Its arrival in town had caused quite a stir. Popular opinion It the time held that the Dearest Departures plan for “discount dying” spelled the end of the line for people like Norm Higgins and other longtime members of family-owned funeral and mortuary businesses. Dearest Departures was supposed to do for the mom-and-pop mortuary business what McDonald’s had done for hamburgers-standardize things and lower costs over all. People predicted that Higgins Funeral Capel and Mortuary would soon disappear off the face of the earth.

It turned out, however, that Dearest Departures was far more of a marketing concept than it was a going concern. It was actually a get-rich-quick pyramid scheme couched in terms that sounded far better than the principals were prepared to deliver.

Franchisees were promised a complete business plan-building, state-of-the-art equipment, and in-depth training for one set fee. A slippery company-hired contractor had come to town with an itinerant crew and a motor-home-based workshop. Almost overnight the crew successfully remodeled the aging storefront into a reasonable facsimile of a mortuary. Unfortunately, corporate training of franchisees and their employees didn’t measure up to the contractor’s ability to transform space. The Dearest Departures “store” in Bisbee, one of the first in the country, had opened with a cadre of people who had barely managed to pass the state licensing requirements and who really didn’t know what they were doing.

In the Bisbee franchise, trouble showed up almost as soon as the doors opened in the form of several public relations disasters. The first Dearest Departures funeral was that longtime Bisbeeite Ralph Calloway. Due to an unfortunate employee screw-up during the embalming procedure Ralph’s send off had a distinctly unpleasant odor. Days later, two bodies were misfiled, with unfortunate and irrevocable results. Miss Maybelle Cashman was mistakenly cremated while Doris Bellweather’s body showed up in the coffin at what was supposed to be the Cashman viewing.

Dearest Departures had been open for less than two weeks, but the Cashman/Bellweather episode proved to be the local franchise’s undoing. The well-organized business plan called for a considerable cash flow based on relatively low-cost but prepaid services. Once people stopped prepaying and took their business back to Norm Higgins, it was only a matter of time. Norm’s costs may have sounded like the high-priced spread, but at least people had some confidence that Norm and his boys would stick the right body in the right box.

One month later, Dearest Departures was dead in the water. The owners locked the place up and abandoned town in the middle of the night, leaving behind a bunch of bad debts and a few very unhappy prepaid and unburied customers. Less than a year later, the parent company was out of business as well. When the building in Bisbee, along with all existing equipment, was about to be auctioned off for back taxes, some bright-eyed public servant came up with a better idea. The Dearest Departures facility in Tombstone Canyon was transformed, with a modest capital outlay, to house the offices of the newly appointed Cochise County Coroner, Dr. George Winfield.

Doc Winfield had come to Bisbee by almost as circuitous a path as the building he now occupied. A trained pathologist specializing in oncology with a practice in Minneapolis, he had lost heart when first his wife and, soon after, his only daughter had succumbed to cervical cancer. No longer willing to fight the good fight, he had given up on cancer and returned to school to study forensic pathology. Winfield had graduated with that specialty at a time when most of his original medical school class was thinking of retirement. Two months later, he had answered a blind ad in the Wall Street Journal. He arrived in Bisbee as a permanent snowbird in time to oversee the remodeling of the new facility.

As careful with public money as he was with his own, George Winfield had changed only that which was necessary. The walls of his office were still draped with lush burgundy velvet curtains that, as he said, still had several good years of use left in them. That explained why, when Joanna Brady pulled tip to his office, she parked her Blazer in a spot on reserved for Dearest Departures hearses.

“Why, Sheriff Brady,” Winfield said easily, rising in true gentlemanly fashion when Joanna knocked, unannounced, at his open door. “What can I do for you?”

“Ernie Carpenter’s been called out of town because of…” she began.

George Winfield nodded knowingly. “Dick Voland ready told me. Because of the Reed Carruthers case,” he finished.

“Right. I was in the neighborhood, though,” Joanna said. “I thought I’d come by and see if there was anything important enough for me to pass along to Ernie tonight.”

“Like I told Dick, I don’t have anything in writing yet,” George answered. “At this point I’m limited to one half-time clerk-typist. She only works mornings, regardless of how many bodies turn up in the morgue. I can verbal you some preliminary results, but that’s about it. You can’t have it black and white officialese until around noon tomorrow.”

“I’d appreciate anything you could tell us. So would my public information officer,” Joanna told him.

Winfield leaned back in his chair. “Amos Buckwalter was dead before the fire ever started,” he replied without further preamble. “The lung damage I saw would be consistent with what one would expect from a long term smoker, but not am someone dying of smoke inhalation.”

“If the fire and smoke didn’t kill him, what did?” Joanna asked.

“He died of a single puncture wound.”

“A puncture wound? Where?”

“Right here,” Winfield said. He turned slightly in his chair and pointed to a spot just over the top of his stiffly arched shirt collar. “It’s in this little indentation. There were so two matching abrasions on the outside of his neck-one either side. If you’re wondering about a murder weapon, I’d say you’d do well to go looking for a pitchfork.”

“A pitchfork!” Joanna exclaimed, remembering what be Noonan had said about stumbling over a pitchfork when she found Hal Morgan lying in the burning barn. “You’re sure that’s what it was?”

Winfield nodded. “My older brother and I spent lots of summers working on our uncle’s farm back in Minnesota,” said. “We hated each other’s guts. Still do, as a matter of fact. Believe me, I know the receiving end of a pitchfork when I see one. Incidentally, I have the scars to prove it, right here on my upper thigh. I could demonstrate same, if you’d like.”

George Winfield was sixty if he was a day, and Joanna recognized the remark as nothing more than gentle teasing. “No, thanks,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just take your word for it. Now, if you could give me something little more official-sounding than that, I’d appreciate it. I need the kind of verbiage I can pass along to Frank Montoya. He’s the guy the reporters are calling for details on this case. In dealing with the media I’m sure he’d benefit from having something more concrete and more anatomically correct than pointing to the back of his head or giving the newsies a lecture on the inherent dangers of pitchforks.”

“Happy to oblige,” George said.

A few minutes later, armed with the needed information, Joanna stood up to leave. “By the way,” George said as she started for the doorway. “What do you hear from Ellie?”

Ellie?

Joanna stopped in mid-stride. It had been years since she had heard anyone refer to her mother by the pet name only her father had used.

“Ellie?” she repeated stupidly. “You mean my mother?”

Winfield looked confused. “I hope I’m not mistaken,” he said. “I understood Ellie to say that you were her daughter.”

“Eleanor Lathrop is my mother,” Joanna managed.

Nodding and looking relieved, George Winfield smiled. “And she was going to D.C. to see her son.”