Tom nodded. “But as far as I know, nothing of value was found.”
“And nothing that would have told you who she was or where she was from?”
“No,” he answered.
“What about her vehicle?”
“A 4-Runner, I think. I remember it had Arizona plates. I told her that once she had a job she would need to reregister it and get Washington plates. I don’t think she ever got around to doing it.”
“After she left, did you do any skip-chasing?” I asked.
“Look,” Tom said. “She had paid her rent up until the middle of November. When she wasn’t there to pay up on the fifteenth, we packed up her junk and got rid of it. It’s not like she owed months of back rent. She was gone, her rent wasn’t being paid, we moved her stuff out, and moved someone else in. End of story.”
“Her fiance, a guy by the name of Mason Waters, filed a missing persons report,” I said. “I don’t think the local cop shop expended much effort on the case.”
“Waters,” Mama Rose said. “Isn’t that the name of the guy whose private eye came around asking questions about Marina a couple of months ago?”
Tom Wojeck nodded. “I think that’s the right name, but by the time the detective showed up at Silver Pines, Marina’s stuff was long gone.”
And so was she, I thought.
With me mentally going over that previous conversation, Mel and I had been silent for quite some time. Finally I noticed that she was only picking at her chicken, which meant she was probably doing the same thing.
“What?” I asked.
Mel shook her head. “So chances are, the young woman in the morgue over in Ellensburg is the woman who claimed to be Marina Aguirre, but we have no idea who she really was. I wonder if we’ll ever figure it out.”
I wondered that myself.
“And what about Tom Wojeck and Mama Rose?” Mel asked. “They weren’t wearing rings.”
Being a man, I had somehow missed that small detail altogether.
“I wonder how long they’ve been together,” Mel continued. “I don’t think they’re married, but they seem to have a good working relationship.”
“They’re probably as close to being married as you can get,” I told her, “especially when one member of the team is HIV-positive.”
“Wake up,” Butch said. He sat down on the edge of the bed and bounced up and down until Joanna opened her eyes. “Here’s some coffee. Time to rise and shine.”
“What time is it?” Joanna mumbled groggily.
“Ten to eight,” Butch answered. “I already called in and told Kristin you’d be late.”
Joanna took a sip of the coffee. “Thank you. But it was a great night. We were working a missing persons case. An old lady named Philippa Brinson walked away from an Alzheimer’s home out in Palominas.”
“Did you find her?” Butch asked.
“We certainly did,” Joanna answered. “They took her to the Copper Queen Hospital for observation, but I think she’s okay. Her niece was coming down from Phoenix. Once Ms. Brinson is released from the hospital here, she’ll go to Phoenix with her grandniece.”
“How about you tell me the rest of it over breakfast,” Butch said. “Otherwise you’re going to be even later.”
Showered and dressed, Joanna went out to the kitchen, where she had to weave her way through a scatter of boy, toys, and dogs to make it to the kitchen table. Dennis, as at home with the three dogs as he was with people, lay contentedly on the floor with his head propped on Lucky’s back while he chewed on the ear of a teddy bear that had originally been a dog toy.
While Butch whipped out two eggs over easy with bacon and toast, Joanna told him about the previous evening’s adventures. She edited out some parts of the story, focusing less on the appallingly filthy conditions inside Caring Friends. She failed to mention that on Alma DeLong’s watch, residents there were treated more like prisoners than patients, or how vulnerable and frail people had been left unsupervised and helpless for hours on end. Instead, Joanna told Butch about how they had successfully tracked down Philippa Brinson.
“Tom Hadlock managed to get an announcement about her being missing on the ten o’clock news from Tucson,” Joanna said. “Before the news broadcast ended, we had a tip from a man who called in and who said he had found an old woman standing beside the road in Palominas yesterday afternoon. He had stopped and asked if she needed help. She said she needed a ride to Bisbee, that she had to get back to her office.”
“Office?” Butch said. “Isn’t she in her nineties?”
“Ninety-three,” Joanna said. “But remember, she’s an Alzheimer’s patient. Things that happened a long time ago are far more real to her than something that happened this morning. She thought she was going back to her office after a noon meeting out at Sierra Vista, and she was clear enough that she convinced the driver she was okay and should be dropped off. The problem is, she left that office for the last time over thirty years ago. Even so, that’s where we found her. Up by the old high school. She retired as the county superintendent of schools in 1973.”
“So why was she at the high school?”
Dennis abandoned the teddy bear in favor of climbing into his mother’s lap to freeload on some of Joanna’s toast.
“That’s where her office was when she was superintendent, but she had worked there even earlier than that. Back when the old high school was still in operation, she was the school librarian. She wanted to be a principal, but women didn’t become high school principals back in the forties and fifties, so she became a school librarian. Then she pole-vaulted over the principal job and became the county superintendent of schools instead.”
“Sounds like somebody else I know,” Butch said with a smile as he refilled Joanna’s coffee cup. “She’s okay then?”
“I think so. She was cold, of course. We took her down to the hospital so the ER doctors could check her out and wrap her in warm blankets. By the time we knew she was okay, her grandniece was on her way from Phoenix. The grandniece is hoping to find a facility closer to her home so she’ll be able to keep better track of Ms. Brinson’s care and caretakers.”
“That makes sense,” Butch said. “Why didn’t she do that to begin with?”
“Philippa Brinson lived in the San Pedro Valley all her life and she didn’t want to leave it. She was born there. That’s where she and her husband lived after they married, and it’s where she wanted to stay. Bad idea. Caring Friends is a joke. The only thing Alma DeLong cares about is her bottom line. And if I can figure out a way to charge her with reckless endangerment, I will.”
“You go, girl,” Butch said. “So what’s on the program today, aside from the bachelor party, that is?”
“A homicide investigation,” Joanna said, gulping the last of her coffee. “And I’d better head out, or they’ll start the briefing without me.”
CHAPTER 10
In actual fact, most of the players were already assembled in the conference room by the time Joanna arrived. In the old days, Frank would have started without her. Tom Hadlock kept everyone waiting.
“Sorry about my slow start this morning,” she apologized, settling into her usual chair. “It was a short night without much sleep, but it was a successful one. Good work, guys, and good work on the media contacts, Tom,” she added, addressing her chief deputy. “Without your making that ten o’clock news slot, we might have had an entirely different outcome on Philippa Brinson.”
Hadlock accepted the praise with a self-conscious nod. “Marliss Shackleford isn’t too thrilled about it,” he said with a mirthless chuckle. “She just called to give me an earful about giving a scoop to the Tucson media while ignoring the locals.”
Marliss, a reporter for the local paper the
