Joanna spent the next half hour emptying her suitcases and putting things away. Her threadbare bath towels looked especially shabby in the upscale bathroom. When she was totally unpacked, she treated herself to a long, hot bath with the Jacuzzi heads bubbling full blast. Lying there in the steaming tub, supposedly relaxing, she couldn’t get the Grijalva kids out of her mind. Ceci and Pablo. They were orphans, all right. Twice over. Their mother was dead, and their father might just as well be.
Sighing, Joanna clambered out of the tub into the steam-filled room and turned on the exhaust fan, hoping to clear the fogged mirrors. The first whirl the blades brought a whiff of cigarette smoke to her nostrils. A moment later it was gone. Obviously, her next door neighbor was a smoker.
After toweling herself dry, Joanna pulled on a robe. By then it was only nine o’clock. Instead of getting into bed, she walked over to the desk and picked up Juanita Grijalva’s envelope, which she had dropped there in the course of unpacking. Settling at the desk, she emptied the envelope and read through all the contents, including rereading i. articles she had read earlier that afternoon in the truck stop.
This time, she took pen and paper and jotted notes as she read, writing down names and addresses as they appeared in the various articles. The Grijalvas—Antonio Jorge, Ceci, and Pablo; Jefferson Davis and Ernestina Duffy of Wittmann; of Peoria Detectives Carol Strong and Mark Hansen; Butch Dixon, bartender of the Roundhouse Bar and Grill; Anna-Ray Melton, manager of the WE-DO-YU-DO Washateria; Madeline Bellerman, Serena’s attorney.
Those were the players in the Serena Grijalva case—the ones whose names had made it into the papers. If Joanna was going to do any questioning on her own, those were the people she’d need contact.
It was after eleven when she finally put the contents back in the envelope, climbed into bed, and turned off the light. As she lay there waiting for sleep to come and trying to decide what, if anything, she was going to do about Jorge Grijalva, another faint whiff of cigarette smoke wafted her room.
Her last thought before she fell asleep was that whoever lived in the room next door had to be a chain smoker.
Joanna woke early the next morning, dressed, and hurried down to the lounge, hoping to call Jenny before she left for school. Unfortunately there was a long line at the single pay phone. All her classmates seemed to have the same need to call home.
While she waited, Joanna helped herself to coffee, juice, and a piece of toast. A newspaper had been left on the table. She picked up the paper and read one of the articles. A power-line installation, crew, working on a project southwest of Carefree, had stumbled across the decomposing body of a partially clad woman. Officers from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department were investigating the death of the so-far unidentified woman as an apparent homicide.
Joanna’s stomach turned leaden. Some other as yet unnamed family was about to have its heart torn out. Unfortunately, Joanna Brady knew exactly that felt.
“You can use the phone now,” someone said.
Joanna glanced at her watch. Ten after eight. “That’s all right,” she said. “My daughter’s already left for school. I don’t need it anymore.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Within minutes of the beginning of Dave Thompson’s opening classroom lecture, Joanna was ready to pack her bags and go back home to Bisbee. Her first encounter with the bull-necked Thompson hadn’t left a very good impression. The lecture made his stock go down even further.
Listening to him talk, Joanna could close her eyes and imagine that she was listening to her chief deputy for operations, Dick Voland. The words used, the opinions voiced, were almost the same. Why had she bothered to travel four hundred miles round-trip and spend the better part of six weeks locked up in a classroom when she could have the same kind of aggravation for free at home just by going into the office? The only difference between listening to Dave Thompson and being lectured Dick Voland lay in the fact that after a day of wrangling with Dick Voland, Joanna could at least go home to her own bed at night. As far as beds were concerned, the ones in the APOA dormitory weren’t worth a damn.
