Eleanor Lathrop, Joanna's mother, had done her utmost to inculcate Joanna with the same kinds of repression and overweening modesty in which she herself had been raised. In Eleanor's scheme of things, walking naked through her own house-even a good mile from the nearest neighbor-would have been utterly unthinkable. But Eleanor was out of town this week, on a belated Alaskan honeymoon cruise with George Winfield, Cochise County 's new medical examiner and Eleanor's new husband of some three months' standing. No, if Joanna happened to walk around naked in her own home, who was going to give a damn? Certainly not the two dogs.

With that Joanna flung open the bedroom door-closed out of habit-and strode through the living room and kitchen and on into the enclosed back porch that doubled as a laundry room entryway. There she pulled the clothes out of the dryer and put them on. Then she went back to the kitchen and switched on Jenny's boom-box CD player. Patsy Cline's distinctive voice came wafting through the speakers in her trademark song of falling to pieces, a roadmap for how not to move beyond the loss of a love.

The CD was new, a birthday gift from Butch Dixon, a friend of Joanna's from up near Phoenix. It was a never-before released recording of a concert Patsy Cline had given shortly before the plane crash that had taken her life. Listening to Patsy sing from across all those years was like hearing from Andy as well. Patsy Cline was dead and yet, through the magic of her work, she lived on in much the game way Andy was still a part of High Lonesome Ranch and of Jenny's and Joanna's lives as well.

Joanna had been taken aback by her strong emotional reaction to the music. She had been surprised. To her dismay, Butch Dixon hadn't been surprised in the least.

With the music still swirling around her, Joanna opened the refrigerator door and stared at the contents, wondering what to fix for dinner. It came to her all at once. Closing the refrigerator door and opening the cupboard instead, she plucked out the box of Malt-o-Meal. She had always wondered what it would be like to have hot cereal for dinner.

That night, with no one there to criticize or complain-with no one to consider but herself-Joanna Brady found out. She cooked the cereal in the microwave, covered it with milk and brown sugar, and then ate it standing there by the counter. Eleanor would have been aghast.

For the first time, a fragile thought slipped across Joanna's consciousness-flitting briefly through her mind on gossamer butterfly wings-that maybe living alone wasn't all bad.

"So what went on overnight?"

Morning briefing time the next day found Sheriff Joanna Brady closeted in her office at the Cochise County Justice Complex with her two chief deputies, Dick Voland and Frank Montoya. For a change, the burly Voland and the slight and balding Montoya weren't at each other's throats.

Montoya, deputy for administration and a former city marshal from Willcox, had been one of Joanna's several opponents in her race for sheriff. Voland, chief for operations, had been chief deputy in the previous administration and had actively campaigned for another losing candidate. Joanna had confounded friends and critics alike by appointing the two of them to serve as her chief deputies. Almost a year into her administration, their volatile oil-and-water combination was working. The constant bickering didn't always make for the most pleasant office environment, but Joanna valued the undiluted candor that resulted from the two men's natural rivalry.

"Let's see," Voland said, consulting his stack of reports. "Hot time up in the northwest sector last night. First there was a report of a naked female hitchhiker seen on Interstate 10 in Texas Canyon. Not surprisingly, she was long gone before a deputy managed to make it to the scene."

"Sounds to me like some long-haul trucker got lucky," Montoya said.

"That's what I thought, too," Voland agreed. "Then, overnight, somebody took out Alton Hosfield's main pump and two head of cattle over on the Triple C."

CCC Ranch, referred to locally as either the Triple C or the Calloway Cattle Company, was an old-time cattle ranch that straddled the San Pedro River in northwestern Cochise County. The family-owned spread had historic roots that dated all the way back to Arizona 's territorial days. Alton Hosfield, the fifty-three-year-old current owner, was waging a lonely war against what he called "enviro-nuts" and the federal government to keep his family's holdings all in one piece. Meanwhile, neighboring ranches had been split up into smaller parcels. Those breakups had caused a steady influx of what Alton Hosfield regarded as "Californicating riffraff." Most of the unwelcome newcomers were people the rancher could barely tolerate.

"Does that mean the Cascabel range war is heating up all over again?" Joanna asked.

Voland nodded. "It could be all those rattlers are getting ready to have another go at it."

In high school Spanish classes Joanna had been taught that cascabel meant "little bell." But in Latin American Spanish it meant "rattlesnake." No doubt Voland wanted to impress Frank Montoya with his own knowledge of local Hispanic place-names.

"Deputy Sandoval checked to see if maybe Hosfield's cattle had broken into Martin Scorsby's pecan orchard again," Voland continued. "As far as he could tell, the fence was intact, and both rattle were found on the Triple C side of the property line."

Scorsby, Hosfield's nearest neighbor, was a former California insurance executive who had planted a forty-acre pecan orchard on prime river bottom pastureland Alton Hosfield had coveted for his own. During an estate sale, he had attempted to buy the parcel from the previous owner's widow. Years later, Hosfield still read collusion into the fact that Scorsby's offer had been accepted by the former owner's son-yet another Californian-in place of his. In addition, Joanna knew that on several previous occasions, when Triple C cattle had breached the fence and strayed into Scorsby's peccan orchard, Hosfield had been less than prompt in retrieving them.

"It's not just that the cattle are dead," Voland added ominously. "It's how they got that way. This isn't in the report, because I just talked to deputy Sandoval about it a few minutes ago. He managed to recover a bullet from one of the dead cattle. He said he's never seen anything like it. The slug must be two inches long."

"Two inches!" Joanna repeated. "That sounds like it came out of a cannon rather than a rifle."

"Sniper rifle," Frank Montoya said at once. "Probably one of those fifty-caliber jobs."

Both Joanna and Voland turned on the Chief Deputy for Administration. "You know something about these guns?" the sheriff asked.

"A little," Montoya said. "There's a guy over in Pomerene named Clyde Philips. He's a registered gun dealer who operates out of his back room or garage or some such thing. He called me a couple of months ago wanting to set up an appointment for his salesman to come give us the whole sniper-rifle dog and pony show. He said that since the bad guys might have access to these things, our Emergency Response Team should, too. He sent me some info. After I looked it over, I called him back and told him thanks, but no thanks. Maybe the crooks can afford to buy guns at twenty-five hundred to seven thousand bucks apiece, but at that price they're way outside what the department can pay.”

"What can fifty-calibers do?" Joanna asked.

"Depends on who you ask. After I talked to Philips and looked over the info he sent me, I got on the Internet and researched it a little further. Fifty-calibers were first used as Browning automatic rifles long ago. Remember those, Dick? Then the military in Vietnam tried a sniper version. The farthest-known sniper kill is one point four-two miles, give or take. Not bad for what the industry calls a 'sporting rifle.' "