Shoot, Don't Shoot (28 page)

Joanna shook her head. “No, I didn’t. And I don’t understand what you’re saying. What do you mean the second time this happened?”

“It’s the second time Dave Thompson fell for a lesbian,” Carol answered. “His wife left him for a woman, not for another man. I thought you knew that.”

“No,” Joanna said. “I didn’t know. But what about the other women, Serena and Rhonda? What about them?”

“We’re working on it,” Carol answered. “Anyway, thanks for coming and helping us I.D. him.” The detective looked at her watch. “I guess you’d better be getting back to the hotel. It’s almost four-thirty. Aren’t you supposed to be having dinner with your family?”

“That’s at five,” Joanna said. “I have plenty of time.”

Just then two men came pushing a body-bag-laden gurney into the garage. One of them waved at Carol Strong. “What’ve you got?”

“Suicide,” she answered. “We’ve already identified him for you.”

“Good,” the other replied. “That’ll save time. If I’m not home for dinner by six, my wife will kill me.”

Despite Carol’s urging, Joanna wasn’t ready to leave. “Doesn’t it all seem just a little too pat?” she asked.

“What?”

“Dave tries to kill Leann in a fit of rage and then takes his own life.”

“It happens. As soon as Leann Jessup is well enough to talk to us about it, we’ll get the whole thing cleared up. So let’s leave it at that for the time being.”

With that, Carol turned as though to follow the medical examiner techs back toward the car.

“Did you find Leann’s panties, then?” Joanna asked.

“Not yet,” Carol answered. “They weren’t in  Thompson’s apartment or we would have found them by now. Maybe they’re still on him—in a pocket or something. Or maybe he hid them in the car.”

“What if you don’t find them?” Joanna prodded.

Carol shook her head emphatically. “Then maybe they never existed in the first place,” she said.

For a moment, the two women stood looking at each other. Homicide detectives are judged by a very public scoreboard—by cases opened and by cases promptly closed. Here was a classic twofer. The attempted homicide/successful suicide theory cleared two of Carol Strong’s cases at once and in less than twenty-four hours. With that kind of payoff waiting in the wings, the mysterious disappearance of a pair of panties diminished in importance. And two pairs of missing panties linked the deaths of Leann Jessup and Serena Grijalva.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll hang around for a while,” Joanna said. “I want to see if they turn up in the car.”

“Suit yourself,” Carol said, and returned to the group of investigators gathered around the car. “All right, you guys. Let’s get him out of here, then.”

Removing the body took time. Joanna stayed in the background waiting, watching, and thinking. What if the panties didn’t show up at all? If that happened, it was likely that the possible connection between Dave Thompson and Serena Grijalva would be ignored. Jorge would go to prison on the negotiated plea agreement, and no one would ever come close to knowing the truth. Other than Juanita Grijalva, Joanna Brady, and a literary-leaning bartender, nobody else seemed to care.

Up to then, relations between Detective Carol Strong and
Sheriff Joanna Brady had been entirely congenial if a little unorthodox. During the hours of questioning earlier in the day, Carol had treated Joanna with a good deal of respect, handling her like a colleague and treating her with the deference one police officer usually accords another. But Joanna was smart enough to realize that if she once questioned Detective Strong’s professional judgment or challenged her authority, that cordiality
would evaporate. After that, any further investigation Joanna did on Jorge Grijalva’s behalf would be strictly on her own. She would be starting from square one with only the few scraps of information she herself had managed to accumulate.

Those didn’t amount to much. She still had Juanita’s collection of clippings. Then there was the essay from Butch Dixon, but that didn’t seem likely to be of much help. After all, in his “opus,” as Butch had called it, he had failed to mention the very important fact that Dave Thompson had been in the bar the night Serena was killed.

“So far no luck,” Carol said, pulling off her latex gloves and walking over to where Joanna was standing. “I personally checked his pockets. Nothing. The crime scene guys will be going over the car, but it doesn’t look promising. You could just as well go. You’re late now as it is.”

Joanna nodded. “I guess you’re right. But do you mind if I stop by my room to pick something up before I go back to the hotel?”

“No problem,” Carol said.

Joanna walked back across the parking lot feeling uneasy. This would be the first time she ventured back inside the room since learning about the two-way mirrors. Still, she could just as well get it over with. She’d have to do it sooner or later, if for no other reason than to pack up her stuff to go back home.

After unlocking and opening the door, she paused for a moment on the threshold of the darkened room, feeling like a child afraid of some adult-inspired bogeyman. Don’t be silly, she chided herself, and switched on the light. She walked purposefully to the desk and opened the drawer. The envelope wasn’t there.

Frowning, she stared down into the empty drawer. That was odd. Wasn’t the drawer where she had last seen it? Puzzled, she went through the stack of papers she had left on top of the desk. The envelope wasn’t there, either.

For several seconds, she stood in the middle of the room looking around. She had been in the room for only a matter of a few days. The place was still far too neat for something as large as a manila envelope to simply disappear. With a growing sense of apprehension, Joanna walked over to the closet. Nothing seemed to be out of place. The two suitcases she hadn’t taken along to the Hohokam were still right where she had left them.

Dropping to her hands and knees, Joanna examined the wall underneath the single shelf. With effort, she succeeded in finding the secret access door Carol Strong had told her about. Even knowing it was there, finding it in the gloom of the closet took careful examination. The cracks surrounding it were artfully concealed. A professional job. The door was there because it was supposed to be there. It was something that had been there from the beginning, not something that had been remodeled in as an afterthought.

Joanna stood up and took a deep breath. Had Leann Jessup’s attacker let himself into Joanna’s room as well? Someone had been here. After all, the envelope was gone. Was anything else missing? Using a pencil, she pried open the other drawers in the room—the ones in the nightstand and in the pressboard dresser. Nothing seemed to out of order.

She went into the bathroom. Again, at first glance, nothing seemed to be amiss. The shampoo and conditioner, the large container of hand lotion—things she hadn’t needed to take along to the hotel—all stood exactly where she had had left them. Turning to leave the room, she caught sight of the dirty-clothes bag hanging on the hook on the back of the bathroom door.

Dragging the bag down from the hook, Joanna shook the contents out on the floor. There should have been three days’ worth of laundry in that scattered heap. Joanna sorted through it, almost the way she would have if she had been doing the laundry—separating things by colors. When she first noticed the missing pair of panties, she thought that maybe they were still caught in the legs of a pair of jeans. But that wasn’t the case. Three sweatshirts, three bras, two sets of jeans, one pair of pantyhose, and two pairs of panties. Only two pairs. The third one had disappeared.

With her pulse pounding in her throat, Joanna turned and fled from the room. Out in the breezeway, she could see Carol Strong and several of her investigators gathered outside the still-open door of the garage.

“Hey,” she shouted, waving. “Over her.”

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 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 hag.”

“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 question 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 look 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.”