer park to let her know we were on our way. The fact that the speaker used my name that way—with no Mr. and no J.P., either—told me this was someone who knew me, and probably someone I knew as well.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I recognized a voice and name out of the past: Thomas Wojeck—Detective Thomas Wojeck. He had to be at least ten years older than I was. He had been a homicide detective for Seattle PD while I was still working Patrol. We had never actually worked together, although I seemed to remember that at one time, before my appearance on the scene, he had been partnered with Big Al Lindstrom, one of my former partners. Wojeck had left the department to go work somewhere else shortly after I was promoted to Homicide. After that, as far as I knew, he had pretty much disappeared from view.

I wondered if Donita was right and if he was more than just Mama Rose’s driver. If he was the boyfriend or even the man of the house, I had to admit it was one hell of a house, verging on palatial. Tom had either moved up or married up. In landing in such very posh digs, Tom Wojeck, like me with Anne Corley, had done all right for himself.

“Hey, Tommy,” I said. Taking his word as far as the dog was concerned, I opened the door, stepped out of the car, and walked to meet him with my hand extended in greeting. “Long time no see. How the hell are you? Some place you have here,” I added.

“Not bad,” he said. “We like it.”

His comment did nothing to clarify his exact position in this universe, and I was well mannered enough not to ask.

Mel climbed out of the Cayman and came around to where we were standing. “This is my partner, Mel Soames,” I told him. And by way of keeping things even, I didn’t explain the true nature of our partnership, either.

“Mel, this is an old colleague of mine from Seattle PD, Tom Wojeck.”

“Glad to meet you, Mr. Wojeck,” she said.

Wojeck smiled and pumped her hand. “Forget the mister stuff,” he said. “Most people call me Tommy. It’s what my mother called me, and I’ve never gotten over it. Let’s go inside before you’re soaked. I hope you don’t mind coming in through the garage. The front entry is a lot nicer, but getting to that door is a bit of a wrangle in the dark.”

The well-lit four-car garage was impressive on its own. So were its occupants. Parked side by side were a looming black Hummer, a shiny black Lincoln Town Car, a deep maroon Mercedes S550, and a bright red Dodge Grand Caravan.

“Quite a collection of rolling stock,” I said.

“We mostly use the minivan for taking Reg1; Tommy said.

He took us into the house itself through a massive kitchen, a catering kitchen, really, that had double everything, from sinks and ovens to dishwashers, warming drawers, and microwaves. The appliances were top-of-the-line stainless steel. The countertops were a gorgeous tawny granite and I suspected the cabinets were solid cherry. The materials that had been used here were way upscale compared to the grim and gray Formica on the counter at the manager’s office back at the Silver Pines, but that’s how come they’re called slumlords and ladies.

“This is some kitchen!” Mel enthused. Since I happen to know she barely cooks a lick, I understood this to be another blatant case of her playing good cop/bad cop. No need to specify which one of us was which.

“You should have seen it when we bought it,” Tommy said, smiling at her. “It was framed in, but that was it. No windows and hardly any interior walls. It was a mess. The guy who was building it lost his shirt and his money in the big dot-com bust. Rose bought it for a song. I think most people thought she’d just bulldoze the house and start over, but Rosie’s idea was to finish it and turn it into a showstopper. We’ve been working on it for years. I think she did very well.”

So did I.

Tommy led us first through a breakfast kind of area, then a huge dining room with a boardroom-style table that would easily seat a dozen or so guests. Beyond that was a spacious window-lined living room followed by a much smaller, more intimate room. In the old days it might have been called a sitting room, or maybe it had been intended for use as a library or a study. A flat-screen TV hung on the wall over a cheerfully burning gas-log fireplace. Ranged in front of it were four comfortable easy chairs. Seated in one of them was one of the most stunningly beautiful women I had ever seen. She lifted the clicker and turned off the television set as soon as we entered the room.

I think I may have mentioned before that Ross Connors encourages us to use our own vehicles rather than company cars. That means we don’t drive around with the kind of communications capability that’s now routine in patrol cars. Yes, we have a high-end nav system, but we don’t have a computer that can deliver Records information to us on the road. The clerk I had spoken to had given me a rundown of Rose Marie (Mama Rose) Brotsky’s rap sheet. But from the name, I expected a little Polish woman, short and a bit wide, with a face and body that showed some hard miles.

The records clerk hadn’t hinted that although her father may have been Polish, Mama Rose was at least a quarter and maybe even half African-American. She was stately; she was serene. When she held out her rail-thin arms in welcome, I noticed that her hands were beautifully manicured. When she smiled at me, her face was transformed. She was simply gorgeous.

I noticed that right off. So did Mel.

“Why, Mr. Beaumont,” Mama Rose said. “That is correct, isn’t it—Mr.—since you’re no longer a detective? Welcome. Tommy says he knew you back in the day. And this is?”

“My partner,” I said. “Melissa Soames.”

Mel stepped forward to accept her own handshake. “People call me Mel,” she said.

“I hope you’ll forgive me for not standing up8221; Mama Rose said. “I have MS.” She reached out and patted a walker that was stationed strategically on the far side of the chair. “When they told me years ago that I was HIV-positive, I thought that was a death sentence. And, without all the progress they’ve made in AIDS treatment, it could have been, but it turns out that dealing with MS has been much more debilitating. Won’t you please have a seat?”

Mel and I sat. “Can I get you something?” Tommy asked. “Beer, a soda, coffee, tea. We have pretty much everything.”

“We’re working,” I said, which was easier than saying the truth, which would have been to say that I’m off the sauce and have been for years.

“Coffee,” Mel said decisively. She can drink coffee at any hour of the day and sleep like a baby. I used to be able to do the same thing. Now I can’t do that, either.

“Nothing for me,” I said. “I’m fine.”

Tommy disappeared, but instead of going back toward the kitchen the way we had come, he continued on through a swinging door just to the left of the fireplace. I suspected that it most likely led into a small butler’s pantry.

“You have a lovely home,” Mel said. The compliment may have sounded phony and ingratiating, but it was absolutely true. Mama Rose knew her home was spectacular, and she accepted the comment with good grace.

“It’s easy to have nice things when money’s no object,” Mama Rose said with a small shrug. “When I first got the HIV diagnosis and didn’t have insurance or a place to live or enough money to pay for the medicine, that was scary. Now, whatever the prescriptions cost, I just pay it. Or, rather, Tommy does. It’s no big deal.”

And that’s when it came back to me. I remembered how, years ago, I had encountered the improbable rags-to-riches story of a young homeless woman (the word “prostitute” had been discreetly edited out of the newspaper account) who, within months of being diagnosed with HIV, had been one of the first-ever Powerball Winners in Washington State.

“I remember now,” I said. “Aren’t you the person who had one of the first winning Powerball tickets around here?”

She smiled at me. “Thank you for not saying ‘Weren’t you the whore who won…’ Believe me, I’ve heard that more than once. But yes, that’s true. Mine wasn’t ‘one of the first’ winning tickets in Washington State. It was the first winning ticket. And you’re right—it was a big one—sixty-seven million after taxes!”

Mel was living back east at the time. I doubted she knew any of the story. “Whoa!” she exclaimed. “That’s a lot of money.”

“Yes, it is,” Mama Rose agreed.

“So why do you even bother with something like the Silver Pines?” Mel asked. “Isn’t that more trouble than it’s worth?”

“It is a lot of trouble on occasion,” Mama Rose admitted. “But it’s made it possible for me to help a lot of people over the years. And that feels good, of courno exceptions. I believe some people call it zero tolerance.”

To me, it sounded a lot more like tough love.

“I believe Donita mentioned that when it comes to collecting the rent, you only take cash,” Mel said.

“That’s right,” Mama Rose replied.

“How come?”

Mama Rose shrugged. “People who have been living on the street, who don’t have jobs and have never touched a lawn mower or a paintbrush have never opened a checking account, either. Besides, checks bounce. Cash never does.”

The story was starting to make me smile. The city had objected to the idea of Mama Rose’s charitable intention to open a shelter, but she had outfoxed them and done it anyway. In the process, she had outmaneuvered the naysayers by marching over or around their roadblocks. And how had she done it? By using the oldest ploy in the book—plain old garden-variety capitalism.

“I’m guessing the local city fathers would still like to put you out of business?” I asked.

“They certainly would,” Mama Rose agreed. “Probably some of the city mothers as well, but it turns out I have something they don’t have.”

“What’s that?” Mel asked.

“Better lawyers.” Mama Rose beamed. “I happen to have the big bucks here,” she added. “I’ve got plenty of money, and I’m not afraid to use it.”

It was nearly eight-thirty when Joanna finally arrived at Caring Friends, the privately run Alzheimer’s group home in Palominas. On the drive out, she had called Peggy Whitehead’s home phone and left a message for the head of the county health department, letting her know about a possible problem at the facility. When she arrived, she had to wait while three separate ambulances drove out of the yard and toward the highway with their lights flashing. Tom Hadlock hurried forward to bring her up to speed.

“Those were for the other residents?” Joanna asked, nodding toward the disappearing aid cars.

“Yes,” Tom said. “We couldn’t very well leave them here. According to the EMTs, they’re all dehydrated. At least one is severely malnourished, and another one has bedsores.”

“How many patients in all?”

“There are six rooms altogether. One is apparently unoccupied at the moment. One belongs to the woman who’s gone missing. The other four patients, all women, are being transported to area hospitals. The most serious one has been airlifted to Tucson Medical Center.”

“Do we know who’s in charge and where he or she is?”

“She,” Tom replied. “Her name’s Alma DeLong. She evidently lives in Tucson. We’ve tried contacting her. Left a message on her machine.”

Tom handed Joanna a piece of paper. She leaned back inside her Crown Victoria and switched on the reading light. The paper was a three-fold full-color brochure about Caring Friends. It showed sever, smiling and neatly dressed. One showed them eating at a table in a tastefully decorated dining room. Another showed two women seated on chairs on a sun-drenched front porch. A third showed a woman standing in the shade of a huge cottonwood tree while looking into the far distance.

At the bottom of the back page of the brochure was a photo of Alma DeLong. She was an attractive-looking woman, probably somewhere in her fifties at the time the picture was taken. According to the brief bio under the photo, she had spent years working in the area of health-care administration before taking on the management of Caring Friends.

“What about the attendants?” she asked.

“The one who was here at the time and called in the missing persons report has no papers, no ID, and no driver’s license. She’s been taken into custody by ICE.”

“At least she called in the report,” Joanna said.

Tom nodded. “But if there are charges to be filed, by the time we finish our investigation and get around to doing that, Immigration will probably have put her on a bus and shipped her back to Mexico.”

“What about the other attendant?”

“Same deal. I sent a deputy to the address where she supposedly lives. He says it looks like she’s skipped town.”

“And the nurse?” Joanna asked.

Tom Hadlock nodded in the direction of a tow truck that was hooking on to an older-model Toyota sedan. “Her name is Sylvia Cameron. She was supposed to be on duty today but called in sick. She showed up tonight about the same time we did. She stepped out of her vehicle smelling like a brewery and couldn’t walk a straight line. If somebody looks like she’s drunk and smells like she’s drunk, she probably is drunk. We administered a Breathalyzer.”

“How’d she do?” Joanna asked.

“She blew a .20,” Tom replied. “She’s on her way to jail right now. She already has two other DUI convictions.”

“No wonder she called in sick,” Joanna said. “Once she sobers up, maybe we’ll have a chance to talk to her about what’s really going on here.”

“Exactly,” Tom agreed. “As it says in the brochure, Caring Friends is supposed to provide ‘skilled nursing care. ’ It looks to me like the care in question was being provided mostly by unskilled illegal immigrants supervised by somebody too drunk to talk or walk, to say nothing of drive.”

“What about our missing person?” Joanna asked. “Any word on Ms. Brinson?”

“Not so far,” her chief deputy told her. “The K-9 unit was able to follow her trail all the way out to the highway and across to the other side. Terry says that after that he lost her.”

“So someone may have picked her up and given her a ride into town.”

“Yes,” Tom agreed. “Most likely someone hoing on?” someone demanded behind them.

Standing in the narrow hallway, Joanna turned in time to see a tall dark-haired woman in a turquoise-colored brushed-silk pantsuit come storming toward them. She was clearly angry. Only when she reached them did Joanna recognize the woman from her photo on the brochure. This had to be Alma DeLong.

“Who the hell are you?” she asked, looking from Joanna to Debra and then back again. “This is private property. What do you think you’re doing here?” She was spoiling for a fight.

Trying to defuse the situation, Joanna stepped forward and identified herself. “I’m Sheriff Joanna Brady, Ms. DeLong,” she said, holding out her hand. “Please calm down. My people and I are here in response to a missing persons report. One of the patients here has gone missing.”

Ignoring the proffered handshake, Alma continued her tirade. “I have no intention of calming down!” she replied. “I happen to own this place, every inch of it. Now, where are my residents? What have you done with them? You can’t come waltzing in here without a search warrant.”

Alma’s right hand strayed toward the pocket of her jacket, and Joanna’s heart skipped a beat. The previous summer, one of her newer deputies, Dan Sloan, had been shot to death with his own weapon while trying to apprehend a homicide suspect. That life-ending tragedy had set Joanna off on a one-woman campaign to arm her officers—herself included—with effective but nonlethal Tasers. It hadn’t been easy to make that kind of department-wide change in the face of falling revenues. Buying new equipment and making sure she and her officers knew how to use it had been an expensive proposition, but Joanna had managed to convince the Board of Supervisors that using Tasers was a cost-effective alternative to handguns or batons in many combat situations.

Her biggest selling point had been the proposition that Tasers would improve the bottom line when it came to preventing line-of-duty deaths and injuries. Officers sometimes hesitated before deploying a lethal weapon, and it was often that single moment of hesitation—those bare seconds when a cop asks himself whether or not he should pull the trigger—that proved fatal. And if the criminal managed to get control of the officer’s weapon—as had happened in Danny Sloan’s case—the officer might well end up on the ground after being Tased, but at least he or she wouldn’t be dead.

Tasers were now Joanna’s officers’ first line of defense. That was the case for Joanna as well. She still carried her Glock, but she also wore a Taser X26 along with her Kevlar vest. She didn’t leave home without them, not even tonight on what had seemed to be nothing more than a simple missing persons call-out. That’s what happened when you were a cop. You could never tell in advance what might happen. Better to be safe than sorry. And she drew her Taser now, but before she could fire it, Alma’s hand emerged from her pocket holding a cell phone rather than a weapon.

Focused solely on her cell phone, Alma seemed oblivious to what had just happened. Instead, she flipped open the phone. Then, turning her back on both Joanna and Deb Howell, she punched in a series of numbers. “I’m calling my attorney, by the way,p height="0%" width="5%">“Don’t you understand?” Alma raged. “I’m talking to my lawyer. Now get your hands off me, you stupid bitch!”

Brandishing her phone, she took a single swipe at Deb’s face. It was an ineffectual blow which the detective easily dodged. For a long moment the two women stood staring at each other.

“That’s enough now, Ms. DeLong,” Joanna warned. “Either you go with Detective Howell or you risk being booked for disorderly conduct.”

“Disorderly conduct?” Alma retorted. “She was trying to manhandle me, and now you’re threatening me with arrest? No way! It’s not going to happen. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“For starters, you’re interfering with officers of the law, to say nothing of criminal assault. If Ms. DeLong refuses to go willingly, Detective Howell, cuff her and read her her rights.”

With a nod, Debbie produced a pair of handcuffs. At the sight of them, Alma went wild. She began backing away, as if preparing to make a run for it, but by then Tom Hadlock had appeared at the far end of the hall. When Alma saw him and realized she had lost that avenue of escape, she evidently decided to take her chances with Debra. First she flung her phone full in the detective’s face, then sprang after it. For a moment the two women grappled there in the hallway. Before Joanna could join the fray, Tom waded into the fight. In a matter of moments the two officers wrestled Alma DeLong to the floor. Once they had her down, Debra snapped the cuffs in place.

“My outfit!” Alma screeched as they hauled her back to her feet. “Look what you’ve done to my outfit. You’ve ruined it. That floor is filthy.”

“Maybe you should have had someone clean it,” Joanna suggested.

Deputy Matt Raymond appeared just then to offer his assistance. Taking over from Tom, he and Detective Howell headed back down the hall, holding the still-struggling woman between them.

“What got into her?” Tom asked.

“She’s upset,” Joanna said. “She should never have been allowed inside here.”

Tom nodded. He had been charged with securing the scene, and he hadn’t done so. “I know,” he said. “Sorry about that. I was talking to a reporter from Tucson when a car drove up and stopped behind me. Before I had a chance to stop her, she hopped out of her car and came racing in here.”

“It’s okay,” Joanna told him. “Don’t worry about it. For right now, we’re charging her with interfering and assault. Those will do for starters.”

Just then Peggy Whitehead of health department fame arrived on the scene. Dealing with another irate woman was pretty much the last thing Joanna needed.

“What’s going on here?” Peggy demanded. “If this is a health-related issue, my department has jurisdiction. You’ve got no reason—”

“I have every reason in the world,” Joanna interow.”

Joanna realized immediately that she should have been more diplomatic. As she was still shaken from the confrontation with Alma DeLong, however, diplomacy wasn’t high on Joanna’s list. And once the words were out of her mouth, it was too late.

Tom Hadlock didn’t come right out and say, “With pleasure!” but the slow smile of satisfaction that spread across his face spoke volumes. Peggy Whitehead had done everything in her power to make his life miserable. Now Joanna had handed him an opportunity to return the favor.

“Right this way, please, Ms. Whitehead,” he said politely.

Peggy hesitated for a moment, then turned and strode away.

Good riddance, Joanna thought, watching her go. Good riddance to both you and Alma DeLong!

She stood there for a long time staring into yet another appalling room—a room with soiled and stinking bedclothes along with a handy supply of damning Flex Cuffs right there on the nightstand. She doubted Alma DeLong would spend more than a single night in jail before being bailed out, and she would be staying in far better conditions than the poor residents of her “care” facility. It was a shame Joanna couldn’t have ordered her to be locked up in one of these very rooms. The same went for Peggy Whitehead. Wasn’t she supposed to see to it that places like this didn’t exist? To Joanna’s way of thinking, the head of the health department deserved to be locked up as well.

Dave Hollicker, camera equipment in hand, came hurrying down the hallway behind Joanna. “Are you all right, boss?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said, and she meant it. For one thing, her officers were all safe, and so was Alma DeLong. When their shifts ended that night, all of her people would be going home to their families, and so would she.

“I’ll be a lot better than fine,” she added, “once we locate Philippa Brinson.”

By the time Mel and I finally left Black Diamond and headed back to downtown Seattle, it was much later. Traffic was no longer an issue, but believe me, we were a long way from those Pecos Pit sandwiches we’d had many hours earlier. It was almost ten. Late-night dining choices in downtown Seattle aren’t what they used to be, but we stopped by the 13 Coins to grab a quick dinner. I had the steak salad. Mel had the buttermilk chicken salad.

“If she hadn’t won that lottery, she’d be dead by now,” Mel said thoughtfully as she cut into a chunk of crispy fried chicken. “Medicine can keep people alive, but not if they can’t afford it.”

“Yes,” I said. “Mama Rose is a remarkable woman.”

“A survivor,” Mel added. “And I notice you liked the idea that she put what’s essentially a homeless shelter where they didn’t want a homeless shelter.”

That made me grin. “I always like it when somebody manages to pull a fast one on over-reaching bureaucrats.”

“Most people see us as bureaucrats, ’re the good guys.”

“Mama Rose is a good guy,” Mel added. “She’s not helping people because she’s naive. She knows these people—really knows them. She cares about them because she’s been there.”

I nodded. That had become clear the moment we mentioned the name Marina Aguirre. A troubled look had crossed Mama Rose’s face and she sighed.

“Oh,” she said. “That one. Marina really disappointed me. Most of the time I don’t have unreasonable expectations, but Marina had that special something—the spark; the determination. I thought she was going to be a star.”

“You remember her then?” Mel had asked.

Mama Rose laughed. “Who could forget her? For one thing, she still had her looks. Most people go to the consignment store or St. Vincent de Paul and come away looking like drudges. Marina came out looking like a rodeo queen, boots and all.”

Mel and I exchanged looks. I had told her about that single singed boot I had seen in Ellensburg.

“She was smart,” Mama Rose continued. “And she was determined. She told me she wanted her son back.”

“How did she lose him?” Mel asked. “A custody fight?”

Mama Rose shrugged. “Could be. She didn’t give any details. She was pretty closemouthed about where she came from, but that goes with the territory. Most of the girls don’t want to let on to the folks back home that they’re working the streets. When Marina walked out on Silver Pines, I assumed she’d decided she wanted to be back in the game and didn’t want to tell me to my face. In a way, I don’t blame her. Waiting tables at Denny’s is very hard work, and it doesn’t pay very well—not compared to what she was used to earning. I’m sure she could have done something else eventually, but to do that, she would have had to go back to school and get some training.”

It crossed my mind that Marina might not have wanted to change jobs because she was using some long-dead girl’s name and Social Security number. I didn’t mention any of that to Mama Rose. Instead, I asked, “When Marina disappeared, who cleaned out her unit?”

Tom Wojeck raised his hand. “That would be me. It’s pretty tough for Mama Rose to get around much these days. That means I’m the one stuck with doing the dirty work.” He smiled fondly at Mama Rose when he said it, as though it was a point of regular teasing between them.

“Did you find anything?”

Tom shrugged. “As I recall, the place was a mess. Worse than usual, especially considering she’d only been in the mobile for a matter of months. But we brought in our cleaning crew, mucked it out, and had it rented again within a matter of days.”

“Who’s on the cleaning crew?” Mel asked. “Some of the residents?”

Tom nodded. “But as far as I know, nothing >

“What about her vehicle?”

“A 4-Runner, I think. I remember it had Arizona plates. I told her that once she had a job she would need to reregister it and get Washington plates. I don’t think she ever got around to doing it.”

“After she left, did you do any skip-chasing?” I asked.

“Look,” Tom said. “She had paid her rent up until the middle of November. When she wasn’t there to pay up on the fifteenth, we packed up her junk and got rid of it. It’s not like she owed months of back rent. She was gone, her rent wasn’t being paid, we moved her stuff out, and moved someone else in. End of story.”

“Her fiancé, a guy by the name of Mason Waters, filed a missing persons report,” I said. “I don’t think the local cop shop expended much effort on the case.”

“Waters,” Mama Rose said. “Isn’t that the name of the guy whose private eye came around asking questions about Marina a couple of months ago?”

Tom Wojeck nodded. “I think that’s the right name, but by the time the detective showed up at Silver Pines, Marina’s stuff was long gone.”

And so was she, I thought.

With me mentally going over that previous conversation, Mel and I had been silent for quite some time. Finally I noticed that she was only picking at her chicken, which meant she was probably doing the same thing.

“What?” I asked.

Mel shook her head. “So chances are, the young woman in the morgue over in Ellensburg is the woman who claimed to be Marina Aguirre, but we have no idea who she really was. I wonder if we’ll ever figure it out.”

I wondered that myself.

“And what about Tom Wojeck and Mama Rose?” Mel asked. “They weren’t wearing rings.”

Being a man, I had somehow missed that small detail altogether.

“I wonder how long they’ve been together,” Mel continued. “I don’t think they’re married, but they seem to have a good working relationship.”

“They’re probably as close to being married as you can get,” I told her, “especially when one member of the team is HIV-positive.”

“Wake up,” Butch said. He sat down on the edge of the bed and bounced up and down until Joanna opened her eyes. “Here’s some coffee. Time to rise and shine.”

“What time is it?” Joanna mumbled groggily.

“Ten to eight,” Butch answered. “I already called in and told Kristin you’d be late.”

Joanna took a sip of the coffee. “Thank you. But it was a great night. We were working a missing persons case. An old lady named Philippa Brinson walked away from an Alzheimer’s home out in Palo/p>

Without much more to discuss on the homicide situation, the detectives went on their way, leaving Joanna and Tom Hadlock to go over more routine matters. They had finished and were about to leave the conference room when Tom added one parting comment.

“When we were on the phone, Marliss Shackleford asked about Frank’s party tonight,” he said. “I told her no comment.”

“That’s correct,” Joanna said. “It’s a private party. No comment is the right answer.”

It was close to midnight before we finally got back home after our side trip to Black Diamond and our late-night dinner. Mel fell into bed and was out like a light. I love the woman dearly, but the truth is, she snores. Most of the time it doesn’t bother me, but it did that night, mostly because Tom Wojeck’s hairy-chested coffee, combined with indigestion from our late-night dinner, left me tossing and turning. Finally I gave up on sleeping altogether. I climbed out of bed and went into the room that’s now our combination family room/office.

I spend a lot of time there now that my recliner has been permanently banished from the living room. I don’t blame Mel for insisting that if I refused to opt for a new one, the old one would have to disappear from the living room. The furniture she bought for the living room is stylish and surprisingly comfortable. And, much as I hate to admit it, the recliner no longer measures up.

For one thing, the poor old thing lists badly to one side these days. I had it recovered with leather a long time ago, but even good leather doesn’t last forever. It’s developed a certain sway to the cushions. And the last time the kids were here, I caught Kayla jumping on it. By the time the grandkids went back home, the recliner had lost the benefit of full motion. It no longer goes all the way up or all the way down. In other words, the recliner is a bit like me—a little butt-sprung and with a hitch in its get-along.

I sat there for a while looking at the city lights playing off the low-lying clouds and thinking about Mama Rose. Finally I picked up my laptop and logged onto the Internet, put in my LexisNexis password, and went looking for Rose Marie Brotsky. And found plenty. Her recent history wasn’t nearly as colorful as her earlier history, but as the owner of the Silver Pines Mobile Home Park, she was in the news. A lot.

Somewhere along the way, Mama Rose had missed the memo about not fighting city hall. Just as she had told us earlier that evening, she and her lawyers had taken on the local city council and city manager and had won one round after another. The city had tried to shut down Silver Pines based on the fact that the place harbored registered sex offenders—although, for the most part, former hookers are sex offenders in only the broadest sense of the word. The city next claimed that the mobile home park was too close to a local elementary school, even though the school had been built long before Mama Rose became the owner of the property. But that hadn’t worked either. A new survey, conducted at Mama Rose’s expense and using modern GPS technology, had determined her property was 2.3 inches to the good. After that, the city had tried to condemn the trailer park under eminent domain so they could sell it to a developer. Her lawyers had succeeded in stopping that one in its tracks as well. In the process, Mama Rose had become something of an idol to property-rights-minded peopleght="0%" width="5%">But if articles about Mama Rose were in abundance, I found no mention of Tom Wojeck, Thomas Wojeck, or even Tommy Wojeck. It seemed he had left Seattle PD and fallen into a hole of utter obscurity. If he had taken up with Mama Rose, a lady of ill repute, it was possible there was more to his quiet exit from the force than anyone had ever let on, and that left me with one option.

When you work partners with a guy, you pretty much have to know everything about him—good, bad, and indifferent. It’s the only way you can be sure that when push comes to shove, he’ll have your back covered. Or not. And if not turns out to be the case, your very life may be at risk. It seemed reasonable to me that if Tommy Wojeck had left the department with some kind of blemish on his record, Big Al Lindstrom would know all about it. He’d also know where the bodies, if any, were buried.

In order to find out for sure, I’d have to go see Big Al in person and ask him. The big question in my mind that morning was whether or not I’d have nerve enough to do it.

Al Lindstrom had turned in his badge, pulled the plug, and retired from Seattle PD shortly after being shot in the gut while trying to protect an endangered homicide witness, a little five-year-old boy named Benjamin Harrison Weston. Ben Weston Senior, little Ben’s daddy, had also worked for the department. Senior had been about to unmask a whole gang of crooked cops when someone had broken into the family home in Rainier Valley and slaughtered the whole family—every one of them except for little Benjamin. He had fallen asleep in a closet during a long-drawn-out game of hide-and-seek. That was the only reason he was still alive—the only reason little Benjy hadn’t died that night along with the rest of his family.

Big Al Lindstrom and Ben Senior had been friends, and Big Al took those senseless murders very personally. In trying to protect Ben Junior, he had also taken a bullet. He had recovered from his wounds enough to come back to work for a while, but something had changed for him. His heart was no longer in the job. He told me he had put in his time and now he needed to spend some time with his family. I have to confess that, once he was gone, I more or less forgot about him. Out of sight; out of mind.

I suspect I’m not alone there. Women seem to hang on to their friends with real tenacity. Men don’t. I’ve heard it claimed that’s due to our being so egotistical that we don’t care about anyone but ourselves. I still keep up with Ron Peters and Ralph Ames on a regular basis, but other than those two, most of my male friendships, which were usually job-related, have fallen by the wayside.

When it came to Big Al Lindstrom, I didn’t even know if he was still around. It was possible that he and his wife, Molly, might well have sold out and turned into snowbirds. I doubted he had corked off. If that had happened, I’m sure someone from Seattle PD would have let me know. I remembered hearing that he’d gone in for quadruple bypass surgery a while earlier—was it a year or so ago, or maybe longer?—and I’d even sent a get-well card, but I had been too caught up with my own life—with my new job and my new relationship with Mel—to pay much attention to anyone else. Now I felt guilty because I hadn’t made time to go see him—not while he was in the hospital and not later, after he got out.

Wrestling with the question of whether or not I was a worthy friend, I finally drifted off to sleep—with the laptop on my lap. I awakened to find Mel standing over me, shaking her he221;

Molly came into the room carrying two mugs of coffee. “Who’s still around?” she asked.

“Tommy,” Big Al told her. “Tommy Wojeck.”

“And he’s got a girlfriend?” Molly asked. “That figures.”

Molly Lindstrom’s disapproval was obvious, but I had to ask. “What do you mean?”

“He was married at one time,” she said, “but that never kept him from fooling around.”

Big Al nodded. “Tommy liked to walk the wild side.”

“I’ll say,” Molly agreed. “Believe you me, he didn’t do that poor wife of his any favors.” With that, she turned on her heel and left the room.

“How so?” I asked.

Big Al sighed. “He got himself involved with a gentlemen’s club down in Tacoma.”

“You mean a strip club?”

“Yes. That’s what it was really. Word about Tommy’s extracurricular activities got back to the department up here. Internal Affairs was gearing up to do an investigation, but he quit before they had a chance. Not quit exactly. In the middle of all that, he got sick. The powers that be decided they’d be better off medically retiring him rather than putting on a dog-and-pony show and airing all that departmental dirty laundry in public. So they sent Tommy down the road with a one-hundred-percent disability. No muss, no fuss. Besides, they all probably thought he’d be dead and gone within a matter of months. But then he fooled them,” Big Al added with a shrug. “When he didn’t die on schedule the way he was supposed to, there wasn’t a whole lot they could do about it.”

I thought about the man I had seen in Black Diamond the night before. He hadn’t looked like someone who needed to be on one-hundred-percent disability.

“That’s medical science for you,” Big Al continued. “What they did to fix my knees wasn’t remotely possible not all that long ago. It’s the same thing with AIDS. People still come down with it, I’m sure, but not as many are dying of it now as there were when it first showed up back in the eighties. Or maybe they’re just not dying as fast—at least not in this country.”

“You’re telling me Tom Wojeck has AIDS?”

“Sure,” Big Al said. “Didn’t you know that?”

“No,” I said. “I had no idea.”

But I did now.

When it came time to leave Big Al’s house a little while later, he walked me as far as the door. On a table in the front entry sat a framed photo of a handsome young black man. The suit and tie meant it was probably a senior photo. Big Al caught me studying it.

“That’s Benjy,” he said in answer to my unasked question. “His daddy would be so proud of him. He’s going to Gonzaga in the fall on a full nt little boy, in the aftermath of a horrific home invasion that had left the rest of his family dead. I could still picture him in the pulsing lights of emergency vehicles, clutching a Teddy Bear Patrol teddy bear. That plush bear had been his only source of comfort on what was and would always be the worst night of his life. I was thrilled to know that he was all right now; that he had grown up and was moving forward.

“I’m glad he stays in touch,” I said.

Big Al nodded. “Me, too,” he said.

As I headed south on I-5, some things about Tom Wojeck that hadn’t been clear to me before made sense now. I suspected that Mama Rose Brotsky had used her lottery megamillion windfall to keep herself alive and to keep Tom Wojeck alive as well. They were probably both walking medical miracles. But they were also both connected to a murder victim who had died while pretending to be someone she wasn’t. Tom Wojeck had told us he had cleaned out Marina Aguirre’s apartment. I had a feeling there might be a few telling details that he had left out of that story, however, and I wanted to find out what they were.

After being out of the office for a day and a half, Joanna was behind the eight ball when it came to paperwork. Shuffling through it to get an idea of what was lurking there, she came across Lester Attwood’s preliminary autopsy report. She scanned through it and learned that the victim’s body had shown signs of multiple contusions and abrasions as well as numerous broken bones, all of which were consistent with having been struck several times by several different moving vehicles. None of those were fatal wounds. What had actually killed him was being left facedown and unconscious in the sand. Cause of death was suffocation.

When Joanna reached the line with Dr. Machett’s florid signature, she picked up her phone. The M.E. answered, but he wasn’t happy to hear from her. “I can’t believe how much damage that crazy old battle-ax did to the van when she pulled me out of the sand. It’s at least a thousand bucks’ worth of body work.”

And you think that’s my fault? Joanna thought. That’s what you get for not waiting for a regular tow truck!

“Sorry to hear it,” she said, hoping she sounded more sympathetic than she felt. She went on to give Guy Machett an overview of the problems at the Caring Friends facility, ending with the fact that the body of another possible victim might need to be exhumed.

“Why wasn’t an autopsy done at the time?” Machett wanted to know. “That’s how it’s supposed to work, you know.”

Joanna ignored the man’s condescending sarcasm. “From what Detective Howell told me,” she said, “the woman was supposedly under a doctor’s care at the time she died. Family members were informed that, since she had died of natural causes, if they wanted an autopsy it would have to be done at their expense. They couldn’t afford it. Now that there’s a possibility of wrongdoing on the caregiver’s part, however, all bets are off.”

“All right,” Machett agreed reluctantly. “I’ll see what I cane keeps a comprehensive list of all the padlocks on the lockers—a list of who has which locker and what the combination is. The students and the parents sign a contract at the beginning of the year. If the lock on any given locker isn’t on the official list or on the right locker, the administration has the right to cut it off.”

“You’re saying you went through Luis’s locker?” Joanna asked.

Jaime nodded bleakly, and Joanna’s heart sank. She knew a lot of bad stuff had a way of turning up in high school lockers these days, everything from illicit drugs to illicit weapons.

“I take it you found something?”

“It’s a letter,” Jaime said. “A letter Luis wrote to his father in prison, asking if he knew where his mother was.”

“That’s hardly surprising,” Joanna said. “In fact, under the circumstances, I’d be surprised if he didn’t try to find her. Luis could have had lots worse things in his locker.”

“The letter hadn’t been opened until I opened it,” Jaime continued. “Someone at the prison had sent the envelope back to Luis with the word D-E-C-E-A-S-E-D written across the address in big red letters.”

Joanna was appalled. “Luis’s father is dead and that’s how the poor kid found out about it?”

Jaime nodded. “Whoever crossed out the address had no idea who Luis was. The return address is to a PO box in Bisbee—a PO box Luis rented in his mother’s name and without my knowledge, by the way. He evidently forged his mother’s name to make it work, and he was using the address to try to find her—to find Marcella. I guess he didn’t want Delcia and me to know what he was up to.”

“How long ago did the letter come?”

“A month ago,” Jaime said. “Which is about the time things started going downhill with him at school. Before that he had been doing fine. After this came, he fell apart.”

“And when did his father die?” Joanna asked. “Were you able to find that out?”

“I called California first thing this morning and spoke to the warden’s office,” Jaime said. “Marco Andrade died the last week in October. On October 31. Someone shanked him in the shower. According to the corrections officer I spoke to, they have no idea who’s responsible. It was a medium security facility with more drug dealers than anything else.”

“Why wasn’t Luis notified?” Joanna asked.

“That’s what I wanted to know as well,” Jaime said. “Marcella is listed on Marco’s prison records as his next of kin, but the address he gave was her old one. When she and Luis moved down here from Tucson, she didn’t tell anyone where she was going and she didn’t leave a forwarding address, either.”

“Because she didn’t want to be found,” Joanna added.

Jaime nodded. “Because she and Marco had evidently ripped off money from one of their fellow drug dealers or maybe from one of their drug suppli rate, according to the warden’s office, they did attempt to notify the family about Marco’s death.”

“But they didn’t try very hard,” Joanna added.

“Exactly,” Jaime agreed. “But if whoever did this was able to get to Marco inside the walls of the prison, what if they decide to come after Luis? Any bad guy who gets a look at Marcella’s missing persons report will know everything he needs to know. If she was reported missing from here, this is the logical place to find her son. Bisbee’s a small town. If somebody comes here looking for Luis, they won’t have much trouble finding him.”

“In hopes he might still have the missing money,” Joanna said.

Jaime nodded again.

“Did you tell the warden’s office that Luis is your nephew?”

“I didn’t even mention Luis,” Jaime replied.

“I seem to remember your telling me about one of Marco’s drug-dealing pals in particular…” Joanna began.

“That’s right,” Jaime said. “His name is Juan Francisco Castro. His street name is Paco. He used to live in Tucson and was a minor player for the Cervantes gang out of Cananea. Supposedly he’s the one Marco and Marcella ripped off.”

“Where’s Paco now?” Joanna asked.

“He seems to have disappeared. I have some pals inside Tucson PD, and I’ve made some discreet inquiries. No one seems to have any idea where Paco is at the moment. For all I know, he could be dead or he may have gone back to Mexico.”

“Is there a chance he landed in the same prison where Marco died?” Joanna asked.

Jaime shook his head. “Nope. I already asked. That would have been too easy.” For several long moments they sat in silence. Finally Jaime continued. “So what do I do about Luis?” he asked glumly. “How do I handle this?”

“We,” Joanna said, emphasizing the pronoun. “We handle it by protecting him. We do everything in our power to protect him, including, if necessary, sending him to live someplace else until we find out who was responsible for his father’s death.”

If need be, we’ll send your whole family somewhere else, Joanna thought.

“But what do I tell him?” Jaime insisted.

“You tell him exactly what you told me,” Joanna replied. “That you’re afraid whoever killed his father might come looking for him next.”

“There’s a problem with that.”

“What problem?”

“I wouldn’t have known Marco was dead if I hadn’t broken into Luis’s locker. How’s he ever going to trust me again when he finds out about that? He probably already knows, because were trying to find out what it was.”

“I suppose I could lie to him,” Jaime said. “What if I told him I found out about Marco through work?”

Joanna stood up. She came around the desk and sat down next to Jaime. “Don’t do that,” she urged, placing a hand on his knee. “A lie takes constant maintenance. One thing leads to another until it screws up your life. You know that. It’s what you do in interview rooms—you catch crooks in the little lies so you can nail them on the big ones.

“Considering the kinds of stunts your sister pulled over the years, don’t you think your nephew has been lied to enough? Even if Marco was a bad father, he was still Luis’s father. Tell him the truth about how you found out and then be there for him when he needs you to be. It takes time to grieve. That poor kid has been doing it all on his own. No wonder he’s been a problem at school.”

Jaime Carbajal thought about that for a moment. Finally he nodded. “You’re right, boss,” he said softly. “Luis Andrade has been lied to long enough.”

CHAPTER 11

I CAUGHT UP WITH MEL IN FEDERAL WAY IN TIME TO BUY HER

lunch at Marie Callender’s. She had spent the morning at Denny’s talking to the people who worked there, and she was sick of it. She wanted to eat somewhere else.

“So what did you find out?” I asked over steaming potato soup with a side of corn bread.

Mel shook her head. “It’s one of those places with enough employee turnover that there’s zero corporate memory. Well, maybe not quite zero. One of the cooks thought he maybe remembered someone named Marina, but he wasn’t sure. They evidently had the manager from hell for a while and everyone who could walk away did so. In that regard, Marina was no different from anyone else. She left without telling anyone and without bothering to pick up her final paycheck. That was sent in the mail.”

“To Silver Pines?”

“That’s the address they had,” Mel told me. “That’s the only address they had.”

“Was it ever cashed?” I asked.

“Nope. It came back.”

“But no one bothered to mention that she had disappeared.”

“No one from work. What did you find out?”

“I went to see an old buddy of mine from Seattle PD.” I was going to let it go at that, but then I remembered that Mel and I are married now. And that bit about “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is a good idea if you want to stay that way. “Al Lindstrom and I used to be partners,” I added. “He used to work with Tom Wojeck, too. Big Al claims Tom Wojeck left under a cloued to have come up in the world since I quit the force,” he said, casting an approving glance in the direction of my S550 Mercedes, which, except for the color, was very much like the one in Tommy and Mama Rose’s garage.

“It’s mine,” I said. “They let us use our own rides these days. I bought it used and got a great deal on it.”

Mel doesn’t have a lot of patience with boy/car small talk. She likes driving fast cars fast; she doesn’t like standing around discussing them.

“What’s all this?” she asked, waving toward the beehive of activity.

Wojeck shrugged. “If Mama Rose wants a rose garden, we build a rose garden. Like that old song ‘Whatever Rosie wants; Rosie gets.’ I designed it myself, with a little help from a landscape architect. We’ve got a hundred and eighty varieties of roses that should be arriving in the course of the next week or so. That’s why we’re doing a full-court construction press right now.”

“That’s a lot of roses,” I said. “Who’s going to take care of them?”

“We have a full-time gardener who’ll be doing that,” Tom said. “And you’ll notice that we’ve regraded the entire area so the walkway is wheelchair accessible coming and going.”

He was clearly proud of his project, and I couldn’t blame him for that, but we weren’t here as building inspectors. “So which is worse?” I asked. “AIDS or MS?”

Tom gave me a sharp look. “So you know about that?”

I nodded. “I talked to Big Al. And to Molly.”

“I suppose Molly is still pissed at me?” he asked.

“That’s a reasonable assumption.”

“She was good friends with Abbie, my ex. Did you know we were neighbors at one time? Big Al and I used to carpool to work.”

I hadn’t known that, but it stood to reason.

“I didn’t give it to her, thank God,” he went on. “We’d been fighting a lot, which isn’t exactly conducive to rolling in the hay. As soon as I got the diagnosis, I moved out. She took the kids and moved to Spokane, where she ended up marrying another cop. I would have thought she’d have learned her lesson after marrying me, but her second husband is more of a team player than I ever was. I believe he’s moved up to being an assistant chief.”

“Was Mama Rose one of your girls?” Mel asked.

“She wasn’t,” Tom said. “We met at a support group, several months after Abbie and I split. We were the only heterosexuals in the group, so we sort of bonded. At the time, we were both down on our luck. Rosie wasn’t doing very well, and neither was I. It was looking like we were both going to be short-timers, but that’s when Mama Rose won her Powerball prize. That changed everything—for both of us. It turns out there are things money can buy. We found doctors who got us into clinical trials. And sis. It would give dealers a relatively private place to make their load transfers without anyone being the wiser. Lester probably saw the wisdom of letting them do it. All he had to do was keep quiet to earn a little extra cash on the side. Everything was peachy-keen until the Savage brothers came up with the bright idea of installing video surveillance.”

“Right. And if the traffickers were about to be caught, so was Lester,” Ernie said. “I think that’s what happened the night of the murder. Lester went out to warn them. First they took him out, and then they came back to do away with the recording equipment without realizing that the Savages had a backup system running somewhere off site.”

“There were ATVs on two of the trucks in the video,” Joanna said. “Dave’s analysis suggests that there were three vehicles used in the attack on Lester. If they’re using the ATVs as camouflage—as a ticket to come and go from out-of-the-way places with no questions asked—what are the chances that they’ve pulled the same stunt at other spots as well—other places where ATV enthusiasts hang out? We need to find a way to enhance those videos.”

Ernie nodded and stood up to go. “Jaime told me he was working on the enhancement situation. In the meantime, I’ll start checking to see if I can find any other locations they might have used. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find someone who bought better surveillance equipment.”

Ernie left then, and Joanna went back to work. She had promised Butch that she’d leave by three to help out with party preparations.

Debra Howell came by just as Joanna was clearing her desk. She was furious. “Machett turned us down,” she said. “He says that Inez Fletcher’s son refuses to allow her remains to be exhumed regardless of what his sister says.”

“Did you get a look at the death certificate?”

“Better yet, I have a copy of it.”

“Who signed it?”

“Someone named Dr. Clay Forrest.”

“Never heard of him,” Joanna said.

“He’s from Tucson,” Debra replied.

“Which means he’s probably a close personal friend of Alma DeLong,” Joanna said. “See what you can find out about him.”

Debra nodded and headed for the door. “By the way, have fun at the party tonight,” she added on her way out.

“I don’t understand why I couldn’t invite everyone,” Joanna said. “I mean, we’ve all worked together for years.”

She had been upset when she had learned that Dr. LuAnn Marcowitz’s bridal shower was scheduled for the same evening and time as the bachelor party.

“Don’t give it another thought,” Deb said. “I spend more than enough time with these clowns. I’m happy to be going to a ladies-only event.”

“I’d be glad to trade places.”

“Too bad, boss.” Deb Howell grinned. “No way. Hosting the bachelor party goes with the best-y. I hear you’re playing poker?”

“That’s right,” Joanna said. “Texas Hold’Em.”

“Is Dr. Machett coming?”

“He may,” Joanna said. “We invited him because we pretty much had to, since George Winfield will be there, too. After all, Machett will be working with Frank’s department as well as ours. I don’t know for sure if he sent back an RSVP.”

“If he shows up, then,” Deb Howell said, “do me a favor and clean his clock.”

Joanna nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

When I returned from my musings, Mel was still on the phone. She had dragged her notebook out of her purse and was taking notes with a kind of indecipherable shorthand that is beyond my capability.

“Okay,” she said finally to Barbara. “Thanks for the good news. Sounds like we’re making progress.”

“What progress?” I asked when she closed her phone.

With any other woman, it would have been different, but Mel doesn’t carry a grudge. We may have spats from time to time, but when the fight is over, it’s really over, as this latest one evidently was.

“Brad may have found Marina’s vehicle,” she said.

Brad was Brad Norton, one of our colleagues and a fellow investigator for S.H.I.T.’s Squad B.

“Stolen?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” Mel said. “Brad was checking statewide for any 4-Runners that showed up in police reports around the time Marina disappeared. He found one with Arizona plates that had been parked with the hazard lights on and the keys still inside at an abandoned weigh station on I-90 east of Issaquah.”

That sounded about right to me. “When was it found?” I asked.

“In the early morning hours of November 9.”

“That would fit,” I said. “That’s right in line with the time Marina disappeared.”

Mel nodded in agreement. “When the vehicle was found it was in good running order,” she continued. “The keys were in it and it still had gas in the tank. When a Washington State Patrol officer ran the plates, he found out that the registered owner was a woman named Frances Dennison, who lives in Tucson. She told him that the previous summer she had decided that the 4-Runner was getting to be too much for her. She wanted something smaller, but since the dealer wouldn’t give her what she thought her vehicle was worth in trade, she had sold it herself.”

“When was this?”

“Back in July. She listed it in something called the Nifty Nickel and sold it to a young woman—a young Hispanic woman—who paid her thirty-five hundred in cash and promised that she would go straight to the vehicle licensing ofunctioned without her.

The Gang of Four was a natural outgrowth of that arrangement. Over the months the four kids had become pretty much inseparable. Despite the age differences, they seemed to get along fine. Jenny had taken it upon herself to teach Rick and Danny both how to ride her sorrel quarter horse, Kiddo. And all three of the older kids were tremendously patient with Dennis, whom they regarded alternately as either an annoying pest or else a beloved mascot.

Hearing Dennis’s gleeful squawk, Joanna realized this had to be one of the mascot days.

“Hey, Mom,” Jenny said. She caught the handlebar with her rope, shook it off, and then recoiled it to throw it again. “Butch and Carol threw us out. They’re setting up for the party and said no kids or dogs allowed.”

All of which made good sense.

“But we get to have pizza for dinner,” Danny added. “Pepperoni. Wanna come?”

“She can’t,” Jenny told him. “She’s got to go to the party.”

Joanna had grown up as an only child. She had been an adult when she finally met her older brother, who had been given up for adoption long before her parents married. Jenny, too, had spent most of her young life as an only child. With that kind of background, Joanna had been amazed to see how the four kids managed to cope with one another. Sometimes the four were all the best of friends; sometimes they weren’t. Joanna often found herself wondering if that wasn’t how real sisters and brothers functioned.

There was a redwood picnic table next to the gym, and Joanna eased herself onto one of the benches. “I think I’d rather have pizza,” she said.

Jenny gave her mother a questioning look and then came over to sit down beside her. Jenny was about to turn fifteen, but she was already a good five inches taller than her mother and still growing.

“What’s wrong, Mom?” Jenny asked. “Are you okay?”

“The best man seems to be having a case of nerves,” Joanna admitted. “I’ve never been to a bachelor party, much less hosted one.”

“I don’t know why you’re worried about it,” Jenny told her. “You should be used to doing weird things by now. You’ll be fine.”

Joanna couldn’t help laughing at that bit of reassurance. That one word—weird—pretty well said it all. In Jenny’s book, having her mother be sheriff or “best man” was pretty much one and the same.

Danny let Dennis out of the swing and he came racing toward Joanna at a toddler’s broken-field dead run. “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” he squealed gleefully, hurtling himself into her lap. “Denny swing! Denny swing.”

“I saw you,” she said, gathering him into her arms. “What a big boy you are.”

She hung out with the kids for a while, but before long Carol emerged from the house. “All right, kids,” she said. “Time to gather up and head out. We’ll keep the dogs at our house tonight. Except for Lady, of cought="0%" width="5%">Joanna waited until the guests had loaded their plates before she filled her own. Then she wandered into the family room and took one of the few remaining spots at one of the tables—a chair that happened to be next to Jaime Carbajal’s. He had come to the party because he had said he would be there, and he was clearly having to make an effort to be part of the festivities.

“How’s it going?” Joanna asked.

He shrugged. “Okay, I guess,” he said.

“You don’t sound very convincing,” Joanna told him. “Did you talk to Luis about his father and about the locker situation?”

“Yes,” Jaime said.

“How did it go?”

Jaime shrugged. “He was pretty mad at first and stormed off into the bedroom. But I think you’re right. He’ll get over it and come around eventually. It’ll take time. He and Pepe were still in their room talking when I left to come here. I could hear their voices, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.”

Pepe, Jaime’s son, was only a few months younger than his cousin.

“I suppose Luis had already told Pepe about what had happened to his father.” Joanna’s comment was more a statement than it was a question, and Jaime shot her a sidelong glance.

“How did you know that?” he asked.

“You’ve told me before that Pepe and Luis are close, more like brothers than cousins. Since they’re also kids, it stands to reason that if Luis had confided in anyone, it would have been Pepe. That’s a good thing, Jaime. Give Luis some credit. He was smart enough to realize he couldn’t deal with this crisis by himself. We should all be thankful that he had someone to go to with his troubles. We should also be glad that he was smart enough to go looking for help.”

“You’re right,” Jaime agreed. “I am glad about that, but what about Pepe? My son knew all about this for a long time, but he never let on to me. That hurts, boss. It really hurts. Pepe and I have always been close. I don’t like finding out that he’s been keeping secrets.”

“Of course he’s keeping secrets,” Joanna told him. “Why wouldn’t he? Pepe may be your son, but he’s also a teenager. Keeping secrets goes with the territory.”

Even as she said the words, Joanna couldn’t help wondering what secrets her almost-fifteen-year-old daughter might be keeping from her. On the surface, Jenny was a joy. She helped around the house, adored her little brother, and had a part-time job helping out at a local veterinary office. She was also within months of having her learner’s permit. Joanna knew only too well the kinds of secrets she had kept from her own mother at that age. The possibility that Jenny might be doing the same thing and pulling the same stunts was disturbing. Joanna didn’t want to go there. On the other hand, it turned out that at the time Joanna’s mother had been keeping quite a few secrets of her own.

“The boys will be all right,” Joanna assured him. “Both of them.”

“I hope so,” Jaime said.

< Joanna assumed that would be the case this time as well. Instead, a moment later Butch appeared in the doorway between the rooms, holding the kitchen’s portable receiver in one hand and motioning for her to come answer it with the other. Joanna tried shaking her head, hoping he’d take the hint and tell whoever was calling that she wasn’t available. Her head shake seemed to make Butch’s motions that much more insistent.

What now? she wondered irritably. Can’t Tom Hadlock handle anything on his own?

With a resigned sigh and without dealing the cards, she passed the deck to the guy sitting next to her—Bisbee’s chief of police, Alvin Bernard. Then she excused herself and went to the kitchen to take the call.

“Sheriff Brady?” an unfamiliar male voice said when Butch handed her the phone.

“Yes,” she said. “Who is this? I’m really busy at the moment. I have guests. If you’ll excuse me—”

“It’s Beaumont,” the man said urgently. “J. P. Beaumont. Remember me?”

The words stunned her. Beaumont? She remembered—all too well. Hearing both the voice and the name, she was reminded of that one moment in particular. To her dismay she found herself blushing from the top of her collar to the roots of her hair.

Even though their encounter was years in the past, she remembered it as if it had been yesterday. She and the Washington State investigator had found themselves conducting a joint investigation, one that had ended with a life-threatening encounter with a dangerous killer. In the aftermath of that, Joanna and the visiting detective had been caught up in a moment of emotional heat that could easily have gotten out of control.

There was no question that the attraction had been mutual. They had both felt the momentary magnetism. What shamed Joanna now was knowing she had been the instigator in that situation, the one who had made the first move. She might well have gone on to moves two and three as well if Beaumont hadn’t called a halt by summoning her back to reality. She was, after all, a married woman. And once Joanna came to her senses, she agreed wholeheartedly.

As the blush subsided, Joanna stepped into the doorway of her home office to continue the call.

“Of course I remember,” she said. “How nice to hear from you again.”

That was an outright lie. Hearing from him again was anything but nice. With Butch back in the kitchen cleaning up after the party and with a houseful of company, this was not a good time to be reminded of things past. It wasn’t that Joanna had been unfaithful to her husband—it was that she might have been.

“How are you doing?” she asked. “And how did you get my number?”

It seemed unlikely to her that Beaumont would have kept her old phone number or had access to her new one.

“I called your office and spoke to your chief deputy,” Beaumont told her. “A Mr. Hadlock, I believe. When I told him why I was calling, he said I should probably speak to you directly.”

Joanna’s heart gave a little squeeze—a premonitithat handing out her unlisted number to anyone was a big no-no. This had to be important.

“Why?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

“Actually, there is,” Beau replied. “I’m calling about one of your cases—a missing persons case from last year, a young woman named Marcella Maria Andrade.”

Jaime’s sister! Joanna thought at once. “Marcella,” she repeated. “Have you found her?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid we have.”

Right at that moment Joanna was unable to recall the name of Beau’s agency, but she understood that he worked homicide and the tone of his voice told her what she didn’t want to hear—Marcella’s story wouldn’t have a happy ending.

“She’s dead, then?” Joanna asked.

“Yes,” Beaumont responded. “I’m afraid so. It turns out she has been for several months. The partial remains of an unidentified female homicide victim were found near a town called North Bend, Washington, late last week. It took until today for the M.E. over in Kittitas County to get around to entering the victim’s dental X rays into a national missing persons database. Notification of the hit came back to her office late this evening. When the local homicide dick called to tell me about it, I felt I should make the call.”

During the course of the evening, Jaime had gradually loosened up. For the first time in months, Joanna had actually heard him laugh. The previous summer, Jaime’s life had been slammed with two separate disasters. First had come the line-of-duty death of his young protégé, Deputy Dan Sloan. At about the same time, Jaime’s sister, Marcella, had abandoned her son and disappeared. Since then, Jaime had walked around with a black cloud over his head. Peering around the doorjamb, Joanna looked into the family room, where she spotted Jaime chatting amiably and sharing a joke with Frank Montoya’s new second in command.

Joanna wished she could preserve that precious moment of lighthearted banter, but she couldn’t. It would be gone the moment Jaime heard the bad news.

“Her next of kin is listed as her brother,” Beaumont continued. “A man named Jaime Carbajal. I think we met when I was there in Bisbee.”

As he spoke, Joanna could find no discernible subtext in Beau’s Joe Friday, “just the facts, ma’am” delivery. Maybe she was the only one who actually remembered that moment.

“Yes,” Joanna replied. “That’s correct. Jaime is one of my homicide detectives.”

“In view of that, I was hoping I could ask you to let the family know.”

“Of course,” she said at once. “Absolutely. You don’t even have to ask. I’ll handle that right away.”

The moment I get off the phone with you, she thought.

“The information I have also makes mention of the victim having a son,” Beau continued. “Is there a chance he could provide a comfort, Joanna thought. But not much.

“Any idea when the body will be released?” she asked.

“We’re not talking about a body,” Beau cautioned. “Skeletal remains only. Her family needs to be prepared for that. As far as a schedule for releasing the remains, her family will need to discuss that with the medical examiner over in Ellensburg.”

He gave her the names and applicable phone numbers.

“And where exactly is Ellensburg?”

“A couple of hours east of Seattle on I-90.”

“All right,” Joanna said after writing it all down. “I’ll talk to Jaime, and then I’ll have him call you.”

When the call ended, Joanna stood in the quiet of her office for a moment, gathering herself. Out in the living room she heard the sound of easy laughter, but she had moved far away from the world of bachelor party fun and playing poker. She went back to the kitchen looking for Butch, who was grabbing a fresh set of sodas. He took one look at her face and got it.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“How are you at Texas Hold’Em?” she asked.

“I stink. Why?”

“Because Jaime and I are leaving,” she said. “I just found out that his sister’s been murdered. I have to go tell him.”

Joanna went back into the family room and beckoned for Jaime to come with her. He put down his cards and followed her into the hallway. “What’s up?” he asked.

“It’s Marcella, Jaime,” Joanna said with a catch in her throat. “I’ve just received a call from a homicide detective in Washington State.”

“A homicide detective.” He repeated the words aloud and in the process seemed to come to an understanding of what they meant, even if he didn’t want to. “She’s dead, then?” he asked.

Joanna nodded. “Murdered.”

The naked shock on Jaime’s face left Joanna momentarily unable to speak. She knew that look from the inside out as well as all the hurt that went with it. She had been there herself on the day Andy died.

After a few moments, though, Jaime’s cop mind switched on. “Where?” he asked. “When? What happened?”

“I don’t know the details, but she’s evidently been dead for several months,” Joanna replied. “Her skeletal remains were positively identified through dental records late this afternoon.”

“I’d better go,” Jaime said. “I need to tell Luis and my parents.”

He made as if to turn away, but Joanna caught his arm. “Wait,” she said. “Let me change my clothes. I’ll go with you.”

“You don’t need to…”

“Yes, I do,” she insisted. “Please.”

he piece of paper with her scribbled notes. Jaime studied it for a moment. Before he could say anything more, she pressed her cell phone into his hand.

“Use this to call the detective,” she said. “I put his number in this. All you have to do is hit ‘send’ twice. That should take you straight to Mr. Beaumont. I’ll be right back.”

Joanna hurried into the bedroom, where she stripped off her jeans and the bright green top. Next-of-kin notifications were tough, but this one in particular required a certain protocol and decorum. One of the grieving family members happened to be a teenager who was about to lose his second parent. Such an occasion called for nothing less than a full-dress uniform.

As Joanna went about putting on her uniform, it seemed to her as though she was also putting on the job. She had zipped up the pants, had fastened the Kevlar vest, and was buttoning her shirt when the name she had been searching for finally came through.

“S.H.I.T.!” she muttered aloud, just as Butch came through the bedroom door and closed it behind him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “If you’ve lost a button, change shirts. Cussing about it isn’t going to help.”

“I wasn’t cussing,” she said. “I just remembered. S.H.I.T. is the name of the outfit in Washington, the one J. P. Beaumont works for. It’s called the Special Homicide Investigation Team.”

“Oh,” Butch said. “I see. Beaumont. Isn’t that the same guy you worked with a couple of years ago?”

Joanna nodded and hoped to hell she wouldn’t blush again. Fortunately she didn’t.

Butch walked over and waited patiently for her to finish with her shirt. Once she had fastened the last button and tucked in the tail, he gathered her into his arms for a long hug.

“I know you have to go,” he said. “I came in to kiss you good-bye and tell you to be careful.”

“Thank you,” she said, kissing him back. “I will be.”

I always am.

Once I hung up, it seemed like only a few minutes had passed before the phone rang again. Mel had gone into the bedroom and slipped into “something comfortable,” as they say. It was a slick enough outfit that, as soon as I saw her again, I started having amorous ideas. The ringing phone, however, effectively put an end to any considerations other than work.

“Beaumont here.”

“My name’s Jaime Carbajal.” The man’s voice cracked as he spoke.

I hadn’t expected to hear back from him quite that soon. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I told him.

If Jaime heard my expression of sympathy, he didn’t mention it. Instead, he asked a question I didn’t expect. “Did you find the money?”

I paused for a moment, ta one of the nightshift deputies to bring me home.”

Once buckled into Jaime’s car, they were silent as he maneuvered down the bumpy dirt track that led from the house back down to High Lonesome Road. As they bounced across the cattle guard at the end of the of the ranch’s private road, Joanna caught sight of a vehicle tucked in close to the fence line and the stand of mesquite trees behind it. Caught up in his own thoughts, Jaime seemed not to notice and started to drive past.

After registering the vehicle’s presence, it took only a moment for Joanna to identify it. The snub-nosed Toyota RAV-4 sitting just beyond Joanna’s mailbox belonged to none other than reporter Marliss Shackleford.

“Stop, please,” Joanna said. “Go back.”

Jaime pulled a U-turn. The Camry’s wheels had barely stopped moving when Joanna hopped out of the passenger seat. She charged over to the parked SUV and rapped sharply on the window, which Marliss eventually opened.

“What are you doing?” Joanna demanded. She asked the question, but she already knew the answer. Marliss was here hoping to dredge up some dirt on someone; whose dirt it was hardly mattered.

“It’s a party,” Marliss said.

“Yes, it is,” Joanna agreed. “And I’m quite sure you weren’t invited. As I said before, what are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see who all came.”

You wanted to see if anyone had too much to drink before they left, Joanna thought. “Now would be a good time for you to leave,” she said.

“This is a county road,” Marliss objected. “You can’t order me off it. I have every right to be here.”

“She’s right, boss,” Jaime called from behind her. “Leave her be. Let’s go.”

“Where are you going?” Marliss asked. “What’s so important that you’re leaving in the middle of your own party?”

Joanna definitely didn’t want Marliss trailing along behind them. Taking a deep breath, Joanna suddenly found herself remembering Marianne Maculyea’s sermon from the previous Sunday. It had been all about turning the other cheek, along with the verse from Proverbs about a soft answer turning away wrath. Maybe, in this situation, giving a soft answer was the only solution.

“When we left, Butch was about to serve dessert,” Joanna said. “I’m sure there’s plenty to go around. Why don’t you mosey on up to the house and see for yourself who all’s there?”

Joanna saw at once that her invitation left Marliss torn. She wanted to know all the details about who had come to the party and what was going on. She was also curious about where Joanna was going. In the end, curiosity about the party won out.

“Are you sure it’ll be all right?” she asked, turning the key in the ignition.

“Thanks for getting rid of her,” he said. “I don’t think I would have been that nice.”

CHAPTER 13

WHEN THE NEXT-OF-KIN NOTIFICATIONS HAD BEEN MADE, JOANNA

asked Deputy Raymond to drop her off at home. By then the bachelor party was long since over. She fell into bed and into a sound sleep. When she staggered into the kitchen the next morning with Lady at her heels, Joanna was amazed to see that the place was clean as a whistle and unnaturally quiet. Dennis and the three other dogs were evidently still at Carol’s place. Butch had made use of the child- and dog-free time to haul the rented tables and chairs out of the family room and to return pieces of furniture to their customary positions.

“How was it?” Butch asked, studying her face as he handed her a cup of coffee.

“Pretty rough,” she admitted, stroking Lady’s long smooth fur.

“Pretty rough” was an understatement. It had been more than rough. Joanna would never forget how fifteen-year-old Luis had heard the awful news of his mother’s murder in stoic silence. Only when Jaime finished had the boy’s narrow shoulders slumped. He had turned away and tried to bolt from the room, but Jaime had caught him on the way past. Engulfed in a smothering embrace, the boy had sobbed brokenly into his uncle’s chest.

Eventually, leaving the boy in the care of Jaime’s wife, Delcia, Joanna and Jaime had gone on to take the bad news to Jaime’s parents’ house. The moment Elena Carbajal answered the bell and saw who was standing on her doorstep, she knew why they were there. She had burst into a keening wail of grief before either Jaime or Joanna said a word. The gut-wrenching sound had prompted Jaime’s father to burst into the living room. He had emerged from the bedroom wearing slippers and pajamas.

“What is it, Elena?” Conrad Carbajal, Jaime’s father, had asked. “What’s going on?”

Jaime, as he had done with Luis, was the one who gave his parents the bad news.

“Naturally the parents blame themselves for what happened to their daughter,” Joanna told Butch over coffee. “But parents always do. Marcella was evidently a headstrong, out-of-control teenager. She ran off at age seventeen without ever completing high school. Her parents disapproved of her friends and her lifestyle, but they were thankful when she and Luis moved back here a year or so ago. At least that gave them a chance to look out for Luis.”

“How’s Jaime doing?” Butch asked.

“He’s on bereavement leave as of this morning,” Joanna answered. “Naturally he’s devastated.”

“Why wouldn’t he be?” Butch replied. “When someone diedn’t seem likely that a tip from a grieving relative would lead us straight to a killer. That hardly ever happens. But what our research did do was show us that Paco Castro had an extensive rap sheet dating back to juvenile days. If he was representative of the caliber of Marco and Marcella Andrade’s friends, they had run with a pretty tough crowd.

The next morning, Mel and I filled our traveler’s cups with java, got in our two separate vehicles, and headed across the water to our office in Bellevue’s Eastgate neighborhood. It’s a fifteen-mile commute that, under good traffic conditions, can take as little as twenty minutes. As I’ve mentioned before, during rush hour in Seattle, there are no good traffic conditions. That day the drive took over an hour door-to-door in wall-to-wall rain. Once inside the building, we settled into our tiny but nonetheless private offices. My job that morning was to go nosing around in the world of a now-deceased two-bit thug named Marco Andrade.

From the multiple offenses listed on Marco Andrade’s rap sheet, everything from aggravated assault to attempted murder, I was mystified as to why he would have been transferred from a maximum security facility near Lancaster in southern California to a medium-security lockup called Wild Horse Mesa Prison near Redding. While doing time in Lancaster, Marco had been tagged with numerous infractions, including fighting and being nonco-operative. If it had been up to me, I would have left him where he was instead of transferring him to something less severe.

Anyone who has ever tried to outwit a recalcitrant two-year-old will be happy to tell you, chapter and verse, why it’s never a good idea to reward bad behavior.

Once again, however, I was grateful to be working for Ross Connors. When I’m initiating contact with folks in other jurisdictions, it always gives me a big leg up on the credibility ladder when I’m able to drop the name of Washington State Attorney General into the mix. If I need to go to the top, using his name makes it possible for me to take the express elevator, so to speak. It was a lot tougher back in the old days when I was a grunt working for Seattle PD.

In this instance, the top turned out to be a guy named Donald Willison, the warden of Wild Horse Mesa Prison. When his secretary put me through to him at ten past nine, Willison sounded surly and argumentative, but then again, if I had to spend every day and hour of my working life locked up inside an institution right along with a bunch of convicted criminals, maybe I’d be surly, too.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “And what do you want?”

I told him who I was and that I was calling about Marco Andrade.

Willison sighed. “Oh, crap,” he said. “Him again? You and everybody else. I knew that mope was going to be trouble the minute they dropped him off in my sally port. And once I got a look at his paperwork, I was even more convinced. I could see right off that he was going to be a problem and had no business being here. Sure enough. As soon as he got in a pissing match with one of my guards, I started trying to send him back where he came from, but reversing transfers is a lot like trying to push a rope uphill.”

That’s the way it works in bureaucracies. It may be possible to undo whatever’s been done, but you can count on it taking lots of time and extraordinary amounts of effort.

“And now that he’s dead,” Willison continuhim or why?”

“There’s an ongoing investigation into that incident,” Willison said.

That’s CYA-speak for “I don’t know squat.” I waited long enough. Finally Willison continued just to fill up the dead air.

“Andrade’s throat was slit with what started out as a toothbrush with a handle that got turned into a deadly weapon. Twelve guys went into the showers; eleven came out. He bled out right there on the shower floor.”

“What about surveillance cameras?”

Willison paused again. “Funny you should ask,” he said with some reluctance. “It turns out we just happened to be having a facility-wide problem with our surveillance equipment at that very same time. We have no tape of what happened in that shower and no way of knowing who was responsible.”

How convenient, I thought, but I could hear what he left unsaid. Willison didn’t know who had murdered Marco Andrade, and he also didn’t know who had sabotaged his surveillance equipment. It seemed to me, and most likely to Warden Willison as well, that Marco Andrade had attracted the unwelcome attention of someone with a lot of deadly horsepower.

“I suppose your investigators have talked to all the inmates who were in the shower at the time.”

“My investigators haven’t talked to anyone!” Willison retorted. Outrage was clearly audible in his voice. “Because of the surveillance camera screw-up, I was ordered to hand the investigation over to someone else—to the local guys, in this case—in order to avoid ‘any further appearance of impropriety.’”

In other words, Willison had been disciplined for both the death of his inmate and the breach of the prison security cameras. That gave me an even better idea of why the warden wasn’t happy to be discussing Marco Andrade.

“And none of the guys in the showers have come forward to volunteer any information?” I asked.

Willison hooted aloud at that one, but I don’t think he thought it the least bit funny. “You could say that,” he said. “And why would they? If there was even the slightest suspicion one of them had turned snitch, he’d probably be next on the hit list.”

“What about the surveillance cameras? Did you ever find out what happened to them?”

“I’ve been told that someone from outside hacked into our supposedly ‘super-secure’ system and that the breach has been handled, that it’s a done deal,” Willison said. “Super-secure, my ass! Just for the record, I’m not at all sure this whole thing, Marco’s death included, wasn’t an inside job, but that’s strictly between you and me. And just because I’ve been told something is a done deal doesn’t mean it is a done deal.”

In other words, Donald Willison does not play well with others, I thought. And he’s still following up on this even though he’s been told not to.

“Who’s handling the homicide investigation then?” ald Lowell. He seems to be a pretty squared-away, conscientious guy, but I don’t think he’s made a whole lot of progress. For one thing, he’s on the outside and his potential eyewitnesses aren’t. Not only that, Lowell is having to work against the grain inside his own department.”

“Which is?”

“If one punk knocks off another one inside, it’s considered good riddance. They’re doing society a favor and saving the taxpayers’ money. Who cares? Nobody gives a rat’s ass!”

But I could tell by the way Donald Willison said it that he did give a rat’s ass. He was mightily offended that one of his inmates had been murdered on his watch. That was a major blow to his own job record. Willison was further offended because the powers that be were tying his hands when it came to finding out who, why, and how.

“Who do you think did it?” I asked.

“I know who did it,” he echoed. “The killer is either one of my inmates or one of my guards. There’s no way to tell which, and I’m mad as hell about that. This is a medium-security facility. We’re not supposed to be harboring killers. We’re supposed to focus on rehab and on getting people ready to go back outside and live in the real world. Now I’m faced with the possibility that one of those eleven guys, two of whom are supposed to be released in the next several weeks, is a cold-blooded killer. For the time being, I’ve put a moratorium on releases for all of them, but I won’t be able to keep them here forever. I need to know which one did it before I’m forced to let him back on the streets.”

I noticed it was easier for him to focus his anger on the inmates than it was to consider the idea that one of his guards might have switched sides.

“How long was Marco Andrade at Wild Horse Mesa?” I asked.

“He arrived here on October first,” Willison said. “Like I told you before, I knew the guy was trouble as soon as I saw his paperwork, even before he took a swing at one of my guards.”

“And the guard in question?” I asked.

The question was a natural follow-up, and Willison answered it without hesitation. “He wasn’t here. He was on medical leave from October 6 to November 15.”

It wasn’t difficult to look at all the machinations and see the same thing Warden Willison was seeing. Whoever was behind this had worked in the background, pulling strings and manipulating the system so that Andrade could be shipped from a facility where he wasn’t touchable to one where he was. In this case he was better off when he was doing hard time than when he was pressing the easy button. Maybe not better off, really, but safer.

“Were any of Andrade’s known associates in that set of showers at the time?”

“No,” Willison answered. “Not as far as I’ve been able to ascertain. What I do know is that this was a hit—as much as anything the Mafia does—and every bit as deadly.”

I heard the frustration in his voice, and I didn’t blame him for being pissed.

“I’ll talk to Detective Lowell thee’s personal effects?”

“Yes. He’s got everything. By the way, what’s your name again?”

“Beaumont,” I said. “With the Washington State Attorney General’s Special Homicide Investigation Team.”

“Lowell can’t very well talk to me about what’s going on,” Willison said. “But he might talk to you. If someone who works here is a crook, I want to know about it. Understand?”

I understood completely.

“You bet,” I said. “If he comes up with a name, I’ll be happy to pass it along.”

By the time the morning briefing started, everyone had already heard about the situation with Jaime’s sister, so it was a subdued group of officers who gathered in the conference room as Joanna brought them up-to-date. With Jaime out on bereavement leave, Joanna was gratified to see how eagerly her remaining officers were to pick up the slack. Ernie Carpenter volunteered to take charge of the DPS photo enhancement project while Debra Howell agreed to take the lead on the situation with Caring Friends.

The briefing was almost over and people were preparing to leave when they heard the sound of raised voices on the other side of the closed door. Hearing the disturbance, Ernie reached over and opened the door. From Joanna’s place at the head of the table she saw a mountain of a man standing in front of Kristin’s desk in the small lobby outside Joanna’s private office.

“I don’t care what she’s doing!” he exclaimed. “I need to see Sheriff Brady now! Understand?”

With that, he slammed his fist into Kristin’s desktop. There was enough force behind the blow that Kristin’s crystal paperweight went skittering off the desk and onto the carpeted floor. Fortunately it didn’t break. Every officer in the conference room was ready to leap to Kristin’s defense, but Joanna beat them to it.

“Excuse me,” she said calmly, walking up behind the man. “What seems to be the problem?”

The man-mountain spun around, whirling to face her. He was six-six if he was an inch, portly and slightly balding. He could have been in his late sixties or early seventies. He was also mad as hell.

“Problem?” he repeated. “You’re damned right there’s a problem. You people want to dig up my mother, and it’s not gonna happen. Understand?”

“That would make you Mr. Fletcher?” Joanna asked. Walking toward him, Joanna paused long enough to retrieve the fallen paperweight and return it to Kristin’s desk. In the meantime her officers emerged from the conference room one by one and edged into the room. Their very presence made it plain that they were all ready and willing to provide backup in case things got out of hand.

“Yes,” the man said. “That’s right. Robert Fletcher. Bobby.”

“Very well, Bobby,” Joanna said. “Let’s go ip. She was living there on Social Security and her widow’s pension from PD.”

That meant Bobby’s father had probably been a miner—underground or open-pit—for Phelps Dodge.

“I’ll never forget the look on her face when she opened the door and saw me there. She just beamed. She was so happy to see me. She called me her baby. ‘Come in, come in,’ she said. ‘I’ve been praying every day that you’d come home and here you are.’ And so I stayed. Like I said, I didn’t have much of an education and I wasn’t really qualified to do anything other than make license plates—I was pretty good at that. But Mother helped me get odd jobs here and there—carrying out groceries at Safeway, cleaning people’s yards and garages, detailing their cars. That way I was able to help with the bills, and we got along fine. For a while. For quite a while.”

He paused for a moment, as if he wasn’t ready to go on with the story. Finally he did. “Then Mother started slipping,” he said. “At first it was just little things, like putting her purse in the freezer or not being able to remember whether or not she’d eaten lunch. Then, one night, I came home and found her in the living room cussing like a sailor and breaking up the furniture. That’s when I knew I couldn’t handle it any longer.”

“And that’s when you went looking for Caring Friends?”

Bobby shook his head. “Actually, no. Mother had already found it on her own. She had been looking for places to go if she ever needed to. She wanted something that wouldn’t break the bank, a place she could pay for out of her Social Security and her pension. And Caring Friends was it. She was already signed up and on their wait-list. Once they had an opening, they admitted her.”

“That was when?”

“Three years ago.”

“Your mother’s death certificate says she died of sepsis,” Deb Howell said. “Your sister claims she had bedsores.”

“How would Candace know anything about it? Was she there every day, holding Mother’s hand and feeding her lunch? No, ma’am, she was not, but I was. I went there every single day and I didn’t see any sores. This is all sour grapes, you know. That’s why Candace is doing this. She wanted me to take Mother home. When Caring Friends started going downhill, Candace said keeping Mother there was just a waste of money, but Mother liked it. The place was familiar. Besides, Candace doesn’t understand what Alzheimer’s does to people. You have to watch them like a hawk. They’re like little kids, you know. They get into everything.”

“So you knew the people running Caring Friends sometimes used restraints?”

“They had to,” Bobby said with a shrug. “Otherwise the patients would just run away—like that Brinson woman did the other night.”

“You said Caring Friends started going downhill,” Deb put in quietly. “Does that mean it used kel.”

“But why?” Deb asked.

“My guess is that once Caring Friends hit the news, Candace saw a chance to make some money out of the deal. She’s hoping we’ll help her make a case for a wrongful death suit. And she probably figures she won’t have to go to court—that just threatening to do so will be enough to get Alma DeLong to send some money Candace’s way just to get her to shut up. And I’m guessing if we scratch Candace’s surface, we won’t have to go very deep to find a personal injury lawyer.”

“No wonder Bobby Fletcher is pissed,” Deb said. “I would be, too.”

Joanna stood up and grabbed her purse from the credenza behind her. “Gotta run,” she said. “I’m off to do my weekly song and dance with the Board of Supervisors.”

As I put down the phone, Mel came into the room, sat down beside my desk, and crossed one shapely stocking-clad leg over the other.

“I just spoke to Marcella’s brother, Mr. Carbajal. The family is eager to make funeral arrangements. He’s planning on coming up later today to collect the remains. I told him to send us his flight time and number—that one or both of us would be glad to pick him up and drive him to Ellensburg.”

“Picking his brain all the while.”

Mel grinned. “Sure,” she said.

We both know that it’s often easier to elicit information in a casual setting than in a more formal one.

“Any luck locating Paco Castro?” I asked.

Mel shook her head. “None so far,” she said.

Just then Brad Norton poked his head into my tiny office. “Is it safe to come in?” he asked. “No office hanky-panky, right?”

Being the only newlyweds on the S.H.I.T. squad leaves Mel and me open to a lot of good-natured teasing from our associates.

“None whatsoever,” I said. “What’s up?”

“I just had a call from Frances Dennison, the woman who’s the registered owner of that abandoned 4-Runner. She said when her grandson brought it down to Tucson, it was a mess—full of trash and garbage. She said when they cleaned it out, she found a man’s wallet. She didn’t tell me about it when I first talked to her because she had put it away somewhere and wasn’t sure she could find it again. Now that she has, she wanted to know if she should open it and tell me what’s inside. I told her to leave it be, that opening it or handling it might destroy possible evidealominas, her people, supervised by an inexperienced chief deputy, grievously overstepped their authority. Without consulting anyone other than Sheriff Brady—without consulting medical personnel or family members, I might add—they moved several frail and at-risk patients to other facilities. When the owner of the facility attempted to object to those precipitous actions, she was verbally attacked by Sheriff Brady and physically assaulted by several of Sheriff Brady’s senior officers. They went so far as to jail her overnight.

“Caring Friends is a health-care facility and it falls in my area of responsibility. It may be that there are and were serious deficiencies at Caring Friends, but it’s impossible for me or my people to do a proper investigation with Sheriff Brady and her officers running roughshod over the premises. I don’t get in the way of how Sheriff Brady does her job, and I respectfully request that she stay away from mine.

“I am placing my words in the minutes of this meeting as a way of expressing my dismay about the manner in which this was handled and to officially serve notice to the board that I expect you to properly supervise Sheriff Brady and her officers in the future. Thank you.”

Stunned to momentary silence, Joanna was about to stand up and respond to Peggy Whitehead’s charges when Claire Newmark, the chairman of the board, unexpectedly came to Joanna’s defense.

“It’s my understanding that the sheriff’s department was summoned to Caring Friends the other night on a missing persons call. Is that correct?”

Peggy had been about to sit down. Now she returned to the podium. “Yes,” she said. “That’s right. One of the patients had walked away from the facility.”

“How did that happen?” Claire asked.

“I understand there was a staffing problem,” Peggy answered.

“And was this patient found safely?”

“Yes, but—”

“As for those patients who were moved. Where were they taken?”

“Two of them were admitted to the hospital in Sierra Vista, one went to the Copper Queen Hospital in Bisbee, and one to Tucson, Tucson Medical Center, I believe.”

“And did Sheriff Brady’s deputies drag those unfortunate people out of their beds and force them into patrol cars in order to transport them?”

A titter of laughter went through the room. This wasn’t going the way Peggy had intended, and she flushed angrily. “No,” she said. “Of course not! They were transported in ambulances.”

“Presumably ambulances accompanied by EMTs,” Claire added drily. “Which means that there was some agreement on their part that the patients in question required further medical assistance. And isn’t it true that what you refer to as a ‘staffing problem’ was actually a situation where the patients were left entirely on their own for a number of hours? And weren’t the conditions found there something less than sanitary?”

“Yes, it was unstaffed,” Peggy admitted. “But when the nurse on duty arrived and tried to intervene, she, too, was waylaid and manrcella had stayed in touch with her soon-to-be-ex-husband by using her work address instead of her home address. Worried about being found, she hadn’t told many people where she lived, including Mason. Once she disappeared, the poor guy had been reduced to hiring a private eye to find out where his missing fiancée had once lived.

It occurred to me that if Marcella’s killer or killers had snatched her from her workplace, that would help explain why the man who had come to Tom Wojeck in search of Marcella’s missing money had no idea where she lived, either. He might have uncovered the Silver Pines part, but he couldn’t risk breaking into one trailer after the other until he finally hit on the right one.

The conversation with Lowell brought me up against another realization—one I didn’t like. In all the busy hubbub—in finding out Marina’s real name and notifying Marcella Andrade’s family—I had forgotten all about Mason Waters. Down in Federal Way, Marcella had left behind one additional survivor, a not-quite-family member who had not yet been notified. My heart went out to the poor guy who still cherished the Seiko watch he had purchased as a Christmas gift for his missing fiancée. Somebody needed to go see him and let him know that the Christmas morning he had in mind was never going to come.

I picked up my car keys and headed for Mel’s office. She was on the phone. When she saw me standing there waiting, she signed off. “That was Detective Carpenter on the phone,” she said. “He went by that house in Tucson and picked up the wallet. The name on the driver’s license is Tomas Eduardo Rivera. He lives on North Wright Avenue in Cle Elum. There was money in the wallet—five twenty-dollar bills and six ones. Carpenter said that tucked in among the ones and written in pencil on what appeared to be the corner of a paper napkin was the name Miguel, along with a phone number that listed a 360 prefix. There were also school pictures of two dark-haired boys. I told Carpenter that I’d see what I can do to track Rivera down, find out where he works, et cetera, as well as what his connection might be to Marina.”

“Great,” I told her. “In the meantime, someone needs to have a talk with Mason Waters and tell him what we’ve learned.”

Mel doesn’t like doing next-of-kin notifications any more than I do, and she was happy to pass the buck. “Good thinking,” she said. “And since you’re going to be so close to the airport, maybe you could stop by and pick up Jaime Carbajal. His plane’s due in at two-thirty.”

I glanced at my watch. It was just past noon. “It should work,” I told her. She gave me the flight information and I headed out.

When Joanna arrived at Daisy’s Café, she was surprised to find Daisy herself standing by the cash wrap. “Where’s Junior?” Joanna asked.

Junior Dowdle was a middle-aged developmentally disabled man who had been abandoned by his caregivers and who had been taken in by Daisy Maxwell and her husband Moe. For several years now, Junior had been a constant presence at Daisy’s—greeting arriving customers, handing out menus, and busing tables. In the past few months, Joanna had noticed that his smile wasn’t as ready as it had other today,” she said, leading Joanna to the booth where Eleanor was already seated. “He’s at home with his dad.”

“I’m sorry to miss him,” Joanna said.

Daisy nodded. “Thank you,” she said.

Joanna slid into the booth.

“At least you’re here,” Eleanor said. “I thought you were going to stand me up, too. George is working on his baby. Packing. Everything has to be in just the right place. I swear, sometimes I think he loves that RV of his more than he loves me. He wants to be under way at the crack of dawn Sunday morning.”

George’s “baby” was a hulking Newell motor home that they had bought used and would be traveling in on their jaunts back and forth between their two homes, one in Arizona and the other in Minnesota. Joanna was disappointed to learn that George wouldn’t be there for lunch. She had wanted to talk to her stepfather about the situation concerning Inez Fletcher’s possible autopsy and the poor woman’s two feuding offspring.

“He had a great time at the party last night,” Eleanor added. “Where’s Butch? He’s late, too. Still cleaning up after the bachelor party?”

“No,” Joanna said. “The cleanup is pretty much done. His publisher scheduled a surprise conference call for sometime today. He didn’t know if he’d be able to make it or not.”

Eleanor clicked her tongue. “Men,” she said disapprovingly. “You can’t live with ’em and you can’t live without ’em.” But Joanna noticed Eleanor smiled when she said the words. From Joanna’s perspective, it seemed as though the last year or so, since George had retired, her mother seemed truly happy for the first time in her life.

Now, peering across the top of her menu at Joanna’s face, Eleanor’s smile was suddenly replaced by a frown. “You look upset,” she said. “Don’t be. The two of us are perfectly capable of having lunch on our own.”

It was Joanna’s turn to smile. “It’s not that,” she said. “I just came from the Board of Supervisors meeting. Peggy Whitehead would like to have my head on a platter. Marliss was there. I’m sure you’ll be able to read all about it in one of her upcoming columns.”

The fact that Marliss Shackleford and her mother continued to be good friends was something that had bugged Joanna for years.

“The two of you are a lot alike,” Eleanor said now. “Both of you are ambitious. Both of you are determined to make a mark in your hometown. Both of you have nontraditional jobs. I’ve never understood why you couldn’t be friends, the same way you and Marianne Maculyea are friends.”

Because Marianne doesn’t come after me with knives drawn, Joanna thought as Daisy came to take their order. The daily special was two shredded beef tacos and a cheese enchilada. Joanna and Eleanor both ordered that.

“So how’s the best man this morning?nning the details, Eleanor was also the one who had tracked down a suitable outfit—a gray silk ankle-length skirt topped by a matching boxy jacket studded with rhinestone buttons. The material was a close match to Frank’s tux, and Joanna was relieved that she wouldn’t have to walk down the aisle in a tuxedo.

“Fine,” Joanna said.

“And you’re going to Helene’s this afternoon?” Eleanor asked.

“For a cut.” Joanna nodded. “Right after lunch. It’s the only time Helen could work me in.” Helen Barco had added an e to her name in hopes of lending Helene’s Salon of Hair and Beauty a little class. But Helen was still Helen.

“You might ask her if she could put a bit of a color rinse on your hair,” Eleanor suggested. “You may not have noticed, but you have some gray showing these days.”

As soon as she said the words, Joanna knew her real mother was back. This sounded more like the Eleanor Joanna had known and loved all her life.

“Sure, Mom,” she said. “I’ll see what can be done.”

Even as Joanna said the words, she knew she would do no such thing. Yes, relations between Joanna Brady and Eleanor Lathrop Winfield had changed some. Things had improved but not that much. If Eleanor didn’t like the fringe of gray that was showing up on her daughter’s otherwise red head, too bad.

I’ll wear that gray proudly, she thought ruefully to herself. Like a red and gray badge of courage.

I could have called ahead, but I didn’t. Mason Waters deserved more than a phone call. Tracking him down in person to give him the information he dreaded was the right thing to do. At least, it was the right thing for me to do.

I was relieved when I drove up the cul-de-sac and saw both the Kenworth and Mason Waters’s Honda parked out front. That meant he was home. I found him out in his carport. Armed with a DustBuster vacuum, he was cleaning the front floorboards of the little maroon sedan.

When I walked up beside the car, he straightened up, looked at me, and said, “This is going to be bad news.”

I nodded.

His eyes filled with tears. “You’d better come inside,” he said, quickly brushing them away.

I followed Mason into his house. By the time he lowered himself into the recliner, he seemed to be under control. “Tell me,” he said.

So I did, explaining that the woman he had known as Marina Aguirre was actually Marcella Andrade. I didn’t spare any of the details. Eventually they’d end up being media fodder. I thought he was better off hearing them from me in the privacy of his own living room. He listened to it all, sitting in stark silence with his big hands folded in his lap. When I finished, he shook his head.

“How do you know it’s her?” he asked. “How can you be sure Marina and this Marcella are one and the same?”

“Marcella was found through dent absolutely ballistic. She told me that, if she had to, she’d go to court and have him declared incompetent.”

“Bobby is not incompetent!” Joanna exclaimed.

“Right,” Debra said. “I agree. He’s mad as hell, but who can blame him? That sister of his is poison, and I suspect their mother knew it, too. I went to the courthouse and checked the probate records. Long before she got sick, Inez Fletcher went to a lot of trouble to see to it that Bobby had a roof over his head and that his interests would be protected.”

Behind Joanna, Helen Barco heaved an exaggerated sigh and pointed at her watch.

“Good work, Deb,” Joanna said. “I’ve gotta go. Talk with you later.”

The Lady in the Dash, as Mel likes to call our GPS, mangled the word Cle Elum when she told me to take the next exit, but the sound of her voice was enough to rouse Jaime Carbajal. Once he was awake, I called Mel.

“Okay,” I said. “We’re just now coming into town. What’s the deal?”

“Detective Caldwell and I have been gathering what information we can. Tomas Rivera works out in the woods. Under ordinary circumstances, he’d be home by now. But we found out from his crew chief that he didn’t show up at work today. For as long as we’ve had the name and address, Lucy has kept a deputy in an unmarked patrol car parked on the street to keep an eye on the house, so we’re fairly certain that he hasn’t come or gone from there. He has an old Toyota pickup registered in his name. We’ve got people on the lookout for that, too.”

“Does he have family?” I asked.

“A wife and two young sons. They came home from school a little while ago and went inside.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“Lucy thinks we should meet up at their house. She’ll ride with me. We’ll park a couple of blocks away. You do the same. That way we won’t have a collection of unfamiliar cars sitting out front to warn him away.”

Following directions, we parked on a side street two blocks away from the address on Front Street; then Jaime and I walked to a small frame house that reminded me a lot of Ken Leggett’s place in North Bend. This house was of the same vintage and in much the same shape. We met up with Mel and Detective Caldwell on the rickety front porch, which creaked ominously beneath our combined weight. Detective Caldwell’s partner was nowhere in evidence. Once we had dispensed with introductions, Lucy knocked on the door frame. The door was opened by a dark-haired, dark-eyed little boy who couldn’t have been more than eight or nine.

“I’m Detective Caldwell,” Lucy said, holding up her badge. “Is your father here? Or your mother?”

He simply stared at her and didn’t answer. Finally he turned back into the house, letting go with a volley of rapid-fire Spanish. I picked out something that sounded like police, but that was about it. From inside a woman said something back to him in equally quick Spanish. The boy started to close the door, but Jaime Carbeone will ask. For right now, though, it looks like he may have taken off and left his wife and kids to manage on their own, which isn’t going to be easy. The way I read the situation, he has a green card. She doesn’t. Neither do the kids.”

“How are you doing?” Joanna asked. “You sound tired.”

“I am tired,” Jaime admitted. “At this point, I’m not sure why I bothered coming. Delcia was on the phone with the M.E. while I was still on the plane. She helped my mother order a casket through Costco.com. They’ll deliver it to the M.E.’s office here in Ellensburg sometime on Monday. They’ll release the remains to me at that time and give me the necessary paperwork so I can fly home with the casket Monday evening. I’ve hired a hearse from a funeral home here to get the casket and me to the airport in Seattle. Norm Higgins from the funeral home in Bisbee will send a hearse to Tucson to meet the plane. He’s cleared the funeral-home chapel schedule on Tuesday, so we can hold the service at our convenience. Since it’s going to be private—family only and officiated by Father Rowan—we can be pretty flexible about timing.”

It seemed to Joanna that Norm Higgins of Higgins and Sons Funeral Chapel wouldn’t be thrilled to hear that a casket was coming his way from Costco.com. She herself never would have thought of ordering one online.

“Good,” she said.

“And Delcia has spoken to the Bisbee Bee,” Jaime continued. “Someone from there called to see if we would be posting a paid obituary. She told them to forget it—that the family doesn’t want an obituary, paid or not. As you can well imagine, my parents don’t want a lot of publicity about this. Thankfully, though, we don’t have to worry about someone coming after Luis looking for the money Marcella and Marco stole. According to Beaumont, it’s been returned.”

“It has?”

“That’s what he said. Someone came around to see Marcella’s landlord and asked about it. The landlord went to Marcella’s place, found the money where she’d hidden it, and gave it back to whoever came looking for it.”

“That’s a relief,” Joanna said.

“I’ll say. Beaumont also said that once Marcella got to Washington it seemed like she was trying to get herself straightened out. She was working at a regular job for the first time in her life—waiting tables in a restaurant—and staying out of trouble. She had asked Marco for a divorce so she could marry a new boyfriend—a nice one. According to Beaumont, the guy is a truck driver who had even given Marcella an engagement ring. He’s hoping we’ll let him come to her funeral.”

“Will you?” Joanna asked.

“I don’t know,” Jaime said. “The idea that Marcella would ever hook up with someone decent sounds far-fetched, but Beaumont gave me his name and number. I thought I’d give the guy a call and check him out.”

By then Butch had parked the car in the Rob Roy Links lot and had been waiting patiently for Joanna to finish the call. Meanwhile, most of the wedding party had walked into the restaurant. Finally Butch gestured at his watch. “Wep height="0%" width="5%">“I have to go,” Joanna told Jaime. She didn’t say she was going to the rehearsal dinner. The fact that Jaime was missing Frank Montoya’s wedding was one detail that didn’t bear repeating. “But if you need anything…” she added.

“Yes, boss,” Jaime said. “I know who to call. Thanks.”

People who aren’t citizens of this country are at a distinct disadvantage in dealing with law enforcement. They often come from places where cops have an inarguably upper hand. Lupe Rivera wasn’t a suspect in Marcella’s homicide and so far no one had mentioned that word in her presence. Her husband was the guy with the problem. Lupe would have been well within her rights to have refused to speak to us, but she didn’t, mostly, I believe, because she was petrified.

While we were still at the house and still using Jaime Carbajal as her translator, Detective Caldwell managed to make it sound like going back to the sheriff’s department in Ellensburg to continue the interview and record it was the most routine thing in the world.

Lupe made a small attempt at objection. “But what about the boys?” she asked.

“I’ll look after them,” Mel offered helpfully. “They can come with me. Maybe they’d like to go get something to eat.”

It was another of those good cop/bad cop, divide-and-conquer routines that Mel Soames does so well, and in the end, that’s how we did it. I drove Jaime Carbajal into Ellensburg and dropped him off at the Best Western. Then I drove back to the Log Jam Diner in Cle Elum where Mel had taken the two boys. Tomas was cheerfully mowing through a platter loaded with pancakes—the Log Jam is an all-day breakfast kind of place—while Alfonso sat staring out the window. His arms were folded stubbornly across his chest. He had refused Mel’s offer of food. Even the glass of water in front of him remained untouched.

“Where’s my mom?” he asked as I scooted into the booth next to Mel. “What did you do with her?”

“Your mother is fine,” I said. “She’s still with Detective Caldwell. She’ll bring your mom back to your house as soon as they finish.”

“You’re lying,” Alfonso insisted. “You won’t bring her home. You’re going to send us back to Mexico.”

“I ordered a burger for you,” Mel told me, then she turned to Alfonso. “You’re wrong,” she said. “We’re not from Immigration. That’s not our job.”

“Why are you here, then?” Alfonso asked.

Mel took a long meditative bite of her hamburger and chewed it thoroughly before she swallowed and answered. “We’re here because of your father. Has he seemed different lately?”

Done with talking, Alfonso shook his head and turned away. Tomas poured several more glugs of maple syrup onto a pancake that was already swimming in the stuff. Then he looked up at Mel.

I’ve heard that kids learn new languages faster than older people can. Tomas’s English was far better than his mother’s, and better than his older brother’s as well. Fueled by his sugar-high short stack, he seemed ready to tell all.

“He hit your mother?” Mel asked. “When did that happen?”

Tomas shrugged. “The other day. Sunday night, when they had a big fight. They thought we were asleep.”

My burger came. It had obviously been sitting under a warming lamp for some time, and it wasn’t anything to write home about. Not eating it gave me a chance to study Alfonso. He was biting his lip. I guessed Tomas wasn’t the only one who knew about the fight.

“Why did your parents fight?” Mel asked.

“Mama was mad because Papa had been gone all weekend. She was yelling at him about that. That’s when he hit her. He was drunk.”

He said the words quietly and with no particular malice. That was simply how things were; how their lives were.

Then Mel sprang her trap. “Did you know your father lost his wallet?”

Alfonso shook his head.

“Just now?” Tomas asked.

“No,” Mel said. “It happened a couple of months ago. Someone found it and returned it. We wanted to find him and tell him thank you. We think his name is Miguel.”

Mel had mentioned the napkin fragment that had been found in Tomas Rivera’s wallet—a torn napkin with the name “Miguel” written on it along with a no-longer-functioning cell-phone number. She brought it up innocently enough, but the reaction from both boys was nothing short of electric. Tomas dropped his fork into his plate, slopping a spatter of sticky syrup onto the table. Alfonso drew in his breath in a sharp gasp. The wary look that passed between them spoke volumes.

“Does your father have a friend named Miguel?” Mel asked.

Now neither boy answered aloud, so I stepped into the melee to give Mel a hand.

“Does he?” I asked.

After a long silence, the younger boy finally nodded his head. “We’re not supposed to talk about him,” Tomas muttered with a sideways glance in his brother’s direction.

“Why not?” I asked. “Why aren’t you supposed to talk about him?”

“Because…” Alfonso said. His eyes brimmed with sudden tears. I knew he was wavering, so I focused my attention totally on him.

“Well?” I persisted.

Even so, Tomas was the one who answered. “Papa told us never to say his name,” the boy said. “He said Miguel is a bad ma/p>

“Have you met him?” I asked. “If you saw Miguel again, would you recognize him?”

“I would,” Alfonso said. “He has a big scar on his face.”

“When did you see him last?” I asked.

“This morning,” Alfonso said. “Before we left for school. He came to the house looking for Papa. Mama told him he was too late, that Papa was already at work.”

Tomas may have gone to work, I thought, but he didn’t show up at work. Big difference.

“Did you hear what Miguel and your mother talked about?” I asked.

“He said that if Papa knew what was good for him, he’d keep his mouth shut.”

“Keep his mouth shut about what?” Mel asked.

Alfonso shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think Mama knew either, but after he left she was scared. And crying.”

And she was still crying this afternoon when we got there, I thought.

“Did you happen to notice what kind of a vehicle Miguel was driving?” Mel asked.

This time Tomas was the one who piped up. “One of those trucks like army guys drive.”

“A Hummer, you mean?” I asked.

Tomas nodded. “Except it wasn’t brown and tan,” he said. “It was yellow.”

“Washington plates?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Alfonso said. “I’m not sure.”

I signaled for the bill. “Time to go,” I said. “This is information Detective Caldwell needs to have ASAP.”

Joanna was polishing off the last of her crème brûlée and chatting with Frank Montoya’s mother when the waitress came up and whispered, “Sorry to interrupt, Sheriff Brady. There’s someone who would like to speak to you. His name is Norm Higgins, and he’s waiting in the bar.”

Shaking her head in exasperation, Joanna put down her napkin. She had thought Norm might object to Jaime’s using a store-bought coffin, but she was astonished that the man would track her down at a private function to hassle her about it. After all, the Carbajals were the ones making Marcella’s funeral arrangements. Joanna had nothing to do with it. But then again, Higgins and Sons was a family-owned business. If their bread and butter was going away, Joanna supposed Norm had reason to be upset.

She walked into the bar and found Norm sitting in a booth at the back of the room. She didn’t know him well, but she recognized him. He was nursing a beer and seemed engrossed in watching a televised basketball game.

“Hi, Norm,” she said. “What seems to be the problem?”

“Thanks for ’t want to have a seat. Summoning her away from another function seemed incredibly rude. Not wanting to create a scene, however, she did as he asked and slipped onto the banquette across from him.

“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked.

“No, thanks,” she said. “I’m due back in the other room.”

That should have been enough of a hint, but Norm didn’t take it. Instead he sampled another sip of beer.

“I knew your father,” he said.

That was hardly surprising. In its copper-mining heyday, Bisbee’s population had topped out at around sixteen thousand. Once the mining activity disappeared, so did half of the population. In a town of eight thousand people, everyone pretty well knew everyone else.

“Old D.H. was a good guy,” Norm added. “Someone you could count on. I miss him.”

It didn’t seem likely that Norm had summoned Joanna into the bar to reminisce about her father.

“I miss him, too,” she said.

“But you’re a sheriff now, just like he was. DNA’s odd that way,” he added. “I studied to be a mortician and so did both my boys. Now it’s my grandson. Third generation.”

So? Joanna wanted to say, but she didn’t. Norm was clearly working his way up to something. She needed to let him do it at his own speed.

“In this kind of a business climate, when you’re trying to keep the wolf from the door—from the whole family’s door—you sometimes do things you’re not proud of,” Norm said. “You do things you would never do under ordinary circumstances.”

Joanna maintained her silence.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what?” he asked.

“I don’t need to,” she said. “It’s what you came here to tell me.”

Norm nodded. “You’ve met Alma DeLong?”

For the first time Joanna understood that the conversation had nothing to do with Delcia’s cut-rate arrangements for her sister-in-law’s funeral.

“Yes,” Joanna said noncommittally. “I’ve met her.”

“Not a nice person.”

“Not nice,” Joanna agreed.

“Forceful, though,” Norm said. “Very forceful, and a good saleswoman. Knows how to overcome objections.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Joanna said.

“I do,” Norm said mournfully. “That’s how I got into this mess.”

“What mess?”

“The group-sales agreement with Caring Friends. When clients check into her facility, they have a sectionbut I never did. I didn’t want to rock the boat. Then I heard about Philippa Brinson. I knew Philippa Brinson from years ago, and I couldn’t stand the thought that if she hadn’t run away, Alma DeLong and her people might have done the same thing to her. It took a day or so for me to work up my courage to do something about it, but I did, and now you have them.”

And if you had spoken up earlier, Inez Fletcher might not be dead right now, Joanna thought in sudden fury. But there was no need for her to say it aloud. Norm Higgins knew it all too well.

“Thanks for your help,” Joanna said, getting to her feet. “We’ll take it from here.”

“Will this be enough to put her in jail?” Norm asked hopefully.

“I’m not so sure about jail,” Joanna said. “That’s best left up to a judge and jury, but if it’s as bad as you say, it should be enough to shut her down.”

“I hope so,” Norm said plaintively.

So do I, Joanna thought.

I seem to remember that sometime in the not-too-distant past I hated computers. And there are times when I admire people like Warden Willison and Harry I. Ball, who prefer keeping records on paper; but from a law enforcement standpoint, computers are amazing. Databases are amazing. Search engines are amazing. Back at the sheriff’s department, we went to the Records Department, where a clerk put in three separate fields in the Department of Licensing database—Hummer, yellow, and Miguel. Within seconds, out popped a name—Miguel Escalante Rios, with what turned out to be a waterfront address in Gig Harbor just up Highway 16 from Tacoma.

When we went looking for Mr. Rios’s rap sheet, what we found was interesting. He had several convictions in his early twenties—grand theft auto, several drug-related offenses, and pimping, but those convictions were all nearly thirty years old. The most recent incident was a domestic-violence arrest three years ago, one in which charges were dropped when the wronged wife refused to take him to court. The mug shot from that arrest showed a handsome enough Hispanic man somewhere in his fifties. Only in profile could you see the vicious scar that ran down one side of his face where he was missing a good part of his right ear.

“So what’s your guess?” Mel asked me, once we’d both had a chance to read through it. “Does it seem likely to you that this guy, just like Mama Rose, decided to straighten up and fly right?”

“No,” I said. “I’m of the opinion that he just stopped getting caught.”

The Records clerk, who had two sons of her own, happened to have an old GameBoy in the bottom drawer of her desk. She kept it around to use on those occasions when her kids dropped by to see her at work and she needed to keep them occupied. When we headed off to join Lupe Rivera, Detective Caldwell, and the translator in the interview room, Alfonso and Tomas were seated side by side in a worn armchair with their faces glued to the tiny screen.

%" width="5%">Lupe nodded. “Sí,” she said in a very small voice.

“Did the girls have any idea about what was in store for them?”

“No,” Lupe said. “I don’t think so.”

“What did Miguel want when he came here this morning?”

“I know Tomas did things for Miguel sometimes, things he wouldn’t talk about. This morning Miguel was very angry. He wanted to talk to Tomas, but my husband was already gone. Miguel said that I should give Tomas a message—that there were worse things than being dead.”

“What do you think he meant by that?”

“I don’t know.”

“What happened then?”

“I called Tomas’s boss at work, hoping to talk to him and let him know Miguel was looking for him, but my husband wasn’t there. He hadn’t shown up. And then I started thinking about what if Tomas was in some kind of trouble? What if he ran away and left us? That’s when I went through his drawers and things. If he was supposed to keep his mouth shut, I thought maybe I might find something that would let me know what was wrong.”

“And that’s when you found the photo?” Mel asked.

Lupe nodded.

“The photo of the boy you thought might be your husband’s child by another woman?”

Lupe didn’t answer for a very long time. “If I tell you the truth now and if it’s different from what I told you before, will you still put me in jail?”

“That depends,” I said.

“The picture wasn’t in Tomas’s drawer,” Lupe said. “It was in his Bible. Like he had been praying over it. And I thought…”

Tears spilled out of her eyes. She couldn’t go on.

“You thought what?” I asked.

“I thought he was a…” She struggled for a moment before continuing. “A boy someone had used just like those men used those poor girls. And I thought Tomas knew about it and he couldn’t stand it—that he was afraid the same thing could happen to Alfonso and Little Tomas. So when that other man told me the boy was his nephew and he was fine, I was very happy. But now that I know the boy’s mother is dead, I’m afraid—afraid Tomas has done something awful. So afraid.”

With good reason, I thought as she collapsed in tears once more. With very good reason.

Butch caught Joanna’s eye as she returned to the table. “Is everything all right?” he asked.

She nodded. “Everything’s fine,” she said, even though everything wasn’t fine. She found herself wondering how many times her own father and countless others like him had come home from wo adults always tell the people they love.

Dennis was asleep within minutes of being belted into his car seat. On the way home, though, Joanna couldn’t keep all the ugliness locked inside her, and so she told Butch all about the situation at Caring Friends because it was far too heavy a burden to bear alone. When they got home, Butch carried Dennis into his room and put him to bed while Joanna went into the office and inserted the memory card into her home computer.

Norm Higgins was right. The photos were appalling and as graphic as any autopsy photos Joanna had ever seen. Derek Higgins had used a ruler to document the seeping wounds on Faye Carter’s back and buttocks. One of them was a full three and a half inches wide. Derek had also scanned a copy of the death certificate into the file. Joanna recognized the doctor’s name. Dr. Clay Forrest was the same physician who had pronounced Inez Fletcher’s death as due to natural causes. Sepsis. Again.

Scrolling through the photos, Joanna came face-to-face with the idea that now Inez Fletcher’s remains would most likely need to be exhumed. The evidence in front of her was telling, but it wouldn’t satisfy the requirements of a court of law. Derek’s sworn statement wouldn’t hold up to the demands of maintaining a chain of evidence. Only an official autopsy would do that.

A while later Butch came into her office and stood behind her, staring at the computer screen over her shoulder. Finally he heaved a sigh and walked away. By the time Joanna followed him into the bedroom, he was already in bed.

“I don’t know how you do it,” he said gruffly.

“Somebody has to,” she said.

She undressed and then had to bound over Lady’s prone sleeping body to make it into bed.

Butch reached over and wrapped his arms around her. “You’ll probably have nightmares,” he said. “I’ll probably have nightmares.”

It turned out Butch was wrong about Joanna having nightmares. She didn’t. In actual fact, she put her head on her pillow, closed her eyes, drifted off immediately, and slept like a baby.

Lupe Rivera was still in the interview room when Mel and I went out into the lobby and placed a call to Ross Connors. Once he heard the background he was adamant. “Find ’em a hotel room,” he said, “someplace with a restaurant. Put it on your company Amex. With this Rios character out gunning for them, you sure as hell can’t take them home.”

So that’s what we did. It turned out that the same Best Western where Jaime Carbajal was staying was the only place that filled the bill as far as sleeping and eating were concerned. But it occurred to me that maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. At least Jaime would know what to do if things got rough.

By the time we took them to the hotel, there weren’t any stores left open. “We’ll come over tomorrow morning,” Mel told Lupe. “We’ll help you pack up clothing and so forth.”

Or buy new, I thought. I found myself wondering how many times Lupe and her sons had actually worn clothing that wasn’t secondhand”

“Hell, no,” Ken said. “You’d be lost for years. Some elk hunter would find you dead in your car next winter. But I can show you.”

He heaved himself out of the booth. “Come on,” he said.

Ken staggered outside. There was no way I was letting him drive, but when I showed him my Mercedes, he hooted with laughter. “That thing’ll high-center and we’ll end up needing a tow.”

In the end, we took his four-wheel-drive Toyota Tundra. I drove. He directed me down I-90 and off into the woods on roads that made no sense and where I began to believe he was right—that once we got in, we’d never get out. But eventually we rounded a corner and there, in front of us, was a massive metal shed with two sets of huge garage doors. And parked off to one side was a red Toyota pickup truck.

I suddenly felt nervous and wished I were wearing my Kevlar vest. I was there alone, except for Ken, but he was drunk and I knew he wouldn’t be any help if push came to shove. I was going to tell him to stay put and let me go scout around. Before I had a chance, he swung open the door and half tumbled/half stumbled to the ground. Then he righted himself and started toward the shed, swearing under his breath.

I yelled at him to stop, but he ignored me. Instead, he set off in a staggering broken-field trot, lumbering toward the shed. I got out of the Tundra, too. Once I was on the ground, I heard what he had heard. Coming from inside the shed was the low-throated rumble of some kind of heavy equipment.

By the time I caught up with Ken, he had fumbled a set of keys out of his pocket and was opening a door that was set into the side wall of the shed. He reached inside and switched on a light. Then, after hitting a button that opened the garage doors, he came rolling back out of the shed coughing as a thick cloud of diesel smoke and carbon monoxide billowed behind him and rose skyward in a cloud through the open garage doors.

We waited for a few moments for the air to clear. When Leggett went back inside to turn off the bulldozer, I followed behind. A man sat slumped at the wheel. I knew from the way he was sitting that Tomas Rivera was gone.

I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. Amazed to see I had a signal, I called Mel.

“You’d better turn around at the next exit,” I told her. “We have a problem.”

CHAPTER 16

AS BEST MAN, JOANNA WAS DUE AT THE CHURCH FOR WEDDING

photos at nine. By seven-thirty she knew she was having a bad hair day. After wetting her hair down completely and starting over, she managed to make the grade.

After the fuss Dennis had made during the rehearsal, she and Butch decided to run up the flag to see if Carol could keep him with her rather than having him mess up the ceremony. Jenny wouldn">Holding the phone to his ear, he didn’t answer. “Damn!” he said. “Went straight to voice mail.” He glanced at his watch. “She’s probably already gone to the wedding.”

“What’s going on?”

But Jaime was already dialing another number. When there was no answer on that one, either, he tried a third. “Ernie!” he exclaimed. “I’m glad I caught you. You’re not going to believe it. We think the guy who murdered Marcella may have been hooked in with the Cervantes brothers from down in Cananea. I’m hoping you can call up the folks from the Border Task Force and see if they can tell us anything about what’s going on with those guys at the moment.” He paused, then added, “Sure, I understand. Have Tom give me a call. I don’t have a computer with me, but he can fax whatever they send him to my hotel here in Ellensburg.”

I waited until he finished the call. “How about putting me back in the loop?” I said. “Who are the Cervantes brothers?”

“Antonio and Jesus,” he said. “Their father, Manuel, was a good man, a copper miner at Cananea, a mining town just south of the border in Sonora. He got dusted and died.”

“Dusted?” I asked.

“Lung disease,” Jaime told me. “Once he was gone, his two sons decided they didn’t want the same thing to happen to them—and they were too lazy to work that hard. So they went into business for themselves—drug trafficking, running illegals across the border, you name it. As the bigger cartels started getting taken down, Antonio and Jesus moved in on their territories and in on their businesses, too. Prostitution, protection rackets, you name it.”

The word “prostitution” made me think about Marcella Andrade and those other five murdered girls. She had been taken out because of the money. I wondered if maybe some of the other girls had objected when they’d found out the real price of admission for their ride across the border.

I said aloud to Jaime, “Sounds like the Mafia.”

“It is the Mafia,” he replied grimly. “Mafia Mexican style.”

“But why would Miguel Rios of Gig Harbor, Washington, be dealing with people from—where was it again?”

“Cananea, Sonora,” Jaime answered. “Maybe because they’re all part of the global economy. Once I hear back from the Task Force, we may have an answer on that.”

“We?” I asked. It seemed reasonable to point out to him that this was our case, not his.

“You,” he corrected. “Obviously, if anything important turns up, I’ll pass it along.”

Mel came into the restaurant and made her way to the booth. Even in yesterday’s clothes and with minimal makeup, she looked terrific.

“Morning, guys,” she said, smiling at Jaime. “Mind if I join you?”

The reception was a catered affair in the base groceries, furniture, appliances, and dry goods were all gone now—had been for generations—but ghosts of the building’s commercial past still lingered. There was a reasonably good restaurant along with several boutique shops on the main floor, while the basement was devoted to a single large meeting room.

Joanna and Butch walked down the worn terrazzo stairs and made their way through the reception line, greeting the smiling bride and groom and offering congratulations. A local and very enthusiastic mariachi band, Los Amigos, was playing in one corner of the room, next to a table stacked high with wedding presents. Emily Post may have decreed that gifts shouldn’t be brought to wedding receptions, but Frank’s and LuAnn’s friends and relations hadn’t gotten that memo.

Keeping the gifts and gift cards straight isn’t my problem, Joanna thought gratefully. And neither are the kids.

True to form, the twins, still in their wedding-procession finery, were once again at each other’s throats. Joanna knew that if she and Butch had brought Denny along, he would have made a beeline for all the excitement and put his own toddler spin on the proceedings.

Along one wall was a buffet table laden with mountains of Mexican food provided by Chico Rodriguez of Chico’s Taco Stand fame. The restaurant, in Bisbee’s Don Luis neighborhood, was little more than a hole in the wall, but the spread here, pulled together by Chico and an assortment of his female relatives, was nothing less than splendid.

Painfully aware that her hairdo battle had left no time for breakfast, Joanna took her growling stomach and headed straight for the buffet table. She and Butch filled their plates with a delectable assortment of tacos, taquitos, enchiladas, and chips. After locating two seats together at the already crowded tables, Joanna looked after the plates and places while Butch went in search of punch.

Joanna was still waiting for him to return when Eleanor and George stopped in passing to say hello. George moved on to visit with someone else while Eleanor, eyeing Joanna’s loaded plate, bent over and whispered in her ear.

“Try not to spill any salsa on that gray silk,” she warned. “That stuff will never come out.”

After imparting that bit of wisdom, Eleanor moved on.

“What did your mother want?” Butch asked when he returned a couple of minutes later.

“The usual,” Joanna replied with a laugh. “She was giving me the benefit of her years of experience with silk suits.”

For the next half hour or so, Joanna enjoyed herself immensely. It was fun to see her people—uniformed personnel and not; some active and some retired; sworn officers and not—enjoying themselves together. She knew that on this Saturday afternoon her department was functioning with only a skeleton crew, and she hoped nothing momentous would happen while they were all off having a good time.

A few minutes later, as the bride was gearing up to toss the bouquet, Joanna heard her cell phone’s distinctive chirp. Joanna’s outfit had no pockheight="0%">

Right that minute, however, Joanna had no idea which of her officers might have expressed an interest in the Cervantes Cartel or why. She seemed to remember that Jaime Carbajal had mentioned the name in regard to his murdered sister. The exact details eluded her right then, and Joanna wasn’t about to let Agent Delahany know about any of it, not until she understood the situation herself.

“We’ve been involved in this top-secret operation for months now,” Delahany continued. “We’ve had assets in play, keeping an eye on things. And just when we’re about to spring the trap on them…”

Joanna wondered if Delahany’s outburst might have something to do with Ernie’s checking into other ATV hangouts around the county. Was that what had gored Agent Delahany’s ox?

“We’re investigating a murder that took place at Action Trail Adventures near Bowie last weekend,” she told him now. “If there happens to be some overlap between your investigation and ours, so be it.”

“I don’t believe you’re hearing me,” Delahany said, his voice rising. “I want you and your people to stand down. This is important. We need to bring these guys down all at once, not piecemeal, one dumb crook at a time.”

“And I’m working on solving a homicide that happened inside my jurisdiction,” Joanna said firmly. “And we’re going to keep on working that homicide.”

“I swear, if you mess up this operation…”

Joanna didn’t wait long enough to hear the remainder of his threat. “This conversation is over, Agent Delahany. Have a nice day.”

He was still blustering into the phone when she ended the call. When her phone chirped again a few seconds later, she didn’t answer. Instead, she made her way back downstairs, where George had commandeered her seat and was talking with Butch.

When she said she needed to leave, Butch started to stand up. “Let’s go then,” he said.

“Stay here and have fun,” she said. “Ernie or Deb can give me a ride.”

George immediately grasped the transportation dilemma. “Give Joanna the car keys and let her drive herself,” he said. “Ellie and I will be glad to take you home later.”

Joanna plucked Ernie off the dance floor and Deb from the line of people waiting for punch. “Come on,” she told them. “We have work to do.”

One of the most unusual additions to Ross Connors’s Special Homicide Investigation Team in recent years is a remarkable guy named Todd Hatcher, who originally hails from southern Arizona. In the course of a year, our department had made good use of Todd’s geeky Ph.D. in forensic economics and his computer savvy.

In terms of background, I doubt anyone in his senior class at Benson High School would have voted him Most Likely to Succeed. Born the son of a convicted repeat bank robber and a waitress, Todd had grown up ious student who had won a scholarship to the University of Arizona, where, with a combination of scholarships and summers spent working as a ranch hand, he had earned both a B.A. and master’s degree in economics. Later on, a fellowship had brought him to the University of Washington to work on a Ph.D.

When Todd’s father had developed early-onset Alzheimer’s, the prison system had seen fit to turn him loose and make him his wife’s problem rather than theirs. The strain of caring for her seriously ill husband until his death had been too much for Todd’s mother. She had died within months of her husband. With that painful family history in his background, Todd had proposed doing his dissertation on the unfunded medical expenses caused by our country’s aging and permanent prison population. The project had been nixed by his dissertation adviser, so Todd had completed the project on his own, turning out a modestly successful book in the process and turning my boss, Washington Attorney General Ross Connors, into a devoted fan who had brought Todd’s talents to bear on any number of sticky projects.

Given Todd’s considerable talents, I was pretty sure he’d be able to dig up plenty of information for us as well. Out in the car, I called Ross and asked him to put Todd on the case of Miguel Rios and the Cervantes brothers. Then I headed for Seattle.

Once again, because Mel had gone on ahead and because I was driving solo, my mind was running full speed ahead. Yes, people like Todd can use computers to put together amazing connections, but so can ordinary old-fashioned human beings. And just like the night before with North Bend and Ken Leggett, it was a road sign on the freeway that jarred me into making the connection out of the previous day’s collection of word salad. It was the one for Highway 18, from I-90 to Tacoma.

Tacoma via Black Diamond and Mama Rose Brotsky. Mama Rose had known Marcella Carbajal Andrade as Marina Aguirre. Yesterday I had made time to let Mason Waters know the truth about what had happened to his missing fiancée. Now I needed to do Mama Rose the same unwelcome favor. Maybe learning about her protégée’s death would be enough to cause her to remember some other helpful detail.

I immediately called Mel and popped the question, asking if she wanted to join me in a little side trip down to Black Diamond.

“Nope,” she said without a moment’s hesitation. “Not today. We worked until all hours last night. It’s Saturday. I just got a reminder call from Gene Juarez about my three o’clock appointment for a much needed mani-pedi, and I’m not going to miss it. Too bad, buddy boy,” she added. “This time you’re on your own.”

Joanna held a hurried strategy session with Deb and Ernie on the sidewalk outside the Convention Center, where she was surprised to learn that it had been a request for information from Jaime Carbajal rather than the ATV park inquiry that had set off Agent Delahany’s temper tantrum.

“Jaime was looking for information regarding the Cervantes Cartel,” Ernie said. “Since he was calling on his cell and since requests like that have to be sent through regular channels, I told Jaime I’d have Tom Hadlock look into it.”

Joanna’s temper flared. “There’s a good reason reports are sent through regular channels,” she said flatly. “Jaim. If that request has anything to do with his sister’s homicide, he has no business sticking his nose in it.”

“Sorry, boss,” Ernie said. “He’s my partner. He needed some help and I gave it to him.”

Joanna shook her head in frustration. “I’m going home to change,” she said. “We’ll meet up at the office in half an hour and see where things stand.”

On the way home Joanna called Tom Hadlock. “I understand Jaime Carbajal called in looking for some information on the Cervantes Cartel earlier this morning,” she said. “What happened with that?”

“Nothing at all,” Tom replied. “The duty officer for the DEA called back a little later and said they were having technical difficulties on their end—some kind of computer upgrade problem—and wouldn’t be able to send anything out today.”

What they really meant was wouldn’t send, period, Joanna thought. Not wouldn’t be able to send. Big difference. And that request for information was enough to send Agent in Charge Delahany into a spasm.

“I called Jaime to let him know I couldn’t access the Cervantes records,” Hadlock continued. “That’s when he asked for a rap sheet on some guy named Miguel Rios. I found his records in the regular database and I faxed the information to Jaime’s hotel room.”

“How long ago?” Joanna asked.

“An hour or so, I suppose,” Tom said. “Maybe longer.”

“Do you have current address information on Rios?” Joanna asked.

“Sure,” Tom said. “It’s right here. He lives in a town in Washington called Gig Harbor.”

Joanna felt her stomach knot. None of this was information Jaime Carbajal needed if all he was doing in Washington was retrieving his sister’s remains.

“Do me another favor,” Joanna said. “Look up the records on a guy named Juan Castro. I can’t remember his middle name. Street name is Paco. If you can track him down, try to find out if he has any connections to the Cervantes organization.”

“Done,” Tom replied at once. “I’ve got Paco Castro’s information right here in front of me, too. His full name is Juan Francisco Castro. Jaime had a file on him in his computer, and he wanted to pass the information along to the people investigating his sister’s murder. He asked me to print it and fax that to him as well. I’ve still got the hard copy. Just a sec.” The phone fell silent as Tom perused the file. “Yes, here it is,” Tom said finally. “It says right here in Jaime’s notes that Paco is suspected of being involved with the Cervantes Cartel, but so far nothing’s been proved.”

In other words, Jaime had been keeping a file on Paco that hadn’t necessarily made it into the official records. Joanna had been holding her breath. Now she let it out.

“If Jaime calls in again, give him a message for me,” she said vehemently. “Tell him he’s to back 0%" width="5%">He gave me a scathing look. “You don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what?” I asked.

“Self-preservation,” he answered. “You may still be the guy you used to be, but I’m not. In the old days I wouldn’t have thought twice about taking on a punk like the one who came here looking for Marina’s money, but I can’t do that anymore, Beau. I’m not that tough. My body isn’t up to it. So that’s what I did—I went along to get along. Giving him his money was the only thing I could do to protect Mama Rose and me, and that’s what I did.”

Unfortunately, I did understand because I’m in the same boat. I can’t take punches the way I could back when I was a young Turk, and I can’t deliver them the same way, either. And, unlike Tommy, I hadn’t spent the last ten years or so of my life battling what would probably turn out to be a fatal disease. Right that minute, Tom Wojeck didn’t look like he was at death’s door, but he wasn’t in the peak of health either.

“Why are you here?” he added. “What do you want?”

“Marina’s dead,” I told him. “We suspected as much when Mel and I came here earlier, but now we know for sure. We’ve made a positive identification. Her real name was Marcella Carbajal Andrade.”

Tom sighed. “All right, then,” he said. “Come on in. It’ll break Mama Rose’s heart, but she’ll want to know.”

This time we walked across the veranda and entered the house through the front door. We found Mama Rose Brotsky sitting on a sofa in the massive living room. She had been watching her rose-planting crew with avid interest, but when I walked into the room, her face hardened.

“It’s about Marina,” she said before I ever opened my mouth. “And it’s bad news, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I concurred. “I’m afraid it is.”

Mama Rose wept as I related my news. I found it oddly comforting to realize that someone besides Marcella’s immediate family mourned the young woman’s passing. When I finished, Mama Rose dried her tears and squared her shoulders.

“How much money was that exactly?” she asked Tom.

“Right at forty-five thousand,” he answered.

“We’ll need to write a check for her son,” Mama Rose said. “His name is Luis, right?” she asked me.

I nodded.

“No matter how Marina…Marcella…came by that money, it wasn’t ours to give away. With her gone, it needs to go to the boy.”

Nodding, Tom Wojeck left the room. He returned a short while later carrying a business-style checkbook. “What’s his name again?” Tom asked.

“Luis,” I told them. “Luis Andrade.” I spelled it out for him.

“Go ahheight="0%">

“In Ellensburg, Washington,” Joanna said. “In the morgue at the Kittitas County medical examiner’s office. I believe the remains are due to be released on Monday.”

“Will the family be bringing the body back to Arizona?” Delahany asked.

“Yes,” Joanna answered. “That’s why Jaime flew up there yesterday—to bring her home to Bisbee for burial. Why?”

“Regardless of what happens with the brother and Miguel Rios, please let the family know that my people and I deeply regret their loss. You can tell them from me that we’ll help with bringing Marcella home. It’s the least we can do.”

Joanna was surprised to hear the sound of genuine regret in his voice.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll let them know.”

“And one more thing,” Delahany added. “About that homicide situation over in Bowie—the one your guys are working on?”

“The Lester Attwood case?” Joanna asked.

“Yes, that’s the one,” Delahany said. “Once the dust settles on all this other stuff, you can let your detectives know that I’m pretty sure we have some surveillance videos that will help you sort out what happened there.”

“As in legible surveillance videos?” Joanna asked.

“Of course they’re legible,” Delahany declared. “Why wouldn’t they be? It’s my belief that it pays to buy the very best.”

That’s something the Savages have yet to learn, Joanna thought.

“All right,” she said. “Detective Ernie Carpenter is my lead investigator on the Attwood case. I’ll have him be in touch.”

With that she ended the call.

I had awakened that morning in a strange bed in a Best Western in Ellensburg. If you had told me that a few hours later I’d be heading for Gig Harbor and chasing a fellow cop across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, I would have said you were full of it.

By the way, I’m not exactly wild about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and my jaundiced opinion has nothing to do with the fact that it’s now a toll bridge. My dislike goes all the way back to the time when I was a little kid growing up in Seattle. I was born only a few short years after the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, otherwise known as Galloping Gertie, crashed into the drink. The bridge had been open for only a few months when it started swaying uncontrollably and then collapsed during a fierce windstorm during the winter of 1940. It took ten years to build a replacement. When that one opened in 1950, newsreels in theaters replayed the flapping demise of Galloping Gertie over and over. For me, seeing that film footage left a lasting impression.

These days and as someone who crosses Lake Washington’s floating bridges on a daily basis, I’m well aware that they can sink, too—especially if you allow water to rush inside the hollow concrete pontoons, as a careless workman did on I-90 back in the early nineties. But at least if one of the floating bridges sinks, out of town, Alma DeLong evidently showed up with another dead client and bullied him into cremating the remains in a hell of a hurry. Once you see the photos, it’s no wonder she was in such a rush.”

“What do we do now?” Deb asked.

“I want you to go see Bobby Fletcher,” Joanna said. “Take your computer and that memory card with you so you can show Bobby the photos. It’s one thing for him to put his foot down about exhuming his mother out of respect for her or even because he’s at war with his bossy sister. But if Bobby realizes that exhuming his mother’s body might prevent some other poor patient’s suffering, I think he’ll step up and give us the go-ahead.”

“Dr. Machett isn’t going to like it,” Deb said.

“Too bad for Dr. Machett,” Joanna answered. “That’s why the county pays him the big bucks.”

Mel pulled up and stopped. I waved at her, got back into the Mercedes and drove off with her tailing behind while I followed the confident turn-by-turn directions issued by the Lady in the Dash. Just as she told me my destination was one half mile ahead on the right, I caught sight of a bright blue Chevy Cobalt parked on the shoulder of the road overlooking a bluff. It could have been a sightseer parked there to enjoy the view, but a quick glance at the text message on my phone told me otherwise. It was Jaime Carbajal’s rental, all right, and it was empty.

“Bingo,” I said aloud. It seemed likely that he had parked here and hiked the rest of the way down the hill to Miguel Rios’s house.

“You are arriving at your destination,” the Lady in the Dash announced.

Ignoring her, I drove another three hundred yards or so beyond the turnoff and pulled off onto a wide spot on the shoulder that was lined with mailboxes. That’s where I parked and got out. Mel did the same. Once out of her car, she hurried up to me and handed me a windbreaker.

“Put this on over your vest,” she said. “That way you won’t look quite so much like a cop.”

And a target, I thought.

I put on the jacket. Together we walked back toward the steep driveway that led down to Miguel Rios’s waterfront home at the base of the bluff.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Mel asked.

We had already discussed the matter on the phone. The fact that there were no emergency vehicles in sight made me think that we might have arrived in time to avert disaster, but if it all went bad, it was important to have someone up at the top of the driveway to sound the alarm and call for reinforcements.

“I’m sure,” I said. “Jaime’s a cop.”

“A cop who’s bent on revenge,” Mel said.

I couldn’t disagree with that, and I didn’t.

“Right,” I said. “I get that. My job is to talk him out of it.”

“What if talking doerry-on bag lay open on the ground at his feet. I suspected he was armed, but I couldn’t see a weapon, not from there.

“Hey, Jaime,” I said. “How’s it going?”

“Get out of here, Beaumont,” he said. “This is none of your business.”

I kept walking, moving closer all the time. “You’re wrong,” I said. “It is my business. I’m a homicide cop too, remember?”

“Tomas Rivera killed my sister.” His voice was taut, a bowstring wound too tight. “Most likely he did it on Miguel Rios’s orders, but do you think the law will ever hold him accountable? No way. I know how the system works. He’s got money. He’ll hire some hotshot attorney to get him off or else he’ll negotiate a slap-on-the-wrist plea bargain. I’m here to make sure that doesn’t happen. I’m going to get him to confess. Then I’m going to take him out.”

“Right,” I said sarcastically. “Sure you will. Let’s see how the old eye-for-an-eye routine works for you. Maybe you’ll end up wringing a confession out of the guy, but if you do it at gunpoint, without reading him his rights, you’ll be winning the battle and losing the war. Nothing he says will stand up in court. He’ll get off on a technicality.”

“He won’t get off because there won’t be any technicality,” Jaime said. “I’m a good shot.”

I was close enough now that I could see the weapon. He was holding it at his side, pointed at the ground. I was glad it wasn’t pointed at me. It looked like a .45 caliber Smith & Wesson. That’s not the kind of handgun you use if you’re intending to wing someone. They call it a deadly weapon because that’s what it is—deadly.

“I know you’re doing this because of Marcella,” I said. “But I’m here because there are five other victims, five victims who are all just as dead but whose names we don’t know. I think there’s a good chance that Miguel Rios killed them as well—that he’s responsible for wrapping them in tarps and setting them on fire. But if you wreak your revenge on Rios for Marcella’s death, you’re taking away any hope of justice for those other families.”

“I don’t care about the other families,” Jaime said. “I care about my family.”

“Like hell you do,” I told him. “You don’t care about anyone but yourself. What you’re planning right now is premeditated murder. What happens to Luis if you go through with this? His parents are gone. Who’ll be left to take care of him? He’ll be devastated.”

Jaime wasn’t persuaded. “He’ll live,” he said.

“And what about the people who didn’t live?” I asked. “What about Marcella and Marco? Is your killing Miguel Rios going to bring them back?”

“Marco was scum,” Jaime spat back. “He deserved to die.”

“He didn’t,” I said. “He was working with the DEA.”

“Marco was a snitch?” Jaime returned. “Div height="0%">

“It’s no joke. Sheriff Brady told me all about it a few minutes ago. Marco was spilling his guts, and the feds were listening.”

“And they’re claiming that’s why he died?” Jaime scoffed. “I don’t think so.”

“But it’s true,” I said. “With Marco’s help the feds have spent months putting together a program that should bring down the whole cartel. It’s all supposed to happen in the next few weeks and it’s going to work—at least it may work if you don’t screw it up, that is. Because if you go through with this, Jaime, that’s exactly what will happen. The Cervantes guys will know someone is closing in on them and everyone connected to the cartel will disappear like a puff of smoke. It’ll take years to bring them back out into the open.”

“You expect me to believe all this?”

“Call Sheriff Brady,” I said. “Ask her.”

“You’re saying that’s why they killed Marcella, too, because of Marco?”

“We think that’s why, but we don’t know for sure. Now give me the gun, Jaime. Let’s get the hell out of here while there’s still time. No one needs to know you’ve been here. No one needs to know what your intentions were. We just walk back up the hill, nice as you please, drive away, and let things take their course. The DEA says they’re going to bring Rios in. Let’s give them a chance to do just that.”

I don’t think Jaime heard a word I said.

“Miguel Rios had Tomas Rivera kill my sister,” Jaime countered, going back to his original position. “For that he’s going to die.”

“Look,” I explained. “The Cervantes Cartel is like a case of cancer. Miguel Rios is only one little tumor in a whole system of tumors. If you take him out, it’s not going to make any difference, because the cancer has already spread—everywhere. With Marco’s help, the feds have a plan and an opportunity to take out the whole mess. If you blow this and they don’t succeed, then trust me, Jaime, you’ll be responsible for a lot more dead people in lots more places, and every one of those unnecessary deaths will be your fault. And your sister and Marco Andrade will have died in vain.”

“But Miguel Rios will be dead, too,” Jaime insisted.

“And most likely so will you, you stupid bastard!” I growled at him. “Don’t do this. Please don’t do this.”

Suddenly I was transported back in time and space. I was standing at the bottom of a waterfall trying to talk Anne Corley out of doing something stupid. And I hadn’t been able to do it. Losing Anne had almost been the death of me. If I lost Jaime Carbajal, too…

The only thing left for me to do was beg. My voice cracked as I spoke. “Please, Jaime,” I said again. “Please don’t.”

Finally I seemed to have his undivided attention and maybe I was getting through, but just then I h we’re from Windermere Real Estate. That you heard he might be interested in selling the property and you came here in hopes of getting the listing.”

But even though Mel was screaming at me, I didn’t take my eyes off Jaime’s face. I couldn’t afford to.

“Someone’s coming, Jaime,” I said evenly. “Give me the gun. We can still walk away.”

I don’t know how long we stood staring at each other, me with my hand outstretched and him sitting casually on the seat of the swing. Behind me I could hear the low growl of the Hummer’s engine as it wound down through the trees. Any moment it would burst into the open and it would all be over. It would be too late.

At last Jaime bent down, put the gun in the bag, and handed it over.

“All right,” he said, “but if it turns out you’re lying…”

The Hummer braked to a stop at the edge of the driveway. A man leaped out and came charging across the lawn. The woman stayed where she was.

“This is private property,” the man yelled. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Someone told me you were interested in selling.”

“Whoever told you that was wrong. Now get the hell out of here!”

Jaime looked at him with unmistakable fury, then looked away. He had made his choice and he was abiding by it no matter what it cost him because Jaime Carbajal was a man of his word.

“Sure thing,” I said to Rios, giving Jaime a slight shove in the direction of the driveway. “Sorry to bother you.”

As we trudged back up the driveway, I may have been huffing like a steam engine, but to my astonishment, my knees didn’t hurt.

Not at all.

By the time we reached the trees, Jaime Carbajal was sobbing. It could have been letdown or grief or even a little of both. At the top of the driveway, Mel was waiting in the Mercedes. She had the doors unlocked and the engine running.

“Get in,” she urged. “Let’s get out of here. We can come back for the other cars later.”

And so Mel drove. Like a bat out of hell, of course. After fastening my seat belt, I handed Jaime my phone. “You’d better give Sheriff Brady a call,” I said. “She’s waiting to hear from you.”

As Jaime took the phone, Mel glanced in my direction. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I couldn’t be better,” I said. “The good guys won.”

CHAPTER 18

I WAS SURPRISED WHEN JAIME CARBAJAL ASKED IF I WOULD0%">

“Look,” I said. “For a while there, wanting to take revenge got the upper hand. What finally carried the day is that Jaime Carbajal is a good man. More than that, he’s a good cop. If he had used that gun on Miguel Rios, Jaime would have been going against everything he believes in—everything we all believe in.”

“Yes,” Joanna said, looking up at me. “Sometimes walking away is the best thing you can do.”

In the old days I would have taken that remark at face value and assumed she was still talking about Jaime Carbajal. But I’m smarter now, at least as far as women are concerned. She had changed the subject.

“And believe me,” she added, “I really appreciate it.”

Moments later, she took Butch’s hand and the two of them did just that—they turned and walked away. I knew as they did so that whatever had happened or might have happened between Joanna Brady and J. P. Beaumont was over, completely over, once and for all. She had put it firmly in the past, and so had I.

“Come on, Mel,” I said. “We’ve got a plane to catch. Let’s go home.”

About the Author

J. A. JANCE is the New York Times bestselling author of the J. P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, the Ali Reynolds series, and three standalone thrillers. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, she lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.

www.jajance.com

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ALSO BY J. A. JANCE

Joanna Brady Mysteries

Desert Heat

Tombstone Courage

Shoot/Don’t Shoot

Dead to Rights

Skeleton Canyon

Rattlesnake Crossing

Outlaw Mountain

Devil’s Claw

Paradise Lost

Partner in Crime

Exit Wounds

Dead Wrong

Damage Control

J. P. Beaumont Mysteries

Until Proven Guilty

Injustice for All

Trial by Fury

Taking the Fifth

Improbable Cause

A More Perfect Union

Dismissed with Prejudice

Minor in Possession

Payment in Kind

Without Due Process

Failure to Appear

Lying in Wait

Name Withheld

Breach of Duty

Birds of Prey

Partner in Crime

Long Time Gone

Justice Denied

and

Hour of the Hunter

Kiss of the Bees

Day of the Dead

Edge of Evil

Web of Evil

Hand of Evil

Cruel Intent

Credits

Jacket design by Richard Aquan

Jacket photograph © by Garry Black/Masterfile

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.