COCHISE COUNTY, JOANNA’S JURISDICTION IN SOUTHEASTERN ARIZONA, is a square that’s approximately eighty miles wide and eighty miles tall. The county line to the south is also the international border with Mexico, while the eastern county line is also the state line between Arizona and New Mexico.
The total area amounts to a little more than 6,200 square miles, with a population of approximately 126,000. Next door in New Mexico, Hidalgo County covers 3,400 square miles, with a population of 4,300. Where Cochise County is square, Hidalgo is skinny and tall. On the far side of Hidalgo is Grant County, a similarly sized—3,900 square miles as opposed to 3,400—with a population of 28,000. In other words, the two counties in New Mexico combined add up to an area a thousand square miles larger than Cochise County with only a quarter of the population.
That was the basic geography of the situation. Both Cochise County and Hidalgo County were located along the international border with Mexico and were beset with all the attendant complications of border security and lack thereof. Grant County’s southern border didn’t reach quite far enough to touch the Mexican border, but it was close enough to be affected by events and issues happening to the south.
A year earlier the Police Our Borders folks had come calling on affected counties with their offers of “free” leased helicopters. Over in Cochise County, Joanna had turned them down out of budgetary concerns. In New Mexico, however, the people calling the shots for Hidalgo and Grant Counties had arrived at an entirely different conclusion.
Hidalgo’s longtime sheriff, Randy Trotter, was a good old boy if ever there was one. Somewhere north of sixty, Trotter was cut from the same cloth as Maricopa County’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio and billed himself as a “toes-up sheriff,” one who would die with his boots on, right along with his badge. Despite Trotter’s annoying “sheriff for life” bravado, his constituents loved him, and when it came time for reelection, he generally ran unopposed.
With POB’s generous offer of relatively free helicopters on the table, Sheriff Trotter had joined forces with Grant County’s sheriff, Adam Yates, in an alliance under which the two counties shared the expense and reaped the benefit of having a single helicopter.
That was why, as soon as Carol returned to collect Sage, burp her, and change her, Joanna immediately pulled out her phone and dialed Sheriff Trotter’s number. Much as she hated to admit it, today his shared POB helicopter might be just what was needed.
“Why, Sheriff Brady,” he rumbled pleasantly when he came on the line. “How the heck are you, and did you ever get around to having that baby? The last time I saw you, you were big as a barn.”
Randy Trotter was a lot of things, but politically correct wasn’t one of them. He was known for putting his lizard-skin Tony Lamas in his mouth, sometimes both of them at once. The encounter he mentioned had occurred in the course of a late-night poker game while both he and Joanna had been attending the annual conference of the Society of Southwestern Sheriffs in Las Cruces.
When Joanna was first elected, SOSS had been something of a no-girls-allowed type of organization. They had let her in, but not without some sidelong glances and more than a few derogatory comments. Gradually her determination to be a law-enforcement professional had earned her a kind of grudging respect, but what had finally brought them around and given her real acceptance in the group was her ability to play poker.
Joanna had learned the game at her father’s knee and over her mother’s tight-lipped objections. D. H. Lathrop had been a wizard at Texas Hold’em, and he’d seen to it that his daughter was, too. The first couple of times she attended SOSS conferences, as the only woman there, she’d been self-conscious and out of her depth. She knew about the late-night poker parties—everyone did—but she wasn’t sure she’d be welcome and didn’t go. The games weren’t officially sponsored events with posted times and invitations, but they were always held in one of the sponsoring hotels’ larger suites. When ten o’clock at night rolled around, whoever wanted to play simply showed up.
The first time Joanna crashed an SOSS poker party was at a conference in El Paso. By then she’d already gained a bit of a reputation for beating the socks off her fellow sheriffs back home in Arizona. When she took a seat at the table, Hector Morales, from Greenlee County, had nodded in her direction. After only one hand, he winked at her and then politely excused himself from the table. It was a good thing, too. She’d cleaned everybody else’s clock.
She wasn’t snotty about being a winner, and she wasn’t a sore loser when the tables turned. That qualified her as one of the guys. And the fact that she didn’t take offense at every off-color remark didn’t hurt, either, something that was especially useful in dealing with Randy Trotter. In fact, in Las Cruces—big as a barn or not—she’d pretty much set the old guy back on his heels.
“Yup,” Joanna said now. “Had her a couple of weeks ago. Her name is Eleanor Sage after my mother, but we call her Sage. She’s got red hair, and someday, when she grows up, she’ll probably want to be sheriff.”
“So a chip off the old block, then,” Trotter observed. “Are you going to teach her to play poker?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Randy replied with a hearty laugh. “Good on you,” he said. “Now, to what do I owe the honor? I heard about that dump site over on your side of the Peloncillos. Does this have anything to do with that?”
“It certainly does.”
Not wanting to conduct confidential police business in the public square of a hospital waiting room, Joanna paced the parking lot as she briefed him about the case. By the time she finished, the phone was hot against her ear.
“Okay, my dear,” Trotter said when she finished. “I’ve got some pretty good contacts over Road Forks way. Let me make a few calls and see what I can do. I’ll be in touch.”
As Joanna approached the hospital entrance, she was dismayed to find that Marliss Shackleford had spotted her and was lying in wait.
“What’s going on?” the reporter demanded. “I know one of your deputies was shot and has been transported here from Douglas by ambulance. I believe it’s Deputy Raymond from Elfrida. And there was something else happening as well—something about a woman or a girl—which makes me think this may all be connected to that crime scene over in the Peloncillos.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny,” Joanna said.
“You and everybody else,” Marliss griped. “Nobody’s home out at the Justice Center. I already checked. Hadlock is out. Carpenter is out. There’s nothing coming through on my scanners, and no one seems to have any idea when they’ll be back. Now here you are, back in uniform and hanging out at the hospital when you’re supposedly on maternity leave. Something screwy is going on here, Sheriff Brady, something big, and I want to know what it is.”
“My department is currently involved in a major investigation,” Joanna told her. “I’m assuming Acting Sheriff Hadlock’s people are maintaining radio silence on account of people just like you. For the safety of my officers, I can tell you, Marliss, that anyone publishing premature information about that operation will be considered to be interfering with police business, which would be grounds for being banned from all future press briefings.”
Marliss bridled at that. “That’s not fair,” she snapped. “You can’t do that. I’m just doing my job—following the story.”
“And I’m doing mine,” Joanna countered. “It’s my department, after all, and I’m in charge. If it turns out that one of my officers has indeed been injured, you can rest assured that his name, the circumstances surrounding the incident, and the extent of his injuries won’t be released until Ernie Carpenter, our temporary Media Relations officer, is able to hold an official briefing. As for your finding me in uniform? I may be on maternity leave, but when one of my officers is injured in the line of duty, my place is at the hospital—no matter what.”
With that, Joanna marched into the hospital. She found Juanita Raymond and Marianne seated together in the waiting room.
“How is he?”
“They just took him into the recovery room,” Juanita said. “He lost a lot of blood. They had to give him two transfusions, but he’s going to be okay.”
“Thank God,” Joanna murmured.
“Thank God indeed,” Marianne agreed. She gave Joanna a searching look. “Are you okay?”
Joanna wasn’t okay, but only a good friend would have caught it. She scanned the waiting room. “There’s a lot going on,” she said, “and with Marliss nosing around, I can’t afford to be caught talking about any of it in public.”
“Go do what you need to do,” Marianne said. “I’ll stay here with Juanita and Garth.”
“And with Latisha, too,” Joanna said. “Maybe you could call Deb. I believe Latisha’s parents are flying into Tucson. Deb has their contact numbers. Maybe you could call and see if we can be of any assistance.”
“Will do,” Marianne said. “Go home and don’t worry.”
Not worrying was something far easier said than done.