What’s the matter with you? she lectured herself. I thought you were all about leading by example.

Feeling like a little kid stuffed into last year’s snowsuit, she managed to stand up. Only then did she call Butch.

“When are you going to have this baby?” he asked.

“I hope it’ll be any day now. Why?”

“Because my parents are driving me crazy,” he said. “Mom saw you on the Noon News. She wanted to know why a sheriff’s office would be in charge of the dogcatchers.”

“So you know about Jeannine Phillips then?” Joanna asked.

“I do,” he said. “Heard about it from Jim Bob. We were supposed to go there for dinner tonight, but he and Eva Lou have spent the whole day filling in at the pound, so he called a little while ago to beg off. We’re going out for pizza instead, much to Jenny’s delight. What about you?”

“We’ve located someone who witnessed part of the attack on Jeannine,” Joanna said. “We’re on our way to the crime scene right now. I don’t know when I’ll be home. Probably not in time for dinner.”

“Right,” he said. “You’re probably hiding out in your office and only pretending to be on your way to a crime scene. I know the real story. You don’t want to have anything to do with my parents. The truth is, neither do I.”

“You’ll just have to buck up,” Joanna said. “They won’t be here forever.”

“Oh, yeah?” Butch returned. “That’s easy for you to say. You’re not stuck here at the house with them. I may call Dr. Lee and ask what it would take to convince him to induce labor.”

“From the way I’m feeling right now,” Joanna said, “that doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.”

When she went back into the restaurant, the two younger men were greedily and silently mowing their way through individual platters of tacos. No doubt they were hungry after a hard day of physical labor, but they ate as though their hunger went deeper than that-as though it had been a long time since they’d been able to eat their fill.

Frank Montoya and Ephrain Trujillo had been speaking in Spanish. When Joanna finally managed to maneuver her bulky self onto a chair at the table, the two men politely switched to English. “Mr. Trujillo tells me that he came here from Nicaragua twenty years ago,” Frank said. “He was granted political asylum.”

Nicaragua. A country, yes, but also a word from the history books. Joanna recalled what had happened earlier, how just talking about the sound of someone being kicked had been enough to cause Ephrain’s tears to flow. No wonder he carried a gun. And knew how to use it. And what about the two young men with him? Where did they come from? What had they seen? Whatever their origins, they trusted Ephrain enough to come here with him, to sit quietly in this restaurant with two police officers and to believe that, whatever was coming, Ephrain Trujillo would see them safely through it.

“Are you all right?” Frank asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Why?”

“You look… I don’t know… sort of uncomfortable. I was afraid…”

I am uncomfortable, she wanted to say. I’m wearing this godawful vest and. I can hardly breathe. “I’m fine,” she said.

“Would you like something to eat?” Frank asked.

I couldn’t squeeze in a bite without popping the Velcro, she thought. What she said was “No, thanks. I just had lunch.”

Forty-five minutes later, they pulled into San Simon, where two more sheriff’s department vehicles joined the caravan for the drive out to Doubtful Canyon Road. Half a mile beyond the locked and gated turnoff to Roostercomb Ranch, Ephrain Trujillo stopped the LUV just short of a low rise. He and his friends as well as Joanna’s team of investigators exited their various vehicles and hiked up the hill behind Ephrain. Once at the top, Ephrain stood in the middle of the dirt roadway and pointed to a small, rock-strewn clearing off to one side.

“There,” he said, pointing. “That’s where it happened.”

While Dave Hollicker and Casey Ledford began their painstaking examination of the crime scene, Jaime Carbajal and Debbie Howell began interviewing Ephrain Trujillo and his two so far nameless passengers. Debbie’s Spanish wasn’t fluent enough to do the questioning, so Jaime took the lead. With no definite jobs to do, Joanna and Frank stood off to one side while she briefed him on everything Ephrain had told her. They were standing there speculating about what Jeannine had been watching through her night-vision goggles when they heard a vehicle churning up the hill behind them.

They barely had time to scramble out of the way before an old open-air jeep, spewing smoke and raising a cloud of dust, charged over the top of the rise.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the driver demanded as he stood on the brakes and brought the speeding vehicle to a skidding stop a few feet shy of where Joanna and Frank had been standing.

Joanna recognized Clarence O’Dwyer at once from the jagged scar that ran down one side of his face, a remnant of a barroom brawl in which younger brother Billy had attacked his older sibling with the business end of a broken Budweiser bottle. Both brothers had been hauled into the county jail. The sutures to stitch Clarence’s face back together-all fifteen of them-had been done at sheriff’s department expense. She also noted the wooden butt of a rifle sticking out of a scabbard next to the man’s knee.

I wonder if this vest would stop a 30-06 slug at close range? she thought as she stepped forward to answer his question.

“Good afternoon, Mr. O’Dwyer,” she said. “We’re here investigating the attempted homicide of one of my officers around midnight last night. She was here investigating a complaint about a possible dogfighting ring. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

“Screw you!” Clarence said.

Somebody already did that, she felt like saying, but this was no time for tasteless jokes. “Do you know anything about it?” Joanna persisted.

“I don’t know nothin‘,” Clarence growled. “Now get off my land!”

“We’re well outside the fence line, which means we’re all in the public right-of-way,” she said. “It also means that we won’t be leaving until we’re good and ready or until we’re done, whichever comes first.”

In reply, Clarence flashed her a one-finger salute. Then he ground his gearshift into reverse and tore off back down the hill.

“Same to you, buddy,” Joanna whispered under her breath. “Have a nice day.”

Chapter 11

Joanna was still at the crime scene when Dr. Waller reached her. “Sheriff Brady,” he began. “I can’t imagine what you were thinking. You put me and the hospital in a terrible position!”

“Me?” Joanna asked innocently, but of course she knew exactly what was coming.

“When a woman claiming to be Jeannine Phillips’s mother showed up late this morning and when she asked that we process a rape kit, I assumed she was legitimate-that you or one of your officers had actually made a next-of-kin notification. Imagine my surprise this afternoon, during rounds, when there was a near brawl in the ICU waiting room between two women, both of whom said Ms. Phillips was her daughter. The one had come all the way from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. She only found out her daughter was hospitalized because a friend from Tucson called to check on her after seeing Ms. Phillips’s name on the local news.”

“How do you suppose such a thing happened?” Joanna returned. As she said the words, though, she was thinking about how the raised voices of two very angry women would have sounded in the hushed gloom of the ICU waiting room. And had the battle escalated to more than voices, Joanna suspected Millicent Ross would have been quite capable of physically defending herself.

“Right,” Dr. Waller said sarcastically. “I’m sure you can’t. And since the rape kit was illegally obtained, I’m not at all sure the results will stand up in court.”