Shoot / Don't Shoot

Instead, threading her way through the crush of people, she headed for the lobby cocktail bar. On the way, she walked past the gas-log fireplace where she had sat for such a long time the previous evening. Was that only yesterday? she wondered. It seemed much longer ago than that.

“Joanna,” a man’s voice called. “Over here.”

Without the subtle distortions of the telephone, Bob Brundage’s voice stopped her cold. The timbre was so familiar, she hardly dared turn her head to look. At the far end of the massive fireplace, a man in a military uniform rose from one of a pair of wing chairs and gestured for her to join him. Unable to move, Joanna stood as if frozen in middle of the room.

D. H. “Big Hank” Lathrop himself could have been standing there. Her father was standing there. And yet he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. Big Hank been dead for years. Besides, this man was younger than Joanna’s father had been when he died. But the resemblance was eerie. It was as though the ghost of her father had stepped out of one of those old black-and-white photos and turned into a living, breathing human being.

When Joanna didn’t move forward, the man did, coming toward her with his hand outstretched and with a broad smile on his tanned face.

“Bob Brundage,” he said, introducing himself. He took Joanna by the elbow and guided her back toward the two empty chairs. “Colonel Brundage, actually. I told you it wasn’t Amway.”

“Who are you?” she asked, finally finding her voice.

“I’m the surprise,” he said. “Eleanor had her heart set on introducing us at dinner, but it seemed to me that might be too much of a shock for you. Judging by your reaction, I believe I’m right about that. What would you like to drink?”

Joanna watched him in utter fascination. When Bob Brundage’s mouth moved, it was Joanna’s father’s mouth. He had the same narrow lips that turned up at the corners, the same odd space between his two front teeth.

“I don’t care,” she answered. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

Bob Brundage signaled the cocktail waitress. “Two Glenfiddich on the rocks,” he said. “So your folks never told you about me, did they?”

“No. I knew there were a series of miscarriages before they ever had me, but ...”

Bob Brundage laughed again. The laughter, too, was hauntingly familiar. “I’ve been called a lot of things in my time, but never a miscarriage,” he said. “Your mother—my birth mother, as we say in the world of adoptees—was only fifteen when she got pregnant with me.

“According to Eleanor—you don’t mind if I call her that, do you?”

Joanna shook her head.

“According to Eleanor,” Bob continued, “Hank had just come back from the Korean War and got stationed at Fort Huachuca when they first reopened it. They met on a picnic on the San Pedro River. Eleanor wandered away from the church picnic and met up with a group of soldiers. She told me it was love at first sight. Of course, those were pre-birth control days. Her folks shipped her out of town when she turned up pregnant, forced her to give me up for adoption. But she told me that she and Hank secretly stayed in touch by letter the whole time she was gone, and that they took up again soon as she came back to town. By then he was out of the army and working in the mines. After Eleanor graduated from high school, her folks finally consented to their getting married.

“It’s a very romantic story, don’t you think?”

The waitress brought the drinks. Romantic? Joanna thought, No, the story didn’t sound the least bit romantic to her. It sounded absolutely hypocritical. Do as I say, not as I do. Do as I say, not as I’ve done.

Bob Brundage’s torrent of words washed over her, but she couldn’t quite come to grips with them. Her parents—her mother and her father—had another child, a baby born out of wedlock? Was that possible? For almost thirty years, Joanna had thought of herself as an only child. Now it turns out she wasn’t.

“Those were the days of closed adoptions,” Bob Brundage continued. “My adoptive parents were wonderful people, but they’re both gone now. My father died of a stroke ten years ago, and my mother passed away just this last spring. And once I knew it wouldn’t hurt them—once they could no longer feel betrayed by my actions—I decided to start looking into my roots.

“I’ve actually known Eleanor’s and your names and where you live for several months now. Congratulations on your election, by the way. I saw a blurb about that in USA Today. I always check the Arizona listings, just for the hell of it, and one day, there you were. Then, when I found out a month ago that I would be coming to Fort Huachuca to do an inspection this month, it just seemed like the right thing to do. You’re not upset, are you?’

“Upset?” Joanna echoed, plastering an insincere smile on her face. “Why on earth would I be upset?”

But she was upset. Bob kept on talking, but Joanna stopped listening to him. Her ears and heart were tuned to the past, where she was rehashing Eleanor’s hysterical outbursts and the ugly things she had said once she had discovered Joanna was with Jenny. How could Joanna do such a stupid thing? Eleanor had raged. How could she do that to her own mother? How could she?

For over ten years, Joanna Brady had tolerated her mother’s barbed comments, her constant sniping. Eleanor had run down Andy Brady and their shotgun wedding at every opportunity. She had claimed Andy was never good enough for Joanna, that he had ruined her life, stolen her potential. And all the while ...

After all those years of criticism—both stated and implied—a decade’s worth of suppressed anger rose to the surface of Joanna Brady’s heart.

“Why exactly did you come here?” Joanna asked.

“I already told you,” Bob Brundage answered. “I wanted to find my roots. I wanted to find out if my interest in the army was genetically linked.”

After that small quip, he stopped for a moment and examined Joanna’s face. “You are upset,” he said. “I was afraid of that, but Eleanor said she you’d be fine.”

“How long have you known”—Joanna couldn’t bring herself to say the word Mother right then—”Eleanor?” she added lamely.

“I called her for the first time three and a half weeks ago. I didn’t know what her reaction would be—”

“And she doesn’t know mine,” Joanna interrupted. “In fact, she probably understands you better than she does me.”

Bob held up a calming hand. “I’m sorry. I can see this all very disturbing to you. I certainly didn’t want that to happen. If you’d like, I’ll just go back to D.C. and disappear.... “

Joanna shook her head emphatically. “Oh, no you don’t. Don’t you dare do that. She’d hold me responsible for it the rest of my life. If you leave now, she’ll never forgive me. It would mean she’d been cheated out of her son twice. I don’t want that responsibility. Not on your life.”

Up to that point, Joanna had taken only a single sip of her Scotch. Now she downed the rest of the drink in one long unladylike swallow, letting the icy liquor slide down her throat.

She took a deep breath. “I guess I sound like a real spoilsport, don’t I. A brat. I’m angry with Eleanor.... “

“Why are you angry with her? It wasn’t her fault.... “

“Why am I angry? Because I’ve been betrayed, that’s why. Eleanor Mathews Lathrop always set herself up on a pedestal as some kind of Madam Perfect. And according to her, I never once measured up. When all the while ...”

Joanna paused. “That’s not fair of me, of course, to just blame my mother. She wasn’t the only one who lied to me. After all, it takes two to tango,” she added bitterly. “Obviously, Big Hank Lathrop was in on it from the beginning, too. The whole time I was growing up, I damn near broke my neck a dozen times trying to be the son my father claimed he’d never had. Well, guess what? It turns out he did have that son after all, one he somehow neglected to tell me anything about. In fact, now that I think about it, I probably have you to thank for him turning me into a hopeless tomboy and the fact that I’m sheriff right now....”

“Joanna, I—”

“Mom, there you are,” Jenny exclaimed, skidding to a stop on the polished stone floor behind them.

“Jenny, what are you doing down here?”

“I came looking for you. Detective Strong just called. She said for you to call her back right away. She said it’s urgent!”

Jenny came around the arm of Joanna’s chair. Seeing Bob Brundage, she ducked back out of sight.

The interruption had allowed Joanna to get a partial grip on her roiling emotions. She took a deep breath. “Jenny,” she said, forcing her voice to be Want you to meet Mr. Brundage here. Colonel Brundage. He’s your uncle. He’ll be joining us for dinner tonight.”

With a purposeful shove from her mother, Jenny stepped out from behind the chair and held out her hand. “I’m glad to meet you,” she said politely. Then she turned back to Joanna, frowning. “But you always told me I didn’t have arty aunts or uncles.”

“That’s because I didn’t think you did.”

Joanna stood up. “You’ll have to excuse us, Colonel Brundage. Thanks for the drink. I hope you’ll forgive my outburst. As you can see, this has been something of a shock.”

Bob Brundage nodded sympathetically. “Better here with just the two of us than at dinner in a whole crowd, wouldn’t you say?”

“I suppose so,” Joanna allowed grudgingly. It was the best she could do. She turned to her daughter. “Come on, Jenny. Let’s go.” As they headed back toward the elevator, Joanna asked, “Did Detective Strong say what was wrong?”

“No. But she made me write down her number. Here it is.” Jenny handed over a piece of paper with a phone number scribbled on it. Instead of bothering with going all the way back upstairs, Joanna stopped by a pay phone in the elevator lobby and dialed.

“Thanks for getting back to me so fast,” Carol Strong said. “I’m almost dressed and ready to leave. Meet me at the APOA campus as soon you can, would you?”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“I think we’ve found Dave Thompson.”

“You think?”

“Yes. You know him. I need someone to identify him.”

“Where is he?”

“In a red Ford Fiesta registered to someone named Kimberly George. One of the patrol officers looked through the window of one of the APOA outbuildings. It turned out to be a garage with a red car inside it. He broke in as soon as he realized there was someone sitting slumped over in the front seat. The ignition was on, but the engine wasn’t running. It was out of gas.”

“He’s dead, then?”

“Yes.”

Joanna closed her eyes, feeling an odd combination of both sadness and relief. “I’ll meet you there,” she said. “I’ll be on my way as soon as I drop Jenny off with one grandmother or the other.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Carol Strong had obviously cleared the way. When Joanna arrived at the APOA campus, there was no question about whether or not she was to be allowed through the barriers and given access to the crime scene. A young patrol officer named Reiner walked up to the Blazer as she was shutting off the ignition.

“This way, Sheriff Brady,” he said. “Detective Strong is expecting you.”

Officer Reiner led Joanna into a two-car garage, where, even though the roll-up doors were wide open, the smell of auto exhaust still lingered in the air. As she approached the car, Joanna recognized another smell as well—the ugly odor of death. In a matter of weeks, Joanna had learned the unpleasant truth—that investigating death scenes was anything but antiseptic.

She bent over and peered inside the car. A slack-jawed Dave Thompson slumped over the steering wheel. Wrinkling her nose in distaste, Joanna straightened back up. “It’s him,” she said.

“I thought so,” Carol said. “We’re trying to find the car’s registered owner. No luck so far.”

“Have you checked with the hospital?” Joanna asked.

“What hospital?”

“St. Joseph’s. My guess is she’s in the waiting room keeping Lorelie Jessup company.”

“You know her?”

“Not exactly. I’ve never met her, but I was told Kimberly George is Leann Jessup’s former lover.”

“Lover?” Carol Strong repeated sharply. “Are you telling me Leann Jessup is a lesbian?” Janna nodded.

“I didn’t know that.”

“Neither did I,” Joanna admitted. “Not until this afternoon.”

“How did you find out?”

Joanna shrugged. “After we left your office, Jenny and I went down to the hospital to check on Leann. We talked to her mother and to her brother. What a jerk!”

“Well, that certainly explains a lot,” Carol Strong mused, almost to herself.

“Explains what?” Joanna asked.

“What happened here. Was there some hanky panky going on between them?”

“Between Dave and Leann? No. I’m certain nothing like that was going on.”

“Look,” Carol said, shaking her head. “You can’t be sure, not unless you were with her twenty-four hours of every day. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that they were fooling around a little. One way or another Thompson learns about Leann’s sexual preference, and he freaks. He flips out completely and decides to kill her. After all, it’s the second time this has happened to him. And then, when it falls apart and she gets away, he comes to his senses, realizes that he’s about to be caught, and doesn’t want to face the consequences. So he bolsters his courage with a little more booze and does himself him. You did see the empty vodka bottle on the bedside him, didn’t you?”

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.”

“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 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.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

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 suppose 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 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.

“Here’s reporter Jill January with the first of two related stories on tonight’s newscast. Later on this half hour, Jill will be back with another story concerning a local group determined to do something about the increasing numbers of Valley homicide cases resulting from domestic violence.”

The picture on the screen switched to the figure of a young woman standing posed, microphone in hand, on the steps of a building Joanna instantly recognized as the Maricopa County Courthouse. Only when the camera zoomed in for a close-up did she realize the reporter was the same young woman who had thrust a microphone in Joanna’s face as she and Leann Jessup were filing out of the MAVEN-sponsored vigil.

The photographed face of a good-looking young woman flashed across the screen. “A month ago, Rhonda Weaver Norton moved out of the upscale home she shared with ASU economics professor Dean Norton,” Jill January said. “She moved into a furnished studio apartment in Tempe. At the time, Rhonda told her mother that she feared for her life. She claimed that her husband had threatened to kill her if she went through with plans to leave him.”

While what looked like a yearbook head-shot of a balding and smiling middle-aged man filled the screen, the reporter continued talking. “This afternoon, Professor Norton was arraigned in Maricopa County Superior Court, charged with first-degree murder in the bludgeon slaying of his estranged wife. Rhonda Norton had been missing for three days when her badly beaten body was found by a Salt River Project utilities installation crew working on a power line south of Carefree.

“Judge Roseann Blacksmith, citing the gravity of the case, ordered Professor Norton held without bond. Trial was set for February eighteenth.

“Rhonda Norton’s mother, well-known Sedona‑area pastel artist Lael Weaver Gaston, was in the courtroom today to witness her former son-in-law’s arraignment. She expressed the hope that the prosecutor’s office would seek either the death penalty or life in prison without possibility of parole.

“At the Maricopa County Courthouse, I’m Jill January reporting.”

When the reporter signed off, the picture returned to the studio anchor. “In the past eleven months, sixteen cases of alleged domestic violence have resulted in death. Because the accused is a well-known and widely respected college professor, the Norton homicide is the most high-profile of all those cases. Later in this news-cast, Jill January will take us to a candlelight vigil that is being held on the steps of the capitol building this evening to focus attention on this increasingly difficult issue. In other news tonight . . .”

With lightning fingers running the remote control, Jenny fast-forwarded the video through weather and sports, stopping only when Jill Janu­ary’s smiling face reappeared on the screen.

“The crime of domestic violence is spiraling in Phoenix just as it is in other parts of the country. Domestic violence was once thought to be limited to lower-class households. Increasingly, however, authorities are finding that domestic violence is a crime that crosses all racial and economic lines. Victims and perpetrators alike come from all walks of life and from all educational levels. Often, the violence escalates to the point of serious injury or even death. So far this year, sixteen area women have died as a result of homicidal violence in which the prime suspects have all turned out to be either current or former spouses or domestic partners.

“Tonight a group called MAVEN—Maricopa Anti-Violence Empowerment Network—is doing something to address that problem. At a chilly nighttime rally on the capitol steps in downtown Phoenix this evening, domestic violence activist Matilda Hirales-Steinowitz read the deadly roll.”

The tape switched to the podium onstage at the candlelight vigil, where the spokeswoman fro MAVEN stepped forward to intone the names the victims. “The first to die, at three o’clock on afternoon of January third, was Anna Maria Dominguez, age twenty-six.”

Again, the reporter’s face appeared on-screen. “Anna Maria Dominguez was childless when she died as a result of a shotgun blast to the face. Her unemployed husband then turned the gun on himself. He died at the scene. She died a short time later after undergoing surgery at a local hospital.

“Often, however, when domestic violence ends in murder, children of the dead women become: victims as well.”

“Get ready,” Jenny warned Cecelia. “Here you come.”

Ceci Grijalva’s wide-eyed face filled the screen. Her voice, trembling audibly, whispered through he television set’s speakers. “I have a little brother . . .” she began.

Joanna turned away from the televised Cecelia to watch the live one. When tears spilled over on the little girl’s cheeks, Joanna moved to the couch and placed a comforting arm around Ceci’s narrow shoulders.

“.. he cries anyway, and I can’t make him stop. That’s all,” Cecelia finished saying on-screen while the child on the couch sobbed quietly, her whole body quaking under the gentle pressure of Joanna’s protective arm.

“They wanted me to say something nice about my mom,” Ceci said, her voice choking. “But when I got there, all I could think about was Pepe.”

“You did fine,” Joanna said.

“Nana Duffy says it’s my daddy’s fault, that he did it, but I don’t think so. Do you?” Ceci looked questioningly up at Joanna through tear-dewed eyelashes. Joanna wanted to comfort the grieving child, but what could she tell her?

Torn between what she knew and what could say, “I don’t know” was Joanna’s only possible answer.

“And now here’s my mom,” Jenny said.

The camera on Joanna and Leann making their way through the crowd.

“ .. police officers in attendance,” Jill January was saying “Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady.”

“Cecelia Grijalva is a friend of my daughter’s . . .” Joanna heard herself saying when suddenly Ceci scrambled out from under her arm.

“I know him, too,” she said, pointing to a spot on the screen where a man’s face had momentarily materialized directly over Leann’s shoulder. He was leading a crowd of people filing down the aisle toward the exit.

When first Joanna and then Leann stopped, so did he, but not soon enough. He blundered into Leann, bumping her from behind with such force that he almost knocked her down.

The camera was focused on Joanna in the foreground. Her words were the ones being spoken on tape. Still, the jostling in the crowd behind her was visible as well. As she watched the televised Leann turn around to see what had hit her, Joanna remembered Leann telling her about the incident on their way back to the car after the vigil.

And the glare Leann had mentioned—the one she had said might have been enough to spark a drive-by shooting—was there, captured in the glow of the television lights. Even thirdhand—filtered through camera, videotape, and TV screen—the man’s ugly, accusing stare was nothing short of chilling. He and Leann stood eye to eye for only a moment. Then he glanced up and into the camera as though seeing it for the first time. A fraction of a second later, he ducked to one side behind Leann and disappeared into the crowd.

“You know him?” Joanna asked.

Ceci nodded.

“Who is he?”

Ceci shrugged. “One of my mom’s friends.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me her friends’ names.”

“Jenny,” Joanna said, “would you please run the tape back to that spot and stop it there? I want to look at that sequence again.”

Jenny’s agile fingers darted knowledgeably over the remote control. Moments later, the man’s face reappeared. With his features frozen in place on the television screen, the glower on his face was even more ominous than it had seemed in passing.

“Did you know he was there that night?” Joanna asked.

Ceci shook her head. “No. I didn’t see him until just now.”

“Were there other people there that you knew?”

“Some,” Ceci answered. “There were two teache­rs from my old school, Mrs. Baker and Mrs. Sandoval. And a man named Mr. Gray from the place where Mom used to work, but he talked to Grandpa, not to me.”

“Didn’t this friend of your mother’s come talk to you?” Joanna asked. “Or to your grandparents?”

Ceci shook her head. “If he did, I didn’t see him.”

“Okay, Jenny. Let it play again.”

As Cecelia’s words played back one more time, Joanna closed her eyes momentarily, remembering the vigil, recalling how people had poured up onto the stage after the speeches, how they had gathered in clumps around the various speakers, offering condolences and words of support. Everyone there had come to the vigil with some cause to be angry, but it was only on the face of that one man that the anger had registered full force. Still, if he had felt that strongly about what had happened to Serena, why hadn’t he come forward to visit with the dead woman’s family?

“Did he come to your house while your mother was alive?”

“A couple of times.”

“What kind of car did he drive?”

“Not a car. A truck. A green truck with a camper on it. He brought us an old chair once. He said someone in Sun City was throwing it away because nobody bought it at a garage sale. He said he knew we needed furniture. And sometimes he’d help my mom bring the clothes home from the laundry.”

The phone rang just then, and Jenny pounced on it. “It’s Grandma,” she mouthed silently to Joanna, holding her hand over the mouthpiece as she handed the receiver over to her mother.

“Well,” Eleanor Lathrop said huffily to Joanna, “are you coming down to lunch or not? We’re already down in the coffee shop. Bob’s plane is at two, so he doesn’t have all day. Surely you aren’t going to stand us up two days in a row, are you?”

“Sorry, Mother,” Joanna said. “We were watch­ing something on the VCR. The girls and I will be right there.” Joanna put down the phone. “Turn it off, Jenny. We’ll have to finish this later. Come on.”

Jenny switched off both the TV and VCR. “Have you ever met Grandma Lathrop?” Jenny asked Ceci as they started down the hallway.

“I don’t think so,” Ceci answered.

“She’s a little weird,” Jenny warned. “She sounds mad sometimes, even when she isn’t.”

“Nana Duffy’s like that, too,” Ceci said.

Walking behind them, Joanna realized that having a thorny grandmother was something else the little girls had in common.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Halfway across the Hohokam’s coffee shop, Joanna could hear Eleanor. Already in fine form and haranguing as usual, she was reeling off one of her unending litanies to Bob Brundage, who sat, head politely inclined in her direction, providing an attentive and apparently sympathetic audience.

“From the time that man was elected sheriff,” Eleanor was saying, “I don’t believe we ever again ate on time, not as a family. He was perpetually late. It was always something. I kept roasts warm in the oven until they turned to stone. And now that Joanna’s sheriff, it’s happening all over.”

Hearing Eleanor’s familiar whine of complaint, Joanna found herself wondering what had happened to her mother. What had divested her of what must have been freethinking teenage rebelliousness and turned her into an unbending prig? What had happened to that youthful, romantic love between her parents—the forbidden Romeo-and­-Juliet affair her long-lost brother had found so capti­vating? By the time Joanna had any recollection of D. H. and Eleanor Lathrop, they had settled into a state of constant warfare, perpetually wrangling over everything and nothing.

As Joanna and the two girls crossed the room, Bob Brundage stood up to greet them in a gentlemanly fashion. To Joanna’s surprise, however, when he came around the table to hold her chair for her, he winked, but only after making sure the gesture was safely concealed from Eleanor’s view.

“And you must be Cecelia,” he said gravely, helping Ceci into her chair as well. “Jenny was tell­ing me about you last night at dinner. I’m sorry to hear about your mother.”

“Thank you,” Ceci murmured.

“Marliss Shackleford wants you to call her,” Eleanor said sourly to Joanna, sidestepping Bob’s polite attention to social niceties. “She wants to talk to you. Something about a picture.”

“Oh, no,” Joanna said. “I forgot all about that.”

“All about what?”

“She asked me for a picture—an eleven-by-four­teen glossy of me. She asked for it just before I left town. She’s on the facilities committee at the Wom­en’s Club. They need the picture to frame and put up in the department. It’s supposed to go in that glass display case at the far end of the lobby along with pictures of all my predecessors.”

“But, Mom,” Jenny objected, “you don’t have a picture like that. All those other guys are standing there wearing their cowboy hats and their guns. And they all look sort of . . . well, mean, even Grandpa Lathrop.”

Eleanor shook her head disparagingly. Jenny’s observant objection might not have met with Eleanor Lathrop’s approval, but to Joanna’s way thinking, it was on the money. The display in question, located at the back of the department’s public lobby, featured a rogues’ gallery of all the previous sheriffs of Cochise County, who did all happen to be guys.

The photos in question were primarily of the formally posed variety. In most the subject wore western attire complimented by obligatory Stetsons. All of them wore guns, while only one was pictured with his horse. Most of them frowned into the camera, their grim faces looking for all the world as though they were battling terrible cases of indigestion.

Ignoring Eleanor’s disapproval, Joanna couldn’t resist smiling at Jenny. “The mean look shouldn’t be any trouble. I can handle that,” Joanna said. “And I’ve already got a gun. My big problem is finding a suitable horse and a hat.”

“You’re not taking this seriously enough, Joanna,” Eleanor scolded. “You’re an important public official now. Your picture ought to be properly displayed right along with all the others. That doesn’t mean it has to be exactly like all the others. Maybe you could use the same picture that was on your campaign literature. That one’s very dignified and also very ladylike. If I were you, I’d give Marliss one of those. And don’t let it slide, either. People appreciate it when public servants handle those kinds of details promptly.”

With Bob Brundage looking on, Joanna couldn’t help smarting under Eleanor’s semipublic rebuke. ‘Marliss only asked me about it in church this last Sunday, Mother,” Joanna replied. “I wasn’t exactly in a position where I could haul a picture out of my purse and hand it over on the spot. And I’ve been a little busy ever since then. Besides, I don’t know why there’s such a rush. They don’t make the presentation until the annual Women’s Club luncheon at the end of January.”

“That’s not the point,” Eleanor said. “Marliss still needs to talk to you about it, and probably about everything else as well.”

“What everything else?” Joanna asked. “The food at the jail?”

“Hardly,” Eleanor sniffed. “Obviously, you hav­en’t read today’s paper. Your name’s splashed all over it as usual. It makes you sound like—”

“Like what?” Joanna asked.

Eleanor frowned. “Never mind,” she said.

A folded newspaper lay beside Eleanor’s place mat. Jenny reached for it.

“That’s great. First Mom’s on TV, and now she’s in the paper,” Jenny gloated. “Can I read it? Please?”

Eleanor covered the paper with her hand, adroitly keeping Jenny from touching it. “Certainly not. You shouldn’t be exposed to this kind of thing. It’s all about that Jessup woman. It’s bad enough for your mother to be mixed up in all this murder business, but then for them to publish things about people’s personal bad habits right there in a family newspaper.... “

“Oh,” Jenny said. “Is that why you don’t want me to read it? Because it talks about lesbians? I ready knew about that from going to see Mom’s friend at the hospital yesterday. Her brother called a dyke, so I sort of figured it out.”

“Jenny!” Eleanor exclaimed, her face going pale. “What language!”

“Well, that’s what he said, didn’t he, Mom?” Joanna returned defiantly.

“So you know about lesbians then, do you, Jenny?” Bob Brundage asked, gently nudging himself into what had been only a three-way conversation.

“ ‘Course,” Jenny answered offhandedly.

“Did you learn about that from your mom or from school?” he asked, carefully avoiding the icy disapproval stamped on Eleanor Lathrop’s face “Or do the schools in Bisbee have classes in the birds and the bees?”

Knowing Eleanor’s attitude toward mealtime discussions of anything remotely off-color, Joanna observed this abrupt turn of conversation in stunned silence. What in the world was Bob Brundage thinking? she wondered. Was he deliberately baiting Eleanor by encouraging such a discussion? But of course, since Bob didn’t know Eleanor well, it was possible he had no idea of her zero-tolerance attitude toward nonparlor conversation, as she called it.

On the other hand, maybe he did. As he gazed expectantly at Jenny, awaiting her answer with rapt attention, Joanna caught what seemed to be a twinkle of amusement glinting in his eyes. I’ll be, Joanna thought. He’s doing it on purpose.

At that precise moment, she made the mistake of taking a tiny sip of water.

“Mom told me some of it,” Jenny said seriously. “But we mostly learn about it in school, along with AIDS and all that other icky stuff. Except we don’t call it the birds and the bees.”

Bob Brundage raised a questioning eyebrow. “You don’t? What do you call it, then?”

Jenny sighed. “When it’s about men and women, we call it the birds and the bees. But when it’s about men and men or women and women, we call it the birds and the birds.”

“I see,” Bob Brundage said, nodding and smil­ing.

“Jennifer Ann!” Eleanor gasped, while Joanna choked on the water, sending a very undignified and unladylike spray out of her mouth and nose into a hastily grabbed napkin. When she looked up at last, Bob Brundage winked at her again.

“Such goings-on!” Eleanor said, shaking her head. “And in front of company, too. Jenny, you should be ashamed of yourself.” Eleanor picked up the newspaper and handed it over to a still-coughing Joanna. “If you’re willing to let your daughter see this kind of filth at her tender age, then you’re going to have to be the one to give it to her. I certainly won’t be a party to it.”

Joanna took the paper and stuffed it into her purse.

“And you’d better decide what you want to order,” Eleanor continued. “Bob and I have already made up our minds. We had plenty of time to study the menus before you got here.”

Obligingly, Joanna picked up her menu and began looking at it. She held it high enough that it concealed her mouth where the corners of her lips kept curving up into an irrepressible smile.

Bob Brundage may have been a colonel in the United States Army, but he was also an inveterate tease. Even now, while Joanna studied the menu, he managed to elicit another tiny giggle of laughter from Eleanor Lathrop, although the previous flap had barely ended.

To Joanna’s surprise, instead of still being angry, Eleanor was smiling and gazing fondly at Bob Brundage. Her doting eyes seemed to caress him, lingering on him as if trying to memorize every feature of his face, every detail of the way he held his coffee cup or moved his hand.

And while Eleanor studied Bob Brundage, Joanna studied her mother. That adoring look seemed to come from someone totally different from the woman Joanna had always known her mother to be. Gazing at her long-lost son, Eleanor seemed softer somehow, more relaxed. With a shock, Joanna realized that Eva Lou Brady had been right all along. Eleanor was different because there was a new man in her life. In all their lives.

“What can I get you?” a waitress asked.

How about a little baked crow? Joanna won­dered. “I’ll have the tuna sandwich on white and a cup of soup,” she said. “What kind of soup is it?”

“Turkey noodle,” the waitress said. “What else would it be? After all, it is the day after Thanksgiving, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “It certainly is.”

The remainder of the meal passed uneventfully. When it was over, Joanna said her good-byes to both Bob Brundage and to her mother while stand­ing in the Hohokam’s spacious lobby. “You’re sure you don’t want to stay another night, Mother?”

“Heavens no. I have to get back home.”

Joanna turned to Bob Brundage. They stood look­ing at one another awkwardly. Neither of them seemed to know what to do or say. Finally, Joanna held out her hand. “It’s been nice meeting you,” she said.

The words seemed wooden and hopelessly inadequate, but with Eleanor looking on anxiously, it was the best Joanna could do.

“Same here,” he returned.

Jenny, unaffected by grown-up awkwardness, suffered no such restraint. When Bob Brundage bent down to her level, she grabbed him around the neck and planted a hearty kiss on his tanned cheek. “I hope you come back to visit again,” she said. “I want you to meet Tigger and Sadie.”

“We’ll see,” Bob Brundage said, smiling and ruf­fling her frizzy hair. “We’ll have to see about that.”

Back in the room, Ceci and Jenny disappeared into the bathroom to change into bathing suits, while Joanna extracted Eleanor’s folded newspaper from her purse. She wasted no time in searching out the article Eleanor Lathrop had forbidden her granddaughter to read:

A Tempe police officer was seriously injured early Thanksgiving morning and a former longtime Chandler area police officer is dead in the aftermath of what investigators are calling a bizarre kidnapping/suicide plot.

After being kidnapped from her dormitory room at the Arizona Police Officers Academy in Peoria, Officer Leann Jessup jumped from a moving vehi­cle at the intersection of Olive and Grand avenues while attempting to escape from her assailant. A carload of passing teenagers, coming home from a party, narrowly avoided hitting the gravely in­jured woman when her partially clad body tumbled from a moving pickup and landed on the pavement directly in front of them.

Two of the youths followed the speeding pickup and managed to provide information that led in­vestigators back to the APOA campus itself and to David Willis Thompson, a former Chandler police officer who has been the on-site director of the statewide law enforcement training facility for the past several years.

Thompson’s body was discovered on the campus later on yesterday afternoon. He was found in a vehicle inside a closed garage, where he is thought to have committed suicide. Investigation into cause of death is continuing, and an autopsy has been scheduled.

Meantime, Leann Jessup is listed in serious but stable condition at St. Joseph’s Hospital, where she underwent surgery yesterday for a skull fracture and where she is being treated for numerous cuts and abrasions.

Thompson, a longtime Chandler police officer, left the force there under a cloud in the aftermath of a serious altercation with his estranged wife in which both she and a female friend were injured.

In this latest incident, the injured woman and Cochise County Sheriff, Joanna Brady, were the only women enrolled in a class of twenty-five attending this session of the Arizona Police Officers Academy, an interdepartmental training facility that attracts newly hired police officers from juris­dictions all over the state. Sources close to the case say there is some reason to believe that Ms. Brady was also in danger.

Melody Daviddottir, local spokeswoman for the National Lesbian Legal Defense Organization, the group that was instrumental in forcing Thomp­son’s ouster from the Chandler Department of Pub­lic Safety, said that it was unfortunate that a man with so many problems could be placed in a posi­tion of responsibility where he was likely to encounter lesbian women or women of any kind.

“Dave Thompson left Chandler because, as a danger to women, he was an embarrassment to his chain of command. He could not have gone from disgrace there to directing the APOA program without the full knowledge and complicity of his former superiors,” Daviddottir said.

With Thompson now dead, Daviddottir said, her organization is considering filing suit to see to it that those people, whoever they are, should be held accountable for injuries Leann Jessup suffered in the incident with Thompson.

Lorelie Jessup, mother of the injured woman, ex-pressed dismay that her daughter, a lesbian, had been singled out for attack due to her sexual persuasion. “That won’t stop her,” Mrs. Jessup said. “It might slow her down for a little while, but all Leann ever wanted was to be a police officer. She won’t give up.”

“How do we look?” Jenny asked, as she and Ceci paraded out of the bathroom in their suits. “You look fine.”

“Grandpa said for us to call when we were ready. He says he’ll watch us.”

“Good. Go ahead then.”

As soon as the girls left the room, Joanna returned to the newspaper. Or at least she intended to, but her eyes stopped on two words in the arti­cle’s third paragraph: “partially clad.” Carol Strong had said that, except for the pair of pantyhose that had been used to bind her hands and feet, Leann Jessup had been nude. Since when did hand and foot restraints qualify as being partially clad? But the words sounded familiar—strangely familiar and that bothered her.

Putting down the newspaper, Joanna picked the television remote control off the coffee table where Jenny had left it and switched on the VCR. Joanna wasn’t nearly as handy with the remote as her daughter was, but after a few minutes of fumbling and running the tape back and forth, she managed to turn the VCR to the very beginning of the taped newscast.

Once again the anchor was saying, “. . . 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.”

Thoughtfully, Joanna switched off the tape and rewound it. Then, for several long seconds, she sat staring at the screen with the fuzzy figure of the news anchor poised once more to begin the ten o’clock news broadcast. Even though she no longer had Juanita Grijalva’s envelope of clippings, Joanna had studied the articles so thoroughly that she had nearly committed them to memory.

She was almost positive one of the early articles dealing with finding Serena Grijalva’s body had made reference to her being “partially clad.” Of Purse, in that case, that particular media euphemism had spared Serena’s children from having to endure embarrassing publicity about their dead mother’s nakedness. And the words used no doubt reflected the information disseminated to reporters on that case since, according to Detective Strong, the exact condition of the body—including the pantyhose restraints—had been one of her official holdbacks.

Once again Joanna switched on the tape. The an­chor smiled and came back to life. “... Rhonda Weaver Norton. Her partially clad body was found near a power-line construction project southwest of Carefree late last week.”

Joanna turned off the machine. What did the words partially clad mean when they were applied to Rhonda Weaver? Was it possible they meant the same thing? If Carol Strong had resisted embar­rassing two orphaned Hispanic children, what was the likelihood that another investigator might do the same thing in order to spare a grieving mother who was also a well-known, nationally acclaimed artist?

It was only a vague hunch. Certainly there was nothing definitive enough about the niggling question in Joanna’s head to justify dragging Carol Strong into the discussion. At this point, the possible connection between this new case and the others was dubious at best. But if Joanna could coin up with a solid link between them .. .

Purposefully, Joanna hurried across the room and retrieved the telephone book from the nightstand drawer. Her experience at the jail on Monday, where she had fought her way up through the chain of command, had convinced her there wa­s no point in starting at the bottom. She called the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department and asked to speak with the sheriff himself.

“Sheriff Austin is on the other line,” the receptionist said. “Can I take a message?”

“This is Sheriff Joanna Brady,” Joanna answered “From Cochise County. If you don’t mind, I’ll hold.”

Wilbur Austin came on the line a few moments later. “Well, hello, Sheriff Brady. Don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure, but I’m sure we’ll run into one another at the association meeting in Lake Havasu in February. I hear you’ve been having all kinds of problems with this session at the APOA. Someone mentioned it today at lunch. I just heard about it’ this afternoon. It’s a damn shame, too. Dave Thompson was a helluva nice guy once upon a time. Went a little haywire, I guess, from the sound of things.”

A little haywire? Joanna thought. I’ll say! But she made no verbal comment. Wilbur Austin’s stream-of-consciousness talk button required very little input from anyone else.

“I heard, too, that you visited my jail here the other night. Hope my people gave you whatever assistance you needed. Always glad to oblige a fel­low officer of the law. Had a few dealings with poor old Walter McFadden from time to time.... “

Austin’s voice trailed off into nothing. Joanna waited, letting the awkward silence linger for some time without making any effort to fill it. Her father had taught her that trick.

“If you run into a nonstop talker and you need something from that person,” Big Hank Lathrop had advised her once, “just let ‘em go ahead and talk until they run out of steam. People like that gab away all the time because they’re afraid of the silence that happens if they ever shut the hell up. If you’re quiet long enough before you ask somebody like that for something, they’ll break their damn necks saying yes.”

The heavy silence in the telephone receiver set­tled in until it was almost thick enough to slice. “What can I do for you, Sheriff Brady?” Wilbur Austin asked finally.

“I’d like to speak to the lead investigator on the Rhonda Weaver Norton homicide,” Joanna said.

It worked just the way Big Hank had told his daughter it would, although Austin was cagey. “This wouldn’t happen to have any connection with your visit to my jail the other night, would it?” he asked.

“It’s too soon to tell,” Joanna admitted. “But it might.”

“Well, that’ll be Detective Sutton,” Wilbur Austin said. “Neil Sutton. Hang on for a minute, I’ll give you his direct number.”

“Thanks,” Joanna said.

Moments later, after she dialed the other number, Detective Sutton came on the line.

“Neil Sutton here,” he said.

“This is Joanna Brady,” she returned. “I’m the new sheriff down in Cochise County. Sheriff Austin told me to give you a call.”

“Oh, yeah,” Neil Sutton said. “Now that you mention it, I guess I have heard your name. Or maybe I’ve read it in the newspaper. What can I do for you, Sheriff Brady?”

“I need some information on the Rhonda Weaver Norton murder.”

“You might try reading the papers,” he suggested, attempting to ditch her in the time-honored fashion of homicide cops everywhere. Longtime detectives usually have a very low regard for meddlesome outsiders who show up asking too many questions about a current pet case.

“Most of what we’ve got has already turned up there,” he added blandly. “There’s really not much more I can tell you. Why do you want to know?”

“There may be a connection between that case and another one,” Joanna returned, playing coy herself, not wanting to give away too much.

As soon as Joanna shut up, Sutton’s tone of casual nonchalance changed to on-point interest. Rec­ognizing Sutton’s irritating lack of candor when it surfaced in herself, she wondered if the malady wasn’t possibly catching. Maybe she’d picked it up from the other detective over the phone lines.

“What other case?” Sutton asked.

Joanna became even less open. “It’s one Carol Strong and I are working on together.”

“Carol Strong?” he asked. “You mean that little bitty detective from Peoria?”

Little bitty? Joanna wondered. If Carol Strong had that kind of interdepartmental reputation, things could go one of two ways. Either Sutton held Carol Strong in high enough mutual esteem that he could afford to joke about his pint-sized counterpart, or else he held her in absolute contempt. There would be no middle ground. And based on that, Sutton would either tell Joanna what she needed to know right away, or else he would force her to fight her way through a morass of conflicting interdepartmental channels.

“Yes, that’s the one,” Joanna agreed reluctantly.

Neil Sutton audibly relaxed on the phone. “Well, sure,” he said. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? What is it you two ladies need?”

Joanna took a deep breath. Here she was, a nov­ice and an outsider, about to send up her first little meager hunch in front of a seasoned detective, one whose official turf she was unofficially invading. What if he simply squashed her idea flat, the way Joanna might smash an unsuspecting spider that ventured into her kitchen?

“What was she wearing?” Joanna asked.

“Wearing? Nothing,” Sutton answered at once. “Not a stitch.”

“Nothing at all?” Joanna asked, dismayed that the answer wasn’t what she had hoped it would be. “But I just watched the television report. I’m sure it said ‘partially clad.’ “

“Oh, that,” Sutton replied. “That was just for the papers and for the television cameras. She wearing a pair of pantyhose all right, but weren’t covering anything useful, if you what I mean.”

Joanna felt her heartbeat quicken in her throat. Maybe her hunch wasn’t so far off the mark after all. She tried not to let her voice betray her growing excitement.

“Maybe you’d better tell me exactly what the pantyhose were covering,” Joanna said.

“Oh, sorry,” Neil Sutton responded. “No offense intended. Her husband used her own pantyhose tie her up. Did a hell of a job of it, too, for a college professor. Must have studied knots back when was a Boy Scout. He had her bent over backwards with her hands and feet together. Must have left her that way for a long damn time before he killed her. Autopsy showed that at the time of death there was hardly any circulation left in any of her extremities.”

Sutton paused for a moment. When Joanna said nothing, he added, “Sorry. I suppose I could have spared you some of the gory details. Any of this sound familiar?”

“It’s possible,” Joanna said evasively. “We’ll have to check it out. Where will you be if I need to get back to you?”

“Right here at my desk,” he answered. “I’m way behind on my paper. I won’t get out of here any before six or seven.”

It was a struggle, but Joanna managed to keep her tone suitably light and casual. “Good,” she said. “If any of this checks out, I’ll be in touch.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Heart pounding with excitement, Joanna di­aled Carol Strong’s numbers—both home and office—and ended up reaching voice mail at home and a receptionist at the office.

“What time is she expected?” Joanna asked.

“Detective Strong is scheduled from four to midnight today,” the receptionist said. “May I take a message?”

What Joanna had to say wasn’t something she wanted to leave in message form, electronic or oth­erwise. “No,” she answered. “I’ll call back then.”

Disappointed, Joanna put down the phone. It was barely twelve-thirty. That meant it could be as long as three and a half hours before she could reach Carol Strong. If that was the case, what was the most profitable use she could make of the in­tervening time?

Reaching for pencil and paper, Joanna drew a series of boxes, to each of which she assigned a name that showed the people involved. Serena and Jorge Grijalva. Rhonda and Dean Norton. Leann Jessup and Dave Thompson. She drew arrows between each of the couples and then studied the paper trying to search for patterns, to see what, if any they all had in common.

The use of pantyhose for restraints was the most obvious. In the upper-right-hand corner of the page, she wrote the word “pantyhose.”

What else? Both Serena and Rhonda had been bludgeoned to death. No stab wounds. No guns wounds. Bludgeoned. Leann Jessup hadn’t died but there were no wounds to indicate the presence of either a knife or a gun. In the corner, she wrote: “Bludgeon (2) ? (1).”

In each case, there had been a plausible suspect who became the immediate focus of the investigation. Both Jorge Grijalva and Professor Dean Norton had a history of domestic violence. So did Dave Thompson, for that matter. That became the third notation: “Domestic violence.”

She sat for a long time, studying the notes. And then it came to her, like the second picture emerging from the visual confusion of an optical illusion. With a physical batterer there to serve as the investigative lightning rod in each of the three separate cases, the real killer could possibly blend into the background and disappear while someone else was convicted of committing his murders. Her hand was shaking as she wrote the fourth note “Handy fall guy.”

For the first time, the words serial murderer edged their way into her head. Was that possible? Would a killer be smart enough to target his victims based on the availability of someone else to take the blame?

Lost in thought, Joanna jumped when the phone at her elbow jangled her out of her concentration.

“Joanna,” a reproving Marliss Shackleford said crossly into the phone, “your mother told me you’d call me back right away.”

Irritated by the interruption, it was all Joanna could do to remain reasonably polite. “I’ve been a little too busy to worry about that picture, if that’s what you’re calling about, Marliss. I’ll try to take care of it next week, but I’m not making any promises.”

“Too busy with the Leann Jessup case?” Marliss asked innocently.

For a guilty moment, Joanna felt as though Marliss, like Jenny, was some kind of mind reader. “You know about that?”

“Certainly. It’s in all the papers. And with you up at the APOA during all these goings-on, I was hoping for a comment on the story from you—one with a local connection, of course.”

Before Marliss finished making her pitch, Joanna was already shaking her head. “I don’t have anything at all to say about that,” she answered. “It’s not my case.”

“But you are involved in it, aren’t you? Eleanor told me that you missed Thanksgiving dinner because—”

“It’s not my mother’s case, either,” Joanna said tersely. “I can’t see how anything she would have to say would have any bearing at all on what’s be happening.”

“Well,” Marliss said. “I just wondered about the woman who was injured. Is Leann Jessup a particular friend of yours?”

“Leann and I are classmates,” Joanna answered. “We’re the only women in that APOA session, naturally we’ve become friends.”

“But she’s, well, you know.... “

“She’s what?” Joanna asked.

Marliss didn’t answer right away. In the long silence that followed Marliss Shackleford’s snide but unfinished question, Joanna finally figured out what the reporter was after, what she was implying but didn’t have nerve enough to say outright.

Of course, the lesbian issue. Since Leann Jessup was a lesbian and since she and Joanna were friends, did that mean Joanna was a lesbian, too?

Knowing an angry denial would only add fuel to the gossip-mill fire, Joanna struggled momentar­ily to find a suitable response. She was saved by a timely knock on the door.

“Look, Marliss, someone’s here. I’ve got to go.”

Joanna hung up the phone and hurried to the door, where she checked the peephole. Bob Brun­dage, suitcase in hand, stood outside her door.

“I came by to tell you good-bye in private,” he said, when she opened the door and let him in. “Good-bye and thanks. I couldn’t very well do that with Eleanor hanging on our every word.”

“Thanks?” Joanna repeated. “For what?”

He shrugged. “I can see now that showing up like this was very selfish of me. I was only inter­ested in what I wanted, and I didn’t give a whole lot of thought as to how my arrival would impact one else—you in particular.”

After all those years of being an only child, I confess finding out about you was a bit of a shock,” Joanna admitted. “But it’s all right. I don’t mind, not really. Was Eleanor what you expected?”

Bob shook his head. “Over the years, I had conjur­ed up a very romantic image of the young woman who gave me away—a cross between Cin­derella and Snow White. In a way, I’m sorry to give her up. It’s a little like finding out the truth about Santa Claus.”

“What do you mean?” Joanna asked.

“I mean the woman I spent a lifetime imagining is very different from the reality. I’d say Eleanor Lathrop was a lot easier to live with as a figment of my imagination than she is as a real live woman who can’t seem to resist telling you what to do.”

“Oh, that,” Joanna laughed. “You noticed?”

He nodded. “How could I help but?”

“She’s done it for years,” Joanna said. “I’m used to a certain amount of nagging.”

Bob Brundage grinned with that impish smile that made him look for all the world like a much younger Big Hank Lathrop. “So am I,” Bob said, “but I usually get it from higher-ups and then only at work. You get it all the time. You’re very patient with her,” he added. “That’s why I wanted to thank you—for handling my share of Eleanor La­throp’s nagging all these years—mine and yours as well.”

“You’re welcome,” Joanna said.

This time Bob Brundage was the one who held out his hand. “See you again,” he said.

“When?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. The next time I’m out this way on business, I suppose,” he said a little wistfully.

“You and your wife could come for Christmas if you wanted to,” Joanna offered. “It’ll be our first Christmas without Andy, so I can’t make any guarantees of what it’ll be like, but I’m sure it’ll be okay. I’ve been told I cook a mean turkey.”

Bob looked both hopeful and dubious. “You’re sure you wouldn’t mind?”

“No,” Joanna said. “I wouldn’t mind. Besides, we could pull a fast one on Eleanor and not tell you were coming until you showed up. She loves to pull surprises on everyone else, but she hates it when someone puts one over on her.”

“That’s worth some thought then, isn’t it?” Bob’s eyes twinkled. “Marcie and I will talk it over and let you know, but right now I’d better go. Eleanor’s waiting downstairs to take me to the plane.”

Joanna escorted him as far as the door and then watched as he walked down the hall. “Hey, Bob,” she called to him, when he reached the elevator lobby.

He turned and looked back. “What?”

“For a brother,” she said, “you’re not too bad.”

He grinned and waved and disappeared into the elevator. Joanna turned back into the room. Making her way back to the desk, she expected it would be difficult to return to her train of thought after all the interruptions. Instead, the moment she picked up the paper, she was back inside the case though she had never left it.

Marliss had called in the midst of the words serial killer. Coming back to her notes, Joanna knew she was right. It wasn’t a matter of guessing. She knew. Proving it was something else.

Joanna still wanted to reach Carol, but it was too soon to try again, so she picked up the paper and resumed studying it once more. Assuming her theory was correct—assuming there was only one killer in all this—where was the connection? How did all those people tie together? What was the common link?

Joanna started a new list in the upper-left-hand corner of the paper: “Cops (2).” Divorced? First she wrote down: “3.” Then, reconsidering what Lorelie Jessup had said about Leann’s breakup with her long-term friend, Joanna Xed out the three and wrote in: “4 of 4.”

What else? Joanna stared at the paper for a long time without being able to think of anything more to add. Finally, it hit her: The Roundhouse Bar and Grill. According to Butch Dixon, Serena, Jorge, and Dave Thompson had all been in the Roundhouse the night Serena died. And Joanna herself had taken Leann there. That meant only two people on the list, Rhonda and Dean Norton, hadn’t been there, although they might have.

Dean Norton had been a professor at the ASU West campus, which was just a few miles away on Thunderbird. Maybe he and Rhonda had turned up in the Roundhouse on occasion, along with everybody else. After a moment, Joanna realized that there was one way to find out for sure.

Ejecting Lorelie’s tape from the VCR, Joanna dropped it into her purse. She made it as far as the door before she stopped short. She wasn’t on duty, but she was working.

One of the lessons Dave Thompson had harped on over and over again in those first few days of instruction was the importance of officer safety. It would have been easy to dismiss the advice of a likely Peeping Tom who was also suspected of attacking Leann Jessup. But now Joanna was living with the growing suspicion that somehow Dave Thompson was also a victim. If that turned out to be the case, maybe his advice merited some attention.

Putting down the purse and unbuttoning her shirt, she slipped the Kevlar vest on over her bra. She had ordered her own custom-made set of soft body armor, but until it arrived, she was stuck wearing Andy’s ill-fitting and uncomfortable castoff vest. By the time she put on a jacket that was roomy enough to cover both the vest and her shoulder-holstered Colt, she felt like a hulking uniformed football player. In comparison, Carol Strong’s small-of-back holster had disappeared completely, even on her thin, slender frame.

Joanna stopped by the pool long enough to tell Jim Bob and Jenny she was going out for a while; then she drove straight to the Roundhouse. As expected, Butch Dixon was on duty. He brought her drink without any of his accustomed camaraderie. Only when he set it in front of her did she realize she had screwed up.

If the Roundhouse was a common denominator, that meant so was Butch Dixon. What if he .. .

Joanna took a sip of her drink. “This tastes more like diet Coke than Diet Pepsi.”

He grinned and nodded. “Good taste buds. Got some in special, just for you. Ask for it by name. Joanna Brady Private Reserve Diet Coke. If I’m not here, tell Phil it’s in the fridge next to my A and W of beer.”

It was hard to persist in believing that someone that thoughtful would also be a serial killer. Joanna raised her glass in salute. “Thanks,” she said.

“You bet,” he said. But then the grin disappeared and Butch shook his head. “I just can’t seem to get Dave Thompson out of my head today. He came in here all the time, you know.”

Joanna studied Butch’s face. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t,” she said. “Not until last night. Remember the first time I came in here asking about the night Serena Grijalva died? Why didn’t you tell me then that Dave Thompson was a regular?”

“I don’t recall your asking me that question straight out,” Butch returned easily. “Besides, if you had asked, I probably wouldn’t have told you. I don’t even tell wives and girlfriends who comes and goes around here. Why would I tell anyone else?”

“You don’t tell? Why not?”

Dixon smiled. “Client/counselor privilege.”

“You’re no lawyer, are you?”

Dixon shook his head.

“Since when do bartenders have the protection of client privilege?”

“You’re right,” he said. “It probably wouldn’t hold up in court, but I do try to protect the privacy of my clientele, for business reasons if nothing else. Dave was one of my broken birds. I was hoping that eventually he’d get his head screwed on straight. And he was working on it. That’s why this so-called suicide crap doesn’t wash. Ol’ Dave maybe imbibed a bit more than was good him...,’

“A bit?” Joanna questioned, raising an eyebrow.

Butch shrugged. “So okay, maybe a lot more than was good for him. It’s bad business for me to run down the drinking habits of some of my very best customers. It doesn’t pay. But still, mentally, I’d say Dave was in much better shape in the last few months than he was when he first started coming here. And if he drank too much, at least he was responsible about it. If he was planning to tie one on, he always had me keep his car keys. If I asked for them, he always handed them over without any argument. Whenever he ended up too smashed to drive, I’d keep his car here overnight and get someone else to drive him back home.”

“Did he talk about his wife much?” Joanna asked. “About his ex-wife?”

A curtain seemed to fall over Butch’s face. He didn’t answer right away. “The man’s dead,” Butch said finally. “It doesn’t seem right for us to be pick­ing him apart when he isn’t even buried yet.”

“Don’t go invoking client/bartender privilege on me again,” Joanna said. “Dave Thompson is dead all right, and I’m trying to find out who killed him.”

“Hey, barkeep.” Three stools down the bar, a grizzled old man raised his glass. “Medic,” he said.

Butch hurried away to fill his thirsty customer’s drink order. He returned to where Joanna was sit­ting with a thoughtful expression on his face.

“As in murder?” he asked. “That’s right.”

Butch shook his head. “What the hell’s going on? First Serena Grijalva and now Dave Thompson. Does someone have a grudge against my custom­ers, or what?”

Joanna reached in her purse and pulled out the videotape. “That’s what I was hoping you could tell me. Would you take a look at this and see if there are any other familiar faces on it?”

“You think someone’s knocked off more of my customers? If that’s the case, before long, I’ll be out of business completely,” Butch said. But he took the video and slipped the tape into the VCR that sat on the counter behind the bar. “What is it?” he asked as the television set blinked over from an afternoon talk show to the tape.

“The news,” Joanna answered. “From Tuesday night.”

“Oh, that,” he said. “I think I already saw it.”

Moments later, the now-familiar face of the stu­dio anchor came on the screen introducing the equally familiar reporter, Jill January. As the taped newscast ran its course, Joanna watched Butch Dix­on’s face for any sign of recognition. There wasn’t any in the first segment. Both Rhonda and Dean Norton’s flashed across the screen without any no­ticeable response from Butch. That changed when Ceci Grijalva’s face appeared in the second seg­ment.

“Damn!” he said. “That poor little kid. What’s going to happen to her?” Then later, when Joanna’s name was mentioned, he looked and nodded. “I’ll bet this is the part I saw already.”

The taped Joanna Brady was just beginning to answer Jill January’s question when Butch Dixon clicked the remote.

“Wait a minute. Let me play that back. I don’t want to miss anything.”

The action on the screen slipped into reverse. Joanna Brady and Leann Jessup were walking, backward up the aisle at the end of the vigil rather than down it.

“Hey, looky there,” the old man down the bar exclaimed, squinting up at the television set. “Isn’t that there Larry Dysart?”

“Where?” Butch asked.

The old man pointed. “Right there, over that one broad’s shoulder. Nope, now he’s gone.”

Butch grabbed the remote and stopped the action once again. “Where?” he said.

“Right there,” the old man said. “Wait’ll they get almost up to the camera. See there?”

“I’ll be damned,” Butch said. “It is him. And he looks like he’s all bent out of shape. That sly old devil. He never once said anything about going to the damn vigil. If he had, I would have made ar­rangements to go along with him.”

Joanna felt a sudden clutch in her throat. “What did you say his name was?”

“Larry. Larry Dysart.”

“He’s a regular here, too? Did he know Serena?”

“Sure.” Butch nodded.

“Was he here the night Serena died?”

“I’m pretty sure he was,” Butch answered.

“If Larry’s a regular, then he knows Dave Thompson as well?”

“As a matter of fact, Larry drove Dave home sev­eral times. Larry doesn’t drink booze anymore, so I could always ask him to drive somebody home without having to worry about it. He never seemed to mind.”

“And what exactly does Larry Dysart do for a living?” Joanna asked. There was a tremble of ex­citement in her voice, but Butch Dixon didn’t seem to notice.

“As little as possible. He’s a legal process server. It was a big comedown from what he might have expected, but he never seemed to carry a grudge about it.”

Joanna fought to keep her face impassive, the way her poker-playing father had taught her to do. This was important, and she didn’t want to blow it. “Carry a grudge about what?” she asked.

“About his mother giving away the family farm,” Butch answered. “And I mean that literally. In the old days, his grandfather’s farm—the old Hackberry place—was just outside town here, outside Peoria. It was a big place—a whole section of cotton fields. If Larry had been able to talk his mother into selling it back when he wanted her to, he would have made a fortune. Or else she could have held on to it. By now it would be worth that much more. Instead, she and Larry got in some kind of big beef. She ended up giving most of it away.”

“Who to?” Joanna asked.

“TTI,” Butch answered. “Tommy Tompkins In­ternational. Tommy was one of those latter-day Ar­mageddonists who believed that the world was going to end on a certain day at a certain hour. Before that happened, however, his financial world collapsed. He and his two top guys ended up the slammer for income tax evasion.

“Now that I get thinking about it, I believe the APOA dormitory is right on the spot where the house used to be. That’s where Larry lived with his mother and stepfather back when he was a kid. The stepfather died young, and Larry and his mother went to war with each other. They patched it up for a while after she got sick. Since she was the one who’d donated the land to TTI, she was able to wangle her son a job running security for Tommy back in the high-roller eighties, when he had the whole world on a string. Then everything fell apart. When the dust cleared, the world didn’t end as scheduled, Tommy was gone, and the property went into foreclosure. All Larry was left with was a bad taste in his mouth and what he had inherited directly from his grandfather.”

“What was that?”

“The old Hackberry house on Monroe.”

“Where’s that?” Joanna asked. “In downtown Phoenix?”

Butch chuckled. “A different Monroe,” he said. “This one’s right here in Peoria, only a few blocks from here. Listen,” Butch added. “If you want to talk to Larry, it wouldn’t be any trouble for me to find him. He was in for lunch a little while ago, so I don’t think he’s working today. Want me to give him a call and let him know you’re looking for him?”

Joanna stood up, dropping two dollars on the bar to pay for her drink and to leave a tip. “No,” she said, trying to sound casual. “Don’t bother. Could I have that video back, please? I’ve got some errands to run right now. I’ll get in touch with Larry later if I need to.”

Butch handed over the tape. “Here you go. Sure I can’t talk you into having another?”

Joanna shook her head. “No, thanks, but I’ll be back.”

“Sure you will,” Butch Dixon said, looking dis­appointed. “You and Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Once in the Blazer, Joanna couldn’t decide what to do. For one thing, even though she had learned something important, it was all purely circumstantial. And although she might not be entirely clear on what it all meant, she recognized that the connections she had made were a good starting place.

She knew Larry Dysart’s name, the color of his eyes, and where he lived—the location at least, if not the exact address. She had established a definite link between the guy who had almost knocked Leann Jessup down at the candlelight vigil and Se­rena Grijalva. She had also learned that there was a link between Dysart and Dave Thompson—a man who might possibly turn out to be as much victim as he was perpetrator.

Even though Joanna’s quick trip to the Roundhouse had garnered a good deal of information, she had failed to accomplish her original purpose—to establish a link between the Roundhouse and the Nortons. Had she been able to find a connection from them to the Roundhouse, she would have automatically ended up with a connection to Dysart as well. Unfortunately, after watching the video, neither Butch Dixon nor his grizzled, permanent-f­ixture customer had been able to verify such a link with either Rhonda or her husband.

So there are a few holes in my thinking, Joanna thought, leaning forward to turn the key in the ig­nition. But that’s why there were real homicide cops in the world; why there were detectives like Carol Strong who would know exactly what to do with the vague patchwork quilt of information Joanna had managed to assemble. And as soon as it was humanly possible, she would hand what she had over to Carol and let the detective go after it.

At one-thirty, however, it was still too early for that. Four o’clock would be plenty of time to talk to her.

In the meantime, Joanna returned to the hotel to wait and think and to relieve Jim Bob Brady of his baby-sitting responsibilities. She stopped by the pool and was happy to find that the girls were fi­nally out of the water. If they were spending the afternoon up in the room watching videos, it would give Ceci’s waterlogged braids time enough to dry out before she had to go back home to Wittmann.

But when Joanna stopped outside the door to room 810, there was no sound at all coming from inside. And when she opened the door, the room wasn’t exactly as she’d left it. There were two wet towels on the bathroom floor in place of the girls’ clothing, which was gone. Obviously, Jenny and Ceci had come back to the room long enough to change, but where were they now?

Joanna picked up the phone intending to dial the Bradys’ room, but the staccato sound of the dial tone told her she had voice-mail messages—three ­in all.

The first was from Jim Bob Brady.

“I don’t know where you two girls have gone off to,” he said. “I thought I told you to stay put. Maybe you’re in the bathroom with the shower on or a hair dryer goin’. Anyway, Grandma and I are gonna run across the street to Wal-Mart and do a little Christmas shopping. You girls stick around the room until your mom gets back, Jenny. I haven’t had a chance to talk to her today, so I don’t know what the plan is for dinner.”

A half-formed knot of worry began to grow in the pit of Joanna’s stomach. She replayed the mes­sage and listened again to Jim Bob saying, “You girls stay around the room ...” No, there was no mistake. Jim Bob had left the girls in the room and expected them to stay there. So where were they?

The second and third messages were from Carol Strong. Both of those had come in within the last ten minutes and both said Carol would call back later.

Once again, Joanna searched the bathroom, pull­ing the shower curtain all the way aside. She ex­pected to find two wringing-wet bathing suits on the floor of the tub, but the tub was dry and empty. So was the sink. The drain plugs were still closed in the exact same way the housekeeper had left them earlier that morning.

Joanna stood in the bathroom, staring at her re­flection in the mirror, trying to ward off a rising sense of panic, trying to think what to do. Don’t overreact, Joanna told herself firmly. They probably just went back downstairs. Strangely enough, the thought of possible disobedience made Joanna feel better.

Resolutely, she headed downstairs herself. In ad­dition to the pool, the hotel’s recreation area boasted a hot tub as well as a sauna. Posted rules indicated that the last two were off limits to unac­companied children, but that didn’t mean Jenny would necessarily regard that as the final word. In her daughter’s egocentric, nine-year-old view of the world, what she regarded as unreasonable rules were made to be badly bent if not outright broken.

Jim Bob probably got tired of hanging out at the pool and now Jenny’s trying to pull a fast one, Joanna reasoned grimly. Stalking through the rec­reation facilities, at first Joanna was more angry than worried. As she searched the hot tub and sauna, she rehearsed a carefully phrased dressing down. She couldn’t be all that hard on Ceci Grijalva because she was a guest. Most likely she didn’t fully understand the rules, but for Jennifer Ann Brady, there could be no such excuse.

Except it turned out the girls weren’t anywhere to be found. Not in the hot tub or in the sauna or in the pool itself. Joanna asked everyone she met if they had seen two little girls, one with short curly blond hair and the other with long dark braids. No one had seen them, not for at least an hour. What had started out as a tiny knot of worry in the pt of her stomach turned into a cement block.

Maybe they got hungry, she told herself hopefully, fighting down a rising sense of panic. Maybe Jenny had realized that armed with a room key she might be allowed to sign for food in the coffee shop. Joanna hurried in that direction, rushing along on tiptoe, trying to scan the few busy tables as she approached in hopes of spotting them. Bu none of the tables was occupied by the two AWOL little girls.

“Mrs. Brady,” a man’s voice said quietly at her elbow. “Maybe you’d like to come with me.”

Joanna looked up, expecting the speaker to be some hotel official who had nabbed Ceci and Jenny in the act of doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing. Instead, she found herself star­ing into the astonishingly impenetrable blue eyes of Larry Dysart.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“Not who are you?” he returned lightly. “That figures. It means you know who I am. Let’s go sit down and have a drink—a drink and a little talk.”

He took her by the arm and guided her across the lobby. Joanna allowed herself to be led toward the massive fireplace. Larry Dysart directed her to the same chair where she had sat the previous af­ternoon while she visited with Bob Brundage.

“What about?” she asked.

“About what you want and what I want.”

“The only thing I want right now is my daugh­ter.”

“I know,” Larry Dysart said soothingly. “Of course, you do. Maybe you and I can do a little horse-trading.”

A half-drunk cup of coffee was already sitting on the coffee table. Larry signaled a passing cocktail waitress. “The lady will have a diet Coke,” he said without bothering to ask.

Joanna’s world spun out of control. If Larry Dy­sart knew all about Joanna’s drink of choice, that meant his information could have come from only one source. Butch Dixon, the nice man! Butch Dixon, the feeder of starving multitudes! Butch Dixon, that blabbermouthed son of a bitch!

“What have you done with Jenny and Ceci?” Joanna demanded angrily.

“Shhhhhh,” Larry said, casually waving his cof­fee cup to encompass the rest of the lobby. “You wouldn’t want the whole world to hear our little discussion now, would you? It should be public enough so no one can pull anything off the wall, but private enough so no one else hears, don’t you think?”

“I don’t care if the whole world hears. Where are the girls?” Joanna asked, not bothering to lower her voice. “If you have them, I want you to tell me where they are.”

“I won’t tell you where they are, not right now. They’re safe, at least for the moment. But they won’t be forever, not if you insist on being stupid. Lower your damn voice!”

Gripping the end of the armrests, Joanna forced her breath out slowly. When she spoke again, her voice was a bare whisper. “What is it you want?”

“That’s more like it,” Larry said.

Joanna stared back at him. Years of battling with Eleanor had taught her the futility of raised voices. What Larry most likely misread as terrified com­pliance was, on her part, nothing more or less than self-contained fury.

“I want you and Carol Strong off my back,” he said easily. “I want to leave town. I want things to go the way they would have gone if you hadn’t come around sticking your nose into things that were none of your concern.”

“What things?” Joanna asked, willing her face to remain impassive.

Larry looked at her and didn’t answer. His lips smiled; his eyes didn’t. There was no relationship between his eyes and mouth. It was easy to imagine that the two curving lips and the implacable eyes belonged to two entirely separate faces. The effect was disconcerting, but Joanna didn’t look away.

“You mean like letting Jorge Grijalva’s plea bargain go through?” she asked. “You mean like let­ting Dean Norton go to prison for a crime he didn’t commit? And as for Dave Thompson ...”

In answer, Larry let his glance shift briefly from her to his watch. “I want you to call Carol Strong.”

“It’s too early. She isn’t due into the office until four.”

“Call her anyway. Have them find her. And when you reach her, tell her we need to talk. Tell her I have the girls.”

Hearing him say the words aloud, Joanna’s heart skipped a beat. “How do I know that you—”

Before Joanna could finish framing the sentence, Dysart reached down beside his chair, picked up one of the Hohokam’s plastic laundry bags. He tossed it into her lap. There was something wet and heavy in the bottom of the bag. The weight of it sickened her. Afraid of what warped trophy might he inside, Joanna didn’t want to look. And yet, she had to.

Stomach heaving, she finally peered inside. Jen­ny’s still-wet bathing suit lay in a soggy pink wad at the bottom of the bag. Larry Dysart had told Joanna that he had the girls, but visible confirma­tion more than words brought the horrifying reality of it home to her.

Larry Dysart really did have Jenny. And Ceci, too. The awful realization rocked Joanna to her very core. The lunchtime bowl of turkey noodle soup curdled in her stomach.

“Where are they?” she asked, fighting to keep her voice steady.

“Like I said, they’re safe enough for right now,” Larry told her. “Where they are doesn’t really matter. What does matter is whether or not you’re go­ing to do as you’re told. Go call Carol Strong. Now. Use the pay phone over there by the elevators so I can see you the whole time. Don’t try anything funny. And remember, if anything happens to me, the girls die. You do have her number, don’t you?”

Nodding woodenly, Joanna stood up. She walked across the room feeling like she was bal­ancing on a tightrope hundreds of feet above the ground—a tightrope with no safety net. A monster chess-master held Jenny’s life in his hands and he was using her as a sacrificial pawn. Carol Strong would never agree to a deal. She couldn’t possibly. But with Jenny’s and Cecelia’s very survival hang­ing in the balance ...

It took forever for Joanna to fumble a quarter out of her purse. Then, when she tried to put it in the coin slot, her hand trembled so badly, it was all she could do to make it work. And even after she finally heard the buzz of the dial tone, she could hardly force her fingers to do the dialing.

“Detective Strong, please,” Joanna said. At least her throat and voice still worked. That in itself seemed amazing.

Expecting to be told Carol wouldn’t be in until after four, Joanna was surprised when the clerk said, “Who’s calling, please?”

“Joanna Brady,” she answered. “Sheriff Joanna Brady.”

Carol Strong came on the line a moment later. “Thank God it’s you,” she said breathlessly. “I’ve been calling your room every five minutes. I didn’t want to leave a message on the voice mail for fear Jenny, not you, might pick it up. I think we’ve got him, Joanna. I should have figured it out lots sooner than this. I mean it was right there in front of me all along, but until I talked to Serena’s attor­ney just now—”

“Larry Dysart has Jenny,” Joanna interrupted. “Jenny and Ceci Grijalva both. He told me to call you and tell you he wants a deal.”

Carol stopped abruptly. “You know about Larry Dysart?” she asked. “You say he has Jenny?”

“Yes.”

“Damn! What kind of a deal is he looking for?”

“He says he wants to leave town with no reper­cussions. He wants us to let him go.”

“Where are you?” Carol asked.

“At the hotel. In the lobby. We’re sitting right in front of the fireplace.”

“I can be there in five minutes. I’ll call in the pecial Ops boys—”

“A SWAT team?” Joanna almost screeched into the phone. “No way! Are you crazy? The hotel is full of people. Someone would get hurt. Not only that, he says that if anything happens to him, the girls will die.”

“He’s bluffing.” Carol Strong’s answer was firm and brisk, but that was easy for her. It wasn’t Carol Strong’s daughter who was missing.

“Carol,” Joanna insisted. “Listen to me. He’s got the girls. This isn’t a bluff!”

There was a long pause. “Get a grip, Joanna,” Carol ordered.

“Get a grip?” Joanna echoed. “What the hell do you mean, ‘get a grip’?”

“I mean stop thinking like a mother and start thinking like a cop. What if it’s already too late? What if he is bluffing and the girls are already dead?”

The stark words hit Joanna with the force of a smashing fist to the gut. The sheer pain of it almost doubled her over. Nausea rose in her throat. She fought it down, but somehow the terrible shock of hearing those words vaporized her rising sense of panic.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked finally.

“Tell Dysart I’ll deal,” Carol continued. “While I’m arranging backup, you open negotiations. Ask him what he wants. Try to keep him talking.”

Leaving the phone dangling off hook, Joanna walked back across the room. It was only then that she realized that the Thanksgiving pumpkins were all gone. She saw the poinsettia- and Christmas-tree-decorated lobby for the first time. And, though the spacious lobby wasn’t crowded, then were still far more people there than she had noticed earlier.

Near the desk, a harried young couple tried to check in while riding herd on two active toddlers and a cartful of luggage. A silver-haired, knickers-clad golf foursome stood just inside the lobby door, noisily rehashing the day’s golf game. On the other side of the bank of elevators, teenage organizers from a church youth group were setting up regis­tration tables for a weekend conference. All of the people in the room—hotel employees and guests alike—were going about their business with no idea of the life-and-death drama playing itself out in their midst. And of all of them, only Joanna Brady was wearing a Kevlar vest.

She straightened her shoulders as she ap­proached the fireplace. “Detective Strong says she’ll deal. She wants to know what you want.”

Larry nodded and once again smiled his chilly, humorless smile. “That’s more like it. Tell her—”

“Yoohoo, Joanna,” Jim Bob Brady’s hearty voice boomed from across the room near the hotel en-trance. “We’re back.”

With sinking heart, Joanna watched as the Bradys, arms laden with bags of merchandise, marched purposefully across the lobby.

“Get rid of them,” Larry Dysart whispered ur­gently. “I don’t want them here.”

“Did you have a good time shopping?” Joanna asked, turning a phony smile on her in-laws.

The phoniness of her smile didn’t seem to faze Eva Lou, who sank gratefully into a nearby chair and kicked off her shoes. “My feet hurt like mad,” c announced. “That place was crazy. I didn’t ink we’d ever get checked out.”

“This is Larry Dysart,” Joanna said lightly, while briskly rubbing her earlobe with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. “He’s an old navy friend of Andy’s. These are Andy’s folks, Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady.”

During the election, Joanna and Jim Bob had gone out doorbelling together. On a quiet street in Willcox, while Jim Bob went to the house next door, Joanna had rung the bell of a modest bungalow. The man who answered the door had seemed fine at first, but when he discovered Joanna was a candidate for the office of sheriff, he had started telling her a long, complicated story about how his neighbors on either side were really Russian spies who were planning to kill the President and overthrow the government.

Realizing the man was somewhat disturbed, Joanna had tried to drop off her literature and leave. At the prospect of her walking away, however, the man had become highly agitated. Jim Bob had gone on to two more houses before he realized Joanna was still stuck at the first one. He had come back to retrieve her. Between the two of them, Jim Bob and Joanna had effected a reasonably graceful exit.

From then on, however, a rubbed earlobe had meant that whoever Joanna was involved with at the time was trouble in one way or another. In ad­dition to the tugged earlobe, both the Bradys and Joanna knew that Andy had served a two-year hitch in the army—not the navy.

“Is that so?” Jim Bob put down his packages and then offered a hand to Larry Dysart in greeting. “Did you say navy? Glad to meet you, Larry,” Jim Bob said, then the old man turned and focused his eyes on Joanna’s face.

A dismayed Eva Lou looked back and forth between them, but she was familiar enough with the Willcox story to say nothing and follow her hus­band’s lead.

“And what did you do in the navy?” Jim Bo asked cordially, sitting down and leaning back as if settling in for a genial chat. “Andy was involved in communications.”

“Me, too,” Larry said. “That’s how Andy and I met.”

The lie seemed to come easily. He played along, all the while looking daggers at Joanna with the same hard-edged stare he had used on Leann Jes­sup at the end of the candlelight vigil.

“Anyone care for a drink?” a cocktail waitress asked.

“Sure,” Jim Bob said. “If you don’t mind, the wife and I will join you. We’ll both have coffee, black.”

“You’d better get back to your friend on the phone,” Larry said. “She’ll think you’ve forgotten all about her. Tell her to come here and we’ll talk.”

Joanna walked back to the phone. “What took you so long?” Carol demanded.

“My in-laws showed up. They’re sitting there chatting with us. They’ve ordered coffee.”

“Get rid of them,” Carol said, repeating verbatim the same thing Larry had said. “I’ve called for backup. The SWAT team is gearing up, but it’ll take a little while to get everybody in place. They’ll take up strategic positions outside the hotel. Cars should be on the scene within two minutes. I told them no lights, no sirens. Nobody’s to try going inside until I give the word, and I’m leaving my office now. Can you tell if he’s armed?”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell for sure, but most likely.”

“That’s my guess, too. Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Good girl. Hang in there, Joanna. Believe me, everybody here’s on top of this thing. We’re getting a search warrant for both his house and vehicle. And don’t worry. No matter what happens, we’ll find those girls.”

“You’d better,” Joanna said, but it was a hollow threat, fueled by desperation and hopelessness and nothing else.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Joanna hung up the phone and started back toward the congenial-looking group gathered in front of the poinsettia-banked fireplace. As she walked, the physical weight of the Colt under her jacket was almost as heavy as the terrible weight of responsibility pressing against her heart.

This time it was no dream. Wide awake now, she was back in her worst shoot/don’t shoot night­mare—with Jenny in danger and with people she loved sitting directly in the line of fire. Carol Strong and her backup officers were riding to the rescue, but none of them knew this lobby layout as well as Joanna did. And if Dysart caught a glimpse of cops taking up positions outside, he might turn a gaily decorated hotel lobby into a killing zone.

While Joanna had been on the phone, a school bus had pulled up outside the hotel entrance. Now with whoops of laughter, a crowd of thirty or so teenagers, all of them carrying luggage, swarmed into the lobby. At the sight of all those kids, something came together in Joanna’s heart—an urgency and a determination that hadn’t been there before. As a police officer and as a parent, she had a moral obligation to do something to prevent a gun battle from erupting in a room packed with other peo­ple’s innocent children. Ready or not, the way to do that was to stop the battle before it ever had a chance to start.

Joanna was almost back at her chair when the cocktail waitress arrived carrying cups, saucers, and a pot of coffee on a tray. Seeing an opening, Joanna paused, letting the waitress step in front of her.

“Carol’s coming,” she said to Larry, carefully es­tablishing and maintaining eye contact with him as she continued forward. “She’ll be here in just a few minutes.”

As Joanna stepped around the waitress, she reached out and snagged the coffeepot’s handle. With one smooth movement, Joanna shoved the waitress out of the way and sent the glass coffeepot and its steaming contents hurtling past Jim Bob’s startled face. It landed, upside down, in Larry Dy­sart’s lap.

He screamed and lurched to his feet, shattering the pot as well as his cup and saucer into a thousand pieces on the brass-and-glass coffee table in front of him. While Joanna fought the Colt out of its holster, Jim Bob sprang to his feet as well. The older man made a flying tackle, grabbing for Lar­ry’s knees. Leaping almost three feet straight up in the air, Larry managed to dodge out of the way.

“Stop or I’ll shoot,” Joanna ordered.

Instead of stopping, Larry sidestepped both Jim Bob and the chair. As the waitress scrambled to her knees, he grabbed her arm and yanked her toward him. With his forearm angled across her throat, he pinned the struggling woman to his chest, using her as a living shield between his body and Joan­na’s deadly Colt.

Behind them in the lobby, horrified hotel custom­ers started to scream. “Oh, my God,” someone wailed. “She’s got a gun. Somebody call the cops.”

“I am a cop,” Joanna shouted over her shoulder, but without taking her eyes off Larry. “Everybody down.” To Larry Dysart, she said, “Let her go!”

“You bitch,” he snarled back, his face distorted with unreasoning rage. “You goddamned, interfer­ing bitch!”

Pressing his forearm against the terrified wait­ress’s throat, he held her captive against his chest while his other hand sought to retrieve something from his jacket pocket.

“Watch it, Joanna,” Jim Bob warned. “He’s going for a gun.”

Then, disregarding any possible danger to himself from Joanna’s drawn Colt, Jim Bob rose to his knees and lunged at Dysart a second time. Because the second tackle was launched from below waist level, Dysart never saw it coming. Jim Bob’s un­expected weight pounded into the waitress’s wildly flailing knees. In what seemed like slow motion, Dysart toppled over backward toward the fireplace, pulling the struggling waitress and Jim Bob with him.

All three of them hit the floor in a writhing heap of arms and legs. Before the tackle, Dysart must have managed to pull his handgun—a small-caliber pistol—loose from his pocket. The force of Jim Bob’s blow knocked it from his grip. The revolver clattered to the floor and then came skidding past Joanna’s feet, spinning across the polished surface like a deadly Christmas top. Joanna turned and knelt to retrieve it. By the time she regained her feet, Larry Dysart had rolled behind Eva Lou’s chair. When she saw him again, he was on his feet and halfway across the room, sprinting toward the door to the pool area.

The lobby erupted in a chorus of yells and shouts. A woman’s high-pitched scream rent the air. Joanna barely heard it. She paused only long enough to press Larry Dysart’s .22 into Jim Bob’s hand, then she raced after the fleeing man. By the time she threw open the gate to the wrought-iron fence to the pool, Dysart was already beyond the deep end, pushing his way past a startled gardener and scrambling over the six-foot stucco wall that separated the pool from the hotel’s back parking lot.

With the gardener standing right there, Joanna couldn’t risk a shot. She was enough of a marksman that she probably could have hit Dysart, even from that distance, but what if the terrified gar­dener dodged into the bullet rather than away from it?

The sore muscles she had strained during phys­ical training earlier in the week screamed in protest as she pounded down the pool deck after him. When she reached the wall, she found it was too high for her to pull herself up.

Holstering the semiautomatic, she turned to the gardener for help. “I need a boost.”

Without a word, the man knelt down in his freshly planted petunias and folded his hands to­gether, turning them into a stirrup. His strong-armed assist raised Joanna high enough to pull herself up onto the wall. She dropped heavily onto the other side, hitting the ground rolling, the way she’d been taught. Even so, the graceless landing knocked the breath out of her. Gasping for air, she scrambled to her feet just as Larry Dysart disap­peared behind a huge commercial garbage bin.

Hoping for help, Joanna looked around. There were no cop cars anywhere in sight. If Carol Strong’s reinforcements were on the scene, where the hell were they? But Joanna knew the answer to that. Based on what she had told Carol about where they were, the cops were focused on the front of the building—on the lobby not on the loading dock.

Fueled by adrenaline, Joanna took off after Dy­sart. She stopped at the corner of the building long enough to reconnoiter. Peering carefully around the stuccoed wall, she caught sight of him and knew that his back was toward her before she stepped into the clear. Instead of waiting for her in ambush, Larry Dysart was still running.

Joanna ran, too. Past the back of the kitchen where a cook and a dishwasher stood having a companionable smoke; past the open door of the overheated laundry with its heavy, damp air warmed with the homey smell of freshly drying

linens. Halfway down that side of the building, Dy­sart veered sharply to the left and headed for Grand Avenue. Half a second later, Joanna saw why. An empty cop car, doors ajar, sat parked at e front corner of the building. The reinforcements had arrived, all right, but they had been sucked into the lobby by the panicked uproar there.

Realizing she was on her own, Joanna despaired. Dysart was headed for the street. She was running flat out behind him. Even so, she was still losing ground.

This way, Joanna wanted to shout to the invisible cops in the lobby. Come out and look this way.

But there wasn’t yet enough air in her tortured lungs to permit yelling and running at the same time. And there was no one to hear her if she had. Instead, straining every muscle, she raced after him.

Dysart burst through a small landscaped area that bordered on Grand Avenue and then paused uncertainly on the shoulder of the road. A moment later, he darted out into traffic. Horns honked. Brakes squealed. Somehow he dodged several lanes of oncoming traffic. Making it safely to the other side, he disappeared down an embankment.

Joanna, too, paused at the side of the road. She looked both ways, across six lanes of traffic. Then, taking advantage of a momentary lull in vehicles, she too plunged across Grand. Halfway to the other side, she heard the unmistakable rumble of an ap­proaching train.

Her heart sank. By then, Dysart had gained so much ground that if he managed to cross the tracks just ahead of the train, he might be able to disappear behind the seventy-five or so freight cars the train before Joanna or anyone else would able to come after him.

When she finally reached the far shoulder of Grand Avenue, Joanna looked down in time to see Larry Dysart climbing over the barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence that separated railroad right-of way from highway right-of-way.

“Stop or I’ll shoot.” She screamed the warning over the roar of the approaching train. And he must have heard her, because he turned to look. But he kept on climbing. And when he hit the ground, he kept on running, straight toward the tracks, less than fifty yards ahead of the rumbling southbound train.

He was out in the open now, with nothing but open air between him and Joanna’s Colt 2000. She dropped to her knees and held the semiautomatic with both hands. A body shot would have been far easier. His broad back would have offered a far larger target, but she didn’t want to risk a body shot. That might kill him. Instead, she aimed for his legs, for the pumping knees that were carrying him closer and closer to the track.

Joanna’s first shot exploded in a cloud of dirt just ahead of him. It had no visible effect on Dysart other than making him run even faster. Gritting her teeth, Joanna squeezed off a second round and then a third. The fourth shot found its mark. Larry Dy­sart rose slightly in the air, like a runner clearing a curb. When he came back down, his shattered leg crumpled under him. He pitched forward on his face.

Giddy with relief and triumph, Joanna stumbled down the rocky incline from the roadway. By then the train was bearing down on the injured man. She had him. All she had to do now was wait for help. With a broken leg, he’d never be able to cross the tracks before the train reached him. And even if he did, the leg would slow him down enough that someone would be able to catch up with him.

“Hold it!” she yelled, running toward the fence with her Colt still raised. “Hold it right there!”

He must have heard that, too. He raised up on both elbows long enough to look back at her, then he started crawling toward the track, dragging the damaged leg behind him. By the time Joanna real­ized his intentions, there was nothing she could do.

“Stop!” she screamed. “Please! Don’t do it.”

But without a backward glance, Larry Dysart threw himself under the iron wheels of the moving train. He disappeared from sight while behind him a single severed foot and shoe flew high in the air. Spewing blood, it landed in the dirt thirty feet from the tracks.

Joanna stopped and stared in utter horror and disbelief at the place where he had disappeared. The train rumbled on and on, not even slowing. By then the lead engine had almost reached the next crossing. Totally unaware of the terrible carnage behind him, the engineer sounded his whistle.

To Joanna’s ear, that terrible screech sounded like the gates of hell swinging open to swallow her alive. She dropped to her knees. “Please, God,” she prayed. “Don’t let him be dead.”

But of course, he was.

Moments later, before the last car clattered by,

Joanna felt a steadying hand on her shoulder. “A , you all right?” Carol Strong asked.

Joanna nodded. “But . . “

“I know,” Carol said. “I saw it happen. Let me have your weapon. You’ll get it back after the investigation.”

Without a word Joanna handed over the Colt, Carol helped her up. “Stay here,” she ordered. Joanna nodded numbly and made no effort to follow when Carol walked away.

Standing there alone, Joanna dusted off the knees of her pants. She didn’t look at the track. Whatever was left of Larry Dysart, she didn’t need to see it. Behind her, she heard sirens as emergency vehicles left the hotel and screamed across the intersection to reach the northbound lanes of Grand Avenue. They pulled up on the shoulder, lights flashing, feet thumping on the dirt as a group of uniformed of­ficers followed by an intent aid crew jogged down the embankment. They came to an abrupt stop when they reached the spot by the fence where Joanna was standing.

While the emergency crew milled around her, Joanna was only vaguely aware of them. Larry Dy­sart was dead. By his own hand. Crushed to pieces beneath the iron wheels of an onrushing train.

All Joanna Brady could hear right then, in both her head and her heart, was his voice—his chilling, humorless voice—saying the awful words over and over, repeating them again and again like a horrific: broken record.

“If anything happens to me, the girls will die . . . the girls will die . . . the girls will die.”

A uniformed man appeared at Joanna’s side.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She neither heard nor comprehended the questi­on until the second time he asked. Only then did she realize that he was a medic worried about her condition.

“I’m fine,” she said, brushing him aside. “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

“No, you’re not,” Carol said, coming back to Joanna. “Come on. I’ll get you a ride back to the hotel. We’ll have officers there for the next sev­eral hours taking statements, yours included. And

“What are you going to do?” Joanna asked.

“As soon as I get you back to the hotel, I’m going to go search Dysart’s house on Monroe,” Carol Strong answered. “Somebody should have the search warrant in hand by now. I told Detective Hansen I’d meet him there. And I’ve already called for Search and Rescue. They’ll be bringing dogs. When I go, I’ll need to take along something that belongs to Jenny, and to Ceci, too, if you have anything available.”

Barely aware of her legs moving, Joanna allowed herself to be led to a patrol car and driven back to the hotel. Blindly, she made her way through the lobby without even pausing long enough to talk to Jim Bob and Eva Lou. In the room on the eighth floor, it was easy for Joanna to find something of Jenny’s—her well-worn denim jacket. But once the piece of faded but precious material was in Joanna’s hand, it was almost impossible for her to hand it over to Carol Strong. After that, a careful search of the room revealed absolutely nothing that belonged to Ceci Grijalva.

“That’s all right,” Carol said. “We’ll make do with the jacket for right now. I’ll send someone out to Wittmann to pick up something of Ceci’s from her grandparents’ house.”

“I should do that,” Joanna said. “If anyone goes to talk to the Duffys, it should be me. After all, I’m the one who picked her up this morning. They en-trusted her to my care.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Carol Strong returned. “I’ll send an officer out to notify them. You’re going to go back down to the lobby and give your statement to the sergeant I’ve left in charge. That way you’ll be right here so I can find you at a moment’s notice once we locate the girls.”

Joanna could see there was no sense in arguing. “All right,” she agreed reluctantly. “All right.”

At Carol’s insistence, Joanna returned to the lobby. She had no idea how many officers worked for the Peoria Police Department, but the place was alive with cops, both in and out of uniform. A young uniformed officer was huddled with Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady. A plainclothes detective was questioning the waitress.

While Carol consulted with her sergeant, Joanna went over to the lobby bar and sat down. “What can I get you?” the bartender asked solicitously.

“A glass of water, please,” Joanna said. “That’s all I want.”

Carol came back. “I’ve told the sergeant where you are,” she said. “As soon as someone is ready to talk to you, he’ll send them here.”

Joanna nodded. “Thanks,” she said. “Can you tell me anything Dysart said that might help us know where to look?”

Joanna shook her head. “Just that if anything happened to him, the girls would die. As though he had rigged some kind of timer or maybe left them with someone else.”

“Okay.” Carol nodded. “We’ll go to work.”

She left then. Desolate, Joanna sat at the bar. Jim Bob stopped by when the officer finished question­ing him. “Are you all right?” he asked.

Joanna nodded. “How about you?”

“I’m all right. Eva Lou went up to lay down. She was feelin’ a trifle light-headed. As for me, I’m just all bent out of shape that I’m not as young as I used to be,” he said disconsolately. “If I’da been ten years younger, he wouldn’t of made it past me.”

“It was a good try,” Joanna said. “It was a very good try.”

“We’ll be up in the room,” Jim Bob said. “You let us know if you need anything.”

“Right,” Joanna said.

An hour and a half later, Joanna had finished giv­ing her statement to both a Peoria police officer named Sergeant Rodriquez and a female FBI agent named LaDonna Bright. She was still sitting at the bar and still sipping her water when Butch Dixon sauntered into the room. Uninvited, he hoisted himself up on the stool beside her.

“I heard,” he said. “When it comes to bad news, Peoria’s still a very small town.”

“What the hell are you doing here?” Joanna asked. “Go away. Leave me alone.”

“Wait a minute,” Butch said. “The last thing I knew, you and I were pals. You came into my place and had a drink. Now you’re treating me like I have a communicable disease.”

“You are a communicable disease,” Joanna returned pointedly. “I don’t know what you had to do with all this, but—”

“Me?” he asked. “What makes you think I had anything at all to do with anything?”

“Larry Dysart walks in here, he takes my daugh­ter God knows where, and then the next thing I know, he’s buying me a drink. ‘Diet Coke,’ he says. ‘The lady will have a diet Coke.’ Where would he have picked that up, if not from you?”

“Sure he got it from me,” Butch Dixon said. “So what?”

“Why were you talking to him about me?”

“Damn Larry Dysart anyway. Why shouldn’t I talk about you?” Butch returned. “Pretty girl walks into my bar and walks right back out again with my heart on her sleeve. I’ve been doing what any red-blooded American male would do—bragging like crazy. Telling everybody who’ll hold still long enough to listen all about her. You think I put in private reserve drinks for everybody?” He sounded highly offended.

Joanna looked at him as though she couldn’t quite decipher what he was saying. “You mean you were talking about me to him because you like me?”

“What else?” Butch exploded. “What’s not to like? Now, are you going to tell me what’s happen­ing with Jenny, or not?”

And so she told him. In the middle of telling the story, the phone at the end of the bar rang. Joanna held her breath when the bartender said the call was for her.

“Yes?” she said hopefully, when she heard Carol Strong’s voice.

“Nothing so far,” Carol answered. “We’ve gone over the whole house. The dogs are out searching the yard right now. We haven’t found his car yet, but we’re looking.”

Joanna took a deep breath and let the words soak in. “I’ve got to know, Carol. You told me on the phone that you had him. What did you mean?”

“I talked to Serena’s attorney. I was reading over that thing Butch Dixon wrote for you, the part about Serena’s attorney swearing out a restraining order. Madeline Bellerman is a junior attorney for a very big-time firm here in Peoria—Howard, Howard and Rock. For the first time, I found my-self asking how Serena Grijalva came to have such a gold-plated attorney representing her in the no­-contact-order department. It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and I had to track Madeline down at a ski lodge in Lake Tahoe. Larry Dysart was a process server. He did some work for Madeline. He talked her into doing Serena’s restraining order on a pro bono basis. Turns out he also served divorce papers on Dean Norton.”

Carol paused for breath. “I finally figured it out. He only targeted women for murder when he thought he could get away with it because—”

“Because there was someone else to blame,” Joanna finished.

“I’m sorry to say,” Carol Strong added, “he sucked me right in.”

When Joanna put down the phone, Butch Dixon was anxiously watching her face. “Anything?” he, asked.

“Not yet,” she returned.

Joanna resumed her seat on the stool. By then Butch had ordered her a diet Coke, which she ac­cepted with good grace. With Jenny in danger, Joanna was surprised she could drink a soda or sit still or even talk. It was as though she existed—living and breathing—in a little vacuum of nor­malcy, one that Butch Dixon somehow helped make possible.

When she came back from the telephone, he didn’t say anything for a long time. He seemed to be lost in thought. “While you were gone,” he said, “I was sitting here thinking. I just remembered something. Larry Dysart didn’t stop drinking booze until just a few months ago. And sometimes, when he used to be on the sauce, he’d get off on a big nonstop talking kick. One time he was telling me about what a crazy bastard old Tommy Tompkins was. I always figured that was the pot calling the kettle black.

“But anyway, he was talking about this bomb shelter Tommy used to have. It was supposed to be a big secret, because when Armageddon came, Tommy didn’t want too many people knowing about it. I’ll bet it’s still there. You don’t suppose ...”

Joanna was already on her way to track down Sergeant Rodriquez. “Get hold of Detective Strong,” Joanna told him. “Tell her they’re looking in the wrong place.”

Moments later, the phone rang at the end of the bar. Joanna answered it herself.

“Where?” was Carol Strong’s one-word question.

“Somewhere on the APOA campus,” Joanna an­swered. “My best guess is you’re looking for a bomb shelter.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

It was almost 8 P.M. when the Search and Rescue dogs picked up a trail that led to a man-hole just off the railroad right-of-way. The manhole was labeled UTILITIES, with no specifica­tion as to what kind of utilities might be involved. Inside were conduit runs and circuit-breaker boxes—all of which proved to be dummies.

The girls’ trail led down the ladder and through a concrete tunnel to what was, ostensibly, a dead end. Carol Strong had Butch Dixon and Joanna brought to the scene while a lock technician tried to solve the problem of how the trail the dogs had followed down the tunnel could pass through what appeared to be a solid concrete wall.

“They’re in there,” Carol told an anxious Joanna once she was standing near the head of the line of people at the far end of the tunnel. “I don’t know if they’re both there, and I don’t know if they’re all right,” Carol continued. “All I do know for sure is that when we tap on the wall, somebody taps back.”

Joanna felt her knees go weak with relief, but it was another half hour before the locksmith discov­ered the release mechanism. With a creaking groan, the seemingly massive wall slid aside, moving smoothly on well-oiled rollers. At once, seven sep­arate flashlights probed the darkness beyond the opening.

Jennifer Brady, wearing the same clothes she had worn that morning, stood illumined in the glow of lights, both hands on her hips. Blinking in the sud­den glare, she tumbled out of the darkness with Ceci Grijalva right on her heels. Tears of joy coursed down Joanna’s face as she gathered both girls into her arms.

After enduring her mother’s fierce hug for as long as she was willing, Jenny pushed away. “Mommy,” she said accusingly. “It was dark in there. What took you so long?”

A jubilant Butch Dixon let out a yip that was a cross between a rodeo rider’s triumphant Yippee and a fairly respectable imitation of a coyote’s yip.

“Who’s that?” Jenny asked, peering up at him. “And what happened to his hair?”

“That’s Butch Dixon,” Joanna said. “He’s a friend of mine. It’s because of him that we found you as soon as we did. And as far as his hair is concerned, it all fell out because his grandmother gave him a permanent when he was a little boy.”

Jenny’s eyes widened. “No! Is that true?”

Butch Dixon grinned. “If your mother says so,” he told her, “then it must be.”

Epilogue

Butch Dixon hosted the celebration dinner that night. All the cops and FBI agents who could be corralled into doing so came to the Roundhouse Bar and Grill for freebie dinners, which included Caboose dishes of ice cream, peanuts, and chocolate syrup all the way around.

The party lasted until well after midnight. The Duffys had long since taken Pablo and Ceci and headed for home. Joanna and the Bradys were about to do the same with Jenny when a drained Carol Strong limped into the restaurant carrying her signature high heels, one of which was sheared off under the sole. The lighting in the bar wasn’t the best, but even in its dim glow, Joanna was sur­prised by the haggard expression on the detective’s face.

“What’s wrong?” Joanna asked when Carol sat down beside her. “You look awful.”

“You would, too, if you’d just been through what I’ve been through.”

“What?”

“We discovered Larry Dysart had closed off all the air ducts to the bomb shelter,” Carol answered. “I don’t know exactly how long the girls would have lasted before they ran out of air, but it wouldn’t have been forever. It’s a good thing we found them when we did.”

“Oh,” Joanna said. It was all she could manage.

“And we found a jewelry box,” Carol continued. “A jewelry box that he evidently used as a trophy case. It had nine pairs of panties in it. Eight offi­cially, because I didn’t catalog this one.”

Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a pair of nylon panties and placed them in Joanna’s hands. “Mine?” Joanna asked without looking.

Carol nodded. “You said it was part of a set your husband gave you. If I had listed them in the offi­cial evidence inventory, you never would have seen them again. Put them away fast before anybody else sees them,” Carol ordered. “That FBI agent, LaDonna Bright, and I are the only ones who know about them so far. I want to keep it that way.”

Guiltily, Joanna shoved the panties into her blazer pocket. “Thank you,” she murmured.

“You’re welcome,” Carol Strong replied.

They sat in silence for a moment watching and listening while Butch Dixon charmed a weary Jenny with an old shaggy-dog story that was nonetheless brand-new to her. She laughed delightedly at the punch line.

“You said eight other pairs?” Joanna asked even­tually.

Carol nodded. “There’s an index of sorts taped to the bottom of the box,” she said quietly. “It con­tains names and dates. Matching codes have been inked into the labels of each pair of panties. I guess he must have been afraid the toll might one day go so high that he’d forget which panties belonged to which victim.”

Joanna swallowed hard. “Eight. How could there be so many?”

“Scary, isn’t it,” Carol said. “Number six was Se­rena Grijalva. Seven was Rhonda Weaver Norton. Leann Jessup is listed as number eight, except she didn’t die. Once we finish examining all the trace evidence, I’m pretty sure we’ll find that Dave Thompson didn’t commit suicide.”

“Larry killed him, too? Why?”

“I think so. This morning, before I went looking for Madeline Bellerman, I went by the hospital to see Leann Jessup. I ended up talking to her friend, Kimberly George.”

“Her ex-lover, you mean.”

“Current, not ex,” Carol returned. “Kimberly told me that after she saw you on the news with Leann, she realized she was wrong, that she wanted to get back together.”

“When she saw the two of us?” Joanna echoed. “But I’m not—”

“I know,” Carol said. “Don’t worry about it. I told Kimberly that this morning. But on Wednes­day evening, Kim evidently stopped by Leann’s room on the APOA campus to see if they could patch things up. I don’t know how explicit their reconciliation was, but I think Larry Dysart saw what was happening. He saw one more chance to add to his collection, this time with a deceased Dave Thompson holding the bag.

“I’d like to think that it wouldn’t have worked, that we would have been smarter than that. And I think Larry was beginning to fall apart. That’s what happens to guys like that. They convince themselves that they’re all-powerful and that the cops are too stupid to figure it out. They kill at shorter and shorter intervals until finally their fuses blow.”

Another long silence fell between the two women. “Who were the others?” Joanna asked fi­nally. “Were they all from around here?”

Carol shook her head. “I believe we’ll find they’re from other parts of the country and that the mur­ders took place over a number of years. Larry Dy­sart knocked around some, working pickup jobs here and there. We’re currently checking with other jurisdictions where he either lived or traveled. Only one other case—number five—for sure happened anywhere around here. When that victim died, her death was listed as natural causes. You’ll never guess who that one was.”

“Who?” Joanna asked, wanting to know and yet feeling a sense of dread as she waited for Carol’s answer.

“Emily Dysart Morgan,” she said. “Larry’s mother. She was an Alzheimer’s patient right here in Peoria. She disappeared from a nursing home during a rainstorm in the dead of summer four years ago. Everyone assumed she had died of natural causes and had been washed down the Agua Fria. Her body was never found. Until today.”

“Today?”

Carol Strong nodded, her mouth grim. “Today wasn’t the first time Larry used Tommy Tomp­kins’s vapor-barrier-wrapped bomb shelter. With Jenny and Ceci, it didn’t work, thank God, but with Larry’s mother, I’d say it did.”

Butch Dixon came around the bar. “Are you off duty now?” he asked Carol Strong.

“Yes.”

“What can I get you to drink, then? It’s on the house.”

“Whiskey,” Carol Strong said. “Jack Daniel’s straight up.”

By Sunday afternoon, as the Bradys were packing up to go back to Bisbee, Joanna already knew that the remainder of her APOA session would be post­poned until after the first of the year. “So why can’t you come home today?” Jenny insisted.

“Because I need to pick up my stuff from the dorm,” Joanna answered. “And that won’t be available until tomorrow morning. Not only that, Dave Thompson’s funeral is scheduled for tomorrow af­ternoon. I should go to that.”

“All right,” Jenny said. “But I wish you were coming with us today.”

“So do I,” Joanna said.

The next morning, Joanna had to pack twice—first to check out of the hotel and next to leave the dorm. Even so, the process didn’t take long. After closing up her own APOA room, Joanna helped Lo­relie Jessup pack up Leann’s things.

“Will Leann be coming to the funeral this afternoon?” Joanna asked.

Lorelie shook her head. “She wanted to, but the doctor says no. It’s still too early for her to leave the hospital.”

“That’s probably just as well.”

At noon, Joanna stood on the steps of the Mari­copa County Courthouse, watching from among the crowd while a newly released Jorge Grijalva emerged with his children. As the television cameras rolled, Joanna tried to slip away, but Ceci had spotted her. She dragged the man she knew as her father over to where Joanna was standing.

“Thank you,” Jorge said.

“You’re welcome,” Joanna answered. “Will the kids be going back to Bisbee with you?”

Jorge shook his head. “Not right now. They’re in school. They’ll stay with their other grandparents, at least until the end of the year. It’ll all work out.”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “I’m sure it will.”

Four hours later, Joanna was part of a large con­tingent of police officers, both in and out of uni­form, who gathered respectfully in Glendale Memorial Park for Dave Thompson’s graveside fu­neral service. Listening to the minister’s laudatory eulogy, Joanna found herself wondering what the truth was about Dave Thompson. On the one hand, some of the cigarette stubs from the tunnel behind the mirrored walls were the same brand Dave Thompson smoked. But no one—Butch Dixon in­cluded—had ever seen Dave smoking inside.

Had he been the one in the tunnel or not? If Larry Dysart had been smart enough to plant evidence in Jorge’s pickup, he might also have planted the incriminating cigarette stubs. But there was no way to know for sure. Not ever.

Toward the end of the service, Joanna watched the mourners. There was an elderly couple—probably Dave’s parents—and then two children—a boy and a girl—who were evidently Dave’s kids.

The program provided by the mortuary listed among Dave’s survivors his children, Irene Danielle and David James Thompson. The girl looked to be a year or so older than Jenny, while the boy was maybe a year or so older than that.

The funeral was over and Joanna was almost ready to leave when she saw the boy standing off by himself. Despite the warm afternoon sunshine he stood with his shoulders hunched as if to ward off the cold. He looked so lost and miserable that Joanna couldn’t walk past without speaking to him.

“David?” she asked tentatively.

He turned toward her, his face screwed up with anguish. “Yes?” he said, and then quickly looked away.

Studying him, Joanna found that David James Thompson resembled his father. He couldn’t have been more than twelve, but he was almost as tall as Joanna. His sport coat, although relatively new, seemed to be several months too small. His tie was uneven and poorly knotted. Searching for something comforting to say, Joanna felt the lump grow in her throat. Tying ties properly is something boys usually learn from their fathers.

“I’m Joanna Brady,” she said, holding out her hand. “I was one of your father’s students at the APOA.”

David Thompson looked at Joanna. “Was he a good teacher?” he asked. “At home we never heard any good stuff about him, only bad.”

“Your father wasn’t an easy teacher,” Joanna answered. “But sometimes hard ones are the best kind. He was teaching us things that will help us save lives.”

“I wish I’d had a chance to get to know him,” David Thompson said. “Know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “I certainly do.”

On the third of January, Joanna returned to Peoria to complete her interrupted session at the APOA.

When she checked into her dormitory room—the same one she’d been assigned to before—she was relieved to discover that, under the auspices of an interim director, the mirrored walls had all been replaced with plaster-coated wallboard. The door leading into the tunnel along the back of the dorm no longer existed. The opening had been stuccoed shut.

After unpacking, Joanna climbed back in her Blazer and drove to the Roundhouse Bar and Grill. Carrying a bag full of Christmas goodies, she walked into the bar.

Butch Dixon grinned when he saw her. “The usual?”

“Why not?” she asked, slipping onto a stool. “How are the hamburgers today?”

Butch waggled his hands. “So-so,” he answered. “I’m breaking in a new cook, so things are a little iffy.”

“I’ll try the Roundhouse Special, only no Ca­boose this time. I’ve had enough sweets for the time being.”

Butch wrote down her order. “How’s your new jail cook working out?” he asked.

“Ruby’s fine so far,” Joanna answered. “She got out of jail on the assault charge one day, and we hired her as full-time cook the next. The inmates were ecstatic.”

“I only hope mine works out that well,” Butch returned.

Joanna pushed the bag across the bar. “Merry Christmas.”

“For me?”

Joanna nodded. “Better late than never,” she said.

One at a time, Butch Dixon hauled things out the bag. “Homemade flour tortillas. Who made these?” he asked.

“Juanita Grijalva,” Joanna answered. “She says she’ll send you some green corn tamales the next time she makes them.”

“Good deal,” Butch said, digging deeper into the bag. There were four kinds of cookies, a loaf of homemade bread, and an apple pie.

“Those are all from Eva Lou,” Joanna explained “I tried to tell her that since you own a restaurant you didn’t need all this food. She said that a restaurant’s the worst place to get anything home made.”

Butch grinned. “She’s right about that.”

From the very bottom of the bag, Butch pulled out the only wrapped and ribboned package. Tear­ing off the paper, Butch Dixon found himself hold­ing a framed five-by-seven picture of a little blond-haired girl in a Brownie uniform standing behind a Radio Flyer wagon that was stacked high with cartons of Girl Scout cookies.

“Hey,” he said. “A picture of Jenny. Thanks.”

“That’s not jenny,” Joanna corrected. “That’s a picture of me.”

“You’re kidding! I love it.”

“Marliss Shackleford doesn’t care for it much,” Joanna murmured.

“Who’s Marliss Shackleford?”

“The lady who received the other copy of this picture, only hers is much bigger. Eleven by fourteen. I gave it to her to use in a display at the Sher­iff’s Department. It’s going up in a glass case along with pictures of all the other sheriffs of Cochise County. If you ever get a chance to see it, you’ll recognize me right away. I’m the only one wearing a Brownie uniform.”

“I’ll bet it’s the cutest picture in the bunch,” Butch said.

“Maybe you’re prejudiced,” Joanna observed with a smile. “My mother doesn’t think it’s the least bit cute. She says the other pictures are serious, and mine should be, too.”

“Speaking of your mother,” Butch said. “How did your brother’s visit go? You sounded worried about it when I talked to you on the phone.”

“It was fine. He and his wife came in from Washington, D.C. It’s the first time I’ve ever met my sister-in-law.”

“What are they, newlyweds?” Butch asked.

“Not exactly,” Joanna answered. “It’s a long story.”

Other customers came in and occupied the bartender’s attention. Joanna sat there, looking at her surroundings, realizing with a start that she felt safe and comfortable sitting there under Butch Dixon’s watchful eye. No doubt Serena Grijalva had felt safe there as well. But Larry Dysart would have been dangerous no matter where someone met him.

Butch dropped off Joanna’s Roundhouse Special and then stood there watching as she started to eat it. She caught the quick, questioning glance at her ring finger as she raised the sandwich to her lips.

Her rings were still there. Both of them. Andy had been gone since September, but Joanna wasn’t yet ready to take off the rings and put them away.

“It’s still too soon,” she said.

Butch nodded. “I know,” he answered quietly. “But you can’t blame a guy for checking, can you?”

“No.”

She put down her sandwich and held her hand in the air, examining the rings. The diamond en­gagement ring—Andy’s last gift to her—sparkled back at her, even in the dim, interior gloom of the Roundhouse Bar and Grill.

“If you and Andy had ever met, I think you would have liked each other,” she said at last.

“Why’s that?” Butch Dixon asked.

“You’re a nice guy,” Joanna said. “So was Andy.”

Shaking his head and frowning, Butch began pol­ishing the top of the bar. “People are always telling me there’s no demand for nice guys.”

“You’d be surprised about that,” Joanna Brady said. “You just might be surprised.”