times by the same vehicle, or maybe once each by several separate vehicles.”
“ATVs?” Joanna asked.
“I’d say we’re looking for something bigger than that,” Ernie replied. “And I don’t know how many. One for sure, but maybe more.”
“What about having CSI make casts of the tracks?” she asked. “Surely you’d be able to tell the number of vehicles from the number of tracks.”
“Sorry, boss, no can do,” Ernie said. “These are sand dunes.”
“Sand dunes?” Joanna repeated. Driving to California, she remembered being impressed by the glorious red sand dunes west of Yuma along I-8. She had lived in Cochise County all her life. The idea that there might be sand dunes much closer to home came as something of a shock. “I didn’t know we had any of those,” she said.
“You do now,” Ernie told her. “And believe me, tracks that are left in sand like what’s here aren’t remotely castable.”
“What about identification?”
“None on the body,” he said, “at least none that we’ve found so far.”
“What about the dog? Does it have tags?”
“Maybe so. He was wearing a collar and it looks like he has tags, but no one can get close enough to read them. Natalie’s working on him now, trying to get him into her truck. Once she does that, maybe she’ll be able to tell us something. When I get off the phone with you, I’ll ask her.”
“All right then,” Joanna said. “I’m on my way.”
“Good,” Ernie said. “I’m glad to hear it. Dave Hollicker is headed here as well.”
Most of the time, Joanna’s CSI unit was a two-person team made up of Dave and Casey Ledford, Joanna’s latent fingerprint tech. Unfortunately, Casey was currently out of town attending a training conference on the latest upgrades in AFIS-the nationwide Automated Fingerprint Identification System. With Casey unavailable, Dave Hollicker was reduced to being a one-man show.
Joanna put down her phone and donned her Kevlar vest, then opened the door to her office and spoke to her secretary, Kristin Gregovich.
“How long will you be gone?” Kristin wanted to know.
“It’s a crime scene,” Joanna told her. “I’ll be back eventually; I just don’t know when.”
Relieved to have an excuse to leave her paperwork jungle behind, Joanna hurried out her private back entrance and into her Crown Victoria parked a few steps from her door. A few minutes later, she was driving east on U.S. Highway 80, heading for Double Adobe, Elfrida, and ultimately Bowie.
Joanna’s jurisdiction, Cochise County, was an eighty-square-mile block of territory as large as Rhode Island and Connecticut combined. On the south it was bordered by Mexico and on the east by New Mexico. Her office in the Justice Center was in the lower right-hand corner of the county. The crime scene was seventy miles straight north of there-except she couldn’t drive straight north. The roads didn’t run that way.
Along the highway, she was glad to see the signs of spring-the bright greens of newly leafed mesquite and the carpet of bright yellow flowers that lined either side of the roadway. Lost in thought, she had driven only a few miles when her phone rang.
“Sheriff Brady here,” she said.
“I found Bowie on my GPS,” Guy Machett said without preamble or greeting. “I can make it there just fine, but where the hell is the crime scene?”
His attitude grated on Joanna as much as his words did. He pronounced Bowie the outlander way, Bowie as in bow tie as opposed to the approved southeastern Arizona pronunciation.
“It’s pronounced boo-ee,” she told him.
“That’s not how it’s spelled in my BlackBerry,” he returned.
And obviously your BlackBerry couldn’t be wrong, Joanna thought to herself. “But it is how people around here say it,” she told him. And it’s how you’ll pronounce it, too, if you don’t want the locals laughing at you.
“The crime scene is northeast of there,” she said. “Some GPS receivers don’t cover those rural roads and areas very well.”
“I was scheduled to be at a continuing ed conference in Tucson all day today,” Machett said. “It bugs the hell out of me to miss it, but I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“If you’re leaving Tucson now, you should arrive in about an hour then,” Joanna said. “That’s about the time I’ll get there as well. Call me. I’ll help guide you in.”
“Make that three hours,” Machett grumbled. “They can’t expect me to drive around in that god-awful van wherever I go. I had to drive to Tucson in my personal vehicle. That means I’ll have to drive all the way back to Bisbee and pick up the van before I come to the crime scene.”
George didn’t mind driving around in the M.E.’s van, Joanna thought.
“What about Bobby?” she asked. “Couldn’t he drive the van over and meet you there?”
Bobby Short had spent the last two years working as George Winfield’s full-time assistant.
“Bobby quit,” Machett said, sounding offended. “Just like that. He came into my office last Friday morning. He told me he had two weeks of vacation coming. Said he was taking them both and that he wouldn’t be back. More’s the pity. He wasn’t a trained M.E. tech by any means, but I could have used him for some of the heavy lifting. The one I’d really like to see quit is Madge Livingston. She’s a joke.”
Bobby Short hadn’t been particularly long in the brains department, but he had been a cheerful, willing worker in a difficult job. Joanna had no idea what Machett had said or done that had provoked Bobby enough to quit his job, but apparently he had. Madge, the M.E. office’s other full-time employee, who served as both secretary and clerk, had been a fixture in the Cochise County administrative staff hierarchy for as long as Joanna could remember. She was an opinionated peroxide blonde who smoked unfiltered Camels out by the morgue’s Dumpsters and rode her Harley to work. George Winfield had gotten along with her just fine, but then George could get along with almost anyone, including Joanna Brady’s difficult mother, Eleanor.
Joanna understood that Madge wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but she was anything but a joke. If Guy Machett went after her, he would do so at his own peril-sort of like moving a big rock and uncovering a nest of baby rattlesnakes hidden underneath.
Joanna could have warned him about all that, but she didn’t. “I’ll see you at the crime scene then,” she said. “Whenever you get there.”
“Why are you going?” Machett asked.
She understood the implication. What he meant was that, as sheriff, she was far too important to show up at a run-of-the-mill crime scene.
I do it because it’s part of my job, Joanna thought. “It’s a possible homicide,” she explained.
“Don’t you trust your detectives to handle it?” he asked.
“I trust my detectives implicitly,” she returned. “But we do the job together.”
“That may be fine as far as you’re concerned,” he said. “If you’ve got nothing better to do and don’t mind showing up in person, bully for you. It’s a waste of valuable time and training for me to be expected to make a personal appearance whenever some hick from Cochise County decides to croak out in the middle of nowhere. I fully intend to get myself some decent help to handle situations like this, and it won’t be some untrained gofer, either.”
For years now, Joanna’s department’s hiring practices had suffered under the county’s notorious cost- containment policy of NNP-no new personnel-and it was still very much in effect. It was only through using one of Frank Montoya’s creative budgetary sleights of hand that she’d been able to add on Natalie Wilson as her new Animal Control officer. NNP allowed for replacement of lost employees. That meant Guy Machett would be able to hire someone to take over Bobby Short’s position, but she doubted he’d be able to add anyone else. Picking a fight with Madge Livingston was one thing. Taking on the Board of Supervisors over hiring issues would be downright foolhardy.
Good luck with that, Joanna thought.
“See you when you get there then. As I said, when you get as far as Bowie,” she added, forcefully pronouncing the word in the manner she regarded as the right way, “call me again. Either I’ll guide you from there or one of my deputies will.” With that, she ended the call.
Rolling north through the Sulphur Springs Valley toward Willcox, Joanna was left thinking about what an overbearing jerk Machett was and about how much she missed working with George Winfield on a day-to-day basis.
