The name on the glass door was Richard Whitlock, in gold paint, on the biggest office on Beale Street, and I had read it every morning for twenty six years while I waited for the light to change. Whitlock Land and Development. Richard Whitlock had been the sheriff of Mohave County for sixteen years, then a county supervisor, then the man who owned half of Kingman. He sent a turkey to every employee of the motel at Christmas. I sat on the edge of the bed in Room 206 with the map on my knee and understood that I had been walking past a grave all my life.
I did not call Raj. I did not call anybody. I locked the door of 206 from the inside and read every page of the notebook, forty pages in the handwriting of a dying man, in the order of his memory: dates, names, the license number of a county car, the words of the sheriff. His name was Lyle Gentry, and he had been a deputy for eleven years before he quit and moved to Lake Havasu to repair boats. On the last page he had written, Esther, I am sorry. I should have knocked on your door.
At four in the afternoon I drove to Phoenix in my old Corolla with the notebook in a plastic grocery bag on the seat beside me. I had not been in a city in years. I found the federal building on Van Buren, and I told the guard at the desk that I needed to speak to somebody about a murder, and he looked at my uniform, my sensible shoes, and my gray braid, and I could see him decide that I was a crazy woman. But a young agent in the lobby, a man in his thirties named Delaney, had heard me say 1987, and he stopped.
The one who sees what everyone else scrubs away may be the only witness the dead will ever have.
Delaney read the notebook standing up. Then he sat down and read it again. Then he went into a back room and came out with an older woman in a blue suit, a supervisor, who read it a third time. “Mrs. Villarreal,” she said, “we have had a missing persons file on Lorena Pacheco since 1987. Her mother has called us every March for thirty nine years. We have never had a lead.” She looked at the map. “Do you know that if this is true, it involves a man with a great deal of power in your county?” I said, “I clean toilets for a living, Madam. I know exactly how much power a man has.”
The dig began on a Saturday at dawn. I was not allowed to come close, but Delaney called me when they found the first bone, and I drove out to the wash off Highway 93 in the gray light, and I stood behind the yellow tape beside a mesquite tree and held onto the fence with both hands. It took them three days. They found Lorena Pacheco in a shallow grave, wrapped in a motel bedspread from the Desert Rose, with her sandals still beside her. And beside her, wrapped in an old county jacket, a .38 revolver.
The jacket had a name sewn into the lining, in white thread: WHITLOCK. The ballistics lab in Quantico matched the revolver to the bullet in the skull of the girl. The motel bedspread, cheap polyester with an orange stripe, matched the stock of the Desert Rose in 1987, which Raj found in a box of old invoices in the basement when the agents asked. “Nobody ever asks me for old things,” he said, wiping his glasses. “I told you we only keep records to 2010. I did not say I throw them away.”
They arrested Richard Whitlock on a Thursday morning in his office, behind the gold letters on the glass door, in front of his secretary and two men from the planning commission. I did not see it. I was cleaning Room 118, a truck driver who had left a mess, when Raj came running down the walkway with his phone in his hand. He did not say a word. He only held up the screen, which showed a man in a good suit with his hands behind his back, and the whole of Kingman standing on the sidewalk to watch.
I testified for two days. I told the jury about the blood under the bathroom sink, the sheriff who told me to forget, the cake I had carried home for the birthday of my daughter. I told them that I had forgotten nothing. The defense lawyer, a smooth man from Scottsdale, tried to say that I was a confused old woman who remembered a note from a dead man and nothing else. I looked at him, and I said, “Sir, I have seen blood on a motel floor. I do not need a notebook to remember what I scrubbed.” The jury was out for two hours. Life, without parole.
Carmen Pacheco was eighty one years old, and she came to Kingman from Bullhead City in a wheelchair pushed by her grandson. At the funeral, in the small Catholic church on Fourth Street, she asked me to sit with her in the front pew. She had a rosary wound round her fingers. After the Mass she took my face in her thin hands. “Mija,” she said, “for thirty nine years, every March, I lit a candle. I did not know your name. I knew only that somebody, somewhere, would one day open a door.” I told her that I had only done my job.
Room 206 sits empty now. Raj says nobody wants it, and he says it as if he does not mind. On the first of every March, I bring a clean sheet and a candle in a glass, and I make the bed in that room as carefully as I have ever made any bed, with the corners tucked tight. I light the candle on the nightstand. I stand for a minute in the quiet, with my hands folded. And then I go back to work, because there are forty one other rooms, and every one of them has somebody coming tonight who needs the sheets to be clean.
