“Beaumont!” he exclaimed. “What’s the news?”

“Not good, I’m afraid,” I told him. “It’s looking more and more like whoever did this went to great effort to frame Latisha Wall’s boyfriend.”

“Damn!” Ross Connors said.

“But wait,” I added, “there’s more.” I must have sounded for all the world like an agitated announcer hawking television’s latest 1-800 fruitcake invention. “You remember that second homicide I told you about, the one I said could be related?”

“The one Sheriff Brady threw you off?” Connors asked.

“Right. It turns out the second victim was a good friend of Latisha Wall’s. Her name was Deidre Canfield. The prime suspect in that case is a guy named Jack Brampton. Ever heard of him?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Bisbee’s a small town,” I explained. “A snoopy neighbor let on that this Brampton character routinely used a pay phone down near the post office. Our informant was under the impression that Brampton had a girlfriend on the side.”

“Do people do that in small towns?” Connors demanded with a chuckle. “Are they so bored that they have to report on pay phone use, for Crissake? What about cell phones? Do they call in if someone uses one of those, too?”

Right that minute I didn’t feel like explaining the difficulties of cell-phone usage in Bisbee, Arizona. Instead, I forged on. “We suspect that Brampton used one of those phones three times on Thursday, once in the morning and twice in the afternoon, the second time was within minutes of his learning that Cochise County investigators were going to fingerprint him as part of the Latisha Wall investigation.”

“Get to the point,” Connors urged.

“The calls went to someone in Winnetka, Illinois, at a law firm called Maddern, Maddern, and Peek. One of Maddern, Maddern, and Peek’s big-deal clients happens to be UPPI, and Brampton did time in a UPPI facility when he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.”

There was stark silence on the other end of the phone, a silence so complete that I wondered if maybe I’d been disconnected. Finally, Connors said quietly, “There really is a leak, then.”

“No shit,” I agreed.

“I’ll have to bring the feds in,” he added.

It was a statement, not a question. My response should have been an unequivocal and resounding yes, but I said nothing, letting Ross Connors draw his own conclusions. There was another long pause. Finally, he took a deep breath.

“All right, Beau, here’s what we’re going to do. I know how this must look to you, but I’m going to let sleeping dogs lie for another day or so. I don’t want to do anything prematurely. So far this all sounds pretty circumstantial. You keep right on doing whatever it is you’re doing, and keep me posted on anything else that comes up. I’m not going to make my move until after we have rock-solid evidence.”

What more do you want? I wondered.

Thinking about it, I figured Connors needed the extra time to come to terms with his changing reality. It also occurred to me that he might be looking for a way to cover his own butt. Still, the man was my boss, and he was calling the shots. If he wanted to wait for more damning information before nailing his own people, that was entirely up to him.

“Sure,” I said coldly, “I’ll be in touch,” And we signed off.

I put down the phone and gave myself the benefit of a long, hot shower. Then I lay down on the bed with every intention of watching television. I saw a few minutes of 60 Minutes. It wasn’t even dark yet before I was sound asleep.

Anne Corley stopped by to visit and woke me up around three. In the wee small hours of the morning I was once again wide awake and sleepless in Bisbee, Arizona. But I wasn’t mulling over the increasingly complicated aspects of the Latisha Wall and Deidre Canfield cases. No, I was thinking about something else. Someone else. I was thinking about a little girl named Anne, growing up in a house with a developmentally disabled sister she was unable to protect from their pedophile father and with a mother who didn’t believe – who wouldn’t believe – anything of the kind could happen under her own roof.

No wonder the Anne I had known had been so terribly damaged and hurt. She had been an incredibly beautiful but broken bird. No wonder I had loved her.

IT WAS TEN O’CLOCK THAT NIGHT when Joanna Brady finally dragged herself into the house at High Lonesome Ranch. Jenny was already in bed. Joanna was rummaging through the refrigerator for leftovers when she spotted a bottle of champagne and two glasses sitting on the table in the breakfast nook.

A broadly grinning Butch Dixon appeared in the kitchen doorway. “What’s this?” she asked, nodding toward the bottle.

“Nothing much,” he said casually, but Joanna knew at once that wasn’t true. The man looked so pleased with himself she thought he was going to burst.

“What nothing much?” Joanna asked.

“I had a call from an agent today,” he beamed. “Her name is Drew Mabrey, and she wants to represent me. She says she thinks she knows an editor who’s looking for something just like Serve and Protect.”

Joanna slammed the refrigerator door shut, hurried over, and planted a congratulatory kiss on her husband’s lips. “That’s great!” she exclaimed. “Wonderful! What else did he say?”

“She,” Butch corrected. “The agent’s a woman.”

“Did she tell you how good it was?” Joanna continued. “I told you it was good, didn’t I?”

“Yes.” He smiled, heading for the champagne. “I think you did say something to that effect. That it was all right, anyway.”

Joanna glared at him in mock exasperation. “I never said anything of the kind and you know it. Now tell me. What did she say?”

“Like I said before,” he told her, carefully loosening the cork. “Drew loves it and wants to handle it, but there’s a problem.”

“What? Tell me.”

“It’s my name.”

“Your name?” Joanna asked, mystified. “What’s wrong with your name?”

“Drew said she almost didn’t bother to read it because it came under the name F. W. Dixon.”

“So what? Those are your initials. It is your name.”

“But it’s also the pseudonym of the author who wrote the Hardy Boy books, remember?”

“So?”

“Drew said that while she was growing up, she had to go visit her grandmother in Connecticut every summer. Her grandmother kept trying to get her to read her old Hardy Boy mysteries. Drew ended up hating them.”

“So drop the initials then,” Joanna advised Butch. “Write under the name of Frederick Dixon. What’s wrong with that?”

“There’s a difficulty there, too,” Butch said. With a practiced hand he poured champagne into the glasses, doing it slowly enough that no liquid bubbled over the sides. “Drew says that with all the humor in the story it’s really more of a cozy than a police procedural. She says male readers don’t buy cozies; women do, and most cozies are written by women.”

“What are you supposed to do, then?” Joanna asked.

“She wants me to change my name to something ‘less gender-specific’ were the words she used. Something like Kendall Dixon or Dale Dixon or Gayle Dixon.”

“The agent wants you to pretend to be a woman to fool your readers?”

“And the editor, too,” Butch said. “She wants me to pick a name before she submits the manuscript to anyone.”

“What do you do when it comes time for an author photo?” Joanna asked.

Giving her the champagne, Butch shrugged. “I give up. I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

Joanna raised her glass in a toast. “Well, here’s to you, then,” she said with a smile “Or to whoever you turn out to be.”

“So tell me about your day,” Butch said as they settled into the breakfast nook to sip their champagne. “I knew you’d never make it to church.”

WHEN JOANNA ARRIVED AT WORK the next morning, Kristin Gregovich was nowhere to be seen, but the conference room down the hall was already crowded. Frank Montoya, Ernie Carpenter, and Jaime Carbajal were seated around the table. J.P. Beaumont, however, was among the missing.