“What if she wanted to drop out of school?” Joanna returned. “Would you let her do that, too, just because it was what she wanted?”
Butch looked exasperated. “Joanna, what’s gotten into you?”
“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “I seem to be having a had morning.” With that, she grabbed her purse, stuffed her phone into it, and then stomped out of the room, slamming the door shut behind her. The loud bang from the closing door reverberated up And down the hallway. Two doors away, Pima County Sheriff Bill Forsythe turned and glanced back over his shoulder.
“My, my,” he murmured, clicking his tongue. “Sounds like a lovers’ spat to me.”
Before Joanna could reply, her phone rang again. Considering the fact that she was about to tell Bill Forsythe to mind his own damned business, the ringing phone was probably a lifesaver. There were two more roosterlike squawks before she managed to retrieve the distinctively crowing cell phone from the bottom of her purse. As soon as she picked it up, Joanna saw her chief deputy’s number on the phone’s digital readout.
“Good morning, Frank,” she said, walking briskly past Bill Forsythe as she did so.
Frank Montoya hailed from Willcox, Arizona, in northeastern Cochise County. He came from a family of former migrant workers and was the first member of his family to finish both high school and college. Years earlier he had been one of Joanna’s two opponents running for the office of Cochise County sheriff. After she won and was sworn into office, she had hired him to be one of her two chief deputies. Now Frank Montoya was her sole chief deputy. He was also the person Joanna had left in charge of the department during her absence.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
“Are you all right?” Frank asked. “Your voice sounds a little strained.”
“I’m fine!” she told him. “Just not having a smooth-running morning today. Now what’s up? I’m on my way to the meeting. Anything happening that I should know about?”
“We had another carjacking on I-10 yesterday afternoon, over near Bowie.”
Joanna sighed. This was the sixth carjacking along the Cochise County stretch of the interstate in as many weeks. “Not again,” she said. “What happened?”
“A guy named Ted Waters, an elderly gentleman in his eighties, had pulled over on the shoulder to rest because he was feeling a little woozy. Some other guy came walking up to the car and knocked on the window. Waters rolled it down. As soon as he did, the young punk reached inside, opened the door, and pulled Waters out of the car. He threw Waters down on the side of the road and drove off. Border Patrol stopped Waters’ vehicle this morning at their check-point north of Elfrida. It’s a late-model Saturn sedan. At the time it was pulled over, it was loaded with seven UDAs. My guess is that the people in the car this morning had no idea it was stolen.”
“Coyotes again?” Joanna asked.
People who bring drugs and other contraband across the border are called mules. For a price, coyotes smuggle people. Since vehicles involved in smuggling of any kind are subject to immediate confiscation and impoundment, it had suddenly become fashionable for coyotes to use stolen cars for transporting their human cargo. That way, when the vehicles were impounded, the coyotes were out nothing. They had already been paid their exorbitant smuggling lees, and someone else’s main wound up in the impound lot. “What time did all this happen?” Joanna asked.
“The carjacking? Four in the afternoon.”
“Good grief!” Joanna exclaimed. “The carjackers have started doing it in broad daylight now?”
“That’s the way it looks,” Frank said.
“How’s the victim doing? What’s his name again?”
“Waters, Ted Waters. He’s from El Paso. He was on his way to visit his daughter who lives up in Tucson. He was banged up a little, but not that much. Had some cuts and bruises is all. He was treated at the scene and released. We called his daughter. She took him home with her.”
“Was Mr. Waters able to describe his assailant?”
“Not really. The first thing the guy did was knock off the old luau’s glasses, so he couldn’t see a thing. Waters said he thought he was young, though. And Anglo.”
“The border bandits are hiring Anglo operatives these days?”
“It doesn’t sound too likely,” Frank replied. “But I suppose it could be. We’re asking Border Patrol to bring the car to our impound yard instead of theirs, so Casey can go over it for prints later this morning.”
Casey Ledford was the Cochise Sheriff’s Department’s latent fingerprint expert. She also ran the county’s newly installed equipment loaded with the AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) software.
“Let me know if she comes up with something,” Joanna said. “I’ll put the phone on buzz instead of ring. That way, if you call during a meeting, I’ll go outside to answer or, if necessary, I’ll call you back. What’s DPS doing about all this?”
“After the first couple of carjackings, the Department of Public Safety said they were heeling up patrols on that sector, but so far as I know, that still hasn’t happened,” Frank told her. “We’re the ones who took the 911 call on this latest incident, and our guys were the first ones on the scene. By the time the first DPS car got there, it was all over.”
“Who is it at DPS who’s in charge of that sector?” Joanna asked.
“New guy,” Frank answered. “Name’s Hamilton, Captain Richard Hamilton. He’s based up in Tucson.”
“Do you have his number?”
“No, but I can look it up,” Frank offered.
“I’ll do it,” Joanna told him. “But I won’t have time to call him until later on this morning, when we take our break. Anything else going on down there that I should know about?”
“Just the usual,” Frank said. “A couple domestic violence cases, three DWIs, and another whole slew of UDAs, but that’s about it. The carjacking was the one thing I thought you should be aware of. Everything else is under control.”
“Right,” Joanna told him with a sigh. “Sounds like business as usual.”
CHAPTER TWO
It was late on a hot and sunny Friday afternoon as the four-vehicle caravan turned off Highway 186 and took the dirt road that led to Apache Pass. In the lead was a small blue Isuzu Tracker, followed by two dusty minivans. A lumbering thirty-five-foot Winnebago Adventurer brought up the rear.
Sitting at the right rear window in the second of the two mini-vans, twelve-year-old Jennifer Ann Brady was sulking. As far as she was concerned, if you had to bring a motor home complete with a traveling bathroom along on a camping trip, you weren’t really camping. When she and her father, Andrew Roy Brady, had gone camping those few times before he died, they had taken bedrolls and backpacks and hiked into the wilderness. On those occasions, she and her dad had pitched their tent and put down bedrolls more than a mile from where they had left his truck. Andy Brady had taught his daughter the finer points of digging a trench for bathroom purposes. Jenny’s new Scout leader, Mrs. Lambert, didn’t seem like the type who would be caught dead digging a trench, much less using one.
The Tracker was occupied by the two women Mrs. Lambert had introduced as council-paid interns, both of them former Girl Scouts and now history majors at the University of Arizona. Because the assistant leader, Mrs. Loper, was unavailable, they were to help Mrs. Lambert with chaperone duties. In addition, they would be delivering informal lectures on the lifestyle of the Chiricahua Apache, as well as on the history and aftermath of Apache wars in Arizona.
History wasn’t something Jenny Brady particularly liked, and she wondered how much the interns actually knew. What she had noticed about them was that they both wore short shorts, and they looked more like high school than college girls. But then, she reasoned, since they were former Girl Scouts, maybe they weren’t all bad.