“That’s good.” Joanna picked up the envelope, tapped edge of it on the desktop, but still made no move to open it. “I’ll take this matter under advisement,” she said. “I’ll give it some thought, but for the time being, you need to understand that I have not yet accepted your resignation. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now, then, aren’t I supposed to have some kind of early-morning briefing about what went on in the county overnight?”
“Two brothers got all drunked up at a birthday party over in Kansas Settlement and beat the crap out of one another with wooden baseball bats. One of them is in the county hospital down in Douglas. There were two domestics in the county overnight, one out in Elfrida and the other in Miracle Valley. Three one runaway juvenile from Pirtleville, and a carload of illegals who ran out of gas between Tombstone and St. David. The deputy held them long enough for the Border Patrol to show up and take them into custody.”
“That’s all?”
“Isn’t that enough?” Voland replied.
“What about Ernie Carpenter? Any developments there?”
“Nothing new overnight that I know of, except that Ivy Patterson and that Russian of hers did go ahead and tie the knot. I can tell you that one’s raised a few eyebrows around town. Other than that, things are pretty quiet.” Voland headed for the door.
“Wait, Dick,” Joanna said. “There’s one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you have any suggestions about who to get to fill Martin Sanders’ position?”
Voland shook his head. “Not right offhand. It’s a funny situation, neither fish nor fowl. It would be a big promotion for most of the guys out on patrol, but that person essentially functions in a staff capacity, totally cut off from any direct con tact with the public.
“Not only that, it’s a paper-intensive job. The person who takes it is agreeing to serve as point man for every ugly can of worms that walks in the door-from pet cruelty complaints to wrangling with the board of supervisors over budget cuts.”
“You’re saying most of the people currently in the department would take one look at the job description and run like hell in the opposite direction?”
“That’s right.”
“Including you, I presume?” Joanna asked.
“Most definitely,” Voland answered. “I wouldn’t have that job on a bet.”
He left then. For some time afterward, Joanna stared at the closed door, then she went back to the newspaper article. This time she read it all the way through. Going over the story, she realized why it was Sue Rolles had seemed so familiar to her. She didn’t remember her from any kind of meeting at the hospital in Tucson the day Andy died. She could barely remember anything at all about that awful day. But she had seen Sue Rolles here and there as she traveled the campaign trail around the county, attending various civic meetings in advance of the election.
Sue Rolles must have been following every twist and turn of the campaign for months. Reading the article carefully, Joanna could tell that some of the quotes from disgruntled departmental employees were new and legitimate. There were bound to be others besides Kristin Marsten who were actively provoked at having a new female boss. But most of the quotes attributed to Richard Voland were fragments of things she recognized as campaign rhetoric, sound bites taken out of context and written to seem like up-to-the-minute, post-election bitching.
It was easy to see now how the pieces fit together. Joanna realized that the article might have had an entirely different slant and focus if she hadn’t summarily thrown Sue Rolles out of her office. The reporter was plainly pissed, and she was seeing to it that Joanna Brady paid dearly for her little tactical error.
From out of her past, she could almost hear D. H. Lathrop’s New Mexican drawl telling Joanna and her mother, “Newspaper reporters are Just like rattlesnakes. You’re better off keeping them out in the open where you can see what they’re doing.”
Live and learn, Joanna told herself, and don’t make the same mistake twice.
Joanna SPENT the next half hour studying every word of the articles in the Sun that had anything to do with her department, including the one that dealt with the two Cochise County homicides.
That story was primarily a harmless recitation of the facts as they were known and disseminated at the time of Dick Voland’s early-afternoon press conference. News about the tentative identification of Thornton Kimball’s remains hadn’t made it into Tucson prior to press time.
One for them, one for us, Joanna thought.
She turned then to the rest of the mail. There, among that day’s collection of memoranda and bulletins, she found a copy of that morning’s Bisbee Bee. That one did contain news of the Thornton Kimball I.D. Not only that, some enterprising reporter had managed to track down copies of old Bisbee High School yearbooks. Pictures of Harold Patterson and Thornton Kimball, both as much younger men and both dressed formally in white shirts, jackets, and ties, stared out from the front page of the newspaper.
Seeing them together like that, dressed in the outdated attire of an earlier era, it was interesting to note how much Burton Kimball took after his mother’s side of the family. He looked far more like a much younger version of Harold Patterson than he did his own father.
“Miss Kellogg to see you,” an abrupt Kristin announced over the intercom.
When Angie sauntered into Joanna’s office, she headed straight over to the window where she stood looking out. “You need to put a bird feeder in that mesquite tree and a ground feeder for the quail underneath,” she said.
In two short months, Angie’s knowledge of and devotion to Bisbee’s native wild-bird population had become encyclopedic. The yard of her house in Bisbee’s Galena neighborhood had become a bird-feeding emporium and looked to outsiders like an aviary. Armed with her treasured copy of Birds of North America, she spent her time off work happily watching and cataloging her feathered visitors.
“I haven’t exactly had time to think about birds,” Joanna replied with a laugh. “What brings you here?”
Angie turned toward Joanna, her face suddenly somber. “I almost didn’t come at all,” Angie said, “I wanted to, but when I got as far as the parking lot, I almost chickened out and didn’t come inside. My whole body started to shake. I’ve never walked into a place like this on my own before or without having my hands cuffed behind my back. It brought back lots of bad memories.”
“I’m sure it did,” Joanna said.
Angie left the window and stood briefly behind one of the chairs as if still too nervous to sit down.
“The girls in L.A. would never believe it. I can hardly believe it myself.”
The fact that Angie could count a county Sheriff and a Methodist minister among her friends was, in a word, unbelievable. Nothing in Angie’s troubled past as a runaway teenager who survived by her own wits would have pointed toward that possibility.
“I came to show you something,” she said.
Reaching into the back pocket of her pants, she pulled out a credit-card-sized piece of plastic.
“Here,” she said, handing it over. “Look at this.”
The plastic card was an Arizona driver’s license. Angie Kellogg’s first driver’s license ever, complete with one of the best-looking driver’s I.D. photos Joanna had ever seen.
“You passed,” she said. “Congratulations, and it’s a good picture, too. Must be beginner’s luck.”
Angie smiled smugly. “And I passed on the first try, she said. “In fact, I just came from there. I was afraid I might end up having to take the driving part more than once, but the guy who rode with me was great.”
Looking at the lush, blond Angie, Joanna thought it wasn’t surprising to think that a driving examiner might have somehow overlooked a minor miscue or two. An early loss of innocence had robbed Angie of the ability to see her own physical beauty. What was lost on her most likely hadn’t been missed by the male licensing official.