Prologue
AS SHERIFF JOANNA BRADY AND HER REELECTION COMMITTEE gathered in the social hall at the Tombstone Canyon United Methodist Church in Old Bisbee to await the results, everyone expected it would be an election-night nail-biter, one that would end with either a victory celebration or a concession speech.
This was the third time she had stood for election, and this battle had been by far the toughest. For one thing, her opponent, Donald Hubble, was a well-heeled good old boy who had money to burn. He had paid for his run for office out of pocket without having to do any outside fund-raising, either. He had outspent Joanna three times over, papering the whole of Cochise County with thousands of yard signs and buying spots on Tucson television channels that broadcast throughout southern Arizona. His favorite tagline, “Cochise County needs a full-time sheriff as opposed to a part-time one,” was a not-so-subtle reference to Sheriff Brady’s very obvious and advancing pregnancy. The one thing his paid-for commercials couldn’t paper over was Hubble’s well-deserved reputation as a bully of both people and animals, a reputation he had earned during the years he’d been in charge of running his father’s massive cattle ranch south of Wilcox.
Being both pregnant and outspent hadn’t been Joanna’s only stumbling blocks during this election cycle, not by a long shot. Late in August her world had been shattered when her mother, Eleanor, and her stepfather, George Winfield, had both fallen victim to a freeway shooter on I-17 south of Flagstaff, Arizona. The tragic loss of Joanna’s parents should have been more than enough to derail her reelection effort. Unfortunately, fate had much more in store.
Back home in Cochise County, what started out as a routine homicide investigation had revealed that one of her longtime officers, Deputy Jeremy Stock, despite showing a “good guy” face to the world, had actually been an abusive and ultimately murderous husband and father. When the truth finally came out, he turned his wrath on Joanna herself. Only the timely intervention of Joanna’s K-9 unit—Deputy Terry Gregovich and his dog, Spike—had saved her life, but not before the dog had been gravely injured. Three months later he was still recovering and had been medically retired from his K-9 duties. As for Jeremy Stock? Rather than be taken into custody, he had taken his own life, plunging to his death off a rock-bound cliff.
The fact that Joanna had been totally bamboozled by someone she thought she knew well had shattered her confidence in her ability to read people and made her wonder how many more troubled souls might be hiding in plain sight inside her department. For a time she’d seriously considered dropping out of the race. She might well have done so had not members of her department rallied behind her.
Both her sworn officers and civilian staff members had urged her to stay in contention. Most of them had worked with her for the better part of eight years, and they’d come to trust her. Although she could often be a demanding boss, she required as much of herself as she did of others, and she made every effort to be fair.
With their backing she fought the good fight. After her parents’ funeral and once the ink had dried on the paperwork surrounding the Jeremy Stock homicides, Joanna had gone back to campaigning with renewed effort and purpose. And now here they were—nine o’clock on election night with the results just starting to trickle in.
Using a bottomless checkbook to fund his run for office, Don Hubble had been able to hire a professional campaign manager and campaign workers, while Joanna’s effort had relied on an army of volunteers mobilized by two of her greatest cheerleaders, her first in-laws—Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady, the parents of her long-deceased husband, Andy. When it came time to undo the pause button on the campaign, and once Joanna made the decision to continue her run for office, they had stepped up in a big way, functioning as her campaign co-chairs.
Jim Bob might have been a novice when it came to local politics, but he knew almost everyone in town, if not in the county as a whole, and he wasn’t afraid to ask for help. Eva Lou had served as the campaign’s volunteer coordinator and was a killer when it came to door-to-door canvassing. She had also stepped in as a pinch-hitting grandmother and babysitter, looking after five-year-old Dennis when late-night campaign events in far-flung corners of the county had kept Joanna, and sometimes her husband, Butch Dixon, as well, out on the road far past their son’s bedtime.
One item that had escaped Jim Bob’s attention until the last minute was lining up a location for a post-election party, something that should have been done well in advance. By the time the novice campaign manager figured it out, the preferred venues in town—the ones at the Copper Queen Hotel and in the basement of the Convention Center—were already booked, which explained why tonight’s post-election gig was being held in the parish hall of the Tombstone Canyon United Methodist Church.
The intention was to collect incoming election results in real time and immediately upload them to a PowerPoint display projected onto a screen. So far that process wasn’t going well. While Jim Bob and Butch fought to get the balky hardware and software to work together, Eva Lou coordinated setting up the kitchen to serve coffee and refreshments. As for the candidate herself? Joanna sat at a cloth-covered table near the front of the room, keeping an eye on Denny, who was deep into the Lego project that Eva Lou had wisely brought along to keep him occupied.
This was not Joanna Brady’s best night ever. The waistband of her latest uniform had undergone several discreet expansions. Nonetheless, it no longer fastened. A strategically placed safety pin three inches below the top of the zipper was all that was keeping the placket more or less in place. Unfortunately, her equally snug-fitting jacket could no longer be trusted to keep the resulting gap from showing. In other words, her clothes didn’t exactly fit, and neither did her shoes.
Tonight her ankles were swollen. Under the cover of the tablecloth, she’d managed to slip off her heels in order to give her sore feet a rest. Her back hurt. Any minute now she’d need to put the shoes back on and make a quick trip to the restroom. In the meantime her baby girl—due to make her first appearance three weeks from now in early December—was kicking up a storm.
As guests began to meander into the room, the PowerPoint display finally went live, and numbers began coming in. That was also the same moment when Joanna’s phone rang with her daughter’s photo showing in the ID window. “Hey, Mom,” Jenny said. “How’s it going?”
This was not the time to mention either the swollen feet or the aching back. “Fine,” Joanna said.
“How are the returns looking?”
Jenny had been intimately involved in both of her mother’s previous campaigns. She knew about keeping election-night vigils. Tonight, however, as a freshman at Northern Arizona University, she was three hundred fifty miles away in Flagstaff.
“Just starting,” Joanna replied. “According to the screen, some of the smaller precincts have already reported in, mostly up around the northeast corner of the county—Bowie, San Simon, and Kansas Settlement.” She paused. “Results from Elfrida and Portal just came in.”
“And?” Jenny prodded.
“We’ve got a small margin so far,” Joanna said. “Only about a thousand votes, but still a margin. The problem is, Hubble is a big deal out in Sierra Vista, his home base, and Sierra Vista alone accounts for almost a quarter of the county’s voters.”