Joanna stood up and came around to the front of the desk. “You look upset, Kristin,” she said. “What is it? Is there something the matter with the baby?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that,” the young woman answered hurriedly. “Shaundra’s fine. The thing is, the only time we could get in for the ultrasound was late yesterday afternoon. We went right after the church service ended. By the time we finished up at the hospital, it was too late to go to the graveside service. I was too beat to go to the reception, so Terry and I just stayed home. But I didn’t want you to think we didn’t come because…” Kristin’s voice trailed off uneasily.
When Joanna had first taken over the job of sheriff, she and her young secretary had needed to sort out some issues between them. For a time after Joanna’s election, Kristin’s loyalties had remained with members of the previous administration. With the passage of time, however, the two women had developed a comfortable working relationship. Months earlier, Joanna was the person to whom Kristin had first confided the news of her unexpected pregnancy. And it was Joanna who had helped Kristin and Terry arrange their nice but hurried shotgun wedding.
In the months since, Joanna Brady had taken a kind of proprietary interest in the young couple’s situation. She had been more than a little disappointed the day before when she’d been forced to assume that they, too, had boycotted the funeral reception. It had hurt her to think that both Kristin and Terry had aligned themselves with Ken Galloway’s malcontents in Local 83. That, of course, had been the other reason Joanna had avoided announcing her presence to Kristin.
“You didn’t want me to think you missed the reception because of what?” Joanna asked.
“You know,” Kristin said with an uneasy shrug. “Because of what’s going on around here.”
“You mean because of Deputy Galloway?”
Kristin nodded. “That’s right. Neither Terry nor I wanted to have anything to do with him and his buddies,” she said quickly. “But four forty-five was the only time we could schedule the ultrasound, and the doctor was later than that. I just wanted you to know, Sheriff Brady – whatever those guys in the union are trying to pull, Terry and I aren’t involved. If we had known what was going to happen – that everybody else was going to stay away like they did – we would have come no matter what!”
A wave of relief washed over Joanna. She eased herself into the chair next to Kristin. Maybe things inside her department weren’t quite as universally one-sided as she had supposed.
“The baby’s welfare has to be your first priority,” Joanna said kindly. “Thanks for telling me, though.” She paused, then added, “But what exactly do you think Ken Junior and his pals are up to? Any ideas?”
“I don’t know,” Kristin said, shaking her head. “Not really. I asked Terry the same thing this morning on the way to work. He thinks most of the guys are just messing around and that we shouldn’t pay any attention to them. But how could they do something like that – ditch the cemetery and the reception, I mean? And what about Leon Cañedo? How do those jerks think their staying away made him feel?” Kristin demanded, her voice quivering with suppressed emotion. “What would they think if somebody did something like that to their wives or kids?”
Joanna leaned back in the chair and thought for a moment before she answered. She didn’t want whatever she said to Kristin to add to her department’s inner turmoil if it happened to be repeated to anyone else.
“Some people are simply incapable of putting themselves in anybody else’s shoes, Kristin,” she said finally. “Empathy won’t ever be one of Deputy Galloway’s long suits. But if it will put your mind at ease, I think Leon Cañedo was so overwhelmed by everything that was going on yesterday, he probably didn’t notice who was there and who wasn’t. Ken Junior may have drained off everyone he could bamboozle into not showing up, but it was still standing room only in the parish hall up at St. Dominick’s for most of the evening.”
Kristin heaved another sigh, this one of relief. “Good. I’m really glad.” Saying that, she pushed her unwieldy body upright. “Now that I know you’re here,” she said, “I’ll go get your messages.”
Joanna felt like saying, Do you have to? She didn’t. Instead, she watched Kristin waddle out of the room before returning to her own desk. Moments later, Kristin was back with a fanfold of telephone message slips in her hand. “Chief Deputy Montoya wants to know if you’re ready for the briefing yet.”
“Not yet. Give me a while.”
Nodding, Kristin went out, closing the door behind her. Joanna took the messages and shuffled through them. One was from her mother, one from the county attorney’s office, and two were from people in the community whose names she recognized but who had somehow failed to mention exactly why they were calling. Pulling all pertinent information from reticent phone callers was one of the essential secretarial skills Kristin Gregovich had yet to master. The bottom message was from Butch. “Daisy’s,” it said. “Twelve o’clock. don’t forget!”
With an air of impatience she pushed that one aside. After all, it wasn’t anywhere near twelve yet. What would make him think she’d forget? She glanced at her watch. It was only twenty past eleven – plenty of time.
When it came to returning phone calls, Joanna was a believer in doing the tough things first. She dialed her mother’s number immediately.
“Why, there you are,” Eleanor Lathrop Winfield said. “I’m so glad you called back. I just had the strangest conversation with Marliss Shackleford.”
The fact that her mother was a longtime bosom buddy of The Bisbee Bee’s featured columnist was one of the crosses Sheriff Joanna Brady had learned to bear. Anytime there was a question Marliss didn’t want to pose through official channels – like going through the media relations officer, Chief Deputy Montoya – she had no compunction about asking Eleanor instead. Joanna’s first thought was that Marliss was on the trail of something to do with the Rochelle Baxter case. That assumption proved wrong.
“Marliss asked me why there were so few Cochise County deputies in attendance at the funeral reception yesterday evening,” Eleanor was saying. “I told her she had to be mistaken. I was there myself. It seemed to me there were plenty of people in uniform, all of them plowing through that buffet like they hadn’t eaten in days.”
Hardly any of those starving uniforms belonged to me, Joanna thought despairingly. It bugged her to realize that, as usual, Marliss Shackleford had focused in on the one critical issue Sheriff Brady had been trying to dodge. Rather than issuing a denial Marliss could easily refute, Joanna played coy.
“Really,” she said, feigning as much innocence as she could muster. “Marliss says my deputies weren’t there? That’s strange. I could have sworn they were all over the place, but I could be wrong. I had a few other details to worry about. There wasn’t time for an official roll call.”
“See there?” Eleanor responded, sounding relieved. “I tried to tell Marliss that very thing – that she had to be mistaken, but you know her. Sometimes you have to hit that woman over the head with a baseball bat to get through to her.”
Hitting Marliss Shackleford over the head with anything sounded like an excellent idea to Sheriff Joanna Brady about then, but she fought down a biting comment that could have turned into additional ammunition. “I’ve noticed,” she agreed.
“I’d best be going,” Eleanor went on briskly. “I just spoke to George. He’s finished up with whatever it was he had to do this morning. He’s coming home for lunch. I should get it on the table. The egg salad is ready, but I haven’t made sandwiches yet.”
That, too, was vintage Eleanor Lathrop. The “whatever” George Winfield had to do that morning was to perform an autopsy. How like Eleanor simply to gloss over and/or ignore anything remotely unpleasant. Her husband’s title might be that of Cochise County Medical Examiner, but in Eleanor’s self-centered world, none of his professional duties were any more important than the egg-salad sandwiches she planned to serve for lunch. And if a scheduled autopsy or an unexpected phone call happened to delay him beyond what Eleanor considered reasonable, Joanna knew there would be hell to pay.