J. A. JANCE

Fire and Ice

Contents

PROLOGUE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

Also by J. A. Jance

Copyright

About the Publisher

FIRE AND ICE

J. A. JANCE is the New York Timesbestselling author of the J. P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, the Ali Reynolds series, and three standalone thrillers. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, she lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.

www.jajance.com

For Larry Dever and Ken Wallentine, the real deals

And for Hal Witter, the real deal, too

PROLOGUE

November

DRIVING EAST on I-90, Tomas Rivera was surprised to see the snow spinning down out of a darkened sky in huge fat flakes that threatened to overwhelm the puny efforts of the 4-Runner’s hardworking windshield wipers. It was only the sixth of November. Snow this heavy didn’t often come to the Cascades so early in the season. Beyond Eastgate and North Bend electronic signs flashed a warning that traction devices were required in the pass.

The signaled warnings didn’t concern Tomas all that much. He was sure the stolen SUV’s four-wheel drive would get him through any snow on the roadway. Overworked cops would be so busy dealing with multiple fender-benders that he doubted they’d be on the lookout for stolen vehicles. It also seemed likely that it was too soon for the Department of Transportation to be doing avalanche control, but what if they were? What if he got stopped at the pass and had to wait for snowplows or ended up being stuck at the chain-up area for an hour or two? What if the girl on the floor in the far back of the SUV woke up suddenly and started making noises—thumping, bumping, or groaning? If people were standing around outside in the waiting area, he worried they might hear her or see her or start asking questions.

Despite the cold, Tomas found he was sweating. His armpits were soaked, and so were his hands inside the gloves, but he didn’t dare take them off.

“Wear gloves,” Miguel had warned him. “Whatever you do, wear gloves.”

Since it wasn’t a good idea to cross Miguel, Tomas wore gloves.

The poor woman had already been bound, presumably gagged, wrapped loosely in a tarp and dumped in the back of the 4-Runner when Miguel delivered the vehicle to him. Miguel didn’t say where she was from or why she was there, and Tomas didn’t ask. The less he knew about her, the better.

“Take her out in the woods and get rid of her,” Miguel had said. “There’s a full gas can in the back. Use that. Throw her out, pull her teeth, douse her with gasoline, and light a match. When you’re done, ditch the car somewhere far away. Understand?”

Tomas had nodded. He understood all right. And he understood what would happen if he didn’t. Tomas also understood Miguel and the men he worked with. They were rich and powerful, dangerous and ruthless. They were the kind of men who would kill you in a heartbeat, not with their two hands, of course, but they would have somebody around willing to do the dirty work. They’d hand it off to some poor dope who owed them and owed big; or to someone like Tomas who didn’t dare step out of line for fear of what would happen to him—or to his family.

Yes, Tomas thought. Someone just like me.

He understood what it meant to commit a mortal sin. If he didn’t get to confession and died, he’d go straight to hell. And if he didn’t do what he’d been told, he’d be living in hell. In a way, he already was. He had paid good money—money earned doing backbreaking, dangerous delimbing work out in the woods—to have Lupe and the boys smuggled across the border and brought north. But having paid a small fortune to Miguel’s coyotes didn’t mean Tomas and Lupe were home free. Miguel had made it clear that if Tomas didn’t do what was required of him, what might happen to Little Tomas and Alfonso would be worse than death. For the thousandth time Tomas wished he had left well enough alone. Things weren’t necessarily pleasant or comfortable in the little tin-roofed shack where Lupe and the boys had lived in Cuidad Obregon. But he’d had no idea about the real price of bringing his little family to the United States of America.

So Tomas kept driving. He turned off the freeway at Cabin Creek Road and headed off into the maze of National Forest roads that carried loggers and logging equipment off into the wilderness. That’s why Miguel had come looking for him to do this particular job. Tomas knew all those roads like the back of his hand—because he had driven them himself, ferrying crews in and out of the woods. With severe winter weather setting in, the logging crews were out of the picture for the time being—until the snow melted in the spring. Or summer.

Even though it made it hard to see, Tomas was grateful for the deepening snow. There would be no tire tracks left for the cops to trace. And no footprints, either. By morning, all tracks would be nothing more than slight dents. And in weather like this, no one would be out there watching, either. Only the dumbest of cross-country skiers would venture this far off the main roads.

As Tomas drove, he wondered what the woman had done that merited this death sentence, but he didn’t wonder too hard. That was Miguel’s business, not his.

Tomas stopped the SUV a mile or so short of Lake Kachess at a spot where yet another road wandered away from the one he was on. The intersection created a small clearing that was barely big enough for him to swing the 4-Runner in a tight circle without running the risk of getting stuck. When he turned off the engine, he was dismayed to realize that his prisoner was awake and moaning. Miguel had told him she was out for good, but clearly that wasn’t true.

Shaking his head, Tomas punched the button that unlocked the hatch, then got out and walked through swirling snow to the back of the vehicle. Opening the cargo bay, he reached in and grabbed the tarp-wrapped bundle. As he pulled it toward him, the woman inside struggled and tried to roll away. Grabbing for her a second time, his hand caught on what was evidently a cowboy boot, one that came off in his hand. It surprised him and bothered him somehow. He didn’t want to know she wore cowboy boots. He didn’t want to know anything about her at all.

When he finally had her free of the floorboard, he let her drop to the ground. The force of the fall knocked the breath out of her. For a brief moment she was quiet, then she started moving and struggling once more. The mewling sounds coming from under the tarp were aimed at him in a wordless plea that was clear enough.

“Please don’t do this. Please. Please. Please.”

Tomas didn’t want to do it, either. But it was too late to stop; too late to turn back. Tomas knew that if he failed or wavered, Lupe and the boys would become Miguel’s next target.

Tugging at the end of the tarp, he dragged her away from the road and into the shelter of a second growth tree. Then he went back for the tire iron. Several blows to the head from that rendered the woman senseless. He knew what he was supposed to do then. Tomas had the needle-nose pliers there in his pocket. But he also knew, as Miguel did not, that pulling her teeth was something Tomas could not do.

When his boys had lost their baby teeth—their loose baby teeth—Lupe had been the one who did the honors. The very idea of removing hers … Instead, he went back to the car and retrieved the gas can, poured the liquid over the now still tarp, and lit the match. He had to light more than one because it took more than one before the fumes finally ignited.

When they did, he moved back out of reach, crossing himself and uttering a quick prayer as the flames roared skyward through the swirling snow. In the flickering firelight, he looked down and noticed that while he was wrestling her out of the SUV, the cowboy boot had come to rest in the snow near the back bumper. Reaching down, Tomas picked it up and was about to toss it into the raging fire when he noticed that something had been taped to the instep. Peeling off the tape, he pulled out a small rectangular piece of stiff paper. It was blank on one side, but the other side revealed the smiling photo—a school photo, no doubt—of a dark-haired boy not that much older than his own sons.

Tomas looked back through the eddying snow. The tarp was fully engulfed now. So was the woman. The odor of burning gasoline was giving way to something else. He quickly tossed the boot into the flames, but for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to part with the photo. Slipping that into the pocket of his shirt, he turned and clambered back into the SUV.

As Tomas drove away, he wondered where and how he’d get rid of the 4-Runner. It had to be somewhere far away from surveillance cameras. He couldn’t afford to be seen anywhere near it, and not just because it was a stolen vehicle.

Now it was a matter of life and death—his as well as hers.

MARCH

LAKE KACHESS

KEN LEGGETT wasn’t what you could call a warm and fuzzy guy. For one thing, he didn’t like people much. It wasn’t that he was a bigot. Not at all. It wasn’t a matter of his not liking blacks or Hispanics or Chinese—he disliked them all, whites included. He was your basic all-inclusive disliker.

Which was why this solitary job as a heavy-equipment operator was the best one he’d ever had—or kept. In the spring he spent eight to ten hours a day riding a snowplow and uncovering mile after mile of forest road that logging companies used to harvest their treasure troves of wood from one clear-cut section of the Cascades after another.

Once the existing roads were cleared, he traded the snowplow for either a road grader, which he used to carve even more roads, or a front-end loader, which could be used to accumulate slash—the brush and branches left behind after the logs had been cut down, graded, and hauled away.

As long as he was riding his machinery, Ken didn’t have to listen to anyone else talk. He could be alone with his thoughts, which ranged from the profound to the mundane. Just being out in the woods made it pretty clear that God existed, and knowing his ex-mother-in-law, to say nothing of his ex-wife, made it clear that the devil and hell were real entities as well. Given all that, then, it made perfect sense that the world should be so screwed up—that the Washington Redskins would probably never win the Super Bowl and that the Seattle Mariners would never win the World Series, either.

The fact that Ken liked the Mariners was pretty self-explanatory. After all, he lived in North Bend—outside North Bend, really—and Seattle was just a few miles down the road. As for why he loved the Redskins? He’d never been to Washington—D.C., that is. In fact, the only time he’d ever ventured out of Washington State had been back in the 1980s, when his then-wife had dragged him up to Vancouver, B.C., for something called Expo. He had hated it. It had rained like crazy, and most of the exhibits were stupid. If he wanted to be wet and miserable, all he had to do was go to work. He sure as hell didn’t have to pay good money for the privilege.

As for the Redskins? What he liked about them most was that they hadn’t bowed to public opinion and changed their name to something more politically palatable. And when he was watching football games in the Beaver Bar in North Bend, he loved shouting out “Go, Redskins!” and waiting to see if anyone had balls enough to give him any grief over it. When it came to barroom fights, Little Kenny Leggett, as he was sometimes called despite the fact that he was a bruising six-five, knew how to handle himself—and a broken beer bottle.

So here he was sending a spray of snow flying off the road and thinking about the fact that he was glad to be going back to work. Early. A whole month earlier than anyone had expected. When winter had landed with a knock-out punch early in November, everybody figured snow was going to bury the Cascades with record-shattering intensity. The ski resorts had all hoped for a memorable season, and that turned out to be true for the wrong reason—way too little snow rather than too much.

That first heavy snowfall got washed away by equally record-shattering rains a few days later. For the rest of the winter the snow never quite got its groove back and had proved to be unusually mild. It snowed some, but not enough for skiers really to get out there. And not enough for the bureaucrats to stop whining about it, either. In fact, just that morning, on his way to work, Ken had heard some jerk from the water department complaining that the lack of snowfall and runoff might well lead to water rationing in the Pacific Northwest before the end of summer.

Yeah, Ken thought. Right. That makes sense, especially in Washington, where it rains constantly, ten months out of twelve.

Ken glanced at his watch. The switch to daylight saving time made for longer afternoons, but it was nearing quitting time, and that meant he was also nearing the end of that day’s run. His boss wasn’t keen on paying overtime, and Ken wasn’t interested in working for free, so he needed to be back at the equipment shed by the time he was supposed to be off duty.

It was a long way back—a long slow way—and the thermos of coffee he had drunk with his lunch had run through the system. After turning the plow around in a small clearing, he set the brake. Then, shutting off the engine, he clambered down and went to make some yellow snow.

After the steady roar of equipment, the sudden stillness was a shock to his system. He knew that old saying about if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it … He wondered sometimes about what happened if you took a leak in the woods and no one heard you or saw you, did it exist? Chuckling at that private joke, he headed for a tree that was a few feet off the road to do his business. Better here where there was little chance of being seen. Close to civilization, somebody might be out there. Ken didn’t exactly think of himself as shy, but still …

Spring was coming. The snow had melted away completely in some spots, but under the trees it was still thick enough. Once he was out of sight of the road, he spotted what appeared to be a small boulder sticking up out of the snow. He unzipped and took aim at that. As the stream of steaming yellow urine hit the rock, the remaining snow melted away and a series of odd cracks became visible in the rock’s surface. Squinting, Ken bent to take a closer look. Only after a long moment did what he was seeing finally register. When it did, the horrible realization hit him like the surge of a powerful electric shock. That boulder wasn’t a boulder at all. It was a skull, a gaping human skull, sitting at an angle, half in and half out of a batch of melting yellow snow.

Staring at the awful visage in astonishment, Ken staggered backward, all the while trying desperately to zip up his pants as he went. Unaware of where he was going, he stumbled over something—a root, he hoped—and fell to the ground. But when he looked back to see what had tripped him, he realized that it wasn’t a root at all. He had stumbled over a length of bone that his fleeing footsteps had dislodged from a thin layer of melting snow.

That was when he lost it. With a groan he ducked his head and was very, very sick. At last, when there was nothing left to heave, Ken Leggett wiped his mouth on his sleeve and lurched to his feet. With a ground speed that would have astonished his old high school football coach, Ken headed for the safety of his snowplow. Once inside, he locked both doors and then leaned against the steering wheel, shaking from head to toe and gasping for breath.

His first thought was that he’d just forget about it and let someone else find it later—much later. Ken didn’t like cops. He wasn’t good with cops. And if he reported finding a body, what if they thought he was somehow responsible? But then he managed to pull himself together.

What if this was my brother or my son? Or my sister or daughter? he thought. I wouldn’t want whoever found them to walk away and leave them. Straighten up, he told himself. Have some balls for once and do the right thing.

He reached over to the stack of orange construction cones he kept on the snowplow’s muddied floorboard. He pulled one of those loose and then, after opening the window, dropped it outside. It landed right in the middle of the footprints he’d left in the snow as he leaped back into the vehicle. At least this way he’d be able to find the spot again; he’d be able to bring someone here.

Steeling himself for that ordeal, Ken made himself a promise. Once he got through with the cops, he would hit the Beaver Bar and stay there until he was good and drunk. The best thing about the Beave was that he could walk home from there. Ken Leggett already had a lifetime’s worth of DUIs. He had paid all those off now, and he sure as hell didn’t need another one.

He started the snowplow then and put it in gear. Halfway back to the equipment shed, he stopped and checked to see if he had a signal on his cell phone—only half a bar but enough. His hands still shook as he dialed the number.

“Washington State Patrol,” the 911 operator answered. “What are you reporting?”

“A body,” Ken replied. His voice was shaking, too, right along with his hands. “I just found a dead body out here in the woods.”

“You’re certain this person is deceased?” the operator asked.

“He’s dead, all right,” Ken answered. “As far as I can see, all that’s left of him is bones.”

ONE

March

I AM NOT a wimp. Maybe that sounds too much like Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” but it’s true. I’m not. With twenty-plus years at Seattle PD, most of it on the Homicide Squad, and with several more years of laboring in the Washington State Attorney General’s Special Homicide Investigation Team, I think I can make that statement with some confidence. Usually. Most of the time. Right up until I got on the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party ride at Disneyland with my six-year-old granddaughter, Karen Louise, aka Kayla.

She had been in charge of the spinning. She loved it. I did not. When the ride ended, she went skipping away as happy as can be toward her waiting parents while I staggered along after her. Over her shoulder I heard her say, “Can we go again?” Then, stopping to look at me, she added, “Gramps, how come your face is so green?” Good question.

When Kayla was younger, she used to call me Gumpa, which I liked. Now I’ve been demoted or promoted, I’m not sure which, to Gramps, which I don’t like. It’s better, however, than what she calls Dave Livingston, my first wife’s second husband and official widower. (Karen, Kayla’s biological grandmother, has been dead for a long time now, but Dave is still a permanent part of all our lives.) Kayla stuck him with the handle of Poppa. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a lot worse than Gramps.

But back to my face. It really was green. I was having a tough time standing upright, and believe me, I hadn’t had a drop to drink, either. By then, though, Mel figured out that I was in trouble.

Melissa Majors Soames is my third wife. That seems like a bit of a misnomer, since my second wife, Anne Corley, was married to me for less than twenty-four hours. Our time together was, as they say, short but brief, ending in what is often referred to as “suicide by cop.” It bothered me that Anne preferred being dead to being married to me, and it gave me something of a complex—I believe shrinks call it a fear of commitment—that made it difficult for me to move on. Mel Soames was the one who finally changed all that.

She and I met while working for the S.H.I.T. squad. (Yes, I agree, it’s an unfortunate name, but we’re stuck with it.) Originally we just worked together, then it evolved into something else. Mel is someone who is absolutely cool in the face of trouble, and she’s watched my back on more than one occasion. And since this whole idea of having a “three-day family-bonding vacation at Disneyland” had been her bright idea, it was only fair that she should watch my back now.

She didn’t come racing up to see if I was all right because she could see perfectly well that I wasn’t. Instead, she went looking for help in the guise of a uniformed park employee, who dropped the broom he was wielding and led me to the first-aid station. It seems to me that it would have made sense to have a branch office of that a lot closer to the damned teacups.

So I went to the infirmary. Mel stayed long enough to be sure I was in good hands, then bustled off to “let everyone know what’s happening.” I stayed where I was, spending a good part of day three of our three-day ticket pass flat on my back on an ER-style cot with a very officious nurse taking my pulse and asking me questions.

“Ever been seasick?” she wanted to know.

“Several times,” I told her. I could have added every time I get near a boat, but I didn’t.

“Do you have any Antivert with you?” she asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Antivert. Meclizine. If you’re prone to seasickness, you should probably carry some with you. Without it, I can’t imagine what you were thinking. Why did you go on that ride?”

“My granddaughter wanted me to.”

She gave me a bemused look and shook her head. “That’s what they all say. You’d think grown men would have better sense.”

She was right about that. I should have had better sense, but of course I didn’t say so.

“We don’t hand out medication here,” she said. “Why don’t you just lie there for a while with your eyes closed. That may help.”

When she finally left me alone, I must have fallen asleep. I woke up when my phone rang.

“Beau,” Ross Alan Connors said. “Where are you?”

Connors has been the Washington State Attorney General for quite some time now, and he was the one who had plucked me from my post-retirement doldrums after leaving Seattle PD and installed me in his then relatively new Special Homicide Investigation Team. The previous fall’s election cycle had seen him fend off hotly contested attacks in both the primary and general elections. With campaigning out of the way for now, he seemed to be focusing on the job, enough so that he was calling me on Sunday afternoon when I was supposedly on vacation.

“California,” I told him. “Disneyland, actually.”

I didn’t mention the infirmary part. That was none of his business.

“Harry tells me you’re due back tomorrow.”

Harry was my boss, Harry Ignatius Ball, known to friend and foe alike as Harry I. Ball. People who hear his name and think that gives them a license to write him off as some kind of joke are making a big mistake. He’s like a crocodile lurking in the water with just his eyes showing. The teeth are there, just under the surface, ready and waiting to nail the unwary.

“Yes,” I told him. “Our plane leaves here bright and early. We should be at our desks by one.”

When Mel had broached the Disneyland idea, she had wanted us to pull off this major family-style event while, at the same time, having as little impact as possible—one and a half day’s worth—on our accumulated vacation time. We had flown down on Thursday after work and were due back Monday at one.

On my own, I’ve never been big on vacations of any kind. Unused vacation days have slipped through my fingers time and again without my really noticing or caring, but Mel Soames is another kind of person altogether. She has her heart set on our taking a road trip this summer. She wants to cross the border into BC, head east over the Canadian Rockies and then come back to Seattle by way of Yellowstone and Glacier. This sounds like way too much scenery for me, but she’s the woman in my life and I want to keep her happy, so a-driving we will go.

“Mel can go to the office,” Ross said, “but not you. I want you in Ellensburg at the earliest possible moment.”

If you leave the Seattle area driving east on I-90, Ellensburg is the second stopping-off place after you cross the Cascades. First there’s Cle Elum and next Ellensburg. Neither of them strikes me as much of a garden spot.

“Why would I want to go to Ellensburg?” I asked.

“To be there when the Kittitas M.E. does an autopsy. Friday afternoon some heavy-equipment operator was out snowplowing a national forest road over by Lake Kachess where he ended up digging up more than he bargained for. This is number six.”

I didn’t have to ask number six what—I already knew. For the past two months S.H.I.T. had been working on the murders of several young Hispanic women whose charred remains had been found at various dump sites scattered all over western Washington. So far none of them had been identified. As far as we could tell, none of our victims had been reported missing. We’d pretty well decided that our dead girls were probably involved in prostitution, but until we managed to identify one of them and could start making connections, it was going to be damnably difficult to figure out who had killed them.

These days it’s routine for the dental records of missing persons to be entered into a national missing persons database. That wasn’t possible with our current set of victims. None of them had teeth. None of them! And the teeth in question hadn’t been lost to poor dental hygiene, either. They had been forcibly removed. As in yanked out by the roots!

“Same MO?” I asked.

“Pretty much except for the fact that this one seems to have her teeth,” Ross said. “So either we have a different doer or the guy ran out of time. This victim was wrapped in a tarp and set on fire just like the others. The body was found late Friday afternoon. It took until Saturday morning for the Kittitas County Sheriff’s Department to retrieve the remains. Unfortunately, their M.E. has been out of town at a conference, so that has slowed down the process. They put the remains on ice until she returns and expect the autopsy to happen sometime tomorrow afternoon. That’s where you come in. I want you there when it happens in case there’s some detail that we know about that the locals might miss.”

“Our plane’s due to depart at ten-twenty,” I told him.

“That’ll be cutting it close then,” Ross said. “God only knows how long it’ll take for you to get your luggage once you get here.”

Thanks to a legacy from Anne Corley, Mel and I had flown down to California on a private jet. All we’d have to do was step off the plane and wait for the luggage to be loaded into our waiting car before we drove it off the tarmac, but rubbing my boss’s nose in that seemed like a bad idea.

“I’ll make it,” I said. “I’ll drop Mel off at the condo to pick up the other car and then I’ll head out.”

“All right,” Ross said. “Be there as soon as you can.”

“Do you have a number for the Kittitas M.E.’s office?” I asked.

“Sure. Can you take it down?”

I had no intention of telling him that I was flat on my back in the first-aid station and I wasn’t about to ask the nurse to lend me a pen or pencil.

“Can you text it to me?” I asked.

This was something coming from someone who had come to twenty-first-century technology kicking and screaming all the way. I’m surprised I wasn’t struck by lightning on the spot, but that’s what comes of having Generation X progeny. I had learned about text messaging the hard way—because my kids, Kelly and Scott, had insisted on it.

“Sure,” Ross said. “I’ll have Katie send it over to you.”

Katie Dunn was Ross’s Gen X secretary. Knowing Ross is even more of a wireless troglodyte than I am made me feel some better—more with it, as we used to say back in the day.

I had just stuffed the phone back into my pocket when the nurse led Kelly into the room.

“How are you?” she asked, concern written on her face. “Mel told us what happened and that you needed to take it easy for a while. Are you feeling any better?”

I swung my feet off the side of the bed and sat up slowly.

“Take it easy,” the nurse advised.

But the nap had done the trick. I was definitely feeling better. “I’m fine,” I said. “One hundred percent.”

“Mel went with Jeremy. He’s taking the kids back to the hotel,” Kelly explained. “She’ll help get them fed and make sure the babysitter arrangements hold up. If you’re still feeling up to having that dinner, that is.”

That was what Mel had told Kelly, of course. And that’s what she was doing, but only up to a point. The reasons she was doing those things were a whole lot murkier—to Kelly, at least, if not to me.

Kelly and I haven’t always been on the best of terms. In fact, we’ve usually not been on the best of terms. She had run away from home prior to high school graduation and managed to get herself knocked up. Her shotgun wedding had ended up being unavoidably delayed, so Kayla had arrived on the scene before her parents had ever tied the knot. I have always thought most of this Kelly-based uproar is deliberate.

Mel takes the position that it’s more complex than that—both conscious and not. She thinks Kelly’s ongoing rebellion has been a way for her to get back at her parents—at both Karen and me. Although I didn’t know about it at the time, Kelly was mad as hell at her mother for coming down with cancer and dying while Kelly was still in her teens, and she was mad as hell at me for having been drunk most of the time while she was growing up. And now she’s apparently mad at me for not being drunk. When it comes to kids, sometimes you just can’t win.

So Mel had designed this whole Disneyland adventure, complete with inviting my son and daughter-in-law, Scott and Cherisse, along for the ride, for no other reason than to see if she could help smooth out some of the emotional wrinkles between Kelly and me. So far so good. As far as I could tell, everyone seemed to be having a good time. There had been no cross words, at least none I had heard. And I suspected that was also why Mel had sent Kelly to drag me out of the infirmary.

“I should have gone on the teacups with her,” Kelly said as we walked toward the monorail. “Jeremy won’t set foot on one of those on a bet, but rides like that don’t bother me. They never have. And Kayla loves them so much. She rode the teacups three more times after you left. She didn’t want to ride on anything else.”

I stopped cold. Kelly turned back to look at me. “Are you all right?” she asked.

It took me a minute to figure out what to say. I now knew something about Kelly and her mother and her daughter, and it was something she didn’t know about me. As I said already, I was mostly AWOL when Kelly and Scott were little—drinking and/or working. Karen was the one who took them to soccer and T-ball and movies. She was also the one who “did the Puyallup” with them each fall. When it’s time for the Western Washington State Fair each September, that’s what they used to call it—“doing the Puyallup.” It was Karen instead of me who walked them through the displays of farm animals and baked goods; who taught them to love eating cotton candy and elephant ears; and who took them for rides on the midway.

“You’re just like your mother,” I said, over the lump that rose suddenly in my throat and made it difficult to speak. “And Kayla’s just like you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kelly asked. She sounded angry and defensive. It was so like her to take offense and to assume that whatever I said was somehow an underhanded criticism.

“Did your mother ever tell you about the first time I took her to the Puyallup?”

“No,” Kelly said. “She never did. Why?”

“She wanted to ride the Tilt-a-Whirl, and I knew if I did that, I’d be sick. Rides like that always make me sick. So I bought the tickets. Your mother and I stood in line, but when it came time to get on, I couldn’t do it. She ended up having to go on the ride with the people who were standing in line behind us. Here I was, supposedly this hotshot young guy with the beautiful girl on his arm, and all I could do was stand there like an idiot and wait for the ride to end and for her to get off. It was one of the most humiliating moments of my life. We never talked about it again afterward, but she never asked me to get on one of those rides again, either.”

Kelly was staring up into my face. She looked so much like her mother right then—was so much like her mother—that it was downright spooky. It turns out DNA is pretty amazing stuff.

“So why did you do it?” she asked.

Now I was lost. Yes, I had been telling Kelly the story, but her question caught me off guard. I didn’t know what “it” she was asking about.

“Do what?” I asked.

“If you already knew it would make you sick, why on earth did you get on the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party with Kayla?”

“I thought maybe I’d grown out of it?” I asked lamely.

Kelly shook her head as if to say I hadn’t yet stumbled on the right answer. “And?” she prompted.

“Because my granddaughter wanted me to?” I added.

The storm clouds that had washed across Kelly’s face vanished. She reached up, grabbed me around the neck, and kissed my cheek.

“Oh, Daddy,” she said with a laugh. “You’re such a dope, but I love you.”

See what I mean about Mel Soames? The woman is a genius.

TWO

THE CALL came in just after the morning briefing ended and as Sheriff Joanna Brady was about to tackle that day’s bushel basketful of paperwork.

“Sorry to disturb you,”Larry Kendrick, her lead dispatcher, had said. “We’ve had a call about a possible homicide north of Bowie at a place called Action Trail Adventures.”

“Never heard of it,”Joanna said.

“I’m not surprised. It’s an all-terrain vehicle hot spot. They keep a fairly low profile, probably to avoid coming up against planning and zoning restrictions. I’ve dispatched Detectives Carpenter and Howell to the scene, and I’ve asked Jeannine to send out an Animal Control officer. She has Natalie Wilson coming over from Willcox. She should be on the scene within the next twenty minutes or so.”

Ernie Carpenter was Joanna’s senior homicide detective, a guy who had put in his twenty years and was verging on being ready to pull the plug and put himself out to pasture. Debra Howell had been working homicide for the better part of two years, partnering with Ernie as often as possible as she gradually learned the ropes. Jeannine Phillips, on the other hand, was Joanna’s head of Animal Control. Animal Control had been stuffed into Joanna’s area of responsibility years earlier, supposedly on a temporary basis, which had now turned permanent. Natalie Wilson was Jeannine’s new hire.

“What’s going on?”Joanna asked. “Why an ACO?”

“A concerned citizen called it in. He was out on his ATV when he saw buzzards circling overhead. He went there and saw what he thinks is a body, but he can’t get close enough to tell for sure. There’s a dog there with the victim, and he’s fierce as hell. The dog is keeping the vultures away, but he’s doing the same thing to everyone else, acting like he’s ready to tear them limb from limb. With the dog there, no one has been able to get close enough to the victim to check on him. He looks dead, but maybe he’s not.”

“Any idea what happened to him?”Joanna asked.

“The guy who called it in on his cell phone says it looks like he was run over by something. It could be an accident, but it could be something else, too.”

Five years earlier, when Joanna Brady had first run for office as sheriff of Cochise County, it had been in the aftermath of her first husband’s death. Deputy Andrew Roy Brady had been gunned down by a drug trafficker’s hit man while he himself had been standing for election. People had encouraged Joanna to run in Andy’s place. When she was elected, many people had assumed it was a gesture of sympathy more than anything else. She may have been the daughter of one law enforcement officer and the widow of another, but she had never been a cop herself, and no one really expected that she would be.

Once she took office, Joanna had assumed the administrative duties that came with the office, but she had also set herself the task of becoming a real cop. She had enrolled in and graduated from the same police academy course of training that was required of all her new recruits. She did enough range work to keep her weapons skills at proper levels, and rather than hiding out in her office and behind her desk, she had insisted on going to the scene of every homicide that had occurred on her watch and in her jurisdiction. If this possible homicide turned into a real one, Joanna knew she would go there as well.

“Thanks for keeping me posted, Larry,”she told him. “When you know more details, let me know or tell Ernie to call me.”

As soon as Joanna put down the telephone, she returned to the stack of paperwork—the never-ending stack of paperwork—that was the bane of her existence. It had always been bad, but now it was worse. Her longtime chief deputy and second in command, Frank Montoya, had been wooed away from her department when he was offered the chief of police job in the nearby city of Sierra Vista. She missed him more than she could say.

Frank had been one of her opponents in her original race for sheriff. After winning the election, she had chosen him to serve as one of her two chief deputies. Turning a major opponent into a loyal ally had been a stroke of genius on Joanna’s part. Frank’s attention to detail had been a major asset to her. He had kept an eagle eye on budgetary issues and had handled the complex job of shift scheduling with a casual flair that had made it seem easy. He had also been at the forefront of bringing Joanna’s department into the world of twenty-first-century information/technology.

Joanna had decided against turning the chief deputy search over to a head-hunting search firm. Instead, after several months of deliberation, she had promoted from within. Tom Had-lock, her jail commander, who had a master’s degree in public administration, had seemed a reasonable choice. Two months into his new and greatly expanded role, however, Tom was still struggling, and so was Joanna. Tom may have had a university degree to his credit, but on the job he was stiff and inexperienced and lacking the easygoing confidence and competence that had made working with Frank such a pleasure.

Staring at a paper copy of the next month’s shift schedule that had finally made it to Joanna’s desk a day later than it should have been, she shook her head regretfully and recalled the words to that old Bob Dylan song: “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”

Of course, Frank wasn’t completely gone. He had asked her to stand up with him and be his “best man”—Joanna liked to think of it as “best person”—at the wedding that was scheduled to happen on Saturday morning of this very week. Joanna had been honored to accept, but the hoopla surrounding the wedding and Joanna’s expected participation in all of it added more complications to a week that was already busy even before Larry Kendrick’s Monday morning phone call.

Joanna signed off on the scheduling paperwork and had started making progress on her mound of correspondence when her direct line rang again. This time the caller was Ernie.

“Sorry to bother you, boss,”Ernie said. “Natalie finally corralled the dog—a Doberman-looking mutt—and hauled him out of the way so someone could check on the guy. He’s dead, all right. Looks to me like he’s been that way for some time—several hours at least.”

“Have you called the M.E.?”Joanna asked.

“You know Dr. Machett,”Ernie said sourly. “Remember? We’re not allowed to call him directly. I talked to Madge Livingston. She said she’d send him a text message and that he’d call when he can. I guess she’s not allowed to call him directly, either. Makes me miss the hell out of Doc Winfield.”

Joanna missed him, too. Dr. George Winfield, the previous Cochise County medical examiner and, coincidentally, Joanna’s stepfather, had announced his retirement at almost the same time Frank Montoya had given Joanna his notice. Giddy as a pair of teenagers, George and her mother, Eleanor, had headed off on their first snowbird adventure in a newly purchased but used motor home. They were currently gearing up for their second summer’s worth of RVing. In the meantime, Joanna couldn’t help feeling that she had been left holding the bag.

Losing two valued members of her team—George Winfield and Frank Montoya—at once had come as a severe body blow to Joanna’s administration, and the constant readjustment uproar inside her department since then had left her reeling. For months, Joanna’s officers had been plagued by having to work with a series of contract M.E.s who had filled in on a temporary basis. A month earlier, the Board of Supervisors had finally gotten around to hiring George’s permanent replacement. They had given the M.E. nod to Dr. Guy Machett, a newcomer to Cochise County, and to Arizona as well, who had earned both his medical degree and his pathology specialty from Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Machett was energetic and smart, but he seemed overly impressed with himself along with his high-blown credentials. He often prefaced derogatory remarks about southeastern Arizona with the words “Where I come from…,”to which Joanna often wanted to reply, “So why don’t you go back there?”

Two weeks earlier, in the aftermath of a tragic automobile accident, Joanna had seen Dr. Machett interact with grieving family members of a young man who had died as a result of a single-vehicle rollover. In dealing with the parents, Machett had exhibited zero amounts of charm and even less empathy. As Joanna had told her husband, Butch, after that uncomfortable encounter, “Guy Machett has the bedside manner of your basic bullfrog.”Butch had laughed off her comment, but as far as Joanna was concerned, the situation with Dr. Machett was no laughing matter.

For one thing, he had insisted on establishing an official “chain of command”style of operation. When George Winfield had been running the show, Joanna’s detectives had been allowed unlimited access to him. They had been encouraged to contact the M.E. directly whenever they judged that the situation warranted his involvement. Not so with Dr. Machett. As far as he was concerned, lowly homicide detectives, people Machett deemed to be somehow beneath him, had to “go through channels”—which is to say through Joanna or through his office—in order to contact him or summon him to a crime scene. And he had made it clear that no one, under any circumstances, was to refer to him as Doc. He was Dr. Machett, thank you very much.

Despite his apparent arrogance, Joanna couldn’t help but wonder if it was possible that he was putting on a front. For one thing, although he was several years older than Joanna, he was relatively new and untried as far as doing the job was concerned. And he didn’t have the foggiest idea about the importance of winning friends and influencing people. In fact, in the course of a few short weeks, he had managed to create a whole cheering section of people who were actively rooting for the man to fall flat on his face.

“But Machett is on his way to the crime scene?”Joanna asked.

“Beats the hell out of me,”Ernie replied. “According to Madge, he’ll get back to me. I take that to mean he’ll get back to me eventually—when he’s damned good and ready.”

“What do you think we have?”Joanna asked, changing the subject away from Dr. Machett’s all-too-obvious shortcomings and back to the victim.

“The guy who called it in thought it was an ATV accident. Now that I’ve seen it, I’d have to say from the tracks that it looks more like a hit-and-run,”Ernie said. “Or else maybe a hit, hit, hit-and-run. I think the dead guy was run down deliberately, and whoever did it is long gone. It looks to me like he was run over several different 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-miles-square 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. They had been thrown together as M.E. and sheriff long before George had married Joanna’s mother, and afterward as well. Rather than appreciating George’s close working relationship with her daughter, Eleanor Lathrop had been jealous of it, but she’d been even more jealous of George’s job itself. Now that he was retired, the two of them were able to spend time off by themselves, traveling in the used Newell Coach they’d purchased. It was clear enough that this new Eleanor was happier and more contented than the mother Joanna had known all her life. It didn’t seem fair, however, that Eleanor’s new-found happiness came with the unfortunate trade-off that left Joanna working with Dr. Guy Machett.

Despite Joanna’s confidence about her own ability to locate the crime scene, she was forced to make two false starts after leaving Bowie before she finally pulled up at the wrought-iron gate that marked the main entrance to Action Trail Adventures. She stopped her Crown Victoria and rolled down her window. The entry gate was wide open. Just beyond her window stood a post equipped with both a telephone receiver and a keypad. On the first section of barbed-wire fence to the right of the gate was a hand-painted sign that read PRIVATE PROPERTY. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. CALL FOR ADMITTANCE. The fence post nearest the gate held the tangled remains of what might have been a surveillance camera. Fifty yards or so away from the gate sat a decrepit, dusty Airstream trailer with an equally disreputable F-150 pickup parked nearby.

“Looks like somebody tore that camera out by its roots,”someone said.

Joanna turned away from the trailer in time to see Natalie Wilson walking toward her. The ACO wasn’t any bigger than Joanna’s own five-foot-one frame, but she was tough as nails. Natalie had spent a couple of years on the professional rodeo circuit and had applied to work for Animal Control after turning in her spurs and saddle. Next to her, walking docilely on a leash, was an enormous dog—a Doberman, apparently. Once they were within a few feet of the car, the dog spotted Joanna through the window. He lunged at her, barking. Remembering what Ernie had said about the dead man’s vicious dog keeping investigators at bay, Joanna drew back in alarm.

“Quiet, Miller,”Natalie ordered, yanking back on the leash. “Sit!”

Without a moment’s hesitation the dog complied. He stopped barking and sat, still keeping a close eye on Joanna. It was enough of a threat that she made no move to open the door.

“This is the dead guy’s dog?”she asked.

Natalie nodded. “That’s right.”

“Ernie told me he’s dangerous. What’s he doing out of your truck? Shouldn’t he be on his way to the pound?”

“I called Jeannine and asked about that,”Natalie answered. “She checked. Miller’s not a stray. His tags and shots are all current and in order, and this is where he lives. Since he hasn’t set foot outside the property line, we’ve got no call to take him into custody. Jeannine said for me to stay here with him. We’re hoping one of the dead guy’s relatives will come forward and take him.”

“But Ernie said—”

“That Miller was vicious?”Natalie asked. “That’s a laugh. The poor thing was scared to death. He was also hungry and thirsty. Not only that, someone had killed his owner and taken a potshot at him as well. Fortunately the bullet only grazed the top of his shoulder. He should probably see a vet, but Jeannine is hoping that whoever takes him will handle that.”

Looking closer, Joanna could see a bloody mark that sliced across the top of the dog’s back. And she had to agree that right that moment, the dog didn’t seem the least bit vicious.

“That’s his name?”Joanna asked. “Miller?”

Natalie nodded. “Funny name for a dog, but he was wearing a name tag along with his dog tag. He’s a two-year-old Doberman mix. And he’s not vicious. All he was doing was trying to protect his owner. If that had happened to me, I’d probably turn vicious, too. You’re a good dog, aren’t you, Miller,”Natalie added gently, speaking to the dog. “You’re a very good boy.”

Miller responded by looking at her and wagging his stub of a tail the tiniest bit.

Joanna had learned that in the topsy-turvy world of Animal Control, the animals’ names often took precedence over those of any humans involved.

“If we know the dog’s name,”Joanna said, “and if you’ve seen his tags, does that mean we know the victim’s name as well?”

“Attwood,”Natalie answered. “Lester Attwood. At least that’s what Jeannine says anyway, and the address Attwood listed as his home address in our records matches up to this one.”

“You called that over to Detective Carpenter?”

“Just a few minutes ago,”Natalie agreed with a nod. “He said he’s on his way. For me to wait here.”

Looking off to the east, Joanna saw a cloud of light tan dust billowing skyward. A few minutes later, Ernie arrived, driving the new four-wheel-drive Yukon that had finally replaced the aging Econoline van her detectives had used for years. Ernie parked next to Joanna’s patrol car, then rolled down his window and glared out through it first at the dog and then at Natalie.

“What the hell?”he muttered. “That dog is a holy terror. Why’d you let him out?”

Miller, who seemed to be as happy to see Ernie as Ernie was to see him, made a very believable lunge at the idling SUV.

“No!”Natalie ordered. “Leave it. Sit.”

Once again Miller obeyed Natalie’s command. He sat while Natalie returned Ernie’s look, glare for glare. “Just because he doesn’t like you,”she told the detective, “doesn’t mean the dog is vicious. Maybe he’s got good sense.”

“Just keep him away from me,”Ernie said. “I don’t trust him.”With that, he turned to Joanna. “Want to go see the crime scene?”

Joanna nodded. “Should I follow you?”

Ernie shook his head. “Not unless you want that Crown Vic of yours to be stuck up to its hubcaps. We’re talking world-class sand here, boss.”

A new Yukon was on order for Joanna as well and was due to be delivered in two weeks, but that wouldn’t help today. Without a word Joanna exited her vehicle.

“What about the dog?”Natalie asked. “Have you done anything about finding out who’s going to take him?”

That was always an ACO’s straightforward concern—what would become of the animal? As a homicide detective, Ernie’s concerns and possible courses of action were far more complicated.

“Thanks to you, we may finally have a lead on our victim’s ID, and I appreciate that,”he said, “I really do. Now that we think we know the man’s name, our next job is to verify that—to find someone who can identify the body. After that we have to locate and notify his next of kin. That’s a lot to worry about without even thinking about that dog. Got it?”

“Got it.”Natalie’s brisk reply hinted that she wasn’t backing down. “Got it loud and clear.”With that, she tugged on Miller’s leash. “Come on, boy,”she told the dog. “Let’s go for a walk.”She didn’t say “far away from this jerk,”but she might as well have. Her meaning was abundantly clear.

Natalie Wilson turned on her heel and marched away with Miller walking placidly beside her.

“Where on earth did Jeannine Phillips find that piece of work?”Ernie Carpenter wanted to know.

“I believe she fell off the rodeo circuit,”Joanna replied. “She used to be a barrel racer.”

“Figures,”Ernie said disapprovingly. “Women like that are always a handful.”

That parting remark might have been a lot funnier if Joanna hadn’t taken it so personally. Not only did she suspect it was absolutely true, there was something else that bothered her. Her very own daughter, fourteen-year-old Jenny, had her own heart set on the world of rodeo. Being sheriff was hard work, but it was easier for Joanna to discuss murder and mayhem than it was to consider her daughter’s plans for the future.

“Come on,”Joanna said, climbing into the Yukon’s passenger seat, where she immediately fastened her seat belt. “Let’s go take a look at that dead body.”

THREE

AS THEY drove away from the gate, Joanna was still thinking about Jenny and her rodeo-riding ambitions when Ernie brought her back to the case.

“I left Deb with the witness,”Ernie said.

“What witness?”Joanna asked. “The man who found the body?”

“Seems like a pretty squared-away guy. His name’s Maury Robbins. He’s a 911 operator from Tucson, and he’s also an all-terrain vehicle enthusiast. He comes down here on his days off whenever he can. What he told me is that he drove down late last night after his shift ended. He got here about three A.M. The gate was open, but he didn’t think that much about it. He drove on in, set up his Jayco—”

“His what?”Joanna asked.

“His Jayco. It’s one of those little pop-up camper things. He carries his ATV in the bed of his pickup truck and drags the camper along behind.”

“So there’s an actual campsite here?”

“Yes, but it’s pretty primitive,”Ernie replied. “No concrete pads, no running water. People have to haul in their own water and the only facilities turn out to be a few strategically located Porta Pottis. Maury’s camper has its own facilities. News to me. The Jayco I had years ago sure as hell didn’t.”

Joanna smiled to herself. When she had first arrived on the scene, Ernie had apologized whenever he used a bad word around her. She liked the fact that they had both moved beyond that. And right now, Joanna wasn’t especially interested in either Ernie’s language or his old camper.

“So this is private property?”she asked. “Action Trail Adventures isn’t situated on state or federally owned land?”

“Yes,”Ernie said. “That’s my understanding. It’s privately owned. Robbins told me he pays an annual fee that gives him access through a card-activated gate. That way he can let himself in or out as needed. There’s also a keypad where you can punch in an entry code to open the gate.

“Anyway,”Ernie continued, “Robbins got in last night. This morning, when he took his ATV out for a ride, he found the body lying facedown in the sand with the dog standing guard over it. Once we finally managed to drag the dog away, Robbins was able to take a closer look at the victim and give us a tentative ID. He says the guy’s first name is Lester. He had no idea about his last name, or any next of kin, either.”

“Lester’s last name is Attwood,”Joanna said, but she was thinking about the number of times so-called good citizens calling in reports of a homicide turned out to be perpetrators.

“Do you think Mr. Robbins might be involved in whatever happened here?”she asked.

Ernie shook his head. “Not to my way of thinking. At any rate, as you said, the name we got back from Animal Control on the dog’s license is Lester Attwood. According to Records, Attwood’s driver’s license is suspended. His rap sheet shows six DUIs, two criminal assaults, two driving without a license.”

“So we’ve got a photo then?”

“On the computer,”Ernie said. “Not one I can print right now. Any idea when Dr. Machett will bother getting his butt out here?”

“All I can tell you is that he’s on his way,”Joanna said.

“I’m not holding my breath,”Ernie grumbled. “He always takes his own sweet time about getting to a crime scene, and we’re left standing with one foot in the air until he does.”

Following a fairly smooth gravel road, the Yukon wound down into a steep wash. When they roared up the far side, they came out on the boundary of a breathtaking landscape. Even though Joanna had been warned about them in advance, seeing the tawny-colored dunes in person took her by surprise. Starting with a line of demarcation just to the left of the gravel, the dunes stretched off into the distance in a series of rounded hills. Here and there the rippled surface of the sand was marred by a series of tire tracks.

Gripping the steering wheel with both hands, Ernie swung the Yukon off the road and into the dunes along a course that included several of those tracks. Even with four-wheel drive, he had to maintain a fair amount of speed to keep from getting bogged down.

As they jolted along, Joanna checked her seat belt and then held on to her armrest. “How can this be?”she said over the laboring sound of the engine. “I’ve lived here all my life and never knew these dunes were here!”

“Think about Kartchner Caverns,”Ernie replied. “Lots of people knew about that before it ever came out in public. This is all on private property. As far as I know, it’s only been open to ATVers in the last few years. Now that I think about it, I think some environmental group or other was trying to buy it up a few years back, but the owner wouldn’t sell.”

Kartchner Caverns, a series of limestone caverns on the far side of Benson, was Cochise County’s most recent tourism hot spot. The caves had been discovered in the late seventies by a pair of hikers who had been exploring the countryside at the base of the Whetstone Mountains. When they had first located and started exploring the caverns, they were located on private land owned by a family named Kartchner. It had taken another ten years to make arrangements to transfer the property to the state of Arizona and turn it into a state park people could actually come visit. Now Kartchner Caverns is a genuine tourist home run. Joanna wondered if something similar was going on with Action Trail Adventures. People in the ATV community seemed to know all about it. No one else did.

Is that what this murder is all about? Joanna wondered. Have we wandered into some kind of environmental range war?

The Yukon crested a dune. In the cleft between that dune and the next, Joanna caught sight of the crime scene. The debris field included an upright ATV as well as a second one that had been tipped over onto its side. Yards away from the vehicles in a tangle of tire tracks lay something that, from this distance, might have been a pile of loose laundry.

The victim, Joanna thought. “Stop for a minute, please,”she said to Ernie. “Let me take a look from here.”

Ernie stopped abruptly, allowing a towering plume of dust to blow past them. When it cleared, Joanna could see the victim again. He looked like a crumpled rag doll, lying facedown in sand. Around him ranged a complex scribble of vehicle tracks that resembled the Etch-a-sketch doodlings of some giant-sized child.

Joanna glanced at her detective. “So what do you think happened?”she asked.

Ernie shrugged. “I don’t know,”he said. “It looks to me like several vehicles were involved.”

“And several people?”

Ernie nodded. “We’ve got tracks of that one wrecked ATV and at least two others, four-wheel-drive pickups, most likely, one with dual rear tires. I’m guessing the dead guy rode up on the wrecked ATV right through there.”

Ernie pointed casually off to his left, where a pair of tracks emerged from the cleft between the dunes and then disappeared into the tumult of disturbed sand.

“Once he got here, I’m guessing there was an altercation of some kind. There may have been some gunfire.”

“What makes you say that?”

“For one thing, somebody evidently took a shot at the dog. There’s an empty scabbard on the ATV. I doubt the owner would have shot his own dog. But if there are weapons or shell casings out here, we’ll need metal detectors to find them.”

“Okay, so all these guys meet up. What do you think happened next?”

“At some point, I think, our victim, the guy on the ATV, may have tried to leave. One of the larger vehicles T-boned him and knocked him ass over teakettle. Once the victim was on foot, the other guys ran him down. Not just once, either—several times over.”

“Sounds cold-blooded,”Joanna said.

Ernie nodded. “It was cold-blooded. I suspect he died from internal injuries. Machett should be able to tell us for sure, if and when he bothers to show up.”

Despite being in agreement with Ernie’s disparaging remark about Dr. Machett, Joanna let it pass. “What about that single track?”she asked, pointing to a track in the sand that disappeared over the top of the next dune. “The one that leads off to the right from the body?”

“Looks to me like the dog made that one, either going or coming or maybe both,”Ernie said. “The bad guys probably ran him off, but he came back as soon as the coast was clear. I have to give the damned dog credit,”the detective added grudgingly. “Even though he’d been shot, he was downright fierce about not letting any of us near that body. After he offered to tear me limb from limb, I was a little surprised to see Natalie Wilson with him on a leash, walking around just as nice as you please.”

Which is why you work homicide and she’s animal control, Joanna thought.

She studied the expanse of disrupted sand around the body. “You said you thought one of the vehicles had dual tires. How do you know that?”

“This isn’t the shortest way to and from the gate, but it’s the most passable. If you look carefully, you can see the dips left in the sand by the dual wheels even though you can’t make out the treads on the tire.”

Joanna looked down and saw that he was right. The tracks were there, but the fine grade of the sand left behind no visible tread.

“The victim didn’t bother following the road when he came here, and he didn’t take a direct route from the gate, either,”Ernie said. “It looks to me like he approached the scene by zigzagging in and out between the dunes.”

“Trying to stay out of sight, maybe?”Joanna asked.

Ernie nodded. “Could be,”he said.

“In other words,”Joanna said, “it’s possible the victim realized something was amiss and came out to investigate.”

“Maybe,”Ernie agreed.

“What about the trailer back by the gate?”Joanna asked. “Any sign of breaking and entering?”

“Lots,”Ernie said. “The front door is smashed and the inside is a mess. No way to tell from looking at it if anything was taken. We’ll need to dust it for prints, but with Casey away at that conference, that’s problematic. Jaime said he can collect the prints, but we won’t be able to run them through AFIS until Casey gets back.”

Jaime Carbajal was Joanna’s third homicide detective. It was unusual to have Joanna’s entire homicide unit focused on only one case, but for right now she was glad that was possible.

“By the way, where is Jaime?”Joanna wanted to know.

“I asked him to stop off and pick up a search warrant for the trailer.”

“But the guy who lived there is dead…”Joanna began.

“I know, I know,”Ernie replied. “But what if he isn’t the owner? What if the trailer actually belongs to Action Trail? The owners of that might have an objection.”

“What are you thinking?”Joanna asked.

“Look,”Ernie said, “I know this is all supposition on my part, but what if Action Trail Adventures is being used as a cover for a drug-smuggling operation? Maybe the victim was in on it; maybe he wasn’t. But supposing we end up finding out that the owners of Action Trail Adventures are somehow involved in what went on. We’d better be damned sure we have a valid search warrant in hand before we ever set foot inside that trailer. Otherwise, whatever we find there could end up being ruled as inadmissable.”

“Good point,”Joanna said.

“And I noticed what looked like the remains of a surveillance camera near the gate,”Ernie added. “The killers probably took that down as they were leaving.”

“Makes sense to me,”Joanna said. “But if there’s a camera, there’s probably also a tape. We need to find that, too.”

“Yes, we do,”Ernie asked. “Seen enough?”

“I think so,”Joanna said. “Let’s go talk with your witness.”

I’M JUST an ordinary guy, and it’s taken me a lifetime to learn that we all exist in a world of unintended consequences. For me that’s more than just a slogan. It’s life itself. My unmarried mother had no intention of getting pregnant with me, but she did. And when her fiancé, my father, died in a motorcycle accident prior to my birth, my mother had choices. Even though abortions were illegal back then, she could probably have found a way to make one happen, but she didn’t. And she could have given me up for adoption, but she didn’t do that, either. In spite of her family’s opposition, she had me and raised me and, if you ask me, she did a damned fine job of it, too.

I lost Karen, my first wife, twice. The first time was as a result of the divorce and that was an unintended consequence of my years of drinking. I usually claim it was caused by working and drinking, but you need to consider the source. That’s how alcoholics work. Even when we finally sober up, we try to rationalize things away and minimize the impact our love affair with the bottle had on ourselves and the people around us. When I lost Karen the second time, it was to cancer. Not my fault. I didn’t cause it, and I like to think that, before she died, I managed to make amends for some of the heartache I caused her, and I’m very fortunate to have lived long enough to have a chance to get back in my kids’ lives.

And then there’s Anne Corley, my second wife. When I think of Anne now, I can still see her, striding purposefully through that cemetery on Queen Anne Hill in her bright red dress. And that’s pretty much all I remember, and maybe it’s better that way. Of course, I was still drinking then, so a lot of my forgetfulness may be due to booze, but there’s no arguing with the fact that what happened between us in the course of those next few dizzying days was astonishing—both astonishingly good and astonishingly bad. Thrown together, we were a fire that burned too hot and bright to last—like the brilliant flash from a dying lightbulb just before it goes black.

What I do know about those few interim days was that we didn’t talk about money. We never talked about money. We had far more important things to think about and do, but the money was there all the time. The fact that Anne had plenty of money was plain to see in everything about her: in the car she drove—a Porsche 928; in the hotel where she stayed—the Four Seasons Olympic in those days; in the clothing she wore; in the way she carried herself.

At the time I was far too wrapped up in being with her to wonder what she could possibly see in a hard-drinking homicide cop. And once she was gone, I was too devastated by losing her to have any grasp on what she had given me. It turned out I wasn’t so much a fortune hunter as I was a fortune finder. The money she gave me was there, but for a long time I didn’t pay much attention to it. (Thank God, Anne also left me under the wing of her very capable attorney, Ralph Ames, who was paying attention to it. He’s also the one who finally helped force me into treatment, but that’s another story.)

Over the years I didn’t talk about the money with anyone other than Ralph Ames and with Ron Peters, my best friend on the force. Make that my best friend, period. Ron knew all about it. He was there in my apartment on that awful afternoon after Anne Corley died and he did me the enormous favor of running what remained of our wedding cake down the garbage disposal. I suppose there was some talk around the department when I moved from the Royal Crest to Belltown Terrace, but since I didn’t make a big deal of it, neither did my coworkers at Seattle PD or at the Special Homicide Investigation Team. And since I kept coming into the office just like any other poor working stiff and since I didn’t make a fuss about my financial situation, neither did anyone else. The subject of money seldom came up.

Until recently, and that brings me to yet another unintended consequence, Mel, my third wife, and the light of my life. At the time I met Melissa Soames, I wasn’t at all interested in having either another partner or another wife. Despite both our efforts to the contrary, she became both. Once she showed up to work at S.H.I.T. and once I laid eyes on her, I should have known she was trouble, but I didn’t, and by the time I figured it out, it was too late. The wheels were off the bus. J. P. Beaumont was a goner.

When Mel and I were courting, we didn’t talk about money any more than Anne Corley and I had. Mel’s first husband had been pretty well fixed as far as finances were concerned, but he was also a jerk who made sure she didn’t make off with much. Once Mel and I were married and had to file our first set of income taxes, things changed and suddenly money was an issue.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?”Mel had demanded, hands on her hips. “Why on earth do you think Anne Corley gave you all that money in the first place?”

It’s funny that’s how Mel and I both talk about her—Anne Corley, with both names. It’s almost as though I never lasted long enough to be on a first-name basis with the woman. Mel has copied that peculiarity.

“Because she liked me?”I asked lamely.

I have to admit, I had never given that question all that much thought or even any thought. Why would I?

“Because she wanted you to have fun with it,”Mel told me. “Because she figured out the moment she met you that you worked too hard—that you were too serious and too driven. She wanted to lighten your load. Instead, you’ve kept right on working too hard and amassing a fortune. It’s time that changed. You can either sit around like some modern King Midas, or you can get off your dead butt (she didn’t say butt, actually) and have some fun with that gift while you’re still young enough to enjoy it. I don’t need to be a rich widow. We’re both alive and healthy. Let’s have fun now!”

Our trip to Disneyland was a direct result of that conversation. The only bad unintended consequence of that, of course, had been my ride on the teacups.

It turns out that Mel has lots of good ideas for spending my money. Sometime earlier, Mel had become involved with a group of high-flying Seattle-area women who had introduced her to the miracle of private jets, or “Business Aviation,”as they call it in the literature. It turned out that the women had been up to no good, but the private-jet lesson had stuck.

Mel liked using them, and now so do I. It’s nice to travel on your own schedule and to get off and on planes with your luggage and dignity intact. It’s slick that you don’t have to remove your belt or your shoes or your jacket. All you have to do is show your ID, get on the plane, and off you go. If you want to take along a brand-new ten-ounce container of toothpaste? Fine. If you want to take along a twelve-ounce container of mouthwash or baby formula? That’s fine, too. And if you happen to carry a stray 9-mm with you? That’s not a problem, either. You don’t have to walk through any metal detectors. You show the pilots your government-issue ID and away you go.

Being able to do all these things doesn’t come cheap, as I had learned when I flew all my nearest and dearest to Las Vegas for Mel’s and my wedding. It was expensive but a fun first crack at flying private aircraft. Once I actually tried it and found out “how the other half lived,”I had zero interest in ever getting back into one of those slow-moving TSA security check lines at Sea-Tac airport. And that’s how Mel and I had flown to Anaheim, on board a Hawker 400XP. And that’s how we were flying home as well.

When Ross Connors had talked about the chances of my being able to get my luggage back in time to make it over to Ellensburg for the Jane Doe autopsy, I didn’t come right out and say that I knew good and well that getting my luggage wasn’t going to be a problem. And so, although I didn’t mention any of that to Ross, I did place a call to Owners’ Services and let them know that we’d like to leave an hour earlier than our originally scheduled departure time of 10:30 A.M.

“So what do you think?”Mel asked, once we were buckled into our seats and drinking our coffee while we taxied to the end of the runway. “Was it a success?”

I reached across the aisle, took her hand, and kissed the back of it. “Unqualified,”I told her. “Everybody had fun. There were no major blowups. Kelly was on speaking terms with me the whole time. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

Mel, whose relationship with her own father isn’t exactly trouble-free, has been more of a help in decoding my daughter than she could have imagined.

“Jeremy’s an interesting guy,”she said. “The more I’m around him, the more I like him.”

Which was my opinion, too. He deals with Kelly’s periodic outbursts with a quiet reserve that is calming without being patronizing. He’s good with the kids, goes to work every day, carries his weight around the house, and loves my daughter to distraction. What more could a father-in-law want?

“I’m glad they’ll be spending some of Kayla’s spring break with Dave.”

Mel’s easy acceptance of everyone’s ongoing relationship with my first wife’s second husband was another thing that made her easy to love. She had come into our family, lumps and all, and figured out a way to make it work. After three days of nonstop grandkids, though, I was glad to share the wealth and the work with someone else. I was more than ready to let their “other”grandpa have a crack at them.

“Me, too,”I said, and meant it.

I dozed as we flew north. It was bumpy as we did our approach to Boeing Field, circling over Puget Sound, and coming down just to the west of downtown Seattle and our Belltown Terrace condo. It had been sunny in southern California. It was raining in Seattle. My car was sitting waiting for us on the tarmac. Four minutes after landing, our bags had been transferred to the car and we headed north. I dropped Mel and the luggage off with the doorman at Belltown Terrace and went east on the 520 Bridge.

After a winter of hardly any snow, it was snowing some as I headed across Snoqualmie Pass—not enough to require chains, but enough to make for slow going in the pass. I shouldn’t have bothered. When I reached the Kittitas County M.E.’s office, I was stopped by a square-jawed receptionist named Connie Whitman who gave me the third degree. Who was I? What did I want? Did I have an appointment? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I’m not sure why it is that gatekeepers always get my hackles up, but they generally do. And it was only after I had been grilled three ways to Sunday that I was finally given the information that Dr. Laura Hopewell was on her way back from a conference and had been unavoidably delayed by low-lying fog at SFO.

“Any idea when she’ll arrive then?”I asked.

Ms. Whitman gave me what I regard as the receptionist’s signature cold-eyed stare. “No idea,”she said. “She’ll get here when she gets here.”

Steamed but knowing better than to mention it, I left the office. I put as much distance as possible between the receptionist and myself. I made my way back out to the freeway and grabbed some lunch at Dinah’s Diner.

While I waited for my “Cascade Burger,”I called into the office and talked to Harry. “So you lucked out, drew the latest honey crisp, and ended up in Ellensburg?”he asked. “When do you think you’ll be back?”

Harry I. Ball is a good guy in a man’s man sort of way, but don’t expect him to toe the PC line when it comes to talking the talk. That’s one of the reasons he ended up in charge of S.H.I.T.—he flunked out of his local department’s diversity training. I think Ross Connors took pity on him and gave him a job because he’s a great cop who knows how to get the job done, and that was more important than his being unfailingly politically incorrect.

When he made that comment about “honey crisp,”I knew he was talking about our series of dead females and not some new kind of whole-grain breakfast cereal.

“You might not want to use that particular term with Mel or Barbara,”I advised.

Barbara Galvin is our secretary. Mel and Barbara live in a post-feminist world. I doubt either one of them ever burned a bra, but if the two of them took a notion to clean Harry’s clock, I wouldn’t have bet money on Harry.

“Right,”he said. “Sorry.”

“The Kittitas M.E.’s plane got delayed in San Francisco,”I told him. “I don’t know when she’ll get around to doing the autopsy, and I won’t be back until after she does. Is there anything in particular you can tell me about this case?”

“The guy who found the bones last Friday is named Kenneth Leggett. He’s a heavy-equipment operator who lives on North First Street in North Bend. So far he’s been interviewed by the locals but not by anyone from our office. Do you have your computer with you?”

“Yes,”I said. Astonishingly enough, after years of resisting computers, I now seldom leave home without one, usually air-card equipped. I’m a new man as far as telecommunications are concerned. Harry isn’t. He’s glad computers work as long as he doesn’t have to use them himself.

“Good,”he said. “I’ll have Barbara send over one of those PFDs of the crime scene report.”

“You mean a PDF?”I asked.

“Whatever,”Harry replied. “You know what I mean, and when you get a look at the report, you’ll see. The tarp business pretty well corks it.”

“The tags are clipped off?”I asked.

“You got it,”Harry said.

In each of the previous five cases, the victim had been wrapped in a tarp before being set on fire. In each instance one corner of the tarp that had served as a shroud had been cut off—not torn off, but carefully clipped off. Not surprisingly, those missing corners happened to be the ones that would have held the manufacturing tags along with identifying information that might have led us back both to the original manufacturer and to possible local retail outlets. Not having the tags made it infinitely more difficult to get a line on the ultimate purchaser. Ross Connors had crime lab folks doing chemical analyses of each tarp fragment we’d found in hopes of narrowing where the tarps might have come from, but so far that wasn’t leading us where we needed to go.

“Personal effects?”I asked.

“She was wearing boots, snakeskin Tony Lamas, and what looks like an engagement ring on one of her fingers. No wedding band, though,”Harry said. “The M.E. may find more on the corpse itself.”

That had been the situation in two of the other cases, where personal items had come to light only in the course of the autopsy.

Just then a smiling waitress came to my table to deliver what turned out to be a gigantic hamburger. Early in my career as a homicide detective, the grisly discussion at hand might well have wrecked my appetite. I’m beyond that now. Lunch is lunch, whatever the topic of conversation.

“All right,”I said to Harry. “My food’s here. Have to go. Have Barbara send me the info.”

As soon as I finished my lunch, I paid the tab and headed back over to the M.E.’s office. I wanted to be there, Johnny-on-the-spot, when Dr. Laura Hopewell was ready to rumble. Over the years I’ve learned that most medical examiners have one thing in common with a live theater performance: Don’t show up after the opening curtain and expect the usher to hand you a program and show you to your seat.

It isn’t going to happen.

FOUR

JOANNA ARRIVED in time to be in on part of Detective Howell’s interview with Mr. Maury Robbins. Clearly much of it was a repeat of what Ernie had already asked him. But that was standard in a homicide investigation—to ask the same questions several different times to see if there were any discrepancies.

“Like I told that Detective Carpenter,”Robbins said. “When I come here after work, I usually arrive somewhere between two and three in the morning.”

“And the gate was open when you got here?”Deb asked.

“Right,”Maury said, “wide open. At the time I thought, why bother buying a season pass when anyone who wanted to could just drive right in?”

“Besides the gate, did you notice anything else that was out of the ordinary?”

“The dog,”Maury said. “Lester’s dog usually raises hell. I forget what his name is, something that starts with an M, I think. I always hear him barking when I roll down the window to open the gate. Last night he didn’t make a peep.”

“Can you tell me anything in particular about Lester Attwood?”

“That’s his last name, Attwood?”

Debra nodded.

“Not much,”Maury said. “I mean, I knew him. Everybody who comes here knows Les. I’m here a couple of times a month. He’d usually meander around the place a couple of times a day, to make sure everything was okay. Sometimes people would get stuck, and he’d help drag ’em out. Sometimes we’d talk. He struck me as a good enough guy, but one who’d put in some hard miles. I asked him once how many times he’d had his nose broken. Said he couldn’t remember.”

“So he was a fighter, then?”Debra asked. “A brawler?”

“Probably, but by the time I met Les, he seemed to have put his demons behind him and had his life back on track.”

“About last night,”Debra said. “Aside from the open gate and missing dog, did you notice anything else amiss?”

“Nope,”Robbins answered. “That about covers it.”

“Tell me about this morning,”Deb asked.

“I got up, made some breakfast, unloaded Moxie—that’s what I call my ATV. It was while I was doing that that I heard the dog barking. I looked off in that direction, and that’s when I first saw the buzzards circling overhead. They were gliding around and around, just like they do in cartoons. I’m sure now the poor dog was barking his head off trying to keep them away. But seeing the birds made me curious. A little later, when I was ready to take my first ride, the dog was still barking, so I headed here to check it out.”

“You suspected something was dead?”Joanna asked, inserting her own question into the conversation.

“Yeah,”Maury said. “I figured it would turn out to be a cow or a coyote or a jackrabbit. There are a lot of those around here. I sure as hell didn’t expect it to be a person.”

“When you realized the victim was a person, did you recognize him?”

“Are you kidding? That dog wouldn’t let me close enough to see anything, much less touch him.”

Dave Hollicker arrived on the scene. After surveying the situation, he dragged something that looked like a stack of plastic pavers out of the back of his van. The twenty-by-twenty-inch grid pieces can be clicked together and used to create temporary parking. In this case Dave laid them out across the debris field where they formed a two-inch-thick firm pathway that investigators could use to come and go from the body without further disturbing the field of churned sand that surrounded the victim.

“Is that all then?”Robbins asked, glancing first at the two detectives and then at Joanna. “No more questions?”

“Not right now,”Deb said.

“If you don’t mind, then,”Maury said, “I’ll pack up and head out. I was looking forward to having some quiet time to myself to relax. I wasn’t planning on finding a homicide victim. Detective Howell has all my numbers. I’m not due back at work until Wednesday afternoon, though,”he added. “I work four P.M. to midnight. If you need anything at all, feel free to give me a call.”

His last comment seemed to be aimed directly at Detective Howell rather than anyone else. The way he said it made Joanna think he wasn’t just wanting to talk about the case.

“Good,”Deb told him. “We’ll be in touch.”

“I saw the way he was looking at you,”Ernie said to Deb as Robbins sped away on his ATV. “I think you made yourself a conquest.”Joanna suppressed a smile when she realized Ernie had shared that same impression.

“Leave me alone,”Debra said impatiently. “All I did was interview the man. I was just doing my job.”

“Sure you were,”Ernie said, “but he sounded like he was more interested in you than he was in answering your questions.”

There was a squawk from the radio in Ernie’s Yukon. He was still talking on the radio when Joanna heard the sound of another approaching vehicle. Ernie reemerged, waving in the direction of the new arrival. “Victim’s sister is on her way,”he called to Joanna. “Natalie tried to give us a heads-up, but it took this long to relay the message.”

When Animal Control had been folded into Joanna’s department on a “temporary”basis, she had soon discovered that the two radio systems involved were incompatible. Requests to replace Animal Control’s system with new and compatible equipment had been disallowed on the grounds that the situation was “temporary.”Permanently temporary. Relaying messages back and forth was cumbersome, time-consuming, and, in this case, pointless. By the time Joanna knew someone was coming, she was pretty much there.

The three officers watched as an antique jeep careened over the top of the dune behind them. Ernie moved forward to flag down the vehicle. For a time it appeared that the jeep was going to plow right into him. The female driver stopped only a couple of feet from where Ernie was standing. The woman, tanned and weather-beaten, wore a man’s Western shirt and a faded baseball cap. A foot-long gray ponytail stuck out through the hole in the back of the cap. Looking at her, Joanna estimated the woman to be in her late sixties or early seventies. There was no need to guess about her state of mind. She was mad as hell.

“Where’s my brother?”she demanded. “What’s happened and what have you done with him? That’s Lester’s ATV over there. It looks like it’s been wrecked.”She pointed at the fallen ATV. “Is he all right? And who the hell are all of you?”

Since Ernie was right in front of the bumper, he was closer to the newly arrived vehicle than anyone else. Producing his badge and ID wallet, he held them up. “I’m Detective Ernie Carpenter with the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department. That’s Sheriff Brady and Detective Howell,”he added, pointing in their direction. “I’m afraid there’s been an accident.”

“I can see that!”the woman snapped. “What do you think I am, blind or something? Now get the hell out of my way.”

The engine was still idling. She gunned it determinedly, as though she fully intended to hit the gas and barge right past him. Or over him.

“You can’t go there, miss,”he insisted. “It’s a crime scene.”

“Don’t you ’miss’ me…”she began, but before she could pull away, Ernie reached across her, switched off the ignition on the steering column, and took possession of the keys. In the momentary quiet, the woman gave Ernie a piercing look.

“Wait a minute. Did you say crime scene?”she asked. It seemed as though she had only then internalized his words.

Ernie nodded again. “Yes, ma’am,”he said. “It’s a possible homicide.”

A shocked expression flitted across the woman’s face. “You’re saying someone’s dead—that they’ve been murdered?”she asked.

“There’s been a fatality,”the detective told her, keeping his voice neutral. “We don’t know yet if it’s a homicide. That’s what we’re investigating right now.”

“My brother lives out here,”the woman said forcefully. “Tell me who’s dead. Where?”

In answer Ernie nodded slightly in Dave Hollicker’s direction. Before anyone could stop her, the woman bolted from the jeep. With an unexpected burst of speed she dodged past Ernie and sprinted toward Dave, heading straight off across the sand. Without pausing to confer, Joanna and Deb Howell leaped forward to head the woman off. Each of them managed to lay hands on an arm and together they jerked the woman to a stop.

“Let me go,”she shouted, trying to extricate herself. “What if that’s my brother over there? I saw Lester’s dog back at the gate with another cop. She wouldn’t tell me what was going on, either, but Miller wouldn’t have left Les’s side unless something was terribly wrong.”

“Our victim may very well be your brother,”Joanna agreed calmly, trying to reason with the still struggling woman. “But you can’t go there. As Detective Carpenter told you, this is a crime scene. We need to preserve it. We have to keep it the way it is in hopes of figuring out what happened.”

“Let me go!”

“No!”Joanna told her. “Not until you calm down. You can’t just go tearing off across the sand. What if the victim does turn out to be your brother? The only way we’ll be able to find out what really happened to him is by examining every detail of the crime scene so we can figure out what went on.”

As suddenly as the struggle had started, it ended. The woman dropped her arms and stopped pulling. “Okay,”she said. “Okay.”

Joanna let go of the arm she was holding. As a precaution, Debra continued to hold on to hers.

“Who are you?”Joanna asked. “What’s your name?”

The woman took a deep breath. “Margie,”she said. “My name’s Margie Savage.”

“You said you think this man—the victim—may be your brother?”Joanna asked.

“My baby brother,”Margie answered. “His name is Lester—Lester Attwood. He lives in that camper back by the gate. His truck’s there, but he’s not. I was afraid something bad had happened to him.”

“What made you think that?”Joanna asked. “Is that why you came here today?”

Margie nodded. “I work at the post office in Bowie. One of the neighbors from up the road stopped by a little while ago and told me something strange was going on up here. He said he’d seen an Animal Control truck turn in here and a cop car, too, one that took off over the dunes. I couldn’t figure out why Animal Control would be here. I know Miller’s licensed. I took care of that myself. So I headed out here on my lunch hour to see what happened. I followed the tracks and they led me right here. So what did happen? Did he come down that dune too fast and take a spill? I kept telling him to stay off that ATV, that the damned thing would be the death of him.”

That jeep doesn’t look much safer, Joanna thought, but what she said was “We don’t think what happened was an accident. That’s why Detectives Carpenter and Howell are here. They’re homicide detectives, and that man you see working over there…”She pointed at Dave. “He’s my crime scene investigator. That’s why we’re trying to preserve the crime scene—so we can examine it for clues.”

“You’re saying Lester’s been murdered?”Margie repeated the words as if she couldn’t quite believe them.

“We think murder is a distinct possibility,”Joanna answered. “As to whether or not the victim is your brother…”

Margie squared her shoulders and raised her chin. “Show him to me,”she said. “Let me see for myself. I’m not going to faint or anything. I’m a hell of a lot tougher than that.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“All right, then,”Joanna said. “Follow me. If you don’t mind, please stay on the pathway.”

Margie nodded. “I will,”she said.

With Joanna leading the way, they started off across the intervening sand by following the plastic-grid path Dave Hollicker had laid down. A full ten yards from the half-buried body, Margie came to an abrupt stop. Ernie, following behind, almost ran into her.

“It’s him,”Margie said. “That’s my brother.”

Joanna stopped, too. From where she stood, all that was visible of the body was the back of the man’s head and neck, as well as the top of his shirt collar. What looked like an ugly bruise covered the back of his neck from the top of his shirt to the bottom of his hairline.

Joanna was surprised by the certainty in Margie’s voice. “Are you sure?”Joanna asked. “You can identify him from all the way back here?”

“It’s the birthmark,”Margie said. “The one on the back of his neck.”

Joanna looked again at what she had assumed to be a recent injury. “That’s a birthmark instead of a bruise?”she asked.

Margie nodded. “The whole time we were growing up I was forever having to beat the crap out of asshole kids who teased him about it. They’d torment him and tell him the discoloration on his neck was really the mark of the devil. By the time I finished blackening their eyes, they knew all about the mark of the devil.”

She paused and gave a small snort. “When I was younger, I used to have a pretty mean left hook. I busted out Tommy Leroy’s right front tooth when I was sixteen, and it wasn’t no baby tooth, either. He was only fourteen, but he was also a good five inches taller than me. I thought his mother was gonna kill me when she found out about it, but then someone told her what he’d been doing—that Tommy and some friends of his had been picking on Lester—she changed her mind. She lit into Tommy herself and gave him a whuppin’, too. Not that any of that ever helped poor Les,”she added sadly.

For a long moment, she stood staring across the expanse of sand toward her brother’s still form. “It’s like the guy never had a chance at a decent life,”she said finally. “The cards were so stacked against him from the start that you could hardly blame him for drowning his sorrows in booze.”

With that, she turned and walked back the way they had come, deftly slipping past Ernie without once venturing off Dave Hollicker’s plastic-grid trail. By the time Margie reached the side of her jeep, she sank down on her knees next to it, buried her face in her hands, and wept. Joanna realized then that Margie Savage had put on a good front of being tough, but it was only that—a front. Joanna caught up with her in time to hear her sob, “I’m sorry, Mama,”she said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“None of this is your fault,”Joanna said consolingly, “unless you did this. Did you?”

Margie shook her head. “But I promised our mama that I’d look after him, that I’d keep him safe. Once he sobered up, I helped him get this caretaker’s job so’s I could keep an eye on him. Now he’s dead.”

She pulled a red hankie out of the pocket of her jeans and blew her nose into it. Then she straightened her shoulders and looked back at the ATV. “They ran him down, didn’t they?”she said.

“That’s what it looks like,”Joanna agreed. “We won’t know for sure until we finish our investigation.”

“And who did it?”

“We don’t know that, either. Is there a chance your brother got involved with some unsavory characters?”

“Les has been involved with ‘unsavory characters’ all his life,”Margie replied. “He didn’t hardly know any other kind. I thought he’d left all that behind him—those kinds of friends, but maybe he had a slip.”

“A slip,”Ernie said, latching on to the sobriety lingo. “Are you saying he’d been through drug or alcohol treatment?”

“Alcohol,”Margie answered. “Three times, to be exact, but this last time it finally took. Les had been sober for a little over a year. Fourteen months, to be exact. Said the only kind of booze he still had around the house was Miller.”

“Miller High Life?”Ernie asked. “You mean he still drank beer?”

“Not that kind of Miller,”Margie said. “His dog. Les was still drinking two years ago when somebody dumped an almost dead puppy out by the garbage cans at the trailer court in Tucson where Les used to live. The puppy was a tiny little thing. To begin with, Les fed him with an eyedropper and later with a toy baby bottle. He finally managed to nurse him back to health. Les named the dog after his favorite beer—Miller—and even taught him to bring him a cold one from the fridge. He thought that was funnier ’an a rubber crutch. ‘Hey, Miller,’ he’d say, ‘bring me a Miller.’ And that dog would do it just as cute as can be. Truth be told, Les let that dog drink some of his beer as well. But finally Lester went through treatment and sobered up. It turns out that when Les stopped drinking, so did Miller. But when Les wanted a soda from the fridge, he’d still say the same thing—for Miller to bring him a beer. Les told me it was just too much trouble to try teaching that dog a new command. Besides, Les liked it. He said asking the dog to bring him a soda didn’t have quite the same ring to it; wasn’t as funny.”

Margie paused and looked around. “Les loved that dog to distraction,”she added. “What’s going to happen to him now?”

Joanna had learned over time that dealing with pets left behind by homicide victims was often a tough call. Sometimes any number of people—friends and relatives—came forward to lay claim to the suddenly orphaned animal. Other times no one did and the unwanted dog or cat or gerbil ended up being hauled away to the pound. As head of Animal Control, Jeannine Phillips was a tiger about finding homes for abandoned animals, but sometimes even she came up empty.

“Miller loved Lester, but ever since he stopped being a puppy, I’ve been half scared of him,”Margie admitted. “And after getting used to living out here with all this room to run around, I think he’d be too much dog for me and my little single-wide. I doubt he’d get along with my pug, Miss Priss, either.”

Joanna had learned enough about animal control to see that sending Miller to live with someone who was scared of him was an invitation to disaster—for Marge Savage, for her little pug, and for Miller as well. A second choice would be to send Miller to live with some other relative so the dog wouldn’t be shipped off either to the pound or to live with complete strangers.

“Is there anyone else who’s familiar with the dog?”Joanna asked.

“My stepsons know him, of course,”Margie said.

“Could one of them take him?”Joanna asked.

The woman shook her head. “They both have little kids,”she said. “Miller’s a Doberman, after all—part Doberman, anyway. He’s used to being around grown-ups.”

Joanna sighed. “All right, then,”she said. “You have enough on your plate right now to worry about the dog, but we certainly can’t leave the poor thing here. I’ll have my ACO take Miller back to the pound in Bisbee.”

“You won’t let them put him down, will you?”Margie asked. “I mean, none of this is Miller’s fault.”

That was certainly true.

“I can’t promise,”Joanna said, knowing how often her pound filled up with unwanted animals. “We’ll do our best to find a place for him, but if you happen to think of anyone else who might want him…”

The sentence was interrupted by the ringing of Joanna’s cell phone. “I’m here,”Guy Machett announced in her ear. “At least I think I’m here. I’m at a place where the sign on the gate says ‘Action Trail Adventures.’ This is where the guy at the post office told me to come. There’s an Animal Control truck parked out on the shoulder of the road. I don’t see anyone in it.”

“You asked for directions from the post office?”Joanna asked.

“Yeah, right here in Bowie,”the M.E. replied. “Why not? Those people have to know where to find people.”

Joanna noticed the man was still using the bow-and-arrow pronunciation of Bowie. He had also disregarded her advice about calling her for directions. She knew that his driving up to Bowie’s post office in a vehicle marked COCHISE COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER would have caused a firestorm of small-town interest even it hadn’t been Margie Savage’s place of employment.

“The crime scene is out here in the dunes,”she told him. “If you like, I could send Ernie or Debra to come guide you in.”

“I don’t need a babysitter,”he said. “I’m perfectly capable of getting there myself. Just tell me where you are.”

Joanna turned to Ernie. “How far is it from the gate to where we turned off?”

“Three-quarters of a mile,”he said. “Give or take.”

Joanna returned to the phone. “All right,”she said. “Turn right on the gravel road and follow that for three-quarters of a mile. You’ll see where the tracks lead off to the left into the dunes.”

Joanna ended the call. “The M.E.,”she replied in answer to Ernie’s quizzical look. “He’s coming.”

For the next several minutes she took a backseat to her detectives while Debra and Ernie plied Margie for information about her brother. “How long did Les work here?”Ernie asked.

“Since he got out of treatment,”Margie said. “A little over a year. My two stepsons own the place, and they hired him as a favor to me. The ranch has been in the family—their mother’s family—for generations, and they inherited it after Monty died. Monty was my husband, you see. Third husband. The boys—Arnie and Chuck—have wanted to turn it into an ATV playground for years. Monty was against it, but once it belonged to them, they went ahead and did what they wanted.”

“Is there any bad blood between your stepsons and your brother?”Debra Howell asked.

“Between Les and the boys? Good heavens, no!”Margie exclaimed, rolling her eyes. “They’ve been good as gold to him, and to me, too. Just as Les was getting out of treatment, their previous caretaker quit. I asked them if they’d mind hiring him. He’d had to move out of his other place when he went in for treatment, and I knew the job here came with a place to live. I sure as hell didn’t want Les and his dog living with me.

“It was a huge relief for me when they hired him. That way I knew Les had a roof over his head, and he made a little money, too, enough to supplement his Social Security and keep him and Miller in food. Chuck and Arnie let him have that old pickup truck and the ATV to drive around here and use for chores, but the rule was, Les wasn’t allowed to take either one of them off the property or onto the highway. With all those DUIs on his record, he’d lost his driver’s license and couldn’t have gotten insurance on a bet. So I’d take him into town if he needed groceries and dog food. Or one of my daughters-in-law would. Like I said, Chuck and Arnie and their families were all as good to him as they could be, even if they did it because they were doing me a favor. They’re nice people.”

“Did Les have a girlfriend?”Deb asked.

Margie snorted at the very idea. “Not a girlfriend,”she said. “More like a drinking buddy.”

“Does she have a name?”

“LaVerne,”Margie said.

“Last name?”

“LaVerne,”Margie replied. “I believe her last name’s Hartley and I think she lives in Benson, but once Les sobered up, Old LaVerne gave him the brush-off. My reading is that if he was off the sauce, she didn’t want anything to do with him. Besides, she didn’t like Miller, and Miller didn’t like her. ‘Les,’ I told him more than once, ‘when it comes to women, that dog of yours has got way better sense than you do.’”

“Do you happen to have LaVerne’s phone number?”

“No. It’s probably in the phone book, but I doubt this has anything to do with her.”

Deb jotted a note, and Joanna knew that one of her detectives would be calling on LaVerne Hartley soon to verify whether or not that was the case.

“What about drugs?”Debra asked. “Was your brother mixed up with any of that?”

“I already told you. As far as Les was concerned, alcohol was his drug of choice—his only drug of choice. He wasn’t into meth or coke or pot or even cigarettes. Just booze.”

Joanna’s phone rang. “I’m stuck,”Guy Machett said when Joanna answered.

He sounded aggrieved—as though the fact that he’d gotten his vehicle mired down in sand was all Joanna’s fault. She turned and looked back over the path she and Ernie had used to drive from the gravel road to the crime scene. Debra had come in that same way, and so had Margie Savage. There was, however, no sign of the M.E.’s van.

“Stuck where?”Joanna asked.

“In the sand,”he snapped irritably. “Where do you think?”

Joanna covered the mouthpiece. “The M.E.,”she told the others. “He’s stuck.”Removing her hand, she spoke into the phone. “I’m looking back toward the road,”she said. “I don’t see any sign of you.”

“I didn’t bother with the road,”Machett said. “I ran into that woman from the truck—the one from the dog pound. She told me you were out this way. I didn’t see any point in following the road when the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.”

Not when you’re driving through sand, you jerk, Joanna thought. It turned out Guy Machett did need a babysitter.

“Where are you exactly?”she asked.

“Somewhere between the gate and where you are,”he said. “Can you come pull me out or send someone who can?”

“You need a tow truck,”Joanna said.

“Then call one for me,”Machett replied.

Months earlier, Joanna’s department had been forced to eat a five-thousand-dollar towing bill when a murder victim’s vehicle had crashed through a guardrail and come to rest on a steep mountainside. She didn’t want to fall into a similar trap. She suspected that if she or someone from her department called for the tow, Guy Machett would somehow find a way to have the costs come out of her budget instead of his.

“I’ll get you a number and call you back.”

“Come on,”Machett said. “That homicide cop of yours has four-wheel drive. I’ve seen it. Couldn’t you just send him over here with a tow chain?”

And get Ernie stuck, too? Joanna thought. Not on your life.

“He’s interviewing a witness right now,”she said. “And I don’t think our insurance covers DIY towing. If something happened to your vehicle or ours, the damage wouldn’t be covered.”

“Have a heart, Sheriff Brady,”he wheedled. “Help me out here.”

But on this matter, Joanna’s mind was made up. “I’ll get you the number,”she said.

She called Dispatch, got the names and numbers of several towing companies, and relayed them back to Guy Machett. Then Joanna called in to Animal Control and spoke to Jeannine Phillips. It was easier and faster to call on the phone than to work with the nonworking radio system.

“Have Officer Wilson take the homicide victim’s dog into custody and bring him back to Bisbee.”

“To the pound?”Jeannine asked. “Does that mean none of the relatives want him?”

“Not so far.”

“Natalie already asked me about this,”Jeannine said. “According to her, Miller seems to be a great dog. He’s been neutered, has all his shots, and is properly licensed. Instead of bringing him to the pound, she was wondering if she could foster him until we find out if the relatives give a final yea or nay. If they don’t want him, Natalie might take him permanently.”

Joanna felt a slight lightening in her chest. In the course of that tough afternoon, not having to lock up a grieving dog seemed like a good thing—a small but good thing.

“Great,”she said. “If you don’t have a problem with that arrangement, far be it from me to interfere.”

Call waiting buzzed, and Joanna switched over to another call. “I just talked to towing company number three,”Guy Machett complained. “They can’t be here in anything less than an hour. What the hell am I supposed to do in the meantime—waste my whole day?”

Of course Guy Machett wasn’t the only one wasting time. Until he made his appearance to examine the victim, Joanna’s detectives were also stuck in a holding pattern.

Joanna covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “The tow truck’s at least an hour away,”Joanna told Ernie. “Want to try pulling him out with the Yukon?”

“What’s the matter?”Margie interrupted before Ernie had a chance to answer. “Who’s stuck?”

“The medical examiner,”Joanna said. “He’s bogged down in the sand somewhere between here and the gate.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,”Margie Savage said. “Why don’t I just go get him? I’ve been driving these dunes most of my life. I’ve got a tow chain right here on my jeep, and I know how to use it.”

“You wouldn’t mind?”Joanna asked.

“Hell, no,”Margie said. “Why would I mind?”

With that, she headed for her jeep. Ernie moved as if to stop her, but Joanna held up her hand.

“Let her go,”she said. “There’s nothing Dr. Machett will hate more than being rescued by an old lady.”

And nothing I’ll like better.

FIVE

BY THE TIME I got back to the Kittitas County complex, I had no intention of going another few rounds with the receptionist. Instead, I prowled the parking lot. You’ve heard the old adage: Rank hath its privilege? In the world of bureaucrats, no privilege counts for quite as much as having your very own reserved parking place. It didn’t take long to find the spot that was marked: RESERVED MEDICAL EXAMINER.

I kept circling the parking lot until someone finally left a parking place that gave me a clear view of the M.E.’s precious spot. That way, when she finally showed up, I’d be the first to know. I put the seat all the way back, opened my computer, logged on, and indulged myself. For a long time, I had resisted doing online crossword puzzles. Doing them on a computer rather than in a banged-up folded newspaper had seemed sacrilegious somehow.

But I’m over it. That was another change Mel had instituted in my life. Despite her love of fast, powerful cars—she adores the Porsche Cayman I gave her as a wedding present—she’s a greenie at heart. She has managed to convince me to give up on newsprint altogether, including crosswords, which were the only thing I thought papers were good for to begin with.

Just because it was raining in Seattle and snowing in Snoqualmie Pass didn’t mean it was raining or snowing here. Ellensburg is right at the edge of Washington State’s unexpected stretch of desert. So I sat in the clear cold sunlight, squinting at my dim computer screen, and worked the New York Times puzzle. In a little over five minutes. That’s the problem with Monday and Tuesday puzzles these days. Most of the time they’re way too easy.

A few minutes later and an hour and a half after the receptionist had given me the brush-off, a bright red Prius pulled into the M.E.’s reserved spot. A young woman with long dark hair and wearing an enormous pair of sunglasses got out of the car and then turned to retrieve a briefcase. I put down the computer and scrambled to intercept her.

“Dr. Hopewell?”I asked tentatively.

Peeling off the glasses, she swung around and faced me. I was surprised to see a pair of almond-shaped dark eyes, angry dark eyes, staring back at me. “Yes,”she said. “I’m Dr. Hopewell. That was certainly quick. Where is it?”

Excuse me? She seemed to be in the middle of a conversation I hadn’t yet started.

“Where’s what?”I asked.

“My suitcase. The airline called while I was still in the pass. They said they had found the missing luggage and they were dispatching someone to deliver it to me. I thought maybe the airline finally got around to doing something right for a change.”

That seemed unlikely, but rather than telling her so, I managed to fumble my ID out of my pocket and hand it over. “Sorry,”I said. “Special Investigator J. P. Beaumont. I’m here for the autopsy.”

“Oh,”she said. She glanced at my ID and handed it back. “Sorry about that,”she said. “As you can see, there’s been a slight delay. Come on in. I’ve been out of town. I’ve heard about the case, but so far I haven’t seen anything about it. As soon as I get suited up, we can start. You can wait in my office if you like.”

She led me through the lobby. I waltzed past the evil-eyed receptionist without being hit by any incoming missiles and hurried on into the relative safety of the morgue’s nonpublic areas. The first office beyond the swinging doors was labeled DR. HOPEWELL. She ushered me into that and offered me one of two visitors’ chairs. Then she set the briefcase down behind a suspiciously clean and orderly desk.

“Wait here,”she instructed. “I’ll be right back.”

I find that women in positions of authority have a tendency to be at one extreme or the other. Either they’re comfortable with themselves and easy to get along with—like Mel, for instance—or they can be a royal pain in the butt. I had no idea where Dr. Hopewell would stand on the particular dividing line. To be on the safe side, I did exactly as I’d been told and sat where she’d left me.

While I waited, I examined her small but exceptionally neat office in some detail. Eventually my eyes were drawn to a framed photo on the wall—a graduation photo with a smiling cap-and-gown-clad Laura Hopewell standing between a very non-Asian middle-aged couple, a man and a woman. I was still studying the photo when Dr. Hopewell returned.

“Those are my parents,”she said. “They adopted me from China when I was three.”

“They look like nice people,”I said.

She nodded. “They are.”

“And you must make them very proud.”

She shrugged and sighed. “Maybe not so much,”she said. “My mother would rather I was curing cancer or delivering babies instead of solving murders.”

That made me laugh. “Some things never change,”I said. “When I told my mother I was going to be a cop, she felt the same way.”

That broke the ice. “Come on,”Dr. Hopewell said. “Let’s go get this done.”

Which we did.

Standing in on autopsies is tough, but it’s part of my job. Bereaved family members go to funerals. They remember the dearly departed in eulogies and they start the process of saying good-bye. For homicide cops, autopsies are a way of saying hello. What the M.E. uncovers in an autopsy is usually a starting point. By learning everything we can about the victims at the moment of death, we begin trying to find out what happened to them and why. And with unidentified victims, it’s even more basic than that. Before we can find out who killed them, we have to know who they are. And in this case, once we established the victim’s identity, we needed to ascertain if her death was related to the others we were investigating.

“All right, Mr. Craft,”she called to her assistant. “Let’s get started.”

The assistant rolled out a gurney. Rather than a sheet-draped body, the gurney held a sheet-draped box. Inside was what looked like a haphazard collection of bones. This would be an autopsy with some assembly required. One by one, Dr. Hopewell began removing bones from the box, examining the charred and chewed remains as she brought them out, and then laying them out in a rough approximation of a human form.

As I watched this painstaking process I was reminded of something I hadn’t thought about in years. As a high school sophomore, I had used my own hard-earned cash to buy myself a motorcycle at a garage sale. I had dragged it home in pieces, with the frame and tires in one section and with all the smaller parts stashed in an old wooden laundry basket. I had used all the mechanical skill my high school auto-shop teacher had been able to instill in me into trying to put the pieces back together.

My father died in a motorcycle accident months before I was born. Taking that part of my history into consideration, you could say that my mother wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of my having a motorcycle of my own. She didn’t come right out and actually forbid me to do it, but she watched the piece-by-piece reconstruction process with an undisguised lack of enthusiasm.

I’m a lot older now than I was then, and I also have a far greater understanding of what women will and won’t do in order to get their way. Standing in the Kittitas County morgue and watching the bones being laid out on the examining table, I wondered if it was possible that my mother had sabotaged the whole process. Once I finally got the bike back together, I never did make it work. Had my mother somehow managed to remove the one critical part that made it so I couldn’t get the engine to turn over? However it happened, I never managed a single ride.

Something similar seemed to be going on here. Dr. Hopewell could put the pieces back in some semblance of the right order, but no one was going to be able to breathe life back into that body. Whoever was dead was going to stay that way.

“Our victim is a female,”Dr. Hopewell intoned early in the process. “Late twenties to early thirties.”

“Wait a minute,”I objected. “I thought we already knew that. Isn’t that why I’m here?”

Dr. Hopewell gave me what my son-in-law calls “the stink eye”over the top of her surgical mask. “I believe the CSI people made their initial assessment regarding the victim’s gender based on other evidence found at the scene,”she said. “There was an engagement ring, a woman’s boot, and some odd fragments of clothing. But just because someone dresses like a woman doesn’t make her a woman. The bones do.”

I homed in on the engagement ring. That was strikingly different from our other victims, where no identifiable jewelry or clothing had been found.

“No robbery then?”I asked.

Dr. Hopewell shrugged, reached into the box, and removed the skull. As soon as she did so, I saw the other huge difference Ross Connors had already mentioned. This skull still had teeth. The teeth of all the other victims had been removed, if not prior to death, then at least prior to the time the corpse had been set on fire.

Dr. Hopewell examined the skull for a long time before she spoke again. “Lots of signs of blunt trauma here,”she said. “It looks like any number of them could have been fatal.”

“What about strangulation?”I asked. “Any sign of that?”

Dr. Hopewell shook her head. “None,”she said.

That was a point this victim had in common with the others. They hadn’t been strangled, either.

“Look at this,”Dr. Hopewell said. She used a hemostat to pluck a long strand of blackened material out of the box and held it up to the light.

“Rope, maybe?”I asked.

She nodded. “Restraints. Bag, please, Mr. Craft.”

Her assistant stepped forward with an open evidence bag and she dropped the strand of burned rope into it.

“What about hair?”I asked.

“Some,”she said.

“Enough for DNA testing?”

Dr. Hope well’s eyes met mine. “We don’t do DNA testing,”she said. “And we don’t order it, either. Too expensive. My office can’t afford it.”

“Mine can,”I said with some confidence. It was reassuring to know that I worked for a guy who would spare no expense when it came to doing the job. “Forward what you have to the Washington State Patrol Crime lab. Tell them it’s a Ross Connors case.”

Dr. Hopewell nodded again and returned to her work and her narrative. “The victim was evidently lying on her back when she was set on fire. You’ll notice that the charring is far more pronounced on the top portions of the body than it is on the bottom,”she continued. “I would assume that whoever did this probably expected that the body would burn down to mere ashes, thus erasing all trace evidence. Unfortunately for him, the fire went out prematurely.”

“Due to weather conditions?”I asked. In the Cascades in November, it’s either raining or snowing.

“The weather could be partly responsible in putting the fire out,”Dr. Hopewell conceded. “But remember, most of the people who turn to crime do so because they don’t have many other career options. They aren’t smart and didn’t pay attention in school. The guy who did this—and I’m pretty sure it was a guy—obviously had no idea that the human body is more than fifty percent water. He may have poured on all the gasoline he had, but it wasn’t nearly enough to do the job completely. Unfortunately for us, when the fire was out, there was still enough flesh on the bones to attract carrion eaters. That’s why the bones were scattered around the way they were.”

Suddenly the door to the morgue swung open. A woman who appeared to be in her mid-to-late-thirties strode into the room. She was five-six or -seven and solidly built. She looked tough enough that I wouldn’t have been surprised if she could take me in a fair fight.

“How come you started already?”she demanded of the M.E. “Connie was supposed to call and let me know when you got back. I wanted to be here for this. I was supposed to be here.”Noticing me, the woman stopped short in mid-tirade and stared at me. “Who the hell is this guy?”she added pointedly. “What’s he doing here?”

“His name is J. P. Beaumont,”Dr. Hopewell said. “He’s an investigator with the AG’s office, and this is Detective Lucinda Caldwell, Kittitas County Sheriff’s Department.”

“Homicide,”Detective Caldwell added unnecessarily, since I’d already figured out that much on my own.

It struck me that if Detective Caldwell thought the lady in the outside office was going to lift a hand to help her or anyone else, she was a lot more naive than your run-of-the-mill homicide cop ought to be.

“Glad to meet you,”I said. I wasn’t particularly glad to meet her, but I’m old enough to know that a certain amount of insincerity is necessary to get along in this world. “People call me Beau,”I said. “Or else J.P.”

“I don’t give a damn what people call you,”she said. “I’m going to call you gone. This is my case. What are you doing here?”

Ross Connors had sent in Special Homicide because of the possible connection between this victim and the five other cases we were already working. But the truth was, the body had been found in Kittitas County, and their homicide folks should have been primary. Until Detective Caldwell’s abrupt arrival, the local constabulary had been notable in their absence.

My initial instinct was to take offense at Detective Caldwell’s proprietary approach. I started to object but then thought better of it. I happened to remember how I used to feel back in the old days at Seattle PD when some arrogant piece of brass would deign to come down from on high and venture onto the fifth floor to tell me and the other lowly homicide cops how to do our jobs. Or the time when some twit of an FBI agent ended up being parachuted into the middle of one of my cases and took it upon himself to rub my nose in the concept that he was smart and I was stupid. Given all that, it made sense that Detective Caldwell might be territorial about her case. What I had to do was find a way to work with her.

“My boss, Attorney General Ross Connors, believes this case might be related to several other ones we’ve been working.”

“I don’t care who you are or where you’re from,”Detective Caldwell declared. “You’ve got no business horning in on my—”

“Play nice, you two,”Dr. Hopewell ordered. “I happen to be doing an autopsy here. How about if you cool it, Lucy? You can sort out all the jurisdictional wrangling later on. In the meantime, you need to know that our victim is female. Probably late twenties, early thirties. She’s had at least one child, and she died on or around November eighth.”

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