Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(3)
Kristin’s husband, Terry, happened to be Joanna’s K-9 officer. During a shoot-out nearly a year earlier, Spike had taken a bullet that had been intended for Joanna and very nearly died as a result. Spike’s extensive injuries had made his returning to active duty impossible. When his replacement, a newly trained pit bull named Mojo, appeared on the scene, Spike had been disconsolate each morning to see Mojo ride off in Terry’s patrol vehicle. Taking pity on the grieving dog, Kristin had asked Joanna if she could bring Spike along with her. These days Spike spent his workdays dozing on a dog bed beside Kristin’s desk while Mojo went out on patrol.
With the outer office completely deserted, Joanna didn’t linger. “Okay,” she said to the empty room. “Since everyone else has called it quits for the day, I guess I’ll do the same.”
She went back into the office long enough to gather up her laptop and stuff it into her briefcase. Then she headed home, leaving through the private door at the back of her office, an exit that led directly to her reserved parking place just outside.
Joanna had a short commute—eight minutes door-to-door—from the Cochise County Justice Center to her home at High Lonesome Ranch. She sometimes wished it were longer, to give her a larger buffer between her life as an Arizona sheriff and her life as a wife and mother, between dealing with bad guys and dealing with kids, between fighting bureaucracy and handling dirty diapers. The bureaucracy battle would be never-ending, but Joanna’s daughter Sage was now more than a year old, and with any kind of luck the diaper era would be coming to an end in a matter of months.
At the moment Joanna’s husband, Butch Dixon, was off on the second leg of a book tour for his latest novel, book number five, A Step Too Far. His lighthearted, genre-jumping stories might have been cozies but for the fact that his main protagonist, Kimberly Charles, was a law-enforcement officer. The books were set in a small and entirely fictional town in southern Arizona, but the strong resemblance between Sheriff Brady and Butch’s fictional Sheriff Charles was hardly coincidental.
Butch’s editor often referred to him as a solid “midlist” author, and for authors in that category going on tour was mandatory. In this instance conflicting scheduling issues had required breaking the tour into two separate parts. The half before Thanksgiving had focused on out-of-state appearances. The second half featured drivable events located in and around Arizona and New Mexico. For the earlier part of the tour—the national one—Butch had used media escorts. For more local venues, he was driving himself.
With Butch out of town, Joanna checked his schedule daily. Today she knew he had a three-hour dinner break between the end of his afternoon event in Mesa and the start of an evening one at White Tank Library in Waddell, Arizona. Joanna had never heard of Waddell until she Googled it and learned it was a Phoenix suburb located at the base of a mountain range on the far western side of the Valley of the Sun. In terms of the Phoenix metropolitan area, Waddell was about as far from Mesa as humanly possible.
Once in the car, Joanna plugged in her phone and dialed Butch’s number. “How’s your day going?” she asked when he picked up.
“Pretty well,” he said. “I’m grabbing a burger at a Denny’s in Avondale right now, so I don’t have to fight rush-hour traffic all the way from central Phoenix to White Tank. Since I’m on my own, I can’t use express lanes, and that’s a pain.”
“How was attendance this afternoon?” Joanna asked.
“Red Mountain in Mesa was a full house,” he replied, “but people are still surprised when Gayle Dixon turns out to be male instead of female. I get the feeling that the bookstores aren’t exactly thrilled to have an author out on the road this late in the season. With Christmas on the way, it’s as though I’m more of an annoyance to them than I am a help.”
“Speaking of Christmas,” Joanna said, “I just had a call from Jenny. She was asking if it was okay for her to bring someone along home for Christmas vacation.”
“I know,” Butch said. “She called me about that, too. I was afraid it was going to turn out to be a boy, and they were coming home to announce an engagement. I told her sure, the more the merrier. I met Beth last fall when I drove up to Flag to help Jenny and Maggie get settled in before school started.”
Maggie was Jenny’s quarter horse—the equine half of a prizewinning barrel-racing team.
“Beth struck me as being very quiet,” Butch added. “She’s evidently smart enough but very shy. Jenny’s so outgoing, I wondered how they’d get along.”
“Based on that Christmas invite, I’d say they’re doing fine,” Joanna assured him. “By the way, Jenny’s last final is on Friday, the fifteenth. I’m guessing they’ll show up sometime late on Friday evening or else sometime during the day on Saturday.”
“That’s what she told me, too,” Butch said. “When I come home this weekend, I’ll have to get my rear in gear if I want to have Christmas decorating done and holiday baking in hand before they show up.”
Butch was due home on Saturday. Joanna had been looking forward to the two of them enjoying a relaxing weekend together. Her vision for the upcoming weekend didn’t include the hustle and bustle of getting ready for Christmas.
“Why not leave most of that for the girls to do after they get here?” Joanna suggested. “Jenny’s always loved decorating, and since Dennis is seven now, he’s big enough to be a help this year, too. Ditto for making Christmas goodies. Put all three of them to work in the kitchen. It’ll give them something to do.”