Butch nodded, his eyes dry but red. “They could,” he said.
Unable to say anything more, Joanna turned away from Butch so he wouldn’t see the tears blurring her own eyes. When she did so, she caught sight of the shattered top of her rolltop desk—the place where she kept her various weapons under lock and key.
“My Colt Two Thousand is missing,” she said as a sudden chill passed over her body. She had stopped using the Colt due to dependability problems, but she also knew that when it did fire, it was a powerful and deadly weapon.
“I know,” Butch said. “I noticed that, too.”
“What about Jenny’s room?”
“It’s fine,” Butch said.
It sounded to Joanna as though he was telling her that to soothe her rather than because it was the truth. “Fine?” she demanded. “What do you mean, fine?” Even she could hear the threat of hysteria rising in her voice. “You mean, like this is fine?” she asked, swinging one arm to encompass the wreckage of her bedroom.
“I mean it’s fine,” Butch said. “Whoever did this left Jenny’s room entirely alone. It’s untouched. Nothing is broken; nothing wrecked. Now come on. We have to go back outside.”
“I don’t want to go outside,” Joanna protested.
“We have to,” Butch insisted. “Frank Montoya didn’t think you should come in here at all, not until after the crime-scene techs have had a chance to process the scene. But I told him that wouldn’t work—that you’d have to see it firsthand. The only way I got him to agree to that was to promise we wouldn’t touch anything and that we’d come back out as soon as you had seen it for yourself. Come on.”
Joanna tried to dodge away, but he caught her hand and pulled her toward the doorway. “Really, Joanna. You’ve seen enough. Standing here in the mess isn’t going to make it any better.”
“But who would do such a thing?” Joanna murmured. “Who could possibly hate me this much?”
“Good question,” Butch said, leading her back the way they had come. “It’s what we were talking about outside just before you drove up. Dick Voland was telling us he had a call from Reba Singleton late last night.” Butch paused. “She’s missing, by the way. Did you know that?”
“Of course I knew that,” Joanna replied. “I’m the one who told Dick about it in the first place.”
“What you maybe don’t know is that Reba’s husband had her served with divorce papers at her B and B here in Bisbee yesterday afternoon after the funeral and just before she was getting ready to leave town.”
“He what?”
“You heard me,” Butch replied. “He had the divorce papers served on the poor woman just hours after her father’s funeral. The no-good son of a bitch must have been planning it for days. No wonder she didn’t go flying straight home when she was supposed to. I’d be a missing person, too, if somebody had pulled that kind of asshole stunt on me.”
A power surge of mind-clearing anger erupted in Joanna’s head. “So that’s what happened!” Joanna exclaimed. “Dennis Singleton did Reba dirt, and so she turned it all on me.”
“That’s the general consensus,” Butch agreed.
“How could he do such a thing?”
Butch shrugged. “Some men are all heart,” he said.
Looking around the mayhem that had once been Joanna’s home, she saw the damage in a new light—as the manifestation of a broken woman’s rage and hurt and utter despair. In her outrage, Reba Singleton had focused her anger on property—on things. Dennis Singleton, on the other hand, had aimed his heart-seeking missile directly at his wife’s very soul. As Joanna grasped both those concepts, her perspective shifted. A toggle switch in her head went from off to on.
“Where’s Dick Voland now?” she demanded.
“Outside,” Butch replied. “At least that’s where he was when I left everybody else to go meet you.”