Desert Heat by J. A. Jance Read Free Book Online Page A

sheriff had slipped into using the past tense where Andy was concerned. “Andrew Brady is a good deputy,” she corrected. “Don’t go writing him off, Walter McFadden. It’s not over ‘til it’s over.”
    The sheriff smiled. “Your daddy, Old D. H. Lathrop, was one damn stubborn hombre in his time. Is that where you get it?”
    Even Joanna couldn’t help but smile in re-turn. “Actually,” she said, “I think I got a double dose. Stubborn streaks are pretty strong on both sides of my family tree.”
    She picked up a ragged People magazine and made some pretense of reading it, but the words wouldn’t jell in her mind. She ended up flipping randomly through the pages without even bothering to read the captions under the pictures. When she finished with that one, she didn’t bother to pick up another. Instead, she stared fixedly at the clock. It seemed to take forever for the minute hand to move from one small black dot to the next.
    Twenty minutes later, a swinging door burst open and the Reverend Marianne Maculyea strode into the room. Marianne was half-Mexican and half-Irish. To everyone’s surprise and in spite of a strict Catholic upbringing, Marianne had turned out to be one hundred percent Methodist. She was a Bisbee girl who had gone away to college in California expecting to major in microbiology. She had returned home several years later as an ordained Methodist minister, sporting braces, Birkenstocks, and a househusband named Jeff Daniels who stayed home, baked his own bread, kept an incredibly clean parsonage, and who never hinted to Marianne that perhaps they ought to share the same last name.
    This unusual arrangement inevitably caused Bisbee’s old-timers to be somewhat suspicious. Scandalized was more like it. Five years after Marianne Maculyea’s return, the braces were gone but the househusband remained. Even though the town as a whole languished in economic woes, the once dwindling First Methodist Church up the canyon in Old Bisbee boasted a healthy, thriving congregation. When the local Kiwanis Club began admitting women, Reverend Marianne Maculyea was one of the first women invited to join.
    “I figured I’d find you here,” Marianne said to Joanna, who had gotten up and hurried to meet the other woman. “Your mother called Jeff, and Jeff called me. What’s the word? What’s going on?”
    “We still haven’t heard anything,” Joanna answered. “Andy isn’t out of surgery yet. Mari, how on earth did you get here so fast?”
“I was already in Tucson,” she said. “I came up to meet with Deena O’Toole to help her plan the memorial service. Jeff caught me at her house out in the foothills just as I was leaving.”
    “Memorial service?” Joanna asked, frowning. “What memorial service? Who died?”
    Marianne shook her head. “I didn’t know you hadn’t heard. I’m sure you remember Lefty O’Toole, don’t you?”
    Wayne O’Toole had graduated from Bisbee High School in the early sixties and had gone on to receive a degree from the University of Arizona before falling prey to the draft. After a stint in Vietnam he had returned to Bisbee to teach only to leave the district in disgrace three years later when he was found to be growing a healthy crop of marijuana in his Mother’s backyard up in Winwood Addition. It was years since Joanna had heard his name.
    “1 didn’t know him,” she said, “not personally. But Andy did. Mr. O’Toole was the line coach the whole time Andy played football, JV and Varsity both. He got fired the year I was a freshman. What happened?”
    “Murder, evidently,” Marianne Maculyea replied. “Someone shot him in the back. He had just gotten out of drug rehab a month or so ago. According to his mother, he was living in Mexico and supposedly getting his life back in order. Lefty’s like me. He was raised a Catholic but left the church years ago. I’ve become friends with Mrs. O’Toole up at the Mule Mountain Rest Home. She asked me to