“No, wait. I have a question for you, too. Do you think Dora Matthews and Connie Haskell were killed by the same person?”
“No,” George Winfield said at once.
His abrupt, no-nonsense answer flooded Joanna with relief. It opened the door to the possibility that perhaps the two homicides—Connie’s and Dora’s—weren’t related after all. If that was the case, maybe Jenny wasn’t a target, either.
“Why do you say that?” she asked.
“For one thing, because the two deaths were so dissimilar,” George Winfield replied. “The person who killed Connie Haskell wasn’t afraid of getting down and dirty about it. He was more than just brutal, and most of it was done while she was still alive. Her killer wasn’t the least bit worried about being bloodied in the process. In fact, I’d go so far as to say he enjoyed it.
“On the other hand, Dora Matthews’s killer went about doing 1e job in an almost fastidious fashion. That death wasn’t messy. I’d bet money that Dora’s killer was an inexperienced first-timer who is downright squeamish about even seeing blood, to say nothing of wearing it. The other guy isn’t, Joanna. Once you identify Connie Haskell’s killer, I’m convinced you’ll discover that he’s done this before, maybe even more than once.”
“And he’ll do it again if we don’t catch him first,” Joanna returned.
“You’ve got that right,” George said. “Sorry, there’s another call. It may be Ellie. But please, Joanna. I need you to talk to her.”
“I’ll call her,” Joanna said. “I promise.”
She punched down the button and was getting ready to dial her mother when Frank came rushing back into her office. “We just hit pay dirt,” he said, waving a piece of paper over her head. “I finally got a call back from the phone company about that pay phone in Tucson. It belongs to some little private company that operates a small network of pay phones only in the Tucson area. That’s why it took longer to track down the calls than it would have otherwise. But there is some good news. Another call was made from that pay phone within thirty seconds of the end of Alice Miller’s 911 call.”
“Really,” Joanna breathed. “Where to?”
“A place called Quartzite East.”
“Isn’t that a new RV park off I-10 in Bowie?”
Frank nodded. “Relatively new,” he corrected. “It opened last year. It’s a joke, named after the real Quartzite, that mostly migratory motor-home town on the other side of the state. That’s where the next phone call went—to the office at Quartzite East.”
“Good work, Frank,” Joanna said. “Our mysterious Alice Miller may net live at Quartzite East, but she sure as hell knows someone who does. What say you and I head out there ourselves?”
“My car or yours?” Frank asked.
“Let’s take yours,” Joanna said.
“I’ll have to go down to the Motor Pool and fill it with gas.”
“You do that,” Joanna told him. “I’ll be right there.”
Going back for her purse, Joanna found Deputy Galloway standing by Kristin’s desk. “You wanted to see me?” he asked. Joanna nodded and ushered him into her office. “I wanted to talk to you about Yolanda Canedo,” she said as Galloway took a seat.
“What about her?”
“You know she’s back in the hospital?”
“I guess,” he said in a nonchalant tone that said he wasn’t particularly concerned one way or the other.
“Are the deputies as a group going to do anything about it?” “Like what?”
“Like sending a group
