Fatal Error

of Arizona to begin their law enforcement duties. The whole experience had been an incredible high.

As a result, nothing could have prepared her for what happened to her the following Monday morning. Dressed in a perfectly creased uniform, she drove to Prescott fully expecting to resume her media relations duties. Before the scheduled preshift roll call meeting at nine, however, Sheriff Gordon Maxwell called her into his office, sat her down opposite his desk, and gave her the bad news.

“I’m sorry to do this, Ali, but I’m going to have to furlough you.”

At first Ali didn’t think she’d heard him right. “Furlough?” she repeated. “As in let me go?”

He nodded.

“Are you kidding? I just busted my butt for six weeks getting through the academy.”

“I understand,” he said. “And no, I’m not kidding. Believe me, I’m very, very sorry. The county budget-cutting axe fell on every aspect of county government about three weeks ago. I knew then this was going to happen. I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t want you to drop out without finishing the course. And you did great, by the way.”

“Right,” Ali replied sarcastically. “I did so well that now I’m being fired.”

“Furloughed, not fired,” Maxwell insisted. “Once the fiscal situation straightens out, I fully expect to bring you back as a sworn officer, but right this minute my hands are tied. Last in, first out, and all that jazz. Hell, Ali, it was either you or Jimmy. He’s got a couple of kids and really needs this job.”

Deputy Jimmy Potter happened to be a recent hire as well. He and Ali shared office space in the Village of Oak Creek Substation. He was a nice guy with a wife and a pair of preschool-aged children. Ali could see that Sheriff Maxwell had a point. Ali had no dependents. Her financial situation made work an option for her rather than a necessity, but she really wanted this job. She loved it. She was good at it.

“So that makes me expendable?” Ali asked.

“Not expendable, not at all.”

Despite what he said, it turned out Ali Reynolds was indeed expendable. Without ever attending that morning’s roll call, she turned in her laptop, her cell phone, her weapons, and her badge and went home. She wasn’t in disgrace, but it certainly felt like it.

In a way, losing the media relations job was somehow worse than losing her newscasting job in California years earlier. Her response to that had been to pack up and go home to Sedona. This time she was already in Sedona. That left her nowhere else to run. L.A. was big enough to allow for a certain amount of anonymity. Sedona was another proposition entirely. Everyone seemed to know she’d been laid off. Even though most of the comments came in the inoffensive guise of harmless well-wishing, the lack of privacy in both her love life and job situation bothered her.

She had been forced to sit on the sidelines licking her wounds and watching while the media storm over the “sweat lodge wars” once again catapulted the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department to national prominence. And who was doing the media relations work for the department in the midst of that maelstrom? The guy with his face on TV and voice on the radio was Mike Sawyer, a twenty-two-year-old college kid Ali had brought on board as an unpaid summer intern while she was down in Phoenix at the academy. Instead of returning to school to work on his master’s degree in the fall, he had stayed on.

It irked Ali that Sheriff Maxwell couldn’t scrape up enough money to pay her but had managed to find enough funds in the budget to pay Mike. It probably wasn’t a living wage, because Mike was living with his parents, but still. .

One of the customers at the counter held up his coffee mug and caught Ali’s attention. “Can I have a refill?”

“Sure.”

Ali poured coffee, dropped off a check, picked up some menus, and put them back in the holder over by the cash register.

So what had Ali done since that day of her surprising “furlough”? She’d read books, dozens of them. She was just now working her way through The Count of Monte Cristo. It was a book Mr. Gabrielson, her English teacher at Mingus Mountain High, had recommended to her years ago. With nothing else pressing, Ali had decided this forced hiatus was a perfect opportunity to read all those books she had said she would get around to reading someday when she had time. At the moment finding time for reading was not a problem.

Reading aside, Ali Reynolds was bored. She was beyond bored. When she’d been working for the department, she’d enjoyed everything about her job including the hour-and-a-half commute on those days when she’d drive from Sedona to the county seat in Prescott. Yes, she hadn’t been well accepted by some of the old-timers there, but she’d been working on getting along with them and she was surprised to discover that, once she was sent packing, she missed everything about her work for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department, including some of the prickly clerks in the front office.

Ali’s mother had suggested that Ali give the garden club a try, but Ali’s lack of anything resembling a green thumb precluded that. She had zero artistic skill, so taking up drawing or painting wasn’t an option. She didn’t play golf or tennis. She didn’t ride horses. She wasn’t into hot-air ballooning.

When B. was in town, the two of them had fun hiking in Sedona’s red-rock wilderness, but these days B. was out of town as much or more than he was home. Most of the time her parents were bound up with the Sugarloaf Cafe and their own peculiar squabbles. Chris and Athena were building their own lives together and getting ready for the birth of their twins.

Ali had Leland Brooks to fall back on, of course. He kept her house running in tip-top shape. Theirs was a pleasant, untroubled relationship with each respecting the other’s privacy, but Leland wasn’t someone she could talk to, not really talk.

What Ali missed more than anything was having friends, close friends. Her best pal from high school, Reenie Bernard, had been dead for years. Dave Holman was still working for the sheriff’s department as their lead homicide investigator. Dave and Ali were friends, but when Dave wasn’t at work, he was preoccupied with raising his two teenaged daughters.

Ali had one new friend, a seventysomething nun named Sister Anselm. They had met in the course of caring for a badly injured burn victim and had bonded after surviving a shootout with a suicidal ecoterrorist. Sister Anselm lived at Saint Bernadette’s, a Sisters of Providence convent in Jerome that specialized in treating troubled nuns. Unlike Ali, Sister Anselm was fully employed, either at the convent itself or traveling all over Arizona as a patient advocate for severely injured and mostly indigent patients.

Had anyone asked Bob and Edie Larson about their religion, they would both have claimed to be Lutheran. Because Sunday mornings were big business at the Sugarloaf, other than attending occasional weddings and funerals, they’d barely stepped inside a church of any kind for years. Having grown up as a relatively unchurched child, Ali had remained so as an adult and had raised Chris without regular church attendance. In advance of the twins’ birth, Athena and Chris had joined the congregation of Red Rock Lutheran.

All that background made the growing friendship between Ali and Sister Anselm seem unlikely, but the two women managed to get together once a week or so for a quick dinner or for one of Leland Brooks’s sumptuous English teas. Sister Anselm was a trained psychologist, and it sometimes occurred to Ali that their visits turned into informal counseling sessions in which Ali ended up grumbling about being let out to pasture.

It was at Sister Anselm’s gentle urging that Ali had broached the idea of sending Bob and Edie away on a January cruise. January, of course, was the best time for them to go since it was still far too chilly in Sedona for a full snowbird onslaught. That would come later in the spring.

The front door opened. Ali was pulled from her reverie by a group of eight people who piled into the room, bringing with them a gust of cold air and a buzz of conversation. Jan Howard, the Sugarloaf’s longtime waitress, had been outside on a break, puffing on one of her unfiltered Camels. She hurried inside as well. She grabbed up a handful of menus and helped the new arrivals sort themselves into three groups. A four-top and a two-top went to booths in Jan Howard’s station. The other two made for Ali’s counter. As they sat down to study the menus, Ali went to make a new pot of coffee.

For the next two hours she worked nonstop. When they finally closed the Sugarloaf’s front door on the last lunchtime customer at two thirty in the afternoon, Ali was beyond tired, and that was before they finished doing the cleanup work necessary to have the place ready to open the next morning.

When it was finally time to head home, she could hardly wait. She was ready to shower, take a nap, and sit