Desert Shadows (9781615952250) by Betty Webb

don’t they?”
    Zhang’s answer was less zoological, even less restrained. His own fists remained clenched.
    This was no time to indulge the National Alliance’s obvious desire for a dust-up, so I ripped a sheet of paper from my notebook and thrust it toward Ramos. “Do me a favor and show me where everyone was seated during the meal, plus all the entry and exit doors to the banquet hall. Write down the names of everyone at your table and the tables next to yours, anyone who had easy access to Gloriana’s place setting.” Although the salads had been waiting for the SOBOP people when they entered the banquet hall, there was a chance that the water hemlock had been added later.
    Hands still shaking from suppressed rage, Ramos sketched a rough seating chart. Gloriana sat with her niece, Sandra, to her right. Next came Myra Gordon; Zhang; the Rev; Dr. Deborah Messinger, who had administered CPR; Randall Ott; and then, finishing up the table, Emil Ramos on Gloriana’s left. At the next table sat Representative Tinsley; Zachary and Megan Alden-Taylor; John Alden Brookings, a free-lance writer whose byline I’d sometimes seen in the Scottsdale Journal (a relative of Gloriana’s?); “Chaps” Peterson, the cowboy poet I’d heard earlier; and three men whose names I didn’t recognize.
    â€œPublishers from California,” Ramos explained when I asked, his voice still tight. At least his hands had steadied. “They were attending the SOBOP Expo for the first time. I do not believe they knew Gloriana at all.”
    I looked at the seating chart again, still not finding the name I expected to see. “Where did Owen sit?”
    The Rev’s voice was almost as tight as Ramos’ when he answered. I guessed that the confrontation with the neo-Nazis bothered him more than he cared to admit. “That evening, as with the evening before, Gloriana made Owen sit outside in the corridor on one of those fold-up chairs.”
    I took a moment to digest this information. “You mean he wasn’t even in the room?”
    The Rev shook his head.
    No dinner for Owen, then, other than a heaping portion of humiliation. And Owen was a proud man. The more I studied the diagram, the more worried I became. Gloriana’s table was located right next to the banquet hall’s exit, with a probably furious Owen seated within poisoning distance. Even a Marine can only take so much. How easy it would have been to take the water hemlock he already had in his pocket and….
    When I asked about the table’s peculiar placement, Zhang gave me a sour smile. “You should have heard Gloriana carry on. Heck, I wasn’t that crazy about sitting near the exit, myself. Half the people in the room strolled past us at one time or another, going in and out. Grand Central station, Arizona style.” Then he flushed, probably remembering too late that Ramos’ wife had drawn up the chart. “Oh, Emil, I’m sorry. I didn’t.…”
    Ramos, after giving one last look toward the neo-Nazis, interrupted him. “The table placement was my fault, not Beatrice’s. You see, I suffer from diabetes, and I have to get up and down a lot, so to make it easier for me, Beatrice sat me close to the corridor that led to the men’s room.”
    A whole banquet hall full of suspects, then, walking to and fro past the victim’s table on the way to the john. Getting the hemlock onto Gloriana’s plate without being seen would have been relatively easy under any circumstances, whether before dinner or during. “Mr. Ramos, how many people attended the banquet?”
    When he rubbed his forehead I noticed his hand was still shaking. “There were eight people at each table and there were fifteen tables. A few convention attendees may have missed the banquet, but I do not believe so. We publishers only meet once a year, and the time we spend together is quite