“Enough so Sheriff Forsythe noticed, I hope,” Kristin said.
That late-night poker game seemed aeons ago rather than mere days. “He noticed, all right,” Joanna said. “Now bring me up-to-date. Is there anything in particular I need to know before I go into the morning briefing?”
Over the next few minutes Joanna listened while Kristin gave her a rundown of the phone calls that had come in during the past several days. At eight-thirty, leaving Jenny in her office and deeply engrossed in the latest Harry Potter book, Joanna hurried into the conference roost. Drank Montoya was already there. So were Detectives Carpenter and Carbajal.
Joanna nodded in their direction. “I brought Jenny along,” she told them. “I’ll be sitting in on the interview.”
Both detectives nodded in unison. “Sure thing, Boss,” Ernie said. “I’d be surprised if you weren’t.”
There was a knock on the door and Casey Ledford, the finger print technician, poked her head inside. “You wanted to see me?” she asked uncertainly.
“Yes,” Frank said hurriedly. “I asked Casey to stop by. She has some information that I think will be of interest to everybody concerned. We’ll take care of that before we start on routine matters. “
Joanna nodded. “All right,” she said. “Go ahead, Casey. You’re on.”
Slipping into a chair, Casey Ledford smoothed her very short skirt and then placed a file folder in her lap. “As you know, I went up to Tucson yesterday to examine Connie Haskell’s vehicle, the blood-stained Lincoln Town Car that was left in the parking lot It Tucson International. The thing that surprised me was the minimal amount of blood showing on the outside of the car—not enough that an ordinary passerby was likely to notice it. Most of the blood was inside the trunk. And there’s a big difference between the two—between the blood on the Town Car’s exterior and that inside the trunk.”
“What difference?” Joanna asked.
“They’re two different types,” Casey responded. “Which means they came from two different people.”
“So maybe some of it is from the killer and some from the victim?” Joanna suggested.
Casey Ledford nodded. “Possibly,” she said. “The evidence we found in the trunk is consistent with a body having been transported in it. The DPS crime lab is going over that for trace evidence.”
“Good,” Joanna agreed with a nod.
“I picked up a whole bunch of fingerprints,” Casey continued, “some of which belong to the deceased and some that don’t. I’m in the process of enhancing the ones I’ve found. So far I have no way of knowing whether or not AFIS will come up with a match, but I did find something odd.”
“What’s that?” Joanna asked.
Casey opened the folder and handed around pieces of paper. Each contained a typed transcript of the 911 call reporting the location of Connie Haskell’s vehicle. It seemed straightforward enough. A woman, giving her name as Alice Miller and her address as 2472 East Grant Road, had reported that on her way to Minnesota to visit her daughter in Duluth she had parked next to a vehicle at the Tucson airport, a Lincoln Town Car with what looked like bloodstains on the car door.
Joanna read through the transcript. “So?” she inquired.
“Don’t you see anything that doesn’t fit?” Casey Ledford asked.
Joanna reread the transcript. “I still don’t see anything,” she said. “What’s the deal?”
“If, as Mrs. Miller claimed, she was on her way to Duluth, Minnesota, at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, why did her 911 call originate from a pay phone on North First Avenue?” Casey asked. “Look at the address for the phone. When I saw it, I smelled a rat. If the woman who called really was on her way out of town by plane, wouldn’t she have called in the report either from the airport or from her daughter’s home in Minnesota once she got there? That struck me as odd, so just to be on the safe side, I drove past the address of the phone booth. It turns out to be inside a Target store on North First. Then I checked out the address she gave as her home address, the one on East Grant Road. It’s a vacant lot. Alice Miller doesn’t live there, and neither does anybody else.”
