Seconds after Frank walked off as well, Butch showed up and opened the car door. Joanna tumbled out of the Bronco and into his arms. She had been tough and strong long enough. Now all she wanted was to be held and comforted and told everything would be all right. Butch Dixon was happy to oblige.
“Come on,” he said. “I’m taking you home.”
“To your house?”
“Where else? I certainly can’t leave you here.”
“Shouldn’t I go inside and get a nightgown for tonight and something to change into tomorrow morning?”
“Sweetie pie,” he said. “The whole time you’ve been gone, I’ve been inside your house and looking over the damage. What you’re wearing is what you’ve got.”
“There’s nothing left?”
“Nothing salvageable. But there is some good news.”
“What’s that?”
“I talked to Dr. Ross a few minutes ago. She says she thinks both dogs are going to pull through. Come on.”
Joanna looked up at Butch through suddenly tear-dimmed eyes. That was just about the time a photographer from
“Forget it,” he said. “They got what they came for. Let them have it.”
“Wait,” she said. “What about Kristin? I’m sure she was planning on spending the night tonight as well.”
Butch nodded. “Fortunately for Kristin, all her stuff was in Jenny’s room, which means it’s fine. She’ll be spending the night at Terry’s. I don’t think she minded very much,” he added with a smile.
An hour later, with a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and single stiff Scotch under her belt, Joanna lay next to Butch in the queen-sized bed of his Saginaw-neighborhood home. “Remember, we weren’t going to have any more sleep-overs before the wedding,” she said wistfully.
“This isn’t a sleep-over,” Butch returned. “You’re a refugee.”
“With all this going on, maybe we should postpone the wedding,” Joanna hinted.
“No.”
“The honeymoon, then. What if we took it later?”
“No. If anything, we need the honeymoon more than ever.”
“But, Butch. How are we going to get the mess cleaned up? It’s so much-”
“Don’t you mean how am
“I sent everyone home tonight, but they’ll be back first thing in the morning. Jeff and Marianne will be there. Angie Kellogg and her boyfriend, that parrot guy. Jim Bob and Eva Lou. My folks. Your brother and his wife, to say nothing of your mother and who knows who else. And the fact that all those people will be doing salvage and cleanup means you don’t have to. You go to the department and do what you have to do in order for us to be out of town next week. Besides, it’s not going to be that bad. Except for the bathroom and kitchen the repairs are mostly cosmetic. Once we clean things up and dry the place out, it will be livable again. But maybe we don’t want to do that.”
“Don’t want to do what?”
“Live there. I’ve been reading articles in newspapers and magazines about a contractor from Tucson, a guy named Quentin Branch, who specializes in building rammed-earth houses. The house is actually constructed so the walls are made of layers of compacted dirt. A lot of time, whatever soil needs to be moved from the site in order to make way for construction can be worked into the construction of the house itself rather than having to be hauled off in dump trucks. Due to the miracle of natural insulation, rammed-earth houses are warm in the winter and cool in the summer. If we did that and built from scratch, we’d be starting married life fresh in a place that didn’t belong to somebody else first, either to you and Andy, or to me. It could be our place, Joanna, yours and mine.”
“It sounds like you’ve been giving this idea a lot of thought,” she said quietly.
“I have,” Butch admitted. “Long before what happened today. I’ve been worried about how all our furniture was going to fit into one place. How we’d all survive with that one bathroom and still be friends, to say nothing of lovers.”
“You were worried about that?” Joanna asked. Butch nodded. “So was I. I couldn’t figure out how it would work, but now it’s not nearly such a problem since all my furniture is wrecked.”
“Not all of it,” Butch said. “Jim Bob and I were talking about how to repair the damage to the dining room table and the buffet. But going back to what we were talking about-what would you think of the idea of building a new place?”
“I guess we could think about it,” Joanna conceded. “After all, thinking doesn’t cost anything.”
At nine o’clock the next morning, feeling grubby in her clothing from the previous day, Sheriff Joanna Brady hurried into the conference room just in time for the morning briefing. Frank Montoya and the two detectives were already present and drinking coffee.
“Hi, guys,” Joanna said, trying to keep things on a businesslike basis. She knew from meeting with Kristin Marsten a few minutes earlier that on the morning after the disaster at High Lonesome Ranch expressions of sympathy tended to erode her emotional control.
“Sorry I’m late,” she announced breezily. “I just got off the phone with Lucy Ridder. I’ve made arrangements for her to come here to be interviewed by Frank and Ernie and to do the composite drawing. I was in such a hurry yesterday that I forgot to bring Sister Celeste back here to the department to pick up her car. Right this minute, it’s still out in the parking lot, so she’ll be coming along with Lucy. That way, she can give Lucy some moral support and pick up her car at the same time. And since Sister Celeste already met you, Frank, I told her you’re the one who will come to Saint David to pick them up.”
“Good enough,” Frank said. “How soon?”
“As soon as you can get to Saint David after we finish up here. So where do we stand?”
“I already told Jaime about the computer thing,” Ernie Carpenter offered. “About Sandra Ridder’s work record being erased out at Fort Huachuca. He has some thoughts on the subject.”
All eyes in the room focused on Jaime Carbajal. “Which are?” Joanna urged.
“I started to tell you about this last night. When I was talking to Catherine Yates yesterday afternoon, she finally admitted that she hadn’t been entirely truthful when she spoke to us earlier. She told us she knew weeks earlier that Sandra was due to be released from prison. It seems somebody from the Justice Department came to Sandra several months ago. Whoever it was told her that somebody had finally gotten around to investigating allegations of security leaks that had occurred at Fort Huachuca back in the early nineties.
“He told her that investigators had somehow tied her into a plot that involved the lifting of top-secret command and control codes from STRATCOM for delivery to the Iraqis. The agent from the Justice Department offered her a sweet deal-an early out, full immunity from prosecution, and witness-protection status if she would tell them everything she knew. Sandra Ridder was nobody’s dummy. According to Catherine, she agreed to the deal and then upped the ante by offering to deliver an actual diskette containing encrypted codes in exchange for an extra cash bonus.”
“Any idea which agent made the deal?”
Jaime Carbajal shook his head. “None. My guess is that something like this is going to be damned difficult to trace from this end or from the bottom up.”
Joanna nodded. “Full-immunity packages don’t get passed out by lower-echelon players. I’ll give Adam York a call over at DEA. He may have some idea as to where we should start looking. But here’s my real concern: Why didn’t Catherine Yates bother to tell us any of this earlier?”
“She was afraid to,” Jaime answered. “Sandra had sworn her to secrecy. She told her mother that the other people involved-the people she used to work with-would kill her in a minute if they knew she was spilling the beans. She said that’s what they did to Tom Ridder. He found one of the disks before she had a chance to deliver it. Ridder hid the diskette and threatened to blow the whistle on the entire Fort Huachuca operation. Whoever was running the show tried to get the diskette back, but Ridder wouldn’t tell where he’d hidden it. So they killed him, and convinced Sandra to take the fall for it. They told her that if she didn’t plead guilty to Tom’s death and keep the
