easier to circumvent parental disapproval. They would be able to do the same things they did now-they just wouldn’t have to lie about it.
Leaning back on the stool, Bree breathed deeply, thought about Nacio, and wished he were there with her to share the wonder of this beautiful night. She was still sitting that same way when she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle.
On other nights, lying together in the back of her truck, cuddling in the warmth of a double bedroll, Bree and Nacio had heard an occasional and virtually invisible vehicle pass by on the Forest Service road half a mile away. Now, though, staring off in the direction of the road, Bree was able to make out the glow of slow-moving headlights. Holding her breath, Bree waited to see if the vehicle would pass on by or if it really would turn left at the turnoff.
Long moments later, it did. The headlights that had been moving eastbound suddenly turned north. Clutching her journal to her, Brianna O’Brien leaped to her feet and hurried to meet her lover. She could hardly wait to see him. She wanted nothing more than to share the glories of this wonderful night with him. She wanted to lie in the bedroll with their bodies entwined and tell him how much she loved him.
The headlights were closer now, flickering through the darkness, when Bree decided what to do. She loved Nacio with all the devotion of newly awakened passion. She knew what plea-sure he took in her body and she in his. And now, with the headlights flickering toward her, Bree knew there was a gift she could give Nacio-a gift only she could offer.
She had to hurry. In the process she put the journal down on a nearby rock and then failed to notice when it slipped off to one side. By the time the laboring engine of the approaching vehicle rounded the last outcropping of rock, she was ready and waiting.
Twin rays of light stabbed through the night and caught her there like a deer frozen and alert in the brilliant glow of a pair of high beams. Her arms were outstretched in greeting. A welcoming smile parted her lips.
The surprise for Nacio Ybarra-Bree’s gift to him-had nothing to do with her arms or with her lips. It had to do with the rest of her, impaled on those piercing rays of light. She was smooth and pale and beautiful and as unashamedly naked as flay she was born.
CHAPTER THREE
Dennis Hacker came home from his shopping trip and unloaded his supplies. At six-one, he had to be careful not to clip his head on the ceiling as he moved around the little two-wheeled caravan that Americans insisted on calling a trailer.
Once the groceries were put away, Dennis glanced at his cell phone before crawling into bed. It would be morning in England. If his grandmother, Emily Lockwood, was well enough, she would be downstairs, drinking her morning tea in her sunny kitchen and looking out at the beginnings of a lush summer garden.
He thought about calling her. That was why he had parked the trailer in this particular spot. It was the last usable place on Geronimo Trail where he could still send and receive a cell phone signal. He thought about telling her she might be right once again when it came to his contacting this young woman who had expressed such an unusual interest in Dennis Hacker’s beloved parrots.
Dennis considered calling his grandmother, but after some reflection, he didn’t. It was too soon, way too soon. Besides, Sunday morning was when she usually called him. Leaving the phone alone, he clambered up into the upper bunk. He had to lie on a diagonal in order to fit his frame into the bed. He fell asleep almost instantly.
Hacker had lived alone in the wilderness for so long that he was comfortable with the animal-punctuated silence that surrounded him. He had just settled into a sound sleep when something startled him awake. The unusual noise was gone before he was fully conscious, but he could tell from the total silence around him that the animals had heard it as well. They, too, were hushed and listening.
Swinging down to the rag rug-covered linoleum floor, he opened the door and stepped out onto the wooden step. Under a star studded sky, the Peloncillos were dead silent. After a minute or two, a coyote finally howled in the distance. The coyote’s plaintive yelp seemed to settle Dennis Hacker’s jangled nerves. Closing and locking both the metal door and the wooden screen door, he climbed back into bed and soon was fast asleep once more.
Long after Jenny’s bedroom light went out, Joanna lay sleepless in her own room. Over the months since Andy’s death, she had learned to sleep in the dead middle of the bed. It blurred the lines between his side and hers, making the bed seem smaller and not quite so lonely.
For a change, Sheriff Brady wasn’t worried about something at work. For the past two weeks all of Cochise County had been amazingly quiet. Other than rounding up the usual quota of undocumented aliens there had been no murders, no ugly domestic violence cases, no fatal traffic accidents, and only a few drunk drivers. The lack of new incidents had allowed her two detectives, Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal, to go back over a few old and still-unsolved cases to see if there was anything new that could be brought to bear.
For one thing, the county had recently installed an Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Usually the AFIS technician was so busy entering new prints into the system that there was no opportunity to do anything about cold cases. Already the extra effort was paying off. A perpetrator in a two-year-old Huachuca Mountains burglary case had been found in the Pima County jail in Tucson.
So, instead of worrying about work, Joanna was anticipating the next two weeks with a certain amount of dread. Jenny would be away at Camp Whispering Pines all that time. Although Joanna was confident Jenny would be fine, she wasn’t so sure how she herself would fare. High Lonesome Ranch had seemed decidedly well-named in the months since Andy’s death. With both Jenny and Andy gone, Joanna wasn’t convinced she’d be able to handle it.
Turning over on her side, trying to find a more comfortable position, Joanna forced herself to think about something else-about the solo shopping trip she had planned for herself in Tucson after she dropped Jenny off up on Mount Lemmon.
It was summer, and the simmering heat required a change of wardrobe. She needed some lightweight work clothes, ones that would be reasonably cool, look professional, and also be built in a fashion that would accommodate the soft body armor she wore each day when she went to work. There were times when she looked at some of her female officers and felt almost envious of their uniforms. At least they didn’t have to go to their closets every morning and decide what to wear.
Joanna wasn’t wild about shopping. She didn’t usually look forward to fighting her way in and out of malls jammed to the gills with mothers out shopping for early back-to-school bargains. Nonetheless, buying clothes was something that had to be done-a necessary evil. Then, when she came back from Tucson Saturday evening, she needed to see her mother.
Lately, both Joanna and her mother, Eleanor Lathrop, had been so busy they had barely seen each other. Not only that, there had been an alarming drop in the number of Eleanor’s phone calls.
“I’m too hot,” Jenny grumbled to her mother in an irritating whine. “Can’t we stop and get something to drink?”
Joanna Brady was hot, too. Twenty miles earlier, just outside Tombstone, the air-conditioner in her Eagle had finally given up the ghost. For weeks now, she had heard an ominous howl in the AC’s compressor, but she had hoped to nurse it along for a while longer-at least long enough to drive Jenny to camp. Naturally, it had quit working completely on the tip to Mount Lemmon and on what promised to be a record-breaking scorcher of a June day.
