Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)
J. A. Jance
Prologue
Late on Wednesday afternoon, the first week in December, Sheriff Joanna Brady sat at her desk, mired in paperwork. She was laying out the details of her request for a budget increase for the next fiscal year, something that had to be in the hands of the county supervisors well before their next scheduled Friday morning meeting. At this point Joanna’s department was grossly understaffed, and only an increase in the bottom line would allow her to hire more sworn officers. Unfortunately, right this minute Joanna’s heart wasn’t in it.
When her cell phone rang with her daughter’s photo showing on the screen, Joanna welcomed the interruption. “Hey,” she said, more cheerily than she would have thought possible. “How’s it going?”
“It’s snowing,” Jenny said, not sounding the least bit happy about it. She was in her second year at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where she had quickly run out of patience with Flag’s winter weather. That had happened during the second blizzard of her freshman year, and now, to her utter dismay, this year's Farmers’ Almanac was predicting yet another season of record-breaking snowfall. “We’ll probably have another foot by morning,” she added gloomily.
Joanna had to bite her tongue to keep from mentioning that Jenny could have chosen to go to school in Tucson, where it was much warmer and seldom if ever snowed, but the offer of a scholarship and a spot on NAU’s rodeo team had carried the day.
“How are things with you?” Jenny asked.
“Fine,” Joanna replied, but that was an outright lie, because things definitely weren’t fine, not even close. As Jenny rattled on about her day and about the latest rivalries on the rodeo team, her mother’s mind wandered back to a conversation with Detective Ernie Carpenter earlier that afternoon.
Ernie, who had been Joanna’s lead investigator for as long as she’d been sheriff, had let himself into her office unannounced and then closed the door behind him before dropping into one of her visitor’s chairs.
“It’s back,” he said.
Joanna struggled for several long moments, trying to come to terms with exactly what “it” was, but then, observing his somber demeanor, she got his drift.
“The cancer?” she asked.
He nodded.
Years before, Ernie had been treated for prostate cancer, choosing to go the radiation-seeds route. Since then he’d been in remission, and Joanna had almost forgotten about that original diagnosis. Now she realized she’d been noticing that he seemed to have lost some weight recently and was looking a little more worn than usual.
“It’s metastasized,” he added. “It’s in my lymph nodes and my liver.”
“I’m so sorry,” Joanna murmured, “so very sorry. Does anyone else know?”
“Only Rose,” he said. “I’m not ready for the guys around here to start treating me like the cancer guy with one foot in the grave, even if it’s true.”
Joanna couldn’t help half smiling at that. When it came to gallows humor, Ernie Carpenter had always been at the top of the class.
“So here’s the deal,” Ernie continued. “I’m letting you know that I’m pulling the plug as of January first. Rosie and I have talked it over. The seeds gave me a pretty good run, but it looks like that’s coming to an end. I’m not going to put myself through some kind of godawful round of treatment that would maybe give me a few more months at best but zero quality of life. That’s not fair to me, and it’s sure as hell not fair to Rose. I’m going to take my retirement, and the two of us will hit the road. We’ll travel while I can travel, and when I can’t do that anymore, we’ll come home.”
He left off there. The recurrence was bad enough news, but the idea that Ernie planned to forgo any additional treatment was stunning. Joanna’s first instinct was to ask, Are you sure? But the set of Ernie’s jaw caused her to stifle. Yes, he was sure. He and Rose were sure. They had obviously reached this conclusion together. This was their business and nobody else’s.
“How can I help?” Joanna asked quickly. “What can I do?”
“Keep this under your hat, for one thing,” he replied. “You find sympathy in the dictionary between shit and syphilis, and I’m not interested in sympathy. I wanted to give you a heads-up in advance so you can start getting your ducks in a row as far as detectives are concerned, but I don’t want a lot of hoopla about this. I’ll tell Jaime, of course. He’s my partner, and I owe it to him, but that’s it. I’m not telling anyone else.”
Joanna thought about that before speaking up. “I’ll give you a week,” she said.
Ernie seemed taken aback. Clearly that kind of terse response was not what he’d expected. “I beg your pardon?”
“You have until a week from today to tell Jaime whatever you decide to tell him about why you’re retiring. You can let him know about the cancer or not—that’s entirely up to you—but after that, all bets are off. If you don’t want to be labeled ‘cancer guy’ on your way out the door, you’d better put on your big-boy underwear and announce your upcoming retirement, because there’s no way in hell I’m letting you leave this department without a retirement party, and that will need to be scheduled ASAP. Got it?”