“And the envelope?”
“I’m not absolutely sure, but I think I left it in the desk drawer.”
By then the technician was bringing the ALS into the room. “Where do you want it?” he asked. Carol looked questioningly at Joanna, and she was the one who answered.
“Over there by the closet.”
Once plugged in, it took a few moments for the equipment to reach operating temperature. Then, with the lights off, the technician, crawling on his hands and knees, aimed the wand toward the floor.
“There you go,” he breathed as a ghostlike footprint appeared on the carpeting. “There’s one, and here’s another. Looks to me like it’s the same as in the other room,” he added. “The guy came into the room through the door in the closet. Some of these prints have been disturbed, though. Could be he left the same way.”
“No that was me,” Joanna said. “I was crawling around trying to get a look at the access door in the closet. I wanted to see it for myself.”
Carol nodded. “All right, guys. I want photos of the footprints, and I want the entire room searched for fingerprints as well.”
“Will do,” the technician replied.
Carol took Joanna by the arm. “Come on outside,” she said. “We’ll go out there to talk and leave the techs to do their jobs.”
Once they were standing in the breezeway, Joanna realized the sun was going down. That meant it was long past five o’clock. The shock of knowing someone had broken into her room left her in no condition to face the emotional minefield of that Thanksgiving dinner right then. Her guests would simply have to go on without her.
“What does it all mean?” Joanna asked.
“I don’t honestly know,” Carol replied.
“Do you think he planned on killing me, too?”
“That ‘s possible. Actually, now that you mention it, it’s probably even likely.”
“But why?” Joanna asked.
For a while both women were silent. Carol was the first to speak. “Supposing Dave Thompson did kill Serena Grijalva,” she suggested grudgingly. “Since the envelope with the press clippings in it is the only thing missing from your room, we have to look at that possibility. And let’s suppose further that he killed her with the intention of blaming the murder on someone else.”
“Jorge,” Joanna supplied.
“Right. Fair enough,” Carol continued, “but why try to kill Leann? Getting rid of you I can understand. After all, Dave had committed the perfect murder. Jorge was about to take the rap for it. Then you show up from Bisbee and start asking questions—the kinds of troublesome question that could mess up his whole neat little game plan. So if I were Dave, I’d go after you for sure. But why Leann?”
“And where are the panties and the envelope?” Joanna added. “Why did he take them in the first place, and why can’t we find them now?”
Carol nodded thoughtfully. “There’s no way to tell what the timing is exactly, but it doesn’t look like he had a lot of time to get rid of them between the time Leann fell out of the truck and the time officers found it abandoned a few blocks away. So maybe that’s where we should look—around the lot where we found the Toyota. Maybe he tossed them in a Dumpster somewhere over there. You’re welcome to come along if you like. And we should also see if we can find out how he got back to the campus from there. He must have walked.”
With her mind made up, Carol headed off toward her Taurus, striding purposefully along on her usual three-inch heels. A few steps into the parking lot, she stopped cold. “Wait a minute. You’re supposed to be eating dinner with your family right now. And you’re not exactly dressed to go rummaging through garbage cans.”
“Neither are you,” Joanna retorted. “If you can go Dumpster dipping the way you’re dressed, so can I. Not only that, for some strange reason, I’m not the least bit hungry right now. Maybe you could get someone from the department to call the hotel and let people know that I’m not going to make it.”
“Sure thing,” Carol said.
They started at the flooring warehouse, which was located in a small industrial complex along with five or six other businesses—all of them shut down for the holiday. Using flashlights from Carol’s glove compartment, they searched all the Dumpsters in the area. All of them had trash in them, which meant there had been no pickup that day. But there were no panties anywhere to be found. In one Dumpster, they came across several manila envelopes, but none of them were Juanita Grijalva’s.
In the next hour and a half, they went south and searched through three more industrial neighborhoods with similar results.
“I give up,” Carol said finally as she banged shut the heavy metal lid on the last Dumpster. “The running track’s right here, so if we were going to find them, it seems to me we would have by now. What say we clean up and see about having some dinner.”
Joanna looked bedraggled, but she was feeling better. The activity had done her a world of good. The idea that Dave Thompson might have tried to kill her had rocked her, but at least she wasn’t sitting around doing nothing. “God helps those who help themselves.” That was something else Jim Bob was always saying. Tracking through dusty back parking lots and wrestling with Dumpsters meant Joanna Brady was helping herself.
“Now that you mention it, I’m hungry too, but I still don’t want to go back to the hotel while there’s a chance everyone will still be down in the dining room,” Joanna said. “Not with a run in my pantyhose and smelling like this. My mother would pitch a fit.”
“Who said anything about a hotel?” Carol Strong responded. “Besides, if you’re game, we still have some work to do.”
She drove straight to the Roundhouse Bar and Grill, where the parking lot was jammed full of cars.
“What are we going to do?” Joanna asked. “Talk to Butch Dixon?”
“I don’t know about you,” Carol Strong replied, “but my first order of business is to wash my hands. Second is get something to eat. I’m starved. I’ve only been here a couple of times, but some of the guys down at the department were saying this place puts on a real Thanksgiving spread.”
At seven o’clock, the bar wasn’t very full, but the entryway alcove that led into the dining room was packed full of people, most of them with kids, waiting for seating in the restaurant. “Name please,” a young woman asked.
Joanna looked at the hostess, looked away, and then did a double take. The young woman was dressed in a Puritan costume, complete with a long skirt and a ruffled white apron.
“It’ll be about forty-five minutes for a table in the dining room, or you can seat yourself in the bar.”
“My aching feet say the bar will be fine,” Carol Strong said. “But first I need to use the RR.”
When they walked into the bar a few minutes later, Butch Dixon was standing behind the bar, gazing up at an overhead TV monitor with rapt
attention. Only when they got closer did Joanna realize that he, too, was dressed in a Puritan costume, complete with breeches, socks, and buckled shoes.
As they came toward him, he glanced away from the set. “Oh, oh,” he said. “My two favorite female gendarmes. You haven’t come to arrest me, have you?”
“Arrest you?” Carol Strong returned. “What for?”
“Video piracy,” he answered with a grin. “I know it says for home use only, but it turns out this is my home. I live upstairs, so that makes this my living room. We have a few important customs around here. One is that on Thanksgiving, the wait staff, me included, dresses up. They can choose between Puritan or Indian, it’s up to them. And in the bar we have continuous screenings of my favorite Thanksgiving movie—Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. It’s just coming up on the best part, where John Candy sets the car on fire. What’ll you have to drink, Diet Pepsi?” he asked, looking at Joanna.