Once we gave him a description of the 4-X-4, the patrol officer in charge seemed to pay a lot closer attention to what I was saying. Within moments of hearing that Rhonda Attwood was Joey Rothman's mother, he was on the horn to his dispatcher, calling for a helicopter backup to search the canal for our assailant. His use of the word "assailant" struck me as important, especially in view of the fact that the jogger was still jumping up and down and telling anybody who would listen that I had attacked the pickup with my Subaru.
Subdued but uninjured, Rhonda seemed content to sit on the berm between the road and the canal with a blanket thrown around her shoulders while I worked my way through the tangle of paperwork. The last representative of officialdom was the tow-truck driver, a burly barrel-chested man in his late fifties who looked at the battered wreck of the Subaru and shook his head.
"I've picked up Alamo casualties for years," he said with a scowl. "But I've never heard that whole office so riled up as they are over this."
"They're pretty upset?" I asked innocuously. He nodded. "And you don't think it would be such a good idea for me to ride along out there with you tonight to get things straightened out?"
The tow-truck driver grinned. "It's up to you, buddy. Just how brave are you?"
"Not very," I said. "Maybe I'll send my attorney out to handle it in the morning."
"That's the ticket," he said.
I watched him load the crumpled remains onto a slanted rack on the back of his tow truck. The Subaru was neither driveable nor towable.
Boeing test pilots talk about flying the biggest piece home. They claim that you're all right as long as you keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down. The game little Subaru was still shiny side up, but her flying days were over.
"Detective Beaumont?" I turned to see who was calling. It was the Scottsdale patrol officer who had been first on the scene, although I didn't remember telling him or anyone else there my title as well as my name.
He motioned me over to his car. "We're about finished up here. Are you done with the car?"
I nodded. "He'll be gone in a few minutes."
"The Town of Paradise Valley has two detectives waiting for Mrs. Attwood at La Posada. We're sending one of ours as well. We'd like her to accompany the detectives when they go through her room. Another detective, one from Prescott, is on her way to pick you up."
"Delcia? How did she find out about it?"
"I wouldn't know about that, sir," the patrolman said, "but she should be here in a few minutes."
I went back over to where Rhonda was sitting. "Are you all right?" I asked.
"My collarbone hurts, where the shoulder strap cut into me, but I don't think anything's broken."
"Me too," I agreed, rubbing my finger along the painful bruise that cut diagonally across my own chest. "It could have been worse. That's why I aimed for the tire. The rubber took some of the shock."
"Have they found him yet?"
"No," I answered, "but I'm sure they will. A pickup stuck in the canal should be easy enough to spot."
Another car approached the scene, red lights flashing. "Come on," I said, gently helping Rhonda to her feet. "That's probably our ride."
It was. Delcia Reyes-Gonzales came around the car to meet us. "Are you two all right?" she asked anxiously.
"So far," I told her. The tow truck was just pulling away, and she allowed her eyes to follow it. "I'm going to need some more help with Alamo," I said.
She nodded. "I can see that. Ready?"
Delcia held open the back door of her Reliant, and I handed Rhonda into the back seat. There wasn't enough leg room for me, so I went around and climbed in on the rider's side. Delcia's unquestioning acceptance of what had happened seemed odd to me. I expected her to ask who was in the 4-X-4 and why I had deliberately collided with him. Instead, she drove us back to La Posada in thoughtful silence.
We went by way of Camelback and Invergordon. An assortment of officers had cleared away the wrecked cars, but the intersection was still lit with flashing lights while someone armed with a massive broom finished sweeping broken glass out of the street.
"In the entire Phoenix metropolitan area, you couldn't have picked a worse place than this," Delcia said, as she eased her way through the still-stalled traffic.
"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.