“Remoted?” Joanna repeated, wondering if she’d heard the strange word correctly. “What’s that?”
Voland chuckled. “You never heard of a remotion? Well, Dave Thompson was always a good cop. Spent almost his whole adult life working for the city of Chandler. But about the time he got divorced, while he was all screwed up from that, he worked himself into a situation where he was a problem. Or at least he was perceived as a problem. So they got rid of him.”
“You mean the city fired him?”
“Not exactly,” Dick answered. “The way it works is this. If the brass reaches a point where they can’t promote a guy, and if they don’t want demote him, they find a way to get him out of their hair. They send him somewhere else. The more remote, the better.”
“The gutless approach,” Joanna said, and Dick Voland laughed.
“Most people would call it taking the line of least resistance.”
Once she understood the process, Joanna’s first thought was whether or not remoting would work with Kristin Marsten. Where could she possibly send her? Out to the little town of Elfrida, maybe? Or up to the Wonderland of Rocks?
Dick Voland went right on talking. “Believe me, you can’t go wrong listening to Thompson. He knows what it’s all about. Of all the instructors the APOA has up there, I think he’s probably tops. You say your classes are going all right?”
Joanna took a deep breath. No wonder listening to Dave was just like listening to Dick Voland. They were two peas in a pod and old buddies besides. Bearing that in mind, it didn’t seem wise to mention that she was bored out of her tree, especially not now when the lounge was filled with most of her fellow students.
“The classes are great,” she answered after a pause. “As a matter of fact, they couldn’t better.”
For the next few moments and in a very businesslike fashion, Dick Voland briefed the sheriff the all latest Cochise County law-and-order issues including the Sunset Inn domestic assault. Try she might, Joanna couldn’t hear any ominous subtext in what Chief Deputy Voland was telling He seemed surprisingly upbeat and positive.
Joanna waited until he was finished before broaching the question she’d been toying with and on since leaving Jorge Grijalva and the Maricopa County Jail the night before. And when she did it, she tried to be as offhand as possible.
“By the way,” she said, “I’ve been meaning ask. I can’t remember exactly when it was, back early to mid-October, you helped a couple of out-of-town officers make an arrest down at the Paul Spur lime plant. Remember that?”
“Sure. That guy from Pirtleville—I believe name was Grijalva. Killed his ex-wife somewhere up around Phoenix. What about it?”
“What can you tell me about the detectives who were working the case?”
“I only remember one of them,” Dick Voland answered. “The woman. Her name was Carol Strong.”
“What about her?”
“I can only remember one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not sure you want to know.”
“Tell me.”
“Legs,” Dick Voland answered. “That woman had great legs.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
When Joanna hung up the phone, she saw Leann Jessup heading for the door on her way back to class.
“Wait up,” Joanna called after her. “I’ll walk with you.”
As they started down the breezeway toward the classroom wing, Joanna studied her tablemate. Since breakfast, Leann had said almost nothing. During class that day, there had been no hint of the previous day’s lighthearted banter or note passing. Leann had spent the morning, her face set in an unsmiling mask, staring intently at their instructor, seemingly intent on every word. Even now a deep frown creased Leann Jessup’s forehead.
“Are you getting a lot out of this?” Joanna asked
“Out of what?” Leann returned.
“Out of the class. It looked to me as though you devouring every word Dave Thompson said this morning.”
Leann shook her head ruefully. “Appearances can be deceiving. I hope you’ve taken good notes, because I barely heard a word he said. I was too busy thinking about Rhonda Norton and what happened to her. Her husband may have landed the fatal blow, but we’re all responsible.”
“We?” Joanna said.
Leann nodded. “You and me. We’re cops, part of the system—a system that left her vulnerable to a man who had already beaten the crap out of her three different times.”
“You shouldn’t take it personally,” Joanna counseled.
Even as she said the words, Joanna recognized the irony behind them. It took a hell of a lot of nerve for her to pass that timeworn advice along to someone else. After all, who had spent most of the previous evening tracking down leads in a case that was literally none of her business?
Leann shot Joanna a bleak look. “You’re right, I suppose,” she said. “After all, domestic violence is hardly a brand-new problem. It’s why my mother divorced my father.”
“He beat her?”
“Evidently,” Leann answered. “He knocked her around and my older brother, too. I was just a baby, so I don’t remember any of it. Still, it affected all of us from then on. And maybe that’s why it bothers me so when I see or hear about it happening to others. In fact, preventing that kind of damage is one of the reasons I wanted to become a cop in the first place. And then, the first case I have any connection to ends like this—with the woman dead.” She shrugged her shoulders dejectedly.
They were standing outside the classroom, just beyond the cluster of smokers. “I’ve been thinking about that candlelight vigil down at the capitol tonight,” Leann continued. “The one they mentioned in the paper. I think I’m going to go. Want to go along?”
The subject of the vigil had crossed Joanna’s own mind several times in the course of the morning. Obviously, Serena Grijalva would be one of the remembered victims. Joanna, too, had considered going.
“Maybe,” she said. “But before we decide one way or the other, we’d better see how much homework we have.”
Leann gave her a wan smile. “You’re almost too focused for your own good,” she said. “Has anybody ever told you that?”
“Maybe once or twice. Come on.”
Once again, the two women were among the last stragglers to find their seats. Dave Thompson was at the podium. “Why, I’m so glad you two ladies could join us,” he said. “I hope class isn’t interfering too much with your socializing.”
In the uncomfortable silence that followed Thompson’s cutting remark, Leann ducked into her chair and appeared to be engrossed in studying her notes, all the while flushing furiously. Joanna, on the other hand, met and held the instructor’s gaze. Of all the people in the room—the two women an ‘ their twenty-three male classmates—Joanna was the only one whose entire future in law enforcement didn’t depend in great measure on the opinion of that overbearing jerk.
With Dick Voland’s tale of Dave Thompson’s “remotion” still ringing in her ears, Joanna couldn’t manage to keep her mouth shut. “That’s all right,” she returned with a tight smile. “We were finished anyway.”
The rest of the morning lecture didn’t drag nearly as much. At lunchtime two carloads of students headed for the nearest Pizza Hut. Joanna had already taken a seat at one of the three APOA-occupied tables when the perpetual head-nodder from the front row paused beside her. “Is this seat taken?” he asked.
Joanna didn’t much want to sit beside someone she had pegged as a natural-born brown noser. Still, since the seat was clearly empty, there was no graceful way for Joanna to tell the guy to move on. His badge said his name was Rod Bascom and that he hailed from Casa Grande.
“Help yourself,” Joanna said.