by J. A. Jance
Dedication
For Terry, and for Kathy and Rusty
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by J. A. Jance
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Late on Wednesday afternoon, the first week in December, Sheriff Joanna Brady sat at her desk, mired in paperwork. She was laying out the details of her request for a budget increase for the next fiscal year, something that had to be in the hands of the county supervisors well before their next scheduled Friday morning meeting. At this point Joanna’s department was grossly understaffed, and only an increase in the bottom line would allow her to hire more sworn officers. Unfortunately, right this minute Joanna’s heart wasn’t in it.
When her cell phone rang with her daughter’s photo showing on the screen, Joanna welcomed the interruption. “Hey,” she said, more cheerily than she would have thought possible. “How’s it going?”
“It’s snowing,” Jenny said, not sounding the least bit happy about it. She was in her second year at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where she had quickly run out of patience with Flag’s winter weather. That had happened during the second blizzard of her freshman year, and now, to her utter dismay, this year's Farmers’ Almanac was predicting yet another season of record-breaking snowfall. “We’ll probably have another foot by morning,” she added gloomily.
Joanna had to bite her tongue to keep from mentioning that Jenny could have chosen to go to school in Tucson, where it was much warmer and seldom if ever snowed, but the offer of a scholarship and a spot on NAU’s rodeo team had carried the day.
“How are things with you?” Jenny asked.
“Fine,” Joanna replied, but that was an outright lie, because things definitely weren’t fine, not even close. As Jenny rattled on about her day and about the latest rivalries on the rodeo team, her mother’s mind wandered back to a conversation with Detective Ernie Carpenter earlier that afternoon.
Ernie, who had been Joanna’s lead investigator for as long as she’d been sheriff, had let himself into her office unannounced and then closed the door behind him before dropping into one of her visitor’s chairs.
“It’s back,” he said.
Joanna struggled for several long moments, trying to come to terms with exactly what “it” was, but then, observing his somber demeanor, she got his drift.
“The cancer?” she asked.
He nodded.
Years before, Ernie had been treated for prostate cancer, choosing to go the radiation-seeds route. Since then he’d been in remission, and Joanna had almost forgotten about that original diagnosis. Now she realized she’d been noticing that he seemed to have lost some weight recently and was looking a little more worn than usual.
“It’s metastasized,” he added. “It’s in my lymph nodes and my liver.”
“I’m so sorry,” Joanna murmured, “so very sorry. Does anyone else know?”
“Only Rose,” he said. “I’m not ready for the guys around here to start treating me like the cancer guy with one foot in the grave, even if it’s true.”
Joanna couldn’t help half smiling at that. When it came to gallows humor, Ernie Carpenter had always been at the top of the class.
“So here’s the deal,” Ernie continued. “I’m letting you know that I’m pulling the plug as of January first. Rosie and I have talked it over. The seeds gave me a pretty good run, but it looks like that’s coming to an end. I’m not going to put myself through some kind of godawful round of treatment that would maybe give me a few more months at best but zero quality of life. That’s not fair to me, and it’s sure as hell not fair to Rose. I’m going to take my retirement, and the two of us will hit the road. We’ll travel while I can travel, and when I can’t do that anymore, we’ll come home.”
He left off there. The recurrence was bad enough news, but the idea that Ernie planned to forgo any additional treatment was stunning. Joanna’s first instinct was to ask, Are you sure? But the set of Ernie’s jaw caused her to stifle. Yes, he was sure. He and Rose were sure. They had obviously reached this conclusion together. This was their business and nobody else’s.
“How can I help?” Joanna asked quickly. “What can I do?”
“Keep this under your hat, for one thing,” he replied. “You find sympathy in the dictionary between shit and syphilis, and I’m not interested in sympathy. I wanted to give you a heads-up in advance so you can start getting your ducks in a row as far as detectives are concerned, but I don’t want a lot of hoopla about this. I’ll tell Jaime, of course. He’s my partner, and I owe it to him, but that’s it. I’m not telling anyone else.”
Joanna thought about that before speaking up. “I’ll give you a week,” she said.
Ernie seemed taken aback. Clearly that kind of terse response was not what he’d expected. “I beg your pardon?”
“You have until a week from today to tell Jaime whatever you decide to tell him about why you’re retiring. You can let him know about the cancer or not—that’s entirely up to you—but after that, all bets are off. If you don’t want to be labeled ‘cancer guy’ on your way out the door, you’d better put on your big-boy underwear and announce your upcoming retirement, because there’s no way in hell I’m letting you leave this department without a retirement party, and that will need to be scheduled ASAP. Got it?”
Sitting there at her desk, she met Ernie’s gaze and held it. He was the first one who blinked.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said finally. “I hear you loud and clear.” He had stood up to leave just then but paused at the door and added, “By the way, I’ll be using up some of my vacation time and taking tomorrow and the next day off. Rose and I are going to Phoenix to pick up an RV, and we’ll be spending the night.”
“Good-o,” Joanna said with a wave. “Travel safe.”
When the door closed behind him, Joanna was left alone with the term “RV” echoing in her heart. When her mother and stepfather—Eleanor and George Winfield—had hit retirement age, they, too, had dived into the RV life, expecting to spend many “golden years” cruising the USofA. Unfortunately, that plan had been cut short. A hail of bullets
fired by a troubled teenager from a highway overpass had forever ended George and Eleanor’s travels together. Joanna dreaded the idea that Rosie and Ernie’s traveling days, too, would soon end in a somewhat different but equally tragic way. So it was hardly any wonder that when she’d turned back to writing her report, she hadn’t been up to the task.
“Well, Mom?” Jenny’s exasperated voice broke into Joanna’s reverie. “Have you heard a word I said?”
“Sorry,” Joanna replied. “Something was going on, and I was distracted. What were you saying?”
“I was asking if you and Dad would mind if I brought someone home for Christmas vacation.”
The fact that Jenny routinely referred to her stepfather as “Dad” was something that never failed to gladden Joanna’s heart. But Jenny was planning on bringing someone home for Christmas? Who? A boyfriend, maybe? Jenny had friends who were boys—most notably Nick Saunders, the kid from St. George, Utah, who was also on the NAU rodeo team. He and Jenny boarded their horses at the same place in Flag and sometimes looked after each other’s mount when one or the other was out of town. Joanna knew the two were good friends, but if there were any romantic links between them, the subject had never come up. And if this was someone else, who was he and what were his intentions?
“Who is he?” Joanna asked.
Jenny laughed aloud. “It’s not a he, Mom,” she said. “It’s a she—Beth, my roommate. That’s her name, remember? Beth Rankin.”
Jenny’s reply sent Joanna spinning down yet another mental rabbit hole. Halfway through her sophomore year, this was the first time Jenny had suggested bringing one of her college friends home for a visit. But having someone stay over for several days might be a problem. Family members were well accustomed to the many inconveniences of having one-year-old Sage and seven-year-old Denny in the house. A college student might not be up for that. And then there was the challenge of sleeping arrangements.
“With the guest room changed into a nursery . . .” Joanna began.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” Jenny put in quickly. “I’ll bunk on the sofa in the living room, and Beth can stay in my room. She had a huge blowup with her folks over Thanksgiving, and she isn’t planning on going home. The idea of having her stuck on campus all alone during winter break is just . . .”
“Of course she can come,” Joanna said quickly. “Didn’t you tell me she’s an only child?”
“Definitely,” Jenny returned, “with an over-the-top helicopter mom.”
“You might want to warn her in advance that a household with a one-year-old and a seven-year-old may be a little more than she bargained for.”
“I’ll pass that along,” Jenny said. “But maybe being around Sage will do the same thing for Beth that it did for me.”
“What’s that?”
“Being around a baby made it blazingly clear that I’m nowhere near ready to have one,” Jenny answered. “Sort of like making the case for birth control without anyone having to say a word.”
It was Joanna’s turn to laugh. “In other words, delivering the ‘birds and bees’ talk by remote control.”
“You’ve got it—indirect but very effective.”
They both laughed at that.
“All right,” Joanna said. “Tell Beth she’s more than welcome. As for you? Thank you.”
“Thank me for what?”
“For being the kind of daughter you are,” Joanna said. “For making me laugh and for reminding me what the season for giving is all about.”
“You're welcome,” Jenny said, “but now that I’ve called you, I’m going to call Dad, too, and make sure my bringing home company is okay with him as well.”
“Good idea,” Joanna said. “No, make that an excellent idea, but I can’t imagine he’ll say no.”
“I know, but I’ll call him anyway. I don’t want him to think we’re ganging up on him.”
“Okay,” Joanna said. “Bye, then.”
When the call ended, Joanna felt as though she’d just been run through an emotional spin cycle. Glancing at her watch, she was surprised to see that it was after five. That meant that her secretary, Kristin Gregovich, had most likely already bailed. Just to be sure, Joanna walked over to the door Ernie had left closed on his way out and opened it. Sure enough, the chair behind Kristin’s desk was empty, as was the dog bed next to it where Spike, the department’s recently medically retired K-9, spent his days.
Kristin’s husband, Terry, happened to be Joanna’s K-9 officer. During a shoot-out nearly a year earlier, Spike had taken a bullet that had been intended for Joanna and very nearly died as a result. Spike’s extensive injuries had made his returning to active duty impossible. When his replacement, a newly trained pit bull named Mojo, appeared on the scene, Spike had been disconsolate each morning to see Mojo ride off in Terry’s patrol vehicle. Taking pity on the grieving dog, Kristin had asked Joanna if she could bring Spike along with her. These days Spike spent his workdays dozing on a dog bed beside Kristin’s desk while Mojo went out on patrol.
With the outer office completely deserted, Joanna didn’t linger. “Okay,” she said to the empty room. “Since everyone else has called it quits for the day, I guess I’ll do the same.”
She went back into the office long enough to gather up her laptop and stuff it into her briefcase. Then she headed home, leaving through the private door at the back of her office, an exit that led directly to her reserved parking place just outside.
Joanna had a short commute—eight minutes door-to-door—from the Cochise County Justice Center to her home at High Lonesome Ranch. She sometimes wished it were longer, to give her a larger buffer between her life as an Arizona sheriff and her life as a wife and mother, between dealing with bad guys and dealing with kids, between fighting bureaucracy and handling dirty diapers. The bureaucracy battle would be never-ending, but Joanna’s daughter Sage was now more than a year old, and with any kind of luck the diaper era would be coming to an end in a matter of months.
At the moment Joanna’s husband, Butch Dixon, was off on the second leg of a book tour for his latest novel, book number five, A Step Too Far. His lighthearted, genre-jumping stories might have been cozies but for the fact that his main protagonist, Kimberly Charles, was a law-enforcement officer. The books were set in a small and entirely fictional town in southern Arizona, but the strong resemblance between Sheriff Brady and Butch’s fictional Sheriff Charles was hardly coincidental.
Butch’s editor often referred to him as a solid “midlist” author, and for authors in that category going on tour was mandatory. In this instance conflicting scheduling issues had required breaking the tour into two separate parts. The half before Thanksgiving had focused on out-of-state appearances. The second half featured drivable events located in and around Arizona and New Mexico. For the earlier part of the tour—the national one—Butch had used media escorts. For more local venues, he was driving himself.
With Butch out of town, Joanna checked his schedule daily. Today she knew he had a three-hour dinner break between the end of his afternoon event in Mesa and the start of an evening one at White Tank Library in Waddell, Arizona. Joanna had never heard of Waddell until she Googled it and learned it was a Phoenix suburb located at the base of a mountain range on the far western side of the Valley of the Sun. In terms of the Phoenix metropolitan area, Waddell was about as far from Mesa as humanly possible.
Once in the car, Joanna plugged in her phone and dialed Butch’s number. “How’s your day going?” she asked when he picked up.
“Pretty well,” he said. “I’m grabbing a burger at a Denny’s in Avondale right now, so I don’t have to fight rush-hour traffic all the way from central Phoenix to White Tank. Since I’m on my own, I can’t use express lanes, and that’s a pain.”
“How was attendance this afternoon?” Joanna asked.
“Red Mountain in Mesa was a full house,” he replied, “but people are still surprised when Gayle Dixon turns out to be male instead of female. I ge
t the feeling that the bookstores aren’t exactly thrilled to have an author out on the road this late in the season. With Christmas on the way, it’s as though I’m more of an annoyance to them than I am a help.”
“Speaking of Christmas,” Joanna said, “I just had a call from Jenny. She was asking if it was okay for her to bring someone along home for Christmas vacation.”
“I know,” Butch said. “She called me about that, too. I was afraid it was going to turn out to be a boy, and they were coming home to announce an engagement. I told her sure, the more the merrier. I met Beth last fall when I drove up to Flag to help Jenny and Maggie get settled in before school started.”
Maggie was Jenny’s quarter horse—the equine half of a prizewinning barrel-racing team.
“Beth struck me as being very quiet,” Butch added. “She’s evidently smart enough but very shy. Jenny’s so outgoing, I wondered how they’d get along.”
“Based on that Christmas invite, I’d say they’re doing fine,” Joanna assured him. “By the way, Jenny’s last final is on Friday, the fifteenth. I’m guessing they’ll show up sometime late on Friday evening or else sometime during the day on Saturday.”
“That’s what she told me, too,” Butch said. “When I come home this weekend, I’ll have to get my rear in gear if I want to have Christmas decorating done and holiday baking in hand before they show up.”
Butch was due home on Saturday. Joanna had been looking forward to the two of them enjoying a relaxing weekend together. Her vision for the upcoming weekend didn’t include the hustle and bustle of getting ready for Christmas.
“Why not leave most of that for the girls to do after they get here?” Joanna suggested. “Jenny’s always loved decorating, and since Dennis is seven now, he’s big enough to be a help this year, too. Ditto for making Christmas goodies. Put all three of them to work in the kitchen. It’ll give them something to do.”
“Besides staring at their cell-phone screens you mean?”
“Exactly,” Joanna agreed with a laugh.
“Based on what Jenny had to say about the weather up in Flag, I’m really glad New York left the northern end of the state off the tour schedule this time around. Phoenix traffic is a pain, but it’s better than driving in snow and ice.” Then, after a brief pause, he added, “So what are your plans for tonight?”