JanaLynn appeared by the serving station, hesitant to intrude. Estelle looked at her and nodded, and she stepped up to the table. “Not much in the mood for eating, huh,” JanaLynn said sympathetically. Both dishes looked as if an ambitious mouse had attacked one corner. “How about a take-home box?”
“That’ll work,” Mike replied.
“How about you?” JanaLynn asked Estelle.
“Sure. Why not.” The plates disappeared.
“When was the last time your mom talked to your dad, Mike?”
“I have no idea how I would know something like that. You’d have to ask her.” His tone was clipped and contentious, and Estelle hesitated.
“What year were they divorced?”
“Nineteen ninety-two,” he said without hesitating to calculate.
“Long time ago.”
“Yeah, it’s a long time. Life goes on.”
Yes, it does, Estelle thought. “Tell me about Janet’s friends,” Estelle said. “She’s lived with you for how long now?”
“A couple of months.”
“And in that time, who’s come over to the apartment?”
“Oh, she has a couple of friends that we see now and then. Nobody that has a key.”
“No one she’d lend a key to?”
“What for? You don’t just lend house keys, do you? And there’s the timing thing, too. I don’t know for sure when the pistol went missing. I told Mitchell that, too. I don’t take it out and fondle it on a regular basis, you know. It could have been taken yesterday, or last week, or last month…even last year.”
“Do you have anyone come into your apartment on a regular basis? Cleaning lady, someone like that?”
“Mitchell and I went over every inch of that. No, I don’t. I can’t afford a cleaning lady. The gas guy reads the meter from the outside. So does the electric company.” He grinned and, except for the fatigue, might have looked five years younger. “The Jehovah’s Witnesses knock once in a while, but I don’t let ’em in.” He took a long swig of coffee and grimaced. “The last person in the apartment, other than me and Janet, was Tommy Pasquale. He borrowed the Mustang to take Linda out for a swank dinner in Las Cruces. He didn’t want to take her in his Jeep.”
“When was that?”
“I don’t remember exactly. Sometime in early December. I told him that he could just let himself in and toss the keys on the table when he came back.”
“And that’s what he did?”
“That’s what he did. Said ‘Howdy’ to Janet, and went on his way. And if I can’t trust him, then the whole damn world can just come to a stop for all I care.”
“Sure enough,” Estelle agreed, and then she sat back abruptly. A realization stabbed through Estelle’s head like a mini-stroke, so simple and obvious that she felt the surge of blood up her neck. She hadn’t blushed in years, but her face burned now. Everyone was tired, everyone had worked too many hours, everyone-well, she-was preoccupied with a dozen other things, and it all boiled down to missing the obvious.
She pulled her cell phone off her belt and punched the speed dial for Sergeant Tom Mears.
Chapter Twenty-six
“You have reached voice mail for Sergeant Tom Mears. If this is an emergency, please dial 911. Otherwise, leave a message at the tone.”
“And your call is important to us,” Estelle said to the robotic voice. She punched another set and waited.
“Posadas County Sheriff’s Department. Sutherland.”
“Brent, this is Estelle. Do you know where Sergeant Mears is right now?”
“I think he’s home, ma’am. I’m not sure. He worked most of the night, I know. He logged out this morning about four or so.”
“How long have you been up?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Sutherland said. “But Ernie is coming in a little later to relieve.”
And he’s the swing shift, Estelle thought. The department organization was going to pieces. “Okay, thanks.”
“Captain Mitchell just came in a few minutes ago. Do you want to talk to him? He’s standing right here.”
“Sure.”
In a moment Mitchell’s quiet, soft voice greeted her. Estelle had always thought that if voices were all that mattered, Edward Mitchell would make a great physician, handling patients over the phone. He could make Take two aspirins and call me in the morning sound as if it really might work.
“Eddie, we need to check Janet Tripp’s keys. Tom Mears had them in an evidence bag, and he was going to run prints, but we need to know if her apartment keys are on the ring.”
“You mean the keys to the place she shares with Sisneros?” Mitchell asked.
“Right.”
“Is Sisneros with you?”
“Yes, he is. We’re at the Don Juan.”
“Okay. Hang tight. Tom was downstairs with Linda a few minutes ago. I don’t know if he still is or not. Give me a minute to track things down.”
“We’re headed back to the office right now,” Estelle said. As she switched off, Mike nodded and slid out of the booth. He accepted both doggie boxes from JanaLynn.
Estelle dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the table, thinking immediately of the countless times she’d seen Bill Gastner do exactly the same thing, whether he’d had a dinner or just a slice of pie and coffee. “Thanks, JL,” she said.
“You guys take care,” JanaLynn said, and the look she gave Mike Sisneros would have been comical under other circumstances. She didn’t quite reach up and pinch her nose shut against the aroma, but her reaction was close. Oblivious, the deputy headed out of the restaurant toward Estelle’s car.
“Is he going to be all right?” JanaLynn whispered to Estelle as Mike slipped through the inner foyer door.
“We hope so,” Estelle said. “A little more sleep, a lot less beer, and a very long shower.”
It took a minute and a half to drive back to the Public Safety Building, straight east on Bustos through the heart of Posadas. The two of them rode in silence, Estelle content to leave the young man alone with his thoughts. Mike Sisneros appeared to have pulled himself out of his personal morass, and his eyes flicked from one side of the street to another as if the answers to all his questions were about to step out in front of the county car. Estelle could see that he was thinking, not just puddling. That was progress of a sort.
Inside the Sheriff’s Office, Eddie Mitchell stood near the dispatch island, and as Estelle and Mike entered, he extended a plastic evidence bag toward Estelle. “They’re still downstairs,” he said.
“Still?” She looked up at the wall clock as she and Mike followed Mitchell to his office.
“Still. It’s the new schedule we talked about. Thirty-six hours on, two hours off. That way, we’ll be able to cut back to a staff of two. Leona Spears will be ecstatic.”
Estelle looked quickly toward the front doors and the foyer, where the line of plastic chairs awaited visitors. Leona Spears, the potential county manager-to-be, was nowhere in sight. “She was here?”
Mitchell raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Paranoid, are we?”
“No…not paranoid, exactly. I just want to have time to prepare for the challenge,” Estelle said. Mitchell closed his office door, and Estelle spread the plastic bag out on his desk so she could look at each key. The fob was bright blue plastic with the a amp; h welding logo in gold. “Which one goes to the apartment, Mike?”
Sisneros took the bag, glanced through the set, and shook his head, then looked more carefully. “It’s not there.”
“She did have them, though?”
“Well, of course she had them.”
“As far as you know, she had them when you two last saw each other? What, that would be yesterday some time?”
“I suppose so. I didn’t ask.” He hunched his shoulders. “Who ever asks somebody if they have their keys? I mean, do you have your house key on your key ring?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
Resisting the temptation to check, but now keenly aware of the weight of her own key ring in her pocket, she plunged doggedly on. “But as far as you knew, Janet had her own key to your apartment and she had it with her. It was on this key ring, not some separate one? She didn’t have it on a separate special one or something?”