“You cope,” Marianne said simply. “You do the best you can, and you cope. You ignore the people who choose not to be in your corner, including your bitchy mother-in-law.”
Her outspoken comment made Joanna laugh. “But you have no strong opinions about Margaret Dixon.”
“Some people require strong opinions,” Marianne returned. “When do you see Dr. Lee again?”
“Tomorrow,” Joanna said. “That’s my last scheduled prenatal exam.”
“He’s the one you should talk to about this,” Marianne advised. “Not me, not Butch, and certainly not Margaret Dixon.”
“Will do,” Joanna said. She hung up the phone feeling infinitely better.
Late in the afternoon Joanna went back out to the impound lot, where both Casey Ledford and Dave Hollicker were still hard at work. “Finding anything?” she asked.
“Look at this,” Dave said. He held up an evidence bag. Peering through it, Joanna was able to see a single thread.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I found it hung up on the tailgate latch,” Dave said. “I won’t know until I do my analysis, but I’m guessing it’ll be from the tarp I already have in the lab, the one Bradley Evans’s body was wrapped in. I noticed there was a tear in it when I did my preliminary exam. But the big thing is the Luminol.”
“You got a hit?”
“You bet,” Dave said. “Take a look at this.” He switched off the overhead light. Peering under the camper shell, Joanna saw several thin lines of bright blue in the bed of the truck.
“Someone made a real effort to clean up the mess, but they didn’t do a good enough job in the cracks where the sections join together. Without more tests, I can’t say for sure that what we found in those cracks is blood, or if it’s human blood or even if it’s Bradley Evans’s blood. We’ll find that out later.”
“But you’re saying that the back of the truck might actually turn out to be the crime scene?” Joanna asked.
“It’s possible,” Dave replied. “Or maybe not. It all depends. I didn’t find any visible spatter patterns, but it’s conceivable the killer managed to wash them away. I think it’s likely that the truck was only used for transporting the body.”
“Did you find anything else?” Joanna asked.
Dave grinned. “As a matter of fact, we did,” he boasted.
“Look at this.” He produced another evidence bag. Inside Joanna saw a small yellow-and-black disposable camera with a coating of black fingerprint powder clinging to it.
“This was wedged in under the passenger’s side of the seat. There are twenty-four shots per camera. Only sixteen of them have been exposed. Casey lifted plenty of prints. Her preliminary determination is that the prints on the camera belong to the victim.”
“Which may mean Bradley Evans is the only person who used it,” Joanna theorized.
Dave nodded. “And he stuffed it under the seat in hopes of making sure no one saw either the camera or what it was he was taking pictures of. I talked to Jaime a little while ago. He’s still out in Huachuca City trying to find out exactly when the pickup showed up on the lot and who may have put it there. The Double Cs are sending Debbie Howell here to pick up the camera. She’s going to take it to that One Hour Photo Shop out in Sierra Vista.”
Obviously Debbie Howell was spending her first day in Homicide as Jaime and Ernie’s gofer-in-chief.
“Good,” Joanna said. “The sooner we see what’s on those photos, the better.”
Wanting to spell Butch, Joanna left work early that afternoon. When she got home, though, the house was quiet. Butch was seated at the kitchen table with his laptop open in front of him while tantalizing cooking aromas wafted around him.
“Where is everybody?” Joanna asked, kissing the smooth top of his bald head.
“Jenny and the dogs are hiding out in her room, and I don’t blame them a bit,” Butch said. “If I thought I could get away with it, I’d be there, too. As for my parents? They’re out in the RV watching Fox News.”
“In the RV?” Joanna asked. “Why not in the living room?”
“Because Dad likes watching on his flat-screen TV and he prefers using his own clicker.”
“But what kind of reception do they get?”
“Didn’t you notice the satellite TV antenna up on top of their rig? I went out earlier today and watched Dad locate the satellite. And don’t think I’m not grateful. It gave me a couple of hours of peace and quiet. God knows I was ready for some of that. Believe it or not, I even managed to get some work done. I couldn’t very well work in front of them. Somehow I never picked up on how much my mother despises mysteries. Did you know that about her?”
“She may have mentioned something to that effect,” Joanna answered diplomatically. “But that’s one person’s opinion. Obviously the people who handed over that check have other ideas, and so do I. Now what’s for dinner? I’m starved.”
Butch patted her bulging belly affectionately. “You’re always starved these days,” he said. “We’re having two of my father’s favorites-roasted Cornish game hen and baked acorn squash with a side of coleslaw.”
“Do you need any help?”
“No,” Butch said, turning back to his computer. “Everything’s under control. We’ll eat about six-thirty”
“In that case, I think I’ll go into the office for a little while. I need to work on my thank-you notes from the baby shower. Did you see all the great stuff we got?”
“It’s great stuff, all right,” Butch agreed, “but about your office-”
Butch’s warning came too late. Joanna was already standing in the middle of the room and staring at the mound of boxes- the same boxes that had been impeding traffic in the garage earlier that morning, which were now piled in front of her built-in bookcases. The blockade made it all but impossible for her to reach the chair behind her desk.
“What are these doing here?” she demanded.
“In case you haven’t noticed, my mother is an incredible busybody,” Butch said. “When I was growing up, she was forever going through my stuff. I finally started leaving things I didn’t want her to see at a friend’s house. This morning she was all over me, wondering what was in the boxes. When I told her where the boxes came from, she was hot to trot to go through them. I told her I was sure you’d rather do that yourself. When she insisted that someone in your condition shouldn’t be lifting heavy boxes, I finally moved them in here to keep them out of her reach. I put today’s mail in here, too, for the same reason.”
“You think she’d go through that?” Joanna asked.
“I wouldn’t put it past her,” Butch replied. “The good thing about your office is that we can always lock the door if need be. Come to think of it, I’ll probably lock my computer in here, too, when I’m not using it.”
“Poor baby,” Joanna said and meant it.
For the next hour Joanna sat at the desk in her now-crowded home office and dutifully wrote thank-you notes exactly as Eleanor would have wanted her daughter to do. It was funny, in a way, to think that both she and Butch had survived being raised by very similar and extremely autocratic mothers. It went a long way to explaining why the two of them got along so well.
Dinner turned out to be more of the same, with Margaret monopolizing every avenue of conversation. Knowing that Butch had been stuck with his mother all day, Joanna did her best to run interference for him. She was cheerful. She asked focused questions. And she kept Margaret rambling away. With Margaret’s having downed a predinner cocktail or two, that wasn’t difficult. It wasn’t until dessert when Margaret finally managed to get under Joanna’s skin.