by J. A. Jance
“Really, Ms. Haynes,” Neighbors was saying, looking decidedly uncomfortable, while his eyes remained focused on the little diamond sparkler winking at him from Tamara Haynes’s very much exposed belly button. “As I said,” he continued awkwardly, “I’m already late for a meeting. You’ll have to excuse me.”
He broke away from his interrogator then and dodged into the building right on Joanna’s heels. “Who in the world are those people?” he wanted to know. “And why are they so upset with me?”
“What set them off was having all those animals die at the scene of that homicide last week,” Joanna told him.
“That’s certainly not my fault,” Neighbors grumbled. “I don’t see how they can hold the board of supervisors responsible for that.”
“But they know Animal Control is shorthanded,” Joanna replied. “If we’d had enough personnel to keep an eye on hoarders like Carol Mossman, she might not have ended up with so many animals in her possession at the time of her death.”
“What did you call her?”
“A hoarder,” Joanna said. “Carol Mossman was what’s called an animal hoarder. It’s a mental condition.”
“Really,” Charles Longworth Neighbors said with a concerned frown. “I had no idea. And what’s this about all that adoption nonsense?”
“It’s not nonsense,” Joanna returned. “The more pets we place in adoptive homes, the fewer we have to euthanize.”
They were nearing the boardroom now. Charles Longworth Neighbors appeared to be lost in thought. “How many people do you think were out there?” he asked.
“Out in the parking lot? Fifty, I suppose,” Joanna answered.
“On a Friday morning,” he mused. “That’s quite a few. Do you think they really do vote?”
In that moment Sheriff Joanna Brady understood exactly what was at stake. Charles Longworth Neighbors had been appointed to fill out someone else’s unexpired term. Now he faced the prospect of running for election on his own and based on his own record.
In the years since her election, Joanna Brady had learned a little about politics herself.
“I’d be amazed to think they didn’t,” she said. “Vote, that is. And if they can summon this many folks for a Friday morning rally, who knows how many votes they can muster?”
This was news Charles Longworth Neighbors clearly found disturbing. “We should do something about this,” he said.
“Yes,” Joanna agreed amiably. “We certainly should.”
“Do you have any ideas?”
Yes, Joanna thought, like breaking Animal Control out of the sheriff’s department and putting Jeannine Phillips in charge.
“One or two,” Joanna said.
“Good, good,” Neighbors said distractedly as he held the boardroom door open for Joanna to enter. “Write up something on that and get it to me, would you, please? I’ll put it on the agenda for next week.”
“Sure,” Joanna said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
She took her seat in the room and waited for the meeting to get under way. It was hard not to smile. After all, doing what it took to give the AWE vote to Charles Longworth Neighbors was also going to help Sheriff Brady.
Frank Montoya showed up just as the meeting was called to order. He leaned over to her and asked, “What’s going on? You look like you just won the lottery.”
“Tell you later,” she said.
The meeting that morning wasn’t as bad as meetings sometimes were, but when Joanna emerged just before noon, she wasn’t surprised to see that the protesters had evaporated in the face of the hot sun. She checked her phone and found she had five missed calls. Scrolling through them, she discovered they were all from home. She called there immediately. Jenny answered on the second ring.
“Hi, Mom.”
“What’s going on?” Joanna demanded. “Is anything wrong?”
“No,” Jenny said. “Everything’s fine. Butch and I just got back from taking Lucky to the vet. Dr. Ross says Butch is right. Lucky is stone-deaf. She gave us the name of a book on sign language for dogs. She said we might be able to train all the dogs to respond to hand signals. Wouldn’t that be neat?”
“Yes, it would. Is Butch there?”
“No. He’s in town. He said that if you called, he’d meet you at Daisy’s for lunch.”
“Want to grab some lunch?” Frank asked, coming up behind her.
“Sorry,” Joanna told him. “It turns out I’m having lunch with my husband.”
As she drove to Daisy’s, Joanna had to pull over at the traffic circle to let a funeral cortege go past. She knew whose funeral it was—Stella Adams’s—and she was glad the windows in the limo following the hearse were dark enough that she couldn’t see inside. She was glad not to see Denny Adams and his son, Nathan, coping with their awful loss. She had read in the paper that the services for Stella Adams would be private, but still, it seemed wrong that more people weren’t there. This was a time when Dennis and Nathan Adams needed people around them—even if they didn’t want them.
As the procession with its woefully few cars drove past, Joanna said a small prayer for Dennis and Nathan Adams and for all the remaining Mossmans as well.
It was a subdued Joanna Brady who arrived at Daisy’s Café. Butch was seated in their favorite booth, the one at the far corner of the restaurant. He was grinning from ear to ear.
“What’s up?” she asked as she slipped onto the bench seat.
“What makes you think something’s up?” Butch returned.
“Your face, for one thing. You’d never make it playing poker.”
“Drew called,” Butch said, bubbling over. “Carole Anne Wilson is making me an offer. She wants Serve and Protect to be the first title in her new Hawthorn Press Mystery imprint. Can you believe it, Joey? It’s not that much money, but it’s a start.”
He leaned across the table and kissed her full on the lips. A few nearby diners looked askance.
“Yeah,” Daisy Maxwell added as she walked by, carrying a tray laden with glasses of iced tea. “You keep that up, Butch Dixon, and you’ll make all the other women in here jealous.”
But Butch’s infectiously happy mood was catching.
“I can’t believe it, Butch. This is wonderful!”
“You can’t believe it,” Butch returned. “Just wait until I tell my mother. She always told me I’d never amount to anything. When she finds out I’m going to be published, she’ll be amazed.”
“I’m not,” Joanna said with a smile. “When does it come out?”
“September of next year.”
“Over a year away?” Joanna asked. “It takes that long? That’s even longer than it takes to have a baby.”
“I guess so,” Butch agreed.
“So what are the love birds having today?” Daisy asked, stopping at their booth. “The special is all-you-can-eat machaca tacos, five ninety-nine. And for the tenderhearted…” she added, peering pointedly over her glasses at Joanna, “for them, I’ve got a nice new batch of chicken noodle soup.”
Joanna looked at Butch and realized she was suddenly feeling better. “Today,” she said, “I’m going for gusto and grabbing the machaca.”
“Me, too,” Butch said, beaming. “Whatever the lady’s having, I’ll have the same, and don’t spare the salsa.”
Minutes later, Joanna bit into the crunchy tortilla shell on the first of three delectable tacos. “So how did the board meeting go?” Butch asked.
“It was fine,” Joanna said.
“Really?” Butch gave her a searching look. “After everything that’s happened, for a change Charlie Neighbors didn’t give you too much grief?”
A lot had happened. In terms of Cochise County, the human death toll for the last week and a half was off the charts. As far as Charlie Neighbors was concerned, those deaths weren’t worth mentioning. What counted for him were the votes that could be delivered to an opponent by the group protesting the deaths of Carol Mossman’s dogs.
Ever s
ince his appointment to the board of supervisors, Charles Longworth Neighbors had made Joanna’s life miserable. Only today had she realized that he wasn’t nearly as all-powerful as she had once assumed him to be. And the next time Sheriff Brady had to go up against him in defense of her department, she wouldn’t be nearly as intimidated.
“No,” Joanna said, giving her husband a thoughtful smile, “when it comes to grief and Charlie Neighbors, today was my day to dish it out.”
After that, she lapsed into silence. “You’re awfully quiet,” Butch said finally. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, Joey. I know you better than that. Tell me.”
“I drove past the ballpark this morning,” she said. “There’s already a For Sale sign posted on the Adams place.”
Butch shrugged. “Makes sense to me,” he said. “If I were Denny Adams, I’d do the same thing. Take Nathan and go somewhere else—preferably someplace far enough away that nobody knows anything about what’s happened. If Nathan tried to go back to school here in the fall, the other kids would eat him alive.”
“Yes,” Joanna agreed, “I’m sure you’re right. And I’m sure, too, that’s why Stella did what she did—to protect Nathan—to keep her son’s friends from learning the truth about who he is and where he came from.”
“You have to give the woman some credit,” Butch said. “Regardless of who Nathan’s father was, Stella Adams obviously loved her child more than she loved life itself. I’m not sure how that works, though,” he added with a frown.
“How what works?”
“How is it possible that the process of becoming a mother can also turn someone into a killer?”
“It’s not that hard to understand,” Joanna told him. “Motherhood changes you. From the moment you hold that baby in your arms, you’re a different person from who you were before. You turn into…” She paused, searching for words.
“A tigress defending her young?” Butch offered.
Joanna nodded. “Something like that,” she said.
“You make it sound as though fathers have nothing to do with it.”
“Ed Mossman certainly had something to do with it,” Joanna said fiercely. “He had everything to do with it. All this happened because his daughters were trying to escape from the mess he created.”
“Ed Mossman’s dead,” Butch reminded her gently. “He can’t be punished any more.”
Joanna thought about her jail-based conversation with Ramón Alvarez Sandoval. Confronting the driver of the SUV with his crucifix and forcing him to look at his actions through the prism of his own beliefs had helped tip the scales and convince him to turn state’s evidence. It had taught Joanna something about her own beliefs as well.
“You’re wrong there,” she said at last. “Ed Mossman can be punished more.”
“How?” Butch asked.
“He can rot in hell,” Joanna told him, pushing her plate away and standing up. “And if there’s any justice anywhere, he’ll do just that.”
Author’s Note
Hoarders like Carol Mossman exist in the real world. I wouldn’t have known about them or written about them had it not been for my sister, E. Jane Decker, Director of Animal Control for Pinal County in Coolidge, Arizona. Like Carol Mossman, these unfortunate people have two things in common: an unending availability of unwanted dogs and cats and a chaotic and disturbed childhood that might include a history of sexual abuse, alcoholism, and profoundly unstable relationships with people.
What can we do to help? First, we must understand that when we take a cute, cuddly little puppy or kitten into our home, it is a commitment of at least ten to fifteen years. We also need to understand that if the animal in our care has problems, we must go to experts for help and training to ensure the animal’s well-being and to keep the animal from becoming unwanted and difficult to place. Next, we should spay and neuter our animals, and when we choose to welcome a new animal into our lives, we ought to avail ourselves of any one of the many pet rescue operations located throughout the country.
Finally, if we know of a hoarder in our neighborhood, we must notify our local animal control officers. Hoarders think they’re helping, but the animals in their care are usually under-nourished, unvaccinated, neglected, and unsocialized animals that become difficult to place after being removed from this unfortunate environment. Please consider helping in any way you can because animals cannot help themselves, and neither can hoarders.
The Humane Society of the United States (www.hsus.org) has valuable information on how communities can effectively respond to the animal and human problems associated with hoarding cases.
About the Author
J.A. Jance is the New York Times bestselling author of the J.P. Beaumont mystery series, the Sheriff Joanna Brady mystery series, and the suspense novel Kiss of the Bees. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives in Seattle and Tucson.
Books By J. A. Jance
Joanna Brady Mysteries
Exit Wounds
Desert Heat
Tombstone Courage
Shoot/Don’t Shoot
Dead to Rights
Skeleton Canyon
Rattlesnake Crossing
Outlaw Mountain
Devil’s Claw
Paradise Lost
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
and
Hour of the Hunter
Kiss of the Bees
Partner in Crime
Credits
Jacket design by Richard Aquan
Jacket photograph © by Daryl Benson/Masterfile
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.
EXIT WOUNDS. Copyright © 2003 by J. A. Jance. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition August 2003 eISBN 9780061742057
FIRST EDITION
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Author’s Note
About the Author
Books By J. A. Jance
Credit
Copyright
Aboutpublisher