Life seemed to get back to normal at the Roundhouse Bar and Grill. I hired a new cleaning lady—the sister-in-law of one of my dishwashers. (No, Helena isn’t an illegal, and her English is just fine, thank you very much.)
After jumping through all kinds of hoops, I finally got my Honda sedan back, and wished I hadn’t. The bloody bat had been found in the trunk, almost in plain sight, but the CSIs had torn the whole interior of the car to pieces looking for trace evidence. The car was already old before that happened. When the insurance adjustor looked at it, he shook his head, said it was totaled, and gave me a check that was just enough to buy myself a slightly used Honda Gold Wing.
Shortly after that, a new batch of police officer recruits turned up at the police academy next door. One day a couple of weeks later my life changed forever when a little red-haired ball of fire named Joanna Brady—the newly minted Sheriff of Cochise County—marched into the Roundhouse, stepped up to my bar, and ordered herself a Diet Coke.
While attending the academy, she was also in the process of looking out for some poor guy from Douglas, a guy name Jorge, who was about to be given the shaft.
As soon as I met her, I was done for. She may have been a lot slower to come around, but as far as I was concerned, it was love at first sight. The fact that she went out on a limb to bail Jorge out of a pot of hot water didn’t hurt things, either, at least not for me. Having recently been bailed out of my own pot of hot water, that was one thing about her that I really appreciated.
But what is it they say about once burned, twice shy? I had fallen head over heels once before, and I was determined that if Joanna was the one for me, I was going to take things slow and easy. I could see that she liked me—at least I thought she did—but that was about as far as things went before she finished up her academy training and went back home to Bisbee.
That’s when my life took another unexpected turn. In the middle of December a guy named Clark Ashton showed up at the Roundhouse with an offer to buy me out. He had bought up all of Jeffrey Jones’s properties as well as his permits and plans, and he was eager to get his new hotel building under way as soon as possible. We dickered back and forth for a time, but not that much, not that hard, and not that long, because Ashton wanted to buy, and by then I wanted to sell.
Bisbee’s a little over two hundred miles to the southeast from Peoria. When you’re head over heels in love, two hundred miles is entirely too much distance.
It took time for me to convince Joanna Brady that I was the new man in her life. She wasn’t an easy sell. And I didn’t tell her about someone trying to frame me for murder until much later in our relationship because I didn’t want to spook her. It wasn’t, in fact, until after Charlie called to let me know that Pop O’Malley had passed away in his sleep that I finally got up my nerve and told her the whole story once and for all.
“Tim O’Malley and his friends did all that?” she marveled once I had finished.
I nodded.
“And now I can’t even meet the man long enough tell him thank-you?”
“No, I’m afraid you can’t,” I said, shaking my head. “Sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” she told me, wiping a tear from her eye. “He and your Grandma Hudson must have been quite a pair.”
Thinking of the two of them together made me smile. “You’re right,” I said. “They certainly were.”
Next from J. A. Jance An old woman, a hoarder, is dying of emphysema in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. While cleaning out her house, her daughter, Liza Machett, discovers a fortune in hundred dollar bills hidden in the stacks of books and magazines. Trying to discover the provenance of that money will take Liza on a journey all the way to Joanna Brady’s Cochise County. In the meantime, Joanna has problems of her own when a family friend is found dead in a limestone cavern near Bisbee. But are these seemingly unrelated cases more closely connected than they appear?
Here is a sneak preview of Remains of Innocence
Coming soon
from William Morrow
An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Prologue
LIZA MACHETT’S HEART was filled with equal parts dread and fury as she pulled her beater Nissan into the rutted driveway of her mother’s place, stopped, and then stepped out to stare at the weedy wasteland surrounding the crumbling farmhouse. In the eleven years since Liza had left home, the place that had once been regarded as messy or junky had become a scene of utter desolation.