A
sharp rap next to his ear awakened Bradley Evans out of a troubled
sleep and plunged him headlong into the worst hangover of his life.
Or maybe it was a pre-hangover. Even before he managed to open his
eyes, the world began spinning. He felt sick. He was so parched his
tongue and lips seemed ready to splinter into pieces. Every bone in
his body ached, and he was cold as hell.

The second sharp rap was accompanied by an
authoritative voice. “Unlock the door, son. Then place both
hands on your head and step out of the truck.”

Bradley groaned.
Step out of
the truck?
he wondered.
What truck?
What the hell am I doing in a truck?

“I’m warning you,” the voice said
again. “Unlock the door, hands on your head, and step out of
the vehicle!”

Less than six months out of the army, Bradley was
still accustomed to following orders from someone in authority, so
he did his best to comply, but when he finally managed to open his
eyes all he saw was blood—clots of blood
everywhere: on the windshield, the dashboard, the rearview mirror.
And on him, too—smeared on his hands, shirt, pants, and
shoes. Somehow he managed to unlock the door, but he was incapable
of stepping out of the vehicle on his own. Instead, he leaned out
of the truck and retched onto the pavement, splashing bright yellow
bile that still reeked of beer onto the deputy’s highly
shined pair of boots.

Suspended over the mess, Bradley tried to grasp
what had happened. He remembered going to the bar and playing a
couple of games of pool, but that was it. After he’d been
given a DWI a year ago, he had promised Lisa that if he ever again
had too much to drink, he’d call her to come get him, no
matter what. Obviously he hadn’t done that last night.
Instead, he had wrecked his truck and now this huge cop was about
to haul his ass off to jail. When Lisa found out, she’d kill
him—or leave him.

Finally, he tried to straighten up. “Anybody
else hurt?” he managed.

“You tell me,” the cop returned.
“Are you finished? Come on out now. Stand up. Hands behind
your back.”

Off in the distance, Bradley heard the siren of a
second arriving cop car, but he had no intention of giving even
this lone officer any trouble. He stumbled to his feet and then
stood weaving unsteadily while the cop snapped a pair of metal
cuffs onto his wrists. When he was able to look back at his old
GMC, he was astonished to see that the pickup showed no visible
damage.

Must be on the other
side,
he thought.
Maybe I veered off
the road and sideswiped a telephone pole or a fence
post
.

The problem with that line of thinking was that he
didn’t seem to be hurt, certainly not injured enough to
explain that awful amount of blood.

“Who was with you?” the cop was asking.
“Who else was in the vehicle?”

“I don’t know,” Bradley mumbled.
“I don’t remember. I thought I was alone.”

He looked at the cop for reassurance. He was a
balding, middle-aged, slightly portly man in a spotless stiffly
starched khaki uniform and with a very large pistol strapped to a
holster on his hip. The name tag over his shirt pocket identified
him as Deputy Lathrop—Deputy D. H. Lathrop.

“I’d have to say you’re mistaken
about that,” Deputy Lathrop returned with what Bradley
recognized as a trace of an East Texas drawl. “And whoever
was with you is hurt real bad or else he’s dead.”

Leaving Bradley standing alone, cuffed, and
struggling to maintain his balance, the deputy returned to the
pickup. Reaching in through the open driver’s-side door, he
brought something out. When he held it up, Bradley could only stare
in stricken silence. It was Lisa’s purse, the fringed dark
leather one he had bought from a booth at the Cochise County Fair.
He had given it to her on the spot even though her birthday was
still weeks away.

“What’s this?” Lathrop asked.

For a moment Bradley was too stunned to reply.
What’s Lisa’s purse doing
here?
he wondered.
She wasn’t
with me at the bar, or was she?

The deputy reached into the purse and pulled out a
wallet—Lisa’s wallet. As he opened it, Bradley
dissolved into tears, muttering, “Oh, God, what’s
happened? What have I done?”

CHAPTER 1

K
en
Galloway sauntered up to the lectern and wrenched the neck of the
microphone to its full height. Then, smiling, he gazed out at the
“Candidate’s Night” audience assembled in the
spacious meeting room of the Sierra Vista Public Library.

“First off,” he said with an engaging
grin, “let me say that I’m in favor of motherhood and
apple pie. After all, if it weren’t for my mother, where
would I be?”

The anticipated ripple of polite laughter drifted
through the crowd. This was Ken’s favorite way of opening his
stump speeches. It always served him well in getting things off to
a good start. Beginning with a familiar joke was a way of putting
his whole political agenda front and center.

Seated off to Ken Galloway’s right, Sheriff
Joanna Brady steeled herself for what she knew would come next. She
folded her hands in her lap, plastered a faint and entirely fake
smile on her face, and willed her ears not to turn red. This far
into the
campaign she should have been used to
her opponent’s constant references to what he described as
her “delicate condition.” Joanna should have been
accustomed to it, but she wasn’t. The subject still rankled
her every time Ken Jr. brought it up. She resented his constantly
drawing attention to her growing belly and casually discussing her
pregnancy again and again as though she were nothing more than an
obliging live-action mannequin in some high school sex-ed
classroom.

“The point is,” Ken continued,
“when my brothers and I were little, our mother stayed home
and took care of us.”

Yes,
Joanna thought,
because your father took off and left Lillyan
Galloway penniless. She ended up living on welfare and raising her
kids on Aid to Dependent Children.
But Ken Galloway never
mentioned that part of his wonderfully idealized family history,
and neither did Joanna.

“Call me old-fashioned,” Ken went on,
“but I think there’s a lot to be said for mothers being
at home with their kids. Cochise County is a big place. There have
been times in the last four years when Sheriff Brady hasn’t
been as responsive to her duties as she might have been due to the
very real conflict of having a child at home. How much more
difficult will it be for her to attend to law enforcement needs
when she has two children to contend with, including a newborn
baby?”

In the back of the room a woman, applauding
furiously, rose to her feet. “That’s right, Ken! Way to
go!” Eleanor Lathrop Winfield shouted. “You tell
her.”

Joanna’s mother’s enthusiastic outburst
was enough to propel Joanna out of her dream. She awakened panting
and sweating, but the dream stayed with her for several long
minutes. Although those were likely Eleanor’s true feelings,
to Joanna’s personal knowledge her mother had never made any
such
statement—at least not in
public—not during the campaign or after it.

The election itself was now a full three months in
the past. Joanna had managed to eke out a narrow 587-vote victory,
so she should have been over the campaign nightmares, but she
wasn’t. Night after night, in some variation of that same
dream, she was perpetually running for office, and night after
night her mother’s continuing disapproval was always with
her.

She reached out, longing to cuddle up to
Butch’s comforting presence, but he wasn’t there. He
had left early the previous afternoon for El Paso and a weekend
mystery conference, where he would be on what his editor called the
“limbo” panel—made up of first-time writers whose
books were sold but not yet published. Butch’s first novel,
Serve and Protect,
wasn’t due out
until September, but his editor, Carole Ann Hudson, had engineered
his being placed on a panel at the conference so he could
“start getting his name out there.”

“I’m not going to go running off to El
Paso for three days when the baby’s due in less than a
week,” Butch had declared.

“Due dates aren’t exactly chiseled in
granite,” Joanna had responded. “Look at Jenny. She was
ten days late, and I was in labor for the better part of eight
hours before she was born. Think about it. El Paso is only five
hours away, especially the way you drive. If I called you right
away, you’d be here in plenty of time. Besides, Carole Ann
must have gone to a lot of trouble to make this happen, including
having bound galleys available. You need to be there.”

But now, with the nightmare still lingering and her
back hurting like crazy, Joanna wished she hadn’t insisted
Butch go. What she would have liked more than anything right then
was one of his special back rubs. And although massages helped,
Joanna was
tired of having a sore back. Tired of
not being able to sleep on her stomach. Tired as hell of being
pregnant. And, as if to add its own two cents’ worth, the
baby stirred suddenly inside her and began hammering away at her
ribs.

“All right, all right,” she grumbled.
“Since we’re both wide awake, I could just as well get
up.”

Pulling on a wool robe that no longer connected
around her middle, Joanna waddled out into the kitchen and started
heating water. The bouts of morning sickness that had plagued the
beginning of her pregnancy no longer existed, but her aversion to
the taste of coffee lingered. Tea, not coffee, was now her drink of
choice.

Joanna stood at the back door while Lady, the
loving Australian shepherd she had rescued the previous summer,
went outside to investigate the news of the day. In the crisp chill
of early morning, Joanna savored the gentle warmth of the heated
floor on her bare feet. Radiant heat in the floor was one of the
things Butch had built into their rammed-earth house. At the time
he suggested it, Joanna had thought it a peculiar thing to be
worrying about heating a house in the Arizona desert. In the past
few months, though, when her feet had been swollen after a long day
at work, it had been wonderful to kick off her shoes and walk
barefoot on the warmed floor. The dogs seemed to like radiant heat
every bit as much as she did.

Once her tea was ready, Joanna repaired to her cozy
home office, opened her briefcase, and removed her laptop. In the
months before and after the election, she and Butch, along with her
chief deputy, Frank Montoya, had strategized on how best to handle
the complications of juggling being both sheriff and a new
mother—the very question Ken Galloway had harped on
throughout the campaign.

Under departmental guidelines, Joanna could have
taken up to six weeks of paid maternity leave, but that
didn’t seem like a reasonable way to run her department.
Barring some kind of unforeseen complication, she had settled on
the idea of taking only two weeks of maternity leave. Beyond that,
she’d do as much of her paperwork from home as possible. In a
world of telecommuting, that wasn’t such an outlandish idea.
Between them, Butch and Frank had installed a high-speed Internet
connection at High Lonesome Ranch and created a teleconferencing
network that would allow Joanna to participate in morning briefings
without her having to be at the Cochise County Justice Center in
person.

“As long as you cooperate,” she said,
patting the lump of her belly where the as-yet-unnamed baby was
still kicking away. Months earlier she had brought home the
ultrasound report her doctor had given her that would have revealed
whether the baby was a boy or a girl.

Butch had taken the envelope from her fingers and
stuck it on the fridge with a heavy-duty magnet. “I’m
an old-fashioned kind of guy,” he told her. “When we
unwrap the baby will be time enough to know what it is.” And
there the unopened envelope remained to this day—much to
Joanna’s mother’s dismay and despite her many
remonstrances to the contrary.

For the next hour or so, Joanna answered e-mail.
Yes, she would be honored to be the commencement speaker for Bisbee
High School’s graduation. No, she would be unable to
participate in the Girl Scout Cookie-Selling Kickoff Breakfast in
two weeks. No, she would not be able to speak to the Kiwanis Key
Club meeting on March first. Yes, she would come to the May 2
Career Day assembly at St. David High School. Baby or no baby,
Joanna could see that her calendar was already filling up for the
months ahead, even without a reelection campaign to worry
about.

The next e-mail was an announcement that the annual
sheriffs’ convention would be held in June. What about that?
Some of her fellow lady sheriffs (there were now approximately
thirty of them nationwide) would be having their first-ever meeting
of the newly formed LSA (Lady Sheriffs Association) at the
convention. Joanna was eager to meet some of the women who did the
same job and faced the same struggles she did. In fact, she now
corresponded regularly with someone she had never met in
person—the female sheriff of a tiny department in San Juan
County, Colorado. Much as she wanted to be in attendance, Joanna
knew that a final decision on that needed to be discussed with
Butch. She saved that e-mail as new.

At six, as Joanna began scanning on-line news
articles and with the sun just coming up, Lucky, a gangly black Lab
pup, trotted into Joanna’s office, proudly carrying one of
Jenny’s socks. At sixty-plus pounds and less than a year old,
Lucky’s oversize paws indicated that he still had some
growing to do. The dog had been born deaf, but he was smart, and
Jenny’s patient training was paying big dividends. When
Joanna signaled for him to sit and to drop the sock, he immediately
complied. After checking to see that the sock was still in one
piece, Joanna rewarded the dog with one of the dog treats she kept
in her top drawer.

“Mom,” Jenny said from the doorway.
“Since Butch isn’t here, can I fix a pot of
coffee?”

“May I,” Joanna corrected. “And
no. You’re too young for coffee.”

“Butch lets me have coffee,” Jenny
countered.

“He does?”

“Sometimes.”

There was a lot that went on between Jenny and
Butch that Joanna wasn’t necessarily consulted on or even
knew about.
Blond and blue-eyed, Jenny was a
willowy teenager who was already a good two inches taller than her
mother. She was a responsible kid who got good grades and did more
than her fair share of chores around the ranch.

“All right,” Joanna relented. “Go
ahead.”

As Jenny left for the kitchen, their third dog, an
improbably ugly half pit bull/half golden retriever named Tigger,
joined the others and padded along after her. Just then the phone
rang. “I didn’t know you let Jenny have coffee in the
morning,” she told Butch once she knew who it was.

“It won’t kill her,” he returned.
“I started drinking coffee when I was eight. It didn’t
stunt my growth. Well, on second thought, maybe it did. Maybe
I’d be a few inches taller if I hadn’t started drinking
java so early, but still. One cup isn’t going to hurt her.
Besides, wouldn’t you rather have her drinking it at home
with us instead of hanging out with her friends at the local
Starbucks?”

“There is no local Starbucks,” Joanna
pointed out.

“Oh, that’s right,” Butch said.
“I forgot.”

Joanna couldn’t help laughing. “So
how’s the conference?” she asked.

“Weird. Turns out Hawthorn put a bound galley
of
Serve and Protect
in the goody bags
they hand out to each of the conference attendees. I had dinner
with Carole Ann last night. According to her, handing out bound
galleys like that is good. It shows the publisher is putting some
horses behind this book—and that’s not all that common
for a first-time author.”

“It’s a good book,” Joanna said.
“But what makes the conference weird?”

“For one thing, it means that people see my
name badge and then they want me to sign their books, so I’m
already signing au
tographs even though my book
isn’t actually published yet. One of my fellow
newbies—a lady named Christina Hanson—is on the same
panel I am. Her book is due out in June. At the pre-conference
cocktail party she made it abundantly clear that she’s more
than a little annoyed that I have bound galleys here and she
doesn’t. I’m worried that later on today when we do the
panel, the sparks will fly.”

“Are you saying even mystery writing is
political?” Joanna asked.

Butch laughed. “Evidently. Now, how are
you?”

“Woke up early with my usual backache. And
the baby’s a busy little bee today. I’ve been doing
paperwork, but it’s about time to shower and go in to
work.”

“You don’t have to work until the last
minute,” Butch said.

“I
want
to
work,” Joanna said. “If I stayed home, I’d sit
around and worry. Besides, Marianne and I are supposed to have
lunch at Daisy’s today. If I don’t go to work, I
won’t have an excuse to go out to lunch.”

Marianne Maculyea, the Reverend Marianne Maculyea,
had been Joanna’s best friend since junior high. She was also
the pastor of Tombstone Canyon United Methodist Church, where
Joanna and Butch were members.

“Wish I could join you,” Butch said.
“I don’t think lunch here will be that much
fun.”

Joanna’s call-waiting buzzed in her ear.
Caller ID told her it was Dispatch. “Got to go,” Joanna
said. “I’ve got another call. Have fun. I love
you.”

“Good morning, Sheriff Brady,” Tica
Romero said. “I hope it’s not too early to
call.”

“It’s not,” Joanna said.
“I’ve been up working for a while. What’s going
on?”

“We’ve got a homicide,” Tica
responded. “Halfway between Bisbee Junction and Paul’s
Spur.”

Joanna’s initial election to office had been
in the immediate aftermath of her first husband’s murder.
Andy had been running for sheriff at the time, and Joanna’s
subsequent election had been regarded more as a gesture of
community sympathy than anything else. Once in office, however, she
had been determined to function as a real sheriff rather than
sheriff in name only. Through the years she had done her best to
show up on the scene of every homicide that happened within her
jurisdiction. Now was no time to stop.

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