Paradise Lost

had already heard the woman threaten to shoot her hapless brother-in-law. Under those circumstances, handing Maggie a loaded weapon would be outright madness. Joanna dropped the nine bullets into her blazer pocket before placing the gun in Maggie’s purse.

“So what are you doing here anyway?” Maggie asked, peering at Joanna over the rim of her raised glass. “What’d you say your name was again?”

“Joanna. Joanna Brady. I’m the sheriff in Cochise County.”

“Tha’s right; tha’s right,” Maggie said, nodding. “I ‘member you. I came down to cover the story when you got elected. So whaddaya want?” With every word spoken, Maggie’s slurred speech grew worse.

“I’m here because a body was found last night in Apache Pass down in the Chiricahuas,” Joanna said quietly. “A medical identi­fication bracelet was found nearby with your sister’s name on it. We need someone to come to Bisbee and identify the body.”

Maggie slammed her empty glass onto the table with so much force that it shattered, sending shards of glass showering in all directions.

“Goddamn that son of a bitch!” she swore. “I really am going to kill him. Just let me get my hands on him. Where is he?”

She sat there with her eyes wide and staring and with the palms of both hands resting in a spray of broken glass. From across the room, Joanna saw blood from Maggie MacFerson’s lacerated hands spreading across the otherwise snow-white tablecloth. Maggie didn’t seem to notice.

“Come on,” Joanna said calmly. “Come away from the broken glass. You’ve cut your hands.”

“Where’s the body?” Maggie demanded, not moving. “Just tell me where Connie’s body is. I’ll go right now. I’ll drive wherever it is. Just tell me.”

Watching the blood soak unheeded into the tablecloth, Joanna knew Maggie MacFerson was in no condition to drive herself anywhere. Walking over to the table, Joanna gently raised Maggie’s bleeding hands out of the glass.

“I’ll take you there,” she said quietly. “Just as soon as we finish cleaning and bandaging your hands.”

Several hours later, after opening the car door and fastening Connie MacFerson’s seat belt, Joanna finally headed out of Phoenix for the three-and-a-half-hour drive to Bisbee while Mag­gie slept in the Civvie’s spacious front seat. Once out of heavy city traffic, Joanna reached for her phone and asked information for the Conquistador Hotel. Rather than speaking to Butch, she found herself dealing with an impersonal voice-mail system.

“There’s been a slight delay,” she told him in her message. “I’m on my way to Bisbee to do a positive ID. I’m just now passing the Warner Road Exit going southbound, which means you’re right. I am going to miss that rehearsal dinner. I’m so sorry, Butch. I’ll call later and let you know what time I’ll be back at the hotel. Give me a call on the cell phone when you can.”

What she didn’t say in her message was that she had spent the better part of two hours in the ER at St. Joseph’s Hospital while emergency room doctors and nurses removed dozens of tiny pieces of crystal from Maggie MacFerson’s glass-shredded hands and put stitches in some of the longer jagged cuts. Both hands, bandaged into useless clubs, now lay in Maggie’s lap. Even had the woman been stone-sober—which she wasn’t—Joanna knew Maggie wasn’t capable of driving herself the two hundred miles to Bisbee to make the identification—not with her hands in that condition.

Joanna settled in for the trip. She generally welcomed long stretches of desert driving because they provided her rare opportu­nities for concentrated, uninterrupted thinking. With Maggie MacFerson temporarily silenced, Joanna allowed herself to do lust exactly that      think.

Weeks earlier, as Joanna sat in her mother’s living room, she had thumbed through George Winfield’s current copy of Scientific American. There she had stumbled upon a column called “Connections.” The interesting content had tumbled back and forth across the centuries showing how one scientific discovery was linked to another and from there bounded on to something else. At the time, Joanna had recognized that the solutions to homicide investigations often happened in much the same way, through seemingly meaningless but nonetheless critical connections.

Was the death of Constance Marie Haskell linked to the outbreak of carjackings that had plagued Cochise County? If Maggie MacFerson’s version of events was to be believed, Connie Haskell had an absent, most likely estranged, and quite possibly dishonest, husband. Once Ron Haskell was located, he would no doubt be the first person Joanna’s detectives would want to interview. Still, rape, torture, and a savage beating were more in keeping with a random, opportunistic killer