“You said she was hit by a car and that maybe it was just an accident,” Jenny said. “Was it?”
“That’s how it looks so far,” Joanna said, although that answer wasn’t entirely truthful. Hours of searching the highway had filled to turn up any sign of where the collision might have occurred as well as any trace of Dora Matthews’s missing tennis shoe.
“When’s the autopsy?” Jenny asked.
Jennifer Ann Brady had lived in a house centered on law enforcement from the day she was born. As in most homes, dinner time conversation had revolved around what was happening in those two vitally important areas of their lives—school and work. In the Brady household, those work-related conversations had featured confrontations with real-life criminals and killers. There were discussions of prosecutions won and lost, of had guys put away or sometimes let go. Young as she was, Jenny knew far too much about crime and punishment. And, with Eleanor’s fairly recent marriage to George Winfield, discussions of autopsies were now equally commonplace. In that moment, Joanna wished it were otherwise.
“I believe he’s doing it tonight.”
Jenny absorbed that information without comment. “What about Dora’s mother?” she asked after a pause. “Does she know yet?”
Every question as well as every answer drove home Joanna’s sense of failure. “No,” she said. “And I can’t imagine having to tell her any more than I can imagine what I’d do if something terrible happened to you.”
“Will Mrs. Matthews have to go to jail even if Dora is dead?”
“If she’s convicted of running a meth lab,” Joanna conceded.
Heaving a sigh, Jenny flopped back over on her side, signaling that the conversation was over. “Come on, Jenny. We probably shouldn’t talk about this anymore tonight. Let’s go out to the kitchen. Butch is making omelettes.”
“I’m not hungry,” Jenny said.
“Night.”
Joanna returned to the kitchen. Butch looked up from the stove where he was about to flip an omelette. “No luck?” he said. “None.”
“You look pretty down.”
Joanna nodded. “I talked to Connie Haskell’s husband. I don’t think he did it.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t be absolutely sure because he doesn’t have a real alibi. He was off away from everyone else in an isolation cabin that’s Pathway to Paradise’s version of solitary confinement. He was there from Thursday morning on. Still, Butch, you should have seen how he looked when we drove up. He was expecting his wife to get out of the car. He wasn’t expecting me. He’d have had to be an Academy Award–winning actor to fake the disappointment I saw on his face.”
“I see what you mean,” Butch agreed. “If he’d killed her, he wouldn’t have been expecting her to show up.”
“My point exactly”
“But what if he is that good an actor?” Butch said after a moment of reflection. “It’s possible, you know.”
Joanna nodded. “You’re right. It is possible, but he also volunteered to come into the department tomorrow and let us take DNA samples. Innocent people volunteer samples. Guilty ones demand lawyers and court orders.”
Butch set Joanna’s plate in front of her and then sat down across the table from her. “What you’re really saying is, you don’t have the foggiest idea who the killer is and you’re afraid Jenny may still be a target.”
“Exactly,” Joanna said.
The omelette was good, but Joanna didn’t do much justice to it. The table was cleared and they were on their way to bed when the blinking light on the caller ID screen caught Joanna’s
