A cop would know the right order to pursue these questions.

“Rosie, you need to talk to the police,” I said, not for the first time since I’d entered the room.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Here’s where I should deny the suspect water or a chance to visit the bathroom. I looked at my friend, ragged and vulnerable, and threw back my shoulders.

“Let’s take a break,” I said. “Have some more ice tea, Rosie.”

When Maddie’s call came in on my cell phone, I was alone in the tiny bedroom. Rosie was in the bathroom; Linda was back on the floor, as she termed it, with patients.

“Where are you, Grandma?” Maddie asked.

“I-”

“No, wait. Let me guess. You’re doing er-r-r-rrands.”

I smiled at the way she stretched out the word, rolling the r’s as if she were practicing a romance language. I couldn’t deny my overuse of the word, whenever I was looking into matters I thought too risky for Maddie’s involvement.

“Are you having a good time with Aunt Beverly?”

“Uh-huh. And with Uncle Nick.”

Nice for all. I was just getting used to Nick’s being part of the family. Beverly had met him in her work as a civilian volunteer for the LPPD and they now seemed to be inseparable. She’d been a widow much longer than I had, since Skip was only eleven years old. On days when I wasn’t completely selfish, I was happy for her.

“And Uncle Skip is here,” Maddie said.

Not so nice. I had a reaction similar to the one I’d have if I were cruising down the 101 and saw the black-and-white California Highway Patrol car in my rearview mirror, even if I wasn’t exceeding sixty-five miles an hour.

“How’s the pool?” I asked Maddie.

Maddie laughed. “No stalling around, Grandma. Uncle Skip wants to talk to you.”

The odds seemed stacked against me. My Nancy Drew granddaughter, my homicide detective nephew, and retired homicide detective Nick Marcus were all at the other end of the phone line. Not a line, exactly, since it was cell phone to cell phone. Maybe an electric wave of some kind.

In any case, this time I was speeding.

Chapter 11

In the approximately ten seconds it took for Skip to assume control of the phone at Beverly’s house, I ran through my options for truth or consequences. What if he asked whether I knew where Rosie was? How could I get around that? I could use his technique and ask another question. I could-

“Is Rosie Norman with you?” Skip asked, without prelude.

I swallowed hard. Then, aha! I heard water running in the bathroom, behind a closed door. “No,” I said, with the ease of the just.

“If you find her, will you advise her to come in immediately?”

“Of course,” I said with great confidence. No lies so far. If he’d phrased his question as “Do you know where she is?” I’d have been stuck. I couldn’t believe my luck. And it was my turn. “Is Rosie a fugitive from justice?”

“Technically, no.”

Whew. I was home free. “When can I talk to you?”

“Besides right now on the phone?”

“Yes.” (Because the water had stopped running and technically, I would be with Rosie in about one minute.)

“I’ll meet you at my office in ten,” he said.

“How about twenty? And, Skip, can you leave-”

“Without the redheaded squirt.”

“You mean the other redheaded squirt.”

I was glad we were a close family.

I knew the LPPD would be looking to make an arrest soon, partly to give David’s family some comfort as the time for his memorial approached. The sooner Rosie talked to them, the better.

My strategy with Rosie hadn’t worked so far; I had to try a new tack that I hoped wouldn’t upset Linda even more than she was already. Maddie’s term “freaked out” came to mind, and I had to say, though I admired and taught proper English, that some of my granddaughter’s current favorite expressions had more impact than the classics.

“Rosie, you know Linda’s job is on the line here, if not worse.” I didn’t mention that I was prepared to take the full blame, telling whoever needed to know that I’d forced Linda into this position, on threat of… something. I’d work it out.

As I feared, Linda gasped. She had a habit in times like this of grabbing the front of her uniform, already stretched across her full bosom, as if she were having a heart attack. Before she lost her composure completely, I told her that I had it on good authority that, technically, she was not harboring a fugitive.

“But you might be one soon, Rosie. The longer you put this off, the more guilty you look. I’m going downtown to talk to Skip, to clear the way for you, but you have to promise me that you’ll go to the station and talk to him before the day is over.”

Rosie nodded, her sad eyes drooping.

“Now, I have only a few minutes to clear up some things.” I dug in my tote and fished out the tiny mirror, which I’d wrapped in tissue, having thought of preserving fingerprints only after it was too late. “No beating around the bush, Rosie. I found this in David’s room on Saturday afternoon.”

Rosie took the mirror between her thumb and index finger. Neither she nor Linda asked what I’d been doing in the murdered man’s hotel suite. Apparently my friends took my investigative privileges for granted. Rosie peered closely at the mirror. The shiny gold edge seemed to blink on and off as it caught the late afternoon sun, now directly, now through a waving tree branch. She squinted, missing her magnifier, I was sure. I had one in my tote but decided against offering it to her. Either Rosie knew where the mirror had come from or she didn’t. It didn’t take close scrutiny for her to figure it out.

Rosie looked confused. “It looks like one from the set I used in my room box, for the locker doors. But I swear I don’t know how this mirror got in David’s room, Gerry. I was never in there, just at the doorway, with you.”

And lurking in the hallway, I added, but not out loud. “You did take the scene to the hallway while you were waiting, though.”

“I told you, I thought it might take him back to high school, to those old hallway lockers, in a good way. Remember I told you how it was in front of the lockers when he kissed me and asked me out that one time? But, I never got to show it to him on Friday night.” She looked at the mirror again, as if in wonder. “The only time I actually laid eyes on David that night I was with you. Where would I have put the room box then? I had that tiny evening purse.”

“With a big buckle,” Linda said, reminding us she was there, with a slightly wrong-time, wrong-place joke. She cupped her hand over her mouth. Linda couldn’t know how relieved I was that she wasn’t still gasping in terror over the possibility of being arrested herself for her Good Samaritan gesture.

“One more thing, Rosie.” I took my time describing how the scene was trashed. I wrote out the words in the air between us: I hate David. I could tell from Rosie’s expression that she herself was the vandal. “Remember, no skirting the truth,” I reminded her.

“I trashed it. I was so angry, Gerry. I was in our room after you and Maddie left on Saturday morning. I’d shoved it in a drawer the night before. It was already broken in a lot of places. Everything was loose. I started to put the scene back into its carrier while I was packing up and I went nuts. I shaved a point on my lipstick and used it to write that graffiti and then I had this thought of making a bottle of poison. That part calmed me down in a strange way.”

It was not a pretty sight-Rosie madly writing her hate message on the miniature lockers, then, with great concentration, gathering materials from hotel supplies and fashioning the tiny bottle.

“Then you-what?-threw it away?” I was still trying to figure out how the police got hold of it. Rosie blew her nose and nodded at the same time. “I was on my way out and I started to feel so angry again. I just shoved it in the wastebasket in the room. Who needed it? I’m surprised it survived at all.”