Exit Wounds (2 page)

One

L ate on Tuesday afternoon, Sheriff Joanna Brady sat at her desk, stared at the pages of her calendar, and knew that Butch Dixon, her husband, was absolutely right. She was overbooked. When he had mentioned it at breakfast that morning, she had done the only reasonable thing and denied it completely.

Coffeepot in hand, Butch had stood looking at the week’s worth of calendar he had finally convinced Joanna to copy and tape to the refrigerator door in a vain attempt at keeping track of her comings and goings.

“Two parades on Friday?” he had demanded, studying the two pages of copied calendar entries she had just finished posting. “According to this, the parades are followed by appearances at two community picnics.” Butch shook his head. “And you still think you’ll be at the fairgrounds in time for Jenny’s barrel-racing event, which will probably start right around four? You’re nuts, Joey,” he concluded after a pause. “Totally round the bend. Or else you’ve picked up a clone without telling me about it.”

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “I’ll be fine.”

Butch had poured coffee and said nothing more. Now, though, late in the afternoon and after putting in a full day’s work, Joanna studied her marathon schedule and worried that maybe Butch was right. How would she cover all those bases?

The Fourth of July had always been one of Joanna’s favorite holidays. She loved going to the parade, hosting or attending a backyard barbecue, and then ending the evening in town watching Bisbee’s community fireworks display.

But this wasn’t a typical Fourth of July. This was an election year, and Joanna Brady was an active-duty sheriff trying to do her job in the midst of a stiffly contested reelection campaign. Rather than watching a single parade, she was scheduled to participate in two of them—driving her Crown Victoria in Bisbee’s parade starting at eleven and in Sierra Vista’s, twenty-five miles away, starting at twelve-thirty. She was also slated to appear briefly at two community picnics that day—in Benson and St. David. The day would end with her making a few introductory remarks prior to the annual fireworks display eighty miles from home in Willcox. Stuffed in among all her official duties, she needed to be at the Cochise County fairgrounds outside of Douglas at the stroke of four o’clock.

After years of practicing around a set of barrels positioned around the corral at High Lonesome Ranch, Jennifer Ann Brady had declared that she and her sorrel quarter horse, Kiddo, were ready for their public barrel-racing debut. That Fourth of July would mark Jenny’s first-ever competition on the junior rodeo circuit. Joanna’s showing up for the barrel-race rodeo had nothing at all to do with politics and everything to do with motherhood.

Be there or be square
, Joanna told herself grimly.

Looking away from her calendar, Joanna walked across to the dorm-sized refrigerator Butch had brought back from Costco in Tucson and installed in her office. She retrieved a bottle of water. Taking a thoughtful drink, she stared out the window at the parched hills surrounding the Cochise County Justice Center. The thermometer perched in the shade under the roof of a covered parking stall just outside her office door still hovered around 103 degrees. Summertime temperatures in and around Bisbee seldom exceeded the low nineties, so having the temperature still that hot so late in the afternoon was bound to be a record breaker.

Inside Joanna’s office, things weren’t much better. The thermostats at all county-owned facilities were now set at a budget/ energy-conscious 80 degrees—too warm to think or concentrate. She had a fan in her office, too, but she hated to use it because it tended to blow loose papers all over her desk—and there were always loose papers.

The radio, playing softly behind her desk, switched from music to bottom-of-the-hour news where the weather was a big concern. All of Arizona found itself in the grip of a severe drought and what was, even for July, a fierce heat wave. The radio reporter announced that flights in and out of Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport had been grounded due to concerns that the heat-softened runways might be damaged by planes landing and taking off in the record-breaking 126-degree temperatures. The announcer’s running gag about its being a dry heat didn’t help Joanna’s frame of mind. Bisbee, situated two hundred miles southeast of Phoenix, was a couple of thousand feet higher than Phoenix and more than twenty degrees cooler, but that didn’t help, either. Deciding to ignore the weather, Joanna switched off the radio and returned to studying her calendar and its self-inflicted difficulties.

Months earlier, one of her least favorite deputies, Kenneth W. Galloway, had officially announced his intention to run against her. Bankrolled by a wife with a booming real estate business in Sierra Vista, Ken, Jr., had resigned from Joanna’s department within weeks of announcing his candidacy. Minus the burden of a regular job, Galloway had been on the stump ever since. He spent every day on the campaign trail, crisscrossing the county with door-belling efforts and public appearances.

And that was where he had Joanna at a disadvantage. With a department to run, she couldn’t afford to doorbell all day long. She had done her share of rubber-chicken banquets and pancake-breakfast speeches for local civic organizations, but she’d had to squeeze them in around her regular duties. Which was why she had said yes to appearing at all those various Fourth of July events. She’d be able to cross paths and shake hands with far more people at those holiday get-togethers than she would have been able to see under ordinary circumstances. But now, at the end of a long day, the prospect of keeping multiple far-flung commitments seemed nothing less than daunting. She wished she had said no more times than she had said yes.

The phone rang. Thinking Kristin would answer it, Joanna let it ring several times before she realized it was a quarter to six. Her secretary, Kristin Gregovich—a young working mother with both an eight-month-old baby girl and a baby-sitter waiting at home—punched out each afternoon at the stroke of five. Sighing, Joanna picked up the phone.

“Hi, Joey,” Butch Dixon said. “How’s it going?”

Just hearing her husband’s cheerful greeting lifted Joanna’s sagging spirits. “My head aches and my feet hurt,” she told him. “Other than that, I’m fine.”

“So it’s off to Sierra Vista?” he asked.

“That’s right,” she said, reading from the calendar notation. “Seven P.M., Karen Oldsby,
Sierra Vista Tribune
. Interview.”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic about it,” Butch said.

“I’m not,” Joanna agreed. “It’s so hot in this office I could scream.”

“Couldn’t you do the interview by phone?”

“Ms. Oldsby prefers doing interviews in person, but while I’m driving out there I’ll turn the air-conditioning on full blast. That way, by the time I get there, I’ll have had a chance to cool off. Maybe I’ll feel better.”

“Do you want me to hold dinner for you?” he asked.

Other husbands might have suggested Joanna cancel the interview and come straight home. She appreciated the fact that Butch did no such thing. He understood as well as she did that politicking had to be done during off-duty hours, during what should have been considered family time. It was clear to her that it was Butch’s backstopping of her—his being at home, doing chores, cooking meals, and looking after Jenny—that made Joanna’s run for office possible. It had also given her a new understanding of and respect for her mother, Eleanor Lathrop Winfield, who, years earlier, had supplied the same kind of priceless but unpaid behind-the-scenes labor for Joanna’s deceased father, D. H. Lathrop, when he had run for and won the same office Joanna now held. However, Joanna’s newfound respect for her mother didn’t make the woman any less annoying.

“Joey?” Butch asked. “Are you still there?”

“Yes,” she said quickly, embarrassed to have been caught woolgathering. “I’m here.”

“You never answered me about dinner.”

“Sorry. No, don’t bother keeping anything warm. If I’m hungry, I’ll grab something on my way to Sierra Vista. Otherwise, I’ll dig through the fridge when I get home.”

“Or have a bowl of Malt-o-Meal,” Butch said, making no effort to mask his disapproval. For years Butch Dixon had run a Phoenix-area restaurant—the Roundhouse Bar and Grill in downtown Peoria. He had hired cooks, but he was also a respectable short-order cook in his own right. Joanna’s propensity for coming home late and having a bowl of cereal or cocoa and toast for a supper drove him nuts.

“Drive carefully,” he said. “See you when you get here.”

“I will,” she said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

In the aftermath of the Twin Towers tragedy, where so many police and fire officers had died, those were words they exchanged without fail every single day. They said the words, and they meant them.

Joanna put down the phone and then scrounged around under her desk for the pair of low heels she had kicked off in the course of the afternoon. Her feet squawked in protest as she tried to slip the shoes back on. Was it possible her feet had grown a full size in a matter of hours? Shaking her head, Joanna limped over to the mirror on the back of the door and did a quick hair and makeup check. Her short red hair would need to be cut soon, and there were deep shadows under her bright green eyes.

I’m a mess
, she thought grimly.
And, with my luck, they’ll probably want a photo
. After all, the possibility of having her picture taken for the paper was the reason she had chosen to wear a skirt and blazer that morning rather than her uniform. She had wanted to look businesslike and not too official. But that was also
before
she had put in a full day and then some in her anything but cool office at the Cochise County Justice Center.

Joanna had picked up her purse and was on her way to the door when her phone rang again. She hurried back to her desk to answer. “Sheriff Brady.”

“Oh, good,” dispatcher Tica Romero said. “You’re still there. I was afraid you’d already left the office.”

“Why?” Joanna said. “What’s up?”

“Manny Ruiz is on the line,” Tica said. “He’s out near the San Pedro and needs assistance. I’m sending him some backup, but I thought you’d want to talk to—”

“Put him through,” Joanna said.

Early in the year, the head of Cochise County Animal Control had left the county to take a better-paying job elsewhere. Struggling to come to terms with an out-of-balance budget, the board of supervisors had decided against replacing her. Instead, they had folded the Cochise County Animal Control unit into Joanna’s department. Now, in addition to her law enforcement duties, Sheriff Brady was responsible for running the local pound as well. Fortunately, the core members of the Animal Control unit had stayed on when their supervisor left. Joanna may have been less than thrilled with her additional responsibilities, but at least she was supervising a group of people who knew what they were doing.

“What is it, Manny?” she asked when Animal Control Officer Ruiz came on the line.

“Sorry to bother you, Sheriff Brady,” Ruiz said. “I’m out off the Charleston Road. You know, where Graveyard Gulch runs into the San Pedro? I came out to check on that hoarder, Carol Mossman. You remember her, don’t you? The one with all those dogs? I gave her a citation two weeks ago. But they’re dead, Sheriff Brady. All dead.”

Manuel Ruiz was usually a very slow talker, known for a ponderous delivery that tended to hold back far more information than it passed along. This time his words tumbled over themselves in a rush.

Joanna did indeed remember Carol Mossman. In the last six months, thirty-seven rabid skunks and three rabid coyotes had been found inside the boundaries of Cochise and Santa Cruz counties. As a result a rabies quarantine was now in effect in those two adjoining southern Arizona jurisdictions. Carol Mossman had come to the attention of Animal Control due to complaints that her loose dogs had been chasing some of her neighbor’s horses.

Two weeks earlier, Manny Ruiz had driven out to the Mossman place expecting to find one or two unlicensed and unvaccinated dogs. Instead he had discovered a total of eighteen, most of them confined to a dog-crate-lined straw-bale shed out behind a run-down mobile home. The crates had been shaded by a makeshift roof constructed of discarded lumber and delaminating cast-off doors. When Carol Mossman had been unable to produce valid vaccination records for any of her animals, Officer Ruiz had issued a citation. Yesterday had marked the end of her two-week compliance period. Today he had returned to see if the animals had now been properly licensed.

“The dogs are all dead?” Joanna asked, trying to clarify what Manny Ruiz had said. “Are you telling me she chose euthanasia over licensing?”

“I don’t think she chose anything,” Manny replied. “I think she’s inside the trailer along with all her dogs. I looked in through one of the living room windows. There are dead dogs everywhere and no sign of movement. The door’s locked from the inside, and there’s a bunch of waist-high bullet holes punched through the back door. In the living room I can see a foot, sticking out from behind the couch, but I can’t tell if whoever’s there is alive or not. Should I break in to check on her, or what?”

Joanna closed her eyes. If Carol Mossman was already dead, then it was important not to disturb the crime scene. If, however, there was the smallest chance the woman was still alive, saving an injured woman’s life automatically took precedence over preserving evidence.

“Is there another door?” Joanna asked.

“Yeah, the front door. I already checked. It’s locked, too.”

“Open it if you can,” Joanna said. “Break it down if you have to. If Carol Mossman’s still alive, call for an ambulance. If she’s dead, don’t touch anything.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Manny Ruiz said.

“Call right back and let me know what you find out,” Joanna added. “I’ll wait here until I hear from you.”

As soon as she ended the call, Joanna dredged her calendar out of her purse. She had been scheduled to meet Karen Oldsby at the
Tribune
office on Fry Boulevard at 7 P.M. Whether or not Carol Mossman was dead, what had happened at her mobile home constituted a more compelling demand on Sheriff Joanna Brady’s time than a newspaper interview.