Joanna got up, walked over to the door that led to the interior lobby and Kristin’s desk, and pulled it shut.
“I guess I did, in a manner of speaking,” she said. “Swallow the canary, that is.”
58
Frank seemed mystified. Joanna sat back down and looked at him across her desk. “I’m pregnant, Frank.”
“Whoa! Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I took a pregnancy test last night, and I’m definitely pregnant.”
Frank’s face broke into a grin. “Well, congratulations, then. That’s big news!”
“I’ll say.” Joanna grinned back at him.
“So who knows?”
“Well, Butch, Jenny, and now you.”
“What are you going to do?” Frank asked.
“What do you think? I’m going to have the baby.”
“What about the election? Are you going to drop out?”
Joanna was adamant. “And give Ken Junior a free ride? No way.”
“So are you going to keep it … well, under wraps until after election day?”
“We probably should delay making an announcement, just in case of a miscarriage, but Butch and I already talked it over. I’m going to go public with it. ASAP. I may even give our old friend, Marliss Shackleford, an exclusive on this.”
Marliss, a columnist for the local paper, The Bisbee Bee, had long been a thorn in Joanna’s side.
“Do you think that’s wise?” Frank asked. “She’s done everything but post ‘Galloway for Sheriff’ signs at the top and bottom of her column.”
“That’s exactly why I want Marliss to be one of the first to know,” Joanna responded.
“It’ll be one of her biggest scoops ever in “Bisbee Buzzings.’ Knowing Marliss is solidly in Ken Junior’s corner, people are bound to read the column and talk about it for days afterward. I figure, if the voters know about the baby in 59
advance and elect me anyway, then no one will be able to complain about it later on. And if I lose? Then I lose. I’ll go back to selling insurance—although that wouldn’t be my first choice.”
“I take it you and Butch have talked this through?”
“Absolutely.”
“All right, then,” Frank said. “If you two are okay with it, then I’ve got no complaints.”
He picked up his stack of papers. “Sorry I wasn’t there to help out last night,”
he added.
“Don’t apologize, Frank,” Joanna told him with a smile. “You get to have some time off, and so do I. Now, what more do you have for me this morning?”
For the next twenty minutes or so they went over routine departmental business, including the previous day’s incidents reports. They ended with a discussion of the Mossman homicide.
“Ernie Carpenter will be at the autopsy later this morning,” Frank said. “Jaime Carbajal will start canvassing the neighborhood around Carol Mossman’s place and talking to her supervisor and coworkers. He’ll also be organizing an inch-by-inch search of the property. Dave Hollicker believes that since the shots were fired through a locked door, there’s a good chance the killer never made it inside Carol Mossman’s place.
That means any physical evidence left behind by the killer would most likely be outside the trailer rather than inside it.”
Joanna nodded. “This whole thing offends me,” she said, her green eyes flashing in sudden outrage. “Most people, including Carol’s own grandmother, might consider that rundown trailer little more than a hovel, but it was Carol Mossman’s home, Frank—her place of refuge. She and her animals were inside it, unarmed and defenseless, when somebody blew her away and killed all her dogs in the process. It’s true that, in trying to help all those strays, Carol Mossman may have broken some of the 60
dog-ownership statutes, but at the time she was killed, she and her dogs weren’t hurting anybody.” “No, they weren’t,” Frank agreed.
“I was on the scene last night. We were all working and doing our jobs. This morning, I realize it was like it was all business as usual. It would be all too easy to write Carol off as some kind of weirdo who was somehow responsible for what happened to her, but if the Carol Mossmans of this world aren’t safe in their own homes, nobody else is, either. I want whoever did this caught!”
By the time Joanna paused, Frank Montoya seemed a little taken aback by the strength of her emotion on the subject. “I see what you mean,” he said. “So what’s the next step?”
“Have Jaime contact that Explorer troop out on post at Fort Huachuca to see if they can help with the foreign- object search.” “Will do,” Frank said.
“And we should probably get the Double C’s in here to update us sometime this afternoon.”
The term Double C’s was departmental shorthand for the two homicide detectives, Carbajal and Carpenter.
“Okay,” Frank agreed. “Anything else?” Joanna asked.
