by J. A. Jance
Years earlier, Joanna had been elected to the office of sheriff in the aftermath of her first husband’s death. Andy Brady had been running for the office when he died in a hail of bullets from a drug cartel’s hit man. When Joanna was elected sheriff in her late husband’s stead, members of the local law enforcement old boys’ network had sneered at the outcome, regarding her election as a straight-up sympathy vote, and had expected Joanna to be sheriff in name only. She had surprised the naysayers by transforming herself into a professional police officer. As she developed a reputation for being a good cop, that initial distrust had melted away. She now had a cordial working relationship with most of her fellow police administrators, including Bisbee’s Chief Bernard.
“What’s up?”
“Junior Dowdle’s gone missing from his folks’ house up the canyon. He left his room sometime overnight by climbing out through a bedroom window. His bed hasn’t been slept in. Daisy’s frantic. She and Moe have been up and down the canyon several times looking for him. So far there’s no trace.”
Junior, Moe and Daisy Maxwell’s developmentally disabled foster son, had been found abandoned by his paid caregiver at a local arts fair several years earlier. Once his blood relatives were located, they had declined to take him back. That was when the Maxwells had stepped in. They had gone to court and been appointed his legal guardians. Since then they had cared for Junior as their own, giving him purpose in life by teaching him to work as a combination busboy and greeter in the local diner that bore Daisy’s name.
In recent months, though, Junior’s behavior had become increasingly erratic, both at home and in the restaurant. Only a few weeks earlier the family had been given the dreaded but not-so-surprising diagnosis—not so surprising because the doctor had warned the Maxwells a year earlier about the possibility. Now in his early sixties, Junior was suffering from a form of dementia, most likely Alzheimer’s, an affliction that often preyed on the developmentally disabled. Under most circumstances, a missing person report of an adult wouldn’t have merited an immediate all-out response. Because Junior was considered to be at risk, however, all bets were off.
“He’s on foot then?” Joanna asked.
“Unless some Good Samaritan picked him up and gave him a ride,” Alvin answered.
“Okay,” Joanna said. “I’ll give Terry a call and see what, if anything, he and Spike can do about this.”
Terry Gregovich was the human half of Joanna’s departmental K-9 unit. Spike, a seven-year-old German shepherd, was Terry’s aging canine partner.
“You’re sure Junior left through a window?”
“Daisy told me they’ve been concerned about Junior maybe wandering off, so they’ve gotten into the habit of keeping both the front and back doors to the house dead-bolted. It was warm overnight, so Daisy left the window cracked open when Junior went to bed. Had Daisy Maxwell ever raised a teenage son, she would have known she needed to lock the window as well.”
“That’s how he got out?”
“Yup, it looks like Junior raised the window the rest of the way, pushed open the screen, and climbed out.”
“Do you want me to see if I have any additional patrol officers in the neighborhood who could assist with the search?”
“That would be a huge favor,” Alvin said. “We’ll be using the parking lot of St. Dominick’s as a center of operations. Once the neighbors hear about this, there will be plenty of folks willing to help out. From my point of view, the more boots we have on the ground, the better. It’ll make our lives easier if Terry and Spike can point the search crews in the right direction.”
“I’ll have Dispatch get back to you and let you know if anyone else is available.”
She called Terry first, dragging him out of bed, then she called Dispatch to let Tica Romero, her overnight dispatcher, know what was going on. The City of Bisbee and Cochise County had a standing mutual aid agreement in place, but it was better to have everything officially documented in case something went haywire. Mutual aid in the course of a hot pursuit was one matter. For anything else, Joanna had to be sure all the necessary chain-of-command t’s were crossed and i’s were dotted.
Butch came and went through the bathroom while Joanna was in the shower. Once dried off, she got dressed, donning a neatly pressed everyday khaki uniform and a lightweight pair of lace-up hiking boots. Early on in her career as sheriff, she had worn business-style clothing, most of which couldn’t accommodate the Kevlar vest she wore each day right along with her other officers. Then there was the matter of footwear. After going through countless pairs of pantyhose and wrecked pairs of high heels, she had finally conceded defeat, putting practicality ahead of fashion.
Minutes later, with her bright red hair blown dry and her minimally applied makeup in place, she hurried out to the kitchen, where she found Butch brewing coffee and unloading the dishwasher.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I’m on my way to St. Dominick’s,” she explained. “Junior Dowdle took off sometime overnight. Alvin Bernard is using the parking lot at St. Dom’s as a center of operations, and he’s asked for help from my K-9 unit.”
Joanna knew that her husband maintained a personal interest in Junior’s life and welfare. She and Butch hadn’t been married when Junior first came to Bisbee after being abandoned at the Arts and Crafts Fair in Saint David. Bringing him to Bisbee in her patrol car, Joanna had been stumped about where to take him. Her own home was out. The poor man wasn’t a criminal and he wasn’t ill. That meant that neither the jail nor the hospital were possibilities, either. In the end, she had taken him to Butch’s house in Bisbee’s Saginaw neighborhood, where Junior had stayed for several weeks. A restaurant Butch had owned previously, the Roundhouse in Peoria, Arizona, had once fielded a Special Olympics team, and Butch had been one of the team coaches. He had taken charge of Junior with practiced grace and had kept him until more suitable permanent arrangements could be made with the Maxwells.
“You’re going to join the search?” Butch asked, handing Joanna a cup of coffee.
She nodded.
“All right,” he said. “If they haven’t found Junior by the time I drop the kids off at school, I’ll stop by and help, too. Do you want breakfast before you head out? It won’t take more than a couple of minutes to fry eggs and make toast.”
That was one of the advantages of marrying a man who had started out in life as a short-order cook. Joanna didn’t have to think long before making up her mind. Depending on how her day went, the next opportunity to eat might be hours away. Besides, this was Alvin’s case. She and her people were there as backup only. In addition, Butch’s over-easy eggs were always perfection itself.
“Sounds good,” she said. “Do you want any help?”
“I’m a man on a mission,” Butch told her with a grin. “Sit down, drink your coffee, and stay out of the way.”
Doing as she’d been told, Joanna slipped into the breakfast nook. She’d taken only a single sip of coffee when Dennis, their early-bird three-year-old, wandered into the kitchen dragging along both his favorite blankie and his favorite book—The Cat in the Hat. There wasn’t a person in the household who didn’t know the story by heart, but Joanna pulled him into a cuddle and started reading aloud, letting him turn the pages.
They were halfway through the story when two dogs scrambled into the kitchen—Jenny’s stone-deaf black lab, Lucky, and a relatively new addition to their family, a fourteen-week-old golden retriever puppy named Desi. The puppy carried the tattered remains of one of Jenny’s tennis shoes in his mouth. Both dogs dove for cover under the table of the breakfast nook as an exasperated Jenny, wearing a bathrobe and with her wet hair wrapped in a towel, appeared in the doorway.
“I was only in the shower for five minutes,” she fumed. “That’s all it took for Desi to wreck my shoe.”
“Wait until you have kids of your own,” Butch warned her. “Desi will be over it a lot faster than a baby will. Besides, it could have been wors
e. It’s only a tennis shoe. When Lucky was a pup, he always grabbed one of your boots.”
Leveling a sour look in Butch’s direction, Jenny knelt down by the table. Rather than verbally scolding the miscreant puppy, she glowered at him and gave him two thumbs-down—her improvised sign language equivalent of “bad dog.” Next she motioned toward her body with one hand, which meant “come.” Finally she held out one cupped hand and patted the cupped one with her other hand, the hand signal for “give it to me.”
There was a momentary pause under the table before Desi squirmed out from under his temporary shelter and handed over the mangled shoe. In response, Jenny gave him a single thumb-up for “good dog.” Two thumbs would have meant “very good dog,” and currently, no matter what he did right, Desi didn’t qualify. Once the puppy had been somewhat forgiven, Lucky dared venture out, too. He was rewarded with the two-thumb treatment before Jenny took her damaged shoe in hand and left the room with both dogs on her heels.
Joanna couldn’t help but marvel at how the hand signals Jenny had devised to communicate with Lucky were now making it possible for her to train a service dog as part of a 4-H project. There was the expectation that, at some time in the future, Desi would make a difference in some person’s life by serving as a hearing assistance dog.
“Your breakfast is on the table in five,” Butch called after Jenny as she left the room. “Two eggs scrambled, whole wheat toast. Don’t be late.”
“I’m afraid training that dog is more work than Jenny anticipated,” Joanna commented. “After losing Tigger the way we did, I’m worried about her ability to let Desi go when it’s time for him to move on.” Tigger, their previous dog, a half golden retriever, half pit bull mix, had succumbed within weeks of being diagnosed with Valley Fever, a fungal disorder commonly found in the desert Southwest that often proved fatal to dogs.
“Jenny and I have already discussed that,” Butch said, “but you’re right. Talking about letting go of a dog is one thing. Handing the leash over to someone else is another.”
Joanna nodded in agreement. “We all know that when it comes to horses and dogs, Jennifer Ann Brady has a very soft heart.”
“Better horses and dogs than boys,” Butch observed with a grin. “Way better.”
That was a point on which Joanna and Butch were in complete agreement.
“Speaking of horses, did she already feed them?”
For years the horse population on High Lonesome Ranch had been limited to one—Kiddo, Jenny’s sorrel gelding, who was also her barrel-racing partner. Recently they had added a second horse to the mix, an aging, blind Appaloosa mare that had been found, starving and dehydrated, in the corral of a recently foreclosed ranchette near Arizona Sunsites. The previous owners had simply packed up and left town, abandoning the horse to fend for herself. When a neighbor reported the situation, Joanna had dispatched one of her Animal Control officers to retrieve the animal.
After a round of veterinary treatment at county expense, Butch and Jenny had trailered the mare home to High Lonesome, where she seemed to have settled into what were supposedly temporary digs in the barn and corral, taking cues on her new surroundings from Kiddo while she gained weight and recovered. Dennis, after taking one look at the horse, had promptly dubbed her Spot.
In Joanna’s opinion, Spot was a far better name for a dog than it was for a horse, but Spot she was, and Spot she remained. Currently inquiries were being made to find Spot a permanent home, but Joanna suspected that she had already found one. When Butch teased Joanna by saying she had turned High Lonesome Ranch into an unofficial extension of Cochise County Animal Control, it was more true than not. Most of the dogs that had come through their lives had been rescues, along with any number of cast-off Easter bunnies and Easter chicks. Now, having taken in a hearing impaired dog and a visually impaired horse, they were evidently a haven for stray animals with disabilities as well.
“The horses are fed,” Butch answered. “Jenny and the dogs went out to do that while I was starting the coffee and you were in the shower.”
By the time Jenny and the now more subdued dogs returned to the kitchen, Joanna was ready to head out. After delivering quick good-bye kisses all around, she went to the laundry room to retrieve and don her weapons. For Mother’s Day a few weeks earlier, Butch had installed a thumb recognition gun safe just inside the door. Located below a light switch, it was within easy reach for Joanna’s vertically challenged five-foot-four frame. With her two Glocks safely stowed—one in a holster on her belt and the other, her backup weapon, in a bra-style holster—Sheriff Joanna Brady was ready to face her day.
It generally took the better part of ten minutes for Joanna to drive her county-owned Yukon the three miles of combination dirt and paved roads between High Lonesome Ranch at the base of the Mule Mountains and her office at the Cochise County Justice Center. In this instance she drove straight past her office on Highway 80 and headed into Bisbee proper. St. Dominick’s Church, up the canyon in Old Bisbee, was another four miles beyond that.
The time Joanna spent in her car each day gave her a buffer between her job and her busy home life. On this late-spring day, she spent some of the trip gazing off across the wide expanse of the Sulphur Springs Valley, taking in the scenery—the alternating squares of cultivated fields and tracts of wild desert terrain punctuated with mesquite trees—that stretched from the nearby Mule Mountains to the Chiricahua Mountains in the distance, some thirty miles away. She loved the varying shades of green that springtime brought to the desert, and she loved the very real purple majesty of the mountains rising up in the distance to meet an azure sky. As much as she thought of this corner of the Arizona desert as being hers, it was always humbling to remember, as her history-loving father had loved pointing out to her, that much less than two hundred years ago everything she could see had been the undisputed domain of the Chiricahua Apaches.
Today, however, she didn’t bother admiring the landscape. Her thoughts were focused on Junior Dowdle—a troubled individual with the body of a grown man, the ailments of an old one, and the heart and mind of a child. Knowing that Junior was out in the world somewhere—lost, alone, and unprotected—was heartbreaking, and she uttered a quiet prayer as she drove. “Please help us find him,” she pleaded. “Please let him be okay.”
Driving through the central business district of Old Bisbee on Tombstone Canyon Road, Joanna kept her eyes peeled, watching for anything out of the ordinary on side streets or on the steep scrub-oak-dotted hillsides that loomed above the town. If Junior had wandered outside in the dark, it wouldn’t have taken him long to cross that narrow strip of civilization and find himself lost in a desert wilderness with neither food nor water.
Joanna had just passed Tombstone Canyon Methodist Church when her radio crackled to life.
“Alvin Bernard just called. Terry and Spike have arrived at the Maxwells’ house. They’re working on finding a scent. Everyone else is at St. Dom’s.”
“Okay,” Joanna told Tica. “I’m almost there, too.”
When Joanna arrived at the parking lot for St. Dominick’s Catholic Church, she found Father Matthew Rowan, one of St. Dom’s two resident priests, standing at the gate directing traffic. He pointed Joanna toward a clutch of official-looking vehicles. Tucked in among the collection of patrol cars sat a 1960s-era VW. The chaplain sticker on the VW Bug’s back bumper explained its odd presence among the other official vehicles. The vintage VW belonged to Joanna’s friend and pastor, the Reverend Marianne Maculyea, who in the past month had been certified as a chaplain for the local police and fire departments. It was no surprise to Joanna that, if first responders were on the scene, Marianne would be, too.
Pulling into the open spot next to the VW, Joanna stayed in the car for a moment, taking in the scene. The hustle and bustle might have been part of something as innocuous as a church bazaar. Cars came and went. The center of activity seemed to be a hastily erected eight-by-ten-foot canvas canopy. Some enterprising soul had
used several matching sawhorses and a piece of plywood to create a massive makeshift table on which a six-foot-long paper map of the city had been tacked down. Surrounded by teams of officers and volunteers, Chief Bernard was bent over the map, assigning people to the streets and neighborhoods they were expected to search.
Twenty yards away from Chief Bernard’s command center, a clutch of ladies from several nearby churches were setting up a refreshment buffet complete with a coffee urn, stacks of Styrofoam cups, and a surprising selection of store-bought and homemade baked goods and cookies. A blond teenage boy, someone Joanna didn’t recognize, sprinted past her. Carrying a thermal coffee carafe in one hand, he waved in Joanna’s direction with the other. Looking at her rather than at traffic, he came close to stepping into the path of another arriving vehicle.
“Look out!” Joanna called out, and he jumped back just in time.
Another stranger, a woman Joanna had never seen before, shouted after him, too. “For Pete’s sake, Lucas! Watch what you’re doing! Pay attention.”
Joanna turned to the woman, a harried-looking thirty-something. Her long dirty-blond hair was pulled back in a scraggly ponytail. “He’s yours?” Joanna asked.
When the woman nodded apologetically, a faint whiff of booze and an even stronger scent of cigarette smoke floated in Joanna’s direction.
“My son,” she answered, “fourteen years old and full of piss and vinegar. Once the coffee was ready, he wanted to be the one to take it to Chief Bernard.” Then, glimpsing the badge and name tag on Joanna’s uniform, the woman’s eyes widened in recognition.“You’re Sheriff Brady?”
Joanna nodded.
“I’m Rebecca Nolan. Lucas is my son. My daughter, Ruth, Lucas’s twin sister, is over there.”
The woman nodded toward the refreshment table. Following Rebecca’s gaze, Joanna caught sight of a teenage girl who, with her mouth pursed in concentration, was laying out straight lines of treats in a carefully designed fashion. Rebecca had said the girl was Lucas’s twin. True, they were about the same size—fair skinned and blue eyed—with features that were almost mirror images. They were also dressed in matching bright blue track suits. When it came to hair, though, the two kids weren’t on the same page. Lucas’s dark blond hair resembled his mother’s. Ruth’s, on the other hand, was mostly dyed deep purple, with a few natural blond strands showing through here and there. A glance at the girl’s purple locks was enough to make Joanna grateful that her own daughter’s hair didn’t look like it came from a box of crayons.