Hardly any of those starving uniforms belonged to me, Joanna thought despairingly. It bugged her to realize that, as usual, Marliss Shackleford had focused in on the one critical issue Sheriff Brady had been trying to dodge. Rather than issuing a denial Marliss could easily refute, Joanna played coy.
“Really,” she said, feigning as much innocence as she could muster. “Marliss says my deputies weren’t there? That’s strange. I could have sworn they were all over the place, but I could be wrong. I had a few other details to worry about. There wasn’t time for an official roll call.”
“See there?” Eleanor responded, sounding relieved. “I tried to tell Marliss that very thing – that she had to be mistaken, but you know her. Sometimes you have to hit that woman over the head with a baseball bat to get through to her.”
Hitting Marliss Shackleford over the head with anything sounded like an excellent idea to Sheriff Joanna Brady about then, but she fought down a biting comment that could have turned into additional ammunition. “I’ve noticed,” she agreed.
“I’d best be going,” Eleanor went on briskly. “I just spoke to George. He’s finished up with whatever it was he had to do this morning. He’s coming home for lunch. I should get it on the table. The egg salad is ready, but I haven’t made sandwiches yet.”
That, too, was vintage Eleanor Lathrop. The “whatever” George Winfield had to do that morning was to perform an autopsy. How like Eleanor simply to gloss over and/or ignore anything remotely unpleasant. Her husband’s title might be that of Cochise County Medical Examiner, but in Eleanor’s self-centered world, none of his professional duties were any more important than the egg-salad sandwiches she planned to serve for lunch. And if a scheduled autopsy or an unexpected phone call happened to delay him beyond what Eleanor considered reasonable, Joanna knew there would be hell to pay.
Better him than me, she thought.
Even so, Eleanor didn’t hang up immediately. “According to Marliss, there was another murder last night,” she added.
Here we go again, Joanna fumed. Another one of Marliss Shackleford’s notorious end runs.
“A suspicious death,” she corrected. “I suppose she asked you about that, too.”
“Not about the death specifically,” Eleanor replied. “She wanted to know if I had noticed how the crime rate has really taken off since you became Sheriff.”
That depends on who’s counting, Joanna thought. “What did you say?” she asked.
“I told her the truth,” Eleanor replied. “I said that no matter who’s in charge, the crime rate stays pretty much the same.”
Coming from Eleanor Lathrop Winfield, that lukewarm statement constituted a ringing endorsement.
“Thanks, Mom,” Joanna said.
“You’re welcome.”
Next Joanna dialed the county attorney’s office. Arlee Jones was a blowhard, deal-making good old boy.
“Glad to hear from you, Sheriff Brady,” he said cordially. “Wanted to keep you in the know.”
“About what?” Joanna replied.
“Remember Rob Majors?” Arlee asked. “That kid from San Simon?”
Joanna remembered Rob Majors all too well. He was a not-too-bright kid who had spent the summer earning college tuition money by carjacking travelers along I-10 and selling their stolen vehicles to migrant-smuggling crooks from Old Mexico. Joanna’s department had spent weeks and far too much valuable overtime before they had apprehended him. They had finally decoyed Majors into trying to lift a car driven by Terry Gregovich with Spike, his German shepherd sidekick, stationed in the backseat.
Majors had been taken into custody at the rest area just inside the Arizona/New Mexico border, but he wasn’t jailed until after emergency-room treatment of the numerous puncture wounds on his arm, compliments of an eighty-five-pound police dog.
“What about him?” Joanna asked.
“Thought you’d be relived to hear that I’ve brokered a deal. Rob Majors pleads guilty to a lesser charge, and he drops the police brutality charge against your K-9 officer.”
“How good a deal did he get?” Joanna asked. Arlee Jones’s plea bargains usually gave her a headache. This one was no exception.
“He pleads guilty to one count of first-degree assault and goes to Fort Grant until his twenty-first birthday.”
Joanna barely believed her ears. “The kid’s seventeen. You’re letting him off as a juvenile?”
“It’s the best I could do,” Jones said in an aggrieved tone. “At least it gets your Deputy Gregovich off the hook.”
“Thanks,” Joanna said. “That’s just what I wanted to hear.”
She hung up and was still burning with indignation when she dialed the number for Debra Highsmith, the newly installed principal at Bisbee High School. A student office assistant put the call through.
“This is Sheriff Brady,” Joanna said when Debra Highsmith answered. “I understand you called earlier.”
“That’s right. Thanks so much for returning the call,” Ms. Highsmith said. “We’re trying to do something a little unusual around here. I was wondering if you could help us out.”
“That depends,” Joanna said. “What are we talking about?”
“I attended an all-girls high school, and an all-girls college as well. This was back in the days when they still had such things,” Debra Highsmith added with a chuckle. “I’m trying to create an atmosphere that will challenge and motivate the young women here at Bisbee High. We want to get them thinking outside the box, as it were. For that we need really dynamic role models.”
Joanna waited silently for Debra Highsmith to cut to the chase.
“BHS career day comes up the end of next week,” Ms. Highsmith continued. “I must apologize for calling you at the last minute. I had made arrangements for an old college chum of mine, Althea Peachy, who works for NASA, to speak to our girls-only assembly. Unfortunately, Peaches found out just this morning that she has to testify before the House Appropriations Committee in D.C. next week. I was wondering if I could prevail on you to pinch-hit.”
Suppressing a sigh, Joanna reached for her desktop calendar. “What day?” she asked.
“Next Thursday. We’d like you to speak first thing in the morning – around nine or so. The boys will be in the gym having their own assembly. The girls will be in the auditorium.”
Joanna consulted her calendar. The morning after a night of Halloween pranks would be a bad day for her to be out of the office, but encouraging young people was also part of her job.
“All right,” she said, penciling it in. “Nine o’clock. Anything else I should know?”
“Well, there is one more thing,” Debra Highsmith added. “I need to let you know that we have a zero-tolerance policy about weapons here on campus.”
“Wait a minute,” Joanna objected. “I’m a sworn police officer, remember? You want me to come to your school and talk to students about the possibility of considering law enforcement as a career, but you don’t want me to wear my guns?”
“Right,” Debra Highsmith allowed. “It doesn’t make sense, but you know how paranoid school boards can be about such things these days. What if a student overpowered you, grabbed one of your weapons, and used it on some other student?”
“And what if one of your students shows up at school that day with a weapon of his or her own? What then?” Joanna returned. “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a properly trained and armed police officer on-site when all hell breaks loose?”
“I don’t make the rules,” Debra Highsmith returned. “I simply enforce them.”
That’s the same thing I always say, Joanna thought.
“All right,” she said. “Nine o’clock, on Thursday, November first, in the auditorium.”
She put down the phone and was still staring at it when her private line rang.
“You’re late,” Butch said. “It’s ten after twelve. You’re still in the office.”