"I guess you heard about Clyde Philips," she said as Frank settled into his chair.

Montoya nodded. "If he's dead and his shop's been cleaned out, I don't suppose we'll be buying sniper rifles from him, no matter what."

"When you talked to him, he didn't happen to mention how many of those things he had on hand, did he?"

Frowning, Frank considered a moment before he answered. "Now that you mention it, I believe he told me there were three individual weapons we could choose from, ones he had available for immediate delivery."

"Great," Joanna said. "That's just peachy."

Voland came in holding computer printouts of the previous day's incident reports. "So what all's happening, Dick?" she asked.

"Not too much. S and R's been up and out since six of the A.M.," the chief deputy replied. "Still no sign of Katrina Berridge. The evidence techs are on their way to the crime scene to pick up anything we may have missed last night. Detective Carbajal will meet them there and lead them in. Ernie is going up to Tucson to be on hand for the two autopsies. Dr. Daly has scheduled them back-to-back this morning, one right after the other."

Joanna didn't shirk from most law enforcement duties. One of the precepts of leading by example was that she didn't ask her officers to do things she herself wasn't prepared to do. The lone exception to that was standing by during autopsies. That was one official task she was more than happy to delegate to her detectives.

Joanna leaned back in her chair. "All right, then," she said. "Let's get started. We're having a tough time around here at the moment. Do we have any deputies we can spare from Patrol to augment Search and Rescue?"

Voland glowered at Frank Montoya. The Chief Deputy for Administration was charged with overseeing the budget. In that role, he had been conducting an unrelenting campaign to keep Dick Voland's Patrol Division pared to an absolute minimum.

"You're trying to get blood out of a turnip," Voland said. "Frank here has us running so close to the bone that I don't have anybody I can spare. And if I bring in off-duty officers, we'll he dealing with overtime all over again."

In these kinds of internal turf wars, Joanna often found herself agreeing with Frank and his budget considerations. This time, however, she had to come down in favor of Dick Voland's need for additional manpower.

"You're going to have to cut us a little slack here, Frank," she said. "Dick's going to have officers running two homicide investigations and conducting a search-and-rescue operation in addition to working our normal caseload. He has to have extra help. If that means overtime, that means overtime."

Frank nodded. "You're the boss," he said. "I'll see what I can do."

"Speaking of normal caseload," Joanna added, "what else went on overnight?"

"Not too much," Voland answered. "We had somebody-teenagers, most likely-shooting up road signs out on Moson Road."

"Road signs but no livestock and no people, right?" Joanna asked.

"Right," Voland replied. "Two speeders, a couple of DWIs, a reported runaway from out east of Huachuca City, and that's about it. Nothing serious."

"No illegals?"

"Hard as it is to believe, nobody picked up a single one last night."

"God," Joanna said. "What else? Any leads on that truck hijacking over by Bowie? Has anybody been in touch with Sheriff Trotter's office over in New Mexico?"

"I have," Frank volunteered. "No leads so far. The driver isn't exactly eager to talk about it. He's evidently married and doesn't want his wife to know that he stops along the road to pick up naked hitchhikers."

"That's hardly surprising," Joanna returned. "If I were in the wife's shoes, I wouldn't be any too thrilled, either." She addressed her next question to Frank. "How did the grievance hearings go?"

"Pretty well," he said. "At least they're put to rest for the time being. Some of the old-time jail guards still haven't figured out that women are in the workforce to stay. There were three different complaints, all of ' em about Tommy Fender. He's forever telling off-color jokes and making snide comments. The women finally had enough. After I heard what they had to say, I hauled Tommy into my office and gave him a second warning. I told him to cool it. I let him know if he wants to stay around the department long enough to see his retirement, he'd damned well better shape up."

"Do you think he will?" Joanna asked. "Shape up, I mean."

Frank shrugged. "Who knows? I wouldn't hold my breath. I tried to put the fear of God in him, but if he doesn't fly right and we have to fire him, we'll be stuck between a rock and a hard place. We are anyway. If we ignore what he's doing, the women take us to court for sexual harassment. And if we end up firing him over it, chances are he'll take us to court for wrongful dismissal. Either way, it's going to be a mess. And as for those two provisioners-"

"I don't have time to talk about the provisioners, Frank," Joanna interrupted. "And I don't want to talk to them, either. Since you and the cook are the ones most closely involved, it makes a lot more sense for the two of you to meet with them and make a decision. I have total faith in your ability to decide who we should go with and where we'll get the best deal."

"You're right about that," Dick Voland grumbled. "Montoya's such a cheapskate, you'd think every dime he spends comes out of his own personal pocket instead of the county's."

"And you should be properly grateful," Joanna told Dick, biting back the urge to smile. "After all, if you'd been in charge of the budget last year instead of Frank, there would have been approximately two weeks at the end of the fiscal year that we all would have been without paychecks, which wouldn't have been any too cool. Now, if that's all, you two clear out and let me get started on my paper."

Squabbling as usual, the two men left the office. For more than an hour Joanna whaled away at paperwork-proofing and signing off on typed reports, scanning through the agenda for the next board of supervisors meeting, reviewing two requests for family leave. Good as his word, Frank Montoya had delivered the September rotation-and-vacation schedules. Those had to be gone over in some detail and signed off on as well. It was boring, time-consuming, but necessary work. The better part of two hours had passed and Kristin had just come into Joanna's private office with that morning's collection from the post office when the phone rang. Without Kristin at her desk to intercept the call, Joanna answered it herself.

"Sheriff Brady," Ernie Carpenter said, "I've got news."

Joanna glanced at her watch. "Don't tell me Doc Daly's already finished up the autopsy."

"Hardly," Ernie replied. "But that doesn't mean she hasn't made progress. We've got a positive ID on the girl from the ledge. Her name's Ashley Brittany. She's a twenty-two-year-old oleander activist from Van Nuys, California."

"An oleander activist?" Joanna said. "What's that? And how did Fran Daly pull this one out of her hat? Considering; the condition of the corpse, I figured this was one ID that would take months or even years."

"First things first. The Pima County ME is a big supporter of the FBI's National Crime Information Computer. They're on this program to make sure all their missing persons' dental records get registered. In fact, I think some professor at the University of Arizona finagled a federal grant to help them do it."

"I remember reading something about that."

"So in Pima County, it's automatic now. Once people go on the missing-person's roster, their dental charts go into the computer. This Ashley Brittany was reported missing a month ago, although she may have been gone longer than that."

"May have?"

"That's where the oleander comes in. She was part of a federal grant, which they call a federal study, sponsored by the USDA."