J. Jance - Rattlesnake Crossing

Joanna looked back at the darkened mobile home. Where does that leave us? she wondered. Is Frankie Ramos another victim, or is he a killer? Which is it?

"My detectives will get a search warrant and be here first thing in the morning," she said.

Ruben looked at her questioningly. "What about the door?" he asked.

And there was Joanna Brady, stuck in the same gray world of neither right nor wrong, the same one that hadtrapped a deputy named Eddy Sandoval when he had tried to help a friend, the father of a wayward son.

"The way I remember it," she said, "the door was al-ready off its hinges when we got here."

"Thanks," Ruben Ramos said. "I'd better go."

Joanna stood on the porch and watched him make his defeated way back to the Crown Victoria. An hour earlier, the man had been at home with his wife, peacefully asleep. Joanna's phone call had summoned Ruben Ramos out of dreamland and dragged him into a waking nightmare. First she had forced him to look at the very real possibility that his son might have been exposed to the AIDS virus. Now she had presented him with the likelihood that Frankie Ramos was a serial killer as well.

"Chief Ramos," Joanna called after him.

"What?"

"Did your son ever spend much time around Phoenix?"

"Not that I know of," he said. "Tucson's easy to get to from Benson. Phoenix isn't. Why?"

"Just wondering," she told him.

He drove out of the weed-choked yard. Feeling the weight of the man's heartbreak, Joanna had all she could do to climb into the Blazer to get herself home.

Why is it people want to have kids? she wondered as she drove. Parenthood sure as hell isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Joanna pulled into the yard at High Lonesome right at one-thirty. As usual, the dogs were glad to see her. But dogs were like that. It was their nature to always be glad to see whoever happened to come home, late or not. But thinking about Ruben and Alicia Ramos' mixed results in the parent-hood department had made Joanna consider her own parental efforts.

Right now, coming home in the middle of the night was fine-Jenny was in Oklahoma with her grandparents. But what if Jenny had been at home? She was still too young to be left by herself on a long summer's day. And yet Joanna's job required her to put in those long hours.

When she had first been elected sheriff, there were a few none-too-subtle puns about her being the "titular" head of the department. The only way to stifle those criticisms and to prove her detractors wrong had been to do the job and do it well. She had pulled the long shifts when necessary and had worked her heart out, making sure her officers had the equipment and support they needed to do their jobs.

In the process, Joanna had really earned the title of sheriff-made it her own. But she had done so at considerable cost, both to herself and to her daughter. Working hard made people expect that she would continue to work at that same level. In fact, that was what she herself expected. But what kind of long-term family crisis was being created by her doing an outstanding job at work? Ruben Ramos had supplied an answer that came chillingly close to home.

According to Ruben, three of his four kids were fine. Frankie, the youngest, was the joker in the deck, the loser. Had Ruben failed Frankie as a father because of his job? Because he had been so focused on moving up the ladder in the Benson Police Department? The other three kids were evidently older. Maybe they'd had the advantage of a less distracted, less work-involved father. Maybe that was why they were upstanding, productive citizens, while their baby brother was a suspect in a serial murder case.

But what were the implications in all that for Joanna and for Jenny? Ruben had four chances to succeed as a father. When it came to being a mother, Joanna Brady had one-Jenny. What worried her now was that perhaps, by doing a good job at work, she was damning Jenny to a lifetime of alienation and failure. Of all the things Ruben had said, one had rung especially true. Cops' kids did exist under a microscope. For good or ill, members of the community tended to exaggerate whatever they did. The bad things were worse and the good things were better if your parent-your father, usually-was a cop. That had been as true for Joanna as it was fur Frankie Ramos.

And so that night, as Joanna Brady crawled into bed, she included any number of parents in her prayers-Ruben and Alicia Ramos along with Jeff Daniels and Marianne Maculyea. Her own mother, Eleanor Lathrop Winfield, made the list, as did Joanna Lathrop Brady.

The alarm went off at six-thirty the next morning. Joanna punched it and decided to snooze for just a minute or two more. She woke up when the phone rang. "Are you coming in for the briefing or not?" Dick Voland growled. "With four people dead so far, you can pretty well figure things are a little hot around here this morning."

Joanna turned over and stared at the clock in total disbelief. Nine-thirty. She had slept three hours longer than she had intended. "I'll be right there," she said, scrambling out of bed as she spoke. "And yes, we definitely need that briefing."

Oversleeping was bad enough. Oversleeping when she was the boss was inexcusable.

As she threw on clothes and makeup, nothing went right. The first two pairs of pantyhose she put on both had runs. And no matter what she did in front of the mirror, it was going to be a bad-hair day. On her way to the Blazer, she noticed that Kiddo was in his corral, happily munching oats out of his feed trough. That meant that Clayton Rhodes, her handyman neighbor, had already stopped by that morning to do the chores and feed the animals. Too bad he didn't wake me up at the same time, she thought.

Driving to the justice center, she felt half sick and more than a little disoriented. Too many days in a row with far too much to do and not enough rest had taken their inevitable toll. Her already shaky sense of well-being went even further downhill when she encountered half a dozen media vehicles and out-of-town television remote-broadcasting vans parked in the driveway. Squeezed in among the vans was a small white Nissan bearing the Bisbee Bee's logo.

That's just what I need this morning, Joanna thought grimly, another dose of Marliss Shackleford.

Joanna threaded her way through the vehicles toward the rear parking lot. She pulled into her reserved slot, the one directly in front of the private entrance that opened straight into her corner office. Letting herself in via that solitary door, she felt a debt of gratitude-and not for the first time-to whoever had designed that entryway; it allowed her to come and go at times like this without having to deal with what was sure to be a media mob scene in the lobby.

On an almost daily basis, she tried to remind herself that the media were not the enemy, but saying that didn't necessarily make it so-not on mornings like this.

She picked up the phone as soon as she reached her desk. "Send in Deputies Voland and Montoya," she told Kristin. "And Detectives Carpenter and Carbajal."

"All at the same time?"

"You bet," Joanna said. "There's no reason to go over all this stuff more than once if we don't have to."

It took a few minutes for the four officers to assemble, dragging along both extra chairs and coffee. The mood in the room was grim as Joanna called the meeting to order by turning to Dick Voland. "Did Ruben Ramos turn in a missing-persons report on his son this morning?"

Voland nodded. "I've issued an APR on Frankie Ran and his VW bus."

"Good," Joanna said, turning to the others. "All right then, guys, here's the score-four people dead and one missing. It's time to get a handle on this thing. Where do we stand?"