her easel. It sat there staring back at her, waiting for her hands to fill it with color and give it life. Turning away from the empty canvas, she settled down at her drafting table and went through her sketchbooks trying to decide what she would paint next. Finally, around nine or so, she went to bed.
In her dream, she was back in Desert Storm. Oil-well fires, burning all around her, filled the air with evil- smelling smoke. She couldn’t breathe. She felt as if she were choking; her eyes were tearing. What woke her up, though, wasn’t the dream. It was a terrible cramping in her gut. Writhing in pain, Rochelle attempted to get out of bed, but before her feet touched the floor, her body heaved. The involuntary spasm hurled a spray of vomit halfway across the room. Falling back onto the bed, she grasped blindly for the phone. Somehow she reached it. Her stabbing fingers seemed numb and out of control, almost as though they belonged to someone else. Struggling desperately to manage her limbs, she finally succeeded in dialing.
“Nine one one,” the calm voice of an emergency dispatcher responded. “What is the nature of your emergency?”
By then Rochelle Baxter was beyond answering. Another wild spasm of vomiting hit her and sent her reeling back onto the bed. As she lay there, retching helplessly and unable to move, the phone clattered uselessly to the floor.
“Ma’am?” the operator said more urgently. “Can you hear me? Is there anyone there to help you? Can you tell me your location?”
There was no answer. By then Rochelle Baxter was beyond hearing as well. A few minutes later, medics dispatched by the Cochise County emergency operator arrived at the scene. When no one responded to their repeated knocking, they finally splintered the sturdy front door to gain entry. While a noisy burglar alarm squawked its insistent warning in the background, a young EMT located Rochelle in her vomit-splattered bed. Gingerly, he felt for a pulse, then looked at his supervisor and shook his head.
“We may have already lost her,” he said.
One
AS SHERIFF JOANNA BRADY DROVE through the last thicket of mesquite, the house at High Lonesome Ranch lay dark and still under a rising moon. Usually her daughter Jenny’s two dogs – Sadie, a bluetick hound, and Tigger, a half golden retriever/half pit-bull mutt – would have bounded through the undergrowth to meet her. This time, Joanna surmised, they had chosen to accompany Butch on his appointment with the contractor at the site of the new house they were planning to build a mile or so away.
Butch had bugged out of St. Dominick’s immediately after the service, while he and Joanna waited for the sanctuary to empty. “I’ll stay if you want,” he had whispered. “But I really need to go.”
“Right,” she had told him. “You do what you have to. I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll stop by the house and do the chores first,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.”
Joanna had simply nodded. “Thanks,” she said.
By then Yolanda Ortiz Canedo’s grieving husband, her two young sons, her parents, brothers, and sister were walking out of the church through two lines of saluting officers made up of both police and fire department personnel. Joanna could barely stand to watch. It was all too familiar, too close to her own experience. As her green eyes filled with tears, Joanna glanced away, only to catch sight of the prisoners. That forlorn group – eleven county prisoners, freshly barbered and dressed in civilian clothes – stood in respectful silence under the watchful eyes of two jail guards and Ted Chapman, the executive director of the Cochise County Jail Ministry.
Ted had come to Joanna’s office the day after the young jail matron had died of cervical cancer at a hospice facility in Tucson. “Some of the inmates would like to go to the services,” Chapman had said. “Yolanda Canedo did a lot of good around here. She really cared about the guys she worked with, and it showed. She helped me get the jail literacy program going, and she came in during off-hours to give individual help to prisoners who were going after GEDs. Some of the people she helped – inmates who have already been released – will be there on their own, but the ones who are still in lockup wanted me to ask if they could go, too. The newer prisoners, the ones who came in after Yolanda got sick, aren’t included, of course. They have no idea who she was or what she did.”
“What about security?” Sheriff Brady had asked. “Who’s going to stand guard?”
“I already have two volunteers who will come in on their day off,” Chapman answered. “You have my word of honor, along with that of the prisoners, that there won’t be any trouble.”
Joanna thought about how good some of the jail inmates’ words of honor might be. But then she also had to consider the notebook full of greetings – handmade by jail inmates – that Reverend Chapman had brought to Yolanda and her family as the young woman had lain gravely ill in the Intensive Care Unit at University Medical Center in Tucson. Sheriff Brady had been touched by the heartfelt sincerity in all those clumsily pasted-together cards. Several of them had been made by men able to sign their own names at the bottom of a greeting card for the very first time. Other cards had names printed by someone else under scrawled Xs. Their good wishes had seemed genuine enough back then. Now, so did the Reverend Chapman’s somewhat unorthodox request.
“How many inmates are we talking about?” Joanna had asked.
“Fourteen.”
“Any of them high-risk?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Give me the list,” Joanna had conceded at last. “I’m not making any promises, but I’ll run the proposition by the jail commander and see what he has to say.”
In the end, eleven of the proposed inmates had been allowed to attend the service. In his eulogy, Father Morris had spoken of Yolanda Canedo as a remarkable young woman. Certainly the presence of that solemn collection of inmates bore witness to that. And, as far as Joanna could tell, the prisoners’ behavior had been nothing short of exemplary.
They stood now in a single straight row. With feet splayed apart and hands clasped behind their backs, they might have been a troop of soldiers standing at ease. Seeing them there, dignified and silent in the warm afternoon sun, Joanna was glad she had vetoed the jail commander’s suggestion that they attend the funeral wearing handcuffs and shackles.
Chief Deputy Frank Montoya came up behind her then. “Hey, boss,” he whispered in her ear. “They’re putting the casket into the hearse. Since we’re supposed to be directly behind the family cars, we’d better mount up.”
Nodding, Joanna left the inmates to the care of the two guards and Ted Chapman and walked back toward Frank’s waiting Crown Victoria. Even in heels, the five-foot-four sheriff felt dwarfed as she made her way through the crush of uniformed officers. A light breeze riffled her short red hair.
“Looks like the members of Reverend Chapman’s flock are behaving themselves,” her chief deputy observed, as he started the Civvie’s engine.
“So far so good,” Joanna agreed.
“But they’re not coming to the cemetery?”
Joanna shook her head. “No. Having them at the church is one thing, but going to the cemetery is something else. If there’s any confusion, I was afraid one or more of them might slip away.”
“You’ve got that right,” Frank agreed. “We don’t need to give your friend Ken Junior anything else to piss and moan about.”
“Since when does he need a reason?” Joanna returned.
Ken Junior, otherwise known as Deputy Kenneth Galloway, was Sheriff Brady’s current problem child. He was the nephew and namesake of another Deputy Galloway, one who had been part of a network of corrupt police officers in the administration that had immediately preceded Joanna’s. The elder Galloway had died as a result of wounds received during an armed confrontation with Joanna Brady. Although Joanna had been cleared of any wrongdoing in that incident, the dead man’s relatives continued to hold her responsible for Galloway ’s death.
Although the younger man was the deceased deputy’s nephew rather than his son, around the department, he was referred to as Ken Junior. Fresh out of the Arizona Police Academy at the time of his uncle’s death, the younger Galloway had been far too new and inexperienced to have taken an active part in the police corruption that had marred Sheriff Walter V. McFadden’s administration. For that reason, Ken Junior had been allowed to stay on as a Cochise County deputy sheriff. Never a great supporter of Joanna’s, he had quickly gravitated to union activism and
