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trip to Texas. He looked across the room to the corner of his office. His cameras, camera bags and other equipment, as well as duffel bags and backpacks, still lay in a heap. He had been home a month, but he hadn’t been able to muster the enthusiasm or the energy to even sort them. All he had done was unpack his dirty clothes.
    He was taking a break. And he needed it, he had to admit. He had shot some priceless photographs during the three-month tour from which he had just returned: a month in Afghanistan, a month in Iraq and a month in Israel. The book he was putting together would be the best he had done yet. But the experience had drained him physically, mentally and emotionally. And the last leg of it had damn near killed him. A suicide bomber had detonated himself inside a bus stopped in front of a café in Haifa where Dalton happened to be eating lunch. His custom of sitting in the back of the room had saved him that day from what could have been a fatal result.
    As an American photojournalist documenting controversial people, places and events in the Middle East, his MO had been to go about his business as inconspicuously as possible. Being beheaded with a dull knife held even less appeal than being blown to bits in a café. Through the years, curiosity and a thirst for adventure had led him into any number of hair-raising incidents. But the one in Haifa had been enough of a close call to make him decide to wait a spell to allow himself to tame the nightmares before tackling another of the world’s hellholes.
    He needed to do something simple, he had told himself, and had chosen to paint his office. He did not need to make a trip to Texas to visit his family. By any stretch of the imagination, that would be anything but simple.

Chapter 3
    Well after noon, Joanna put in an appearance at her downtown shop. She took customers in the beauty salon only one day a week nowadays, and those were her friends and patrons of long standing. She and her mom shared a chair. Joanna did still attend schools to stay up with the latest styling trends and products. Thankfully, she had no difficulty keeping hairdressers to man the other three chairs in the salon.
    After greeting everyone, deflecting conversation about Lane Cherry’s accident and parrying an attempt by Judy Harrison to arrange an introduction to a newly divorced cousin in Denver City, Joanna finally made it to her office. It was nothing more than a desk tucked behind a half wall in the back of the long room that was the retail store, and it offered no privacy. To keep her mother from snooping, Joanna was cautious with what she left in plain sight or even in desk drawers and had password protected everything on her computer.
    She had no sooner sat down than a ping came from the chime mounted on the wall over the plateglass front door, the signal that a customer had entered the store. She stood up, looked over the half wall and saw Bert Marshall, Hatlow’s elementary school custodian. “Hi, Bert. Be right with you.”
    “Hi, Joanna,” he said from across the room. “Need a couple o’ gallons of that high-powered disinfectant floor wash.”
    Joanna’s Salon & Supplies was Hatlow’s only janitorial supply. For that matter, it was the only one in half a dozen surrounding counties except for Lubbock. After Joanna bought the beauty salon and the building that housed it ten years ago, she had more space than she needed for the salon. She hired a carpenter to build a wall between the salon and what was now the store area and added beauty products and fragrances.
    After the construction work was completed, while cleaning up the disorder, she stumbled across another need—this one for easily available janitorial supplies. On a hunch, she converted one entire wall of the beauty supply store to a display of commercial cleaning products and rental cleaning equipment.
    Now the janitorial products produced as much income as the beauty supplies. Customers drove from other small