“You make it sound as though fathers have nothing to do with it.”
“Ed Mossman certainly had something to do with it,” Joanna said fiercely. “He had everything to do with it. All this happened because his daughters were trying to escape from the mess he created.”
“Ed Mossman’s dead,” Butch reminded her gently. “He can’t be punished any more.”
Joanna thought about her jail-based conversation with Ramon Alvarez Sandoval. Confronting the driver of the SUV with his crucifix and forcing him to look at his actions through 365
the prism of his own beliefs had helped tip the scales and convince him to turn state’s evidence. It had taught Joanna something about her own beliefs as well.
“You’re wrong there,” she said at last. “Ed Mossman can be punished more.”
“How?” Butch asked.
“He can rot in hell,” Joanna told him, pushing her plate away and standing up. “And if there’s any justice anywhere, he’ll do just that.”
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367
Hoarders like Carol Mossman exist in the real world. I wouldn’t have known about them or written about them had it not been for my sister, E. Jane Decker, Director of Animal Control for Final County in Coolidge, Arizona. Like Carol Mossman, these unfortunate people have two things in common: an unending availability of unwanted dogs and cats and a chaotic and disturbed childhood that might include a history of sexual abuse, alcoholism, and profoundly unstable relationships with people.
What can we do to help? First, we must understand that when we take a cute, cuddly little puppy or kitten into our home, it is a commitment of at least ten to fifteen years. We also need to understand that if the animal in our care has problems, we must go to experts for help and training to ensure the animal’s well-being and to keep the animal from becoming unwanted and difficult to place. Next, we should spay and neuter our animals, and when we choose to welcome a new animal into our lives, we ought to avail ourselves of any one of the many pet rescue operations located throughout the country.
368 AUTHOR NOTE
Finally, if we know of a hoarder in our neighborhood, we must notify our local animal control officers. Hoarders think they’re helping, but the animals in their care are usually undernourished, unvaccinated, neglected, and unsocialized animals that become difficult to place after being removed from this unfortunate environment. Please consider helping in any way you can because animals cannot help themselves, and neither can hoarders.
The Humane Society of the United States (www.hsus.org) has valuable information on how communities can effectively respond to the animal and human problems associated with hoarding cases.
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370 USA $24.95 CANADA $38.95
The incomparable A. Jance returns with a powerful tale that explores the darkest corners of human nature, revealing the grievous injuries inflicted behind locked doors, the unseen wounds that bleed and destroy and never heal. …
The heat is a killer in Cochise County, Arizona, with temperatures over 100 degrees.
In the suffocating stillness of an airless trailer, a woman is lying dead, a bullet hole in her chest. Why someone would murder a harmless loner with a soft spot for stray dogs is only one of the questions nagging at the local police; another is why the killer used an eighty-five-year-old bullet, fired from the same weapon that slaughtered two other women who were discovered bound, naked, and gruesomely posed on the remote edge of a rancher’s land.
The slayings are as oppressive as the blistering heat for Sheriff Joanna Brady, who must shoulder the added double burden of a brutal reelection campaign and major developments on the home front. With suddenly more on her plate than many big-city law officers have to contend with, Joanna must put marital distractions and an opponent’s dirty tricks in the background and deal with the terrifying reality that now threatens everyone in her jurisdiction: a serial killer in their midst.
A twisted and lethal drama is unfolding in this small corner of the southwestern desert as fear, hatred, and the evil at the core of one family’s history come to a rapid boil beneath a merciless Arizona sun. Pressure mounts for Sheriff Brady personally and professionally while she pursues a sadistic murderer into the shadows of the past to get to the roots of a monstrous obsession … and expose the permanent wounds of a crime far worse than homicide.
New York Times bestselling author J. A. JANCE was born in South Dakota, brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, and now lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.
Jacket design by Richard . Aquan
Jacket photograph Sby Daryl Benson/Masterfile
Author photograph by Jerry Bauer
Available from HarperAudio, HarperLargePrint, and as an e-book from PerfectBound WILLIAM MORROW
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