When the animal saw Joanna, her cropped tail wagged furiously. Joanna set the plate of water down and watched while the dog lapped it dry.
“When I took the mail in, I wasn’t expecting to find a dog in your office,” Kristin said. “She scared me so much I almost dropped the mail. I guess I scared her, too.”
“Sorry,” Joanna said. “I meant to tell you but you weren’t here when I went by and-“
“Is that the dog from last night’s crime scene?” Kristin asked. “Somebody said it was a puppy, but this doesn’t look like a puppy.”
“Different dog,” Joanna said. “This one’s from Animal Control. They were getting ready to put her down, so I decided to take her. You and Terry wouldn’t happen to want another dog, would you?”
“We’ve already got Spike,” Kristin said, shaking her head. “If we brought home another dog, our landlady would have a fit.”
Kristin’s husband, Terry, and his eighty-five-pound German shepherd, Spike, constituted the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department’s K-9 unit.
“Right,” Joanna said. “I’m sure she would.”
The phone rang, and Kristin reached to answer it. “It’s Tom Hadlock,” Kristin told Joanna. “He says the jail AC has gone out again. He’s done his best to restart it but so far no luck. Now he’s asking what you want him to do about it.”
Joanna sighed and looked longingly at her desk, where that day’s worth of correspondence was already laid out and awaiting her attention.
“Tell him I’ll be right there,” Joanna said.
Walking between her office and the jail commander’s, 74
Joanna found herself squinting in the unrelenting sun. She didn’t need a thermometer to tell her that, for the third day in a row, the midday temperature was already over a hundred.
Tom Hadlock sat at his desk with the top two buttons on his uniform unbuttoned and sweat pouring down his face when Joanna entered his office. A small personal fan sat on his desk, facing him and oscillating feebly. The moving fan blades stirred the air slightly, but the resulting breeze did little to take the edge off the heat.
“I’m on hold with the AC company in Tucson,” he said. “The first person I talked to said they could probably have someone here the day after tomorrow at the earliest.”
“That’s not good enough,” Joanna said.
Hadlock nodded. “I told her that. She said she’d see what she could do. That’s what we get for going with the lowest bidder,” he added. “Sammy Cotton here in town handled our AC contract for years. Whenever we called him, he was always Sammy-on-the-spot, but then the board of supervisors decided we needed to put the contract out to bid.
This outfit up in Tucson underbid Sammy but … Hello? Who’s this?”
Tom punched the speakerphone button so Joanna could hear what was being said.
“I’m Alexander Blair, the owner of Anchor Air Conditioning.”
“Well, Mr. Blair,” Tom replied, “I’m Tom Hadlock, the jail commander down here in Bisbee. You could say I’m a little hot under the collar at the moment. We’ve got an air-conditioning problem here at the jail—an air-conditioning crisis, actually.
The girl who answered your phone told me you wouldn’t be able to have anyone here until the day after tomorrow. That’s totally unacceptable.”
75
Joanna winced at Tom’s use of the word girl. As it turned out, she wasn’t the only one to take umbrage.
“That ‘girl’ happens to be my mother,” Alex Blair answered stiffly. “She’s been in the business for thirty-some- odd years. If she says that’s the soonest we can get to you, then that’s the way it is. Like she said, we’ll have someone down there first thing the day after tomorrow.”
“But,” Tom Hadlock sputtered, “I have the contract right here. It says we’ll receive ‘priority’ treatment.”
“That is priority treatment,” Blair returned. “In case you haven’t noticed, all of Arizona is in the middle of a heat wave at the moment. Every single one of my technicians is out on calls. We’re doing the best we can.”
Joanna stood up and turned the speakerphone in her direction. “Then it’s not good enough,” she said.
“Who’s this?”
“Sheriff Brady, Mr. Blair,” she replied. “Sheriff Joanna Brady. What day is today?”
“The second,” he replied after a pause.
“And that would make the day after tomorrow July Fourth. Do you really think you’ll have a technician willing to come down here on a national holiday, Mr. Blair? And what if he needs parts? Will any of your suppliers be open that day?”
“Sheriff Brady-” Blair began, but Joanna cut him off.
“The weather reports I’ve seen indicate this weather pattern is going to continue for the next few days, so I’m giving you a choice, Mr. Blair. Either you have someone here to fix our problem prior to five p.m. today, or I’m calling someone else. Once they get us up and running again, they can send their bill to you. We’ll just assume you’ve subcontracted the job out.”
“We can’t do that.”
76
