Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(82)
Joanna knew there were plenty of biological mothers who had stepped into this kind of child-care role when necessary, but a stepmother? That seemed downright remarkable. Anne Coyle had to be someone special.
As for the wage disparity between office clerks and deputies? Unfortunately, Joanna knew that was all too true, and she found herself looking at Sunny with new eyes. She was young but dependable, trustworthy, and physically fit. In the last several years, she had earned an A.A. degree from Cochise College by taking classes both at night and online. She was smart, eager, and motivated, and it wasn’t as though she was blind to the inherent risks of being a cop. In addition, she was a hometown girl. If the department paid her way through the academy, it wasn’t as though Sunny would immediately take off for parts unknown.
“You really want to do this?” Joanna asked.
Sunny nodded. “I do,” she said.
With Armando destined to be confined to desk duty for the immediate future and with another deputy—let’s face it, with Deputy Raymond—moving into investigations, Sunny’s offer was a godsend.
“Okay,” Joanna said, standing up and reaching across her desk to shake Sunny’s hand. “Deputy it is. I’ll call the academy and see how soon they have an opening.”
After Sunny left, Joanna didn’t let any grass grow. She immediately called the Arizona Police Academy, where they just happened to have a class with an opening starting after the first of the year, on Tuesday, January 2. Joanna reserved a spot in Sunny’s name and asked for enrollment forms to be forwarded directly to Sunny.
Once that was done, she sat for a moment or two, thinking. Now that she had inadvertently tricked herself into making up her mind on the upcoming detective vacancy, there was no reason to stall any longer. She picked up the phone and called Garth. He sounded surprised to hear from her.
“Are you enjoying your day off?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m helping Gran put up the Christmas tree, but if you need me to come in . . .”
“Actually, I’d like you to do just that if you don’t mind. I want to officially introduce you to your new colleagues.”
“My new colleagues?” Garth echoed uncertainly.
“Yes, as of January first, when Ernie Carpenter retires, you’ll be the newest member of my investigations unit.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“I’ll be there in an hour or so,” Garth said, “maybe a little less.”
When Joanna hung up the phone after that call, she realized that for the space of at least fifteen minutes she’d managed to keep from thinking and worrying about Jenny and Beth and about Butch driving north on far too little sleep. For right now not worrying was a good thing. With a sigh, she, like Jaime and Ernie, turned to do battle with that day’s worth of paperwork.
Chapter 38
A campus cop arrived at Conover Hall at nine forty-five to drive Jenny and Beth to the admin building for their individual exams, which were overseen by a secretary in a conference room next door to the president’s office. As expected, the sociology test was easy. Jenny breezed through it and finished up twenty minutes early. Beth worked on hers right up until time was called.
When they left the building together, another cop was on site, waiting to take them back to the dorm. Neither of them objected. The fact that someone had tried to murder Jenny the night before wasn’t lost on either of them, and they both felt as though they were walking around with targets on their backs.
As they approached the dorm lobby entrance, Jenny felt a sense of relief, but then the door opened and she walked into a reality-based version of Family Feud. Beth stopped short just inside the door. “Mom? Dad?” she said uncertainly. “What are you doing here?”
“We came to get you,” Madeline Rankin stated flatly. “I don’t care what your grandmother wanted or what happens to her money. It can go straight down the drain and good riddance! We are pulling you out of this evil place and taking you home.”
“You can’t do that,” Beth declared. “I’m not quitting school, and I’m not leaving.”
“Yes you are,” Madeline screeched back, waving a brown envelope in her daughter’s face. “We’ve seen the pictures, Beth. This place is Sodom and Gomorrah, and it’s turned you into a godless Jezebel. You are not staying here a moment longer. Not one moment!”
Jenny watched Beth’s face turn white. Meanwhile the sound of raised voices was attracting a lot of undue attention around the lobby, including that of the dorm’s on-duty resident assistant.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” she interjected, coming around from behind the reception desk. “There are people here who are trying to study. Please keep it down.”
“Keep it down my eye!” Madeline returned furiously. “What are they studying anyway, pornography? This place isn’t a dormitory, it’s a whorehouse.”
“Ma’am, please,” the RA insisted, “if you don’t calm down, I’ll be forced to summon a campus police officer.”
“You do that,” Madeline taunted her. “Go ahead. I can hardly wait to show him what people have been up to around here. They’ve defiled my daughter and turned her into a filthy piece of garbage.”