Authors: J. A. Jance
Cochise County, in southeastern Arizona, is eighty miles wide by eighty miles long. That means my department is responsible for six thousand square miles of territory filled with cattle ranches, mines, ghost towns, hordes of undocumented aliens, and even a genuine city — Sierra Vista. My department is spread far too thin to have any permanent partnership kinds of arrangements. Sometimes I’m thrown in with one or the other of my two chief deputies – homicide detectives, Ernie Carpenter or Jaime Carbajal. Chasing crooks with those guys is as new for me as having a female boss is for them, but to give credit where it’s due, we’re all making it happen.
Since I spend most of my work hours in a world of men, I find myself looking to the women in my life to provide balance. My best friend is also my pastor at Canyon United Methodist Church. No matter what’s going on in her own life, Marianne Maculyea, has always been there for me, and I try to do the same for her. I’ve also come to appreciate one of my newer and more unlikely friends, Angie Kellogg. Angie is an ex-L.A. hooker who ended up in Bisbee while trying to escape the clutches of a former boyfriend who turned out to be my husband’s killer. I helped Angie, and she helped me. We’ve been friends ever since. Another valued personal resource is Eva Lou Brady. Officially, Eva Lou is my former mother-in-law. Unofficially, she’s more of a real mother to me than my own mother is. She’s someone I can go to any time of the night or day with any kind of problem. I wish I could say the same for Eleanor Lathrop Winfield.
I was born and raised in Bisbee and have never lived anywhere else. High Lonesome Ranch, the place where my daughter and I live, is a few miles outside the Bisbee city limits and has been in the Brady family for three generations. My father, D.H. Lathrop, died when I was in high school. Dad started out as a lowly miner in Bisbee’s copper mines. Later he went into law enforcement and eventually was elected sheriff. That’s what he was doing when he was killed in a tragic Sunday afternoon drunk-driving traffic incident.
If I had to have a single role model in life, my father would be it. When D.H. was alive, I guess I always favored him over my mother — he was a lot easier to get along with. And that’s still true today. Dad didn’t live long enough to drive me crazy the way Mom does. Maybe it’s easier to gloss over his faults since I don’t have to look at them every day. What is it they say about distance making the heart grow fonder? Or does it have more to do with familiarity breeding contempt? I don’t know which is more applicable.
Pet peeves? Other than my mother, I can’t really think of any. I always thought I understood Eleanor Lathrop — thought I knew her like a book. Unfortunately, in the last few years, she’s proved me wrong time and again. First my long-lost brother showed up, and it turns out he was so long lost that I didn’t even know he existed. He was born before my parents tied the knot and was adopted out as an infant. Neither of my parents ever mentioned him to me, and that’s something I’m having a tough time forgiving. Then, as if that weren’t enough, after years of being a widow, my mother recently dived back into the sea of holy matrimony – without bothering to give me a single word of advance warning. Is it any wonder Eleanor’s my pet peeve?
Don’t ask me about hobbies. I don’t have any. Between working full time and raising my daughter (Jenny’s twelve going on twenty-one!) I don’t have time. Of course Jenny has hobbies – a pair of dogs named Tigger and Sadie, as well as a horse named Kiddo. Jenny expects to take Kiddo off on the barrel racing circuit one of these days. Inevitably, looking after the menagerie has become as much of a hobby of mine as it is Jenny’s. Still, I’m not complaining. I’m glad we’re able to live out in the country where owning horses and dogs – even porcupine-chasing dogs – isn’t as much of a problem as it would be in town. I’m a reasonably good cook. I’m a capable if under-motivated housekeeper. (If you had spent your childhood and adolescence living in my mother’s obsessively clean house, maybe you’d have much the same attitude.)
As I mentioned before, I’m a widow – something most people my age (early thirties) are not. Andy and I married young, but I expected to be married all my life. I didn’t intend to be thrown back into the so-called dating game. And I haven’t been dating – not exactly and not so far. It’s just that this wild and crazy guy named butch Dixon seems to have set his sights on me. I met Butch when I was growing up in Peoria, Arizona attending a law enforcement-training academy. I keep telling him I need more time to sort myself out before I can become involved in any kind of long-term relationship. The problem is, Butch doesn’t seem inclined to take no for an answer.
After writing my first thriller,
Hour of the Hunter
, when it was time to go back to J.P. Beaumont I found that writing was fun again. That was when my editor suggested that I might consider starting a second series so I’d be able to alternate between sets of characters.
I had written ten books through a middle-aged male detective’s point of view. It seemed to me that it would be fun to write about a woman for a change. Because Beau was a Seattle homicide detective, most of the books took place in and around Seattle. Up to that time, I had spent the bulk of my life living in Arizona. And it seemed like it would be fun to use some of the desert stuff that was percolating in the back of my head.
In many of the books I’d read that featured female sleuths, I had found that the characters seemed to live isolated, solitary lives with maybe a cat and a single dying ficus for company. Most of the women I knew lived complicated lives that involved husbands and children, in-laws and friends. They juggled family responsibilities and jobs along with church and community service. I set out to make my character, Joanna Brady (Yes, yes, I know. Another J. B. name) into someone whose life would reflect that complicated act of juggling.
As a writer, I try not to be too buoyed by good reviews or too devastated by bad ones, but there was one review that came in on the Joanna Brady books that is still engraved on my heart. It came for
Mostly Murder
: “Every woman in America is obviously not a sheriff, but Joanna Brady is every woman.”
Thank you,
Mostly Murder
.
My elderly and increasingly frail parents still lived in Bisbee, Arizona when I wrote this. When the need for a helipad at the local hospital became critical, they, as members of the local Kiwanis Club, began trying to raise money to build one. Hearing of the helipad project, I offered to help by doing a local appearance and book signing. It was soon clear, however, that book signings and bake sales weren’t going to cut it when it came to raising the required $104,000 inside a two-year deadline.
Remembering how one person, Marc Alley of Seattle, had made a $10,000 donation to the YWCA for an appearance as a character in
Breach of Duty
, I offered to do the same thing for the helipad project in the next Joanna Brady book,
Devil’s Claw
. My mother was quick to point out, however, that the economic situation in Bisbee was far different from that of Seattle, so I offered people a spot in the book if they made a $1000 donation to the project. Twelve people signed up, and they’re all in this book, under their own names and doing things that are in keeping with their real lives.
As for the helipad: Phelps Dodge Corporation came through and offered to complete the project for $70,000 less than had been bid originally. And so, if you’re ever in Bisbee, Arizona, and have need of an emergency air-evacuation, you can thank Joanna Brady for being part of the process.
Here’s a glimpse of J.A. Jance’s next thrilling
Novel of Suspense
PARADISE LOST
Available September 2001
in hardcover from William Morrow
It was late on a hot and sunny Friday afternoon as the four-vehicle caravan turned off Highway 186 and took the dirt road that led to Apache Pass. In the lead was a small blue Isuzu Tracker followed by two dusty minivans. A lumbering thirty-five-foot Winnebago Adventurer brought up the rear.
Sitting at the right rear window in the second of the two minivans, twelve-year-old Jennifer Ann Brady was sulking. As far as she was concerned, if you had to bring a motor home complete with a traveling bathroom along on a camping trip, you weren’t really camping. When she and her father, Andrew Roy Brady, had gone camping those few times before he died, they had taken bedrolls and backpacks and hiked into the wilderness. On those occasions, she and her Dad had pitched their tent and put down their bedrolls more than a mile from where they had left his truck. Andy Brady had taught his daughter the finer points of digging a trench for bathroom purposes. Jenny’s new scout leader, Mrs. Lambert, didn’t seem like the type who would be caught dead digging a trench much less using one.
The Tracker was occupied by the two women Mrs. Lambert had introduced as council-paid interns, both of them former Girl Scouts and now History Majors at the University of Arizona. Because the assistant leader, Mrs. Loper was unavailable, they were to help Mrs. Lambert with chaperone duties. In addition, they would be delivering informal lectures on the lifestyle of the Chiricahua Apache as well as on the history and aftermath of Apache Wars in Arizona.
History wasn’t something Jenny Brady particularly liked, and she wondered how much the interns actually knew. What she had noticed about them was that they both wore short shorts, and they looked more like high school than college girls. But then, she reasoned, since they were former Girl Scouts, maybe they weren’t all bad.
Behind the little blue Tracker rolled two jam-packed minivans driven by harried mothers and loaded to the gills with girls and their gear-bedrolls, backpacks, and the scattered crumbs and associated debris left over from their now consumed sack lunches. Once the mothers finished discharging their rowdy passengers, both they and their empty minivans would return to Bisbee. They were due back Monday at noon to retrieve a grubby set of campers after their weekend in the wilderness.
Behind the minivans, Mrs. Lambert and one of her twelve charges lumbered along in the clumsy looking Winnebago. The motor home belonged to a man named Emmet Foxworth, one of Faye Lambert’s husband’s most prominent parishioners. Upon hearing that the U.S. Forest Service had closed all Arizona campgrounds due to extreme fire danger, most youth group leaders had canceled their scheduled camp outs. Faye Lambert wasn’t to be deterred. She simply made alternate arrangements. First she had borrowed the motor home and then, since public lands were closed to camping, she petitioned a local rancher to allow her girls to use his private range land.
Even Faye Lambert had to admit that borrowing the motor home had been nothing short of inspired. She might have taken on the challenge of being a Girl Scout leader, but she had never slept on the ground in her life. Having the motor home there meant she could keep her indoor sleeping record unblemished. Also, since the ranch obviously lacked camping facilities, the motor home would provide both restroom and cooking facilities in addition to the luxury of running water.
Cassie Parks, seated in the middle row of the second minivan, turned around and looked questioningly at Jenny through thick, red-framed glasses. “Who’s your partner?” Cassie asked.
Cassie was a quiet girl with long dark hair in two thick braids. Her home, out near Double Adobe, was even farther from town than the Bradys’ place on High Lonesome Ranch. Cassie’s parents, relative newcomers who hailed from Kansas, had bought what had once been a nationally owned campground that had been allowed to drift into a state of ruin. After a year’s worth of back-breaking labor, Cassie’s parents had completely re-furbished the place, turning it into an independent, moderately priced RV park.
When school had started the previous fall, Cassie had been the new girl in Jenny’s sixth grade class at Lowell School. Now, with school just out, the two girls had a history that included nine months of riding the school bus together. Much of that time they had been on the bus by themselves as they traveled to and from their outlying Sulphur Springs Valley homes. They also belonged to the same scout troop. In the course of that year, the pair of girls had become good friends.
If Jenny had been able to choose her own pup-tent partner for the Memorial Day weekend camp out, Cassie would have been it. But Mrs. Lambert, who didn’t like cliques or pairing off, had decided to mix things up. She had shown up in the church parking lot with a sock filled with six pairs of buttons in six different colors. While the twelve girls had been loading their gear into the minivans, Mrs. Lambert had instructed each one to pull out a single button. To prevent trading around, as soon as a button was drawn, Mrs. Lambert wrote the color down on a clipboard next to each girl’s name. Jenny had already drawn her yellow button when she saw Cassie draw a blue one.
The last girl to arrive in the parking lot and the last to draw her button was Dora Matthews. Glimpsing the yellow button in Dora’s fingers, Jenny’s heart sank. Of all the girls in the troop, Dora Matthews was the one Jenny liked least.
For one thing, Dora’s hair was dirty, and she smelled bad. She was also loud, rude, and obnoxious. She couldn’t have been very smart because she was thirteen years old and was still in a sixth grade classroom where everybody else was twelve. Mrs. Lambert usually brought Dora to troop meetings and was always nice to her even though Dora wasn’t nice back. Two months before school was out, Dora and her mother had returned to Bisbee and moved into the house that had once belonged to Dora’s deceased maternal grandmother, Dolly Pommer. All their lives, the elder Pommers had been movers and shakers in the Presbyterian Church. Out of respect for them, Faye Lambert had done what she could for their newly arrived daughter and granddaughter. That also explained why Dora Matthews was now the newest member in Jenny’s Girl Scout troop.