Removing the body took time. Joanna stayed in the background waiting, watching, and thinking. What if the panties didn’t show up at all? If that happened, it was likely that the possible connection between Dave Thompson and Serena Grijalva would be ignored. Jorge would go to prison on the negotiated plea agreement, and no one would ever come close to knowing the truth. Other than Juanita Grijalva, Joanna Brady, and a literary-leaning bartender, nobody else seemed to care.
Up to then, relations between Detective Carol Strong and
Sheriff Joanna Brady had been entirely congenial if a little unorthodox. During the hours of questioning earlier in the day, Carol had treated Joanna with a good deal of respect, handling her like a colleague and treating her with the deference one police officer usually accords another. But Joanna was smart enough to realize that if she once questioned Detective Strong’s professional judgment or challenged her authority, that cordiality
would evaporate. After that, any further investigation Joanna did on Jorge Grijalva’s behalf would be strictly on her own. She would be starting from square one with only the few scraps of information she herself had managed to accumulate.
Those didn’t amount to much. She still had Juanita’s collection of clippings. Then there was the essay from Butch Dixon, but that didn’t seem likely to be of much help. After all, in his “opus,” as Butch had called it, he had failed to mention the very important fact that Dave Thompson had been in the bar the night Serena was killed.
“So far no luck,” Carol said, pulling off her latex gloves and walking over to where Joanna was standing. “I personally checked his pockets. Nothing. The crime scene guys will be going over the car, but it doesn’t look promising. You could just as well go. You’re late now as it is.”
Joanna nodded. “I guess you’re right. But do you mind if I stop by my room to pick something up before I go back to the hotel?”
“No problem,” Carol said.
Joanna walked back across the parking lot feeling uneasy. This would be the first time she ventured back inside the room since learning about the two-way mirrors. Still, she could just as well get it over with. She’d have to do it sooner or later, if for no other reason than to pack up her stuff to go back home.
After unlocking and opening the door, she paused for a moment on the threshold of the darkened room, feeling like a child afraid of some adult-inspired bogeyman. Don’t be silly, she chided herself, and switched on the light. She walked purposefully to the desk and opened the drawer. The envelope wasn’t there.
Frowning, she stared down into the empty drawer. That was odd. Wasn’t the drawer where she had last seen it? Puzzled, she went through the stack of papers she had left on top of the desk. The envelope wasn’t there, either.
For several seconds, she stood in the middle of the room looking around. She had been in the room for only a matter of a few days. The place was still far too neat for something as large as a manila envelope to simply disappear. With a growing sense of apprehension, Joanna walked over to the closet. Nothing seemed to be out of place. The two suitcases she hadn’t taken along to the Hohokam were still right where she had left them.
Dropping to her hands and knees, Joanna examined the wall underneath the single shelf. With effort, she succeeded in finding the secret access door Carol Strong had told her about. Even knowing it was there, finding it in the gloom of the closet took careful examination. The cracks surrounding it were artfully concealed. A professional job. The door was there because it was supposed to be there. It was something that had been there from the beginning, not something that had been remodeled in as an afterthought.
Joanna stood up and took a deep breath. Had Leann Jessup’s attacker let himself into Joanna’s room as well? Someone had been here. After all, the envelope was gone. Was anything else missing? Using a pencil, she pried open the other drawers in the room—the ones in the nightstand and in the pressboard dresser. Nothing seemed to out of order.
She went into the bathroom. Again, at first glance, nothing seemed to be amiss. The shampoo and conditioner, the large container of hand lotion—things she hadn’t needed to take along to the hotel—all stood exactly where she had had left them. Turning to leave the room, she caught sight of the dirty-clothes bag hanging on the hook on the back of the bathroom door.
Dragging the bag down from the hook, Joanna shook the contents out on the floor. There should have been three days’ worth of laundry in that scattered heap. Joanna sorted through it, almost the way she would have if she had been doing the laundry—separating things by colors. When she first noticed the missing pair of panties, she thought that maybe they were still caught in the legs of a pair of jeans. But that wasn’t the case. Three sweatshirts, three bras, two sets of jeans, one pair of pantyhose, and two pairs of panties. Only two pairs. The third one had disappeared.
With her pulse pounding in her throat, Joanna turned and fled from the room. Out in the breezeway, she could see Carol Strong and several of her investigators gathered outside the still-open door of the garage.
“Hey,” she shouted, waving. “Over her.”
Carol obviously heard her, because she waved back, but she didn’t understand what Joanna wanted. When Carol made no move in her direction, Joanna loped off across the parking lot. Her PT shinsplints yelped in protest. At one point, she slipped on loose gravel and almost fell. No matter what they show on those television commercials, she said to herself, running in high heels isn’t easy.
“What’s the matter?” Carol asked, as Joanna made it to within hearing distance.
“Do these guys have an alternate light source them?” she asked.
“Sure. Why?”
“Because someone’s been in my room,” Joanna answered
“Is anything missing?”
“Yes. An envelope full of press clippings on the Serena Grijalva case. And a pair of panties from my laundry hag.”
“Panties?” Carol repeated. “You’re sure?”
“Believe me. I’m sure.”
“Bring the ALS and come on,” Carol said over her shoulder to the technicians as she and Joanna started back across the parking lot. “Can you describe the missing pair?” she asked.
Fighting back an overwhelming sense of violation, at first all Joanna could do was nod.
“What’s wrong?” Carol asked, frowning worriedly in the face of Joanna’s obvious distress. “Is there something more that you haven’t told me?”
Joanna swallowed hard. “I can describe the panties exactly,” she said. “They’re apricot-colored nylon with a cotton crotch and with a column of cutout lace flowers appliquéd down the right-hand side.”
After saying that, Joanna gave up trying to fight back her tears.
“I’m not sure I could describe any of my own underwear with that much detail,” Carol said, more to fill up the silence and to offer some comfort than because the words made sense.
Joanna nodded, sniffling. “I’m sure I shouldn’t be so upset. They are only panties, after all, but they were a present from Andy last Christmas, the last Christmas present he ever gave me. They’re part of a matching set—bra, full slip, and panties. You can’t buy fancy underwear like that anywhere in Bisbee these days. Andy ordered them from a Victoria’s Secret catalog and had them shipped to the office so I’d be surprised. He’s been dead for months now, but they’re still sending him catalogs. They show up on my desk in the mail.”
“I’m sorry,” Carol said.
Joanna nodded. “Thanks,” she said, sniffing and wiping the tears from her face.
By then they had reached the breezeway. Carol waited while Joanna unlocked the door to the room. “Where were they again?”
“The panties? In the laundry bag hanging on the back of the bathroom door.”