“What are treasures?”
“The things you want to keep forever.”
That’s exactly how Steve used it.
Sitting in the bottom drawer of his dresser, it held his pocketknife, the hook he used to catch his first fish, some marbles he’d won at school, a lucky rabbit’s foot, a Ten Commandments bookmark from bible school, and a feather taken after shooting his first-ever pheasant. That night, after his mother went outside to smoke her cigarette, Steve dug Grandma Lucille’s wedding ring out of his jeans, stuck it on the rabbit’s foot, and put them both in his cigar box.
On the day of Grandma Lucille’s funeral, Gramps was really upset because he suddenly noticed that her wedding ring had gone missing. When the cops gave him an envelope with her things in it and the ring wasn’t there, Gramps hit the roof. He blamed all kinds of people, from the ambulance attendant to the first deputy who had arrived on the scene.
“Just because they’re cops doesn’t make them saints,” he had growled.
At the funeral, one person after another stood up in the First Lutheran Church of Fertile and said what a wonderful, hardworking, God-fearing woman Grandma Lucille had been. Steve didn’t say a word. He just sat there, doing his best to look both sad and respectful.
After that things at home were challenging for a while. From what Steve was able to overhear, at first the cops seemed to think that Gramps had been responsible for Grandma Lucille’s death because she’d had some life insurance, and he was the only beneficiary. However, Mr. Cooper at the tractor repair shop gave Gramps an airtight alibi, saying he’d shown up with the tractor on a trailer bright and early that morning and had stayed there all day until the deputy called to say Gramps needed to come straight to the hospital.
Eventually Lucille Hawkins’s death was declared an accident. A few months later, the insurance money came through. Gramps used that to finish paying off the mortgage on his farm and began buying up some of his neighbors’ properties as well. After that, as far as Steve and his mother were concerned, everything changed for the better. Steve and his mom moved into the house to livewith Gramps, while the new hired hand, brought in to help Gramps with the chores, ended up living in the mobile home.
Naturally Steve never talked about what had happened with anyone—other than Hoot or King Kong, and occasionally with Casper, Steve’s very own friendly ghost. And although that was the first time Stephen Roper got away with murder, it certainly wasn’t the last.
Chapter 1
Bisbee, Arizona
Thursday, November 9, 2023
As Sheriff Joanna Brady pressed the ignition buttonon her Ford Interceptor, her husband, Butch Dixon, leaned in through her open window. “Do you have everything you need?”
“I do now, thanks,” she answered. As she’d headed for the garage, she had left her freshly cleaned dress uniform, still in its plastic bag, hanging on the doorknob in the laundry room. It would have been there still had Butch not spotted it and carried it to the car.
“Drive carefully,” Butch said, giving her a peck on the cheek, “and be sure to tell Jenny I’m proud as punch.”
“Will do,” Joanna said, putting the SUV in reverse. Butch was still there waving as the garage door slid shut behind her.
Leaving the ranch, she turned first onto High Lonesome Road and then Double Adobe Road before reaching Highway 80. Her office at the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department was just a few miles ahead. She had intended to drive straight by her office, but with the situation at the jail currently such a powder keg, at the last moment, she turned off, pulled into her reserved spot on the far side of the building, and stepped inside through her private entrance.
When she walked through her office and into the waiting room outside, Kristin Gregovich, her secretary, looked up in surprise.“What are you doing here?” she asked. “I thought you were on your way to Peoria.”
“I am,” Joanna replied, “but I wanted to stop by and see how things are.”
“All right so far as I can tell,” Kristin answered.
“Where’s Tom?”
Tom Hadlock was Joanna’s chief deputy.
“Where do you think?”
“The jail?” Joanna asked.
“Where else?” Kristin said with a sigh.
Aware that she was out of uniform, Joanna made her way through the series of security doors that led into the jail’s interior. Growing up, she’d loved watching reruns of the Andy Griffith show. When she’d first been elected sheriff, the Cochise County Jail resembled the one in Mayberry where even the town drunk had been treated like visiting royalty. Back then, the jail had been a bit on the casual side and generally filled with a collection of locally well-known but minor offenders—ones charged with DUIs, drunk and disorderly, domestic violence, speeding, driving without a license, etc.—who came and went on a regular basis. Those original frequent fliers had usually been held for a matter of days or weeks at the most.
Over time, all that had changed. Chaos along the Mexican border had brought a whole new world of criminal activity to Cochise County. Now, in terms of inmates, the county jail resembled a regular prison. Offenders who had been arrested for various kinds of smuggling and drug offenses and who were unable to post bail were having to be housed for months or even years while awaiting trial. That meant the jail was usually filled to capacity and beyond. In fact, the situation had become so precarious that several months earlier Joanna had been forced to make arrangements for all jail personnel to wear body cams while on duty.
Two months earlier, one of her patrol deputies had spotted a vehicle that had been cosmetically altered to resemble a UPS vanspeeding northbound on Central Highway just outside Elfrida. When the officer gave chase, the driver of the van had opened fire. The pursuing officer had radioed for help, but realizing he was mostly on his own, he had finally resorted to shooting out one of the rear tires of the speeding vehicle, causing the driver to lose control. The van had lurched off the highway, plowed into an irrigation ditch, and then rolled three times before coming to a stop.
The driver, who had been wearing a seat belt, walked away from the incident without a scratch and was taken into custody. Unfortunately none of the twenty-three illegal immigrants crammed into the back of the van had had seats, much less seat belts. Five of the passengers died at the scene. Four more later succumbed to their injuries. EMTs and law enforcement officers from all over the area, and even as far away as Lordsburg, New Mexico, had responded to the carnage. Joanna herself had shown up on the scene, doing her best to comfort the less seriously injured who, after being triaged, had to wait their turn while medics responded to those with life-threatening injuries.
