No Honor Among Thieves
Author: J.A. Jance
Date: 2015-11-16 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Mystery; Fiction; Audiobook; Novella; Mystery Thriller; Thriller; Crime; Short Stories; Detective; Murder Mystery
Description: For the first time ever, Ali Reynolds and Joanna Brady, New York Times bestselling author J.A. Jance’s popular series sleuths, join forces to solve a terrifying crime in this exclusive enovella that has everything you want in a thriller—page-turning action, breathtaking twists and turns, edge-of-your-seat suspense, and…Legos. “A semi’s gone over the embankment.” The call wakes Sheriff Joanna Brady in the middle of the night, but what brings her fully alert is the rest of the story. The driver didn’t drift off to sleep and cross the center line—he was shot, multiple times, by someone with serio
Publisher: Pocket Star

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When Sheriff Joanna Brady’s distinctive rooster ring tone jarred her awake at oh-dark-thirty in the morning, she grabbed the phone off the bedside table and shot a guilty glance at her sleeping husband before she answered. After years of being married to a county sheriff, Butch Dixon had become accustomed to Joanna’s being summoned to some incident or another in the middle of the night. At first he had made it a point to get up with her and make sure that, wherever she was going, she’d at least have a cup of freshly made coffee along for the ride.

Right now, though, the poor guy was fighting a deadline on his next book and had come to bed barely two hours earlier. “Just a minute,” Joanna whispered into the phone.

In the old days, Joanna would have had to scramble across a pitch-dark bedroom while dodging the prone body of her rescued Australian shepherd, Lady, who had formerly slept as close to Joanna’s side of the bed as possible. Now, though, Lady had put herself in charge of Butch and Joanna’s four-year-old son, Dennis. All her instinctive herding proclivities had been turned full bore on keeping track of the boy. Lady spent all her waking and sleeping hours guarding him devotedly—enough so that both Joanna and Butch worried about what the dog would do with herself in the fall when Dennis went off to pre-kindergarten.

Once inside the bathroom with the door closed, Joanna switched on the light and sat down on the closed toilet lid. “Okay,” she said to Tica Romero, the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office’s overnight dispatcher. “What’s up?”

“A Border Patrol officer called in a fatality MVA that may turn out to be a homicide,” Tica replied. “A guy driving a delivery truck tore through the guardrail where Highway 92 crosses the San Pedro and ended up upside down in the riverbed. But the officer who called it in, Agent Bill Cannon, said the truck looked like something straight out of a war zone. He says the cab was riddled with bullet holes that appear to be from automatic weapons fire.”

“Automatic weapons?” Joanna echoed. “Are you kidding me? Sounds like a serious smuggling operation of some kind, probably a couple of the drug cartels duking it out inside my jurisdiction. About the victim: Do we know what killed him? Did he die of a gunshot wound or from the wreck itself?”

“No way to tell at this time,” Tica replied. “I’ve dispatched Detectives Carbajal and Howell as well as Dave Hollicker to the scene.”

Jaime Carbajal and Deb Howell were two of Joanna’s three homicide detectives. Dave Hollicker was part of her two-man—well, one man and one woman—CSI unit.

“Detective Carbajal is already on the scene and he wanted to know if you’re coming, too.”

Years earlier, Joanna’s first husband, Cochise County sheriff’s deputy Andrew Roy Brady, had been running for the office of sheriff when he’d been gunned down by a drug cartel’s hit man. In the aftermath of Andy’s death, Joanna was encouraged to run for sheriff in his place. Most people—including the voters who had elected her—expected Joanna to be sheriff in name only. After all, being the daughter of a sheriff—D. H. Lathrop—and being married to a deputy sheriff didn’t exactly qualify Joanna to be a police officer or sheriff in her own right. But once she was elected, she did her best to get qualified, including sending herself to the Phoenix for a course of police academy training. One of the main things that won her the respect of those under her command was that whenever there was a homicide in Cochise County, Sheriff Joanna Brady was on the scene.

“Affirmative on that,” she said. “I’ll get dressed and head out. Let everyone know I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“One other thing before you go,” Tica said hurriedly before Joanna could end the call.

“What?”

“I don’t know if any rental agencies are open about now. Maybe there’s one in Sierra Vista, but you’re going to need a truck.”

“A truck? Why?”

“Because the truck landed so hard that it broke apart on impact, spilling a whole load of LEGO boxes and scattering them everywhere. If the San Pedro had water running in it today, there’d be a flotilla of Star Wars LEGO sets floating upstream.”

“LEGO boxes?” Joanna repeated. “As in toys? As in those little plastic thingamajigs that kids stick together to build things?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tica replied. “Those are the ones. Evidently that truck was chock-full of them.”

“Okay,” Joanna said. “While I’m getting dressed, why don’t you try you locating a rental truck. That’s not going to be easy in the middle of the night.”

She ended the call and jumped in the shower. She wore her red hair short on purpose. There was enough natural body to it that, if she combed it out wet, it would dry in some reasonable order without needing a blow-dry. Her mother, Eleanor Lathrop Winfield, thought the whole idea of wash-and-wear hair was too scandalous for words, but Joanna had too many demands on her time and energy to keep up with a complicated hairdo. Ditto for her makeup applications, which her mother regarded as hit-or-miss.

Joanna had her face on and was dressed in her uniform, out of the house, and in the car less than twelve minutes after the phone call. She had taken the time to leave a note for Butch, but she hadn’t waited long enough to make coffee.

The clock on the dashboard of her county-owned Yukon said it was 3:03 as she turned off High Lonesome Road and onto the highway. The night before, she’d been caught up in the first meeting of her reelection committee, and it had kept her up far past her usual bedtime. As she accelerated, Joanna realized how rummy she felt. She needed coffee in the worst way. Luckily for her, the Cochise County Justice Center was on her way to the crime scene.

She dialed up the radio. “Hey, Tica,” she said. “Any luck on that truck?”

“I contacted Frank out in Sierra Vista,” Tica said. “Turns out one of his officers has a brother-in-law who operates the local U-Haul franchise. Frank is seeing if they can roust the guy out of bed and have him come handle the rental. If so, he’ll give us a call.”

Frank was Frank Montoya. Frank had been one of Joanna’s two opponents in her run for the office of sheriff. When he lost out, she was smart enough to appoint him to be one of her two chief deputies. In recent years, however, Frank had been lured away from that job when Sierra Vista offered him the position of chief of police.

“Bless his heart,” Joanna said. “If anyone can make it happen, Frank is the guy. One other thing: What are the chances of getting someone to go down to the break room and make a fresh pot of coffee? If I swing through the front parking lot, maybe they could bring a cup out to me. I’m maybe three minutes away.”

“You bet,” Tica said. “Believe me, you wouldn’t want to drink the crap in the bottom of the pot right now. That stuff is thick enough to kill you.”

Minutes later, as Joanna turned into the Justice Center entrance drive, Sergeant Kevin Crane, her nighttime desk sergeant, was already hobbling down the wheelchair ramp with a covered paper cup of coffee in hand. While still a deputy, Crane’s legs had been severely injured in a line-of-duty accident in which his patrol car had been T-boned by a drunk driver. At the time of the wreck, Kevin was divorced and remarried and had two sets of kids to support. He was supremely grateful when Joanna offered to move him over to a desk job rather than forcing him into early retirement.

“It’s hot,” he said, gingerly handing the thermal cup in through the window.

It was hot. It was all Joanna could do to get it transferred to the cupholder without burning her fingers.

“Thanks, Kev,” she said. “If someone from Sierra Vista comes up with a truck we can rent, give them my departmental Amex card. I know Deputy Stock is off duty tonight, but wake him up and ask him to pick up the truck. He does still live in Sierra Vista, doesn’t he?”

“As far as I know,” Crane said. “Are you going to need additional help?”

“Probably. I’m told the crime scene is littered with a truckload of spilled LEGO boxes. If you can spare a patrol officer or two to come help gather them up, I’d be most appreciative.”

“I’ll see what I can do, but we’re stretched pretty thin tonight.”

With her coffee too hot to drink, Joanna drove through town and west on Highway 92 on the far side of Huachuca Terraces, still puzzling over what she had so far learned about the incident. How could a load of LEGO sets be worth a fatality firefight, especially one with assailants armed with fully loaded automatic weapons? Was that even remotely possible? Had the cartels started using phony toy boxes as a way of transporting drugs?

When she estimated the coffee was cool enough to drink, she tried a sip. It may have been fresh, but it tasted vile. If this was what the new coffee in the break room tasted like, the old stuff would have been far worse. Disgusted, she put the cup back in the cupholder and left it there.

The glow of flashing emergency lights, visible from miles away, guided Joanna to the crime scene. Parking on the shoulder of the highway just behind the ME’s van, she stepped out of her SUV and gazed down at the artificially lit scene. She saw moving beams of flashlights here and there, as well as the occasional brilliant flash from someone shooting crime scene photos.

The high-desert chill of early April bit through the shirt of Joanna’s uniform and ruffled icily through her still-damp hair. Suppressing a shiver, Joanna reached into the Yukon’s backseat and pulled out a brown leather aviator’s jacket bearing an arm patch imprinted with the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office logo. She was shrugging into its welcome warmth as Deputy Armando Ruiz walked up to her with his own blazing Maglite in hand.

“It’s still pretty dark, Sheriff Brady. Are you going to go straight down the embankment from here or would you rather walk around?”

“Are you going down?” she asked.

“My assignment is to stay here,” Deputy Ruiz replied. “I’m in charge of directing traffic, not that there’s much of that at the moment. That’ll change once the sun comes up. In the meantime, I’ve been walking up and down the road, looking for skid marks.”

“And?”

“There aren’t any. Looks to me like he made no effort to stop. He just veered across the centerline and crashed into the guardrail at full speed.”

Joanna reached into the front seat and retrieved her own Maglite. Grateful she had worn a pair of sturdy hiking boots, she nodded toward the spot where the mangled iron guardrail had been ripped apart as the truck crashed through it. “I guess I’ll take the straight down option,” she said.

Maglites, heavy enough to be used as batons in a pinch, were designed to be used by cops much larger than Joanna’s diminutive five-foot-four-inch frame. She appreciated the way the flashlight illuminated the tricky rock-strewn downward path, but the weight of the device made it difficult for her to maintain her balance. The last few feet down the incline were done on her butt in a very unladylike fashion. She was glad Deputy Ruiz hadn’t announced her arrival beforehand. Once she reached the bottom, she needed a moment to brush herself off before anyone else spotted her.

The generator-operated work lights created pockets of bright illumination that alternated with places that were pitch-dark, making it impossible for Joanna’s eyes to adjust. The first figure who emerged out of that unsettling mixture of light and dark turned out to be Detective Deb Howell.

“How are things?” Joanna asked.

“This is one night that makes me happy Maury and I finally got around to tying the knot,” Deb replied with a grin. “Used to be when I’d get a call-out like this, I’d have to jump through hoops to find a middle-of-the-night babysitter for Ben. Having a husband right there and on call makes life a lot simpler.”

Years earlier, Deb had met Maury Robbins, a 911 dispatcher from Tucson who was also an ATV enthusiast, during a homicide investigation at an ATV park near Bowie. They dated for a long time and finally got around to marrying a scant two months earlier. Since the wedding, the newlyweds had simplified their living arrangements by having Maury move into Deb’s house in Old Bisbee. From there he made the hundred-mile-each-way commute back and forth to Tucson three days a week.

“That isn’t exactly what I was asking,” Joanna said with a smile.

Deb gestured toward the scene behind them. “We’re stuck in a holding pattern right now, waiting for the ME to finish her preliminary exam.”

For years a man named George Winfield had served as Cochise County’s medical examiner. He and Joanna had maintained an excellent working relationship right up until George hauled off and married Joanna’s widowed mother, Eleanor. That complicated things immensely, especially since Eleanor wanted a retired husband rather than one who was fully employed. When George resigned the post of ME, his replacement, Dr. Guy Machett, became a royal pain. Then, several months ago, Machett himself was murdered in an horrific attack. The new ME, Machett’s replacement, was a tall, serious-minded black woman named Dr. Kendra Baldwin, who arrived in town the same weekend Deb Howell and Maury Robbins married.

This was only the second homicide Dr. Baldwin had investigated for Joanna’s department, but Joanna had been part of the vetting process for the new ME, and she had every confidence that Kendra Baldwin’s abilities would live up to her five-star credentials. Not only that, Joanna had been delighted when, in the course of their first interactions, Kendra suggested that they drop the formal “ ‘Doctor’ and ‘Sheriff’ BS,” as she put it. “I’m Kendra, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to call you Joanna.”

After years of dealing with Guy Machett’s unyielding objections to being called anything other than a strictly formal “Dr. Machett,” Joanna welcomed Kendra Baldwin’s brand of straightforward informality.

Just then, Kendra herself emerged from the circle of generator-powered artificial illumination. “There you are, Joanna,” she said. “I’ve told my guys to take him back to the morgue. Once he’s gone, the truck is all yours.”

Joanna nodded her thanks, smiling as she did so. Guy Machett had never referred to his morgue assistants by anything other than the formal term, “dieners.” The fact that Dr. Baldwin called them “her guys” was also a mark in her favor.

“What can you tell us?” Joanna asked.

“Driver’s license in his pocket identifies him as Fredrico Arturo Gomez from Bakersfield, California. He signed up to be an organ donor, but that’s not going to happen. I found multiple gunshot wounds in his body, all of which penetrated the victim’s left side. Any one of them could have done the trick. I’d say he was dead long before the truck smashed through the guardrail and hit the ground. From what I could see, a barrage of bullets entered the cab of the truck through the passenger side with enough force to penetrate both the truck and the victim.”

“We’re talking real firepower, then,” Joanna observed.

“Right,” Kendra agreed. “If the victim was traveling at sixty miles per hour or even sixty-five, we’d have to be talking either a whole troop of shooters or else an automatic weapon of some kind for there to be that many hits.”

“Since the entry wounds are all on the victim’s left side, that means the shooter was either on the left-hand shoulder of the highway, waiting for him,” Deb suggested, “or else in a vehicle that was passing in the left lane.”

“That could be, too,” Joanna said. “Shooting from a passing vehicle makes more sense than coming from opposite directions. If each of the two meeting vehicles was doing sixty, that adds up to 120 miles per hour. The split second the two would have been side by side wouldn’t allow enough time for multiple hits, even with an automatic weapon. There’s a posted no-passing zone right there where he went through the guardrail, but if someone was out to kill the guy, a solid yellow line on the pavement wouldn’t count for much. What we know for sure is that, one way or another, this guy was ambushed. Either the shooter was following him, or else he knew the exact time he would be traveling this particular section of roadway. So where’s the brass—still on the pavement or on the shoulder somewhere?”

Joanna pulled out her phone and dialed Sergeant Crane’s number. “We need some manpower out here,” she said when he answered. “The targeted vehicle went off the bridge on Highway 92 at the San Pedro River. From the damage to the guardrail, it looks as though he was headed east, but we don’t know exactly where the shooting took place. That part of the highway is fairly straight. The shooting might have happened as far away as a mile or so, and it took the truck that long to finally veer off the road. We need people out here combing the highway on both sides of the crime scene looking for brass and, if we’re really lucky, maybe some usable tire prints.”

“Is this a situation where we should bring the old duffers into play?” Sergeant Crane asked.

Recently a group of local seniors, several of them still in possession of Eagle Scout badges from long ago, had erased the natural dividing lines between the Kiwanis, Rotary, and Lions Clubs and shown up at Joanna’s office offering to form a group of senior citizen reserve officers. Officially dubbed the SCRs (Senior Citizen Reservists), they had all gone through citizens’ academy training and had done a number of patrol ride-alongs. Some of them helped out with routine filing and clerical procedures at the Justice Center. They had also proved to be invaluable in helping locate several vulnerable adults when the sheriff’s office posted Silver Alerts. This, however, was the first time any of them would be deployed on a search for evidence.

Not surprisingly, George Winfield—the retired ME and Joanna’s stepfather—was their leader. Joanna glanced at her watch: four twelve A.M. A phone call to George at this hour wouldn’t faze him in the least, but it would put her mother in a complete snit. Joanna knew from personal experience that having Eleanor Lathrop Winfield get up on the wrong side of the bed wouldn’t be good for anyone. That was the truth of the matter, but she also didn’t want to spill those kinds of family beans in front of Sergeant Crane.

“Now that you mention it,” she said, “calling out the SCRs is an excellent suggestion, but there’s no sense having them out here milling around in the dark. If they’re going to be conducting a search of both sides of the roadway, I’d rather wait until daylight before putting them to work. George is an early riser. Give him a call at five. Tell him what’s up and that I’d like his people here right around sunrise. Before he comes out this way, though, ask him to stop by the Justice Center and pick up our supply of metal detectors. At last count, I think we had ten or so. And remind him that anyone turning up for this operation needs to be wearing orange reflective vests. Understood?”

“Roger.”

About then, several flashlight beams came bouncing toward the spot where Joanna, Kendra Baldwin, and Deb Howell stood conferring. At the center of the group were four men—Kendra’s two dieners and two of Joanna’s deputies—lugging a loaded and unwieldy gurney across sandy terrain that rendered the wheels useless.

“Do you want to see him?” Kendra asked.

Joanna shook her head. “Not right now,” she said. “I’ll see him later at the autopsy.”

“Go ahead and load him up, then” Kendra told her attendants. While they struggled to do so, the ME turned back to Joanna.

“So you’re coming to that?” she asked. “I thought only detectives viewed autopsies.”

“It’s my job, too,” Joanna told her. “When do you plan to do it?”

“Probably first thing this morning,” the ME replied. “Will eight work for you?”

“That’s fine. Both Detective Carbajal and I will be there,” Joanna said. “In the meantime, I’ll put Deb here in charge of tracking down the victim’s next of kin. Was the guy carrying a cell phone?”

“I didn’t see one,” Kendra answered. “Probably got thrown out of the truck in the crash.”

“Don’t worry,” Joanna said. “We’re going to be combing through this scene with a fine-toothed comb. If he had a cell phone in that vehicle, we’ll find it. What about the Border Patrol officer who called it in? Where is he?”

“Agent Cannon,” Kendra answered, pointing. “His vehicle is there on the right, just beyond where the truck came to rest. The last I saw of him, he was talking to Detective Carbajal.”

“Cannon drove through our crime scene?”

“Don’t be too hard on him,” Kendra said. “He got here within five minutes of the incident. At the time, he was far more focused on possible survivors than he was on preserving evidence.”

“Point taken,” Joanna agreed.

As Kendra started back up the embankment, someone else was coming down. In the glow of Kendra’s flashlight, Joanna caught a glimpse of a bristling electrical-socket hairdo and had to stifle the urge to groan aloud. The last thing she needed at the crime scene was reporters of any kind. Among those unwanted reporters, Marliss Shackleford of the Bisbee Bee sat at the top of the list.

“You’ve got no business being here, Marliss,” Joanna said coldly. “This is a crime scene. Go back up top where you belong.”

“Come on, Sheriff Brady,” Marliss said. “Do we have to do this? Can’t you just tell me what’s going on? I heard that a truckload of LEGO boxes had been hijacked or something.”

“ ‘Or something’ is the operant phrase for the day,” Joanna told her. “This is an open investigation. Until we’re ready to give a full press briefing, there will be no comment at all from anyone in my department.”

“You can go ahead and deny it all you want,” Marliss prodded. “The point is I already know that a truckload of LEGO sets is involved. If you’re going to go the ‘No comment’ route, you’ll have to live with the story the way I tell it.”

Joanna knew then that Marliss had probably been listening in on a police scanner and had learned enough to send her out in the middle of the night ready to do her stint of on-the-scene reporting.

“I’m not confirming or denying,” Joanna insisted, “and I’m sticking with ‘No comment.’ Now, go back to your vehicle and get out of here. You’re interfering with a homicide investigation.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Joanna knew she had screwed up, but it was too late to take them back.

Marliss perked up instantly “Did you say ‘homicide’?” Marliss asked. “I was under the impression it was nothing more than a motor vehicle accident.”

“Go,” Joanna insisted. “Go now, before I have one of my deputies to escort you away.”

“That’s all right,” Marliss said. “A homicide with LEGO sets on the side sounds intriguing enough. I should be able to do something with that.”

She left then, scrabbling, unassisted back up to the highway. Joanna turned to Detective Howell. “Would you follow her and make sure that if anyone up there talks to her, especially people in my department, they understand that they will have to answer to me.”

While Deb hurried away to do as she’d been told, Joanna turned and walked across the sandy riverbed to where Jaime Carbajal in plain clothes and Bill Cannon in his Border Patrol uniform stood leaning against the front bumper of Bill’s marked SUV.

Border Patrol was a booming business in southern Arizona these days. Back when Joanna’s father, D. H. Lathrop, had been the sheriff of Cochise County, he would have known all the local Border Patrol guys, the names of their wives, and probably the names of their kids, too. Now, however, with agents cycling in and out of the Tucson sector with astonishing regularity, Joanna knew no more than a handful on sight or by name, and Agent Bill Cannon was one she had never met.

Approaching the two men, she held out her hand. “Sheriff Joanna Brady,” she said, introducing herself. “I understand you’ve been a big help here tonight.”

Agent Cannon, with dark stains on the shirt of his uniform, turned out to be a young guy, not more than twenty-five or so. He was short and stocky and wore his blond hair in a crew cut. “Glad to meet you, ma’am,” he said. “I wish I could have done more. I was just up the river a ways, walking the bank, trying to spot footprints, when I heard gunfire. I made tracks back to my vehicle and was almost there when I heard the crash. Tearing through that guardrail made a hell of a racket.”

“How long between the gunfire and the crash?”

Agent Cannon thought about that for a moment before he answered. “Twenty seconds or maybe thirty at the most. When I came up the riverbed, I spotted the truck right away because the headlights were still on. The truck must have gone end over end a couple of times, because it came to rest a long way from the base of the embankment. And for the cargo box to split apart the way it did when it hit the tree trunk, the driver had to be going way over the speed limit when he hit the guardrail.”

Detective Carbajal nodded. “Deputy Ruiz tells me there aren’t any skid marks up above. I’m wondering if maybe the guy was already dead. His foot could have been deadweight on the gas pedal at the time it went off the road.”

Nodding, Joanna stood for a minute examining the wreckage. The truck had evidently been airborne as it plunged off the embankment. It landed nose down in the dirt and then flipped over at least twice before the bed of the truck slammed into the trunk of one of San Pedro’s venerable old cottonwood trees. The blow was forceful enough to split the cargo box in half and send an eruption of cellophane-covered LEGO boxes exploding in every direction. The delivery truck turned out to be larger than Joanna had envisioned, making her wonder if the single U-Haul truck she had ordered would be big enough to contain this unconventional cargo spill.

Joanna turned her attention back to the conversation in time to hear Jaime Carbajal say, “We’ll need you to leave your vehicle here until we’re finished processing the crime scene.”

“Okay,” Cannon agreed. “Let me know when you’re done. In the meantime, I’ll let my supervisor know that I need someone to come give me a ride so I can go home and clean up.”

For the first time, Joanna realized that the stains on Agent Cannon’s uniform were most likely bloodstains. Since he had been the first one the scene, that made sense, Joanna supposed, but still . . . The person who called in a homicide often had something to do with it.

“And you’ll stop by the department later today to give an official statement?” Jaime continued.

“Sure thing,” Agent Cannon said. “My shift ends at eight A.M. Give me a call after that and let me know what time is convenient.”

“Will do.”

Joanna watched Cannon walk away. “He’s the one who called it in,” she said quietly. “You don’t think he’s involved, do you?”

“I doubt it,” Jaime responded, “although, just in case, I asked Deb to request a copy of his radio transmissions from Border Patrol.”

“We won’t have those anytime soon,” Joanna observed.

She got along fine with the local Border Patrol folks, but relations between her and the headquarters folks for the Tucson sector weren’t always the best. TSA routinely ignored or else delayed responses to requests for information from local jurisdictions. The message being that they were the feds, and everyone else could take a number and get in line.

“Maybe sooner than you think,” Jaime Carbajal said with a grin. “Deb can be quite the bulldog once she sinks her teeth into something.”

Donning a pair of Latex gloves, Joanna reached down, picked up one of the boxes, and shook it, listening and hearing the sound of rattling. The corners of the box were crumpled but not torn. The cellophane wrapping on the outside was still intact. She suspected that all this careful packaging meant that everything inside was still fine, including any drugs that might be hidden there. Turning on her flashlight, she discovered she was holding something that purported to be the TIE fighter with 1,685 pieces.

Joanna had no idea what a TIE fighter was. In their family, Butch Dixon was the resident expert on all things Star Wars, but she guessed that this model was probably worth a fair amount of money. Even the small LEGO sets Dennis lusted for on the shelves in Target were pricier than Joanna thought reasonable. This one was probably somewhere in the $200 range.

But examining the colorful box itself offered no hints about why the driver of a vehicle hauling LEGO sets would have been traveling on an out-of-the way route that wasn’t a direct connection to anywhere else. Nor did it explain why the truck had been ambushed and taken down with automatic weapons fire. Shaking her head, Joanna returned the box to what seemed to be the same place she’d found it.

“We’ll have to wait for sunrise to finish the crime scene photos,” Jaime observed. “That’s a little over an hour away.”

Joanna nodded. “And I’ve asked for the SCRs to show up and search the roadway for brass. I want to know exactly where those shots came from and what kind of weapon was used.”

“Take a look at the cab,” Jaime suggested.

Together, Joanna and her detective approached the passenger side of the truck. The door lock had given way, leaving the door dangling on its hinges. A cursory survey of both sides of the door reminded Joanna of a cheese grater: smooth indentation on the outside and jagged ones on the inside.

“That’s a bunch of holes,” Joanna said. “Have you found any spent bullets?”

“Not yet,” Jaime replied. “The CSIs have been working the scene but they haven’t started on the truck. They’ll probably have to wait until the truck is towed to the impound lot before they can finish up.”

Joanna stepped away from the truck, shaking her head. “I don’t need a team of CSIs to tell me what’s really going on here,” she said. “I already know.”

“What’s that?”

“Whoever the shooter is, he has way more firepower than we do and he’s not afraid to use it. Not only do we need to find him fast, we’ll have to be careful as all hell when it comes to taking him down.”

•   •   •

Ali Reynolds was peacefully asleep when her husband’s cell phone buzzed them both awake at seven A.M.

“Hey, Stu,” B. Simpson said. “What’s up?”

B. Simpson’s company, High Noon Enterprises, had started off years earlier as a locally owned and operated cyber security company located in Sedona, Arizona. Since then it had grown exponentially, morphing into a well-respected international firm that numbered some of the world’s leading companies among its clientele. Stuart Ramey, a high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome guy with a brilliant head for computers and abysmal people skills, was B.’s second-in-command.

“We just got a hit on our LEGO media scanning program.”

As part of their security process, they maintained a constant search for any media hits involving one of their clients. Media hits often meant that some kind of security issue was brewing, and keeping a multilingual worldwide watch for trouble was one of the services High Noon offered.

“What kind of hit?” B asked, switching the phone to speaker as Ali got out of bed and ushered Bella, their recently rescued miniature dachshund, over to the patio door to let the dog out. Because of the presence of too many nighttime critters in Sedona’s semi-wild environs, Ali stayed at the door and kept watch until Bella finished her business. Then the dog came inside, leaped gracefully back up onto the bed, and curled into a small ball in her designated spot in the middle of the foot of their bed.

“I thought you’d be interested,” Stu said, “because, for one thing, it’s from right here in Arizona.”

“Where in Arizona?”

“Bisbee.”

“What exactly are we talking about?”

“It’s a column called Bisbee Buzzings from the local newspaper, the Bisbee Bee, written by someone named Marliss Shackleford. It reads more like a blog than an actual article, but it posted just a few minutes ago at 6:45. The electronic version evidently comes out before the paper version.”

“What does it say?” B. asked with a hint of impatience leaking into his voice.

Stu cleared his throat and began reading aloud.

Early this morning the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office was investigating a fatality motor vehicle incident at the point where Highway 92 crosses the San Pedro River. Although Sheriff Joanna Brady refused to make any comments, this reporter was able to ascertain that the case involves a delivery truck that slammed through the guardrail into the riverbed. The damaged truck was clearly visible, but my understanding is that the investigation is being conducted as a possible homicide.

An anonymous source close to the investigation, speaking without permission, claimed that the truck was transporting a load of LEGO sets when it crashed in the early morning hours. There were indications that automatic weapons fire was involved.

So what’s really going on here? Is this a situation where bad guys with guns targeted some poor truck driver who was minding his own business and was gunned down for simply doing his job? If that’s the case, every resident of Cochise County is in danger and needs to be on high alert.

What I’m asking is this: When will someone from Sheriff Brady’s department come forward and speak candidly about what’s really going on? In the meantime, I can assure you that, as more information becomes available, your intrepid reporter will be on the job.

B. couldn’t help but be pleased that the automated media surveillance network he and Stu had created had managed to pick up on that one-word mention from a tiny electronic newspaper article in an out-of-the-way corner of Arizona. But he also knew why Stu was calling him. LEGO sets were essentially limited editions. Once a popular model was no longer available through regular retail channels, the prices of those sets skyrocketed, creating a lucrative black market trade. The LEGO company, based in Denmark, had hired High Noon as an outside source to address that black market and to search out the source of inventory that was obviously going astray.

The sets were manufactured at several overseas locations. B. had recommended placing GPS locator chips inside the boxes of some of the higher-priced models, concealed inside the gel-packs used for moisture protection. That idea had been dismissed out of hand as being “unworkable and too expensive.”

Having a chip inside even one of the sets from the wreck would have been a huge help about now. The regular radio-frequency identification chips, RFIDs, on the outsides of the packages would provide some information, however, including where they had been manufactured and where they were going. B. assumed that legitimate freight haulers would be using eighteen-wheelers and traveling on interstate highways. They wouldn’t be utilizing midsize box trucks on back roads in the middle of the night. If there were LEGO sets involved in the incident, B. was confident that, one way or the other, they were stolen goods.

“That’s all?” B. asked. “Just that one-word mention?”

“So far.”

“Nothing more on local television feeds?”

“The place where the wreck happened is a good seventy-five miles outside Tucson,” Stu replied. “A motor vehicle accident, even a fatality MVA, in Cochise County generally wouldn’t garner any attention from the Tucson news outlets. If the incident ends up being classified as a homicide, however, the Tucson stations will be all over it.”

“We need to be all over it before they are,” B. declared. “I want someone with a chip reader on the scene as soon as possible. Can you find out where and when the latest LEGO shipments have come ashore? Since we have an ending point, if we can pin down a beginning point, we may be able to track down who’s responsible.”

“I’ll get Cami started on the shipping situation the moment she comes in,” Stu said. “We have a chip reader here, but getting it to Cochise County in a hurry is a problem. I checked. We’re talking a five-hour trip. As for obtaining permission to scan the boxes, good luck with that.”

Cami Lee was a recent computer sciences graduate whom B. had snagged to be Stu’s assistant. She was a dynamite five-foot-nothing package, bright and talented. She was also totally capable when it came to doing her job, which included dealing with Stuart Ramey’s gruff style and less-than-easygoing personality.

“Ali and I will be on our way to Cottonwood in a matter of minutes,” B. said. “Try to find out any additional details you can about that wreck.”

“If you’re going to Bisbee, wouldn’t it make more sense for you to leave directly from home?” Stu suggested.

“No,” B. said firmly. “We’re coming there first.”

•   •   •

Seated at the foot of the bed, petting Bella, Ali was caught off guard by B.’s use of the plural pronoun “we.”

Taking the hint, Ali dashed into the bathroom. When she emerged minutes later, showered but still in her robe, B. was back on the phone with someone else. “Right,” he was saying. “The R66 will be just fine. What’s the pilot’s name again?” There was a pause while he made a note in his iPad.

Ali knew that the R66 was a Robinson helicopter, which meant B. was on the phone with Heli-Pros, a helicopter charter outfit out of Scottsdale that B. used on occasion.

“Okay, Chuck,” B. continued. “Landing at the Sierra Vista airport sounds about right: That should be closer than anywhere else. Can you have a rental car there? . . . Good . . . Yes, there will be two passengers. The lead passenger will be my wife, Ali Reynolds. She should be listed on my customer profile. The second one will be Stuart Ramey.”

B. paused again and then turned to Ali. “How much do you weigh?”

“Are we even having this conversation?” she demanded, hands on her hips, but she knew why he was asking. In order to calculate the range, the charter outfit needed to know the weight of the passengers. “One thirty-three,” she added.

B. repeated the information into the phone then turned to Ali again. “Any idea how much Stu weighs?”

“You think you’re going to talk Stu Ramey into going for a ride in a helicopter?” Ali asked. “Are you nuts? And why aren’t you going?”

“How much?” B. insisted, ignoring her query.

“Two forty or maybe two fifty,” Ali said with a shrug, “but that’s just a guess.”

B. passed along that information as well. “Right,” he said. “The usual place. I know Chuck isn’t our customary pilot. Let him know that we’ve got an approved helipad painted on the far northeastern corner of the High Noon parking lot.”

Ali waited until he was off the phone. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“Because I’m going to be spending my whole day dealing with corporate guys from every corner of the planet. I can’t afford to be out of reach for as long as it takes to get back and forth to Bisbee. Stu would be lost on his own, and Cami’s not experienced enough.”

Shaking her head, Ali collected Bella and took her to the kitchen. Leland Brooks, their majordomo, was already on hand with a freshly brewed pot of coffee. “Will you and Mr. Simpson be wanting breakfast?”

“Sounds like breakfast of any kind is off the list for this morning,” she told him as he busied himself dishing out Bella’s food. “B. and I have to head out for Cottonwood as soon as we’re both decent. There’s some kind of crisis afoot, so whatever you were planning for dinner should probably be put on hold. I’m being deputized to a crime scene in Cochise County. I don’t know where B. will end up, and I have no idea when we’ll be back.”

“In other words, business as usual,” Leland said with a smile. “I take it you won’t be going into the office in Flagstaff today.”

Weeks earlier, Ali and B. both had been involved in the take-down of a polygamous group called The Family located in northern Arizona. The group’s leader, Richard Lowell, knowing he was about to be brought to justice for human trafficking, had gunned down most of the men in the cult, leaving the affected women and children to fend for themselves.

Some of the women had left The Family’s compound willingly. Others who tried to stay on ended up being evicted when the state discovered that most of the dwellings in the community weren’t built up to code and needed to be leveled. Most of the displaced homemakers had few job skills, and the kids were years behind students of the same age as far as scholastic achievement was concerned. Working as a volunteer three days a week out of an office shoehorned into the Flagstaff YWCA, Ali’s job was to smooth out some of the bumps and difficulties The Family’s women and children struggled with as they tried to find their way in a world entirely foreign to them.

“This is a priority right now,” Ali told Leland. “I’ll call the Y and let them know I’m traveling and won’t be in. Since I’m a volunteer, obviously they can’t fire me.”

When Ali returned to the bedroom with two cups of coffee in hand, she found that B., fully dressed, was back on the phone, speaking urgently and fluently in a language Ali suspected to be Danish. It was a lengthy conversation. By the time it ended, Ali was dressed and both of their coffee cups were empty. On their way to the garage, they found that Leland had freshly loaded travel mugs waiting for them on the kitchen counter.

“I’m telling you, you’re never going to be able to talk Stu Ramey into a helicopter,” Ali insisted again, once they were in B.’s car and belted into their seats. “He’s scared to death of flying.”

“He flew to Vegas for the wedding,” B. countered. “He flew to Paris last winter.”

“Yes, he did,” Ali conceded, “but it was under protest, and those trips were on board airplanes. Big difference. Planes are one thing; helicopters are another. He won’t go.”

“He will if you ask him,” B. said. “After all, aren’t you the smooth talker who persuaded him to take both those trips?”

“But why does Stu need to go in the first place?” Ali objected. “I’m not exactly tech savvy, but I’m pretty sure I’m smart enough to operate an RFID chip reader and relay the information back to you.”

“I’m sure you are, too,” B. replied. “But think about this: Supposing a crook of some kind has been tasked with driving a truckload of stolen merchandise from one place to another. How’s he going to figure out how to get there?”

“If he hasn’t been there before, he’d probably need a GPS device of some kind,” Ali answered.

“Right. And who do you suppose is one of the most qualified people on earth when it comes to extracting information out of whatever device Mr. Bad Guy may have been using? Not you and not me, either. Stu can do it with his eyes closed, but he has to be there—boots on the ground—to do the work. It’s just like a haircut: You can’t get a haircut over the phone.”

Ali’s phone rang. When she saw Cami’s name on the display, Ali put the call on speaker so B. could hear as well.

“Hi, Cami,” Ali said. “I’m here and so is B.”

“Good morning, guys,” Cami said cheerfully. “Here’s what I’ve got for you so far. The most recent shipment from LEGO arrived in Long Beach by way of the manufacturing plant in Monterrey, Mexico, yesterday morning. It consisted of twenty-five shipping containers devoted solely to LEGO. The last of that shipment was off-loaded yesterday by approximately three P.M. According to the GPS chips on the pallets, most of those containers are now en route to their final destinations with the exception of ones that have already been delivered at various West Coast distribution centers between San Diego and San Francisco.”

Adding GPS locator beacons to all the pallets had been done at B.’s suggestion. Each chip listed the individual pallet’s weight as well as its final destination.

“We know from the readings on the pallet tracking system that the designated weight on each pallet remains unchanged from what it was when it left the plant in Mexico.”

“All the pallets may still weigh the same amount,” B. said darkly, “but I’m betting some of them aren’t carrying their original payloads or maybe the boxes in the wrecked truck are from a pallet that was never chipped in the first place.”

“As in ‘no chip, no pallet’?” Ali asked.

B. nodded. “Which would mean there are people working this scam at both ends of the food chain, and we need to find out who they are.”

Cami waited quietly on the phone, listening, until B. and Ali finished their own discussion. “Is that all you need me to do, then?” she asked.

“Not exactly,” Ali said. “What’s Stu’s favorite Subway sandwich?”

“The club,” Cami answered without hesitation. “With mayo, lettuce, tomato, and Jack cheese. Why?”

“Go get two of them,” Ali said, “one for him and one for me. It turns out he and I about to take a little trip, and we’ll need some sustenance along the way.”

“What kind of trip?” Cami asked.

“Never mind. We’ll tell you when we get there.”

•   •   •

By the time B. pulled into High Noon’s lot, Ali had finished letting the YWCA know that she would be a no-show for that day at least and maybe longer. Cami arrived at the same time they did. She was just exiting her car with a pair of sandwich bags in hand, when the shadow of a landing helicopter passed over her head and then swooped down for a landing in the far corner of the lot.

Cami looked at it and then back at Ali and B. “Surely you don’t think Stu’s going to ride in that.”

“He’ll have to,” B. said. “This is an important client, and we need a quick turnaround.”

Cami shook her head. “Good luck with that,” she said, and stalked inside with B. and Ali right behind her.

“Hey,” the unsuspecting Stu said when he saw them. “Marliss Shackleford just updated her blog.”

“What’s new?”

“Come look.”

B. and Ali walked over to Stu’s bank of computers and read over his shoulder.

At a hastily called press briefing this morning, Chief Deputy Tom Hadlock, media spokesman for the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office, has just confirmed what I had reported earlier. The fatality truck accident that occurred earlier today on Highway 92 east of Palominas is now being investigated as a homicide.

According to Chief Deputy Hadlock, the vehicle, carrying a load of possibly stolen goods, was attacked with a barrage of automatic gunfire just west of the San Pedro bridge. The driver of the vehicle, still unidentified, was found dead at the scene. An autopsy is scheduled later this morning with the Cochise County Medical Examiner.

Chief Deputy Hadlock is urging anyone who might have been traveling on Highway 92 between the hours of midnight and three A.M. to contact the sheriff’s office, especially if they happened to spot anything out of the ordinary.

In the briefing, Chief Deputy Hadlock said the truck was carrying “contraband” of some kind and declined to discuss the nature of said goods. But that’s just him. He may still be playing the old “refuse to confirm nor deny” game, but I’m convinced that the stolen goods in question are LEGO sets.

Stay tuned and keep in mind that you heard it here first.

“I suspect Ms. Shackleford here most likely isn’t one of the local sheriff’s favorite people,” Ali observed when she finished reading the blog post. “There’s some obvious animosity here, and someone who publishes unsubstantiated rumors is liable to be blackballed from the room.”

“Which means you should probably have a little chat with Ms. Shackleford when you’re down there,” B. said. “After all, I’m not the kind of person who turns up my nose at unsubstantiated rumors.”

“You’re going there?” Stu asked. “To Bisbee?”

“No,” B. said. “You are—you and Ali. There’s likely to be a tech component to all this. If so, I’m hoping you can glean as much information from that as possible.”

“But I already told you,” Stu said. “It’s more than a five-hour drive from here.”

“We won’t be driving,” Ali said. “B. called Heli-Pros. Our aircraft is already out in the parking lot, ready to go.”

“A chartered helicopter?” Stu said, sounding alarmed. “You expect me to get on a helicopter? I don’t do helicopters. I weigh too much, and I know too much about gravity.”

“Stu, we need you to do this,” B. reasoned. “LEGO is an important client, and we need to do whatever’s necessary to learn what we can about what’s happened.”

“Not if it means I have to ride in a helicopter,” Stu said determinedly, shaking his head. “I won’t go.”

“Please,” Ali begged. “We need you on the ground to sort things out.”

“Send Cami,” Stu said. “She can do everything I can do . . . well, almost everything. And if something turns up that stumps her, as long as she has my tool kit and a video camera, I can walk her through whatever needs to be done”

Stu reached under his desk and pulled out a worn leather bag that TV’s Marcus Welby, MD, might have dragged along with him on house calls back in the sixties.

“Trust me,” he said, handing the bag over to Cami. “Most everything you need is in there, except for the RFID reader itself. My cloner’s in there, too, by the way.”

“Really?” Cami said, brightening. “You’re going to turn me loose with your cloner?”

Ali knew the cloner to be a piece of specialized cell phone duplicating equipment that Stu had never before allowed out of his personal possession.

“I’m pretty sure you’re trustworthy,” Stu said. “In fact, I’m sure of it.”

After Stu’s ringing endorsement of Cami’s capabilities, Ali realized that both she and B. had been overruled and outmaneuvered.

“So much for not being able to give a haircut over the phone,” she said with a grin in B.’s direction. “I guess they’re possible these days after all. All right, Cami,” she added, turning to the young woman. “I guess that other club sandwich belongs to you. Wheels up in five.”

•   •   •

Right around five thirty, with the horizon slowly brightening in the east, Dave Hollicker sought out Joanna and shook an evidence bag in front of her face. “Hey, boss,” he said gleefully, “we’ve got some.”

“Some what?” Joanna echoed. “Bullets, I hope.”

“Yup. Five so far, and we’ll probably find more.”

“What kind of bullets?”

“They’re 7.62 NATO rounds,” Dave answered. “That means we’re most likely looking for an AK-47.”

“That news doesn’t exactly make me feel warm and fuzzy,” Joanna told him.

“Me neither.”

“Anything else?”

“A broken Garmin GPS, a cell phone that’s smashed to pieces and dead as a doornail, a crack pipe, a wallet with fifteen hundred dollars in it in cash. There’s also a California driver’s license belonging to one Fredrico Arturo Gomez with an address in Bakersfield, California.”

“So we have a pretty good idea of who our victim is, then?” Joanna asked.

“No such luck,” Dave replied. “When I ran the license, it turned out to be phony and so was the address.”

“So either he’s an illegal, a crook, or both?”

“That’s about the size of it. Once the ME collects his prints, we may get a hit on one of those. With the crack pipe in play, most likely this isn’t his first rodeo, and his prints will be in the system.”

The radio on the shoulder of Joanna’s uniform squawked awake. “Sheriff Brady,” Armando Ruiz barked in her ear. “The SCRs are here asking what you want them to do.”

Joanna’s watch said six A.M. sharp as she started back up the steep embankment. George Winfield and his band of eight eager-beaver reservists stood at the ready. Gathered around a nine-passenger minivan, they were busy examining the metal detectors they had just been issued.

“We’re ready to go to work,” George told her. “What do you want us to do?”

“This is a shooting that was not random. We’re operating on the assumption that the victim was deliberately targeted. We’re looking for shell casings, folks, a whole bunch of shell casings. We’ve had vehicles driving back and forth all morning, and no one has spotted anything on the pavement. That suggests that the shooter was off the roadway somewhere, maybe hiding in the brush, and waiting for our victim to pass by. I want you to start from where the truck went through the guardrail and then, using the metal detectors, work your way back, searching both sides of the highway both visually and with the detectors.

“I’m asking for a systematic, inch-by-inch scan from the edge of the pavement out to the fence line and back again. If you find casings, do not touch them or move them. Call George immediately so he can notify one of my CSIs to come take charge of the evidence. And if you see any recent shoe prints or tire prints near the casings—or anywhere else, for that matter—please avoid obliterating them if at all possible.”

As the SCRs set off to do her bidding, Joanna stood between the torn pieces of guardrail and stared down at the scene, convinced that she’d made the right call. With the number of holes in the truck—in both the cab and the bed—there had to be dozens of casings out there somewhere. The fact that Agent Cannon had been on the scene summoning assistance such a short time after the crash meant the shooter wouldn’t have had time to hang around collecting his brass. Information gleaned from that might well lead back to both the weapon in question as well as the shooter.

Even without additional evidence, it was clear to Joanna that this had to have been an ambush with the shooter lying in wait until the truck reached a certain point in the road. Had the shooter merely intended to disable the truck and lift the cargo, the shots would have been aimed at the engine block or the tires. The shots into the truck’s cab had all been kill shots, so who was the target here? Just the driver, or was it someone behind the driver—maybe whoever might well have forked over $1,500 to have the load transported? Either way, the first order of business was establishing the driver’s identity.

Ten minutes after the SCRs were deployed, George called her. “Okay,” he said. “We found your casings—a whole flock of ’em—inside a mesquite grove on the left side of the road just west of the parking lot for the Saddle Up Steakhouse. Couldn’t see any tire tracks at all. The restaurant’s parking lot is paved, so the shooter may have parked on that and walked from there. With all the grass on the shoulder of the road, I doubt you’ll find footprints.”

“Probably not,” Joanna agreed.

“But as close as this is to Hereford,” George continued, “I’m surprised no one heard anything.”

“Tell your guys I said ‘Thanks and good work,’ ” Joanna told him. “Make that ‘great work.’ I’ll send the CSI team down to bag and tag the casings. I’ll also get someone on the horn to the owners of the steakhouse to see if they have any security cameras.”

“Wait a minute,” George said. “Are you telling me I dragged everybody out of bed for something that only lasted ten minutes and now I’m supposed to say, ‘Go home and go back to bed’?”

Joanna thought about that for a second. “No,” she said finally. “Don’t do that. Once the CSI’s finish processing the scene down on the river, we’ll need someone to go around collecting LEGO sets—hundreds of them—and load them onto another truck.”

“How much time before they’ll be ready for us?” George asked. “Enough for us to head back to the café in Palominas for some breakfast?”

“That should work out fine,” Joanna assured him.

By seven thirty the SCRs, now sporting latex gloves, were down in the riverbed gathering scattered LEGO sets and packing them one by one into the U-Haul truck that Deputy Stock had parked on the bank nearest the highway. Joanna felt guilty watching people she regarded as “old codgers” hoofing it through the sand, but the truth was she needed the help and they seemed to be having a ball. Besides, if she’d called in her deputies to do the job, there would have been no one left out on patrol.

As the boxes were gathered and loaded, it soon became apparent that a second U-Haul would not be required. The same could not be said of the totaled box truck. That one for sure required two flatbed tow trucks: one for the cab and one for the body, which had literally split into two pieces. The tow truck guys were in the process of finishing loading the cab onto the second flatbed, when Joanna’s phone rang. Her secretary, Kristin Gregovich, was on the line.

“I know you’ve got your hands full out there today, Sheriff Brady,” Kristin said, “but I just had a call from Dr. Baldwin. Jaime’s already up at the morgue, waiting. Dr. Baldwin wants to know if you’re still coming or should she do the autopsy without you?”

Glancing at her watch, Joanna was astonished to discover that it was almost eight thirty. She had been at the crime scene for the better part of five hours, and she was now almost half an hour late for the autopsy.

“Tell Dr. Baldwin I’m sorry to have kept her waiting,” Joanna said, sprinting back up the embankment to where her Yukon was still parked. “I’m on my way right now. I’m probably another half hour out at most.”

•   •   •

The trip to the morgue wasn’t one that merited lights and sirens, but Joanna drove well over the posted limits to get there. When she arrived in the parking lot, Jaime was climbing out of his car to go back inside.

“What’s up,” she asked, hurrying to intercept him.

“Dr. Baldwin took the victim’s prints and I just finished running them,” he reported. “Turns out Mr. Fredrico Gomez is actually a small-time crook out of Santa Ana, California—one Alberto Ricardo ‘Taquito’ Mendoza.” He simulated quotation marks in the air with his index fingers when saying the word “Taquito.”

“His nickname is Taquito?” Joanna asked. “Really?”

“That’s what it says on his rap sheet.”

“What else does it say?”

“Small-time drug violations, mostly: possession with intent to sell, everything from crack to meth. He’s been out on probation for three months. I’m sure this little out-of-state venture would have sent him straight back to the slammer. Now that he’s dead, that’s a moot point.”

Jaime was already properly dressed for the occasion. All he needed to do was slip a new pair of paper booties on over his shoes. It took a moment longer for Joanna to dress herself in the paper gown and booties that constituted proper autopsy-viewing attire. When she finally entered the room, Dr. Baldwin stood over the naked body with a scalpel in hand and a frown on her face.

“It’s about time,” she said.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Joanna murmured in return. “It was crazy out there.”

The pallid body had been stripped of its clothing and washed. There were at least four entrance wounds visible, but those weren’t easy to see among hundreds of jagged lacerations that covered the entire left side of the body. A broken piece of the truck’s steering wheel still protruded from the chest wall. The part of the body that should have been a face was totally unrecognizable.

“He went through the windshield,” the ME explained as Joanna took her place at the table.

“How?” Joanna asked. “I saw deployed airbags.”

“They deployed, all right, but by the time the truck slammed into the tree, they had already deflated. Some of the lacerations and the broken steering wheel are from that. Most of them, though, were caused by the bullets propelling shrapnel from the outside of the truck into the cab.”

Using the scalpel as a pointer, Dr. Baldwin indicated the various entry wounds, which Joanna had already noticed. “We have bullet wounds here, here, here, and here—four of them in all. These two are nothing more than flesh wounds and would not have been fatal. The other two bullets entered his chest cavity. Presumably those remain lodged inside, since there are no exit wounds. I’m assuming I’ll be able to retrieve them.”

Joanna kept trying to pay attention as Kendra droned on in an emotionless voice; she might have used it to discuss the weather.

“From the debris we found on the clothing, I suspect that at least one of the chest wound shots entered the cab through the driver’s-side window. The nonfatal wounds came in through the door itself. From here it looks as though either the bullets killed him or else the broken steering wheel. The only way we’ll be able to sort that out is to get on with it, so let’s get started.”

Joanna steeled herself for that first cut. Dr. Baldwin was still speaking as her scalpel sliced into the pale chest and she found that the ME’s voice, strangely muffled, had somehow drifted into the background. For a time she seemed to be speaking from very far away. Then suddenly her voice was much closer at hand and much sharper. “Hey. Are you all right? For God’s sake, Jaime, catch her!”

The next thing Joanna knew, Jaime had grabbed her under the arms. Holding her upright, he manhandled her across the room and held her up in front of a large stainless steel sink in time for her to be very sick. Embarrassed beyond bearing, she shrugged her way out of Jaime’s grasp, cleaned off her face, and dried it with a paper towel.

“Hey,” Kendra Baldwin said when Joanna gathered herself and turned back toward the examining table. “I thought you were an old hand at this.”

In truth Joanna really was an old hand. She’d been through countless autopsies through the years and never once with this kind of humiliating result.

“Sorry,” she said. “It must have been something I ate.”

“No harm, no foul,” the Dr. Baldwin said lightly. “It happens to the best of us, but you still look a little green. If you want to take a rain check . . .”

“No,” Joanna said firmly. “I’ll be fine.”

And she was. It took a lot of grit, but she managed to hang in there through the remainder of the procedure. When the autopsy finally ended with Dr. Baldwin’s declaration of “death by homicidal violence,” Joanna didn’t hang around for any chitchat. Once out in the mercifully fresh air, she waited for Detective Carbajal to emerge as well. The nausea that had plagued her earlier had passed. Having long since missed breakfast, she was starving.

“It’s almost eleven,” she said, glancing at her watch. “Want to go grab a bite?”

Jaime shook his head. “Delcia packed me a lunch,” he said. “Besides, I need to get back to the department and give Deb a hand with the paperwork.” Jaime started to walk away, then he stopped and turned back to her. “What happened inside there, boss, is between us,” he told her. “It’s nobody else’s business.”

Both embarrassed and gratified, Joanna took a moment before answering. “Thank you,” she said. “Thanks a lot.”

Still humiliated and nursing a headache, Joanna headed for Daisy’s Café in Bisbee. The restaurant’s new owner, Liza Machett, greeted her at the door. “It’s eleven,” she said, “so you can have your choice: breakfast or lunch.”

Liza had turned up in Bisbee months earlier. She had come to town on the run from a band of murderous thugs who were on the trail of her long-estranged brother. Unfortunately, her brother—the ME who had made Joanna’s life miserable—had already fallen victim to the same bad guys. As Guy Machett’s half sister and as his only surviving heir, she inherited both his house on the Vista and a fair amount of cash—enough to purchase the café when the previous owners decided to retire. Much to the relief of most of the townsfolk, once Liza took over, she made precious few changes to the menu, although she did occasionally offer a breakfast special of apple-filled Dutch pancakes.

“Breakfast,” Joanna answered. “Eggs over easy, crisp bacon, whole wheat toast, refried beans instead of hash browns. And some coffee,” she added, remembering the still-full cup of coffee sitting cold and almost untouched in her parked Yukon. “I’ve had a very long morning.”

The coffee arrived first, of course. Joanna’s very first taste of it was enough to make her want to race for the nearest restroom. She pushed the cup away and then sat there staring at it, because she remembered all too well the other two times in her life when she hadn’t been able to tolerate coffee.

•   •   •

Once the helicopter landed in Sierra Vista, naturally there was a hang-up with the rental car. The delay in getting the car meant that Ali and Cami were also late in arriving at the crime scene. By the time they reached the bridge over the San Pedro, only a strip of yellow crime scene tape stretching between two crumpled segments of guardrail served as evidence that anything out of the ordinary had occurred earlier in the day.

“What now?” Cami asked.

“I guess we head for the sheriff’s office.”

With Ali at the wheel, Cami keyed the address of the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office into the GPS. Cami Lee was California born and bred. When she hired on with High Noon, she had driven over on I-40, dropped down I-17 to Sedona and Cottonwood, and stayed there. This was her first venture out into the wilds of southern Arizona.

“I don’t think I ever realized Arizona was this big,” she said.

“You need to spend some time touring around and learning about your new home,” Ali told her. “There’s a lot to see.”

They drove into Bisbee by what seemed like a back way. The Justice Center was located on a tract of land that was well outside the town itself. They pulled into the parking lot right at eleven. Inside, Cami lingered in the background, clutching Stu’s tool kit, while Ali approached the counter in the lobby, business card in hand.

“My name is Ali Reynolds. I’m an investigator with a firm called High Noon Security. Ms. Lee here is my associate. We’d like to see Sheriff Brady,” she said.

“Is this about the next press briefing?” the clerk asked. “That’s scheduled for noon.”

“It has nothing to do with the press briefing,” Ali said. “We’re here about that truckload of LEGO sets that came to grief in the San Pedro riverbed early this morning.”

That statement was enough to provoke a raised eyebrow from the young woman behind the counter. “One moment,” she said.

Except it wasn’t just one moment. For the next ten minutes, Ali and Cami cooled their heels in the lobby. One whole wall was devoted to a glass display case featuring photos of previous sheriffs of Cochise. The ones dating from the late 1800s and the early 1900s were all dour-faced men with handlebar mustaches, some photographed on horseback. The more recent sheriffs, mostly without facial hair, looked like standard chiefs of police, businesslike and serious. The newest one featured a young girl in a Brownie uniform, grinning from ear to ear and dragging a wagonload of Girl Scout cookies.

Ali realized that the photo’s stark contrast from the others carried an important message. Joanna Brady was the first and only female sheriff in this part of the world. In that case, Ali figured that was either very good or very bad. Trailblazers were generally one of two types. Confident women were comfortable in their own skins and able to work with others with little difficulty. Ones lacking that confidence were generally a pain in the butt. Since this sheriff had gone against the grain enough to post this particular photo, Ali dared hope Sheriff Joanna Brady was one of the former.

Soon an inner door opened and another young woman walked into the room. “I’m Kristin Gregovich, Sheriff Brady’s secretary,” she said. “The sheriff is out of the office at the moment, but she should be back in a few minutes. Would you care to wait inside?”

Kristin led them through a locked security door, down a long hallway, and into a secondary lobby that was much smaller than the first.

“Can I get you some coffee?”

When Ali and Cami both nodded, Kristin went to fetch it. Returning with the coffee, Kristin took a seat at the desk and busied herself on the computer while another ten minutes dragged by. Ali was almost ready to give up when the door behind Kristin’s desk opened and a uniformed thirty-something young woman marched into the room. She had bright red hair, a sheriff’s badge pinned to her chest, and ten or so pounds of armament and equipment belted to her hip. Since the woman hadn’t come in through the lobby entrance, she’d either been in the office the whole time or else had come in the back way.

“I’m Sheriff Brady,” she announced. “You wanted to see me?”

Ali and Cami both stood up. Ali, at five ten, felt as though she had wandered into the land of the Lilliputians. The sheriff couldn’t have been more than five four or so, but she towered over the diminutive Cami.

“It’s about what happened this morning,” Ali said. “The truck wreck on Highway 92.”

Sheriff Brady crossed her arms. “What about it?”

In answer, Ali produced a copy of a letter that B. had faxed to her in care of the fixed-base operator at the Sierra Vista Municipal Airport. It was a copy of a handwritten document on what appeared to be corporate stationery. She waited quietly while Sheriff Brady read it through.

To whom it may concern:

This letter will serve to introduce Alison Reynolds and Camille Lee, two investigators for a security firm called High Noon Enterprises. They are assisting us with an investigation into missing merchandise that disappeared from a shipment that arrived in the U.S. via Long Beach late last week, some of which may have been on board a truck that crashed in your jurisdiction earlier today.

When she finished reading, Sheriff Brady handed the paper back to Ali.“You expect me to believe that this guy is top dog in the world of LEGO?” she asked.

“You’re welcome to Google him,” Ali replied.

“The press briefing we had earlier made no mention of LEGO, and the next one isn’t due to start for twenty minutes. Do you mind telling me how someone in Denmark already knows there were LEGO sets in our wrecked truck?”

“We read about it online,” Ali answered “in an article posted by someone from right here in Bisbee. What was her name again?”

“Marliss,” Cami replied instantly. “Marliss Shackleford.”

Sheriff Brady shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Spare me,” she said. “That woman’s going to be the death of me, but I guess you need to come on in.”

They followed the sheriff past the secretary’s desk and into what turned out to be a private office. Behind a desk piled high with an untidy collection of paperwork was a wall of windows that looked out at a line of forbidding gray hills topped with limestone cliffs. Between the back parking lot and the mountains was an expanse of wilderness dotted with ocotillo, prickly pear, bear grass, and yucca. It had rained recently enough that the spindly branches of the ocotillo were covered with bright green leaves.

Sheriff Brady motioned them into guest chairs and then sat down on the far side of the desk. “I’m not sure why you’re here,” she said. “You’re both welcome to attend the press briefing, but I’m sure you understand that I can’t and won’t comment on an ongoing investigation.”

“We’re not interested in the briefing,” Ali said at once. “Would it be possible for us to examine one of the LEGO sets?”

“Please.” Joanna shook her head. “Those sets are part of the evidence in what appears to be a sophisticated criminal enterprise. You can’t expect—”

Ali interrupted her: “How many LEGO sets were inside that wrecked truck?”

“Five thousand two hundred and seventy,” Sheriff Brady answered at once. The SCRs had given her a complete inventory.

Cami pulled out an iPad, keyed in some numbers, and then consulted whatever showed on her screen. “According to the shipping manifest, there were four pallets coming from Monterrey, Mexico, containing that number of individual sets,” she said quietly.

The sheriff shot Cami a questioning glance. “You know how many sets were on each pallet?”

“Yes,” Ali said. “If you would allow us to examine one of the boxes with our RFID chip reader, we’ll be able to tell you where and when the box was manufactured and where it was going.”

For a moment, the sheriff said nothing. Then, making up her mind, she rose to her feet. “All right,” she said. “This way.”

Sheriff Brady led the way back down the hall and past the door through which they had entered, a series of interview rooms, and a break room before using a keypad to unlock the security door on what turned out to be what appeared to be a well-equipped laboratory. Two people, a young man and a young woman, were working there. They looked up questioningly as Joanna led Ali and Cami inside.

“These ladies, Ms. Reynolds and Ms. Lee, are doing some investigation into the LEGO connection to what happened out along the San Pedro this morning,” Sheriff Brady explained. To Ali and Cami she said, “This is my CSI team, Casey Ledford and Dave Hollicker.”

Casey and Dave stepped forward to shake hands.

“They process whatever evidence that doesn’t require being forwarded to the state patrol crime lab in Tucson,” Sheriff Brady continued. “Casey’s specialty is latent fingerprints, but we’re a small department and they both have to be jacks-of-all-trades.”

“You’re looking into the LEGO connection?” Casey asked. “Over on my table I’ve got three dozen shell casings and a slew of bullets from what was probably an AK-47. I always thought LEGO sets were just toys. Since when are they worth going to war with automatic weapons?”

“These sets are manufactured in what amounts to limited editions,” Ali explained. “When one set sells out in regular retail channels, there’s a backstreet demand that can cause the prices of those unavailable sets to escalate into the stratosphere. Serious collectors are willing to pay the going rate, whatever that might be. Diverting part of a major shipment away from retailers this early in the sales cycle will create a shortage of that particular item from the get-go. My company, High Noon Enterprises, is charged with tracking down whoever is behind the diversion of these goods.”

“And our job is tracking down a killer,” Joanna countered. “That’s a higher priority than chasing after stolen goods.”

“Have you identified your victim?” Ali asked, hoping that her and Cami’s inside knowledge of the LEGO situation might make Joanna a little more amenable to sharing information.

Joanna considered for a moment before she nodded and replied, “His name is Alberto Ricardo Mendoza, sometimes called Taquito. His prints were in the system. He has a rap sheet with mostly drug violations but no violent crimes. We’ve reached out to the California state prison system for next-of-kin information and were told his mother lives in Mazatlán. He was carrying a fake driver’s license at the time of the wreck. As for the truck he was driving, it’s an off-brand rental from Anaheim, rented in the name of Gomez, paid for in cash.”

“Cash?” Ali asked. “Who in their right mind would rent a truck to someone for cash?”

Joanna sighed. “Someone who didn’t want to know who was using the truck or what it was hauling.”

“Knowing where the shipment originated would help us,” Cami interjected quietly, speaking for the first time. “And it might help you as well. It could give you a point of origin for the truck. If we could just check one of the boxes with the RFID reader . . .”

“Where are they?” Joanna asked, looking in Dave’s direction.

He shrugged. “There wasn’t enough room to bring all the boxes in here. We asked the jail commander if we could commandeer one of his cells. He’s got nobody in solitary at the moment, so he was glad to oblige.”

“All right, then,” Joanna said. “How about if you take Ms. Lee over to the jail and let her do whatever it is she needs to do. With gloves, however,” she cautioned. “We’re still looking for fingerprints wherever possible.”

“And that includes looking for prints on my shell casings,” Casey added. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to them. I’ve got an ATF agent due to arrive here any minute. I want to finish dusting for prints before he shows up to take charge.”

Dave led Cami out of the room, and Casey returned to her examining table, leaving Joanna and Ali on their own.

“I noticed your certificate from APA in your office,” Ali said. “Tough course.”

She had deliberately used cop jargon in her reference to the Arizona Police Academy, and she was rewarded by a visible double take from Sheriff Brady. “You’ve heard about it?”

“Been there,” Ali explained. “I used to be a television newscaster, but the shelf life of female news anchors is amazingly short. When mine ran out, I thought for a time I’d end up in law enforcement. Sheriff Gordon up in Yavapai County sent me to the police academy in Peoria. I made it through all right, even at what some of my classmates regarded as my ‘very advanced age.’ Then the economy took a nosedive, and the offer to work for Yavapai County went away. Besides,” she added with a shrug, “I’m better off doing what I do now.”

“Which is?”

“Doing PR and the occasional bit of investigative work for my husband’s firm.”

Joanna nodded thoughtfully. “Yavapai County. I actually know Sheriff Gordon,” she added with a small grin. “I’ve played poker with him on occasion—and cleaned his clock, too.”

With that small exchange, the whole tenor of the visit seemed to change. By the time Cami and Dave returned from their visit to the jail, Ali and Joanna were standing side by side at a lab table laden with some of the bagged and tagged evidence that had been collected from the crime scene earlier in the morning while Joanna explained that most of it would be picked up later in the afternoon and driven to the crime lab in Tucson for further examination.

Ali glanced up and caught Cami’s eye as she and Dave entered. “Find anything?”

“The boxes are definitely from the most recent Monterrey shipment,” Cami answered. “If we could have the license information and description of that truck, I could ask Stu to start checking on traffic cameras going backwards from here. If the trip here originated in California, the driver would have had to pass through at least one Border Patrol checkpoint and more likely multiple ones, to say nothing of state-run truck inspection stations. That should give us a trail of bread crumbs to follow.”

“Wait,” Ali said, focusing suddenly on that one word: “bread crumbs.”

“What about this?” she asked, pointing at an evidence bag containing the mangled remains of what had once been a dashboard-mounted GPS. “Don’t these leave bread crumbs, too, so you can find your way back the way you came?”

“A lot of them do,” Cami agreed. “If I could take a look at this one, I might be able to find out.”

“It’s broken,” Joanna said. “What good will looking at it do for us?”

“The screen may be broken, but most likely the chip inside is just fine,” Cami pointed out. “May I?”

Joanna shrugged. “I don’t suppose it would hurt,” she said without enthusiasm. “Go ahead and help yourself, but again, wear gloves.”

Dave passed Cami a new pair of gloves from an open box on the next table over. Moments later she began carefully removing broken pieces of the device from the bag and laying them out in an orderly fashion on the lab table. The studied concentration with which she arranged them somehow took Ali back to her high school biology class when they’d had to dissect a frog.

“It’s an ordinary Garmin and the bread crumbs should be there,” Cami remarked as she worked. “Fortunately, I’ve already got a plug-in app for that.” She paused long enough to take a photo of the model number on the back of the GPS. A moment later, Ali heard the sound of a departing e-mail. “I sent it to Stu,” Cami explained. “With the serial and model number, he’ll be able to start tracking the point of purchase.”

With that, Cami turned her attention back to the broken machine. “That’s what I needed,” she said, “a micro-USB port. If I can turn thing on, I should be able to download the history.”

•   •   •

To Joanna’s way of thinking, Cami Lee looked more like a seventh grader than a college graduate. The very idea of having the young woman messing with evidence from one of her homicides made Joanna squirm in her chair.

Why on earth did I let these women into my lab? she asked herself. What the hell was I thinking? I should have tossed them out on their ear when I had the chance.

The problem was she hadn’t done so. Now, having given her tacit permission for them to be there, she couldn’t very well pull the plug. It was too late to go down that road. On the other hand, Joanna knew that there were always built-in delays in sending evidence to the crime lab in Tucson, where cases from smaller jurisdictions always took a backseat to whatever was going on in Pima or Maricopa Counties. If by some miracle Cami was able to extract some usable information from that broken GPS this very afternoon . . .

After having been momentarily lost in thought, Joanna returned to the conversation and to Cami’s running commentary. For a split second Joanna was back in Dr. Baldwin’s morgue and hearing her narration of the driver’s autopsy. The very thought of it made Joanna’s stomach clench. Joanna definitely didn’t want to go there. Absolutely not.

Refocusing on Cami’s progress, Joanna noticed that the power cord to the GPS had been sliced in half. It lay on the table before Cami in two pieces. “If the power cord is wrecked, how are you going to hook it up?” she asked.

“No problem,” Cami said confidently. “All it takes is the mini-USB connection, and I’m pretty sure Stu has one of those in his tool kit.”

She opened a battered black leather case and pulled out a fistful of power cords held together by plastic tie-wraps. She plugged one end of the cord into an opening on the broken frame of the GPS and plugged the other end into the port on her iPad. “Here goes,” she said, punching what was left of the on/off switch. “Let’s see if there’s any life in this old contraption.”

A moment later, the screen on her iPad lit up. “Bingo,” she said triumphantly, turning the iPad so both Joanna and Ali both could see the screen.

“It looks just like a GPS,” Joanna said in amazement.

“That’s because it is a GPS,” Cami assured her. “This GPS,” she added, pointing to the damaged remains of the device that were now connected to hers. “Now, if you’ll give me a minute, I’ll download everything here into a micro-SD card and we’ll be good to go.”

It was clear to Joanna that at this point Cami was simply having fun. What followed was a long, silent pause while the download process took place. Once the download was complete, even more time passed before the newly reconstituted GPS was able to get its bearings. Finally it did.

“Okay,” Cami said. “What do you want to know? How about if we take a look at Recently Found?”

Joanna waited, holding her breath, while the GPS hourglass tipped back and forth. “Yay,” Cami said finally. “There it is. Starting location is an address in Long Beach which . . . Give me a minute,” she added, switching over to another program, “. . . just happens to be a shipping terminal at the Port of Long Beach. And now let’s hear it for that checkered flag. Does any of this look familiar?”

She passed the iPad over to Joanna. It took a moment for Joanna to realize what she was seeing. Squeezing her fingers together on the screen, the focus on the map narrowed, revealing far greater detail.

“That’s Holzmann Road,” she said at last. “It leads to Helmer Holzmann’s place, a ranch located at the base of the Mule Mountains. Helmer’s wife, Greta, died a few years back. The old man lives out there all by himself. Why on earth would someone be taking a load of LEGO sets there?”

Then, only a moment later, Joanna answered her own question. “Oh, no.” she said. I had forgotten all about them, but I wonder if they’re connected.”

“If what is connected?” Ali asked.

“The shipping containers.”

“What shipping containers?”

“As sheriff, I’m required to attend the board of supervisors meetings. A few months ago, Helmer appeared before the board on his son’s behalf, asking for a variance so his son could build a retirement home out of a collection of shipping containers. The containers had evidently already been hauled onto his property, but the board wouldn’t give him the variance. What if those shipping containers have nothing to do with building a house? What if they’re being used to store stolen LEGO sets?”

“You said Mr. Holzmann’s son wanted to build a retirement home on the ranch. Do you have any idea what he’d be retiring from?”

“I’m pretty sure he works for U.S. Customs,” Joanna said. “Somewhere in California.”

“That may be our connection, then,” Ali said. “If you’re running a smuggling operation, what could be handier than having an inside guy? His last name is Holzmann?”

Joanna nodded.

“What’s his first name?”

“He’s quite a bit older than I am. We weren’t in school together, but Ernie might know,” Joanna said, picking up the phone.

“Who’s Ernie?”

“One of my detectives.” She waited a moment until someone must have picked up. “Hey, Ernie. What’s Helmer Holzmann’s son’s name?” She paused. “Thanks,” she added a moment later. “I should have remembered that.”

She turned back to Ali. “His first name is Hans. Why?”

Ali was already on her phone, with Stu’s line ringing in the background.

“Wait,” Joanna objected. “Who are you calling? I didn’t give you permission to share details about this case with just anybody.”

Ali held up her hand. “Stu Ramey isn’t just anybody,” she said. “He’s High Noon’s information guru. Let me give him a first and last name and see what he can come up with.”

“What kind of information guru?” Joanna asked.

But Ali was already back on the line. “Yes, first name is Hans. Last name is spelled H-O-L-Z-M-A-N-N. He may work for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”

There was another long pause when the only sound in the room was the ticking of the clock. While they waited, Joanna went back to fuming in silence.

“I’m sure that’s the one,” Ali said at last, turning to Joanna with a smile lighting up her face. “Hans Dieter Holzmann—that is the son’s full name, isn’t it?”

“I’m sure it is, but how did you do that?” Joanna wanted to know.

“Our resident magician just accessed the U.S. Customs employee database. Turns out, there’s only one employee named Holzmann on their list: Hans Dieter Holzmann. And guess where he works? The cargo ship terminal in Long Beach where that LEGO shipment just happened to come ashore late last week.”

Ali returned to the phone. “Yes, Stu. Do some data mining and send us everything you can find on Mr. Holzmann, including whether or not he’s at work today. If he’s involved in this operation and has somehow learned that his shipment has gone horribly awry, he may be trying to do some troubleshooting from his end.”

“Before you hang up,” Cami said, “may I talk to Stu for a minute?”

“Sure,” Ali said, giving her the phone.

“Stu, I just sent you the coordinates of where the truck was going: the intersection of Holzmann Road and U.S. Highway 92. The ranch belongs to Hans Holzmann’s father. Now might be a good time to check out our new time-share access to satellite imagery.”

Ali silently nodded her agreement. Months earlier, during a serious crisis when High Noon had needed real-time satellite imagery, Stu had managed to come up with a work-around. They had since joined a private consortium that gave them access on an as-needed basis. The initial sign-up fee had been jaw-droppingly expensive. After that, however, the charges were on a pay-as-you-go basis with the attendant fees billed back to the client.

“That’s right,” Cami said into the phone. “If you can, take a look at everything that’s there: house, outbuildings, whatever. We’ve also just learned there may be several metal shipping containers on the property. Try taking a look at those as well.”

“Wait a minute,” Joanna said. “You think your magician guy, wherever he is, will actually be able to see the containers?”

“You’d be surprised what he can see,” Cami said, pointing to another evidence bag. “Do you mind if I take a look at that phone?”

Kristin popped her head in the door. “It’s time for the press briefing, Sheriff Brady. Tom Hadlock would like to have you on hand for that.”

Sighing, Joanna looked first at Cami, then at the phone, and finally at Dave Hollicker. “If we end up needing that phone in court, it’s your job to maintain the chain of evidence.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Dave said. “Will do.”

•   •   •

As Sheriff Brady left the lab, Ali’s phone rang with B.’s caller ID showing on the screen.

“Stu just told me about the situation on the ranch,” B. told her. “I’ve got a call in to corporate right now. Using satellite imagery will cost a ton of money, but if we can break this operation wide open, I’m betting they’ll cough up the fee.”

“Good,” Ali said. “What if what we’re dealing with are the kind of unclipped ghost pallets you mentioned earlier? Supposing whoever’s in Monterrey loads unchipped pallets into one or more shipping containers. The inside guy who works for customs tags those for special attention, and during those ‘special inspections’ said pallets simply disappear. That might not be too difficult, since—as far as anybody but the crooks are concerned—they never existed in the first place.”

“Sounds feasible,” B. said before adding, “Oops, getting a call back. Bye.”

By the time Ali was off the phone, Cami was already returning the damaged cell phone to the evidence bag. “It’s a burner,” she said in answer to Ali’s unasked question. “I sent Stu the model info so he can start looking for point of purchase, but given the circumstances I’m not going to attempt to get inside it without better equipment and a search warrant.”

Ali nodded. “Right,” she said.

After all, High Noon’s responsibility was to their client. Sheriff Brady had a homicide to solve. In order for the information on the phone to be usable in court, it had to be legally obtained with a properly filed search warrant.

Cami’s iPad and Ali’s phone both began pinging with incoming messages as Stu’s data-mining efforts yielded results. Glancing through them, Ali saw Hans Holzmann’s home address for two separate residences, several phone numbers and e-mail addresses, as well as the license information on four different vehicles, one of which Ali recognized as a very pricey Mercedes, along with an equally pricey Range Rover.

Ali glanced at Cami. “U.S. Customs must be paying their employees very well these days.”

Cami nodded. “Look at these property tax records. There are two separate houses, one in Palm Desert and another in Rolling Hills, California. The taxes on either one of those are more than I make in a year. How big do you suppose the mortgages are?”

“More than Mr. Holzmann could handle with his government salary alone,” Ali suggested. “And if he already has a ‘retirement’ home in Palm Desert, why would he want to use shipping containers to construct another one on his father’s property here in Arizona?”

“Good question,” Cami said.

Stu’s information continued to pour in at breathtaking speed. Hans Holzmann had been arrested once for DUI in his early twenties. His transcripts from Cochise College and Arizona State University showed up, as did his discharge papers from the U.S. Army, in which he had served with honor during Desert Storm. He was married with two children, one of whom had graduated from college, and the other was currently enrolled as an honors student at UCLA.

“What we have here is a crook who is evidently a decent husband and father,” Ali observed. “Go figure.”

Sheriff Brady returned to the room. “What’s happening?” she asked.

“We’re getting a ton of information on Hans Holzmann, but so far nothing particularly useful.”

“And the phone?”

“Cami looked at it but didn’t try to get inside. You’ll need a warrant,” Ali answered.

“We’ll have one,” Joanna answered. “Did you hear anything back on the satellite—”

Sheriff Brady’s question was interrupted by the ringing of Ali’s phone. Ali listened for a moment. “Okay,” she said. “Send it to me and to Cami, but let me get Sheriff Brady’s e-mail address for you so she can have it, too.”

Joanna reeled off her e-mail address and then hurried over to the oversized computer monitor on Dave Hollicker’s desktop. By the time Ali’s e-mail account alerted her to a new message, Joanna had opened a mail screen on Dave’s computer. Moments later the same image appeared on the screens of all three devices: Ali’s phone, Cami’s iPad, and Dave’s desktop. At first only a grid pattern was visible, but gradually pieces of brownish desert landscape appeared in an out-of-focus haze before changing into something more understandable. Once the image finished resolving itself, the clarity was amazing. Ali saw a house with what appeared to be a tin roof. Nearby were two more structures. One looked like a barn with a corral out back. The other appeared to be a tin-roofed two-car garage.

“Stu says we need to scroll over north and east from the house,” Cami said, “closer to the base of the mountains.”

Joanna found the shipping containers first. “Holy crap!” she exclaimed. “Not only are the shipping containers there, look at those trucks!”

Working on a smaller screen, Ali took longer to locate that part of the image. When she did, she saw that the shipping containers—five of them in all—were lined up end to end along a dirt track. Parked perpendicularly to each container, about where the door opening should have been, was a bright yellow box truck very much like the one that had come to grief in the bed of the San Pedro River early that morning.

“How long ago was this taken?” Sheriff Brady demanded. Ali had to move away from the image in order to call B., pass along the sheriff’s question, and then relay the answer.

“This one was taken a little over an hour ago.”

As Ali delivered B.’s message, a little red-haired dynamo sprang into action. Joanna made for the door and dashed down the hall, barking orders into her shoulder-mounted radio as she went.

“Dispatch, I want all westbound traffic on Highway 92 stopped at Melody Lane and all eastbound traffic stopped at that new steakhouse in Palominas ASAP. Call out the tactical operations team. Any of members of the TAC team currently on the far side of the San Pedro should assemble in the parking lot at the restaurant, where Deputy Stock will be the incident commander. Everyone else should proceed to the intersection of Highway 92 and Melody Lane. Lights but no sirens. No telling how far sound travels over the desert, and we don’t want them to know that we’re coming. Once officers arrive at their designated locations, they’re to set up roadblocks and deploy as many spike strips as they have available. We need to shut these guys down.”

The conversation was briefly out of Ali’s earshot as Joanna ducked into her office. “Yes,” she was saying when Ali followed her inside. “If this is related to the earlier incident, we may be dealing with automatic weapons. We need to stop these guys, but we also need to be safe. That means that nobody is to show up at either roadblock without a Kevlar vest. We believe the suspects will be driving a convoy of yellow box trucks loaded with contraband.”

Inside the office, Joanna paused long enough to don her own vest.

“If the image is from an hour and a half ago, will we be in time?” Ali asked.

“ ‘We’?” Joanna repeated. “Did you hear what I just said? I want my TAC team, my emergency response guys out there. No civilians. Period!”

Cami appeared in the doorway to Joanna’s office, iPad in hand. “Excuse me, Sheriff Brady, but I think you’re going to need us. Mr. Simpson has asked the pilot of our chartered helicopter to do a single fly-over of the site and relay what he sees back to me, including—with any luck—some video footage. He’s on his way there now. As the crow flies, he’s probably less than ten minutes out.”

“He’s sending video footage to you?”

Cami nodded. “That’s the plan.”

Joanna looked first at Cami, then at Ali. Finally, with a sigh of defeat, she relented. “All right, then,” she agreed. “The two of you can ride along, but both of you are to stay in the car, well back from the roadblock. Understand?”

•   •   •

Ali wanted to object but didn’t. Instead, she climbed into the front passenger seat of Joanna’s Yukon without a word. For one thing, the sheriff was right. Ali had her trusty Glock along, right there in her small-of-back holster, but in a matchup against an AK-47 or something of a similar caliber, the handgun would have all the firepower of a slingshot. As for going into a firefight without wearing Kevlar vests? That would be downright stupid.

The Yukon left the back parking lot of the Justice Center leading a parade of five or six other vehicles, all of them traveling fast with lights flashing but no blaring sirens. Cami sat in the backseat staring at her iPad and seemingly willing something to show up on the screen. Ali watched warily as the Yukon’s speedometer headed for the stratosphere, making her wish Joanna would pay more attention to her driving and less to her radio.

“Is Deputy Stock on the scene in Palominas?”

“He’s about five minutes out,” the dispatcher said. Ali thought the dispatcher’s name was Larry, but she couldn’t be sure.

“Can you patch me through to him?”

“Hang on.”

Moments later a different voice came through the radio. “Deputy Stock here.”

“When you set up your roadblock, I want it to go from fence line to fence line,” she said. “Don’t deploy the spike strips until you’re sure all oncoming traffic has been stopped. Try to lay them out as far to the west of the roadblock as possible, out of sight of it if possible. It’ll be better if they hit the spikes before they see you.”

“You want strips laid out on the shoulders, too?”

“Absolutely, but only if you have enough,” Joanna answered. “Otherwise they might try driving around. We need these guys stuck on rims before they hit either of the roadblocks.”

By then Ali noticed they were speeding along beside what was evidently a huge mine tailings dump. Up ahead, Ali could see buildings on either side of the highway. Ali and Cami had come this route earlier on their way to the Justice Center. Knowing they were fast approaching the town itself as well as a complicated roundabout, Ali was more than ready for Sheriff Brady to lift her lead foot off the damned gas pedal . . . which she did, but only at the last moment. When they swung into the traffic circle, Joanna was still driving way faster than Ali would have liked, but she was relieved to see that uniformed municipal cops had cleared the way for them by shutting down all adjoining intersections.

“Pulling up at the scene now, Sheriff Brady,” Deputy Stock said. “Over and out.”

Larry’s voice immediately came back on the line. “Anything else?”

“Yes. Call Frank Montoya in Sierra Vista. Tell him what’s up and let him know we’re asking for mutual aid. I have way more people on the roadblock on the Bisbee side than I have on his side. Ask him if he can send backup.”

“Will do.”

Ali watched out the window as the town flew past, starting with a few residential neighborhoods on either side. Beyond that, the road was mostly empty desert. When they came to another area of businesses and housing, the houses seemed to be set back from the highway, while the various businesses were not. Ali knew that if the bad guys somehow made it past the roadblock, the people in those businesses—a taco stand, a gas station, a grocery store, an insurance agency—would all be at risk, customers and proprietors alike. She wanted to shout “Take cover!” out the window to warn them, but she didn’t. It wasn’t her place. Sheriff Brady was calling the shots here, not Ali Reynolds.

They came to what seemed to be the edge of town. Joanna slowed abruptly just short of a growing traffic jam. After pausing for a moment at the back of the line, Joanna veered off the pavement and onto the shoulder, dodging around the stopped vehicles and going to the front of the line, where four other cop cars were already parked across the roadway. With only one try, Joanna deftly pulled the Yukon into the single remaining open space, a spot so tight that her back bumper was almost on top of the front bumper of the car just behind hers, while her front bumper was nosed up against a barbed-wire fence.

“As I said,” she cautioned as she opened the door and started to climb out, “you’re both to stay here.”

Just then Cami’s phone rang.

“Okay, Stu,” Cami said when she answered. “Put him through when you can.”

Joanna climbed back inside, shut the door, and waited. An oversized heavy-duty Sprinter with the sheriff’s office logo on the door and the identifying letters TT painted on the side was parked in front, parallel to the four blocking cars.

TT, Ali told herself. Tactical Team.

An officer in full battle dress emerged from the Sprinter. As he hurried up to Joanna’s Yukon, she buzzed the window open.

“Is everybody here, Deputy Ruiz?” she asked.

“Not yet. We’re still short two, including Detective Carbajal,” he told her. “In the meantime, we’re collecting spike strips. You got any with you?”

She nodded. “In the back,” she said, clicking open the rear lift gate.

He reappeared a moment later holding an armload of strips. “Turns out Deputy Stock is short in the spike strip department,” Ruiz reported. “Once we deploy ours, we’ll need to see if there’s enough to reinforce his supply.”

“Which may leave your guys in the middle when all hell breaks loose,” Joanna objected.

“Yes,” he agreed, “but we’re in better shape to deal with that than you are. We’re armor plated. You’re not.”

“Yes, Chuck,” Cami’s voice said from the backseat. “I can hear you.”

“Wait, Deputy Ruiz,” Sheriff Brady said. “Let’s see if there’s an update.”

Cami delivered the pilot’s words in the rapid-fire fashion of a trained interpreter. “Just flew over. They seem to be forming up in a convoy. Four of the trucks are already in line.”

“Crap,” Joanna muttered, turning to Deputy Ruiz. “We don’t have much time, so don’t wait around for Jaime any longer. Whoever doesn’t show up doesn’t show up. Those trucks have three miles of dirt road to travel. Even if they leave right now, they won’t be going fast. You should be able to get your strips down and be past Holzmann Road with additional ones for Jeremy before they hit the highway. Go now. It’s going to be a squeaker.”

Ruiz was off in a flash. “Okay, Chuck,” Cami was saying. “Thanks so much.”

“Wait,” Ali said. “Don’t hang up. Ask him if he can do us a favor and come get us.”

“Come get us?” Joanna demanded. “Are you kidding?”

“If this is war and you’re the general,” Ali said, “wouldn’t we all be better off if you’re somewhere that will allow you to see all the action as you direct your troops?”

Joanna turned to Cami. “Ask the pilot if he can keep us out of range of automatic weapons fire.”

Cami asked the question and came back with another. “He wants to know what the bad guys are carrying?”

“At least one AK-47 and maybe more.”

There was another brief pause. “Chuck says that he flew over AK-47s in the Middle East, and unless they have grenade launchers handy, his bird will be just fine.”

“Then I guess we’re going airborne,” Joanna said. “Tell him to land on the highway just in front of the roadblock. Come on.” She clambered out of the driver’s seat.

Stunned by Joanna’s sudden change of heart, Ali started after her, just as her phone began to ring. Ali knew who was calling: B. If she answered and told him what was happening, she also knew exactly what he’d say, too: Don’t go. Instead of answering, she let the call go to voice mail. By the time Ali was on the ground, Joanna had opened the autolocking back door so Cami could step out of the Yukon.

“Wait,” Cami said, not moving. “Does this mean I’m coming, too?”

“Everybody’s coming,” Joanna said, “but only if you want to. Can you handle a weapon?”

“No,” Cami stammered.

“Doesn’t matter. You’re our dedicated com girl for the day, in charge of keeping us in touch with the mother ship. What about you, Ali?” Joanna asked. “Is that weapon in your small-of-back holster just for decoration, or do you know how to use it?”

“I can use it,” Ali said. “But I’d rather not need to.”

Joanna gave her an appraising look. “That makes two of us,” she said.

•   •   •

On the one hand, Joanna Brady knew she had no business involving civilians in what was bound to be a dangerous operation, but without Cami’s and Ali’s capable help they wouldn’t be here right now. The GPS evidence that had brought the Holzmann Road destination to Joanna’s attention would still be waiting to be transported to the crime lab in Tucson. By the time the lab got around to processing it, the trucks would be long gone.

In other words, she owed Ali and Cami big-time. They would be involved in the firefight without having signed one of those legalese CYA forms civilians always had to sign before doing a ride-along. The board of supervisors would be appalled. To make matters worse, Joanna was bringing a multimillion-dollar helicopter into the mix. If this went south, Joanna figured she’d probably be better off dead than caught up in the middle of a liability lawsuit hurricane.

“Come on, ladies,” she said with as much confidence as she could muster. “Time to saddle up.”

Walking around the Yukon, she had to climb up on the front bumper of the patrol car parked behind hers to reach into the cargo space. Her hand emerged holding not one but two Kevlar vests. She handed the smaller one to Cami and the larger to Ali.

“Put these on,” she told them. “They won’t fit exactly, but they’ll do.”

When Joanna had been pregnant with Dennis, her added girth required that she move up to a larger-size vest. After Denny was born, she went back to her original one, but she kept the other in reserve. Cami pulled it on. The petite young woman seemed to swim in the thing, but Joanna deemed it better than nothing.

As for the one she handed Ali, it had once belonged to Deputy Dan Sloan, her department’s only fallen officer in the course of Joanna’s seven years in office. Dan was wearing the vest the night he was gunned down, shot in the abdomen where there was no Kevlar protection. After Dan’s funeral, his widow brought the vest back to the sheriff’s office in the hope that someone else could use it. Joanna accepted it even though she had understood even then that, out of respect for Dan, none of her other officers would ever agree to wear it. Not only did Joanna accept the vest, she kept it, too, more as a reminder than out of any expectation that it would ever again be used. Once Ali slipped it on, Joanna was gratified to see she was tall enough for the vest to fit fairly well. And since Ali didn’t know the vest’s backstory, Joanna thought it better not to pass it along.

Another battle-dressed guy showed up just then. “Why’d the van leave without me?” he demanded. “I told them I was coming.”

“Good of you to join us, Detective Carbajal. The TAC team left without you because there wasn’t time to wait around any longer,” Joanna said. “I needed them to deliver spike strips to the other roadblock. That had to happen sooner than later, but as long as you’re here, you’re now in charge.”

“Where are you going to be?”

Jaime’s question was drowned out by the noisy clatter of an arriving helicopter. “In that, apparently,” she said with a nod toward the chopper, which was hovering for a landing.

“Sheriff Brady!” a woman’s shrill voice called over the noisy racket from the helicopter. “Sheriff Brady! They won’t let me through!”

Joanna glanced over her shoulder in time to see Marliss Shackleford twist away from the young deputy who was trying to restrain her and come striding forward.

“Can I have a few words?” Marliss asked. “Please?”

“Your first duty as incident commander,” Joanna hissed in Jaime Carbajal’s ear, “is to get that woman out of here.” Then she turned to face Marliss herself.

“Sorry,” Joanna told the determined reporter. “I’m afraid this isn’t a good time. Get out of here. Now!” Then she turned back to Cami. “What’s the pilot’s name again?”

“Chuck,” Cami answered. “His name is Chuck.”

It took some doing for the three women to climb on board. The steps were taller than either Cami or Joanna could manage on their own. Fortunately Jaime was right there to give them a needed boost.

“Earphones,” Chuck said as they settled in. Joanna inserted her radio’s earbud before putting on the aircraft’s padded earphones. Ali made no attempt at introductions until after they were all seated and strapped in with their earphones properly in place.

“I’m Chuck,” the pilot said with a half salute in Joanna’s direction. “At your service, Sheriff Brady. What can I do for you today?”

“Take us back to where you saw those trucks, and keep us out of range.”

“Will do,” he said agreeably. “As for staying out of range, I don’t want a hard landing any more than you do.”

They took off then. The aircraft wheeled into the air and set off toward the northwest. Joanna didn’t watch the altimeter. Her eyes remained focused on the horizon. A minute or so later she spotted what she was looking for: plumes of dust rising skyward.

She pointed. “That’s got to be our guys. Follow the highway but stay a long way above it. Once they hit that, we need to know which way they turn.”

Chuck took a position and held steady, hovering far above the spot where Holzmann Road intersected with the highway. The slow caravan came up to the intersection and stopped. Then, to Joanna’s dismay, they turned neither right nor left. Instead, they continued straight on, crossing the paved highway and continuing southward on a narrow dirt track that was far less traveled than the portion of the road north of the highway.

“Why are they going there?” Joanna demanded. “That part of road goes nowhere. The ranch at the end of it was abandoned years ago.”

Chuck turned the aircraft ninety degrees. From that vantage point it was easy to see that the road came to an end all right, stopping in front of some kind of metal structure large enough to be a pole barn.

Joanna went back on the air. “All units, continue to man the roadblocks on Highway 92. We still have the possibility of an active shooting situation here. TAC Team, suspects are continuing to travel south on Holzmann Road on the south side of Highway 92. Gather up some of those spike strips, come back here, and establish a third roadblock on Holzmann somewhere south of the highway. The suspects are either making a run for the border or they may be headed for a large structure of some kind that’s located a mile or so north of the border. And, Dispatch? Contact Leo Guzman, the local Border Patrol commander. Tell him we’ve located a possible smuggling operation here. See if he can have some of his agents respond, approaching the scene from the south. There’s no road there, but that’s why the Feds buy all those green and white SUVs.”

Below the aircraft, the moving caravan slowed to a crawl as the road went down into a steep gully. On the far side of that, the road was reduced to little more than a cow path.

“TAC Team, a mile and a half or so in from the highway, the road seems to be a lot worse. Yes, the van is four-wheel drive with good ground clearance, but I’m not sure it’ll negotiate both the gully and the sharp turn right after it. Set up north of the gully. We want that Sprinter ready to rock and roll if we need it.”

“Do you think they know we’re onto them?” Ali asked.

“If they’ve seen us up here, maybe,” Chuck replied. “But that road looks pretty challenging. I have a feeling they’re too busy driving to be watching the sky.”

As the moving trucks continued creeping southward, Larry Kendrick’s voice came through the radio. “Border Patrol has been notified. Officers are en route. TAC team is traveling south on Holzmann Road and will let us know once they’ve established their position.”

By now it was clear that the metal-roofed building itself was most likely the trucks’ intended destination. “Pull back up before they get there,” Joanna warned Chuck. “If they get out to open the door, they’ll hear us. On the off chance they don’t know we’re here, let’s try to keep it that way.”

Chuck immediately complied, taking the chopper a fair distance to the west, away from both the moving trucks and the barn, before hovering again. “This should put us out of earshot,” he said. “There’s a pair of binoculars stowed back there. They might be strong enough to give you a view of what’s happening on the ground.”

A moment later Ali tapped Joanna on the shoulder and passed the binoculars forward. It took a moment for Joanna to adjust them to the size of her face. After that, it took even longer for change the focus and eventually locate the barn. She found it just as the first truck reached the barn and rolled right inside without pausing and without needing someone to get out and open the door. The other trucks followed.

“Whatever that building is, it has an automatic door of some kind,” Joanna informed the others. “They’re all inside.”

The helicopter hung motionless in the air while Joanna continued to peer through the binoculars. Finally Chuck spoke. “Maintain position or . . .”

Joanna held up her hand. “Wait,” she said. “They’re coming back out.”

“The trucks?” Ali asked.

“No, some other vehicle—one vehicle only. TAC Team, heads up. Bad guys are coming your way. Are you in position?”

“Roger that,” Deputy Ruiz replied.

“There’s another bird in the air,” Chuck said, nodding toward the east, where a dot on the horizon gradually resolved itself into an approaching helicopter.

“That’ll be Border Patrol,” Joanna said.

On occasions like this, it was beyond frustrating that ongoing differences in radio frequencies made it impossible for Joanna to communicate with Border Patrol radios directly, but she was glad reinforcements were arriving on the scene. Even though she wouldn’t be down on the ground with her TAC team where she felt she should have been, she could, thanks to Ali Reynolds, be her guys’ eye in the sky.

“Let’s move in a little closer,” Joanna told Chuck. “Okay, TAC Team, the vehicle appears to be a black Hummer. Looks like it has one occupant. Repeat, one occupant only.”

“There were five trucks and five drivers,” Ali said. “What happened to the others?”

“I hate to think,” Joanna answered.

Deputy Ruiz was still talking spike strips. “Those strips of ours aren’t going to help much with a Hummer. The guy will hit the gas, go off road, and drive around them.”

“If that happens,” Joanna said, “then somebody had better figure out another way to take out his tires. Four-wheel drive is fine. On rims? Not so much.”

“We’re on it.”

“Jaime, are you there?”

“Here, boss. What do you need?

“What’s the situation where you are?”

“City of Bisbee has officers on-site to man the roadblock. I can take two deputies and go serve as backup for the TAC team.”

“Do that, but have somebody take my Yukon out of the roadblock, bring it along, and fill that spot with another vehicle. I left the keys inside. Once I get out of this helicopter, I’m going to want to have my own wheels.”

Chuck had moved the helicopter closer to the action. They were high enough to see the moving Hummer on one side of the curve and gully and, half a mile or so beyond it, the TAC team’s Sprinter parked with the front of the vehicle pointing back the way they had come. That way, if they needed to leave in a hurry, they wouldn’t have to turn around first.

“Okay, TAC Team, he’s incoming,” Joanna announced. “He just ducked into the gully. When he tops the rise, you should have visual contact, but so will he.”

With the binoculars still pressed to her face, Joanna felt her heartbeat accelerate. Her officers’ lives were on the line down there. A guy she suspected of being a stone-cold killer, someone who was armed and dangerous, was headed in their direction. She had put her people there, but she was not. As far as Joanna Brady was concerned, she should have stayed on the ground with them, but at this point all she could do was watch from the sidelines.

The Hummer topped the rise and ground to a sudden stop. Joanna was sure shots were being exchanged, but over the noise of the helicopter there was no way to tell for sure. A moment later the Hummer’s driver bailed. Joanna could see that the guy was holding his weapon pointed at the Sprinter. She couldn’t see the bullets flying from the barrel, but her soul registered every one.

Then the guy took off running, dodging away from the Hummer and trying to disappear into the desert.

“Shots fired!” Ruiz shouted into his mic. “Runner!”

“Stay on him,” Joanna told Chuck. “On him but out of range.”

“Roger that.”

It wasn’t until the aircraft flew closer that the suspect seemed to notice its presence. He stopped and looked up. Then he raised his weapon, pointed it in their direction, and tried to fire again.

“He should have studied geometry or physics,” Chuck observed with a laugh. “No way can he reach us up here with that thing. Every time he pulls the trigger, he has that much less ammo. Bad for him. Good for us.”

Joanna knew Chuck was trying to lighten her load, but her whole being still locked on the drama unfolding below, and she was in no mood for joking around. She watched as the TAC team spread out in pursuit of the gunman. Her heart was in her throat, knowing that every step they took carried her officers closer to the shooter and put them in even greater danger.

Then, as quickly as it began, it ended. Joanna saw the guy start in alarm and look back over his shoulder just as a black-and-brown streak crashed into him.

“Spike’s got him!” she shouted into her own mic, recognizing the canine member of her department’s K-9 unit. “Suspect is on the ground!”

Within moments the officers converged on the scene. Takedowns were always the most dangerous part of any pursuit. She continued to hold her breath until Armando Ruiz’s elated voice came through her radio.

“Suspect in custody!”

“Great job, guys!” Joanna said. “Great job!” There were tears of gratitude in her eyes. She had to wipe them away before she spoke again. “Somebody needs to go check out the barn. I have a feeling the other four guys who drove inside won’t be walking out. Chuck, how about we go find my Yukon. I can see where it’s parked from here. Since there won’t be any traffic, you can put this thing down right there on the highway to let us out. I want to go see what, if anything, this creep has to say for himself.”

•   •   •

Knowing how much was at stake, Ali had stayed quiet and motioned Cami to do the same during most of the firefight. After all, Joanna’s officers were caught up in a life-and-death struggle, and Sheriff Brady didn’t need comments from the peanut gallery while those lives were on the line. Ali kept her phone on silent, but she knew from the constant buzzing that there had been a flurry of missed calls. When she checked, she saw they were all from B.

Chuck landed in the middle of the pavement. “I’m assuming you’re not ready to bail right now,” he said as Ali rose to exit. “How about if I go back to the airport and be on standby. Give me a call half an hour before you’re ready to leave for Sedona.”

“Thank you,” she said. “We will.”

Once she was back on solid ground, Ali called B. “Sorry to leave you hanging like that,” she said, “but it’s over now. The TAC team caught the guy. They probably wouldn’t have managed it without having Chuck and his helicopter at our disposal.”

Just then a marked patrol vehicle, a Tahoe with a woman at the wheel, pulled up. “Sheriff Brady,” she called through the passenger window. “TAC team is calling for you. Four gunshot victims in the barn down the road. No survivors.”

Ali watched as the horror of those words flitted briefly across Sheriff Brady’s face, then she straightened her shoulders. “Okay,” she said. “If it’s all right with you, Deb, I’ll ride with you.” She turned to Ali. “How about if you and Cami wait here? I’ll have someone come pick you up and take you back to the department for your car.”

“Of course,” Ali said. “That’ll be fine.” She tried to be gracious, but it was clear she had no other choice.

Cami, on the other hand, was totally engrossed with her iPad. “Thanks for the info, Stu,” she said.

“I’m trying to tell you the same thing Stu is,” B. said impatiently when Ali returned the phone to her ear. “He’s spent the whole time working his magic. Hans Holzmann didn’t show up at work today. His wife reported him missing earlier this afternoon. She said he left home in the middle of the night—told her that there was some kind of emergency at work, except he didn’t go to work. Stu also managed to pick up on a trail of Holzmann’s credit card transactions: He bought gas and a sandwich in Blythe, California; stopped at a McDonald’s in Gila Bend; bought another tank of gas in Sierra Vista at ten thirty this morning. And guess what? That extra vehicle parked out in front of the house belonging to Mr. Holzmann the elder turns out to be a Range Rover.”

“And Hans Dieter Holzmann just happens to drive a Range Rover,” Ali supplied.

“Bingo.”

“From what we’ve been able to learn, the shooting that started this whole mess was first called in around two A.M. The satellite shot was time stamped eleven A.M. It takes eight and a half hours minimum to drive from Rolling Hills, California, to Holzmann Road in Cochise County.”

“So Hans Holzmann knew something had gone haywire with the shipment at almost the same time the cops did. He immediately hopped in his car and came straight here.”

“Right,” B. agreed. “Which makes me wonder, what if he was lured here? What if this was nothing but an elaborate trap?”

“So far the body count here on the ground is up to five,” Ali told him. “Based on that, I’m thinking things are looking pretty grim for Mr. Holzmann—maybe for both Mr. Holzmanns.”

An unmarked patrol car showed up, this one an aging but well-preserved Crown Victoria. The man at the wheel was older than the other people Ali had seen in Joanna’s department. “I’m Detective Ernie Carpenter,” he said. “I’ve been assigned to take you two ladies back to the Justice Center.”

“Before you do that,” Ali told him, “I think there may be another problem.”

When she finished explaining the situation, Carpenter got on the horn to request additional assistance. Ali heard the weariness in Joanna’s voice as she replied. “All right, Ernie. Take one of the deputies and go check it out. In the meantime, give Ali the keys to my Tahoe. She can drive herself back to the department, but tell her to watch out for spike strips.”

“All right, ladies,” Ernie said when she finished. “Help yourselves.”

Yet another departmental SUV, a Tahoe again, appeared on the scene. Ali wondered how many of those were part of Sheriff Brady’s collection of rolling stock. As the SUV followed the Crown Vic up Holzmann Road, Ali turned to Cami. “In other words, here’s our hat, what’s our hurry, and don’t let the door slam on our butts on the way out?” she grumbled. “How about a little gratitude?”

They climbed into Joanna’s Yukon. The seat was set so far forward that Ali could barely get her legs under the steering wheel. Once she finished adjusting the seat and the mirrors, she turned to Cami. “You know what? This sucks. We’re the whole reason the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office is on top of this right now. If it weren’t for us, they wouldn’t know about the trucks, wouldn’t know about the bodies in the barn or whatever it is, and wouldn’t have caught the shooter. I’m a little tired of being told to sit down and shut up, aren’t you?”

Cami nodded. “Right,” she said. “It’s like we’re suddenly invisible or something.”

“The shooter is in custody. So what say we go check out what’s happening with Helmer and Hans Holzmann?”

“Sounds good to me.”

Ali turned the key in the ignition, put the Yukon in gear, executed a U-turn, and followed the other two vehicles north from Highway 92. Even there, the road was in bad enough shape that she was glad they had a high-clearance vehicle complete with four-wheel drive. The road ended abruptly at a closed gate with a row of newly leafed cottonwoods on either side. Beyond the gate was a house, barn, corral, and outbuildings—the same ones Ali remembered seeing on the satellite image earlier. The Ranger Rover was where they had seen it, too. The Crown Vic and the Tahoe were parked directly behind it, but neither driver was anywhere in sight.

Ali pulled up to the gate and stopped. Cami rolled down her window. “Should we go in or wait here?” Cami asked.

There was something about this whole situation that was bothering Ali—something that wasn’t right. “No,” she said. “We should just turn around and go back.”

As Ali put the car in reverse and turned to see where she was going, a giant of a man materialized from behind one of the nearby trees. He reached in through the open window and grabbed Cami. Using only one hand, he managed to wrestle her out of her seat belt and drag her, screaming and struggling, out through the open window. The window control buttons were right there on Ali’s armrest, but by the time Ali realized that, Cami was half in and half out of the car, and she couldn’t touch them. A hard clap on the head silenced Cami. As she slumped in the man’s arms, Ali saw the gun in his left hand.

“Who are you?” Ali demanded.

“Who I am doesn’t matter,” he snarled. “What matters is this: You give me a ride and we go where I say. Now, unlock the back door here. The girl and I will ride in back. If you try anything—anything at all—she dies. Got it?”

Ali hesitated, but only for a moment. Cami was in mortal danger at that moment. And who had put her there? Ali Reynolds had. Ali glanced at the house to see if one of the officers had heard Cami’s scream. No one appeared at a door or peered out a window, so apparently they hadn’t. If Cami Lee was going to be saved, Ali Reynolds would have to be the one to do it.

“Got it,” she said.

“Well?” he demanded impatiently. “Are you going to unlock the door or not?”

“Just a minute,” Ali said. “It’s not my car. I need to find the right button.”

She made a show of pushing buttons, raising random windows up and down. By the time she finally unlocked the door, Cami had come to enough that she was the one who opened it. Her captor gripped the terrified girl with one hand while holding a handgun that looked like a .38 to Cami’s head. Her eyes were open wide with fear and pleading for help. She was obviously terrified.

Once the door opened, the man lifted Cami off the ground and shoved her into the vehicle. He had to push her bodily across the bench seat before closing the door behind him. In the split second he was preoccupied with that, Ali managed to extract the Glock from her small-of-back holster. Once she had the weapon out, she slipped it under her thigh where it was out of sight but still close at hand.

“All right,” the man said. “We’re in. Now turn around and get going.”

Ali listened for the distinctive sound of seat belts locking, but none came. The man with the gun wasn’t belted in, but then, neither was Cami.

Ali took her time and made several tries before finally executing the U-turn, hoping all the while that either Detective Carpenter or the deputy would emerge from the house and see what was happening. No one did.

“Where to?”Ali asked once they started back down Holzmann Road.

“Away from here,” he said. “The place is crawling with cops, and leaving in a cop car seems like a good idea to me.”

There was indistinct radio chatter on the radio. Nothing Ali heard told her that the roadblocks had been dismantled. She hoped they hadn’t been, but in an attempt to distract the man from what was being said over the air, Ali turned herself into a regular chatty Cathy.

“They caught your buddy,” she said conversationally. “You know, the guy in the Hummer?”

“They caught Julio? So what?” he said. “He’s got connections around here. He’ll get out.”

“I don’t think so,” Ali said. “He killed the four drivers,” Ali said.

A quick check in the rearview mirror told her that hearing about the dead drivers had blindsided the guy. “Julio killed them?”

“Yup,” Ali said. “Gunned them down right there in the warehouse. Your friend Julio sounds like the kind of guy who wouldn’t want to leave any witnesses behind,” she added. “Once he had all those LEGO boxes, maybe he was going to take you out, too.”

“He wouldn’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“He said he’d come get me once the trucks were taken care of. All I needed was time to finish what I’d started. The thing is it took longer than I expected to get the old man to tell me where Hans was hiding.”

“You killed both of them?” Ali asked.

“Of course I did. Hans was a cheating son of a bitch,” he said. “That’s the whole reason I came here—to teach him a lesson.”

With his every casual admission, Ali slipped deeper into despair. If their captor was this forthcoming, it probably meant that the other two officers—both Detective Carpenter and the deputy—were dead as well. This guy was spilling out all the details because he had no intention of leaving Ali and Cami alive to tell the tale. Still, right at that moment, Ali knew her best option was to keep him talking.

“Cheating you out of stolen LEGO sets?” Ali asked.

“Look, me and Hans were supposedly partners,” he said. “It turns out he’s been robbing me blind the whole time, and I only just now found out. Those old sets he had stowed away here—ones I knew nothing about—are worth a fortune. Who would do something like that?”

“My father told me once there’s no honor among thieves,” Ali said. “Maybe you didn’t get the memo.”

“Shut up,” he said.

So Ali shut up. By then they were nearing the end of Holzmann Road and approaching Highway 92. Creeping up to the stop sign, she paused and looked both ways. There wasn’t a single vehicle in sight in either direction. That probably meant that the roadblocks were still in place.

“Which way?” Ali asked. “Right or left?”

“Suit yourself.”

It suited Ali to turn left and head back toward Bisbee. She knew exactly where that roadblock was located, and she also knew a little about the lay of the land. She suspected the one near Bisbee was closer to Holzmann Road than the one near the river. Ali expected that as soon as the guy saw the roadblock, he’d go ballistic. At least, she hoped that was what would happen. With his attention focused elsewhere, maybe she’d have a chance—her one and only chance—to use the gun.

“So you like to play with LEGOs, then?” she asked, ignoring the fact that he had told her to shut up. “You must.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about LEGO sets,” he growled. “I was in it for the money, and that jackass Hans was scamming me out of some of my share and probably other people out of theirs, too.”

That’s when Ali realized this was more than just a one- or two-guy conspiracy. There were lots of people involved.

“So you showed him,” she said.

“I sure as hell did. Taquito had hauled stuff for us before. The first time I saw him down on the docks, picking up something I knew nothing about, I worried that something was up. After that, I kept an eye on him. This time around I kept track of the ghost pallets, and it’s a good thing I did. Turns out there were a couple of extras that Hans had hidden away. Everybody knew about the extra pallets, but Hans was the only one who knew about those extra extra pallets. This time, when Taquito showed up down on the docks when there wasn’t a shipment scheduled for us, I knew it was time to pull the trigger.”

“Are you saying you shot him yourself?” Ali asked.

The guy laughed at that. “I mean I pulled the trigger in a manner of speaking. You meet a lot of useful people in a job like mine—you know, people who can get stuff done or who know people who can get stuff done. Years ago, one of them put me in touch with Julio, who happens to be a very useful guy from Naco, Sonora. He also happens to have all kinds of connections. When I told him what was up, he told me he knew of a place close to Hans’s dad’s place—an empty warehouse—where we could store the stuff temporarily once we laid hands on it. He found the drivers, located the trucks, handled the whole thing.”

“Including shooting Taquito?”

“Sure. I put a GPS tracker on the bumper of his truck and knew his every move. By the time he came through Palominas, Julio was ready and waiting.”

They were nearing town. Ali saw, to her relief, that the roadblock was still in place. With the risky maneuver she had in mind, she needed to have all other vehicles safely off the road. The man in the backseat spotted the roadblock almost as soon as she did. He leaned forward in his seat, peering warily out the windshield. “What the hell? Turn around,” he ordered. “Go the other way.”

“But they’ll see us,” Ali warned. “They’ll come after us.”

“I don’t care. Go the other way. Now.”

Ali slowed and put the car into a careful U-turn. She briefly considered ramming an abutment on a nearby bridge crossing a dry wash, but she chose not to. With Cami in the back and not wearing a seat belt, she was afraid to try it. Moments later, with the Yukon back on the pavement and westbound once more, Ali checked in the rearview mirror, hoping one of the cops at the roadblock had noticed the turning vehicle and come after them, but so far no one had. As her mother, Edie Larson, liked to say, “God helps those who help themselves.” This time around, the only help available was Ali herself.

Ali’s mother also despised liars in the worst way, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and lie she would—to the very best of her ability.

Ali felt the Glock pressing painfully against the back of her leg, but she wasn’t ready to bring it out into the open. She had already calculated what her next moves would be, and she couldn’t afford to have her only weapon get away from her and go clattering around on the floorboard of the front seat. No, when the time came, she needed to have that gun in her hand and nowhere else.

She made a show of peering into the rearview mirror. “Oops,” she said aloud after a long moment. “Here they come.”

As the man behind her leaned forward again, peering into the rearview mirror to check for himself, Ali slammed on the brakes. The sudden change in momentum threw him forward against the back of the front seat. Cami, too, was propelled forward. Praying that the man’s .38 had been knocked from his grip, Ali used both hands to pull the Yukon out of a 360-degree spin and bring it to an abrupt stop.

“You bitch!” he screamed behind her. “I’ll kill you both.”

Feeling a sudden pressure against the back of her seat, Ali knew for sure that her wild zigzagging had done the job. The man had crawled behind her seat and was reaching for his fallen weapon. That meant he was now on Cami’s side of the SUV. Without a moment’s hesitation, Ali pulled the sweat-covered Glock out from under her leg, raised it, and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet cleanly through the safety screen. The shot, fired at very close range, plugged him in the shoulder. Ali knew at once that it wasn’t a fatal wound—she hadn’t intended for it to be fatal—but the shot had succeeded in taking that damned .38 out of play on a permanent basis.

With the man bleeding, writhing, and howling in pain, Ali opened the back door. The .38 had come to rest against the doorjamb. Ali immediately grabbed it and flung it into the underbrush. Then, with a strength she didn’t know she possessed, she took Cami by the arm and dragged her from the vehicle. Once Cami was safely on the ground, Ali slammed the door shut. The Tahoe was a cop car after all. Anybody who was imprisoned inside the back passenger seat behind the safety divider and with the doors locked wouldn’t be going anywhere until someone on the outside opened the door.

Cami simply sank down on the pavement as though she didn’t trust her legs to support her.

“Are you hurt?” Ali asked.

“You shot him!” Cami exclaimed breathlessly. “How did you do that?”

“First off, you have to have a gun,” Ali said. “And if you’re going to keep working on this job, you’re not only going to have one, you’re going to learn to use it. Now, call 911. Tell them we’re about two miles east of the Bisbee roadblock with a gunshot victim in the back of Sheriff Brady’s Tahoe. In the meantime, I’d better call B. I have a feeling all of this is going to take time, and I don’t think we’ll want to have that helicopter on standby while everything is being sorted out.”

“Hey,” B. said cheerfully when he answered. “I was worried about you and I’m glad to hear your voice. Are you on your way?”

“Not exactly,” Ali said. “Cami and I may need some help getting back home.”

“Why?” B. asked, sounding suddenly worried. “Did something go haywire with the helicopter? Did you wreck the rental car?”

“No to both,” Ali said. “You’ll be happy to know that we seem to have solved at least part of your missing-LEGO problem, and I just shot one of the responsible parties.”

“You did what?” B. demanded.

“You heard me,” Ali said. “I shot the guy. He’s not dead. He’ll be fine eventually. Cami just called 911, and the cops are coming this way even as we speak. I’ll have to tell you the rest of it later. Just get in the car and come get us. Please.”

•   •   •

Joanna dragged her weary body into the house a full twenty hours after leaving it. Butch was already sound asleep. She’d called him earlier to tell him what was going on. Now, with him snoring softly beside her, Joanna lay on the bed and tried to force the day’s ugly images out of her head.

What had started out as a single dead truck driver the day before had turned into the wholesale slaughter of eight people. The first victim, Alberto “Taquito” Mendoza, a small-time hood who regularly hauled stolen goods for Hans Holzmann and some of his coconspirators, had been shot to pieces gangster-style on the far side of the San Pedro.

Then there were the four truck drivers gunned down together in what was probably a single volley of bullets from an AK-47. It would be a long time before Joanna would be able to wipe that bloody carnage from her memory bank. They’d been slaughtered, mostly likely with the same weapon a Naco, Sonora, gangster wannabe had been carrying when Spike knocked him to the ground and chewed a hole in his wrist.

So far Joanna’s people had managed to identify only one of the slain drivers. Undocumented immigrants, they had been recruited from the day-laborer pool at a Home Depot store in Tucson. None of them had been carrying driver’s licenses at the time, so three of their names were still a mystery. The one they had identified was “known to law enforcement” due to three separate DUIs. He had been identified through fingerprint records.

Next came Helmer and Hans Holzmann, father and son. As far as Joanna knew, Helmer was a good man who had raised a wretch for a son. Ernie Carpenter and a relatively new member of the department, Deputy Jim Rider, had found the bodies of both Helmer and Hans Holzmann in the barn behind the house. Helmer’s body exhibited clear signs of torture. Both men had been bound, gagged, and then shot to death execution-style.

And who was the mastermind behind all this? A lowlife named Lester Kraft who turned out to be pissed-off longshoreman from Long Beach who supplemented his “meager” $100,000-a-year salary by joining forces with group led by a corrupt U.S. Customs guy to smuggle contraband LEGO sets into the country. The fact that Hans Holzmann had been caught cheating on one of his erstwhile partners-in-crime was what had set this whole ugly killing spree in motion. Lester had hired a thug from Naco, Sonora, Julio Archuleta, to do the job, and he had evidently been responsible for most of the wet work—with the exception of Helmer and Hans. Archuleta was someone who had long been a person of interest in any number of criminal enterprises in southeastern Arizona, but this was the first time anyone had been able to catch him red-handed. Thank you, Spike.

Joanna still thought the whole idea of people being killed over LEGO sets was utterly preposterous, but those eight bodies lined up in Kendra Baldwin’s morgue, awaiting autopsies, were all too real.

At last Joanna’s brain shut down. She fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. Her eyes blinked open in the morning to see the sun shining in through her window high enough for her to understand that she was already late for work. When Butch opened the bedroom door, she knew exactly what he was doing—something he often did: bringing her that first morning cup of coffee. But this morning the very smell of it sent her racing into the bathroom, retching repeatedly into the toilet bowl.

Once she flushed the toilet and cleaned her face, she opened the door to find him standing there, still holding the coffee, his face awash in worry. “What’s wrong? Are you sick?” he asked. “What can I do?”

“Get rid of the coffee,” she said. “I can’t stand the smell of it.”

“But you love coffee.”

“Not right now I don’t.”

He turned on his heel and took the coffee away. When he came back, he was grinning from ear to ear. “Are you really?” he asked, taking her in his arms and holding her close.

“I think so,” Joanna groaned into his chest. “But when you go to the store later, pick up a pregnancy test. We need to know for sure.”

“What’s your reelection committee going to think?”

“It’s none of their business. What do you think?”

“I’m delighted,” Butch said. “And do you know what I want?”

“What?”

“A little girl with bright red hair and green eyes,” Butch said, “just like her mother’s.”

Follow Ali Reynolds as she investigates the most extreme crimes.

Don't miss J.A. Jance's next installment in the Ali Reynolds series, Cold Betrayal, where Ali finds out revenge isn’t the only dish served cold. . .

Cold Betrayal

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In this “engrossing” (Publishers Weekly) thriller from New York Times bestselling author J.A. Jance, journalist- turned-investigator Ali Reynolds unearths a cold case that puts her in danger from a deadly arsonist.

Moving Target

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Can Ali Reynolds piece together enough clues to connect a frightened teenager, two dead bodies, and $300,000, before the body count rises?

Deadly Stakes

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About the Author

J.A. Jance is the top-ten New York Times bestselling author of Edge of Evil, Web of Evil, Hand of Evil, Cruel Intent, Trial by Fire, Fatal Error, Left for Dead, Deadly Stakes, and Moving Target. In a career that spans more than thirty years, she has written over fifty books, including the Joanna Brady series, the J. P. Beaumont series, and four interrelated thrillers featuring the Walker family. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle and Tucson. Visit her website at www.jajance.com.

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ALI REYNOLDS MYSTERIES

Edge of Evil

Web of Evil

Hand of Evil

Cruel Intent

Trial by Fire

Fatal Error

Left for Dead

Deadly Stakes

Moving Target

Cold Betrayal

JOANNA BRADY MYSTERIES

Desert Heat

Tombstone Courage

Shoot/Don’t Shoot

Dead to Rights

Skeleton Canyon

Rattlesnake Crossing

Outlaw Mountain

Devil’s Claw

Paradise Lost

Partner in Crime

Exit Wounds

Dead Wrong

Damage Control

Fire and Ice

Judgment Call

J.P. BEAUMONT MYSTERIES

Until Proven Guilty

Injustice for All

Trial by Fury

Taking the Fifth

Improbable Cause

A More Perfect Union

Dismissed with Prejudice

Minor in Possession

Payment in Kind

Without Due Process

Failure to Appear

Lying in Wait

Name Withheld

Breach of Duty

Birds of Prey

Partner in Crime

Long Time Gone

Justice Denied

Fire and Ice

Betrayal of Trust

Ring in the Dead

Second Watch

WALKER FAMILY MYSTERIES

Hour of the Hunter

Kiss of the Bees

Day of the Dead

Queen of the Night

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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ISBN 978-1-5011-3559-0

Contents

No Honor Among Thieves

About the Author