Exit Wounds (7 page)

“Pregnant? You’re kidding!”

“No. I’m not kidding. I’m late. Over a week now.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, I’m not sure. I mean, I’m sure I’m late, but I’m not remotely sure if I’m pregnant. It’s possible, though.”

Suddenly, Lucky was forgotten. Grinning from ear to ear, Butch grabbed Joanna by the waist and swung her around the kitchen in a series of circles. “Joey, this is wonderful news. It’s great! I can hardly wait to find out for sure. What time is it?”

“It’s nine o’clock. Why?”

“What time does Safeway close?”

“I don’t know—nine or maybe ten. Why?”

“Let’s go right now and get a pregnancy test. You can buy them over the counter, can’t you? I mean, you don’t need a prescription or anything, do you?”

“I don’t think so,” Joanna told him. “But can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

Butch shook his head. “No, ma’am. If I’m going to be a father, I want to know it now, not later. Besides,” he added with a grin, “we need Puppy Chow anyway. Now, are you and Lucky coming along, or are the two of you staying here?”

In the end, Lucky and Joanna rode along while Butch drove like a maniac. Two hours later, they were lying in bed side by side, giddy and sleepless. “A father,” Butch murmured over and over. “I’m going to be a father. I never thought it would happen to me.”

Joanna lay beside him as he rambled on and thought how different this was from when she’d told Andy she was pregnant with Jenny. They’d been at the drive-in theater on Alvernon in Tucson and to this day she had no idea what movie they had gone to see because she had blurted out the news without even waiting for the show to begin. Where Butch was almost delirious with happiness at the news, Andy had been resolved—maybe even resigned. Of course he would marry her. Of course he would do the right thing. But for years, there had always been that nagging little question in Joanna’s mind. And, although they had never discussed it, maybe the same question had plagued Andy as well. Would Joann Lee Lathrop and Andrew Roy Brady have married if she
hadn’t
been pregnant? Or would they have broken up eventually and lived entirely different lives?

But they hadn’t, and thirteen-year-old Jennifer Ann Brady was very much a part of this new equation.

“We should tell Jenny in the morning,” Joanna said. “First thing. We don’t want her thinking we’ve been sneaking around, keeping secrets.”

“Right,” Butch agreed. “We’ll tell her at breakfast.”

“I thought you said she had tennis early.”

“We’ll get up even earlier. And, in that case, we’d better try to get some sleep.”

And they might have slept. It’s possible they
could
have slept, except right then, as soon as they stopped talking, Lucky, confined to his bedside carton, set up a mournful wail—the same keening cry that had summoned Manny Ruiz earlier that evening. Within seconds Tigger, at the far end of the hall, began barking his head off and throwing himself against the door to Jenny’s bedroom.

Butch sighed. “Well,” he said, hopping out of bed, “I suppose we’d better get used to it.”

Joanna turned on the bedside lamp. Butch had just grabbed Lucky up and was trying to quiet him when Jenny began pounding on their bedroom door. “What’s going on in there?” she demanded. “What’s that awful noise? Tigger’s having a fit. He woke me up.”

Holding the puppy, Butch jumped back into bed and snuggled Lucky under the covers. “All right,” Butch said. “You can come in, Jen, but you’d better leave Tigger in the hall.”

“How come?”

“Because. Trust me.”

Moments later, a pajama-clad Jenny was in their bedroom, looking more than a little cross. “What’s going on?” she asked indignantly.

Standing with her hands on her hips and with a disapproving frown on her face, Jenny looked like a miniature Eleanor Lathrop Winfield.
And sounds like her, too
, Joanna realized in dismay.

In answer to Jenny’s question, Butch pulled the wiggling Lucky out from under the covers and held him up in the air. Jenny’s blue eyes widened in delight, then she vaulted onto the bed between Butch and Joanna.

“He’s so cute!” Jenny exclaimed breathlessly. “Where did you get him? Is he ours? Can we keep him? What’s his name? Can I hold him?”

In answer to the barrage of questions, Butch simply handed Lucky over to Jenny. The puppy scrambled up her bare shoulder and buried his nose in her long blond hair.

“His name is Lucky,” Butch replied. “And we will keep him—if you can keep Tigger from eating him, that is.”

“Tigger won’t eat him,” Jenny declared. “He’ll be fine, I know he will be. Should I let him in now, so we can introduce them?”

“I don’t think so,” Butch said. “Not right now.”

“Why not?”

Taking a deep breath, Butch looked from Jenny back to Joanna. “Because,” he said finally, “I think your mother has something important to tell you.”

Joanna was already in her office and at her computer when Chief Deputy Frank Montoya came in for the morning briefing.

“What’s up?” he asked, placing a sheaf of papers on Joanna’s polished wood desk and taking a seat in one of the captain’s chairs.

“What do you mean, ‘What’s up’?”

“Don’t play innocent with me, Sheriff Brady. You look like the cat that swallowed the canary.”

Joanna got up, walked over to the door that led to the interior lobby and Kristin’s desk, and pulled it shut.

“I guess I did, in a manner of speaking,” she said. “Swallow the canary, that is.”

Frank seemed mystified. Joanna sat back down and looked at him across her desk. “I’m pregnant, Frank.”

“Whoa! Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. I took a pregnancy test last night, and I’m definitely pregnant.”

Frank’s face broke into a grin. “Well, congratulations, then. That’s big news!”

“I’ll say.” Joanna grinned back at him.

“So who knows?”

“Well, Butch, Jenny, and now you.”

“What are you going to do?” Frank asked.

“What do you think? I’m going to have the baby.”

“What about the election? Are you going to drop out?”

Joanna was adamant. “And give Ken Junior a free ride? No way.”

“So are you going to keep it…well, under wraps until after election day?”

“We probably should delay making an announcement, just in case of a miscarriage, but Butch and I already talked it over. I’m going to go public with it. ASAP. I may even give our old friend, Marliss Shackleford, an exclusive on this.”

Marliss, a columnist for the local paper,
The Bisbee Bee,
had long been a thorn in Joanna’s side.

“Do you think that’s wise?” Frank asked. “She’s done everything but post ‘Galloway for Sheriff’ signs at the top and bottom of her column.”

“That’s exactly why I want Marliss to be one of the first to know,” Joanna responded. “It’ll be one of her biggest scoops ever in ‘Bisbee Buzzings.’ Knowing Marliss is solidly in Ken Junior’s corner, people are bound to read the column and talk about it for days afterward. I figure, if the voters know about the baby in advance and elect me anyway, then no one will be able to complain about it later on. And if I lose? Then I lose. I’ll go back to selling insurance—although that wouldn’t be my first choice.”

“I take it you and Butch have talked this through?”

“Absolutely.”

“All right, then,” Frank said. “If you two are okay with it, then I’ve got no complaints.” He picked up his stack of papers. “Sorry I wasn’t there to help out last night,” he added.

“Don’t apologize, Frank,” Joanna told him with a smile. “You get to have some time off, and so do I. Now, what more do you have for me this morning?”

For the next twenty minutes or so they went over routine departmental business, including the previous day’s incidents reports. They ended with a discussion of the Mossman homicide.

“Ernie Carpenter will be at the autopsy later this morning,” Frank said. “Jaime Carbajal will start canvassing the neighborhood around Carol Mossman’s place and talking to her supervisor and co-workers. He’ll also be organizing an inch-by-inch search of the property. Dave Hollicker believes that since the shots were fired through a locked door, there’s a good chance the killer never made it inside Carol Mossman’s place. That means any physical evidence left behind by the killer would most likely be outside the trailer rather than inside it.”

Joanna nodded. “This whole thing offends me,” she said, her green eyes flashing in sudden outrage. “Most people, including Carol’s own grandmother, might consider that run-down trailer little more than a hovel, but it was Carol Mossman’s home, Frank—her place of refuge. She and her animals were inside it, unarmed and defenseless, when somebody blew her away and killed all her dogs in the process. It’s true that, in trying to help all those strays, Carol Mossman may have broken some of the dog-ownership statutes, but at the time she was killed, she and her dogs weren’t hurting anybody.”

“No, they weren’t,” Frank agreed.

“I was on the scene last night. We were all working and doing our jobs. This morning, I realize it was like it was all business as usual. It would be all too easy to write Carol off as some kind of weirdo who was somehow responsible for what happened to her, but if the Carol Mossmans of this world aren’t safe in their own homes, nobody else is, either. I want whoever did this caught!”

By the time Joanna paused, Frank Montoya seemed a little taken aback by the strength of her emotion on the subject. “I see what you mean,” he said. “So what’s the next step?”

“Have Jaime contact that Explorer troop out on post at Fort Huachuca to see if they can help with the foreign-object search.”

“Will do,” Frank said.

“And we should probably get the Double Cs in here to update us sometime this afternoon.” The term
Double Cs
was departmental shorthand for the two homicide detectives, Carbajal and Carpenter.

“Okay,” Frank agreed.

“Anything else?” Joanna asked.

The chief deputy looked decidedly uncomfortable. “Well, there is one more thing,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s about the dog.”

“What dog?”

“The one you took from Carol Mossman’s home last night.”

“It’s not a dog, Frank,” Joanna responded. “It’s a puppy—a cute little fuzzy black puppy.”

“Jeannine Phillips has lodged a formal complaint.”

“You’re kidding!”

“I wish I were,” Frank said regretfully. “She says you confiscated the dog yourself rather than following established procedures.”

“Frank, the puppy’s mother was dead. Lucky was practically starving to death.”

“Lucky. You mean you’ve named him?”

“Yes, I’ve named him. He’s not a dog, Frank. He’s a baby—barely weaned, if that. Somehow he was left alone when all the other dogs got locked inside the trailer with Carol Mossman’s body. It’s a wonder he was still alive. I brought him home. Butch fed him bread and milk and then went straight out to buy Puppy Chow. What’s wrong with that? What was I supposed to do, ship him off to the pound so they could keep him for however long they keep animals before they put them down?”

“And how long is that?” Frank asked.

Joanna shrugged. “I don’t know for sure—a couple of weeks. A month, maybe.”

“You should probably know,” Frank put in mildly, “the correct answer is actually seventy-two hours.”

Joanna was shocked. “That’s all?” she demanded. “You mean, from the time the animals are picked up?”

“That’s right. If they’re not claimed by an owner or adopted by the end of seventy-two hours, they’re out of there.”

“As in put to sleep.”

“Right.”

“That’s awful. I was sure they had longer than that.”

“I thought so, too, boss, but I checked the statute just this morning. If you care about animals at all, and if those are the kinds of conditions Animal Control is working under, maybe that’s part of the reason Jeannine Phillips is so pissed off all the time. I sure as hell would be.”

“Do you think she’ll take her complaints to Ken Junior?” Joanna asked.

“If she’s in a mood to make trouble, what do you think?”

Joanna thought about that. Finally she said, “If I end up losing this election, will it be because I’m pregnant or because I took in an orphaned puppy?”

Frank Montoya grinned and shook his head. “Anybody’s guess,” he said.

After the chief deputy sauntered out of her office, Joanna sat staring out into the lobby through the open doorway. She thought about the scene in her kitchen earlier that morning, when Tigger met Lucky for the first time. Jenny had put Tigger on a “Wait” command at the door to the kitchen. But the word
wait
meant nothing to the puppy. He had scampered across the room and, despite Tigger’s bared teeth, had leaped up and licked the big dog’s face. Offended, Tigger had grabbed the puppy by the scruff of the neck and put him down, where he lay stock-still on the floor with his paws straight up in the air. Only the tiniest tip of his tail had moved—a twitch rather than a wag.

After several seconds, Tigger had let his captive go. Lucky had jumped up and gone racing around the room, his tiny claws clicking on the tile floor as he skidded around the corners. Each time he returned to Tigger, the older dog had growled and bared his teeth again, but he made no further move to attack the little interloper. The scene was so comical that Jenny had giggled with delight. Butch and Joanna, too, had laughed aloud. And now, because she had taken in the little rascal to give him a good home, Joanna was suddenly in the doghouse with her Animal Control officers.

Making up her mind, Joanna punched her intercom button.

“Yes, Sheriff Brady,” Kristin Gregovich answered.

“I’m going out for a while,” Joanna said.

“When will you be back?”

“I don’t know,” Joanna replied. “I’m on my way out to Animal Control. You might call ahead and see if Officer Phillips is there. Let her know I’m coming to see her.”

The several miles between the Justice Center and the Animal Control compound on the far side of Tin Town gave Joanna plenty of time to think about her upcoming meeting. And the more she thought about it, the more she suspected Jeannine Phillips was in the right and she was wrong. After all, police officers investigating crime scenes were charged with collecting evidence connected to whatever crime had occurred. At the same time, they were prohibited from taking any items not thought to be part of the criminal investigation.