every word Dave Thompson said this morning.”
Leann shook her head ruefully. “Appearances can be deceiving. I hope you’ve taken good notes, because I barely heard a word he said. I was too busy thinking about Rhonda Norton and what happened to her. Her husband may have landed the fatal blow, but we’re all responsible.”
“We?” Joanna said.
Leann nodded. “You and me. We’re cops, part of the system—a system that left her vulnerable to a man who had already beaten the crap out of her three different times.”
“You shouldn’t take it personally,” Joanna counseled.
Even as she said the words, Joanna recognized the irony behind them. It took a hell of a lot of nerve for her to pass that timeworn advice along to someone else. After all, who had spent most of the previous evening tracking down leads in a case that was literally none of her business?
Leann shot Joanna a bleak look. “You’re right, I suppose,” she said. “After all, domestic violence is hardly a brand-new problem. It’s why my mother divorced my father.”
“He beat her?”
“Evidently,” Leann answered. “He knocked her around and my older brother, too. I was just a baby, so I don’t remember any of it. Still, it affected all of us from then on. And maybe that’s why it bothers me so when I see or hear about it happening to others. In fact, preventing that kind of damage is one of the reasons I wanted to become a cop in the first place. And then, the first case I have any connection to ends like this—with the woman dead.” She shrugged her shoulders dejectedly.
They were standing outside the classroom, just beyond the cluster of smokers. “I’ve been thinking about that candlelight vigil down at the capitol tonight,” Leann continued. “The one they mentioned in the paper. I think I’m going to go. Want to go along?”
The subject of the vigil had crossed Joanna’s own mind several times in the course of the morning. Obviously, Serena Grijalva would be one of the remembered victims. Joanna, too, had considered going.
“Maybe,” she said. “But before we decide one way or the other, we’d better see how much homework we have.”
Leann gave her a wan smile. “You’re almost too focused for your own good,” she said. “Has anybody ever told you that?”
“Maybe once or twice. Come on.”
Once again, the two women were among the last stragglers to find their seats. Dave Thompson was at the podium. “Why, I’m so glad you two ladies could join us,” he said. “I hope class isn’t interfering too much with your socializing.”
In the uncomfortable silence that followed Thompson’s cutting remark, Leann ducked into her chair and appeared to be engrossed in studying her notes, all the while flushing furiously. Joanna, on the other hand, met and held the instructor’s gaze. Of all the people in the room—the two women an ‘ their twenty-three male classmates—Joanna was the only one whose entire future in law enforcement didn’t depend in great measure on the opinion of that overbearing jerk.
With Dick Voland’s tale of Dave Thompson’s “remotion” still ringing in her ears, Joanna couldn’t manage to keep her mouth shut. “That’s all right,” she returned with a tight smile. “We were finished anyway.”
The rest of the morning lecture didn’t drag nearly as much. At lunchtime two carloads of students headed for the nearest Pizza Hut. Joanna had already taken a seat at one of the three APOA-occupied tables when the perpetual head-nodder from the front row paused beside her. “Is this seat taken?” he asked.
Joanna didn’t much want to sit beside someone she had pegged as a natural-born brown noser. Still, since the seat was clearly empty, there was no graceful way for Joanna to tell the guy to move on. His badge said his name was Rod Bascom and that he hailed from Casa Grande.
“Help yourself,” Joanna said.
