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Seconds after Frank walked off as well, Butch showed up and opened the car door. Joa
“Come on,” he said. “I’m taking you home.”
“To your house?”
“Where else? I certainly can’t leave you here.”
“Shouldn’t I go inside and get a nightgown for tonight and something to change into tomorrow morning?”
“Sweetie pie,” he said. “The whole time you’ve been gone, I’ve been inside your house and looking over the damage. What you’re wearing is what you’ve got.”
“There’s nothing left?”
“Nothing salvageable. But there is some good news.”
“What’s that?”
“I talked to Dr. Ross a few minutes ago. She says she thinks both dogs are going to pull through. Come on.”
Joa
“Forget it,” he said. “They got what they came for. Let them have it.”
“Wait,” she said. “What about Kristin? I’m sure she was pla
Butch nodded. “Fortunately for Kristin, all her stuff was in Je
An hour later, with a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and single stiff Scotch under her belt, Joa
“This isn’t a sleep-over,” Butch returned. “You’re a refugee.”
“With all this going on, maybe we should postpone the wedding,” Joa
“No.”
“The honeymoon, then. What if we took it later?”
“No. If anything, we need the honeymoon more than ever.”
“But, Butch. How are we going to get the mess cleaned up? It’s so much-”
“Don’t you mean how am I going to clean up the mess? Well, you don’t have to. As the guy on that ”Red Green Show“ says, we’re all in this together. I’ve talked to a whole lot of people tonight. When Frank Montoya came back and shut down the crime-scene investigation, people were ready to go to work cleaning up right then.
“I sent everyone home tonight, but they’ll be back first thing in the morning. Jeff and Maria
“Don’t want to do what?”
“Live there. I’ve been reading articles in newspapers and magazines about a contractor from Tucson, a guy named Quentin Branch, who specializes in building rammed-earth houses. The house is actually constructed so the walls are made of layers of compacted dirt. A lot of time, whatever soil needs to be moved from the site in order to make way for construction can be worked into the construction of the house itself rather than having to be hauled off in dump trucks. Due to the miracle of natural insulation, rammed-earth houses are warm in the winter and cool in the summer. If we did that and built from scratch, we’d be starting married life fresh in a place that didn’t belong to somebody else first, either to you and Andy, or to me. It could be our place, Joa
“It sounds like you’ve been giving this idea a lot of thought,” she said quietly.
“I have,” Butch admitted. “Long before what happened today. I’ve been worried about how all our furniture was going to fit into one place. How we’d all survive with that one bathroom and still be friends, to say nothing of lovers.”
“You were worried about that?” Joa
“Not all of it,” Butch said. “Jim Bob and I were talking about how to repair the damage to the dining room table and the buffet. But going back to what we were talking about-what would you think of the idea of building a new place?”
“I guess we could think about it,” Joa
At nine o’clock the next morning, feeling grubby in her clothing from the previous day, Sheriff Joa
“Hi, guys,” Joa
“Sorry I’m late,” she a
“Good enough,” Frank said. “How soon?”
“As soon as you can get to Saint David after we finish up here. So where do we stand?”
“I already told Jaime about the computer thing,” Ernie Carpenter offered. “About Sandra Ridder’s work record being erased out at Fort Huachuca. He has some thoughts on the subject.”
All eyes in the room focused on Jaime Carbajal. “Which are?” Joa
“I started to tell you about this last night. When I was talking to Catherine Yates yesterday afternoon, she finally admitted that she hadn’t been entirely truthful when she spoke to us earlier. She told us she knew weeks earlier that Sandra was due to be released from prison. It seems somebody from the Justice Department came to Sandra several months ago. Whoever it was told her that somebody had finally gotten around to investigating allegations of security leaks that had occurred at Fort Huachuca back in the early nineties.
“He told her that investigators had somehow tied her into a plot that involved the lifting of top-secret command and control codes from STRATCOM for delivery to the Iraqis. The agent from the Justice Department offered her a sweet deal-an early out, full immunity from prosecution, and witness-protection status if she would tell them everything she knew. Sandra Ridder was nobody’s dummy. According to Catherine, she agreed to the deal and then upped the ante by offering to deliver an actual diskette containing encrypted codes in exchange for an extra cash bonus.”
“Any idea which agent made the deal?”
Jaime Carbajal shook his head. “None. My guess is that something like this is going to be damned difficult to trace from this end or from the bottom up.”
Joa