Obviously Debbie Howell was spending her first day in Homicide as Jaime and Ernie’s gofer-in-chief.

“Good,” Joanna said. “The sooner we see what’s on those photos, the better.”

Wanting to spell Butch, Joanna left work early that afternoon. When she got home, though, the house was quiet. Butch was seated at the kitchen table with his laptop open in front of him while tantalizing cooking aromas wafted around him.

“Where is everybody?” Joanna asked, kissing the smooth top of his bald head.

“Jenny and the dogs are hiding out in her room, and I don’t blame them a bit,” Butch said. “If I thought I could get away with it, I’d be there, too. As for my parents? They’re out in the RV watching Fox News.”

“In the RV?” Joanna asked. “Why not in the living room?”

“Because Dad likes watching on his flat-screen TV and he prefers using his own clicker.”

“But what kind of reception do they get?”

“Didn’t you notice the satellite TV antenna up on top of their rig? I went out earlier today and watched Dad locate the satellite. And don’t think I’m not grateful. It gave me a couple of hours of peace and quiet. God knows I was ready for some of that. Believe it or not, I even managed to get some work done. I couldn’t very well work in front of them. Somehow I never picked up on how much my mother despises mysteries. Did you know that about her?”

“She may have mentioned something to that effect,” Joanna answered diplomatically. “But that’s one person’s opinion. Obviously the people who handed over that check have other ideas, and so do I. Now what’s for dinner? I’m starved.”

Butch patted her bulging belly affectionately. “You’re always starved these days,” he said. “We’re having two of my father’s favorites-roasted Cornish game hen and baked acorn squash with a side of coleslaw.”

“Do you need any help?”

“No,” Butch said, turning back to his computer. “Everything’s under control. We’ll eat about six-thirty”

“In that case, I think I’ll go into the office for a little while. I need to work on my thank-you notes from the baby shower. Did you see all the great stuff we got?”

“It’s great stuff, all right,” Butch agreed, “but about your office-”

Butch’s warning came too late. Joanna was already standing in the middle of the room and staring at the mound of boxes- the same boxes that had been impeding traffic in the garage earlier that morning, which were now piled in front of her built-in bookcases. The blockade made it all but impossible for her to reach the chair behind her desk.

“What are these doing here?” she demanded.

“In case you haven’t noticed, my mother is an incredible busybody,” Butch said. “When I was growing up, she was forever going through my stuff. I finally started leaving things I didn’t want her to see at a friend’s house. This morning she was all over me, wondering what was in the boxes. When I told her where the boxes came from, she was hot to trot to go through them. I told her I was sure you’d rather do that yourself. When she insisted that someone in your condition shouldn’t be lifting heavy boxes, I finally moved them in here to keep them out of her reach. I put today’s mail in here, too, for the same reason.”

“You think she’d go through that?” Joanna asked.

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” Butch replied. “The good thing about your office is that we can always lock the door if need be. Come to think of it, I’ll probably lock my computer in here, too, when I’m not using it.”

“Poor baby,” Joanna said and meant it.

For the next hour Joanna sat at the desk in her now-crowded home office and dutifully wrote thank-you notes exactly as Eleanor would have wanted her daughter to do. It was funny, in a way, to think that both she and Butch had survived being raised by very similar and extremely autocratic mothers. It went a long way to explaining why the two of them got along so well.

Dinner turned out to be more of the same, with Margaret monopolizing every avenue of conversation. Knowing that Butch had been stuck with his mother all day, Joanna did her best to run interference for him. She was cheerful. She asked focused questions. And she kept Margaret rambling away. With Margaret’s having downed a predinner cocktail or two, that wasn’t difficult. It wasn’t until dessert when Margaret finally managed to get under Joanna’s skin.

“I guess I didn’t realize your father used to be a sheriff,” Margaret said with a smile. “I’m sure Butch must have told me, but it didn’t sink in. Is that why you wanted to be involved in law enforcement?”

Joanna wasn’t sure where Margaret was going. Joanna had grown accustomed to these kinds of unwelcome questions out on the campaign trail, but she didn’t expect them to crop up at her own dining-room table.

“I didn’t really want it,” Joanna answered warily. “It simply happened.”

“Are you saying you were elected to office by accident?” Margaret asked incredulously. “How is that possible? I was under the impression that election campaigns are a lot more complicated than that.”

Joanna remembered how, in the painful aftermath of Andy’s funeral, she had been asked to run for office in his stead. She had agreed-not because her father had been sheriff once or because Andy had wanted to be, but because it was something she actually wanted to do.

“I wasn’t elected to an office,” she said. “I was elected to do a job, and it’s a job I do willingly every single day.”

She would have said more, but the phone rang, and Jenny hurried to answer it. “It’s for you, Mom,” Jenny said. “Somebody from work.”

Taking the phone from her daughter’s hand, Joanna returned to the relative privacy of the far end of the living room before she answered. An excited Debbie Howell was on the phone, calling from Sierra Vista.

“What’s up?” Joanna asked.

“I’m looking at the photos,” Debbie Howell said breathlessly. “You’re not going to believe this.”

“What?”

“Bradley Evans was stalking someone.”

“Stalking?” Joanna repeated. “Who? And how can you be sure?”

“A woman,” Debbie returned. “A dark-haired Anglo woman, a brunette. Looks to be in her late twenties. She’s wearing what looks like a wedding ring. There are several pictures of her walking in a mall and several others of her pushing a shopping cart through a parking lot. Two more show her getting into a vehicle-a blue sedan. I can’t be sure of the make or model.”

“Does the woman know she’s being photographed?”

“I doubt it,” Debbie returned. “It doesn’t look like she does. In fact, I’d say she’s totally oblivious.”

“Is there any way to identify who she is?” Joanna asked.

“Not that I can tell. There’s no visible license plate, if that’s what you mean.”

“Can you tell where the pictures are taken? I mean, are they from Sierra Vista or maybe somewhere else you recognize? And what about the Double Cs? Have they seen the photos?”

“Not yet. They’re coming here to meet me right now to take a look. Ernie wanted me to let you know what’s going on.”

“Thanks, Debbie,” Joanna said. “I appreciate being kept in the loop. So how’s your first day been?”

“Terrific, Sheriff Brady. I don’t know how much of a help I’ve been so far, but it’s what I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Thanks for giving me a chance.”

Joanna hung up the phone feeling guilty that it had been Ernie Carpenter rather than Sheriff Joanna Brady who had opened the door on Debbie Howell’s new opportunity.

And then she thought about Bradley Evans. Was it true that he had been a stalker? That idea certainly didn’t square with what Ted Chapman had told her about the man. But now Joanna wondered. If he had been following an unsuspecting young woman around and snapping pictures of her without her knowledge or consent, then perhaps he had been on his way to reverting to the behavior that had put him in prison in the first place.