“Thanks,” Joanna said. “That’ll make your life easier, and it should help Ernie Carpenter, too.”

“Ernie. Isn’t he the detective who was at the crime scene yesterday?” Fran asked.

“He’s the one,” Joanna replied. “He’s also the same investigator Detective Lazier banned from attending Alice Rogers’ autopsy this morning.”

“Banned?” Fran repeated, “You mean Hank Lazier told someone he couldn’t come to my morgue?”

“That’s right.”

“What a jackass!” Dr. Daly muttered.

Smiling to herself, Joanna knew that just like the Little Engine That Could, she had succeeded in finding another way over the mountain. Lazier had been hell-bent on shutting Cochise County’s investigators out of the loop. Joanna had managed to open another channel.

“What did you find?” she asked, returning to postmortem results.

“Did you ever hang out with football players much?” Fran responded.

Joanna wished she could point out to Dr. Daly-as she often did with Jenny-that it wasn’t polite to answer a question with a question. “No,” she said. “I can’t say that I ever did.”

“I don’t suppose Alice Rogers did, either,” Fran continued. “But the bruises I found on her back, just over the kidneys, are consistent with the kinds of injuries you’d see in an emergency room on a Saturday morning after a hard-fought football game on Friday night. We’re talking about bruises that would show up on someone’s body after they were tackled from be-hind. That’s the first thing I noticed-the bruising. And not just on the victim’s back, either. There are definite fingertip-type bruises around her wrist-her right wrist. There’s some additional bruising there as well that isn’t obviously related to the handprints.” Fran paused. “Wait just a minute, will you?”

Joanna expected Dr. Daly to go off the line, perhaps to take another call. Instead, she heard a rustle of paper and then, a moment later, the telltale click of a cigarette lighter. “There now,” Fran said, inhaling deeply, “that’s better. Where was I?”

“Bruising to the wrist.”

“Right. So I’m thinking somebody knocked her down and then grabbed her by the wrist, which, considering the cholla spines in the back of her hands, was probably a little tricky.”

“In other words, her attacker should have some cholla puncture wounds of his own.”

“His or her,” Fran Daly said. “Whichever. Most of the cholla puncture wounds are on her back, although there were also quite a few on her legs, arms, and both hands.”

“Anything else?”

“She was drunk,” Fran answered. “Point one-eight. And something else.”

“What’s that?”

“She was clutching a vial in one hand-an empty insulin bottle. Which makes me wonder if maybe that extra bruise on the inside of her wrist might have been caused by a needle-an injection.”

“An insulin shot then,” Joanna murmured. “You’re saying Alice Rogers was diabetic?”

“Insulin isn’t usually injected in arms,” Fran Daly told her. “Since it’s self-injected, it usually goes in the thighs. With long-term insulin use then, there’s damage to the fat tissue in the legs-a puckering where the fat cells die due to repeated injections. I examined Alice Rogers’ legs. There was no evidence consistent with long-term use. If she was on insulin, she hadn’t been for long. We can find out for sure, once we locate her personal physician.”

“Diabetics don’t usually drink, do they?” Joanna asked. “Alcohol?” Fran Daly asked. “It’s not recommended.”

“I talked to her daughter,” Joanna said. “Susan Jenkins said her mother came to dinner on Saturday and that they had drinks before dinner and wine with the meal. It doesn’t seem likely that a daughter, knowing her mother had diabetes, would serve drinks.”

“Unless the daughter wanted to kill her,” Fran put in.

“There is that,” Joanna conceded. “But what if Alice didn’t have diabetes? What happens to someone with normal insulin when they’re given extra?”

“It depends on how much extra, what the person’s physical condition is, and any number of variables.”

“And if the person was already drunk?”

“Well,” Daly said. “Again, it depends on how much insulin is administered. A hundred units of insulin or so, given to someone as drunk as Alice Rogers was, might cause her to pass out, but she’d wake up hours later and be fine, except for a hang-over, that is. With five or six hundred units, though, it could very well be lethal. In this case it might not have taken nearly that much, especially since there was already so much booze in her system, she was probably in shock from falling in the cactus, and she had almost no protection from the cold. I believe she passed out and her blood pressure dropped too low to sustain life. Whatever the cause, she died of heart failure. Still, I’m betting on insulin. If it’s there, you can be sure we’ll find it.”

“What do you use, a blood test?” Joanna asked.

“A serum test, not blood.”

“And how long does that take?”

“Two weeks, about. The thing is, without the presence of the vial, we wouldn’t generally bother with an insulin test at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. An insulin test isn’t part of standard autopsy protocols. And that’s what’s so odd. It’s as though the killer went out of his way to leave a calling card.”

“Can batches of insulin be traced?” Joanna asked.

“Certainly. I’ll get right on it.”

“So where does this leave Detective Lazier and the joyriders he’s planning on bringing back from Nogales?”

Fran Daly laughed. “Up a creek, if you ask me. This doesn’t square with a bunch of gangster-wanna-bes. People who hot-wire cars don’t go around armed with needles full of insulin. They use guns. Insulin is a prescription medication. For punks like that, nine-millimeter automatics are probably a whole lot easier to come by than insulin is.”

Joanna heard another phone ringing in the background of Doc Daly’s office. “Hold on a sec,” Fran said. “I need to take this call.” She came back on the line moments later. “Guess who?” she asked with a laugh. “None other than Hank Lazier himself. When he hears what I have to say, he’s not going to be a happy camper.”

“He didn’t strike me as being that happy to begin with,” Joanna said.

Fran allowed herself another deep-throated chuckle, which was followed by a spasm of coughing. “Do you want a copy of my results?”

“Please,” Joanna said. “Fax them along to Detective Carpenter.”

“Will do.”

She had ended the call but had not yet put down the phone when it rang in her hand. Shaking her head, Joanna Brady momentarily longed for the good old days when telephones were in houses and offices but not in cars. It wasn’t so very long ago when she had been able to drive around southeastern Arizona without holding a cell phone to her ear.

“Hello.”

“Hi, Joanna,” George Winfield said. “I lope I’m not dragging you away from something important.”

George Winfield, Cochise County’s medical examiner, had been Joanna’s stepfather for some time now, but her first supposition was that there was some official reason for the call. Perhaps there was some case-some other homicide she knew nothing about-that needed her immediate attention.

“No,” she said. “I’m just driving from point A to point B. What’s up?”

George Winfield paused before he answered. “It’s about your mother,” he said.

George most often referred to Eleanor Lathrop Winfield as Ellie, a loving nickname that had once been the private pre-serve of Joanna’s father. The fact that George didn’t use that name now, or even the more formal Eleanor, worried Joanna. The term “your mother” had a peculiarly ominous ring to it. In response, an orange warning light switched on in the back of Joanna’s head.

“Is something the matter with her?” she asked. “Is Mother sick or something? Has she been hurt?”

“Not exactly.” George said the words with such studied reluctance that Joanna’s grip tightened on the steering wheel.