Exit Wounds (40 page)

“What’s up?” she asked as she slipped onto the bench seat.

“What makes you think something’s up?” Butch returned.

“Your face, for one thing. You’d never make it playing poker.”

“Drew called,” Butch said, bubbling over. “Carole Anne Wilson is making me an offer. She wants
Serve and Protect
to be the first title in her new Hawthorn Press Mystery imprint. Can you believe it, Joey? It’s not that much money, but it’s a start.”

He leaned across the table and kissed her full on the lips. A few nearby diners looked askance.

“Yeah,” Daisy Maxwell added as she walked by, carrying a tray laden with glasses of iced tea. “You keep that up, Butch Dixon, and you’ll make all the other women in here jealous.”

But Butch’s infectiously happy mood was catching.

“I can’t believe it, Butch. This is wonderful!”

“You can’t believe it,” Butch returned. “Just wait until I tell my mother. She always told me I’d never amount to anything. When she finds out I’m going to be published, she’ll be amazed.”

“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 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 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 Ramón Alvarez Sandoval. Confronting the driver of the SUV with his crucifix and forcing him to look at his actions through 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.”

Author’s Note

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 Pinal 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.

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 under-nourished, 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.

Author’s Note

Ideas for books come from strange places.
Partner in Crime
had its origins in reading an article on the dangers of sodium azide I discovered in my University of Arizona alumni magazine. From that article and from subsequent research, I’ve come to believe that the widespread availability of this hazardous and so-far uncontrolled substance poses a real threat to the safety of far too many people.

When used as intended to inflate air bags in automobiles, the substance is transformed into a harmless nitrogen-based gas. Originally, the idea was that the unused air bags and canisters would be removed from wrecked vehicles and recycled, but in the real world, that’s not happening. No one wants to risk his own life or the lives of his family members to somebody else’s cast-off air bag. As a result, tons of unused and unsecured containers of this deadly, poisonous, and easily water-soluble compound are readily available. They lie, unguarded and unsecured, in junked cars and on junkyard shelves all over the country. And that’s what worries me.

I completed writing this book prior to September 11, 2001, when the world suddenly became a vastly different and more dangerous place. I’m hoping that somewhere there’s a courageous lawmaker who’ll be willing to take on the automotive industry and introduce legislation requiring that all air bags in vehicles must be deployed and the sodium azide rendered harmless at the time the vehicle is scrapped.

A Statement by Joanna Brady

My name is Joanna Brady. Joanna Lee Lathrop Brady. A few years ago I was elected sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona. I’m a widow who never expected or wanted to be drawn into law enforcement. I was working for an insurance company and trying to be a good wife and mother when Andy, my husband and a deputy sheriff, was killed by a drug dealer. Originally, Andy’s death was mislabeled as a suicide. First I had to convince the authorities that it was really a homicide. After I managed to apprehend the killer almost single-handedly, I was asked to run for sheriff myself.

Cochise County, in southeastern Arizona, is eighty miles wide by eighty miles long. That means my department is responsible for six thousand square miles of territory filled with cattle ranches, mines, ghost towns, hordes of undocumented aliens, and even a genuine city — Sierra Vista. My department is spread far too thin to have any permanent partnership kinds of arrangements. Sometimes I’m thrown in with one or the other of my two chief deputies – homicide detectives, Ernie Carpenter or Jaime Carbajal. Chasing crooks with those guys is as new for me as having a female boss is for them, but to give credit where it’s due, we’re all making it happen.

Since I spend most of my work hours in a world of men, I find myself looking to the women in my life to provide balance. My best friend is also my pastor at Canyon United Methodist Church. No matter what’s going on in her own life, Marianne Maculyea, has always been there for me, and I try to do the same for her. I’ve also come to appreciate one of my newer and more unlikely friends, Angie Kellogg. Angie is an ex-L.A. hooker who ended up in Bisbee while trying to escape the clutches of a former boyfriend who turned out to be my husband’s killer. I helped Angie, and she helped me. We’ve been friends ever since. Another valued personal resource is Eva Lou Brady. Officially, Eva Lou is my former mother-in-law. Unofficially, she’s more of a real mother to me than my own mother is. She’s someone I can go to any time of the night or day with any kind of problem. I wish I could say the same for Eleanor Lathrop Winfield.

I was born and raised in Bisbee and have never lived anywhere else. High Lonesome Ranch, the place where my daughter and I live, is a few miles outside the Bisbee city limits and has been in the Brady family for three generations. My father, D.H. Lathrop, died when I was in high school. Dad started out as a lowly miner in Bisbee’s copper mines. Later he went into law enforcement and eventually was elected sheriff. That’s what he was doing when he was killed in a tragic Sunday afternoon drunk-driving traffic incident.

If I had to have a single role model in life, my father would be it. When D.H. was alive, I guess I always favored him over my mother — he was a lot easier to get along with. And that’s still true today. Dad didn’t live long enough to drive me crazy the way Mom does. Maybe it’s easier to gloss over his faults since I don’t have to look at them every day. What is it they say about distance making the heart grow fonder? Or does it have more to do with familiarity breeding contempt? I don’t know which is more applicable.

Pet peeves? Other than my mother, I can’t really think of any. I always thought I understood Eleanor Lathrop — thought I knew her like a book. Unfortunately, in the last few years, she’s proved me wrong time and again. First my long-lost brother showed up, and it turns out he was so long lost that I didn’t even know he existed. He was born before my parents tied the knot and was adopted out as an infant. Neither of my parents ever mentioned him to me, and that’s something I’m having a tough time forgiving. Then, as if that weren’t enough, after years of being a widow, my mother recently dived back into the sea of holy matrimony – without bothering to give me a single word of advance warning. Is it any wonder Eleanor’s my pet peeve?

Don’t ask me about hobbies. I don’t have any. Between working full time and raising my daughter (Jenny’s twelve going on twenty-one!) I don’t have time. Of course Jenny has hobbies – a pair of dogs named Tigger and Sadie, as well as a horse named Kiddo. Jenny expects to take Kiddo off on the barrel racing circuit one of these days. Inevitably, looking after the menagerie has become as much of a hobby of mine as it is Jenny’s. Still, I’m not complaining. I’m glad we’re able to live out in the country where owning horses and dogs – even porcupine-chasing dogs – isn’t as much of a problem as it would be in town. I’m a reasonably good cook. I’m a capable if under-motivated housekeeper. (If you had spent your childhood and adolescence living in my mother’s obsessively clean house, maybe you’d have much the same attitude.)

As I mentioned before, I’m a widow – something most people my age (early thirties) are not. Andy and I married young, but I expected to be married all my life. I didn’t intend to be thrown back into the so-called dating game. And I haven’t been dating – not exactly and not so far. It’s just that this wild and crazy guy named butch Dixon seems to have set his sights on me. I met Butch when I was growing up in Peoria, Arizona attending a law enforcement-training academy. I keep telling him I need more time to sort myself out before I can become involved in any kind of long-term relationship. The problem is, Butch doesn’t seem inclined to take no for an answer.

J.A. Jance on the Origin of Joanna Brady

After writing my first thriller,
Hour of the Hunter
, when it was time to go back to J.P. Beaumont I found that writing was fun again. That was when my editor suggested that I might consider starting a second series so I’d be able to alternate between sets of characters.