Rattlesnake Crossing

It was after midnight before Joanna finally headed for home. Miraculously, the threatened rainstorm had moved north into Graham County without ever hitting the crime scene. Once the body was loaded into a van-a second Pima County morgue van-Joanna had ordered the vicinity of the burial mound covered with tarps. That done, she and her weary collection of investigators had called it a job. If there was anything left to find, it would be better to search for it in daylight.

More than an hour later, when she was finally driving up the narrow dirt road that led to High Lonesome Ranch with Sadie and Tigger racing out to greet her, she saw two extra sets of tire tracks that had been left behind in the dirt.

Now who… Joanna didn't even finish framing the question before she knew the answer. Butch Dixon! Butch had come to take her to dinner and she had forgotten all about it-had forgotten all about him. She had stood the poor guy up. In typical homicide-cop fashion, she had become so embroiled with the body on the ledge that personal obligations had slipped her mind completely.

There was a note pinned to the screen door with a bent paper clip. 'You must be tied up,' it said. 'Sorry I missed you. Butch.'

Tired, dirty, and frustrated-pained by guilt and kicking herself for it-Joanna slammed her way into the house. She was mad at herself, but, unaccountably, she was also mad at Butch. After all, she hadn't meant to stand him up. She had tried to contact him. It wasn't her fault that he hadn't left a telephone trail do she could have caught tip with him in a timely fashion and let him know what was happening.

She slopped in the laundry room, stripped off her soiled clothes, and stuffed them into the washer. Then she went straight to the phone to check for messages, hoping there would he one from Butch. There was a single message, a short one from Marianne, that had come in at eleven-fifty. 'It's Mari. I'll talk to you in the morning.'

And that was all. Disappointed that there was no further message from Butch and believing it was far too late to call Marianne back, Joanna headed for the shower. She stood under the steamy water, letting it roll off her stiff and aching body. And in the course of that overly long and what Eleanor would have regarded as an 'extravagant' shower, Joanna Brady made a disturbing connection.

She remembered all the times her mother had been irate with her father because D. H. Lathrop had gotten himself entangled in some case or other and had missed dinner or one of Joanna's Christmas programs at church or a dinner date Eleanor had set her heart on attending. And there had been times over the years, while Andy was a deputy, that Joanna and he had played out that same drama, following almost the exact same script. Andy would come home late, and Joanna would be at the door to meet him and gripe at him for getting so involved in what he was doing that he had missed Jenny's parent/teacher conference at school or her T-ball game down at the park.

Turning off the water, Joanna stepped out of the tub, wrapped a towel around her dripping body, and stared at her image in the steam-fogged mirror. 'I don't believe it,' she told her reflection. 'The shoe is on the other damn foot now, isn't it!'

And it was true. Joanna Brady had changed. Without realizing it, she had turned into a real cop, into someone for whom a homicide investigation became paramount and took precedence over everything else. Shaking her head, she staggered out of the bathroom. How the hell did that happen? she wondered.

Naked and still damp, she fell into bed. She was so exhausted that she should have dropped off right away. But she didn't. She kept seeing that bare, bony skull glowing tip at her in the glare of Ernie Carpenter's battery-powered trouble light.

Finally, after an hour, she got up, went out to the kitchen, and poured herself a shot of whiskey, emptying the last of the Wild Turkey that Marianne Maculyea had brought her the night Andy died.

That, too, reminded Joanna of other times, of times Andy had come home work-exhausted, had gone to bed, but had tossed and turned and been unable to sleep. How many times had she hassled him for that, too? she wondered now. How many times had she given the man hell for sitting in the kitchen in the dark late at night-for sitting and brooding?

'Sorry, Andy,' she said aloud, raising her glass in his memory. 'Please forgive me. I didn't know what I was talking about.'

Had there been more booze in the house, she might have been tempted to have another drink. As it was, though, she drank only the one, and then she went to bed. She might have tossed and turned some more, but the whiskey, combined with the hard physical labor of moving all those rocks, made further brooding impossible.

She lay down on the bed, put her head on the pillow, pulled the sheet up around her shoulders, and fell sleep. Not sound sleep. Not a deeply restful sleep, but sleep haunted by vague and disturbing nightmares that disappeared as soon as she awoke and tried to recall them.

Considering all she'd been through that day, maybe that was just as well.

CHAPTER TEN

The phone awakened her. Groggy from restless sleep, she almost knocked it on the floor before she finally managed to grasp the handset and get it to her ear. 'Hello?'

'Joanna, I'm sorry,' Angie Kellogg apologized. 'I woke you up, didn't I?'

'It's all right,' Joanna said, squinting at the clock. It was almost seven; the alarm would have gone off in a minute anyway. 'What's up?'

'I'm at Jeff and Marianne's,' Angie said. 'I'm taking care of Ruth.'

Joanna sat up in bed. 'Esther isn't in the hospital again, is she?'

'She is,' Angie replied. 'And it's the most wonderful thing-wonderful and terrible at the same time. Jeff and Marianne got a call from the hospital last night. A heart became available. A little girl in Tucson drowned in her grandparents' pool. That's the terrible part, but for Esther, it's going to be wonderful.'

As a wave of impatience washed over her, Joanna clambered out of bed. 'If that's what was going on, why didn't Marianne say so when she called?'

'You talked to her then?' Angie asked.

'No, she left a message, but I should have known.'

'Known what?' Angie asked.

'That something was going on. When I got the message I decided it was too late to call her back. What time did the hospital call?' Joanna asked.

'Right around midnight,' Angie replied. 'Marianne called me just as I was closing up at one, and asked if I'd come look after Ruth. I told them I'd be right over.'

Helping rehabilitate Angie Kellogg, a former L.A. hooker, had been a joint project assumed by both Joanna Brady and Marianne Maculyea. After escaping virtual imprisonment at the hands of a sadistic hit-man boyfriend, twenty-five-year-old Angie had been totally without resources when she first landed in Bisbee.

Taken under Joanna's and Marianne's protective wings, Angie was making a new life for herself. Bartending for Bobo Jenkins was her first legitimate job. With Jeff Daniels' help, she had purchased her own car-a seventeen- year-old Oldsmobile Omega-which she actually knew how to drive. She owned her own little house, a two-bedroom, in what had once been company housing for Phelps Dodge miners. For topping on the cake, she also had a boyfriend-a real boyfriend-for the first time in her life. Baby-sitting on a moment's notice both for Jeff and Marianne and for Joanna was Angie's way of repaying her benefactors for all they had done for her and for all the many blessings in her new life.

'What can I do to help?' Joanna asked. 'Who's going to look after Ruth when you have to go to work?'

'I already talked to Bobo about it,' Angie said. Bobo Jenkins was the African-American owner of the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge in Bisbee's famed Brewery Gulch, where Angie worked as a relief bartender. 'He said I could take both today and tomorrow off. And I talked to Dennis. He says he'll come to town early on Friday so he can take over when my shift starts.'

Angie had met Dennis Hacker, a British-born naturalist, through a mutual interest in bird-watching. Originally, Angie had been fascinated by his Audubon Society-funded project to reintroduce parrots into their former habitat in the Chiricahua and Peloncillo mountains of southeastern Arizona.