Exit Wounds

by J. A. Jance

  “How come?”

  “Because. Trust me.”

  Moments later, a pajama-clad Jenny was in their bedroom, looking more than a little cross. “What’s going on?” she asked indignantly.

  Standing with her hands on her hips and with a disapproving frown on her face, Jenny looked like a miniature Eleanor Lathrop Winfield. And sounds like her, too, Joanna realized in dismay.

  In answer to Jenny’s question, Butch pulled the wiggling Lucky out from under the covers and held him up in the air. Jenny’s blue eyes widened in delight, then she vaulted onto the bed between Butch and Joanna.

  “He’s so cute!” Jenny exclaimed breathlessly. “Where did you get him? Is he ours? Can we keep him? What’s his name? Can I hold him?”

  In answer to the barrage of questions, Butch simply handed Lucky over to Jenny. The puppy scrambled up her bare shoulder and buried his nose in her long blond hair.

  “His name is Lucky,” Butch replied. “And we will keep him—if you can keep Tigger from eating him, that is.”

  “Tigger won’t eat him,” Jenny declared. “He’ll be fine, I know he will be. Should I let him in now, so we can introduce them?”

  “I don’t think so,” Butch said. “Not right now.”

  “Why not?”

  Taking a deep breath, Butch looked from Jenny back to Joanna. “Because,” he said finally, “I think your mother has something important to tell you.”

  Joanna was already in her office and at her computer when Chief Deputy Frank Montoya came in for the morning briefing.

  “What’s up?” he asked, placing a sheaf of papers on Joanna’s polished wood desk and taking a seat in one of the captain’s chairs.

  “What do you mean, ‘What’s up’?”

  “Don’t play innocent with me, Sheriff Brady. You look like the cat that swallowed the canary.”

  Joanna got up, walked over to the door that led to the interior lobby and Kristin’s desk, and pulled it shut.

  “I guess I did, in a manner of speaking,” she said. “Swallow the canary, that is.”

  Frank seemed mystified. Joanna sat back down and looked at him across her desk. “I’m pregnant, Frank.”

  “Whoa! Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I took a pregnancy test last night, and I’m definitely pregnant.”

  Frank’s face broke into a grin. “Well, congratulations, then. That’s big news!”

  “I’ll say.” Joanna grinned back at him.

  “So who knows?”

  “Well, Butch, Jenny, and now you.”

  “What are you going to do?” Frank asked.

  “What do you think? I’m going to have the baby.”

  “What about the election? Are you going to drop out?”

  Joanna was adamant. “And give Ken Junior a free ride? No way.”

  “So are you going to keep it…well, under wraps until after election day?”

  “We probably should delay making an announcement, just in case of a miscarriage, but Butch and I already talked it over. I’m going to go public with it. ASAP. I may even give our old friend, Marliss Shackleford, an exclusive on this.”

  Marliss, a columnist for the local paper, The Bisbee Bee, had long been a thorn in Joanna’s side.

  “Do you think that’s wise?” Frank asked. “She’s done everything but post ‘Galloway for Sheriff’ signs at the top and bottom of her column.”

  “That’s exactly why I want Marliss to be one of the first to know,” Joanna responded. “It’ll be one of her biggest scoops ever in ‘Bisbee Buzzings.’ Knowing Marliss is solidly in Ken Junior’s corner, people are bound to read the column and talk about it for days afterward. I figure, if the voters know about the baby in advance and elect me anyway, then no one will be able to complain about it later on. And if I lose? Then I lose. I’ll go back to selling insurance—although that wouldn’t be my first choice.”

  “I take it you and Butch have talked this through?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “All right, then,” Frank said. “If you two are okay with it, then I’ve got no complaints.” He picked up his stack of papers. “Sorry I wasn’t there to help out last night,” he added.

  “Don’t apologize, Frank,” Joanna told him with a smile. “You get to have some time off, and so do I. Now, what more do you have for me this morning?”

  For the next twenty minutes or so they went over routine departmental business, including the previous day’s incidents reports. They ended with a discussion of the Mossman homicide.

  “Ernie Carpenter will be at the autopsy later this morning,” Frank said. “Jaime Carbajal will start canvassing the neighborhood around Carol Mossman’s place and talking to her supervisor and co-workers. He’ll also be organizing an inch-by-inch search of the property. Dave Hollicker believes that since the shots were fired through a locked door, there’s a good chance the killer never made it inside Carol Mossman’s place. That means any physical evidence left behind by the killer would most likely be outside the trailer rather than inside it.”

  Joanna nodded. “This whole thing offends me,” she said, her green eyes flashing in sudden outrage. “Most people, including Carol’s own grandmother, might consider that run-down trailer little more than a hovel, but it was Carol Mossman’s home, Frank—her place of refuge. She and her animals were inside it, unarmed and defenseless, when somebody blew her away and killed all her dogs in the process. It’s true that, in trying to help all those strays, Carol Mossman may have broken some of the dog-ownership statutes, but at the time she was killed, she and her dogs weren’t hurting anybody.”

  “No, they weren’t,” Frank agreed.

  “I was on the scene last night. We were all working and doing our jobs. This morning, I realize it was like it was all business as usual. It would be all too easy to write Carol off as some kind of weirdo who was somehow responsible for what happened to her, but if the Carol Mossmans of this world aren’t safe in their own homes, nobody else is, either. I want whoever did this caught!”

  By the time Joanna paused, Frank Montoya seemed a little taken aback by the strength of her emotion on the subject. “I see what you mean,” he said. “So what’s the next step?”

  “Have Jaime contact that Explorer troop out on post at Fort Huachuca to see if they can help with the foreign-object search.”

  “Will do,” Frank said.

  “And we should probably get the Double Cs in here to update us sometime this afternoon.” The term Double Cs was departmental shorthand for the two homicide detectives, Carbajal and Carpenter.

  “Okay,” Frank agreed.

  “Anything else?” Joanna asked.

  The chief deputy looked decidedly uncomfortable. “Well, there is one more thing,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s about the dog.”

  “What dog?”

  “The one you took from Carol Mossman’s home last night.”

  “It’s not a dog, Frank,” Joanna responded. “It’s a puppy—a cute little fuzzy black puppy.”

  “Jeannine Phillips has lodged a formal complaint.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “I wish I were,” Frank said regretfully. “She says you confiscated the dog yourself rather than following established procedures.”

  “Frank, the puppy’s mother was dead. Lucky was practically starving to death.”

  “Lucky. You mean you’ve named him?”

  “Yes, I’ve named him. He’s not a dog, Frank. He’s a baby—barely weaned, if that. Somehow he was left alone when all the other dogs got locked inside the trailer with Carol Mossman’s body. It’s a wonder he was still alive. I brought him home. Butch fed him bread and milk and then went straight out to buy Puppy Chow. What’s wrong with that? What was I supposed to do, ship him off to the pound so they could keep him for however long they keep animals before they put them down?”

  “And how long is that?” Frank asked.

  Joanna shrugged. “I d
on’t know for sure—a couple of weeks. A month, maybe.”

  “You should probably know,” Frank put in mildly, “the correct answer is actually seventy-two hours.”

  Joanna was shocked. “That’s all?” she demanded. “You mean, from the time the animals are picked up?”

  “That’s right. If they’re not claimed by an owner or adopted by the end of seventy-two hours, they’re out of there.”

  “As in put to sleep.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s awful. I was sure they had longer than that.”

  “I thought so, too, boss, but I checked the statute just this morning. If you care about animals at all, and if those are the kinds of conditions Animal Control is working under, maybe that’s part of the reason Jeannine Phillips is so pissed off all the time. I sure as hell would be.”

  “Do you think she’ll take her complaints to Ken Junior?” Joanna asked.

  “If she’s in a mood to make trouble, what do you think?”

  Joanna thought about that. Finally she said, “If I end up losing this election, will it be because I’m pregnant or because I took in an orphaned puppy?”

  Frank Montoya grinned and shook his head. “Anybody’s guess,” he said.

  After the chief deputy sauntered out of her office, Joanna sat staring out into the lobby through the open doorway. She thought about the scene in her kitchen earlier that morning, when Tigger met Lucky for the first time. Jenny had put Tigger on a “Wait” command at the door to the kitchen. But the word wait meant nothing to the puppy. He had scampered across the room and, despite Tigger’s bared teeth, had leaped up and licked the big dog’s face. Offended, Tigger had grabbed the puppy by the scruff of the neck and put him down, where he lay stock-still on the floor with his paws straight up in the air. Only the tiniest tip of his tail had moved—a twitch rather than a wag.

  After several seconds, Tigger had let his captive go. Lucky had jumped up and gone racing around the room, his tiny claws clicking on the tile floor as he skidded around the corners. Each time he returned to Tigger, the older dog had growled and bared his teeth again, but he made no further move to attack the little interloper. The scene was so comical that Jenny had giggled with delight. Butch and Joanna, too, had laughed aloud. And now, because she had taken in the little rascal to give him a good home, Joanna was suddenly in the doghouse with her Animal Control officers.

  Making up her mind, Joanna punched her intercom button.

  “Yes, Sheriff Brady,” Kristin Gregovich answered.

  “I’m going out for a while,” Joanna said.

  “When will you be back?”

  “I don’t know,” Joanna replied. “I’m on my way out to Animal Control. You might call ahead and see if Officer Phillips is there. Let her know I’m coming to see her.”

  The several miles between the Justice Center and the Animal Control compound on the far side of Tin Town gave Joanna plenty of time to think about her upcoming meeting. And the more she thought about it, the more she suspected Jeannine Phillips was in the right and she was wrong. After all, police officers investigating crime scenes were charged with collecting evidence connected to whatever crime had occurred. At the same time, they were prohibited from taking any items not thought to be part of the criminal investigation.

  Going strictly by the rule book, Joanna had no excuse for taking the puppy. But Lucky was by no means part of the Carol Mossman homicide, and the animal was far too small to be shipped off to a pound. That opinion was underscored when, a few minutes later, she found herself wandering through a maze of dog runs searching for Jeannine Phillips. Joanna’s passage set off a cacophony of barking. She found it difficult to look at the sad collection of animals, their muzzles pressed hopefully up against the chain-link gates, watching as Joanna walked by. One in particular caught her eye—a blue-eyed Australian shepherd bitch.

  Joanna finally located Jeannine Phillips. Hose in hand, she was cleaning out an empty run. Joanna didn’t want to consider what had happened to the previous occupant. The Animal Control officer nodded in greeting when Joanna walked up, but continued hosing down the concrete-floored run.

  “What can I do for you, Sheriff Brady?” she asked finally after turning off the hose. “I suppose you’re here to bitch me out for lodging the complaint?”

  “Not exactly,” Joanna said. “Although I did come to talk to you about that.” She paused. “I guess it never occurred to me that saving one puppy’s life was a breach of procedure.”

  “If it had been a child,” Jeannine said brusquely, “you would have turned it over to Child Protective Services.”

  “But there were all those other dead dogs,” Joanna objected. “Seventeen dead dogs.”

  “Right,” Jeannine agreed. “What’s the big deal about seventeen dead dogs? We put away that many every week. And by the time we get through with the Fourth of July weekend—with all the dogs that get scared and run away from home because of firecrackers and are never reclaimed—we’ll do double that next week.”

  Joanna felt sickened. “That’s outrageous!” she exclaimed. “We euthanize that many? I had no idea.”

  “I didn’t think you did,” Jeannine Phillips said. “But don’t feel bad. Nobody else knows, either. Since puppies don’t eat much, we can keep them a little longer. And we could probably have placed your puppy. It’s a different story with older dogs. For one thing, they aren’t that cute, and they eat too much. When the board of supervisors dished out the budget cuts, our unit took a ten percent hit right along with everyone else, Sheriff Brady. But so far I haven’t been able to convince any of the dogs that they should eat ten percent less.”

  As the morning sun climbed higher in the sky, the temperatures in the unair-conditioned kennel area was heating up as well. Joanna followed Jeannine back through the kennel, the woman stopping here and there to turn on big industrial fans.

  “They help some,” she said. “If nothing else, they keep the air circulating.”

  Inside the building, Joanna and Jeannine walked through a hallway lined with cat cages. Most of those were full as well. Animal Control’s ramshackle office was furnished with discarded, mismatched furniture that had seen better days. Joanna soon realized the office wasn’t air-conditioned, either. An old swamp cooler halfheartedly blew tepid air and the odor of mildew into the room as Jeannine sat down behind a scarred wooden desk.

  “We should have two full-time kennel attendants,” she told Joanna. “Since we only have one, Manny and I end up doing kennel duty when we should be out on patrol. If somebody actually wants to adopt a dog, we have to be paged so we can come back and handle the paperwork. It’s no surprise that so few dogs get adopted.

  “Before she left, Donna Merrick had all kinds of bright ideas. She had met with several local veterinarians and was hoping to get the county to contract with them for low-cost spaying and neutering. Donna thought we’d have better luck finding homes for animals if we brought the animals to the people instead of waiting for people to come to us. She had even talked to some of the local store managers about having adoption clinics on Saturday mornings. Donna wanted to pay for a dog groomer so the animals would be cleaned up and looking good the mornings of the clinics.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Joanna said. “What happened?”

  “Donna talked the idea up and the Wal-Mart managers in Douglas and Sierra Vista were all for it. So was the manager of the Safeway store here in town. But when the board of supervisors heard about it, they wouldn’t even consider it. Said that running adoption clinics went beyond our ‘legal mandate’ and that the taxpayers would think it a waste of money. And, once Donna went up against the board, the next thing we knew, she was gone. Now we’re part of the sheriff’s department, and we’re even more shorthanded than before.”

  “So I guess we need to do something about this,” Joanna said when she finished.

  Jeannine nodded. “Yes, we do,” she said, but she didn’t sound convinced that anything would change.
>
  “How long have you worked here?” Joanna asked.

  “Eight years.”

  “And Manny?”

  “Six.”

  Joanna nodded. “So what do you want me to do about the puppy? Should I bring him back here? I offered him to Carol Mossman’s mother, but she didn’t want him. The place where she lives doesn’t allow pets.”

  “Manny said you’d already named him,” Jeannine said.

  “I thought he was lucky, so that’s what I named him—Lucky.”

  “Go ahead and keep him,” Jeannine said in exasperation. “Since he’s already got a home, there’s not much sense bringing him back here. You’re supposed to have him properly licensed, once he has his shots, and he’ll need to be neutered.”

  “Right,” Joanna said. “We’ll take care of it.”

  “Good enough,” Jeannine said.

  Joanna stood and started toward the door. Then she stopped and turned back. “How long has that little Australian shepherd been here?” she asked. “The one in that last bunch of kennels.”

  “Oh,” Jeannine said. “You mean Little Blue Eyes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Three days,” Jeannine replied. “She’ll be gone tomorrow.”

  “Gone as in adopted?” Joanna asked.

  “No,” Jeannine said. “Gone as in gone.”

  Sheriff Joanna Brady thought about that, but not for long. Butch won’t mind, she thought. “My husband and I live on a ranch out on High Lonesome Road,” she said. “There’s plenty of room for dogs.”

  Jeannine Phillips’s sullen expression brightened slightly. “You mean you’d like to take her?”

  “Yes,” Joanna said. “I think I would.”

  “She’ll need to have her shots, too, and be licensed.”

  “And spayed,” Joanna added.

  “No,” Jeannine said, “you won’t have to worry about that. She’s already been fixed. But you should know, she doesn’t like men much—not even Manny, and he’s a real sweetheart when it comes to dogs.”

  “That’s all right,” Joanna said. “I’m sure we’ll be able to manage.”

  For the first time in Joanna’s memory, the grim set of Jeannine Phillips’s face was replaced by a tentative smile. “Great, Sheriff Brady,” she said. “I’ll get started on the paperwork right away.”