by J. A. Jance
“Hey,” she shouted, waving. “Over here.”
Carol obviously heard her, because she waved back, but she didn’t understand what Joanna wanted. When Carol made no move in her direction, Joanna loped off across the parking lot. Her PT shinsplints yelped in protest. At one point, she slipped on loose gravel and almost fell. No matter what they show on those television commercials, she said to herself, running in high heels isn’t easy.
“What’s the matter?” Carol asked, as Joanna made it to within hearing distance.
“Do these guys have an alternate light source with them?” she asked.
“Sure. Why?”
“Because someone’s been in my room,” Joanna answered.
“Is anything missing?”
“Yes. An envelope full of press clippings on the Serena Grijalva case. And a pair of panties from my laundry bag.”
“Panties?” Carol repeated. “You’re sure?”
“Believe me. I’m sure.”
“Bring the ALS and come on,” Carol said over her shoulder to the technicians as she and Joanna started back across the parking lot. “Can you describe the missing pair?” she asked.
Fighting back an overwhelming sense of violation, at first all Joanna could do was nod.
“What’s wrong?” Carol asked, frowning worriedly in the face of Joanna’s obvious distress. “Is there something more that you haven’t told me?”
Joanna swallowed hard. “I can describe the panties exactly,” she said. “They’re apricot-colored nylon with a cotton crotch and with a column of cutout lace flowers appliquéd down the right-hand side.”
After saying that, Joanna gave up trying to fight back her tears.
“I’m not sure I could describe any of my own underwear with that much detail,” Carol said, more to fill up the silence and to offer some comfort than because the words made sense.
Joanna nodded, sniffling. “I’m sure I shouldn’t be so upset. They are only panties, after all, but they were a present from Andy last Christmas, the last Christmas present he ever gave me. They’re part of a matching set—bra, full slip, and panties. You can’t buy fancy underwear like that anywhere in Bisbee these days. Andy ordered them from a Victoria’s Secret catalog and had them shipped to the office so I’d be surprised. He’s been dead for months now, but they’re still sending him catalogs. They show up on my desk in the mail.”
“I’m sorry,” Carol said.
Joanna nodded. “Thanks,” she said, sniffing and wiping the tears from her face.
By then they had reached the breezeway. Carol waited while Joanna unlocked the door to the room. “Where were they again?”
“The panties? In the laundry bag hanging on the back of the bathroom door.”
“And the envelope?”
“I’m not absolutely sure, but I think I left it in the desk drawer.”
By then the technician was bringing the ALS into the room. “Where do you want it?” he asked. Carol looked questioningly at Joanna, and she was the one who answered.
“Over there by the closet.”
Once plugged in, it took a few moments for the equipment to reach operating temperature. Then, with the lights off, the technician, crawling on his hands and knees, aimed the wand toward the floor.
“There you go,” he breathed as a ghostlike footprint appeared on the carpeting. “There’s one, and here’s another. Looks to me like it’s the same as in the other room,” he added. “The guy came into the room through the door in the closet. Some of these prints have been disturbed, though. Could be he left the same way.”
“No, that was me,” Joanna said. “I was crawling around trying to get a look at the access door in the closet. I wanted to see it for myself.”
Carol nodded. “All right, guys. I want photos of the footprints, and I want the entire room searched for fingerprints as well.”
“Will do,” the technician replied.
Carol took Joanna by the arm. “Come on outside,” she said. “We’ll go out there to talk and leave the techs to do their jobs.”
Once they were standing in the breezeway, Joanna realized the sun was going down. That meant it was long past five o’clock. The shock of knowing someone had broken into her room left her in no condition to face the emotional minefield of that Thanksgiving dinner right then. Her guests would simply have to go on without her.
“What does it all mean?” Joanna asked.
“I don’t honestly know,” Carol replied.
“Do you think he planned on killing me, too?”
“That’s possible. Actually, now that you mention it, it’s probably even likely.”
“But why?” Joanna asked.
For a while both women were silent. Carol was the first to speak. “Supposing Dave Thompson did kill Serena Grijalva,” she suggested grudgingly. “Since the envelope with the press clippings in it is the only thing missing from your room, we have to look at that possibility. And let’s suppose further that he killed her with the intention of blaming the murder on someone else.”
“Jorge,” Joanna supplied.
“Right. Fair enough,” Carol continued, “but why try to kill Leann? Getting rid of you I can understand. After all, Dave had committed the perfect murder. Jorge was about to take the rap for it. Then you show up from Bisbee and start asking questions—the kinds of troublesome questions that could mess up his whole neat little game plan. So if I were Dave, I’d go after you for sure. But why Leann?”
“And where are the panties and the envelope?” Joanna added. “Why did he take them in the first place, and why can’t we find them now?”
Carol nodded thoughtfully. “There’s no way to tell what the timing is exactly, but it doesn’t seem like he had a lot of time to get rid of them between the time Leann fell out of the truck and the time officers found it abandoned a few blocks away. So maybe that’s where we should look—around the lot where we found the Toyota. Maybe he tossed them in a Dumpster somewhere over there. You’re welcome to come along if you like. And we should also see if we can find out how he got back to the campus from there. He must have walked.”
With her mind made up, Carol headed off toward her Taurus, striding purposefully along on her usual three-inch heels. A few steps into the parking lot, she stopped cold. “Wait a minute. You’re supposed to be eating dinner with your family right now. And you’re not exactly dressed to go rummaging through garbage cans.”
“Neither are you,” Joanna retorted. “If you can go Dumpster dipping the way you’re dressed, so can I. Not only that, for some strange reason, I’m not the least bit hungry right now. Maybe you could get someone from the department to call the hotel and let people know that I’m not going to make it.”
“Sure thing,” Carol said.
They started at the flooring warehouse, which was located in a small industrial complex along with five or six other businesses—all of them shut down for the holiday. Using flashlights from Carol’s glove compartment, they searched all the Dumpsters in the area. All of them had trash in them, which meant there had been no pickup that day. But there were no panties anywhere to be found. In one Dumpster, they came across several manila envelopes, but none of them were Juanita Grijalva’s.
In the next hour and a half, they went south and searched through three more industrial neighborhoods with similar results.
“I give up,” Carol said finally as she banged shut the heavy metal lid on the last Dumpster. “The running track’s right here, so if we were going to find them, it seems to me we would have by now. What say we clean up and see about having some dinner.”
Joanna looked bedraggled, but she was feeling better. The activity had done her a world of good. The idea that Dave Thompson might have tried to kill her had rocked her, but at least she wasn’t sitting around doing nothing. “God helps those who help themselves.” That was something else Jim Bob was always saying. Tracking through dusty back parking lots and wrestling with Dumpsters meant Joanna Brady was helping herself.
“Now that you mention it, I’m hungry too, but I still don’t want to go back to the hotel while there’s a chance everyone will still be down in the dining room,” Joanna said. “Not with a run in my pantyhose and smelling like this. My mother would pitch a fit.”
“Who said anything about a hotel?” Carol Strong responded. “Besides, if you’re game, we still have some work to do.”
She drove straight to the Roundhouse Bar and Grill, where the parking lot was jammed full of cars.
“What are we going to do?” Joanna asked. “Talk to Butch Dixon?”
“I don’t know about you,” Carol Strong replied, “but my first order of business is to wash my hands. Second is get something to eat. I’m starved. I’ve only been here a couple of times, but some of the guys down at the department were saying this place puts on a real Thanksgiving spread.”
At seven o’clock, the bar wasn’t very full, but the entryway alcove that led into the dining room was packed full of people, most of them with kids, waiting for seating in the restaurant. “Name please,” a young woman asked.
Joanna looked at the hostess, looked away, and then did a double take. The young woman was dressed in a Puritan costume, complete with a long skirt and a ruffled white apron.
“It’ll be about forty-five minutes for a table in the dining room, or you can seat yourself in the bar.”
“My aching feet say the bar will be fine,” Carol Strong said. “But first I need to use the RR.”
When they walked into the bar a few minutes later, Butch Dixon was standing behind the bar, gazing up at an overhead TV monitor with rapt attention. Only when they got closer did Joanna realize that he, too, was dressed in a Puritan costume, complete with breeches, socks, and buckled shoes.
As they came toward him, he glanced away from the set. “Oh, oh,” he said. “My two favorite female gendarmes. You haven’t come to arrest me, have you?”
“Arrest you?” Carol Strong returned. “What for?”
“Video piracy,” he answered with a grin. “I know it says for home use only, but it turns out this is my home. I live upstairs, so that makes this my living room. We have a few important customs around here. One is that on Thanksgiving, the wait staff, me included, dresses up. They can choose between Puritan or Indian, it’s up to them. And in the bar we have continuous screenings of my favorite Thanksgiving movie—Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. It’s just coming up on the best part, where John Candy sets the car on fire. What’ll you have to drink, Diet Pepsi?” he asked, looking at Joanna.
She nodded.
“I’ll have one of those, too,” Carol Strong said. “Wait a minute. She didn’t give us menus. I’d better go get one.”
“No need. Everybody gets the same thing today,” Butch Dixon said. “Turkey, dressing, and all the rest.” He went down the bar and returned with the two soft drinks.
“How much does it cost?” Carol asked.
Butch shrugged. “Whatever,” he said.
“Whatever?”
Butch waved toward the crowded dining room. “Some of these people won’t be able to pay anything at all. No problem. That’s the way it is around here. If you can pay, fine. If you can’t pay, that’s fine, too. Let your conscience be your guide.”
He looked up at the television set. “You’ve got to watch this. The part with the jacket always cracks me up.”
The food was delicious. The movie was a scream. Joanna laughed so hard she was almost sick. But during the last few frames when Steve Martin drags a hapless John Candy—his unwanted and yet welcome guest—home for dinner, Joanna found herself with tears in her eyes.
And not just because of John Candy, either. It had something to do with family and with reconciliation and with forgiveness. Something to do with Eleanor Lathrop and Bob Brundage.
“Great dinner,” Joanna said to Butch when he came to take their empty dessert plates. She turned to Carol. “I think I’d better go back to the hotel now,” Joanna said. “After missing dinner, I probably have a little fence-mending to do.”
Carol nodded. “That’s probably a good idea. We’ll both think about this overnight and then put our heads together tomorrow morning. What do you say?”
“What time?”
“Not before noon,” Carol said. “I’m going to need my beauty sleep.”
They were headed for the door when Butch called after Joanna. “You haven’t seen Dave Thompson around today, have you? I would have thought he’d be in for dinner by now.”
Carol and Joanna exchanged looks. “We’d better tell him,” Carol said, turning back.
And so they did.
21
In the backseat of the Blazer the next morning, Jenny was babbling to Ceci Grijalva. “And so this man comes to see us. It turns out he’s my uncle. Grandma Lathrop wants me to call him Uncle Bob, but I’d rather call him Colonel Brundage. Uncles should be someone you know, don’t you think?”
“I guess,” Ceci mumbled.
Joanna and Jenny had picked Ceci up from her grandparents’ no-frills trailer park in Wittmann at ten o’clock on the dot. They were now in the process of driving her back to the Hohokam, where Bob Brundage and Eleanor Lathrop were supposed to join them for an early lunch in the coffee shop before Bob caught a plane back to Washington, D.C.
With Bob running interference, Joanna had almost managed to work her way back into her mother’s good graces. Still, she wasn’t looking forward to the ordeal of a mandatory lunch. Requiring Joanna’s attendance was Eleanor’s method of exacting restitution from her daughter for being AWOL from the previous evening’s Thanksgiving festivities.
Joanna found it ironic that, with the notable exception of Eleanor, no one else seemed to have missed her at all. Adam York had come to the Hohokam, stayed for dinner, and left again without Joanna ever laying eyes on him, although she had talked to him late that night after they both had returned to their respective hotels. It sounded as though Adam had made the best of the situation. He had spent most of the dinner chatting with Bob Brundage. The two of them had hit it off so well that they had agreed to try to get together for lunch the next time Adam traveled to D.C.
“The company gets to choose what we do,” Jenny was earnestly explaining to Cecelia. “Do you want to watch movies or swim?”
“What movies?” Ceci responded. “I can’t go swimming because I don’t have a suit.”
“Yes, you do,” Jenny told her. “Grandma Brady brought one along for you. I think it’ll fit. And when we get to the hotel, we can choose the movies. What do you like?”
“I don’t care,” Ceci said. “Anything will be all right.”
Driving along, Joanna only half listened to the chattering girls. More than what was being said, she focused on Ceci Grijalva’s tone of voice. The lethargic hopelessness of it was heartbreaking. It seemed as though the little girl’s childhood had been stretched to the breaking point. At nine years of age, all the playfulness had been ripped out of her.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Jenny continued. “Did you know you were on TV?”
“Me?” Ceci asked. “Really?” For the first time, there was a hint of interest in her voice.
“Yeah, really. You were on the news. Mom has a tape of it. I saw it last night after dinner. We can watch that, too, if you want.”
“I’ve never been on the news before.”
“I have a couple of times,” Jenny said. “It’s kinda neat. At first it is, anyway.”
Cecelia Grijalva’s eyes were wide as they walked into the lobby. “I’ve seen this place, but I’ve never been inside it before.”
“Come on,” Jenny said. “I’ll show you the pool first, and then I’ll take you up to the room.”
While the girls wandered off for a quick tour of the hotel, Joanna headed back to the room. She felt tired. She’d been awake much of the night, worrying about whether or not Dave Thompson had acted alone. Up in the room, she found the telephone message light blinking. On the voice-mail recording, she
heard Lorelie Jessup.
“I just now came home from the hospital,” Lorelie said. “Kim brought me here so I could sleep in a bed for a while. From your call this morning, I thought you’d want to know that Leann’s doing better, but she’s still not able to talk. They’ve upgraded her condition to serious. I did speak with her doctor. He says that with the kinds of injuries she received, it’s unlikely she’ll have any recollection of events leading up to what happened. He says short-term memory is usually the first casualty, so I doubt she’ll be able to help you. If you need to talk to me, here’s my number, but don’t call right away. It’s ten o’clock. I’m going to bed as soon as I get off the phone.”
Relieved that Leann was better, Joanna erased the message and replaced the receiver. But, she knew that the doctor was most likely right. The critical hours both immediately before and after a severe trauma or a skull-fracturing accident can often be wiped out of a victim’s memory banks. That meant Leann Jessup would probably be of little or no help in establishing the identity of her attacker.
Jenny’s electronic key clicked in the door lock and the girls bustled into the room. Jenny gave Ceci a quick tour of the room and then dragged her back to the television set. “We’ll watch the news tape before we go to lunch and Snow White after,” Jenny said, expertly shoving a tape into the VCR. Clearly, she was enjoying the opportunity to boss the listless Cecelia around. “And we’ll go swimming right after lunch.”
“You’d better get with it, then,” Joanna said. “It’s only a few minutes before we’re supposed to meet Grandma Lathrop and Colonel Brundage.”
As Jenny fooled with the tape, running it backward and forward to find the right spot, Joanna watched Ceci Grijalva closely, worrying about the child’s possible reaction to the emotionally wrenching material she was about to see.
“In our lead story tonight,” the television anchor said smoothly into the camera, “longtime ASU economics professor Dean R. Norton was arraigned this afternoon, charged with first-degree murder in the slaying of his estranged wife, Rhonda Weaver Norton. Her partially clad body was found near a power-line construction project southwest of Carefree late last week.