Exit Wounds jb-11
Page 33
“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 363
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 since 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
364
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 Ramon Alvarez Sandoval. Confronting the driver of the SUV with his crucifix and forcing him to look at his actions through 365
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.”
366
367
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 Final 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.
368 AUTHOR NOTE
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 undernourished, 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.
369
370 USA $24.95 CANADA $38.95
The incomparable A. Jance returns with a powerful tale that explores the darkest corners of human nature, revealing the grievous injuries inflicted behind locked doors, the unseen wounds that bleed and destroy and never heal. …
The heat is a killer in Cochise County, Arizona, with temperatures over 100 degrees.
In the suffocating stillness of an airless trailer, a woman is lying dead, a bullet hole in her chest. Why someone would murder a harmless loner with a soft spot for stray dogs is only one of the questions nagging at the local police; another is why the killer used an eighty-five-year-old bullet, fired from the same weapon that slaughtered two other women who were discovered bound, naked, and gruesomely posed on the remote edge of a rancher’s land.
The slayings are as oppressive as the blistering heat for Sheriff Joanna Brady, who must shoulder the added double burden of a brutal reelection campaign and major developments on the home front. With suddenly more on her plate than many big-city law officers have to contend with, Joanna must put marital distractions and an opponent’s dirty tricks in the background and deal with the terrifying reality that now threatens everyone in her jurisdiction: a serial killer in their midst.
A twisted and lethal drama is unfolding in this small corner of the southwestern desert as fear, hatred, and the evil at the core of one family’s history come to a rapid boil beneath a merciless Arizona sun. Pressure mounts for Sheriff Brady personally and professionally while she pursues a sadistic murderer into the shadows of the past to get to the roots of a monstrous obsession … and expose the perma
nent wounds of a crime far worse than homicide.
New York Times bestselling author J. A. JANCE was born in South Dakota, brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, and now lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.
Jacket design by Richard . Aquan
Jacket photograph Šby Daryl Benson/Masterfile
Author photograph by Jerry Bauer
Available from HarperAudio, HarperLargePrint, and as an e-book from PerfectBound WILLIAM MORROW
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Www.harpercollins.com
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