Left alone in the foyer, Joanna and Ernie let themselves out the front door. "Whew!" Ernie exclaimed, once the door closed behind them and they were alone on the verandah. "What the hell was that all about? Katherine O'Brien isn't what I'd call your typical grieving mother."

"Maybe there's no such thing," Joanna said thoughtfully. "Come on. Let's go see Maggie Hastings."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

Taking two separate cars, Ernie and Joanna drove back up the road to the Y that led off through the lush grass to the Green Brush Ranch employee compound. It consisted of five separate fourteen-by-seventy mobile homes. They were set in a slight hollow, out of sight from both the road and the main house. The mobile home sites were newly carved from the desert. The trailers were surrounded by raw red dirt punctuated by baby landscaping of reed-thin trees, tiny cacti, and leggy clumps of youthful oleander.

The first trailer on the left-hand side of the road was flanked by a six-foot-high chain-link dog run. As soon as Joanna stopped her Crown Victoria and stepped outside, the German shepherd she had seen on Saturday threw himself against the gate, barking and growling.

Ernie, joining Joanna beside her car, gave the dog run's fierce occupant a wary look. "Let's hope to hell the damned thing holds," he said.

The dog was still harking furiously when a woman opened the door in answer to Ernie Carpenter's knock. "Yeah?" she said, holding on to the doorjamb with both hands and swaying unsteadily on her feet. "Whad'ya want?"

"Maggie Hastings?" he said, opening his wallet and displaying his ID. "Would it be possible to speak to you for a few moments? Could we come in?"

Maggie Hastings was a disheveled, dark-haired woman in her mid-to-late forties. Her graying, lackluster hair was pulled back in a greasy ponytail. She wore a soiled man's shirt over a pair of too-tight shorts. She was also quite drunk.

Stumbling away from the door, she allowed Joanna and Ernie to enter. "Whaz this all about?" she slurred.

The room's curtains were tightly closed. The difference between the interior gloom and the brilliant exterior sunlight left Joanna momentarily blind. The stench of booze combined with a lingering pall of cigar and cigarette smoke was so stifling that Joanna could barely breathe.

"Sorry the place is such a mess," Maggie muttered, kicking something aside. "Haven't had a chance to pick up today. Waddn't 'xactly expecting company."

From the sound, Joanna suspected that the invisible object was an empty bottle of some kind. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she was shocked by the disarray. To the outside world, Alf Hastings presented a neat, well-pressed countenance. It was hard to believe that his starched khaki uniform could have emerged from such filth. The living room wasn't merely a mess. It was a disaster. Empty bottles-gin mostly, but some beer as well-littered the newspaper-strewn floor. The dining room table, visible from the living room, was covered with stacks of dirty dishes, milk cartons, margarine containers, and bread wrappers-several days' worth at least. A line of what seemed like mostly can-and-bottle-filled garbage sacks lined one side of the room, marching from the kitchen doorway toward the front door.

Remembering all too well how many bugs the new cook had rousted from what supposedly had been a clean jail kitchen, Joanna shivered. No doubt there were plenty of well-fed but currently invisible bugs hiding in this very room.

Turning her back on her visitors, Maggie staggered as far as the end of the couch and then fell onto it. She picked up a remote control and muted the droning television set, turning an afternoon talk show into a wordless pantomime of moving lips and wagging heads. She stared at it with such avid interest, however, that Joanna wondered if she even remembered that someone else was in the room.

"This is about your husband," Joanna said.

Maggie Hastings's eyes never wavered from the set. "What about him?" she asked.

"Do you know where he is?"

"Work." Maggie's reply was little more than a grunt.

"No, he's not," Joanna told her. "Mr. O'Brien told us your husband went away for a day or two."

"Well, that's news to me," Maggie said with a noncommittal shrug. "If he was going somewhere, don't you think he'da told me?"

Not necessarily, Joanna thought. And even if he did, who's to say you'd remember? "This is serious, Mrs. Hastings," she said aloud. "Do you have any idea where he might be?"

The firmness in Joanna's question somehow must have penetrated Maggie Hastings's drunken haze. "Why all the questions?" she asked, finally glancing away from the television set for the first time. "Whiz going on?"

"On Saturday night, a young man was severely beaten out-side the gate to Green Brush Ranch," Joanna replied. "Not only was he beaten, but burned, too, with the lit end of a cigar."

Joanna said no more than that, but it was evidently enough. Maggie Hastings's response was instantaneous. Her face seemed to collapse. Her mouth went slack while her eyes brimmed with tears. "Oh, no," she wailed. "Not that. Not again."

"What do you mean?"

"I can't believe it. How could he? What if we lose this job, too?" Maggie whispered brokenly but with far less drunken slurring. "And the roof over our heads, too, just like the other time. You don't know what it was like then. We lost everything-our house, our furniture, our friends. Stevie will kill him when he finds out. He'll just plain kill him."

Overcome with a combination of emotion and booze, she fell into a long series of racking sobs. For several minutes, she was totally incapable of speech. Joanna had no choice but to wait until the sobs subsided before she could ask another question. "Who's Stevie?"

Maggie took a ragged breath, blew her nose, and wiped her eyes. "Stephan Marcovich," Maggie answered. "Alf's cousin up in Phoenix. He's an old friend of the O'Briens. He's also the one who arranged this job for us. If it hadn't been for Stevie, once the lawyers got done with us, we'da been sunk. We had no place to go. Alf couldn't find a job anywhere in Yuma, not even flipping burgers. It was like we had a disease or something. We were one step away from living on the street when Stevie sent Alf here. Oh, my God. And now he's done if again. 1 can't stand it," she wailed. "I just can't."

Once more Maggie's voice trailed off into a torrent of hope-less tears.

"Mrs. Hastings, would your husband's cousin have any idea where Alf might be?"

Blowing her nose again, Maggie shook her head. "I don't think so," she said. "If I don't know where he is, how would Stevie?"

"Just the same, can you give us his number?"

"Stevie's? Up in Phoenix?"

Joanna nodded. "Please," she said.

"I guess so." Unsteadily, Maggie Hastings hoisted herself off the couch, then she wobbled across the room and staggered down a short hallway. For several minutes, Joanna and Ernie could hear her in a room down the hall, mumbling and cursing. Finally she returned, carrying a frayed business card.

"Here it is!" she announced triumphantly, handing it over to Joanna. "Alf says I never can find anything in all this mess, but he's wrong, you know. There's a system around here. He just doesn't understand it, that's all."

She belched then, spewing a cloud of stale gin throughout the room. "Can I get you something?" she asked.

Looking down at the card, Joanna barely heard her. "Air Conditioning Enterprises," the raised print said. "Stephan J. Marcovich, President."

"No," Joanna managed, coming to her senses. "Nothing, thank you. We've got to go."

As soon as the door opened and they stepped out into the fresh air and light, the dog resumed its barking. "What's going on?" Ernie asked as they headed toward the cars. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

In a way, Joanna had seen a ghost-her father's. She was remembering a breakfast from long ago. Her father, D. H. Lathrop-only a deputy back then-had been working on a case. "When it comes to homicide," he had announced over his bacon and eggs, "there ain't no such thing as coincidence."

"Isn't," Eleanor had returned at once, correcting his gram-mar as usual. She was forever doing that, trying to weed out the remnants of her husband's Arkansas childhood. "There isn't any such thing," she added for good measure.

It was one of the few times Joanna could remember her mother's habitual corrections riling her easygoing, even-tempered father. "Ellie," he had said, banging his coffee cup back into the saucer. "It would be nice if, just once in your life, you'd listen to what I mean instead of picking apart whatever I say."

With that, he had stood up and stalked out of the house. "Well?" Ernie pressed. "What's going on?"

"I'm remembering something my father said years ago," she told him, handing over the card. "He told me once that, in a homicide case, there's no such thing as coincidence."

"I'd have to agree, but ..."

"Did I mention anything to you about Jim Hobbs being offered the opportunity to get in on an illegal Freon buy? The guy trying to put the deal together was Sam Nettleton."

"Nettleton? The scuzzball towing operator from up in Benson?"