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
