you all right?”
“You said she’d be safe,” Jenny said accusingly. “You gave me Scout’s honor.”
“Jenny, please. I had no idea this would happen.”
“And now you’re saying that if I stay home, I’ll be safe?”
“Jenny, Butch and I—”
“Just go,” Jenny interrupted. “Go away and leave me alone. You let someone kill Dora. You’d better find out who did it before I’m dead, too.”
Stung by the anger and betrayal in Jenny’s voice, Joanna retreated. A few minutes later she was outside by the Crown Victoria, struggling to fasten her Kevlar vest, when Butch came out of the house.
“Jenny will be all right,” he assured her, once he had unloaded the luggage. “You go do what you have to. Don’t worry about her.”
Tears welled in Joanna’s eyes. “Jenny blames me for what happened. I told her last night that I was sure Dora would be safe, but I was wrong. She wasn’t safe at all, goddamn it! She’s dead.”
“No matter what Jenny said, Joey, and no matter what you may think, what happened to Dora Matthews isn’t your fault,” Butch said.
“I think you’re wrong there,” Joanna told him. “I’m not first in line for that; I’m second—right behind my mother.”
As soon as Joanna was back on the highway, she looked at her watch. Almost two hours had passed since she had last spoken to Frank Montoya. In the world of crime scene investigation, two hours was little more than a blip on the screen.
Picking up her radio microphone, she called in to Dispatch. “Is Chief Deputy Montoya still out at the crime scene on High way 90?” she asked.
“He sure is, Sheriff Brady,” Larry Kendrick told her.
“Good. Let him know I’ve left High Lonesome Ranch, and I’m on my way.”
As she drove, Joanna battled to control her churning emotions. Under most circumstances, where someone else’s crisis was concerned, Sheriff Brady could be calm and completely unflappable. To her dismay she was now learning that her law enforcement training counted for little when her own family was threatened.
It still shamed Joanna to recall how completely she had fallen apart in those first awful minutes when she had come home to High Lonesome Ranch to find her dogs poisoned and her own home virtually destroyed by the frenzied anger of a drug-crazed woman. Joanna had surveyed Reba Singleton’s rampage of destruction with her knees knocking, her heart pounding, and with her breath coining inn short harsh gasps. It had taken time for her to separate the personal from the professional before she could gather her resources and go out and deal with the troubled woman herself.
Driving from the ranch to the crime scene, Joanna once again had to make that tough transition. She had to put her own worries about Jenny aside and focus instead on finding Dora Matthews’s killer and Connie Haskell’s killer, knowing that once the perpetrator—or perpetrators—were found, Jenny—her precious Jenny—would no longer be in danger.
An hour later, as she approached the clot of emergency vehicles parked along Highway 90, she felt more in control. Slowing down, she noted a road sign announcing that Sierra Vista was twenty-three miles away. As she made her way through the traffic backup, Joanna found herself wondering how it was that Dora Matthews—a thirteen-year-old with no driver’s license—had made it more than twenty miles from her foster home in Sierra Vista to here.
Minutes later, she parked behind Frank Montoya’s vehicle, a Crown Victoria that was a twin to hers. Deputies had coned the roadway down to one lane and were directing traffic through on that single lane while investigators clustered in the other lane and on the shoulder. Walking in the traffic-free left-hand lane, Joanna stopped beside Detective Ernie Carpenter, who stood staring off the edge of the highway.
“Hello, Sheriff,” Ernie said.
“What’s going on?”
“The victim’s still down there,” he said. “Jaime’s just finishing taking the crime scene photos.
