“In surgery!” Joanna repeated. “I thought I told you to have Dr. Ross call me before she did anything.”
“I’m sorry, Sheriff Brady,” Jeannine muttered. “There wasn’t time. I was afraid we were going to lose him. Besides, I told Dr. Ross that if the department wouldn’t pay I would.”
Well, Joanna thought, taking a nearby seat. At least I’m not the only softheaded one around here. “So what’s the prognosis?” she asked after a pause.
Jeannine shrugged. “She said we’d know more after she got him stitched back up. She’s been working on him for over an hour now.”
For some time the only sound was the small click of an oversize electric clock that hung on the wall behind the reception desk. Jeannine was the one who broke the silence. “I think I know who’s behind the fights,” she said quietly.
“Who?”
“The O’Dwyers.”
Joanna’s heart sank. If Cochise County had a natural, homegrown pair of troublemakers, the O’Dwyer brothers, Clarence and Billy, were it. Grandsons of one of Arizona‘s pioneer families, they had taken over their parents’ ancestral home. The vast Roostercomb Ranch, established before statehood, had once stretched from Arizona’s San Simon Valley across the northern Peloncillo Mountains and on into New Mexico.
Years of drought and a series of disastrous business decisions had caused the family to sell off huge tracts of land. Several years earlier, the death of their elderly mother had thrown her cantankerous sons into a pitched battle with the Internal Revenue Service over estate taxes. By the time the feds had collected what was due, the sons were left with a much smaller ranch and a permanent antipathy toward anyone in law enforcement. Their run-in with government officials had also left them with a fondness for high-powered firearms.
“How do you know that?” Joanna asked.
“I’ve been keeping an eye on them,” Jeannine said.
“On your own?” Joanna asked.
Jeannine nodded.
The thought of one of Joanna’s unarmed Animal Control officers facing down a pair of gun-toting conspiracy nuts wasn’t something she wanted to contemplate. And she didn’t want the actions of her ACO inadvertently to provoke a Cochise County version of Waco‘s Branch Davidian shoot-out.
“Leave them alone,” she said.
“But, Sheriff…” Jeannine began. “If we ignore them, we’re just letting them get away with it.”
“No buts,” Joanna snapped. “I’m ordering you to stay away from them, Jeannine, and I mean that’s a direct order. Billy and Clarence O’Dwyer are dangerous men. The two of them would make mincemeat out of you.”
“What are we supposed to do? Turn our backs? Let them keep on doing what they’re doing?”
“What you think they’re doing,” Joanna corrected. “Look, Jeannine. I understand how you feel. Don’t forget, I’m every bit as much of an animal lover as you are, but the sheriff’s department is a law enforcement agency. What you suspect the O’Dwyers of doing is very much against the law, but in order to catch them at it, we have to have more than unsubstantiated suspicions. We have to put a team of people on this and conduct a real investigation. Not only that, we’re going to have to follow the rule of law while we do it. We have to have probable cause, properly drawn search warrants, and all those other things-the crossed t’s and dotted i’s-that will stand up in court. Believe me, when we do go in there, we’ll do it with officers who are armed and trained to handle those guys, not with one officer acting on her own. Understand?”
Jeannine Phillips nodded glumly. “Yes, ma’am,” she said.
A swinging door on the far side of the lobby opened, and Dr. Millicent Ross strode into the room. She was a heavyset woman with gray hair pulled into a knot at the back of her neck. Her brusque exterior belied a life lived with unstinting kindness.
“It’s still touch and go, Jeannine,” she said. “But I think that tough little guy of yours may make it.”
Jeannine’s previously grim countenance brightened. “Really?” she asked.
“Really,” Dr. Ross answered. “The damage looked far worse than it was. I’ve stitched him back up. He’d lost a lot of blood, though, and he was very dehydrated, so I’m keeping him sedated and on an IV If you hadn’t brought him in right when you did, though, it would have been an entirely different story. He’d have been a goner.”
Jeannine scrambled to her feet. “I’ll be going then. Thanks, Mil. Thanks a lot.” At the door she stopped and turned back. “I’ll come back later to check on him.”
Once the ACO had left the waiting room, Joanna turned to Millicent Ross. “Jeannine told you the background on this?”
“The dogfight issue?” the vet asked. “Yes, she told me. And to that end, I took a number of photos to document the extent of the dog’s injuries. You’ll have those to use in court. If he lives, there’ll be plenty of scars, too.”
“About the charges then,” Joanna said, opening her wallet and removing a business card. “Since we’re hoping to use the dog as evidence, you should bill the sheriff’s department. Send it to my attention and I’ll see that it’s taken care of.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Millicent Ross said. “It’s already been handled.”
“Surely Jeannine didn’t agree to pay for the treatment. With what she makes, she couldn’t possibly afford-”
“There won’t be any charges, Sheriff Brady,” Dr. Ross said firmly. “This is a situation where I’m donating my services.”
Joanna was taken aback. “Are you sure?”
Dr. Ross smiled. “Absolutely,” she said.
“What about a microchip?” Joanna asked as an afterthought. “Did you find one so we’ll be able to locate the owner?”
“No such luck,” Dr. Ross replied. “And no tag, either. What a surprise.”
Joanna was still scratching her head about Dr. Ross’s not charging for her services when she arrived at her office in the Justice Center Complex. It may have been Saturday morning, but Frank Montoya’s Crown Victoria was already in the parking lot.
“You work too hard,” she said, poking her head into his office. “You need to get a life.”
He grinned back at her. “Look who’s talking,” he returned.
“I have some good news. There won’t be a big vet bill for that injured dog after all.”
“What happened?” Frank asked. “Did the poor thing croak?”
“No. Dr. Ross decided to donate her services.”
“Amazing,” Frank said. “What caused that?”
“Who knows? But don’t look a gift-horse doctor in the mouth. Just be grateful for small blessings. So what’s going on around here?”
Frank gestured toward a cardboard banker’s storage box sitting on the small conference table in one corner of this office. “That just turned up,” he said.
“Lisa Marie Evans?” Joanna asked.
Frank nodded. “Not much to it,” he added.
“Do you mind?” Joanna asked.
“Be my guest.”
She went over to the box, removed the lid, and peered inside. The evidence log was the first thing that came to her attention. Leafing through it, she immediately recognized her father’s distinctive scrawl. The written word had never been D. H. Lathrop’s friend. He had often told people that, as a grade school kid in East Texas, he’d never once been given a passing grade in penmanship. Written missives from him had come in an oddball style that was comprised haphazardly of both cursive and printed letters.
It had been startling enough for Joanna to see her father’s name appear on the printed documents that the Records clerk had retrieved. Now, holding the evidence log in her hand, it was touching and thrilling to be holding a notebook filled with pages over which her father himself had labored. In that moment she felt an incredible closeness to D. H. Lathrop, a closeness that took her breath away. She vividly remembered seeing him seated at the kitchen table with his shoulders hunched in concentration, painstakingly putting pen to paper. Maybe he had been working on this very document. Not wanting to sever that slender thread of spiritual connection with her long-dead father, Joanna held on to the book for a long time, studying what he had written. Finally, with a sigh, she put the notebook aside and turned once more to the box.