Free Devil's Claw by J. A. Jance Page A

Lance and I applied as much first aid as we could, but I’m afraid the EMTs are right in saying that the victim isn’t going to make it.”
    “What happened to her?”
    “It looks as though she was shot in the lower back. She was hit once at least and maybe more. She appears to have lost a good deal of blood and was hanging by a thread as they loaded her into the Med-evac helicopter.”
    Joanna sighed as she lost all hope of being able to stay home and spend a quiet evening with Butch and Jenny. “You mentioned something about a runaway? What’s that all about?” Joanna asked.
    “A fifteen-year-old Elfrida high school girl named Lucinda Ridder disappeared from her grandmother’s house sometime overnight last night, along with her pet hawk. When the grandmother got up this morning, both the girl and the bird were gone. The grandmother, Catherine Yates, made such a fuss with the emergency operators that I finally went over to her place on Middlemarch Road myself. According to Grandma, Lucy’s mother is due home today or tomorrow. Mrs. Yates is frantic that we find Lucy and have her back home by the time her mother arrives. I was at the Yates’ place—the grandmother’s place—trying to explain why we have a twenty-four-hour waiting period on missing-persons reports when the second call came in. I decided to come straight here and check just in case the gunshot victim and Lucy turned out to be one and the same.”
    “And was she?”
    “No. As I said Lucy Ridder is fifteen years old. I’d guess the shooting victim is somewhere in her mid-to-late thirties.”
    “Wait just a minute, Joanna,” Frank said. “There’s a call coming in on the radio.”
    While her chief deputy was off the line, Joanna turned back to Butch, Jenny, and the horse. By then Butch had heaved the new saddle onto Kiddo’s back, and Jenny was busy cinching it up. Watching the two of them talking and laughing together, Joanna felt a pang of jealousy. They were having fun while she could feel herself being sucked back into the world of work. It wasn’t fair.
    “Joanna?” Frank’s voice came back on the line.
    “I’m here. What’s happening?”
    “That was the pilot of the Med-evac helicopter. He says the EMTs lost her. She flat-lined on them and they couldn’t bring her back. The pilot wants to know what he should do, continue on into Tucson or head back to Bisbee.”
    “Bisbee, I guess,” Joanna said. “That way we only have to pay for one transport instead of two. Have Dispatch let Dr. Winfield know so he can meet the helicopter and pick up the body.”
    “You don’t think you should call him yourself?” Montoya asked.
    “Are you kidding?” Joanna returned. “If I do that, my mother will hold me personally responsible for wrecking whatever plans she had for this afternoon or evening. Better you should do it, Frank. What have you done about calling detectives?”
    Ernie Carpenter and Jaime Carbajal were her department’s two homicide detectives. Ernie was an old hand—a burly veteran with more than twenty years under his belt. Jaime, in his early thirties, had been promoted from deputy to detective early on during Joanna’s administration.
    “Ernie’s out of town this weekend, so Jaime’s up. He was in the middle of coaching his son’s T-ball game when I paged him, but he’s on his way.”
    “If Jaime’s on his way,” Joanna said, “I’d better be, too.”
    “You don’t have to do that, Joanna,” Frank said. “After all, this is your day off. I think we have things pretty well under control.”
    At the time of her election to the office of sheriff, Joanna Brady had lacked any kind of previous law-enforcement experience. After the election there had been some scuttlebutt that she had won solely on the basis of a sympathy vote, that her elective office had been a kind of county-wide consolation prize for having lost her husband in a line-of-duty shooting.
    In order to quiet the talk and counter those