by J. A. Jance
“The Christmas cards didn’t go out last week, which means they have to go out by Friday at the latest,” Joanna told him with a sigh. “In other words, tonight I’ll be up to my eyeballs in doing those. Eva Lou said she would stop by this afternoon to help address envelopes. I left her copies of the lists, but I’m the one who has to do all the signing and stuffing.”
Eva Lou Brady had been Joanna’s first mother-in-law. After Andy Brady’s untimely death, Eva Lou and her husband, Jim Bob, had stayed close to their daughter-in-law and granddaughter, a relationship that hadn’t diminished once Butch appeared on the scene. They had welcomed him with open arms, treating him as though he were their own son-in-law rather than a widowed daughter-in-law’s second husband, and once Dennis and Sage had turned up, they had welcomed them with the same kind of loving enthusiasm. Jenny was their first grandchild. Dennis and Sage counted as numbers two and three.
Joanna’s folks—her father and mother as well as a beloved stepfather—were all gone now. Butch’s parents—his father, Don, and his incredibly toxic mother, Margaret—were full-time RVers who, to Butch’s immense relief, preferred to spend most of their time east of the Mississippi. That meant that in the grandparent department Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady were the only ones left standing.
“Eva Lou’s a doll,” Butch said, “and I’m so glad she’s helping out, but I should have worked on the Christmas-card issue before I left on tour.”
“You did,” Joanna reminded him. “For one thing, you wrote, laid out, and printed the Christmas newsletter, but if I remember correctly, at about the same time you had a horrendous batch of copyediting to do.”
“Right,” Butch muttered, “with a brand-new copyeditor who was more than a little challenging.”
“So get off your cross about the Christmas cards,” she told him, as she pressed the remote and opened the garage door. “You're good.”
“Sounds like you’re home.”
“I am,” she said. “I’ll let you go. Give me a call once the event is over and you get back to the hotel.”
“Will,” he said. “Love you.”
“I love you, too,” Joanna murmured. “I love you a lot.”
Chapter 1
When Joanna opened the car door, the irresistible aroma of cooking food—most likely a beef stew—filled the garage, and she uttered a small prayer of thanks for the presence of Carol Sunderson in their lives.
Carol was Joanna and Butch’s not-quite-live-in nanny/housekeeper. Years earlier Carol and her physically disabled husband, Leonard, had been living in a rented and extremely decrepit mobile home while caring for two preteen boys, grandchildren who’d been abandoned by their drug-addicted daughter. Leonard had perished in a house fire caused by a faulty electrical circuit that their landlord could and should have corrected.
The fire had left Carol and the two boys, Danny and Rick, homeless. All this had come about several months after Joanna and Butch had moved from High Lonesome’s original ranch house into the new one they’d had built a little farther up the road. For a time they’d had renters in the old house, but when the renters decamped within days of the Sunderson mobile-home fire, Joanna had suggested letting Carol and her grandsons live there for free.
Carol Sunderson might have been poor, but she was also proud. Unable to afford rent of any kind but disinclined to accept charity, she had offered to help out in the Brady/Dixon household in lieu of paying rent. Joanna had encouraged Carol to take her former landlord to court, where years later he’d been held liable for damages in Leonard Sunderson’s death. A court-awarded settlement had improved Carol’s financial situation immeasurably, but her living arrangement with Joanna and Butch remained in place. She and the boys continued to live rent-free in Joanna’s old house while Carol helped out as needed in the new one.
The grandsons, Rick and Danny, were almost grown. Rick was a senior in high school. He had a driver’s license, an old clunker of a car, and a part-time job in town delivering pizza. Danny, a sophomore, was currently making a name for himself on Bisbee High School’s varsity basketball team. With her boys able to come and go relatively independently, Carol was a daily calming presence in Butch and Joanna’s busy home. Joanna’s position as sheriff called for long hours at times, and without Carol’s logistical assistance in terms of household management Butch wouldn’t have been able to write books much less go on tour.
Joanna entered the house via the laundry room, pausing there long enough to stow her weapons in the gun safe. Once that was done, she closed the metal shutters that covered the exterior windows and doors. High Lonesome ranch was located at the base of the Mule Mountains on the far western edge of the Sulphur Springs Valley. As the crow flies, the two houses were less than ten miles from the border with Mexico. In recent years, because of the drastic increase in cartel-related smuggling, living there had become riskier. That was the reason Butch and Joanna had installed rolling shutter systems and security window screens on both houses. Joanna had always loved sleeping with the windows open, so sleeping in what amounted to a locked vault wasn’t her first choice, but better to be safe than sorry.
Entering the warm kitchen, Joanna found herself in a kind of controlled bedlam. Sage, squealing with delight, rocketed around the room in her walker, leaving behind a trail of Cheerios. Lucky, the deaf black Lab Jenny had rescued years earlier, followed dutifully in Sage’s tracks, sniffing out and scarfing up abandoned Cheerios as he went. Carol stood at the counter, dishing stew out of their relatively new programmable pressure cooker into a serving bowl while a frowning Denny concentrated on setting the table. He stood at Joanna’s end of the kitchen nook with a table knife in his right hand and with that hand placed over the left side of his heart. That way he could be sure the knife would be placed on the correct side of his mother’s plate.
“Soup’s almost on,” Carol announced. “You might want to get Sage out of the cart, change her, and strap her into the high chair.”
“Will do,” Joanna said, giving the housekeeper a mock salute before capturing the child, lifting her out of the walker, and heading for the nursery. A few minutes later, as Joanna strapped Sage into her high chair, she noticed that the table was set for only four. On nights like this, Carol usually cooked enough for everybody and her crew ate here in the kitchen right along with everyone else.
“The boys aren’t coming?” Joanna asked.
“Rick’s working, and Danny has a basketball game in Douglas. I’ll take some stew home for them to eat later on.”
“Are you going to the game?” Joanna asked.
“I don’t know,” Carol said. “The varsity game starts at seven. Danny wanted me to come, but I wasn’t sure if you’d be home in time.”
Joanna’s not showing up at home on time was often a sore subject with Butch—and occasionally with Carol, too.
“Well,” Joanna said, “I’m home now, so you should be able to go. I’m perfectly capable of cleaning up the kitchen and putting the kids to bed.”
While Joanna supervised Denny and Sage, Carol bolted down some dinner of her own. Then, after loading stew into plastic containers for each of her boys, she headed out. Left to handle the evening tasks on her own, Joanna discovered that they took longer than she’d expected. It was after eight thirty before she had the kids bathed and in bed and the kitchen cleaned up as well. Only then did she sit down at the dining-room table—the space deemed Christmas Card Central—to deal with the task at hand.
When Joanna had first decided to run for the office of sheriff, it hadn’t occurred to her that she would end up having to become a politician as well. Her first husband, Andy, had been a deputy sheriff running for office against his boss, then the current sheriff, when he’d been gunned down by a drug-cartel hit man on his way home from work. During the reception after Andy’s funeral, one of the guests had broached the idea that maybe Joanna should run for office in Andy’s stead. When she finally agreed to do so, it had been more to get people to shut up about it than
with any expectation of winning. And once the election was over and she’d won, she took office without realizing that she was on a path that would bring her to her life’s work, that of being a professional law-enforcement officer—a LEO. For most LEOs being a cop is just that, but being sheriff is different. Sheriffs have to do the job, yes, but in order to keep it they have to run for office. That reality had forced Joanna to become a politician, and that was what had brought her up against the Christmas-card problem.
In ordinary times—meaning prior to Joanna’s becoming sheriff of Cochise County—a single box of twenty-five cards would have been enough to do the trick. In terms of her personal list, that was still true—holding steady at twenty-five or so. Those were longtime friends and relations—the ones who got the family holiday newsletter with a collection of chatty year-in-review updates written and arranged by Butch and illustrated with selected photos: Denny with his two front teeth missing, Jenny in a cowboy hat sitting astride Maggie as both horse and rider celebrated their latest barrel-racing win, Sage and Denny posing with a professional mall Santa in a photo that Butch had managed to have taken the day after Thanksgiving. For that one Denny had been grinning from ear to ear while Sage screamed her head off. Santa photos were like that, Joanna supposed—you win some, you lose some.
Once she went to work on the cards, Joanna discovered that Eva Lou had approached the problem in an efficient and typically logical fashion. All the envelopes had been addressed in Eva Lou’s flawless, old-school penmanship. Once addressed, the envelopes had been divided into two distinct groupings. Eva Lou had slipped cards and neatly folded copies of the newsletter under the flap of each envelope in the personal stack. In the other stack, plain envelopes awaited cards only. The personal stack was much smaller, so Joanna tackled it first—signing both the cards and newsletters and adding personal notes as needed.
She was done with that one and starting on the larger stack when her phone rang with Butch on the line. “You must be done,” she said. “How’d it go?”
“Well enough, I guess,” he answered with a singular lack of enthusiasm. “I’m getting pretty tired of giving the same old talk and answering the same old questions, but I love telling stories, so I should shut up and enjoy it, right?”
“Right,” she replied.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Christmas cards,” she answered bleakly. “Eva Lou got all the envelopes addressed. I did the personal list first before starting on the others.”
“As in saving the best for last?” he quipped.
“Not exactly,” she answered.
“What’s going on at work?”
And that’s when Joanna realized she hadn’t told Butch about Ernie Carpenter’s bad news. Ernie might have sworn Joanna to secrecy inside the department, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t share the news with Butch. More accustomed to using a keyboard than writing by hand, Joanna leaned back in her chair to rest her aching shoulder as she told Butch what had happened.
“This is awful news for Ernie and Rose, but it’s also going to leave your detective division pretty shorthanded, won’t it?” Butch observed when she finished.
“Very,” Joanna agreed with a sigh. “I’ll be down to only two detectives, Jaime and Deb.”
Jaime was Jaime Carbajal, Ernie’s longtime partner and the other half of what had always been known as “the Double C’s.” Deb was Deb Howell, who had been promoted from deputy to detective due primarily to Ernie’s careful mentoring.
Joanna had expected Deputy Jeremy Stock to be next up in the detective ranks. He had passed the exam, and she’d been waiting to bring him on board when his hidden life as a fatally abusive husband and father had come to light. Not only had he murdered his remaining family members before taking his own life, he’d come dangerously close to taking Joanna’s as well. And Joanna’s next candidate for promotion, Deputy Daniel Hernandez, had recently left her department in order to take a job with Tucson PD at substantially higher wages.
“Didn’t you tell me Garth Raymond passed the test?” Butch asked.
Joanna nodded. “Yes, with flying colors,” she replied. “The problem is, he’s my youngest deputy. He took the test on a dare because some of the other guys were hassling him about his being a ‘college boy.’ He outscored all of them, so yes, Garth is a ‘college boy’ and smart as a whip, but he’s also been with the department less than two years. If I end up fast-tracking him to detective, I’m worried there’ll be some blowback.”
“Young and smart sounds like a good combination,” Butch observed. “After what Garth did to save that girl out in Skeleton Canyon last year, it seems to me as though he’s also an altogether good human being. In other words, if I were you, I’d discount young and go for smart.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” Joanna said.
“And you should probably give Myron a call,” Butch added. “If you’re going to give Ernie an appropriate send-off, the clubhouse at Rob Roy Links is the place to do it right, but with the holidays in full swing his banquet facilities may already be totally booked.”
Myron Thomas had managed to establish and maintain one of the best golf courses in southeastern Arizona, creating a resortworthy facility out of what had once been farmland along the San Pedro River.
“A big party there will cost money,” Joanna said. “The board of supervisors will never approve of having the department pay for it.”
“Then we’ll pay for it,” Butch declared, “as in you and me, babe. Fortunately, I just turned in a manuscript, and that delivery-and-acceptance check is burning a hole in my pocket.”
Butch’s career as a mystery writer had grown into something neither of them had ever anticipated, and having chunks of discretionary cash show up occasionally for them to use as needed was a real blessing.
“Thank you,” Joanna said. “I’ll give him a call first thing tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Butch said, “I’m doing an early-morning TV interview, so I’d best hit the sack. What about you?”
“I’m going to keep plugging away on the cards a while longer,” she told him. “Have a good night. I miss you.”
She did keep plugging. On the nonpersonal side, there were no newsletters to sign and stuff, but the process still took time. Here she could easily have opted for using cards with her signature supplied by the printer, but these messages were going out to many of her supporters and loyal volunteers. Joanna felt that, at the very least, each of these folks deserved the courtesy of a personal signature on their holiday greeting. And that was why the cards had to be done entirely at home. Marliss Shackleford, a local newspaper reporter and Joanna’s personal nemesis, was always on the lookout for the slightest misstep on Joanna’s part, and if there’d been any hint that Joanna was doing politicking while on the job, Marliss would have made sure it was headline news in the Bisbee Bee.
At eleven, and not quite halfway through the second batch, she gave up and put down her pen. There was no sense in staying up any later in an attempt to finish them.
“Come on, dogs,” she said aloud. “It’s time to go get busy.”
Lady, Joanna’s Australian shepherd, got to her feet and headed for the laundry-room door. Lucky, deaf as a post and sound asleep, didn’t move a muscle. Joanna reached down, touched him awake, and then delivered the same command in sign language.
Joanna opened the garage door to let the dogs out and then stood in the open doorway, waiting for them to finish. The night was clear and bitingly cold. The dark sky overhead was alive with glimmering stars. In the shadow of the Mule Mountains, the lights from Bisbee didn’t detract from the nighttime sky, nor did the lights from Douglas and Agua Prieta, twenty-five miles away.
Standing there, enjoying both the chill and the stars, Joanna focused on one star that clearly outshone all the rest. She wasn’t sure what star it was—Venus, most likely—but it reminded her of the star, the one that had shone over Bethlehem. After all, wasn’t this a time for peace on eart
h and goodwill to men? As a sense of peace really did settle over her, Joanna called to the dogs.
“Come on, guys,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”
Lucky and Lady came at once, and they all went inside, but as far as peace on earth was concerned? Joanna Brady couldn’t have been more wrong.
Chapter 2
It was almost midnight, and Beth Rankin sat on the cold tile of the bathroom floor, leaning against the chill of the porcelain tub and waiting for her phone call. She had silenced the ringer so as not to awaken her roommate, Jennifer Brady, sound asleep in the room they shared in Conover Hall at Northern Arizona University. The last thing Beth wanted was for Jenny to wake up and start asking questions about who would be calling so late at night.
Beth supposed she ought to be using the time for studying rather than just sitting here staring at her silent cell phone. After all, finals were coming up. She needed to do well. Her late grandmother, Granny Lockhart, had bequeathed her a generous trust for the sole purpose of enabling Beth to attend college, but that bequest came with strings attached, including keeping up with her classes and getting good grades. If Beth were to blow it and end up dropping out of school, that money would be forfeited, with no way of ever getting it back.
Shivering and in a futile effort to keep warm, Beth drew her Lumberjack sweatshirt more tightly around her body and pulled the hood up over her ears. Her mother wouldn’t have approved. Madeline Rankin thought sweatshirts, especially hoodies, were vulgar and common. She claimed they made ordinary people look like gangbangers, not that her mother had ever met one of those. Beth had purchased the forbidden sweatshirt in the bookstore that first week of school in the vain hope of fitting in. The strategy hadn’t worked. The other kids, with the possible exception of Jenny, looked on Beth as though she came from another planet. And maybe she did. Maybe Hastings, Nebraska, was another planet, even though she didn’t live there anymore. That was where she had grown up, but none of her family still lived in Hastings. This past October her parents had sold out and had moved—lock, stock, and barrel—into Beth’s deceased grandmother’s old place in SaddleBrooke, a fifty-five-plus community near Tucson.
