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too, if you don’t want the locals laughing at you.
    “The crime scene is northeast of there,” she said. “Some GPS receivers don’t cover those rural roads and areas very well.”
    “I was scheduled to be at a continuing ed conference in Tucson all day today,” Machett said. “It bugs the hell out of me to miss it, but I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
    “If you’re leaving Tucson now, you should arrive in about an hour then,” Joanna said. “That’s about the time I’ll get there as well. Call me. I’ll help guide you in.”
    “Make that three hours,” Machett grumbled. “They can’t expect me to drive around in that god-awful van wherever I go. I had to drive to Tucson in my personal vehicle. That means I’llhave to drive all the way back to Bisbee and pick up the van before I come to the crime scene.”
    George didn’t mind driving around in the M.E.’s van, Joanna thought.
    “What about Bobby?” she asked. “Couldn’t he drive the van over and meet you there?”
    Bobby Short had spent the last two years working as George Winfield’s full-time assistant.
    “Bobby quit,” Machett said, sounding offended. “Just like that. He came into my office last Friday morning. He told me he had two weeks of vacation coming. Said he was taking them both and that he wouldn’t be back. More’s the pity. He wasn’t a trained M.E. tech by any means, but I could have used him for some of the heavy lifting. The one I’d really like to see quit is Madge Livingston. She’s a joke.”
    Bobby Short hadn’t been particularly long in the brains department, but he had been a cheerful, willing worker in a difficult job. Joanna had no idea what Machett had said or done that had provoked Bobby enough to quit his job, but apparently he had. Madge, the M.E. office’s other full-time employee, who served as both secretary and clerk, had been a fixture in the Cochise County administrative staff hierarchy for as long as Joanna could remember. She was an opinionated peroxide blonde who smoked unfiltered Camels out by the morgue’s Dumpsters and rode her Harley to work. George Winfield had gotten along with her just fine, but then George could get along with almost anyone, including Joanna Brady’s difficult mother, Eleanor.
    Joanna understood that Madge wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but she was anything but a joke. If Guy Machett went after her, he would do so at his own peril—sort of like moving a big rock and uncovering a nest of baby rattlesnakes hidden underneath.
    Joanna could have warned him about all that, but she didn’t. “I’ll see you at the crime scene then,” she said. “Whenever you get there.”
    “Why are you going?” Machett asked.
    She understood the implication. What he meant was that, as sheriff, she was far too important to show up at a run-of-the-mill crime scene.
    I do it because it’s part of my job, Joanna thought. “It’s a possible homicide,” she explained.
    “Don’t you trust your detectives to handle it?” he asked.
    “I trust my detectives implicitly,” she returned. “But we do the job together.”
    “That may be fine as far as you’re concerned,” he said. “If you’ve got nothing better to do and don’t mind showing up in person, bully for you. It’s a waste of valuable time and training for me to be expected to make a personal appearance whenever some hick from Cochise County decides to croak out in the middle of nowhere. I fully intend to get myself some decent help to handle situations like this, and it won’t be some untrained gofer, either.”
    For years now, Joanna’s department’s hiring practices had suffered under the county’s notorious cost-containment policy of NNP—no new personnel—and it was still very much in effect. It was only through using one of Frank Montoya’s creative budgetary sleights of hand that she’d been able to add on Natalie Wilson as her new Animal Control officer. NNP allowed for replacement of lost employees.