“They are dead,” Joanna said. “But I believe I’m going to have this baby, and it could be soon.”
“Ambulance is on its way, Sheriff Brady,” Tica reported back a moment later. “Do you want me to call your husband and have him meet you at the hospital?”
“No,” Joanna replied, “that won’t be necessary. Calling him will give me something to do while I wait.”
While Dennis Lee Dixon lay sleeping in his bassinet, Joanna plucked the clicker off her bedside table and searched through the channels until she located Good Morning America. The last thing Butch had said before he left the hospital at midnight was that Frank Montoya had told them GMA was going to run a feature about what had happened the next morning and that Joanna should be sure to watch.
The orderly came in bringing her breakfast-ghastly oatmeal, cold toast, and something that was supposed to pass for coffee. It made Joanna long for one of Butch’s perfectly cooked over-easy eggs and a side of his crisp bacon. But Dr. Lee had said his policy was that new mothers needed to rest and that he wanted her in the hospital for a full twenty-four hours, so twenty-four hours it would be.
Joanna ate what she could tolerate of her breakfast and waited through the news (bad) and the weather (also bad) and the sports (marginal).
“And now,” Diane Sawyer was saying, “from the southeastern corner of Arizona we have the heartwarming story of how, when faced with the potentially tragic aftermath of a triple homicide at a puppy mill, Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady took the law into her own hands in something our on-scene reporter is calling The Pit Bull Penal Project.”“
Joanna’s bedside table rang. “Are you watching?” Butch demanded. “It’s on right now, but I’m TlVOing it, just in case.”
“Yes,” Joanna said. “I’m watching. At least I’m trying to.”
As she put down the phone, Joanna caught a fleeting image of herself standing in front of the door to the department with a bank of microphones in front of her. She didn’t hear and didn’t remember what had been said. The only thing that registered was how incredibly pregnant she looked.
The phone rang again as the cameras switched over to a scene of Millicent Ross handing out puppies while the reporter was saying, “… only inmates expected to be in custody for at least the next six weeks are allowed to participate.”
“I can’t believe it!” Eleanor Lathrop Winfield exclaimed. “You’re actually on Good Morning America. Are you watching?”
“Sort of,” Joanna said. “Can I call you back?”
Joanna expected some kind of comment about her missing dinner the night before, but no such diatribe was forthcoming.
“Is the baby all right?” Eleanor went on. “Butch called and told us that everything was fine, but I want to hear it from you so I can stop worrying.”
“The baby’s fine, Mom,” Joanna said. “And so am I, but I’m busy right now. Let me call you back.”
By then the camera was focused on Axel Turnbull. Axel was one of the regular habitues of the Cochise County Jail. He came in several times a year for sentences of longer or shorter duration depending on how drunk and disorderly he’d been and how much property damage he’d caused in the course of his most recent bender.
There he was, sitting in his distinctive red-and-white-striped jail uniform in the exercise yard with a black-and-white pit bull puppy snuggled, sound asleep, under the man’s grizzled chin. “I think I’ll call him Tucker,” Turnbull was saying, “ ‘cause, as you can see, the little guy’s all tuckered out.”
The camera switched back to Diane Sawyer, who was beaming. “We wanted to interview Sheriff Brady for this piece, but we understand she’s in the hospital in Bisbee, where, a few hours after we filmed this piece, she gave birth to a seven-pound, eight-ounce boy. We are told both mother and baby are doing well.”
The phone rang again. This time it was Jenny “Mom, did you see it? Were those puppies cute, or what? Oh, and Butch is going to bring me by on my way to school so I can see you and the baby. Does he really have red hair?”
Joanna glanced toward the bassinet. “Definitely,” she answered. “An amazing amount of bright red hair.”
“He takes after you then?”
“We’ll see,” Joanna said.
This time she didn’t even bother to hang up the phone, she just depressed the receiver button with her finger. Sure enough, it rang immediately.
“I told you it would be great publicity,” Frank Montoya told her. “What did you think?”
“I looked very pregnant,” Joanna replied.
“It’s not even eight o’clock in the morning, and I’ve already had four requests for interviews with you. People magazine, USA Today, the Arizona Sun, and Newsweek. What do you think?”
“I think I’m on maternity leave, Frank. Besides, you and Millicent Ross were the ones who came up with the idea. You should do the interviews.”
“I’ll tell them I’ll get back to them later,” Frank said.
“You mean you think you’ll be able to talk me into changing my mind. Tell me what happened after I left the Triple H yesterday.”
“I thought you were on maternity leave.”
“Frank…”
“Doc Winfield opened the boxes Joaquin Mattias dug up. His recommendation is that we ship them, boxes and all, to the University of Arizona, where the bones that were inside can be properly examined by a forensic anthropologist. Autopsies for Joaquin Mattias and Rory Markham will be later today. As far as evidence, what we turned up is pretty damning.”
“What’s that?”
“Fingers,” Frank said.
Joanna felt her stomach lurch. “Bradley Evans’s fingers?”
“Presumably. We found ten of them preserved in a half-gallon jar of formaldehyde on a shelf in Rory Markham’s garage. I can’t imagine what possessed him to keep them, and now we’ll never be able to ask him, either. There is a walk-in refrigerator in one of the outbuildings. We’re checking but it looks as though Evans’s body was stored there until they transported it to the dump site. Oops. Another call,” Frank added. “Gotta go.”
When Joanna put down the phone that time, the Reverend Marianne Maculyea was standing in the doorway. “Congratulations,” she said. “I know it’s not visiting hours, but there are times when being a member of the clergy has its advantages. How are you?”
“A little overwhelmed. I’ve just been on national TV”
“I know.” Marianne grinned. “Jeff taped it, but then everybody in town probably taped it as well.”
“It’s all about the dogs, Mari,” Joanna said. “What about the people who died? There was hardly a word about them.”
“What happened to the guy who did it?” Marianne asked.
“You mean Antonio Zavala, the one I shot? He’s at UMC, where the doctors are patching his foot back together. I didn’t want them to take him there because that’s where Jeannine Phillips is. I actually wanted them to bring him here so it would be easier to keep a guard on him. Now I’m glad that didn’t happen. I have guards looking out for Jeannine Phillips. I guess someone else was watching over us.”
Marianne smiled. “Yes,” she said. “I think He was.” She came over to the bed and gave Joanna a hug. “You get some rest now. You’re going to need it.”
But resting was out of the question. By the time Butch took Jenny off to school, the first load of flower arrangements showed up. And they continued to show up. A few came from people Joanna knew, but most came from people she didn’t know-one vase after another.
Once Joanna’s room was overflowing, she started sending the flowers down the hall to other rooms. And still the flowers kept on arriving, except now, with local flower inventories exhausted, the arrangements were coming from shops in Sierra Vista and Benson and even as far away as Tucson.