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afternoon, she was bound to get an instant evaluation. There was comfort in knowing that, Joanna decided as she drifted off to sleep. Eleanor Lathrop had never been one to soft-pedal her opinions. She would take one look at whatever her daughter was wearing and say exactly what she thought.
    Good, bad, or indifferent, at least I’ll know what she thinks.
    “I’m too hot,” Jenny grumbled to her mother in an irritating whine. “Can’t we stop and get something to drink?”
    Joanna Brady was hot, too. Twenty miles earlier, just outside Tombstone, the air-conditioner in her Eagle had finally given up the ghost. For weeks now, she had heard an ominous howl in the AC’s compressor, but she had hoped to nurse it along for a while longer—at least long enough to drive Jenny to camp. Naturally, it had quit working completely on the tip to Mount Lemmon and on what promised to be a record-breaking scorcher of a June day.
    Still, none of that was sufficient reason for Jenny to dispense with the niceties.
    “Is there a please hiding in there somewhere?” Joanna asked. “I didn’t hear one.”
    “Pretty please,” Jenny said.
    Joanna nodded. “All right then,” she agreed. “We’ll stop in Benson for lunch.”
    “At Burger King?”
    “I suppose.”
    As they drove down Benson’s almost-deserted main drag, the thermometer on the bank read 105 degrees. Joanna shook her head, letting the hot wind from the open window blow over her face. If it was already this hot in Benson, what would it be like when they dropped farther down into the valley?
    “Why couldn’t we bring the other car?” jenny had asked when the air-conditioning vents started blowing nothing but hot air.
    Jenny was referring to the county-owned Crown Victoria Sheriff Joanna Brady now drove for work. The Blazer she would have preferred to use as an official vehicle was out of commission after being too near an unexpected blast of dynamite. Since the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department was currently long on Crown Victorias and short on Blazers, Sheriff Joanna Brady was stuck with one of the former.
    “Taking you to camp at Mount Lemmon on my day off hardly qualifies as county business,” Joanna replied. “And since I’m trying to discourage unauthorized private use of official vehicles, that would be setting a pretty poor example.”
    “I know,” Jenny said glumly. “But at least the air conditioner works.”
    “I’m sure I can get this one fixed.”
    “Before you come back to bring me home?”
    “We’ll see.”
    Fifteen minutes later, armed with the remains of two large Cokes and in somewhat better spirits, Joanna and Jenny hooded north on 1-10. The seventy-mile-an-hour speed limit on the interstate chewed up miles so fast that there was still some Coke left by the time they turned off the freeway onto Houghton Road. Using that and Old Spanish Trail, Joanna was aide to make it to the Mount Lemmon Highway without ever having to endure central Tucson’s heavier traffic.
    Had Joanna been willing to get up at four A.M. and drive to Tucson, it would have been possible for Jenny to ride up to ramp on a chartered bus that had left for Camp Whispering Pines from Tucson’s Park Mall at six o’clock that morning. However, knowing that weekend nights often resulted in late night calls, Joanna had opted instead to drive Jenny up to camp on her own. Joanna had used the too-early hour as a handy excuse. Although her rationale might have sounded reasonable enough to anyone else, Joanna herself knew that getting up at the crack of dawn was only part of her reluctance. The truth was that even today she was still having a hard time dealing with the idea of Jenny’s going off to camp on her own lift two whole weeks. After all, with Andy dead, Jennifer Ann Brady was all Joanna had left.
    As soon as the General Hitchcock Highway began climbing tip) out of the desert floor into the Catalina Mountains, the temperature began to fall. Halfway up the mountain, Jenny