'Why's that?'
'This is the borderline where Paradise Valley, Scottsdale, and Phoenix all meet. It's going to take weeks to sort out all the paperwork.'
'Oh,' I said.
Once back at the hotel, Delcia and I stayed with the car while two Paradise Valley police detectives took charge of Rhonda.
No matter where I went, no matter what I touched, some other jurisdiction got dragged into the fray. If I thought about it very long, it would give me a complex.
'How are you feeling?' she asked.
'Fine. Better than fine, actually. Dumping that asshole in the drink did me a world of good. It beats sitting around doing nothing.'
'Doing nothing sounds about right to me,' she returned.
I glanced at my watch. It was only seven-thirty, a bare two hours after Rhonda and I had left Ames' house. 'How did you get here so fast?' I asked. 'It's a long drive down from Prescott.'
'I never went home,' she said. Closing her eyes, she leaned back and rested her head on the car seat.
'Why not?'
'Too busy,' she replied.
'They were already looking for that truck, weren't they?' I ventured shrewdly.
Delcia straightened up and looked at me. 'What makes you say that?'
'As soon as I described the truck, everything shifted into high gear. Despite all indications to the contrary, the officer immediately assumed we had been the ones under attack.'
She shrugged, as though she was too tired to argue about it. 'You're right,' she said. 'They were looking for a truck matching that description.'
'Why?'
'Because I asked them to,' she said quietly.
I could see that Delcia Reyes-Gonzales was bone weary, but her demeanor was far different from the way she'd been at lunch. Then she'd been alert and toying with me, sparring and taunting at the same time. Now the sparkle had been drained out of her as well as the subterfuge. She weighed her words carefully when she spoke, but she answered my questions without ducking them. For the first time, she was treating me like a fellow police officer, someone working the same side of the street. It made a new man of me.
'But how did you know they'd come here looking for Rhonda?'
'I didn't. I put out an alert on the pickup because of the kids in Wickenburg.'
'Wait a minute. What kids?'
'Two junior high kids, a boy and a girl, out necking in the middle of the night without their parents knowing they were gone. They had slipped out of their respective houses and met down by the river the night Joey Rothman died. They saw a dark-colored 4-X-4 parked right beside your Grand AM.'
'Jesus Christ! You mean you've got eyewitnesses?'
'One of them told the counselor at school the next morning. That's why I had to leave your interview, to go talk to those kids.'
'Eyewitnesses,' I repeated.
'Not exactly. They saw two people, a man and a woman. Three, counting Joey. The man did the dirty work, pulled the trigger, while the woman stayed in the truck. Afterward, the man drove the car away, and the woman drove the pickup. The kids saw the whole thing, but from a distance, and they were way too scared to report it that night.'
'But can they identify them?'
'No.' Delcia sighed. 'No such luck.'
We were quiet for a few moments.
I was amazed, not by what she was telling me so much as by the very fact that she was telling me. Those kinds of inside details aren't usually divulged to anyone outside the immediate scope of a homicide investigation, even people in the same department, yet here she was, unloading it on a complete outsider.
'Why are you telling me all this, Delcia? At lunch today, you wouldn't give me the time of day, and now, a few hours later, it's full-disclosure time. What's going on?'
'I've done some checking on you, Detective Beaumont,' she said at last.
'Oh? What kind of checking?'
'I've talked with a number of people in Seattle-Captain Lawrence Powell, for one. Sergeant Watkins, and your partner, Allen Lindstrom.'
'You have been busy,' I observed. 'What did they say?'
Irrepressible laughter bubbled up through her weariness. 'They all said that you're a regular pain in the ass on occasion, but they all agreed unanimously that you're way too smart to shoot somebody with your own gun and then hide the weapon in your car.'
'Some friends,' I snorted.
Delcia grew serious again. 'Convincing friends,' she said. 'Altogether, they made a pretty good case.'
'So where do we stand?'
She didn't acknowledge my question. 'Did Michelle Owens know where Rhonda was staying?'
I thought about it for a moment. 'Michelle? I don't know. Why? I remember Rhonda saying that she had invited Michelle to the funeral. She may have mentioned then that she was staying at La Posada.'
'Michelle Owens has turned up missing,' Delcia answered grimly. 'From her house, sometime during the night last night. I've been on the phone with her father off and on all afternoon.'
'What does this mean? Did she take off on her own, or did somebody grab her?' I asked.
'My first guess, after I talked to him, was that she left of her own accord. Now, after this business here, I'm not so sure. Did anyone else know where Rhonda was staying?'
'I don't know. Ralph Ames, my attorney, and I both knew. And as far as that goes, Rhonda could have told any number of people.'
Delcia nodded. 'I guess you're right.'
'You said you thought at first that Michelle left on her own. Why? What did her father say?'
'That the two of them had had a big fight last night. He'd evidently made an appointment for Michelle to go to an abortion clinic in Tucson early next week, but she didn't want to go. He said he went to bed without worrying about it because he was sure he could get her to change her mind. This morning, though, when he got up, Michelle wasn't in her room. She's disappeared without a trace.'
'Any sign of foul play?' I asked.
'None, and nothing seems to be missing. The officers on the scene are betting she has simply run away.'
'So did she?'
'I don't know,' Delcia replied. 'If someone came looking for Rhonda, they might have come looking for Michelle as well.'
'Exactly.'
'And I don't like the score. Joey's dead. One attempt on Rhonda and two on you, so whoever's behind this isn't playing games.'
'You've got that one right,' I told her. 'That bastard in the pickup wasn't out for a friendly game of chicken. He'd have nailed us good if I hadn't gotten to him first.'
'There's a third possibility,' Delcia said.
'What's that?'
'What if Michelle was the woman those kids saw in the truck?'
I didn't like it, but the theory carried with it a certain ugly plausibility. Delcia didn't seem to like it much either.
'It's more likely that she just took off, that it all got to be too much for her. Think about it. The girl's pregnant, her boyfriend dies, her father wants her to have an abortion, the boy's mother wants her to keep the baby. That's a hell of a load for someone to carry around when they're only fifteen years old.'
'It's a hell of a load at any age,' I said, reminded once more of my own mother's struggles.
