For years the horse population on High Lonesome Ranch had been limited to one—Kiddo, Jenny’s sorrel gelding, who was also her barrel-racing partner. Recently they had added a second horse to the mix, an aging, blind Appaloosa mare that had been found, starving and dehydrated, in the corral of a recently foreclosed ranchette near Arizona Sunsites. The previous owners had simply packed up and left town, abandoning the horse to fend for herself. When a neighbor reported the situation, Joanna had dispatched one of her Animal Control officers to retrieve the animal.
After a round of veterinary treatment at county expense, Butch and Jenny had trailered the mare home to High Lonesome, where she seemed to have settled into what were supposedly temporary digs in the barn and corral, taking cues on her new surroundings from Kiddo while she gained weight and recovered. Dennis, after taking one look at the horse, had promptly dubbed her Spot.
In Joanna’s opinion, Spot was a far better name for a dog than it was for a horse, but Spot she was, and Spot she remained. Currently inquiries were being made to find Spot a permanent home, but Joanna suspected that she had already found one. When Butch teased Joanna by saying she had turned High Lonesome Ranch into an unofficial extension of Cochise County Animal Control, it was more true than not. Most of the dogs that had come through their lives had been rescues, along with any number of cast-off Easter bunnies and Easter chicks. Now, having taken in a hearing impaired dog and a visually impaired horse, they were evidently a haven for stray animals with disabilities as well.
“The horses are fed,” Butch answered. “Jenny and the dogs went out to do that while I was starting the coffee and you were in the shower.”
By the time Jenny and the now more subdued dogs returned to the kitchen, Joanna was ready to head out. After delivering quick good-bye kisses all around, she went to the laundry room to retrieve and don her weapons. For Mother’s Day a few weeks earlier, Butch had installed a thumb recognition gun safe just inside the door. Located below a light switch, it was within easy reach for Joanna’s vertically challenged five-foot-four frame. With her two Glocks safely stowed—one in a holster on her belt and the other, her backup weapon, in a bra-style holster—Sheriff Joanna Brady was ready to face her day.
It generally took the better part of ten minutes for Joanna to drive her county-owned Yukon the three miles of combination dirt and paved roads between High Lonesome Ranch at the base of the Mule Mountains and her office at the Cochise County Justice Center. In this instance she drove straight past her office on Highway 80 and headed into Bisbee proper. St. Dominick’s Church, up the canyon in Old Bisbee, was another four miles beyond that.
The time Joanna spent in her car each day gave her a buffer between her job and her busy home life. On this late-spring day, she spent some of the trip gazing off across the wide expanse of the Sulphur Springs Valley, taking in the scenery—the alternating squares of cultivated fields and tracts of wild desert terrain punctuated with mesquite trees—that stretched from the nearby Mule Mountains to the Chiricahua Mountains in the distance, some thirty miles away. She loved the varying shades of green that springtime brought to the desert, and she loved the very real purple majesty of the mountains rising up in the distance to meet an azure sky. As much as she thought of this corner of the Arizona desert as being hers, it was always humbling to remember, as her history-loving father had loved pointing out to her, that much less than two hundred years ago everything she could see had been the undisputed domain of the Chiricahua Apaches.
Today, however, she didn’t bother admiring the landscape. Her thoughts were focused on Junior Dowdle—a troubled individual with the body of a grown man, the ailments of an old one, and the heart and mind of a child. Knowing that Junior was out in the world somewhere—lost, alone, and unprotected—was heartbreaking, and she uttered a quiet prayer as she drove. “Please help us find him,” she pleaded. “Please let him be okay.”
Driving through the central business district of Old Bisbee on Tombstone Canyon Road, Joanna kept her eyes peeled, watching for anything out of the ordinary on side streets or on the steep scrub-oak-dotted hillsides that loomed above the town. If Junior had wandered outside in the dark, it wouldn’t have taken him long to cross that narrow strip of civilization and find himself lost in a desert wilderness with neither food nor water.
Joanna had just passed Tombstone Canyon Methodist Church when her radio crackled to life.
“Alvin Bernard just called. Terry and Spike have arrived at the Maxwells’ house. They’re working on finding a scent. Everyone else is at St. Dom’s.”