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cargo. That way, when the vehicles were impounded, the coyotes were out nothing. They had already been paid their exorbitant smuggling lees, and someone else’s main wound up in the impound lot. “What time did all this happen?” Joanna asked.
    “The carjacking? Four in the afternoon.”
    “Good grief!” Joanna exclaimed. “The carjackers have started doing it in broad daylight now?”
    “That’s the way it looks,” Frank said.
    “How’s the victim doing? What’s his name again?”
    “Waters, Ted Waters. He’s from El Paso. He was on his way to visit his daughter who lives up in Tucson. He was banged up a little, but not that much. Had some cuts and bruises is all. He was treated at the scene and released. We called his daughter. She took him home with her.”
    “Was Mr. Waters able to describe his assailant?”
    “Not really. The first thing the guy did was knock off the old luau’s glasses, so he couldn’t see a thing. Waters said he thought he was young, though. And Anglo.”
    “The border bandits are hiring Anglo operatives these days?”
    “It doesn’t sound too likely,” Frank replied. “But I suppose it could be. We’re asking Border Patrol to bring the car to our impound yard instead of theirs, so Casey can go over it for prints later this morning.”
    Casey Ledford was the Cochise Sheriff’s Department’s latent fingerprint expert. She also ran the county’s newly installed equipment loaded with the AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) software.
    “Let me know if she comes up with something,” Joanna said. “I’ll put the phone on buzz instead of ring. That way, if you call during a meeting, I’ll go outside to answer or, if necessary, I’ll call you back. What’s DPS doing about all this?”
    “After the first couple of carjackings, the Department of Public Safety said they were heeling up patrols on that sector, but so far as I know, that still hasn’t happened,” Frank told her. “We’re the ones who took the 911 call on this latest incident, and our guys were the first ones on the scene. By the time the first DPS car got there, it was all over.”
    “Who is it at DPS who’s in charge of that sector?” Joanna asked.
    “New guy,” Frank answered. “Name’s Hamilton, Captain Richard Hamilton. He’s based up in Tucson.”
    “Do you have his number?”
    “No, but I can look it up,” Frank offered.
    “I’ll do it,” Joanna told him. “But I won’t have time to call him until later on this morning, when we take our break. Anything else going on down there that I should know about?”
    “Just the usual,” Frank said. “A couple domestic violence cases, three DWIs, and another whole slew of UDAs, but that’s about it. The carjacking was the one thing I thought you should be aware of. Everything else is under control.”
    “Right,” Joanna told him with a sigh. “Sounds like business as usual.”

 
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    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 mini-vans, 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 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