Shoot / Don't Shoot

Grijalva. I know Juanita Grijalva, you see. Jorge’s mother. She asked me to look into things.”

A curtain of wariness dropped over Carol Strong’s face. “And have you?” she asked. “Looked into things, that is?”

There was no sense in being coy about it. “I’ve done some informal nosing around,” Joanna admitted. “I went to see Jorge Monday night down at the Maricopa County Jail. And I picked this up from Butch Dixon, the bartender at the Roundhouse Bar and Grill.”

Taking the yellow pages of Butch’s essay out of her purse, Joanna handed them over to Carol and then waited quietly while the other woman scanned through them. “And?” Carol said finally when she finished reading and pushed the pages back across the desk to Joanna.

“And what?”

“Did you reach any conclusions?”

“Look,” Joanna said. “I’m leaning toward the opinion that Jorge didn’t do it. That’s based on nothing more scientific than intuition, but my conclusions don’t matter one way or the other. I’m not here to hassle you about Jorge. Let’s drop it for the time being. I want to know about Leann Jessup. I assuming I’m here because you think I could be of some help.”

Carol Strong closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, she focused directly on Joanna’s face. “We are discussing Leann Jessup,” she said wearily. “We have been all along.”

“But I ...” Joanna began.

Carol passed a weary hand across her forehead. “You’re a newly elected sheriff, but you’ve never been police officer before, right?”

“Yes, but ...”

“Do you know what holdbacks are?”

“Sure. They’re the minute details about a case that never get released to the media—the things that known only to the detectives and the killer. They’re helpful in gaining convictions, and they also help separate out the fruitcakes who habitually call in to confess to something they didn’t do.”

“Right.” Carol Strong nodded. She leaned forward across the desk, her smoky gray eyes crackling with intensity. “Sheriff Brady, what I’m about to tell you is in the strictest confidence. We had plenty of physical evidence in the Grijalva case. Jorge had a new secondhand truck, one he claimed his wife had never ridden in. But when the crime lab went over it, we found trace evidence that Serena had been in the car, including fibers that ap­pear to match the clothing Serena Grijalva was wearing the last time she was seen alive. We also found dirt particles that tested out to be similar to soil near where Serena’s body was found. The murder weapon was a tire iron. With paint particles and wear marks, we’ve managed to verify that the tire iron that was missing from Jorge’s truck at the time we arrested him was the same one we found at the murder scene. Sounds like a pretty open-and?shut case, doesn’t it?”

This was the first inkling Joanna had of how extensive the case was against Jorge Grijalva. “I didn’t know about any of that,” Joanna admitted. “Certainly not the physical evidence part of it.”

“No, I don’t suppose you did,” Carol Strong agreed. “And there’s no reason you should. It wasn’t a big-name case, and Joe Blow domestic violence is old hat these days. The public is so inured to it that most of the time it doesn’t merit much play in the media. In this particular case, though, I did keep some holdbacks—one in particular was more to spare the children’s feelings than it was for any other reason.”

Carol Strong paused. “Serena Grijalva was naked when we found her. And she was bound with her own pantyhose, trussed with her arms and legs tied behind her in exactly the same way Leann Jessup was found this morning. I may be wrong, but the knots looked identical.”

The crowded little office was