by J. A. Jance
“Help yourself,” Joanna said.
Watching as he put down his plate and drink, Joanna was surprised to note that although he was naturally handsome, he was also surprisingly ungainly. While the conversation hummed around the table, Rod attacked his food with a peculiar intensity. When he glanced up and caught Joanna observing him, he blushed furiously, from the top of his collar to the roots of his fine blond hair. For the first time, Joanna wondered if Rod Bascom wasn’t an inveterate head-nodder in class because he was actually painfully shy? The very possibility made him seem less annoying. At twenty-five or -six, Rod
was close to Joanna’s age. In terms of life experience, there seemed to be a world of difference between them.
“Are you enjoying the classes?” Joanna asked, trying to break the ice.
Once again Rod Bascom nodded his head. Joanna had to conceal a smile. Even in private conversation he couldn’t seem to stop doing it.
“There’s a lot to learn,” he said. “I never was very good at taking notes. I’m having a hard time keeping up. I suppose this is all old hat to you.”
“Old hat? Why would you say that?” Joanna returned.
“You’re not like the rest of us,” he said, shrugging uncomfortably. “I mean, you’re already a sheriff. By comparison, the rest of us are just a bunch of rookies.”
Joanna flushed slightly herself. No matter how earnestly she wanted to fit in with the rest of her classmates, it wasn’t really working. She smiled at Rod Bascom then, hoping to put him at ease.
“I’m here for the same reason you are,” she said “Some of this stuff may be boring as hell, but we all need to learn it just the same.”
He nodded, chewing thoughtfully for a moment before he spoke again. “I’m sorry about your husband,” he said. “It took me a while to figure out why your face is so familiar. I finally realized I saw you on TV back when all that was going on. It must have been awful.”
Rod’s kind and totally unexpected words of condolence caught Joanna off guard, touching her in a way that surprised them both. Tears sprang to her eyes, momentarily blurring her vision.
“It’s still awful,” she murmured, impatiently brushing the tears away. “But thanks for mentioning it.”
“You have a little girl, don’t you?” Rod asked. How’s she doing?”
Joanna smiled ruefully. “Jenny’s fine, although she does have her days,” she said. “We both know it’s going to take time.”
“Are you going home for Thanksgiving?”
“No, Jenny and her grandparents are coming up here.”
Rod Bascom nodded. “That’s probably a good idea,” he said. “That first Thanksgiving at home after my father died was awful.”
He got up then and hurried away, as though worried that he had said too much. Touched by his sharing comment and aware that she’d somehow misjudged the man, Joanna watched him go.
What was it Marliss Shackleford had said about people in the big city? She had implied that most of the people Joanna would meet in Phoenix were a savage, uncaring, and untrustworthy lot.
So far during her stay in Phoenix, Joanna had met several people. Four in particular stood out from the rest. Leann Jessup—her red-haired note-writing tablemate; Dave Thompson, her loud-mouthed jerk of an instructor; Butch Dixon, the poetry-quoting bartender from the Roundhouse Bar d Grill; and now Rod Bascom, who despite his propensity for head nodding, gave every indication of being a decent, caring human being.
There you go, Marliss, Joanna thought to herself, as she stood up to clear her place. Three out of four ain’t bad.
The morning lectures may have dragged, but the afternoon lab sessions flew by. They started with the most fundamental part of police work—paper—and the how and why of filling it out properly. Joanna didn’t expect to be fascinated, but she was—right up until time for the end-of-day session of heavy-duty physical training.
Once the PT class was over, Joanna could barely walk. There was no part of her that didn’t hurt. It was four-thirty when she finished her last painful lap on the running track and dragged her protesting body back to the gym.
The PT instructor, Brad Mason, was a disgustingly fit fifty-something. His skin was bronze and leatherlike. His lean frame carried not an ounce of extra subcutaneous fat. Brad stood waiting by the door to the gym with his arms folded casually across his chest, watching as the last of the trainees finished up on the field. Running laps was something Joanna hadn’t done since high school. She was among the last stragglers to limp into the gym,
“No pain, no gain,” Mason said with a grin as Joanna hobbled past.
Her first instinct was to deck him. Instead, Joanna straightened her shoulders. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll try to remember that.”
After lunch Joanna had told Leann she’d be happy to go to the candlelight vigil, but by the time it she finished showering and drying her hair, she was beginning to regret that decision. She was tired. Her body hurt. She had homework to do, including a new hundred-page reading assignment from Dave Thompson. But it was hard to pull herself together and turn to the task at hand when she was feeling so lost and lonely. She missed Jenny, and she missed being home. The partially completed letter she had started writing to Jenny the night before remained in her notebook, incomplete and unmailed.
Joanna went to her room only long enough to change clothes; then she took her reading assignment and hurried back to the student lounge. Naturally, one of the guys from class was already on the phone, and there were three more people waiting in line behind him. After putting her name on the list, Joanna bought herself a caffeine-laden diet coke from the coin-operated vending machine and sat down to read and wait.
The reading assignment was in a book called The Interrogation Handbook. It should have been interesting material. Had Joanna been in a spot more conducive to concentration, she might have found it fascinating. As it was, people wandered in and out of the lounge, chatting and laughing along the way while collecting sodas or snacks or ice. Finally, Janna gave up all pretense of studying and simply sat and watched. She tried to sort out her various classmates. Some of them she already knew by name and jurisdiction. With most of them, though, she had to resort to checking the name tag before she could remember.
Eventually it was Joanna’s turn to use the phone. Jenny answered after only one ring.
“Hullo?”
At the sound of her daughter’s voice, Joanna felt her heart constrict. “Hi, Jenny,” she said. “How are things?”
“Okay.”
Joanna blinked at that. After two whole days, Jenny sounded distant and lethargic and not at all thrilled to hear her mother’s voice. “Are you all packed for tomorrow?” Joanna asked.
“I guess so,” Jenny answered woodenly. “Grandpa says we’re going to leave in the afternoon as soon as school is out.”
“Aren’t you going to ask how I’m doing?” Joanna asked.
“How are you doing?”
“I’m tired,” Joanna answered. “How about you? Are you all right? You sound upset.”
“How come you’re tired?”
“It may have something to do with running laps and doing push-ups.”
“You have to do push-ups? Really?” Jenny asked dubiously. “How many?”
“Too many,” Joanna answered. “And I have a mountain of homework to do as well, but Jenny you didn’t answer my question. Is something wrong?”
“No,” Jenny said finally, but the slight pause before she answered was enough to shift Joanna’s maternal warning light to a low orange glow.
“Jennifer Ann . . .” Joanna began.
“It was supposed to be a surprise.” Jenny’s blurted answer sounded on the verge of tear. “Grandma said you’d like it. I thought you would too.”
“Like what?”
“My hair,” Jenny wailed.
“What about your hair?” Joanna demanded.
“I got it cut,” Jenny sobbed. “Grandma Lathrop took me to see Helen Bar
co last night, and she cut it all off.”
A wave of resentment boiled up inside Joanna. How like her mother to pull a stunt like that! She had to go and drag Jenny off to Helene’s Salon of Hair and Beauty the moment Joanna’s back was turned. Just because Eleanor Lathrop lived for weekly visits to the beauty shop Vincent Barco had built for his wife in their former two-car garage didn’t mean everybody else did. In Eleanor Lathrop’s skewed view of the world, there was no crisis so terrible that a quick trip to a beautician wouldn’t fix.
Joanna, on the other hand, held beauty shops and beauticians at a wary arm’s length. Her distrust had its origins in the first time her mother had taken Joanna into a beauty shop for her own first haircut. Eleanor had been going to old Mrs. Boxer back then, in a now long-closed shop that had been next door to the post office. Joanna had walked into the place wearing beautiful, foot-long braids. She had emerged carrying her chopped-off braids in a little metal box and wearing her hair in what Mrs. Boxer had called an “adorable pixie.” Joanna had hated her pixie with an abiding passion. All these years later, she still couldn’t understand how a place that had nerve enough to call itself a beauty shop could produce something that ugly.
“It’ll grow out, you know,” Joanna said, hoping offer to Jenny some consolation. “It’ll take six months or so, but it will grow out.”
“But it’s so frizzy,” Jenny was saying. “The kids t school all made fun of me, especially the boys.”
“Frizzy?” Joanna asked. “Don’t tell me. You mean Grandma Lathrop had Helen Barco give you a permanent?”
“It was just supposed to be wavy,” Jenny wailed. She really was crying now, as though her heart was broken. “But it’s awful. You should see it!”
Joanna had always loved the straight, smooth texture of her daughter’s hair, which was so like Andy’s. Had Eleanor been available right then, Joanna would have ripped into her mother and told her to mind her own damn business. As it was though, there was only a heartbroken Jenny sobbing on the phone.
“That’ll grow out, too,” Joanna said patiently. “Ask Grandma Brady to try putting some of her creme rinse on it. That should help. And remember, Helen Barco and Grandma Lathrop may call it
permanent, but it’s not. It’s only temporary.”
“Will it be better by Monday?” Jenny sniffed.
“Probably not by Monday,” Joanna answered. “But by Christmas it will be.” She decided to change the subject. “Are you looking forward to coming up tomorrow?”
“I am now,” Jenny answered. “I was afraid you’d be mad at me. Because of my hair.”
If there’s anyone to be mad at, Joanna seethed silently, it’s your grandmother, but she couldn’t say that out loud.
“Jenny,” she replied instead, “you’re my daughter. You could shave your hair off completely, for all I care. It wouldn’t make any difference. I’d sill love you.”
“Should I? Shave it off, I mean? Maybe Grandpa Brady would do it with his razor.”
Joanna laughed. “Don’t do that,” she said. “I was just teasing. Most likely your hair doesn’t look nearly as bad as you think it does. Now,” she added, “is Grandma Brady there? I’d like to talk to her.”
Moments later Eva Lou Brady came on the one. “Is Jenny right there?” Joanna asked.
“No. She went outside to play with the dogs.”
“How bad is her hair, really?”
“Pretty bad,” Eva Lou allowed. “Jim Bob says he could have gotten the same look by holding her finger in an electrical socket. Don’t be upset about it, Joanna,” Eva Lou added. “Your mother didn’t mean any harm. She and Jenny just wanted to surprise you.”
“I’m surprised, all right,” Joanna answered stiffly. “Now, is everything set for tomorrow?”
“As far as I can tell,” Eva Lou replied. “Kristin called and said you need us to bring along some papers from your office. We’ll pick them up on our way to get Jenny from school. We’ll leave right after that, between three-thirty and four.”
“Good,” Joanna said. “If you drive straight through, that should put you here right around eight o’clock.”
“That’s the only way Jim Bob Brady drives,” his wife said with a laugh. “Straight through.”
“How about directions to the hotel?”
“Jimmy already has it all mapped out. Do you want us to come by the school to pick you up? Jenny wants to see where you’re staying.”
“No, I’ll meet you at the hotel. It’s so close you can see it from here on campus. Jenny and I can walk over here Thursday morning so I can give her the grand tour.”
“Speaking of dinner, do we have reservations for Thanksgiving dinner yet?” Eva Lou asked.
“Yes. Right there in the hotel dining,” Joanna answered.
“Jim Bob needs to know if he should bring along a tie.”
“Probably,” Joanna answered. “From the outside, it looks like a pretty nice place.”
“I’ll tell him,” Eva Lou said. “I don’t suppose it’ll make his day, but since you’re the one asking, he’ll probably do it.”
Joanna put down the phone and left the lounge. Back in her own room, she realized she still hadn’t returned Adam York’s call, but she didn’t bother to go back down to the lounge. Instead, she lay on the bed in her room and thought about strangling her infuriatingly meddlesome mother.
Jenny’s long blond hair had been perfectly fine the way it was. Joanna remembered it floating in the wind as Jenny had waved good-bye.
Where the hell did Eleanor Lathrop get off?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Joanna Brady and Leann Jessup ate dinner at La Pinata, a Mexican restaurant near the capitol mall. Over orders of machaca tacos, the two women talked. In the course of a few minutes’ worth of conversation, they shared their life stories, giving one another the necessary background in the shorthand way women use to establish quick but lasting friendships.
“My mother divorced my dad when my brother was five and I was three,” Leann told Joanna. “The last time I saw my father was twenty years ago. He showed up at my sixth birthday party so drunk he could barely walk. Mom threw him out of the house and called the cops. He never came back.”
“You haven’t talked to him since?” Joanna asked.
Leann shook her head. “Not once.”
“Is he still alive?”
Leann shrugged. “Maybe, but who cares? He never called, never sent any money. My mother had to do it all. Most of the time, while Rick and I were little, she worked two jobs—one full-time and one half-time—just to keep body and soul together.
“In my high school English class, the teacher asked us to write an essay about our favorite hero. Most of the kids wrote about astronauts or movie stars. I wrote about my mom. The teacher made fun of my paper, and he gave me a bad grade. He said mothers didn’t count as heroes. I thought he was wrong then, and I still do.”
Joanna bit her lip. Thinking about her own mother and the flawed relationship between them, she felt a twinge of envy. “You like your mother then?” she asked.
“Why, don’t you?” Leann returned.
“Most of the time, no,” Joanna answered honestly. “I always got along better with my dad than did with my mother.”
She went on to tell Leann about her own folks, about how Sheriff D. H. “Big Hank” Lathrop died after being hit by a drunk driver while changing a tire for a stranded motorist and about the high school years when she and her mother had been locked in day-to-day guerrilla warfare. Joanna finished by telling Leann Jessup how, that very afternoon and from two hundred miles away, Eleanor Lathrop had been able to use Jenny’s hair to push Joanna’s buttons.
From there—from discussing mothers and fathers—the two women went on to talk about what had brought them into the field of law enforcement. For Joanna it had been an accident of fate. For Leann Jessup it was the culmination of a lifelong ambition.
Over coffee, Joanna got around to telling Leann about Andy’s dea
th. Recounting the story always brought a new stab of pain. Telling Butch Dixon the night before, Joanna had managed to corral the tears. With Leann, she let them flow, but she was starting to feel ridiculous. How long would it take before she stopped losing it and bawling at the drop of a hat?
“What about you, Leann?” Joanna asked, mopping at her eyes with a tissue when she finished. “Do you have anyone special in your life?”
Pm a moment, the faraway look in Leann Jessup’s eyes mirrored Joanna’s own. “I did once,” she said, “but not anymore.” With that, Leann glanced at her watch and then signaled for the waitress to bring the check. “We’d better go,” she added, cutting short any further confidences. “It’s getting late.”
Joanna took the hint. Whatever it was that had happened to Leann Jessup’s relationship, the hurt was still too raw and new to tolerate discussion.
They paid their bill and left the restaurant right afterr that. Riding in Joanna’s county-owned Blazer, they arrived at the capitol mall well after dark and bare minutes before the vigil was scheduled to begin. Folding chairs had been set out on the lawn. A subdued crowd of two or three hundred people, augmented by news reporters, had gathered and were gradually taking their seats. After some searching, Joanna and Leann located a pair of vacant chairs near the far end of the second row.
The organizers from MAVEN had set the makeshift stage with an eye to drama. In the center of the capitol’s portico sat a table draped in black on which burned a single candle. Because of the enveloping darkness, that lone candle seemed to float suspended in space. Next to the table stood a spot-lit lectern with a portable microphone attached.
A woman who introduced herself as Matilda Hirales-Steinowitz, the executive director of MAVEN, spoke first. After introducing herself, she gave a brief overview of the Maricopa Anti-Violence Empowerment Network, a group Joanna had never heard of before reading the newspaper article earlier that morning.
“The people of MAVEN, women and men alike, deplore all violence,” Ms. Hirales-Steinowitz declared, “but we are most concerned with the war against women that is being conducted behind the closed doors of family homes here in the Valley. So far this year sixteen women have died in the Phoenix metropolitan area of murders police consider to be cases of domestic partner violence.