I’m sure my jaw dropped. “You’re kidding.”
“Wish I was,” Charles answered. “I got the license of her work car from the surveillance tapes at your security agency. That’s an old Buick, and she doesn’t park it here. She’s got a sweet little SLK that she drives back and forth between Scottsdale and Peoria. The Buick is what she drives when she comes to see you. She keeps it parked, complete with her vacuum cleaner and tray of cleaning supplies stowed in the trunk, in a garage over in Peoria just a few blocks from the Roundhouse.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “How could she possibly afford to live here?”
“I’m sure her boyfriend pays the freight. Does the name Jeffrey Jones sound familiar?”
My jaw dropped again. Or maybe still. “She’s hooked up with the hotel developer, the one who’s trying to buy me out?”
“That’s right. One and the same. I believe that’s what Jones and Ochoa have been after this whole time—they’ve been trying to get the goods on you for months now. Jones must have finally realized that he wouldn’t be able to convince you to sell at what he wanted to pay, so he sent Marina to you along with her hard luck story in order to gain access to your private life. One or the other of them came up with the brilliant idea that if you were in jail facing homicide charges with the possibility of a long prison sentence, you might be more inclined to be reasonable.”
“But I thought . . .”
“I know what you thought,” Charles said. “You believed Marina’s sob story about being an illegal immigrant and about her working her poor little fingers to the bone in order to support her poor fatherless children. Guess again. Her parents immigrated from Mexico long before she was born. She’s a U.S. citizen with an honors degree in history and English from ASU. She went on to get an MBA from Thunderbird over in Glendale. That’s where she and Jeffrey hooked up. He divorced his first wife—his starter wife—shortly thereafter.”
“But she worked for me for months,” I objected.
“True,” Charles agreed, “and they must have been looking to make a huge score, considering she was willing to do that much hard physical labor just to have unlimited access to your private life. Believe me, the Maria Fuentes who lives here has a cleaning lady of her own. The really good news for us is that before she and Jeffrey became a couple, Maria spent several years working in the securities field. That means her fingerprints are on file. I’m hoping the criminalists dusting your file folders for prints will not only find hers, but they’ll find them where we need them.”
“Finding her prints won’t mean anything,” I objected. “She cleans my apartment. Her fingerprints are bound to be there.”
“In your apartment maybe, but not on the file folders containing your private documents. I can’t imagine you expected her to dust the file with your divorce decree in it on a regular basis.”
“But what if she wore gloves?” I objected, thinking about the gloves Charles put on his hands before touching my computer keyboard.
“Crooks like these are arrogant,” Charles said. “It won’t ever have occurred to them that we’re this smart. She’s probably been snooping through your computer the whole time she’s been working for you, looking for something they could use to bring you to heel. Then two things happened. First they found out that Faith Dixon had turned into Katherine Melcher who was living in Las Vegas. Then you decided to go to Vegas for that writing convention. What’s it called again?”
“Bouchercon.”
“Yes, Bouchercon. At that point they must have thought they hit the jackpot because it all seemed to fall into place. At some point along the way your sweet little Marina made a copy of your car keys—the trunk key anyway. I checked the tapes. The week of October fifteenth, the week Katy Melcher died, Marina cleaned your apartment on Thursday rather than Friday. I’m pretty sure she and Jeffrey drove to Vegas together the next day to scope out the situation. I’m sure they used the old Twelfth Step ruse to lure Katy out of the house at that hour of the morning. According to Katy’s widower, she took late night calls from addicts trying to kick their drug and alcohol habits.”
That was way more than I could get my head around. The idea of Faith or Katy or whoever she was going out on a late night mission of mercy and being murdered for it seemed utterly unlikely.
“What about the threatening phone calls?” I asked.
“They came on days when Marina Ochoa would have been working for you. They must have figured that would make your situation a slam dunk. Threatening calls come from the victim’s ex before she’s murdered? What could be better?”
“What about the e-mail from Deeny?” I asked.