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three-day bout with DTs. The acronym DT stands for “delirium tremens,” and Brenda was delirious most of the time. Even with IV drips of medication and fluids, the nightmares were horrendous. When the lights in the room were on, they hurt her eyes, but when she turned them off, invisible bugs scrambled all over her body. And she shook constantly. She trembled, as though in the grip of a terrible chill.
    During her stay at Barstow Community Hospital, Brenda Riley wasn’t under arrest; she was under sedation. She wasn’t held incommunicado, but there was no phone in her room. Besides, when she finally started coming back to her senses, she had no idea who she should call. She sure as hell wasn’t going to call her mother or Ali Reynolds.
    Finally, on day four, the doctor came around and pronounced her fit enough to sign release forms. Once he did so, however, there was a deputy waiting outside her room with an arrest warrant in hand along with a pair of handcuffs. Brenda left the hospital in the back of a squad car, once again dressed in what was left of the still-bloodied clothing she’d been wearing when she was taken from her wrecked BMW—her totaled BMW, her former BMW.
    It didn’t matter how the press found out about any of it, but they did. There were reporters stationed outside the sally port to the jail, snapping photos of her as the patrol car with her inside it drove into the jail complex.
    Sometime during that hot, uncomfortable ride from the hospital to the county jail with her hands cuffed firmly behind her back Brenda Riley finally figured out that maybe Ali Reynolds was right after all. Maybe she really did need to do something about her drinking.
    First the cops booked her. They took her mug shot. They took her fingerprints. They dressed her in orange jail coveralls and hauled her before a judge, where her bail was set at five thousand dollars. That was when they took her into a room and told her she could make one phone call. It was the worst phone call of Brenda’s life. She had to call her mother, collect, and ask to be bailed out of jail.
    Yes, it was high time she, Brenda Riley, did something about her drinking.
    Peoria, Arizona
     
    Back in Peoria that Friday, Ali Reynolds knew nothing of Brenda’s misadventures in going home. At noon Ali went back to her dorm room to check her cell for messages. Ali understood that the major purpose of academy training was to give recruits the tools they would need to use once they were sworn officers operating out on the street. Weapons training and physical training were necessary, life-and-death components of that process. The rules of evidence and suspect handling procedures would mean the difference between a conviction or a miscarriage of justice.
    Drills on the parade ground were designed to instill discipline and a sense of professional pride. That sense of professionalism was, in a very real sense, the foundation of the thin blue line. Still, some of the rules rankled. There was a blanket prohibition against carrying cell phones during academy classes, to say nothing of using them. In the first three weeks, instructors had confiscated two telephones and kept them for several days as punishment and also as an object lesson for other members of the class.
    Ali had definitely gotten the message. She had taken to returning to her room for a few minutes at lunchtime to make and take calls. That Friday, there was only one text message awaiting her. B. said that he had landed in Phoenix, picked up his vehicle, was on his way to Sedona, and would see her at dinner. That was all Ali really wanted to know.
    On her way back to class, Ali encountered one of her fellow recruits, Donnatelle Craig, out in the hallway. Donnatelle was an African-American woman, a single mother, who hailed from Yuma. She was standing in front of the door to her room, weeping, and struggling through her tears to insert her room key into the lock.
    Ali stopped behind her. “Donnatelle, is