10:00 P.M., Monday, April 12
Patagonia, Arizona
By the time Sheriff Renteria got off the phone with Detective Howard and Lieutenant Lattimore, Patty Patton had made a pot of coffee and was frying up a pan of scrambled eggs. It had been a long time since the sheriff had sat at a kitchen table while someone else took charge of the cooking.
All he had to do was hold the traumatized dog, who, hours after the event, continued to shake. Together Sheriff Renteria and Patty had agreed that there was no way either one could walk away and leave Bert, the devastated little Jack Russell, alone at the crime scene. Sheriff Renteria had gone into the house in search of dog gear. In the kitchen he had located a pair of dishes-a water dish and a food dish-as well as a bag of dog food. In a corner of the master bedroom, he found a small dog bed and a few well-chewed toys. All of that had been brought back to Patty’s house in Patagonia.
“I suppose I should turn him over to the pound,” Renteria said.
“Try it,” Patty said. “You’ll take that poor little animal to the pound over my dead body. If someone from the family comes forward to claim him, fine. Otherwise, Bert is mine!”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sheriff Renteria said. They both laughed. It was the laughter that night when there should have been no laughter that took them both completely by surprise.
They ate scrambled eggs, put the dog on a bed in the corner of the room, and then talked for hours. It wasn’t an interview. Patty Patton needed to talk to someone about losing her good friend and coworker, Phil Tewksbury, and about the horror of discovering Oscar Sanchez’s lifeless body. That night Manuel Renteria wasn’t a sheriff so much as he was what Patty needed-a good listener.
“What’s going to happen to Christine?” Patty asked when she started to run down.
“I don’t know. We’ll see what the psych evaluation says. After that, we’ll do what we can to get her the help she needs.”
“Thank you,” Patty said. “I was hoping that’s what you’d say.”
When Sheriff Renteria left Patty’s house to drive home to Tubac, it was almost four in the morning. But he wasn’t tired. He felt better than he had in years. Something had changed for him.
He was relieved to know he hadn’t misread Jose Reyes all that time. He was confident that when ballistics finished with Olga Sanchez’s.38, they’d be able to link her weapon to the Reyes crime scene as well as to Oscar’s murder. Renteria was also convinced that once they were able to track the drugs from Jose’s vehicle and Phil’s garage back to their original source, they would be found to have come from one of Danny Sanchez’s old cronies.
The pilot who had been scheduled to fly Olga Sanchez out of the country had been surprised when cops had shown up instead of his client. He was reportedly spilling his guts, and that was a very good thing. It seemed that raising horses was no longer nearly as lucrative as it had once been. Once Danny was gone, Olga had taken over his contacts and had been operating her own boutique drug-running business ever since. She had been willing to sacrifice a big chunk of product and profit in order to bring down Jose Reyes.
As Sheriff Renteria pulled into his own garage, he looked at his shiny red Dodge Charger and thought about Patty Patton’s shiny red Camaro, both of them almost the same color and both of them of similar vintage. A love of old red cars, scrambled eggs, good coffee, and dogs was a lot for two people to have in common from the get-go.
Yes, maybe he’d need to consider going on a diet and getting back into shape. And if he and Patty ended up getting together? Manuel Renteria was pretty sure Midge would approve.