J. Jance - Fire and Ice

Gary’s grin widened. He was so thrilled to have a chance to rub his underling’s nose in it that he didn’t realize he was being suckered by the tired old good cop /bad cop ruse.

“Now, listen here, Lucy,” Gary interrupted. “If the attorney general says jump, we’d by God better jump.”

His tone was so patronizing I was surprised Lucy didn’t haul off and slap him upside the head. I would have, but she didn’t. She let him get away with it.

“But, Gary…” she began earnestly.

Detective Fields dismissed her objection with a wave of his hand. “Let’s just be sure that when we check things out to him, we do it the right way. We’ll sign off on all the paperwork, preserve the chain of evidence, and all that. As long as we cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s, it won’t come back and bite us in the butt. So go get me the damned forms.”

After giving Gary one final look that should have turned him into a pillar of salt, Lucy marched out of the cubicle.

“Just ignore her,” Gary advised me with a grin. “She’s a little more emotional than usual. It’s probably that time of month.”

In the world of Seattle PD, where political correctness is the name of the game, a sexist comment like that would probably have been enough for Detective Fields to find himself brought up on charges of creating a hostile work environment. The social culture here was evidently a little different.

Lucy returned, bringing with her a set of forms that would release the evidence to my care and keeping. She slapped it down on the table.

“You fill it out then,” she told Gary. “I’m not going to.”

She left again. Gary turned his hand to the paperwork with an amazingly cheerful attitude. “There you go,” he said at last, signing off on the bottom of the last form with a considerable flourish. “It’s all yours,” he said. “Let us know what you find out, as I’m sure you will.”

“Yes, I will,” I agreed. “Absolutely.”

Of course, Fields hadn’t mentioned the budget problem to me or that his department was operating in a world of hurt. How could he? I’m a fellow officer and a guy. And of course he signed off on the request. It was his way of throwing his weight around and showing me that he was the big bad boss and poor little Detective Caldwell had to do things his way. Right. Of course she did.

I took charge of both the paperwork and the evidence box. As I emerged from the cubicle, Lucy Caldwell was waiting just outside. She stood with her arms crossed, her eyes shooting daggers at me and at her partner as well. She didn’t crack a smile, and neither did I, but we both knew she’d won.

Detective Fields had been screwed-without a kiss-and he didn’t even know it; didn’t have a clue.

Which, if you ask me, was exactly what he deserved.

Leaving the crime scene, Joanna headed back to the department. Her mind was still grappling with the apparent murder of Lester Attwood when her phone rang.

“Hey, Joey,” Butch said. “How’s it going?”

This is the kind of question spouses ask each other all the time. It’s usually on a par with “How’s the weather?” and doesn’t generally require a complicated answer. Unless what you’re doing right then is driving away from the scene of a homicide.

When Joanna was first elected sheriff, she was still a relatively new widow, a single mother of a single child. She had not anticipated remarrying, but that was before Butch Dixon appeared in her life and refused to take no for an answer. Now, sometime later, she was still sheriff. She was also the married mother of a usually cooperative teenager, fourteen-year-old Jenny, who would turn fifteen in a little over a week, and an almost never cooperative son, Dennis, who was just a little beyond his first birthday and more than slightly opinionated for his age, something his dot-ing grandmother chalked up to his bright red hair.

“Fine,” Joanna said, editing out any number of things she might have said. “How’s it going for you?”

“I’m still home.”

Joanna knew that Butch had been planning a quick trip to Tucson that day to pick up steaks for the Texas Hold’Em bachelor party they would be hosting for Frank Montoya on Thursday night.

“I thought you were leaving a lot earlier than this,” Joanna said.

Butch sighed. “So did I, but the appliance repairman who was supposed to be here bright and early this morning didn’t come until just a few minutes ago.”

Their relatively new front-loading, water-saving washer had come to grief a week earlier, and it had taken almost that long to get worked into the repair schedule. Joanna was worried the machine had died for good. She envisioned being told that the washer, now minutes beyond the expiration of its warranty, would have to be hauled off to the junkyard.

“What’s the bad news on that?”

“Socks,” Butch said.

For a second Joanna thought that her Bluetooth earpiece might have cut out on her. “What?”

“Socks,” Butch repeated. “Dennis’s socks-several of them-were stuck in the drain. He says we’re supposed to use a lingerie sack when we wash them. Do we even have a lingerie sack?”

“I used to have one, years ago,” Joanna said. “My mother thought I needed one. Jenny used it to carry some baby chicks around once. I don’t think it ever came back inside the house.”

“I’ll put that on my Tucson shopping list,” Butch said. “But now that I’m getting such a late start, I was wondering if you’d like to go along. Carol says it’s fine with her. If it looks like we’ll be getting home too late, she’ll just plan on having the kids stay over at her place until morning.”

Carol Sunderson was a widow whose disabled husband had died in an electrical fire that had destroyed their rented mobile home the previous November. Left homeless, she and her two grandsons and black-and-white Sheltie, Scamp, had taken up residence in Joanna’s old house on High Lonesome Ranch. Carol paid rent for the privilege of living there, but Joanna and Butch paid her a salary for her invaluable service as a live-out housekeeper and nanny.

It was Carol’s calming presence that kept Joanna’s and Butch’s busy lives organized. Her cooking and cleaning and child-caring made Butch’s at-home writing a whole lot easier. While their washing machine had been down for the count, Carol had taken their necessary laundry home and had done it there. And although at almost fifteen, Jenny could conceivably have stayed on her own, Joanna and Butch thought it was best not to leave her on her own with the baby. Jenny was a teenager, as Joanna’s mother Eleanor had pointed out on more than one occasion. Although Jenny doted on her baby brother, it wasn’t fair to give her too much responsibility for the little one.

Bless Carol, Joanna thought.

“Well,” Butch said. “Will you come with me or not?”

Joanna glanced at her watch. It was a little past three. Working as sheriff, she certainly wasn’t required to punch a time clock, and she put in lots of extra hours long after the regular workday ended and on weekends, just as her father had once done before her. But unlike her father, D. H. Lathrop, Joanna was consciously trying to create family time. These days she was home for dinner more often than she wasn’t. And the thought of having some alone time with Butch-just the two of them-sounded heavenly, even if pushing a cart around Costco or tracking down a lingerie bag at Alice-Rae’s Intimate Apparel wasn’t her idea of a great time.

“Why not?” Joanna said. “Sounds like fun. I’ll call into the office and make sure everything’s under control. If it is, you’ve got yourself a date.”

“Where are you now?” Butch asked.

“Just coming through Elfrida,” Joanna said. “I’ll stop by the house and change clothes-”