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Contents

Web of Evil

Hand of Evil

Cruel Intent

ALSO BY J.A. JANCE

ALI REYNOLDS MYSTERIES

Edge of Evil

JOANNA BRADY MYSTERIES

Desert Heat

Tombstone Courage

Shoot/Don’t Shoot

Dead to Rights

Skeleton Canyon

Rattlesnake Crossing

Outlaw Mountain

Devil’s Claw

Paradise Lost

Partner in Crime

Exit Wounds

Dead Wrong

J. P. BEAUMONT MYSTERIES

Until Proven Guilty

Injustice for All

Trial by Fury

Taking the Fifth

Improbable Cause

A More Perfect Union

Dismissed with Prejudice

Minor in Possession

Payment in Kind

Without Due Process

Failure to Appear

Lying in Wait

Name Withheld

Breach of Duty

Birds of Prey

Partner in Crime

Long Time Gone

and

Hour of the Hunter

Kiss of the Bees

Day of the Dead

TOUCHSTONE

Rockefeller Center

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by J.A. Jance

All rights reserved,

including the right of reproduction

in whole or in part in any form.

TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jance, Judith A.

Web of evil: a novel of suspense / J. A. Jance.

p. cm.

I. Title.

PS3560.A44W43        2007

813'.54—dc22        2006052137

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4519-4

ISBN-10: 1-4165-4519-0

eISBN: 978-1-4516-7577-1

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonandSchuster.com

For Donna A., the last missing piece of my childhood.

I’ve been looking for you for years.

WEB OF EVIL

{ PROLOGUE }

When the man opened his eyes, it was so dark that at first he thought they were still closed. So he tried again, but nothing changed. It was dark—a hot black stifling darkness that seemed to suck the breath out of him. He sensed movement, heard the whine of tires on pavement, but he had no idea where he was or how he’d gotten there. He tried to move his legs but couldn’t. They were jammed up under his belly in a space that was far too small, and they seemed to be tied together somehow.

His hands were stuck behind him, shoved up against something hard. After several minutes of struggling he was finally able to shift his body enough to free them. He was stunned to discover that they, too, had been bound together in the same manner his legs were. The combination of their being tied too tight and being stuck under his body had cut off the circulation. At first his hands were nothing more than a pair of useless and inextricably connected dead-weight cudgels. After a few moments the blood returned to his fingers in a rush of needle-and-pin agony.

As his senses gradually reasserted themselves, he realized that the rough surface under his cheek was carpet of some kind, and from somewhere nearby came the distinctive smell of new rubber—a spare tire. That meant he was in the trunk of someone’s vehicle being taken God knows where. He tried to shout, but of course he couldn’t do that, either. His mouth was taped shut. All that emerged from his throat was a guttural groan.

What was it you were you supposed to do if you found yourself trapped in a vehicle like that? Kick out the taillights, hang an arm out the hole, and signal for help? But he couldn’t kick anything. He couldn’t move his legs, and his bound hands were still useless.

As the man gradually understood the seriousness of his predicament, his heart beat faster while his breath quickened to short panicky gasps. For a while he was afraid he was going to pass out again, but he fought it—fought to bring his breathing back under control. Fought to concentrate. What the hell was happening? Where was he? Who was doing this? And why?

He tried to remember something about what had gone on before. He had a dim recollection of something like a party. Lots of lights and laughter, lots of girls, lots of liquor. So had he gotten drunk and pissed someone off? Was that what was going on? He knew that given enough scotch he wasn’t anyone’s idea of Mr. Congeniality, but still…

Sweat trickled down the side of his face and dribbled into one eye, burning like fire. Without the use of his hands, there was no way to brush it away.

The vehicle slowed suddenly and swerved to the right, rolling him back onto his hands. Outside he heard the roar of a semi going past followed immediately by another and another. So they were on a busy freeway somewhere—or had just left one. But where? As hot as it was, it had to be somewhere over the mountains—somewhere in the desert. Palm Springs, maybe? Or maybe farther north, up toward Needles and Parker.

Why can’t I remember where I was or what happened? he wondered. He had always prided himself on being able to hold his liquor. He wasn’t like some of the guys he knew, high-powered wheeler-dealers who would have to call around after a wild night on the town, checking with valets at local watering holes to see where they had left their favorite Porsche or Ferrari. He usually knew exactly where he’d been. He also knew when he’d had enough. But now, his mind was fuzzy. He couldn’t quite pull things together—not just tonight, but what had gone on in the days before that, either.

The vehicle slowed again. He braced himself, expecting another right-hand turn. Instead, the vehicle turned sharply to the left and bounced off the pavement and onto a much rougher surface. Fine dust swirled inside the small space, filling his eyes and nostrils, making his eyes water and his nose run. Definitely the desert somewhere.

There was another hard jolting bump, then the vehicle came to a sudden halt. What must have been the driver’s door opened and shut. And then there was nothing. No sound at all. At first he hoped and dreaded that the trunk lid would click open and his captor would free him, but that didn’t happen. He strained his ears, hoping to establish if the freeway was still near enough that he’d be able to hear semis speeding past, but for the longest time, he heard nothing at all. He felt only the oppressive heat and wondered how long it would be before the oxygen ran out and he suffocated.

He felt it first. The car trembled as if it were alive, as if it were being racked by a bad case of the chills. Then he heard it—a distant rumble growing louder and louder until it turned into an unmistakable roar. The car rocked in concert with the sound until the terrible roar and the shaking were one. It was then the man heard the shrill, earth-shattering screech of a fast-approaching freight train. The whistle sounded once, in a single, long, warning wail. Only then did he realize that whoever had locked him in the trunk had left him on the train tracks—left him there to die.

He struggled desperately against his restraints, but it was no use. He couldn’t free himself. The engine of the speeding eastbound train plowed into the stationary vehicle, peeling it open like an empty tin can and then dragging the wreckage along underneath the engine for the additional mile it took for the shaken engineer to finally bring the fully loaded train to a stop. As the engineer spoke to the 911 operator in Palm Springs, he reported having seen something fly up and out of the shattered vehicle, something that had looked more like a rag doll than it did a human being.

{ CHAPTER 1 }

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

Thursday, September 15, 2005

For all you cutloose fans out there who’ve been following my story from the beginning, tomorrow is the day the D-I-V-O-R-C-E becomes final. For those of you who may be new to the site, the last few months have been a bit of a bumpy ride since both my husband and my former employer simultaneously sent me packing in hopes of landing a younger model.

My soon-to-be-ex, aka Fang, as he’s known in the blogosphere, called me yesterday. It was the first time I’d heard from him directly in several months. What surprised me more than anything was how much I DIDN’T feel when I heard his voice. That, I believe, is a good sign. It turns out Fang was calling, in his own imperious way, to make sure I’d be in court tomorrow so the divorce decree can be finalized. I could have given him grief about it. Could have claimed I was sick or maimed or just too annoyed to bother driving eight hours plus from Sedona over to L.A. And, had I done so, it would have sent him up a wall. You see, Fang needs this divorce right about now a whole lot more than I do. Our court appearance is scheduled Friday. Saturday is Fang’s wedding day.

I’ve heard rumors that he and his blushing bride, aka Twink, are planning a big-deal celebration, a catered affair with all the right people in attendance at what used to be our joint domicile on Robert Lane. In view of the fact that Twink is expecting Fang’s baby within weeks of the scheduled nuptials, you might think a little more discretion was called for, but discretion has never been Fang’s long suit. For that matter, it must not be Twink’s, either, since the baby was conceived some time prior to my abandoning our marriage bed.

For those of you who are concerned about my state of mind as I approach this change in marital status, don’t be. I’m fine. I’m ready to make a clean break of it; glad to have what was clearly my sham of a marriage—as far as Fang was concerned anyway—over and done with. I’m moving on with my new life. When you’re doing that, hanging on to the old one doesn’t help. Neither does bitterness. As my mother is prone to point out, bitterness destroys the container it’s in.

If I do say so myself, this particular container is going to be in pretty fine shape tomorrow when I show up in court. With my son’s help, I’ve been working out. My personal shopper at Nordstrom’s down in Scottsdale has set aside a couple of new outfits for me. I plan on picking up one of them on my way through Phoenix later on this afternoon.

In other words, for today anyway, I’m a rolling stone, and rolling stones gather no moss—and do no blogging.

Posted 7:23 A.M., September 15, 2005 by Babe

As soon as Ali Reynolds hauled her suitcase out of the closet, Samantha, Ali’s now permanent refugee cat, disappeared. Completely. Ali found it hard to believe that a sixteen-pound, one-eared cat could pull off that kind of magicianship, but she could.

Six months earlier, a series of forced moves had left Sam in a new, unfamiliar home with a new owner who wasn’t exactly enamored of cats. Over time, Ali and Sam had developed a grudging respect for each other. With the unwelcome appearance of a suitcase, however, all bets were off. For Sam, the sight of a suitcase and/or the dreaded cat crate brought back all those bad old times and sent the panicky kitty scrambling for someplace to hide.

It took Ali a good two hours—two hours she didn’t have—to find the animal again, scrunched in beside the drainpipe behind the washing machine in the laundry room. And finding Sam was only part of the problem. Extricating the cat from her snug little hidey-hole and into the cat crate for a trip to Ali’s parents’ place was a whole other issue. Had it been any other weekend, Sam could have remained at home and been looked after by Ali’s son, Christopher, but it happened that Chris was due at a two-day seminar in Phoenix starting early Saturday morning.

“Off to Grandma’s with you,” Ali said, retrieving the indignant cat and stuffing her into the waiting crate. “And you’d better behave yourself, too.”

And so, hours later than she had intended, Ali finally finished packing. With Sam yowling in bitter protest, Ali left her hilltop mobile-home digs and drove her lapis blue Porsche Cayenne down to the highway, where she parked under the shady weeping willow tree outside her parents’ family-owned diner, Sedona’s fabled Sugar Loaf Café.

Inside, the lunch hour rush was just beginning. Edie Larson, Ali’s mother, was working the cash register and lunch counter while Ali’s father, Bob, held sway in the kitchen. Edie picked up an empty coffeepot and headed for the back counter to refill it, glancing reflexively at her watch as she did so.

“You call this an early start?” Edie asked.

Since Edie rose every morning at o-dark-thirty to prepare the Sugar Loaf’s daily supply of signature sweet rolls, she considered any departure that happened after 6 A.M. to be tardy. She had thought Ali’s initial estimated departure of nine to be close to slothful. Now it was coming up on noon.

“Unfortunately, Sam had other ideas,” Ali said. “She saw the suitcase and went into hiding. I found her, though, finally.”

“Good,” Edie said reassuringly. “Cats usually don’t like change, but by the time your father gets finished spoiling Sam, that ugly cat of yours won’t even want to go back home. Where is she, by the way?”

“Out in the car in the shade.”

Edie poured Ali a cup of coffee. “I’ll call Kip to come get the crate and take Sam back to the house.”

Kip Hogan was a formerly homeless Vietnam War vet Bob Larson had dragged home about the same time his daughter had adopted Sam. Originally Kip had been hired to help look after Bob in the aftermath of an unfortunate snowboarding accident that had left Ali’s father temporarily wheelchair-bound. Bob had since recovered and was back at work, but Kip continued to hang around, living in an old Lazy Daze motor home parked in the Larsons’ backyard, helping out with odd jobs around both the house and the restaurant, and gradually becoming more and more indispensable.

“Want some lunch before you go?” Edie asked. “Or should I have Dad make up one of the coolers for you to take along with you?”

“What would go in the cooler?” Ali asked.

“Fried chicken,” Bob Larson answered from the kitchen service window. “Biscuits. Some homemade applesauce.”

Having been raised on her father’s crisp fried chicken and her mother’s lighter-than-air biscuits, there was really no contest. “I’ll have coffee now and take the cooler option,” Ali answered.

Edie took a brief jaunt down the counter, delivering coffee as she went, then she returned to Ali. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’m perfectly fine,” Ali said. “It’ll be good to have this whole mess behind me.”

“Yes,” Edie agreed. “I’m sure it will be.”

Ali had retreated to Sedona, her hometown, to find her bearings in the initial aftermath of both losing her job and learning about her husband’s infidelity. She hadn’t expected to like it; hadn’t expected to be comfortable there, but she was. The double-wide mobile home her aunt Evelyn had left her may have seemed like a big comedown from the gated mansion on Robert Lane, but it suited Ali’s needs, everything from the Jacuzzi soaking tub to the basement wine cellar. And having her son, Chris, for a roommate didn’t hurt, either.

Chris had graduated from UCLA and was in his first year of teaching welding and American history at Sedona High School. Ali enjoyed her son’s company. He never left a mess in the kitchen, didn’t stay out all that late, and spent much of his spare time working on his metal sculpting projects down in the basement. From what Ali could tell, she and Chris got along better than did many parents and their newly adult children.

All in all, she felt at ease being back home in Sedona—at ease and at peace.

“I wish Chris were going over with you,” Edie added, seeming to read Ali’s mind. “Driving to L.A. is a long trip to do all by yourself.”

“Chris is busy with a seminar this weekend,” Ali replied. “I don’t mind driving. In fact, I enjoy being on the open road. Besides, I’ve got Aunt Evelyn’s library of musicals along to keep me company.”

“Well, be sure you take plenty of breaks,” Edie cautioned. “They say tired drivers are as bad as drunk drivers.”

Bob rang the bell, letting Edie know that an order was ready. While she went away to deliver it, Kip Hogan turned up at Ali’s elbow. “Keys?” he asked.

When Kip had first appeared, six months earlier, he had come from a snowy, outdoor homeless encampment up on the Mogollan Rim. After years of living rough, he had been gaunt and grubby, with long, filthy hair, dirty clothes, missing teeth, and a much-broken nose. Kip’s missing teeth and crooked nose were still at issue, but months of eating decent food had allowed him to fill out some. And dressed in respectable if secondhand clothing and with ready access to running water, the man looked far less scary than he had initially.

Without a word, Ali handed over her car keys.

“Leave the cat in her crate in the living room,” Edie told Kip as he started for the door. “That way she’ll have a chance to get used to her new digs before we let her out to explore.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kip replied. “Will do.”

“When will you be back?” Edie asked her daughter.

“Tuesday or Wednesday,” Ali replied. “The divorce hearing is tomorrow. Then on Monday or Tuesday there’s supposed to be a deposition in the wrongful dismissal suit. It didn’t make sense to do two trips when one would work. So I’ll stay over however long it takes to give the deposition.”

“Good,” Edie agreed. “It’s always better to kill two birds with one stone. More coffee?”

Ali let her mother refill her cup. Initially she had blamed her tardy departure on Sam. Now Ali realized that she was stalling even more all on her own—and she knew why. Months after the fact, there was part of her that dreaded getting on I-17 and heading down to Phoenix. Ali Reynolds had almost died on one particularly dangerous stretch of that freeway when someone had tried to push her off the highway and over the edge of a sheer cliff. Being the target of an attempted murder is something that lingers, and even though Ali had driven that same route several times between then and now, she was still skittish. Just thinking about driving past the Sunset Point rest area and heading down the steep grade into the valley was enough to make Ali’s hands go clammy.

Her face must have betrayed some of the concern she was feeling.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some company?” Edie Larson asked solicitously. “And some moral support once you get there and have to go to court? I’m sure your father could manage without me for a day or two. He wouldn’t like it, but having to get up early enough to make the rolls wouldn’t kill him.”

Touched by the offer, Ali smiled. “Thanks, Mom,” she said. “I’ll be fine. Really.”

“And you’ll call and let us know how it’s going?”

“I promise.”

Kip returned with her car keys, and Ali took her leave. She stopped by the bank and picked up some cash. She had a particular pet charity that she wanted to help along while she was in L.A., and she knew a cash gift would be most welcome.

A little less than an hour after leaving the bank, Ali was past the most worrisome stretch of the Black Canyon Freeway and headed into Scottsdale. At the time she had left her evening news gig in L.A., she had ditched her old newscasting wardrobe and her California persona like a snake shedding a cast-off skin. For as long as she’d been in Sedona, she’d worn her hair in a less than stylish ponytail and limited her wardrobe to what was comfortable—mostly sweatshirts and worn jeans. Now, though, facing courtroom appointments and the prospect of more than a little public notoriety, Ali understood that she needed to dress and look the part. Not only did she pick up several outfits, she stopped into one of Scottsdale’s upscale salons for some much needed pampering, including a haircut along with a spa-style mani/pedi.

Properly attired, coiffed, and accessorized, Ali felt ready to face what she had come to think of as her California ordeal. She headed west in late-afternoon, rush-hour traffic and soon found herself stuck in a jam of speeding eighteen-wheelers, all of them driving blindly but hell-bent-for-election into the setting sun. Tired of trying to stay out of their way, Ali pulled off at the first rest area she saw. There, sitting at a shaded picnic table, she opened her cooler. Not only was her father’s carefully prepared food there, so was a collection of plastic utensils. With noisy traffic rushing by in the background, Ali savored her combination lunch/dinner of fried chicken and honey-slathered biscuits. Then, feeling fatigued and still not wanting to face into the blazing sunset, she returned to the Cayenne, locked the doors, lowered her seat back, and allowed herself the luxury of a nap.

She slept far longer than she expected. It was dark when she woke up, but she felt refreshed. Once back on the road, Ali was relieved to realize that traffic was noticeably lighter, and she was grateful she’d had the good sense to wait out the setting sun rather than driving into it.

Ali realized that that was one of the wonderful things about traveling on her own. She could eat when she was hungry, sleep when she was tired. It wasn’t necessary to take anyone else’s needs, wants, or opinions into consideration. Yes, being back on her own was definitely growing on Ali Reynolds.

She took her mother’s advice to heart. When she stopped for gas in Blythe, she stopped at a roadside restaurant for coffee as well. She was halfway through the second cup when her phone rang.

“Well,” Helga Myerhoff said in her distinctly gruff and smoky voice. “Have we girded our loins?”

Helga, sometimes called Rottweiler Myerhoff, had a not-undeserved reputation for being one of the Hollywood elite’s premier divorce attorneys. With Helga’s help and with the added impetus of Paul wanting a fast divorce as opposed to a cheap one, Ali had a generous divorce settlement coming to her, one that gave her pretty much everything she wanted. Between them Helga and Ali had, in fact, taken Fang to the cleaners.

Ali laughed. “They’re girded, all right. New duds, new haircut, killer nails. Believe me, I’m ready.”

“Good,” Helga said. “And you’re staying at the Westwood on Wilshire?”

“That’s right,” Ali answered. “I’m booked there through Tuesday. Marcella has a wrongful dismissal deposition coming up on either Monday or Tuesday. I’m staying over for that as well.”

Marcella Johnson and Helga both worked for the same high-end legal firm, Weldon, Davis, and Reed, but the two women had wildly divergent styles and areas of expertise. Helga specialized in divorce cases. Marcella focused on employment issues. Ali counted herself fortunate to have not one but two dynamic attorneys on her team.

“Don’t worry about tomorrow,” Helga said. “We’re in good shape on this and I’m pretty sure it’ll go through without a hitch. Still, though, until everything’s signed, sealed, and delivered, our agreement in principle could conceivably go south.”

“Paul won’t let that happen,” Ali said with a laugh. “Not with his shotgun wedding set for Saturday. If something goes wrong with his walking April Gaddis down the aisle, there’ll be hell to pay.”

“You’re all right then?” Helga asked.

Everyone seemed to be concerned about how Ali was holding up through all this. Why didn’t anyone believe her when she said she was fine? She said it again, one more time and for the record.

“I’m fine, Helga. I wish people would stop worrying about me.”

“Getting a divorce is stressful,” Helga said.

“No,” Ali corrected. “Compared to being married to a jerk, getting a divorce is easy.”

“All right,” Helga said. “See you in court, ten A.M. sharp. Judge Alice Tennant is very old-fashioned. She doesn’t brook tardiness from anybody—attorneys or plaintiffs.”

“Ten sharp,” Ali repeated. “I’ll be there.”

Leaving Blythe, Ali turned up the volume on her MP3 player and sang along with the tunes from one musical comedy after another, from A Connecticut Yankee to A Chorus Line. As she drove, only a bare sliver of rising moon was visible in the rearview mirror behind her, but the nighttime sky was clear enough that even by starlight she could see the hulking forms of distant mountain ranges jutting up out of the silvery desert floor.

Crossing into California, Ali felt a strange disconnect. She had gone there years earlier with a new husband and a new job, following what had seemed then to be an American dream. Now, coming back to L.A. for the first time since that dream had exploded in her face, she realized that she was, literally, yesterday’s news. Her job and her connection to her prominent network-exec husband had made her part of the L.A. in crowd. This trip was the exact opposite. As an antidote, she turned up the music even louder.

Sometime around midnight, shortly after passing the exit to Twentynine Palms, Ali saw a whole phalanx of emergency vehicles surging eastbound and toward her on the freeway. Worried that debris from some unseen accident might litter the road ahead, Ali slowed, but then, one by one, the approaching vehicles veered off on what she knew to be the Highway 111 exit angling toward Palm Springs.

The emergency response was so massive that Ali found it worrisome. Wondering if maybe a plane had gone down, Ali turned off her original cast recording of Camelot and scanned through the radio dial until she found one of L.A.’s twenty-four-hour all-news channels. It was another ten minutes, after bits about Iraq and the latest riots in France, before the announcer cut in with a local news flash.

“The Riverside Sheriff’s Department is investigating a possible train/vehicle collision on the eastbound tracks approaching Palm Springs. Emergency vehicles have been dispatched to the area and a CALTrans spokesman is suggesting that the area be avoided until further notice.”

Relieved to hear that whatever was wrong didn’t involve a problem on the freeway, Ali punched the “resume” button on her cruise control and took the Cayenne back up to speed. Then she switched off the news and went back to listening to King Arthur’s bored and disaffected knights singing their rousing rendition of “Fie on Goodness.”

As she drove past the Highway 111 interchange, the emergency vehicles had mostly stopped, forming a long, unbroken string of flashing red and yellow lights that erased the starlight and cast an eerie pulsing glow on the surrounding desert.

Ali drove on, thinking about trains and cars and what happens when one crashes into the other. In her days as a newbie television reporter, Ali had seen plenty of incidents like that, ones where people seemingly determined to opt out of the gene pool had decided, for one incredibly stupid reason or another, to try to outrun a speeding train, leaving behind a trail of bloody carnage and shattered metal. Sometimes the incidents included groups of teenagers playing a deadly game of chicken. Others drove onto the tracks deliberately and with the full intention of ending it all. Regardless of their motivation, the people in the vehicles usually didn’t survive. Sometimes the engineers on the trains didn’t make it out alive, either. The ones who did often lived out their days with a lifelong burden of guilt.

“At least this time it’s got nothing to do with me,” she breathed aloud as she headed west toward Banning and Beaumont and the sprawling city of Los Angeles glowing far in the distance. “And thank God I don’t have to report on it, either.”

{ CHAPTER 2 }

Helga called the next morning at eight. “So you know where you’re going?” she asked.

Ali had lived in California for years. She knew her way around Beverly Hills. “The West District Courthouse, right?”

“Close, but no cigar,” Helga said. “Your husband wanted this divorce in a hell of a hurry. In California, if you don’t want to wait in line for court time, you can hire a private judge. I told him fine, as long as I got to choose the judge, which I did. Judge Alice Tennant’s court is a few blocks away from there in what used to be a private residence.”

“I didn’t know there was any such thing as a private judge,” Ali muttered.

“You do now,” Helga returned.

Helga had referred to Alice Tennant’s courtroom as a private residence, but the term hadn’t done the place justice. Mansion’s more like it, Ali thought an hour and a half later when she pulled up in front of the two-story porticoed edifice with lions guarding either side of a gated entrance complete with a circular drive. Helga was waiting on the front porch, pacing back and forth in front of a pair of Art Deco doors radiant with what looked like genuine Tiffany stained glass. Beyond the glass doors was a marbled foyer, its old-fashioned elegant ambience marred by the mundane and thoroughly modern presence of a wand-holding uniformed security guard and a metal detector.

They were directed into an ornate room that had probably once served as a formal dining room. A magnificent, hand-carved sideboard at the far end was covered with a silver coffee service, plates, cups, saucers, and silverware, and a collection of breakfast pastries that would have put most self-respecting hotel buffets to shame. The display came complete with a uniformed butler who handled the pouring.

Ali was sipping freshly squeezed orange juice and nibbling on a deliciously flaky croissant when Paul’s attorney, Ted Grantham, came rushing into the room.

“Paul’s still not here?” Grantham demanded of Helga.

“Not so far,” Helga returned with a tight smile.

Ted Grantham was someone Ali knew slightly. He had been a guest at their Robert Lane home on several occasions, and he was a regular attendee at Paul’s daylong Super Bowl extravaganzas. Now, though, Ted barely acknowledged her. Refusing offers of coffee, he paced back and forth in the entryway, making one brief cell phone call after another. By five to ten, when Paul had yet to arrive, Ted was downright frantic.

“So where’s his bad boy?” Helga muttered under her breath. “Hope he’s not planning on keeping the judge waiting.”

But it turned out that was exactly what Paul seemed to have in mind. At three minutes after ten, a bailiff summoned all three of them into the judge’s chambers.

Judge Alice Tennant was seated behind an immense partner desk that reminded Ali of one she’d seen in an antiques shop in the idyllic Cotswold town of Stow-on-the-Wold. Dwarfed by the desk, Judge Tennant was a sixty-something with flaming red hair and a temper to match.

“My time’s very valuable, and you know I don’t like being kept waiting, Mr. Grantham,” she snapped as they filed into the room. “So where exactly is your client? Was he aware that he was expected here at ten this morning?”

“Yes, of course he knew,” Grantham said hurriedly. “I’ve been trying to reach him all morning. He isn’t answering any of his phones. The calls keep going straight to voice mail, and he hasn’t called me back, either.”

“I was given to understand there was some urgency about our doing this today,” Judge Tennant observed. “About Mr. Grayson wanting to have his divorce finalized in a timely fashion.”

Grantham looked uncomfortable. “Yes,” he said. “There is something of a deadline.”

“Because?”

Grantham glanced briefly in Ali’s direction before he answered. “Well,” he said reluctantly. “Actually, Mr. Grayson is due to be married tomorrow.”

“I presume that would be to someone other than the wife who happens to be here right at the moment?” Judge Tennant asked. Her sharp blue eyes focused fully on the squirming attorney, whose forehead, by then, had popped out in a very unlawyerly sweat.

“Yes,” Grantham muttered. “That would be correct. To someone else. I’m sure I’ll be able to locate my client in the next little while. If you could find a spot for us in this afternoon’s calendar—”

Alice Tennant’s reply was brisk. “There is no afternoon calendar. As it happens, I’m leaving town right after lunch,” she said with a cold smile. “You’ll have to check with my clerk to see if it’s possible to reschedule for sometime next week—if that’s all right with you, Ms. Reynolds. I understand you’ve driven all the way over from Arizona.”

“Of course,” Ali said quickly. “Next week will be fine. I want to stay on until this is sorted out.”

“Excellent,” Judge Tennant said.

“Perhaps you could see your way clear to hand this off to another judge—” Grantham began.

Helga started to object, but Judge Tennant silenced both attorneys with a single wave of her hand. “I was contracted to deal with this case,” she said severely. “I have no intention of handing it off to anyone. Once the next court date is set, I trust you’ll notify your client that he will be present on the appointed day and at the appointed hour. Please remind him that I may be a private judge, but I can nonetheless cite him for contempt of court. Is that clear, Mr. Grantham?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Grantham replied contritely. “Quite clear.”

“Just for the record,” she added. “If I hear that any kind of marriage ceremony is performed tomorrow without your client being properly divorced from Ms. Reynolds beforehand, I’ll see to it that he’s charged with bigamy, which happens to be a criminal offense. Is that also clear?”

“Yes,” Grantham said. “Very.”

“All right then. See my clerk.”

Ali couldn’t help feeling a bit giddy at the idea that Paul’s absence at the hearing had left Twink’s lavish plans for her wedding day in utter shambles. Hurrying out into the corridor to wait while Helga Myerhoff and Ted Grantham dealt with the court clerk, she almost collided with a man rushing toward her from the security checkpoint.

“Ali!” he exclaimed. “Don’t tell me the hearing’s finished already.”

Ali recognized the new arrival as Jake Maxwell, one of Paul’s fellow network execs. She was surprised to see him there; surprised to think he’d squander some of his precious time on Paul’s legal issues. Jake and his ditzy wife, Roseanne, weren’t high on Ali’s list of social acquaintances any more than Ted Grantham was.

“Hi, Jake,” she said. “We’re done for today. What brings you here?”

At least he had the good grace to look sheepish. “You know, moral support and all that.”

“Well, you missed on that one,” Ali said. “Paul didn’t show.”

Helga emerged from the courtroom wearing a grim smile. “Thursday morning. Ten A.M. again.” Then, looking at Jake, she added derisively, “Oh, Mr. Maxwell, you must be Mr. Grayson’s cheering section. I’m afraid the match has been rescheduled for next week—same time, same station. See you then.” Dismissing Jake, Helga turned back to Ali. “Is that all right with you?”

“Thursday is fine,” Ali said. “I can stay that long if I have to.”

Ted Grantham entered the hallway. Jake quickly gravitated in his direction.

“Why isn’t Paul here?” he asked.

“Beats the hell out of me,” Grantham replied heatedly. “He blew off our court appearance, and now the judge is pissed at me.”

“Did you check with April?”

“Of course I checked with April. She has no idea where Paul is. He never came home last night.”

The glass doors closed behind the two men, taking the rest of the conversation outside with them.

“So he didn’t come home last night,” Helga observed. “Not good. Not good.”

“It sounds amazingly familiar to me,” Ali said.

“Well,” Helga said, “if Paul Grayson knows what’s good for him, he’ll cancel his wedding and make the cancellation a media event all its own.”

“Why? The bigamy thing? Would Judge Tennant really put him in jail for going through with the wedding?”

“Absolutely,” Helga replied. “Alice Tennant takes a dim view of those kinds of marital shenanigans. Her ex, Jack, did the same thing, you see. Got married while the divorce decree was still warm to the touch—the same day, in fact. It’s lucky for Paul—and for Ted Grantham, too—that we’ve already hammered out a property settlement.”

Ali was astounded. “Why on earth did Paul agree to use her as a judge?”

“Because he was in a hurry,” Helga answered. “Like I told you, I got to choose.”

Just then, the glass entry doors swung open and a very tall black woman, clad in sweats and tennis shoes, entered the building. She paused briefly while going through the security checkpoint then came trotting down the hall toward Ali and Helga.

“Am I too late?” the newcomer asked breathlessly, smothering Ali in a bone-crushing hug. “Sorry. I went to the courthouse and looked everywhere for the right courtroom before someone finally pointed me in this direction. Is it over already?”

“Not over over,” Ali replied. “But it’s over for today.”

“Who’s this?” Helga wanted to know.

“My cheering section,” Ali replied with a smile. “My friend Sister Anne. And Sister Anne, this is my attorney, Helga Myerhoff.”

At six foot seven, Sister Anne towered over both Ali and the diminutive Helga. She was dressed in blue-and-white UCLA insignia sweats and high-end Nikes and looked far more like the NCAA championship basketball player she had once been than the Sister of Charity she was now. Jamalla Kareem Williams had left college with a degree in business administration, plenty of basketball trophies, and a permanently damaged knee. Rather than going into business, she had become a nun. For years now, she had managed My Sister’s Closet, a Pasadena-based clothing recycling program that helped provide appropriate, low-cost attire for impoverished women hoping to get into the job market. That was where Ali had dropped off her newscaster duds when she had left town months earlier.

Sister Anne held out her hand in Helga’s direction. “Glad to meet you,” she said with a gap-toothed smile while her beaded cornrows clicked and clattered around her head.

“Sister Anne and I met years ago at a charity fund-raiser and just hit it off,” Ali explained. “In fact, if it weren’t for her, I probably wouldn’t know about you. Marcella Johnson was one of Sister Anne’s basketball teammates at UCLA. When I was looking at filing a wrongful dismissal suit against the station, Sister Anne pointed me at Marcella, and when I needed a divorce attorney, Marcella sent me to you.”

Sister Anne turned back to Ali. “What do you mean it’s not over over?”

“My not-quite-ex didn’t bother showing up for the hearing,” Ali told her. “The new court date is set for Thursday of next week.”

“Well, then,” Sister Anne said briskly. “Let’s go have some lunch.”

Helga begged off, so Ali and Sister Anne drove to Beverly Center and had lunch in a Mexican restaurant where one of Sister Anne’s recent clients from My Sister’s Closet had hired on as the hostess. Over a shared plate of fajitas, Ali reached into her purse and pulled out an envelope, which she handed to Sister Anne.

“What’s this?”

“Money,” Ali said. “It’s one thing to donate clothing, but this time I decided to give you something that would help pay the rent and keep the lights on.”

Sister Anne counted through the bills then looked up. “You can afford this?”

“Helga’s a very good attorney. I’m going to be fine.”

Smiling, Sister Anne slipped the envelope into a zippered pocket on her pants. “This couldn’t come at a better time,” she said. “We’ve been right on the edge of having to close the place down. You have no idea how much we needed this.”

The hostess, a young Hispanic woman dressed in a stylish black dress and sling-back high heels—clothing that had been someone else’s castoffs—smiled shyly at Sister Anne and Ali as she led a group of diners to a table.

“Glad I could help,” Ali said. And she was.

After lunch, feeling a strange sense of letdown, Ali returned to her hotel. First she called her mother, who was still at the Sugar Loaf.

“Well?” Edie Larson said. “Are you free as a bird now?”

“Not exactly,” Ali said, and then went on to explain the situation.

“My word,” Edie said. “If that doesn’t take the cake! After you had to drive all that way! It’s inexcusable for him to not show up like that. Did you try calling him?”

“No,” Ali admitted. “Under the circumstances, that didn’t seem like a good idea. His attorney called, though. From what he was saying, it sounded like Paul stayed out all night.”

“And he hasn’t even married the poor girl yet?” Edie demanded. “Seems like it’s a little early for him to be up to his old tricks.”

Ali didn’t exactly agree with the “poor girl” part. But the “old tricks” reference worked. “Yes,” Ali said. “It does seem early.”

“You stay there as long as necessary in order to get this all straightened out,” Edie said. “Everything here is under control. Chris stopped by last night before he headed for his seminar in Phoenix tomorrow. We invited him to come to dinner Sunday night when he gets home, so he won’t starve to death. As for Sam? She’s fine. She took to your father the way most strays do. In other words—love at first sight. What are you going to do with this extra time, hook up with some old friends?”

What old friends? Ali wondered. Other than Sister Anne, she didn’t seem to have any real friends waiting for her. The ones she did have were people who were primarily friends of Paul’s. In the aftermath of her blowup with Paul and the abrupt ending to her television career, Ali had been surprised and hurt by the number of people who had simply vanished from her life the moment her face had disappeared from the evening news. It had been hard to accept that people she had considered close friends had been drawn by her celebrity rather than anything else. Coming to terms with the reality of those lost relationships still hurt, but Edie Larson didn’t need to know that.

“Already handled, Mom,” Ali said as airily as she could manage. “Not to worry.”

But it wasn’t. When Ali got off the phone with her mother, she slipped out of her new Nordy’s “court dress” and changed into a T-shirt and jeans. There were, of course, people she could have called, some of whom were bound to be in town. But she didn’t call any of them. There was something so trite and Holly-woody—so whiny and pathetic—about gathering a group of pals around to hold your hand during stalled divorce proceedings that she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead, Ali pulled out her computer and turned to Babe of Yavapai’s new friends—the ones who were only a mouse click away.

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

Friday, September 16, 2005

Surprisingly enough it’s more difficult to be cut loose legally than one would think. The divorce that was supposed to be finalized today isn’t because my soon-to-be-former husband was a no-show in court, and our rent-a-judge refused to issue a decree without his being present and accounted for. So here I am stuck in limbo for a little longer. This should all be brought to a conclusion next week, but for now I’m here with time on my hands and not much to do.

In the past I’ve always had work to fall back on. And family responsibilities. But my son is raised now. I no longer have to look after him, and although I’m not entirely finished with him yet, I no longer have a husband to look after, either.

So I’ve decided to treat this like an extended vacation—a vacation in a place where I used to live, but where I was always too busy working to do the things tourists from around the world come here to do. Starting with the Getty. And the La Brea Tar Pits. Who knows? I may even throw over the traces completely and go for a walk on the beach or spend a day at Disneyland.

In other words, blogging will be light for a while for the very good reason that I’m out having fun.

Posted 2:16 P.M., September 16, 2005 by Babe

After that, Ali read through and posted some of the comments that had come in from her readers while she’d been otherwise engaged.

Dear Babe,

I know you’re lawyer said your divorce would be final, but don’t you believe him. Divorces ain’t never final. They can give you a hundred pieces of paper that say your single, but being married don’t just go away because of a piece of paper, especially if you have kids. And I should know. My husband can still drive me crazy even though we’ve been divorced for fifteen years and hes been dead for ten. If I end up still being married to him when I get to heaven, I may just turn around and walk right back out.

LILY

The next comment came from one of Ali’s regulars, a widowed longtime fan from California, who wrote cheery little notes every other day or so. Over the months, Ali had come to think of the woman as a friend, despite the fact that they had never met in person.

Dear Babe,

I know this is a tough time for you. I just wanted you to know my thoughts and prayers are with you.

VELMA T IN LAGUNA

Then there was Fred.

What happened to “Whosoever God has joined together let no man put asunder”? No wonder the world is going to hell in a handbasket. First women wanted the Equal Rights Amendment and now they don’t even want to bother with having husbands. And did you ever give any thought as to how you treated your husband and what might have driven him into the arms of another woman? I’m glad I only have sons and no daughters.

FRED

So am I, Ali thought. She decided not to post Fred’s comment. Then she changed her mind. She suspected there were a lot of people in the world who shared his opinion and regarded independent women as a direct threat to their manhood and to their very existence. Maybe that was something cutlooseblog needed to bring up as a topic of discussion.

Dear Babe,

My husband did the same thing, married his little cutie two days after our divorce. It didn’t last. Two months later he was back, knocking on my door because she’d thrown him out and begging me to take him back, which I did. He stayed for three more years after that then he left again and now I don’t know where he is. But I know you’re smarter than I am, so if your cheating husband asks you to take him back, whatever you do, don’t.

WISER NOW

Ali’s phone rang. She recognized the number—the Flagstaff branch of the YWCA. “Hi, Andrea,” Ali said.

Andrea was Andrea Rogers. A year ago, Andrea had been second in command in what was essentially a two-woman nonprofit spearheaded by Ali’s girlhood best friend, Reenie Bernard. Reenie had been the outgoing, fund-raising brains of the outfit, while Andrea had functioned as office manager, keeping the place running smoothly in Reenie’s absence. After Reenie’s tragic murder, it had been Andrea who had tracked down Reenie’s personal effects and, for the benefit of Reenie’s orphaned children, rescued them from the thrift shop where they’d been shipped by Reenie’s less-than-grief-stricken husband.

For Andrea, that one act of kindness on behalf of Reenie’s kids had been the beginning of a new sense of self-confidence and independence. The Flagstaff YWCA had been so much Reenie Bernard’s baby that, in the initial aftermath of her murder, there had been serious talk of shutting the place down, but Andrea in particular had been determined that Reenie’s dream wouldn’t perish with her. Over a period of several months, Andrea had managed to keep the doors open while Ali worked to convince the board of directors that, with a little assistance and encouragement from them, Andrea could be groomed to take over the executive director’s position.

Her official promotion had happened three months ago. The board had hired a new assistant for Andrea, but Andrea had yet to catch on to the fact that she no longer needed to answer the phone herself—which she did most of the time.

Andrea was a plugger. She was dependable. She didn’t have the finesse or the vision of a Reenie Bernard. What she had instead was an absolute devotion to her murdered boss and unbridled enthusiasm about carrying Reenie’s life’s work forward. One way or another, Andrea managed to get things done.

“Is it over then?” Andrea asked.

“‘It’ being the divorce?” Ali asked.

“Of course, the divorce,” Andrea returned. “What else would I be asking about?”

“I’m beginning to wonder if my divorce will ever be over,” Ali replied and went on to repeat the gory details one more time.

“But what if you’re not home in time for the board meeting next Friday?” Andrea asked, as a hint of her old reticence crept into her voice. “I’ve never handled one of those by myself. I’ve always had you there to backstop me.”

“I’ll do what I can to be home by then,” Ali said. “But if I’m not, you’ll be fine. You know more about what’s going on at the YWCA than anyone. You’ll be able to handle it.”

“I hope so,” Andrea said, but she didn’t sound convinced.

Ali was talking on her cell phone. It surprised her when the room phone began to ring. “Sorry, Andrea,” Ali said. “I need to take that.”

“Ms. Reynolds?” a woman’s voice asked.

“Yes.”

“My name is Detective Carolyn Little,” she said. “I’m with the LAPD’s Missing Persons Unit. Mr. Ted Grantham said you were staying at the Westwood, and I took the liberty of calling.”

“About?” Ali asked.

“About your husband.”

“My soon-to-be-former husband,” Ali corrected.

“Are you aware he’s missing?”

“I know he failed to show up in court this morning for our divorce hearing,” Ali answered. “That’s all I know.”

“He’s been reported missing by one April Gaddis.”

“His fiancée,” Ali supplied.

“Yes,” Detective Little answered. “She did mention that she and Mr. Grayson are engaged. It seems he went to a bachelor party last evening and never came home.”

Ali felt like mentioning that for Paul to declare himself a bachelor prior to his divorce being finalized was a bit like putting the cart before the horse, but Detective Little didn’t sound like she had much of a sense of humor.

“When was the last time you saw your husband?” Detective Little asked.

“That would be Friday, March eleventh of this year,” Ali answered at once.

There was a slight pause. “March eleventh? That’s a long time ago—six months, but you still remember the exact date?”

“And the exact time,” Ali responded. “I had just lost my job. I came home, expecting some sympathy from my husband, but in our house, you find sympathy in the dictionary between ‘shit’ and ‘syphilis.’ He took off with his girlfriend bright and early the next morning before I even woke up.”

The “‘shit’ and ‘syphilis’” reference was one of her father’s more colorful expressions, one that was guaranteed to send Bob Larson’s wife into a spasm. Even Carolyn Little chuckled a little at that, so the woman wasn’t entirely devoid of humor.

“This same girlfriend?” the detective added. “The fiancée?”

“Yes,” Ali agreed. “That would be the one—the same one who’s expecting his baby.”

“And you came to town when?”

“Last night,” Ali said. “I drove over from Sedona yesterday afternoon. I got a late start. It was almost two in the morning before I finished checking in.”

“And you’re here until?”

“Paul and I have another court date scheduled for next week.”

“On Thursday,” Little said. Obviously she had already acquired the information from Ted Grantham. “And you’ll be staying at the Westwood? And is there another number in case I need to reach you again?”

It had been six months since Ali had seen Paul Grayson, and she didn’t see why the Missing Persons Unit would need to speak to her again, but she gave the detective her cell phone number all the same.

As Ali ended the call with Detective Little, she was already groping for the television remote. Within minutes of turning on the set she located a news tease from Annette Carrera, Ali Reynolds’s blond, blue-eyed, surgically enhanced news anchor successor. The promo was already in progress when Ali tuned in: “…network executive who disappeared from his bachelor party last night. We’ll have the story for you live on the evening news.”

Carrera! Ali had to give credit to whoever had dreamed up that name. It was calculated to be high-toned enough to appeal to L.A.’s Porsche-craving yuppies, but it also sounded vaguely Hispanic—if you didn’t look too closely at the blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin. In Ali’s not-unbiased opinion, Annette was far too young and far too perky. Her hair looked as if she had stuck her finger in an electrical outlet and then moussed the resulting hairdo into a froth of permanent peaks—like whipped cream beaten to a turn.

Disgusted at the idea of having to wait another two hours to glean any additional details, Ali reached for her computer, intent on surfing the Net to track down a breaking-news Web site. As she touched the keyboard, though, she heard a new-mail alert. She paused long enough to read the new message.

Dear Babe,

I just saw a news blurb on your old channel. I’ve gone back to watching them even though I hate that new Annette person. Anyway, it said a man named Paul Grayson, some network bigwig, is missing. I seem to remember that was your husband’s name. So is this your Paul Grayson or is it just someone with the same name?

VELMA T IN LAGUNA

No matter who he is, he isn’t my Paul Grayson, Ali thought, but she sent Velma an immediate response.

Dear Velma,

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. The missing man most likely is “my” Paul Grayson. Once I have more details on the situation, I’ll try to let you know.

BABE

{ CHAPTER 3 }

For the next while, Ali surfed the Net. Her years in L.A. had taught her that Southern California news outlets had an insatiable appetite for anything involving the entertainment industry—movies or television. Paul Grayson was high enough up the network food chain that it wasn’t long before Ali found what she was looking for, even though it offered little more information than she had gleaned from the earlier news promo.

NBC EXEC MISSING

Paul Grayson, long considered NBC’s West Coast go-to guy, has gone missing after an early and abrupt departure from his own bachelor party at the stylish Pink Swan on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. His red Porsche Carrera was found stripped and abandoned in an apartment parking lot in Banning early this afternoon.

There it was again. Everybody seemed free to refer to Paul as a bachelor, despite the inconvenient fact that he was still legally married—to Ali. And what exactly was this “stylish” Pink Swan? Probably some cheesy strip joint or pole-dancing outfit. Whatever it was, the name sounded suitably sleazy. The next paragraph, however, shook her.

A spokesman for LAPD’s Missing Persons Unit said they have reason to believe that Mr. Grayson has been the victim of foul play.

“Foul play.” Ali repeated the words aloud. The very possibility that Paul had been victimized made Ali’s earlier conversation with Detective Little seem much more ominous.

Jake Maxwell, who co-hosted the bachelor party, said the guest of honor departed early on in the proceedings. “Somewhere around ten or so, Paul went outside to take a phone call and didn’t come back. Everyone was having a good time. It was a while before anyone noticed that he hadn’t returned.”

Because everyone was too blasted to notice, Ali thought. The news item ended. For several long minutes afterward, Ali wondered what, if anything, she should do. Finally, however, it seemed reasonable to let her divorce attorney know that Paul had now been declared a missing person. Ali picked up her cell phone and dialed Helga Myerhoff’s number.

“What’s up?” Helga asked.

“I thought you should know Paul didn’t just miss his court appearance this morning,” Ali told her attorney. “He disappeared from what they’re calling his ‘bachelor party’ last night. There’s some suspicion that foul play may be involved. His Carrera was found abandoned in an apartment house parking lot in Banning this afternoon.”

Helga was all business. “How did you find this out?”

“Part of it I learned just now from reading a breaking-news Web site. The rest of it, though, came from a phone call from Detective Carolyn Little of the LAPD Missing Persons Unit.”

“Why did she call you?” Helga asked. “And, beyond that, how did she even know to call you?”

“Since I hadn’t seen Paul in more than six months, I thought it was odd that she’d be asking me for information, but Ted Grantham evidently told the detective I was in town and where I was staying.”

Ali heard a slight rustling on the phone and could picture Helga standing behind her desk and squaring her shoulders, bristling to her diminutive but tough-as-nails five foot two. “What exactly did this detective say? And what’s her name again?”

“Detective Carolyn Little, LAPD Missing Persons. She asked when I had arrived, why I was here, where I was staying, when did I last see Paul. All the usual stuff, I guess.”

“Did she mention the possibility that you might be under any kind of suspicion?”

The severity of Helga’s tone put Ali on edge and made her wonder if perhaps Detective Little’s questions weren’t quite so “usual” after all.

“Me?” Ali demanded, dumbfounded. “Why on earth would I be a suspect?”

“Has Paul changed his will?” Helga asked.

“I have no idea about that,” Ali said. “We’re getting a divorce, remember? I’ve rewritten my will so Chris is my primary beneficiary in case anything happens to me. I would assume Paul has done the same thing in favor of April and her baby.”

“Not necessarily,” Helga mused. “In my experience, men often put off handling those pesky little details.”

“What are you saying?” Ali asked.

“Let’s assume the worst,” Helga said. “Let’s say Paul Grayson turns up dead, a victim of some kind of foul play. If you and he aren’t divorced—and you’re not—and if, by some chance, his will hasn’t been rewritten, it’s likely you’ll make out far better as a widow than you would have as a divorcée. From an investigative point of view and considering the dollar amounts involved, that might well put you at the top of the suspect list in a murder-for-profit scheme.”

“Me?” Ali asked. “How is that possible? I had nothing to do with any of this—nothing at all. Besides, at the time Paul disappeared from his so-called bachelor party, I was out in the middle of the desert, somewhere this side of Blythe.”

“Let’s don’t push panic buttons then,” Helga reassured her. “We’ll just sit back and see what happens. But, in the meantime, don’t talk to any more detectives without having your attorney present.”

“My attorney,” Ali repeated. “You mean you?”

“No. Not me. I do divorces. I don’t do criminal law,” Helga continued. “That’s a whole other can of worms. Not to worry, though. Weldon, Davis, and Reed has several top-drawer criminal attorneys on staff. I’ll get a recommendation and have one of them be in touch with you.”

Great, Ali thought. Just what I need. Another frigging attorney!

Once she was off the phone, Ali paced for a while. Finally, she lay down on the floor and forced herself to do some relaxation exercises. After settling some of her agitation, she climbed up on the bed. She never expected to fall asleep, but she did, waking just in time to switch on the local news. Out of force of habit, she turned once again to her old station.

Of course, the amazingly perky and spike-haired Annette Carrera was front and center, but so was the rest of the old news gang. The foppish Randall James, still wearing his appallingly awful wig, continued on as co-anchor. There, too, was Axel Rod-bury, who, false teeth and all, had to be older than God. If Ali was considered over the hill, why wasn’t he? And there was Bill Nickels, too, the leering and always overly enthusiastic sportscaster. Ali had wanted to smack the smug grin off his face for years, especially after hearing rumors that, when it came to student interns, Mr. Sports Guy had a tendency to try for a home run.

Ali had steeled herself for the ordeal, expecting that seeing her old colleagues gathered in the familiar confines of the newsroom set would hit her with some sense of loss. But as the quartet yucked it up in the required and supposedly unscripted pre-newscast lead-in, Ali wasn’t at all surprised to see that Bill Nickels and Annette seemed to have an especially chummy relationship.

Don’t you have brains enough to aim a little higher than that? Ali thought. Not that aiming higher did me any good.

Beyond that, though, she felt nothing at all. Nothing. Her leaving may not have been of Ali Reynolds’s own volition, but as it turned out, she really had moved on. Whatever had happened, she was over it—except for her wrongful dismissal lawsuit. She wasn’t over that—not by a long shot.

The lead story, introduced by Annette herself, had to do with Paul Grayson’s disappearance. This was, after all, the NBC affiliate, and Grayson was a high-profile NBC bigwig. A young female reporter—one Ali had never seen before—delivered a brief story filmed in front of the gated entrance to the house on Robert Lane. That, Ali knew, would send Paul utterly ballistic once he got wind of it. Having your front gate identified on television news for all the world to see was not good from a security standpoint.

The second, related segment, done by a roving reporter, was filmed in the paved parking lot of a less than desirable apartment complex somewhere in Banning. Of course, by the time the filming occurred, Paul’s Arena Red 911 had already been towed away. Yellow crime scene tape was still visible but the vehicle wasn’t, as the reporter earnestly let viewers know that this was where Paul Grayson’s abandoned Porsche had been found early in the afternoon.

By the time the two segments were over almost three minutes of news time had elapsed and Ali had learned almost nothing she hadn’t known before from simply surfing the Net.

“Useless,” Ali muttered under her breath. She was close to changing the channel when part of a story Randall James was relating penetrated her consciousness. This one concerned an unidentified man found dead in the desert late Thursday night in the aftermath of a fatal train/vehicle collision that had occurred northwest of Palm Springs. Since Ali had been in such proximity to the incident when it happened, she stayed tuned to see the remainder of the piece.

The smiling faces on the tube, reading blandly from their teleprompters, didn’t seem to make any connection between that case and the one they had reported on two stories before, and why should they? After all, they were paid to read what was given to them—stories that had already been written and edited by someone else. Connecting dots was never a required part of the news desk equation.

But Ali’s life had undergone a fundamental change months earlier when she had started trying to piece together the details that would explain the sudden death of her friend Reenie Bernard. And now, this newly reconstituted Ali Reynolds was incapable of not connecting dots, especially when they were this obvious.

The body of an unidentified man found outside Palm Springs? Paul’s abandoned vehicle located in a parking lot somewhere in Banning, ten or fifteen miles away? Without knowing how, Ali understood immediately that the two incidents were connected. She knew in her bones that the dead man found near Palm Springs had to be Paul. The only remaining question was, how long would it take for someone else to figure it out?

The answer to that question wasn’t long in coming. Before Axel could launch into his weather report, there was a sharp rap on Ali’s door.

“Who is it?” she asked, peering out through the security peephole. Two men wearing white shirts, ties, and sports jackets stood in the hall. One was white and older—mid-fifties—with a bad comb-over and the thick neck of an aging football player. The other was younger—mid-thirties, black, with a shaved head and the straight-shouldered bearing of an ex-Marine.

“Police,” the older one said, holding up a wallet that contained a badge and photo ID. “Detectives Sims and Taylor, Riverside Sheriff’s Department. We need to speak to you about your husband.”

Helga Myerhoff’s warning should have been uppermost in Ali’s head, but it wasn’t. Shaken by her sudden realization that Paul really was dead, she unfastened the security chain and opened the door.

“Is he dead?” she asked.

“He may be,” Detective Sims, the older one, said. “That’s why we need to speak with you. May we come in?”

Ali opened the door and allowed the two men into her room. Their looming presence combined with the weight of the news they carried filled what had previously seemed to be a spacious room. Ali retreated to a nearby chair. The detectives remained standing.

Ali’s mind raced. She remembered the desolate desert, the darkness, the flashing emergency lights. She had driven Highway 111 into Palm Springs numerous times. She remembered the tracks running alongside the roadway. On the other side of the tracks was nothing—only desert. There was no reason to cross the tracks there, unless…

“This is about that car that got run over by the train last night, isn’t it?” she said. “What happened? Did Paul commit suicide?”

The two detectives exchanged glances. “You’re aware of the incident then?” Detective Sims asked.

“The incident with the train?” Ali asked. “Sure. It was on the news just now. So was the story about Paul. When I saw that his Porsche had been found stripped and abandoned in a parking lot in Banning, I put two and two together.”

“That’s what we’re doing, too,” Detective Taylor said, “putting two and two together. We have an unidentified victim we believe to be your husband, but we’re not sure. Detective Little from LAPD told us where to find you. We need someone to do a positive ID.”

“I’ll get my purse,” Ali said, standing up. “Where do you want me to go?”

“To the morgue,” Sims said quickly. “In Indio.”

“But that’s hours from here, on the far side of Palm Springs.”

“Riverside is a big county,” Taylor returned. “That’s where they’ve taken the body. But don’t worry about how far it is. We’ll be glad to take you over and bring you back. It’s the least we can do.”

Ali’s purse was on the desk. Her Glock 26 was locked away in her room safe. She had left it there that morning when she was on her way to court, and she was glad it was still there. Even though she had a properly issued license to carry, it was probably not a good idea to show up in a cop car with a loaded handgun in her possession. Ali collected her purse and her cell phone.

“Let’s go then,” she said.

People glanced warily at the trio as they walked through the Westwood’s well-appointed lobby. Ali was in the middle with the two cops flanking her on either side. Detectives Sims and Taylor may not have been in uniform, but they were still clearly cops. Outside, the real giveaway was the plain white, well-used Crown Victoria parked directly in front of the hotel entrance. Sporting a rack of two-way-radio antennas and black-wall tires, the Crown Victoria stuck out like a sore thumb next to its nearest neighbors—a silver Maserati Quattroporte and a gleaming black Bentley GT.

Sims opened the back door of the sedan to let Ali inside. When she saw there was no door handle, she felt a moment of concern. She realized belatedly that she probably should have called Helga before agreeing to come along with Sims and Taylor. Presumably Helga would have warned her against getting into a vehicle with them.

On the other hand, why not? Ali thought. All they need is for me to identify the body. What’s wrong with that?

Ali remembered times in the past when she’d been assigned to cover ongoing police investigations. She remembered instances where some of the people involved refused to cooperate, to give statements of any kind to investigating officers without having an attorney present. And even though at the time Ali had known full well that was everyone’s legal right, she had still harbored a sneaking suspicion that people who hid behind their attorneys had something else to hide as well.

Well, I don’t, Ali told herself firmly. Settling into the backseat, she fastened her seat belt. While Detective Taylor drove, Sims rode shotgun and chatted her up.

“I understand from Detective Little that you and your husband are in the process of getting a divorce?”

Are getting a divorce? Ali wondered. The use of the present tense was telling. Until the detectives had a positive identification of their victim, they were going to hold firm to the fiction that Paul Grayson was still alive.

“Yes,” Ali answered. “It was supposed to be finalized today. That was probably the first time anyone besides April noticed Paul was missing—when he didn’t show up for the hearing.”

“Friendly?” Sims asked.

At first Ali wasn’t sure what Sims meant. “I beg your pardon?”

“You know,” he responded. “Your divorce. Is it amicable and all that?”

“As amicable as can be expected considering my husband’s girlfriend—his fiancée—is eight and a half months pregnant.”

“With his baby?” Sims asked.

“So I’ve been told,” Ali said. “They were supposed to get married tomorrow. Speaking of which, why am I doing the identification? Why not April?”

“You’re still married to him,” Sims said. “From our point of view, you’re a surviving relative. She’s not.”

Ali thought about that for a few moments. It was rush hour. Traffic was painfully slow. As they inched along, Ali realized that she and the two detectives were in the same situation. They wanted information from her; she wanted the same from them.

“This man who’s dead,” she said, “this man who may be Paul. What was he doing on the railroad tracks? Did he go there on purpose? Was he trying to commit suicide or something? Maybe he and April had a fight and it pushed Paul over the edge.”

“It wasn’t suicide,” Sims replied.

“An accident then?”

Sims said nothing.

Ali thought about what Jake had reportedly said about Paul bailing on his own bachelor party without bothering to tell his host or anyone else that he was leaving. Unless…Paul Grayson had never had a good track record where women were concerned. Ali could well imagine him picking up one of the strippers or the pole dancers or whatever brand of feminine charm the Pink Swan had available and taking her somewhere for a little private tête-à-tête.

“Was he alone or was he with someone?” Ali asked.

“We’re not sure,” Sims said. “We have people doing a grid search, but so far no other victims have been found.”

There was a short pause before Detective Taylor piped up. “When exactly did you get to town, Ms. Reynolds? And did you drive over or fly?”

Taylor’s questions activated a blinking caution light in Ali’s head. She considered her words carefully before she answered. The very fact that she’d been close enough to see the flashing lights on the emergency vehicles might give the cops reason to think she was somehow involved. If she told them about driving past Palm Springs at midnight and seeing the lights, Sims and Taylor could well turn Ali’s coincidental proximity into criminal opportunity. Still, she’d already given the same information to Detective Little. It seemed foolhardy to withhold it a second time, and there was even less point to not being truthful.

“I drove over yesterday,” Ali said. “Last night. I left Phoenix late in the afternoon. Got to the hotel around two in the morning.”

“Which means you were driving through the Palm Springs area around…?”

“Midnight,” Ali answered without waiting for Detective Taylor to finish posing his question. “And you’re right. I did see the cop cars and ambulances and other emergency vehicles showing up at the scene of the wreck. It’s dark in the desert. You could see those lights for miles. Later on, I heard on the radio that a train had crashed into a car.”

Ali’s cell phone rang just then. The phone number wasn’t one she recognized. “Hello?”

“Ali Reynolds?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Victor, Victor Angeleri. My colleague Helga Myerhoff asked me to call you. Sorry I couldn’t get back to you earlier. I’ve been tied up in a meeting. I thought maybe it would be a good idea for us to get together so I have a little better feel for what’s happening. Helga gave me a brief overview, but I’d like a few more details from you. Since the office is just down the street from your hotel, I thought maybe I could drop by in a little while before I head home.”

“Sorry,” Ali said. “That won’t be possible.” She was aware that the cops in the front seat were listening avidly to everything she said and to every nuance of her side of the conversation. Their interest gave Ali a hint about how badly she had screwed up by not heeding Helga’s advice.

“Why not?” Angeleri wanted to know. “What’s more important than meeting with me?”

“It’s just that I’m not at the hotel right now,” she said. “I’m actually on my way to Indio. Two detectives from the Riverside Sheriff’s Department picked me up and asked me to come with them. They need someone to identify a dead man—the man they think is my husband.”

Angeleri uttered a string of very unlawyerlike words, ones Edie Larson would have deemed unprintable. “Are you nuts or what? You mean you just got in the car with them?” he demanded. “And now they’re taking you all the way to Indio?”

Ali didn’t know Victor Angeleri, but he sounded upset—furious, even—as though he couldn’t quite believe he’d been stuck with such a numbskull for a client. Ali couldn’t believe it, either.

“That’s where the body is,” Ali said.

“You’re going to the coroner’s office there?” Victor wanted to know.

“Evidently,” Ali answered meekly.

“All right,” Victor shouted into her ear. “Where are you now?”

“Merging onto the ten.”

“I’m leaving the office right now. I’ll meet you there. In the meantime, keep your mouth shut.”

“Where did you say we’re going?” Ali asked, directing her question at Sims.

“The Riverside County Morgue,” he answered. “The address is—”

“I know the address,” Angeleri interrupted, bellowing the words loud enough to break Ali’s eardrum. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Until you and I have a chance to talk in private, you’re to say nothing more. Nothing! You can talk about the weather. You can talk about the World Series, but that’s it. Understand?”

“Got it,” Ali answered. “I hear you loud and clear.”

That was actually something of an understatement since Sims and Taylor must have heard him, too. The two detectives exchanged a raised-eyebrow look, and Sims heaved a resigned sigh. Clearly they had been having their way with her. Now the game was up. Ali’s only hope was that Victor Angeleri would be smart enough to dig her out of the hole she had dug herself into before she made it any deeper.

Ali glanced at her watch. At the rate traffic was moving, it would be another two hours before they made it to Indio. And with Victor leaving the office on Wilshire that much behind them, Ali calculated that it would be hours before the attorney could catch up with them. That meant she was in for several uncomfortable hours of keeping her mouth shut.

Gradually traffic began to thin. The car sped up, but clearly Taylor and Sims had gotten the message. They made no further attempt to ask her questions about anything—including the run-up to the World Series. Left to her own devices, Ali spent the time trying to figure out how, in the course of one short day, she had gone from being an almost divorced woman to being a homicide suspect.

Ali checked her watch when they pulled up outside the coroner’s office in Indio. She expected they’d have to wait another hour at least before Victor could possibly catch up with them. Then, after however long it took to do the identification and conduct any additional interviews, there would be another three-hour car ride back to the hotel.

Resigned to the idea that it was going to be a very long night, Ali was astonished when an immense man rose from a small waiting room sofa and hurried toward them.

“Ali Reynolds?” he asked.

Assuming this was yet another cop of some kind, Ali nodded.

“Good,” the newcomer said, turning to the detectives. “If you don’t mind, I’d like a word in private with my client.”

“We’ll be right outside,” Detective Sims replied before he and Taylor returned the way they had come.

“You’re Victor?” Ali asked. “My attorney?”

He nodded. Victor may have served as the attorney to some of Hollywood’s “beautiful people,” but beautiful he was not. Victor was a wide-load kind of guy—John Candy wide—with droopy jowls and a receding hairline. His suit may have been expensive, but it didn’t quite meet around his considerable girth. In one hand he carried a scarred, much-used leather satchel–style briefcase that was crammed to overflowing with papers.

“We left long before you did,” Ali said. “How did you manage to get here first?”

“I chartered a plane from Santa Monica,” he answered. He led her back to the sofa and placed his briefcase on the floor beside it. “Flew from Santa Monica Municipal to Jacqueline Cochran Regional here in Palm Springs. Believe me, at my hourly rate, it would be a total waste of your money for me to spend six billable hours driving back and forth to Indio. Now sit down here,” Victor continued, indicating a place next to him on the sofa. “I need to know what’s going on.”

Too tired to object, Ali sat. She had been through enough emotional upheaval in the course of the day that she was feeling frayed and close to tears. When Victor reached for his briefcase, she expected him to extract either a hanky for her or else a laptop computer for him. Instead, he removed a dog-eared tablet of blue-lined paper. Reaching into his shirt pocket, he retrieved a black and white Montblanc fountain pen.

Over the past few years, Ali had come to rely on computers more and more. Somehow, though, she found it strangely reassuring to see that Victor Angeleri was not a high-tech kind of guy—that when it came time to do a job, he relied on brainpower and old-fashioned pen and paper. That was exactly what Ali Reynolds needed right then—not someone blessed with good looks or glitz or style, but someone with substance—someone who would be big enough and tough enough to take on the combined girth of Detectives Sims and Taylor and win.

“All right then,” Victor said, removing the cap from his pen. “Tell me everything—from the beginning.”

{ CHAPTER 4 }

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

Saturday, September 17, 2005

It’s after one. I should be sleeping, but I can’t. I didn’t expect yesterday to be a good day. You know before it starts that the day you go to court to get a divorce isn’t going to be a red-letter day or a time for celebration. But I didn’t expect it to be a disaster, either. I didn’t expect it to end with a trip to the morgue.

Because, although my divorce wasn’t finalized yesterday, my marriage ended anyway. My husband is dead. He didn’t show up for our ten A.M. court appearance because he died the night before—died after taking an early powder from his own bachelor party and departing the premises without telling anyone else he was leaving.

After spending hours in the company of a pair of homicide detectives, I now know how Fang died. His hands and feet were bound with duct tape. His mouth was taped shut. He was placed in the trunk of a stolen car that was left parked on the railroad tracks near Palm Springs. The vehicle with him in it was subsequently struck and demolished by a speeding freight train. He was ejected upon impact and thrown into the desert, where his body was found hours later. The autopsy won’t be done until much later today. My hope is that he died upon impact.

And so, since the divorce was never finalized, the authorities consider me to be his “next of kin.” For the first time in my life, I had to go to a county morgue to make a positive ID.

I expected the place to be dingy and cold inside. It wasn’t, but the chill I felt had nothing to do with an overly active air-conditioning unit because the air-conditioning unit was barely functioning. As I stood there in the viewing room, waiting for an attendant to wheel out the loaded gurney, my blood turned to ice. And when I had to look down into that scratched and battered but oh-so-familiar face, it was all I could do to remain upright. I didn’t exactly faint when I saw him lying there, but my knees went weak. Fortunately, someone helped me to a chair.

I didn’t cry, couldn’t cry. Mostly because I didn’t know what I was feeling or what I was supposed to feel. Fang and I were divorcing if not divorced. Our relationship was over if not ended. And yet, this was a man I had loved once—someone vital and strong with whom I had hoped to share the rest of my life. It makes my heart ache to know that he is gone. And yes, it makes me sick to think that his unborn child—a baby due within the next few weeks—will never know him at all, will grow up without ever once seeing him. That’s wrong. Leaving a child fatherless is WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

After I’d done the ID, someone—a clerk—gave me a paper to sign—a form that says what’s supposed to happen to Fang’s remains once the authorities are finished with them. It seemed inappropriate for me to be the one deciding which mortuary should be brought in to do that job. I’ve been out of Fang’s life for a long time—longer, it turns out, than the six months I’ve been out of the house. It seemed to me that Twink…No, correction. Make that, it seemed to me that his fiancée—the woman who’s expecting his child—should be making those decisions, but it turns out the very fact that we were still legally married automatically puts me in charge. So I looked in the phone book, tracked down the name of the mortuary that handled Fang’s mother’s services six years ago, and called them.

Two days ago—was it just two days?—I told you about my plan to pick up some new clothing on my way through Scottsdale so I could go to court looking like a bit of a fashion plate in something more sophisticated than what I wear hanging around home in Sedona. I even splurged on a haircut, a manicure, and a pedicure. I wanted to be able to put my best foot (and toes) forward when Fang and I stood in front of the judge to disavow our vows.

The irony is, when I came back to the hotel, I took off my courtroom duds and slipped into something comfortable—a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, comfy tennis shoes. I took off my makeup and pulled my hair back into a ponytail. That’s how I was dressed when two homicide cops came to ask me to ride along and see if I could positively identify the body of their dead victim. And that’s how I looked hours later when the identification ordeal was finally over and I stepped back outside the Riverside County Sheriff’s Substation in Indio to return to the hotel.

I have no idea who alerted the media to what was going on. I know for sure someone had already leaked Fang’s name. As cameras flashed and reporters yelled questions, someone recognized me and called me by name as well. I’m sure my photo will be all over the news tomorrow, and I’ll look as bedraggled as some of those awful mug shots that turn up when some celebrity gets booked for drunk driving.

It’s one thing to stand outside the emotional box and report on someone’s untimely death for whatever reason. It’s something else to be living it—to be inside that awful box and trying to make sense of it. Now, because of the way the media works, I’ll no longer be reporting on events—I’ll be part of the story.

So this is an early warning for all my cutlooseblog.com fans. I’m sure all kinds of crap is going to hit the fan first thing in the morning. I just want you to know that I’m fine. And I’ll keep you posted as we go.

Posted 1:07 A.M., September 17, 2005 by Babe

Scrolling through her e-mail list, Ali could see more than a dozen comments lined up and waiting to be read, but she was too drained to face them.

Go to bed, she told herself, switching off her computer. Tomorrow’s another day.

Ali did go to bed then. Not only that, she surprised herself by falling asleep almost immediately. After what seemed like only a matter of minutes, the ringing phone awakened her.

“What in the world is going on?” Edie Larson demanded.

“What are you talking about?” Ali grumbled groggily. “And what time is it?” The room’s blackout curtains were pulled shut. In the pitch black room she had to turn over to see the clock, which read 5:35 A.M.

“Why didn’t you call me?” Edie continued. “What happened to Paul? And why did you have to do the identification? What about his bride-to-be who isn’t?”

“Who told you all this?” Ali asked.

“You did,” Edie answered. “In cutloose.”

Ali was astonished. It had never occurred to her that her mother might join the Internet world. “You read my blog?” she asked.

“Of course I do,” Edie said. “Why wouldn’t I? Every morning while I’m waiting for the sweet rolls to rise and when there’s no one here in the restaurant to keep me company, I read the whole thing. When Dad and I got Chris that new Mac, he gave us his old one. Hooked it up here in the office, got me an Internet account, the whole nine yards. My Internet handle is sugarloafmama, by the way, but I didn’t call to talk about me. I want to know what’s going on with you. Tell me everything, and hurry it up. We open in a few minutes.”

So Ali told her mother as much as she could remember—the parts she had put in the blog as well as the parts she’d left out. The truth is, after sitting through the statement she’d given to Detectives Sims and Taylor, Victor had advised her to say nothing in her blog about any of it—nothing at all. Feeling a certain loyalty to her readers, Ali had written her blog entry anyway, saying only what she thought would pass muster. She never came right out and said that she had ridden to Indio in the company of the two homicide detectives. And she never breathed a word about hitching a ride back from Jacqueline Cochran Airport with the newest member of Ali’s burgeoning troop of attorneys.

In talking to Edie, however, Ali corrected this deliberate oversight by mentioning Victor Angeleri by name, while at the same time somehow glossing over the criminal defense portion of his curriculum vitae.

“You say his name’s Victor, Victor Angeleri? What kind of a name is that?” Edie wanted to know.

“Italian, I suppose,” Ali answered.

“And he flies his own plane?”

“No. He chartered one.” And on the way home, to take my mind off my troubles, gave me an in-depth lesson on Jacqueline Cochran, the lady the airport is named after, and on the Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II, Ali thought.

“What’s he like?” Edie asked. “Old? Young? What?”

“About the same age as Dad, I suppose,” Ali said. “And big. He had to use a seat-belt extender in the airplane.”

“I don’t care one whit about his size,” Edie declared. “What I want to know is whether or not he’s any good. Now what kind of attorney is he again? Not your divorce attorney,” she added. “That’s Myra somebody.”

Ali wondered how it was Edie Larson could somehow play dumb while simultaneously and unerringly sniffing out Ali’s every attempt at subterfuge.

“Not Myra, Helga Myerhoff,” Ali corrected. “She was the one handling the divorce proceedings. Victor specializes in criminal defense.”

“But why on earth would you need a criminal defense attorney?” Edie wanted to know. “Do the cops think you had something to do with Paul’s death—that you’re somehow responsible? How could you be? You were miles away at the time.”

Ali remembered the pulsing, telltale glow from that long line of emergency lights that had lit up the desert floor as they streamed through the night toward the scene of the wreck.

Not nearly as many miles away as I should have been, Ali thought.

Victor hadn’t wanted her to mention seeing those flashing lights in the course of giving Detectives Sims and Taylor her taped statement, but since they already knew what time she’d left Phoenix and since they already knew what time she’d checked into the hotel, that meant they also knew the approximate time she would have been passing Palm Springs. Consequently, it seemed pointless to skip over that part. The truth was she had seen the flashing lights. She would have had to have been blind not to, and lying about that in an official statement seemed both pointless and stupid.

“The cops probably do suspect me,” Ali said, trying to deliver the words in a casual, offhand manner that she hoped would throw Edie off course. “But Victor says not to worry. It’s just routine. That’s what homicide detectives do. To begin with, they look at everyone. Then gradually they eliminate the ones who didn’t do it until they arrive at whoever did.”

“So you’re saying for sure that Paul was murdered?” Edie asked.

Ali sighed. “Yes. When Victor and I left Indio, they hadn’t yet released any details about the case because April hadn’t been notified, but I’m sure she has been by now. If that’s the case, the story is probably all over the airwaves. I was asleep, though, so I haven’t had a chance to check.”

The idea that the questioning was routine did nothing to calm Edie’s outrage. “This is unbelievable!” she announced. “I should never have let you drive over there on your own. Never. The subject came up before you left. Dad said I should probably pack up and go along, but then I let you talk me out of it. Big mistake. There are times women need their mothers with them, Alison. This turns out to be one of them.”

In the background Ali heard a door open and close. “Speak of the devil,” Edie said. “Here’s your father now. I’m in the office, Bob,” she called to her husband. “Ali’s on the phone. Come listen to this. You’re not going to believe it.”

Briefly Edie began to recount everything Ali had told her. Halfway through, though, the story came to an abrupt stop.

“My word!” Edie exclaimed. “I completely lost track of time. The first customers just pulled up, Ali. We have to go now. I’ll call again later, but you take care of yourself. Don’t let those turkeys push you around.”

Once Ali put down the phone, she dozed for a little while, but by seven when she was wide awake, she called room service and ordered breakfast and newspapers. She managed to jump in and out of the shower before her breakfast tray showed up.

Sipping coffee, she went through the newspapers, where the homicide—yes, a Riverside Sheriff’s Department spokesman actually used the H-word—of prominent television news executive Paul Grayson was front-page news. So, unfortunately, was Ali’s picture, which turned out to be every bit as bad as Ali had predicted it would be. The caption stated: “Former L.A.-area newscaster Alison Reynolds, accompanied by noted defense attorney Victor Angeleri, leaves the Riverside County Sheriff’s Substation in Indio after identifying the body of her slain husband, Paul Grayson.”

Trying not to look at the tabloid-worthy photo, Ali turned her attention to the accompanying article. Despite the use of a banner headline and the expenditure of lots of front-page column inches, there was surprisingly little content, and hardly anything Ali hadn’t already gleaned on her own.

Today was supposed to be Paul Grayson’s wedding day. Instead, the prospective groom is now a murder victim, having fallen victim to a bizarre kidnapping/murder scheme in which he was left bound and gagged in the trunk of a stolen vehicle that was abandoned on a railroad track near Palm Springs. The stolen vehicle was subsequently struck by a speeding freight train, killing Grayson on impact. An autopsy has been scheduled for later today.

A joint homicide investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department is attempting to establish the exact chain of events from the time Grayson abruptly departed a posh bachelor party being held in his honor to the time an eastbound Burlington Northern freight train slammed into the vehicle in which he had been imprisoned.

Ali scanned the next several paragraphs, which mostly contained information she had already learned. She slowed and read more carefully when she reached the part that discussed the ill-fated bachelor party at the Pink Swan.

“We were all at the Pink Swan having a good time,” said bachelor party host and former NBC executive Jake Maxwell. “I remember someone saying there was a call for Paul. I believe he went outside to take it, and he never came back. I finally went outside looking for him and noticed his Porsche was missing from the parking lot. I just assumed he’d decided he’d had enough and gone home.”

Early yesterday afternoon, Mr. Grayson’s Porsche Carrera was found stripped and abandoned in an apartment parking lot in Banning. The Camry destroyed by the speeding train had been reported stolen earlier in the day from a vacant-lot private-vehicle sales location in Ventura. The Riverside Sheriff’s Department is asking that anyone with information on either vehicle contact them immediately.

Mr. Grayson was in the process of divorcing his wife, former local television news personality Alison Reynolds. He was due at a hearing to finalize their divorce at 10 A.M. yesterday morning. It was his failure to appear in court that prompted his fiancée, April Gaddis, to contact LAPD’s Missing Persons Unit, which immediately began conducting an investigation.

The story continued on page two, but Ali didn’t bother following it. There was nothing new here. She tried two other papers with similar results—much the same story with no additional information and with equally bad photos of Alison Reynolds. Disgusted, Ali gave up, poured another cup of coffee, and turned on her computer. Once it booted up, she logged on and went to check out her new mail. Scanning the subject lines, she saw that three of them were addressed to Fred, the guy who had objected to the fact that Ali was divorcing her husband.

Dear Fred,

You are an ignorant asshole. I hope you die.

So much for reasoned discussion. That one was unsigned, and Ali simply deleted it.

Dear Fred,

You sound just like my first husband, and you know what? It’s been years now and he still hasn’t figured out how come I took the kids and left him. I tried to tell him his actions were pulling us apart, but he didn’t want to hear it—so he didn’t hear it. It was a struggle, but money isn’t everything. I know the kids and I—two daughters and a son—are all better off.

CONNIE IN MI

Dear Fred,

Let no man put asunder? God must have heard what Fang did to Babe, and She smacked him a good one. Maybe She’ll smack you, too. Sounds like you deserve it.

CASEY THE OLD BAT

Casey was someone who wrote in often. Usually Ali posted her comments, but this time they were a little too close to the “hope you die” one. Ali deleted Casey instead. As she was about to move on, a click announced a new e-mail, this one also addressed to Fred. But what caught Ali’s attention was the sender’s address, sugarloafmama.

Dear Fred,

I agree with you. Marriage vows are sacred, but they need to be kept by both parties involved. It reminds me of that old song, about Frankie and Johnny. “He was her man but he done her wrong.” All I can say is, good riddance!

SUGARLOAFMAMA

Laughing, Ali posted Edie’s comment. Anyone who lived in or around Sedona would know exactly who Sugarloafmama was. And the fact that Edie Larson held some reasonably strong opinions on any given subject, especially her former son-in-law, wouldn’t be news, either.

Google sent me here. I thought this was a health care site. If I wanted advice to the lovelorn, I’d go to Dear Abby. You guys should get a life.

That one was unsigned and it went away. After that Ali read a whole series of comments that were essentially notes of condolence to her. One in particular stood out.

Dear Babe,

I understood exactly what you meant when you said you didn’t know what to feel and that you couldn’t cry. My divorce had been final for only two weeks when my husband committed suicide. He always said he would but I didn’t believe him. I needed him out of my life. He was into meth and gambling both, and watching him destroy himself was killing me. But I didn’t mean for him to die. For a long time I thought his death was my fault. It took three years of therapy for me to come to terms with what happened.

So please accept my condolences. I’m sure you loved Fang once. According to my therapist, I had to grieve not only for the man who was gone but also for the man who never was—and for the dream I once had about how our life together would be. Grieving for the dream is as hard as grieving for the person. Don’t be afraid to seek help if you think you need it. But it’s hard work. Harder than anything I’ve ever done.

I’ve been a cutloose fan for a long time. Through the months I know you’ve focused a lot of your anger on Twink even more so than on Fang. I understand that, as far as you’re concerned, Twink is “the other woman,” but I also suspect that she’s much younger than you are and not nearly as smart. She isn’t going to have the emotional resources you have to deal with this tragedy. Try to remember that her dreams are in ashes today, too, right along with yours.

Since your divorce from Fang wasn’t final when his death occurred, I expect that you and Twink will find your lives intertwined in unexpected ways. I hope you can find it in your heart to be kind to her and to her innocent baby as well.

Remember, God will see to it that you reap what you sow.

PHYLLIS IN KNOXVILLE

Ali was in tears by the time she finished reading Phyllis’s note. There was so much hard-won wisdom in the words and so much caring that it took Ali’s breath away. She posted the note in the comments section and then sent Phyllis a personal response.

Dear Phyllis,

Thank you for writing. Thank you for your kindness—for knowing what I was feeling and giving me comfort; for giving me much needed guidance when I was in danger of losing my way.

BABE

Several of the other notes were in the same vein. Ali responded to them all, but the one from Phyllis was the only one she posted. That was the one that said it all and said it best. When her cell phone rang a little later, she expected the caller to be one of her parents or maybe even Chris. She didn’t expect to hear the voice of Dave Holman—Yavapai County homicide detective Dave Holman.

“I just talked to your mom,” Dave said grimly. “Is it true? Do the cops out in L.A. think you’re involved in Paul’s murder?”

In the years before Sedona had built its own high school, kids from Sedona had been bused to Mingus Mountain High School in Cottonwood. Dave Holman had been a tall skinny kid a year ahead of Ali in school. After graduation, he had joined the Marines. He went to college later, studying criminal justice. He was both a detective in the sheriff’s department and a captain in the Marine Reserves who had served two tours of duty in Iraq. He was also a much valued breakfast regular at Bob and Edie Larson’s Sugar Loaf Café.

Ali felt an initial stab of resentment that her parents had spilled the beans about what was going on in her life. Then she remembered her blog. Maybe Dave read cutlooseblog.com the same way Ali’s mother did. Maybe that was where he was getting his information—everything but her phone number, that is.

Why was it I wanted to have a blog? Ali asked herself.

“They didn’t come right out and say so,” Ali replied. “Not in so many words.”

“What words?” Dave asked. “Tell me exactly what was said.”

“They took my statement,” Ali said.

“With your attorney present, this Angel guy?”

Obviously Edie had given Dave a complete briefing on Ali’s conversation with her.

“Angeleri,” Ali corrected. “Victor Angeleri, and yes, he was there.”

“Edie says you told them about driving past the crash site, seeing the emergency vehicles, all that?”

“I had to,” Ali said. “It’s the truth. I could see those lights from miles away. Coming past Palm Springs at that time of night, I couldn’t not see them.”

“Great,” Dave muttered. “What else did they have to say?”

“I don’t know. They asked a bunch of questions. I answered them. End of story.”

“What did they say when the interview was over?”

“What do you mean?” Ali asked. “You mean, like, did they say good-bye?”

“No, I mean like, ‘Don’t leave the state without letting us know.’”

Ali paused. “Well, yes,” she said at length. “I suppose they did mention something to that effect. They told me they’d be pursuing all possible leads but it might be best if I stayed around L.A. for a while. I told them that was fine. That I had planned to be here several more days. They hinted it might take a little longer than that for them to get all their ducks in a row.”

“I’ll just bet,” Dave said. “Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m glad your mother is on her way.”

“Mom is coming here—to L.A.?”

“Yes. Edie Larson is riding to the rescue. Didn’t she tell you?”

“No,” Ali said. “As a matter of fact she didn’t. I’ll call and tell her not to come.”

“That’s probably why she didn’t mention it to you, and by now it’s too late, because she’s already on her way. I may show up, too,” Dave added. “I came to Lake Havasu to see the kids this weekend, which means I’m only four and a half hours away.”

Ali knew that since Dave’s ex-wife and her new husband had taken the children and moved to Lake Havasu City, Dave had spent at least one weekend a month going there to see them.

“Really, Dave,” she told him. “That’s not necessary. What about your kids?”

“What about them? I already did what Rich wanted me to do this weekend—which was to get him signed up for his learner’s permit. As for Cassie and Crystal? They’ll be glad to have me out of their hair. Spending weekends with me is more of a hassle for my daughters than it is anything else. I’m not nearly cool enough to suit them.”

“But it makes no sense for both you and Mom to drop everything and come running to California,” Ali argued. “I’m sure this is no big deal.”

“No big deal?” Dave repeated. “Are you kidding? Being accused of murder is always a big deal, even if you end up getting off. Ask O. J. Simpson. Ask Robert Blake. And since you obviously don’t want me to do this for you, let’s just say I’m doing it for your folks—for your mom. This is my cell phone, by the way,” he added. “Feel free to call me on it anytime if you need to.”

The truth of the matter was, Ali still had Dave’s cell phone number stored in her phone. She had needed his help once, desperately, when the abusive husband of one of her cutloose fans had come looking for Ali. But there was no way she was going to admit that to him, especially not right then.

“I still think this is silly,” she said.

“Everybody’s entitled to his or her opinion,” Dave returned. “I don’t have enough available cell phone minutes to waste time arguing about it.”

“All right,” Ali said, capitulating. “You know where to come?”

“Edie gave me the address. Rich is putting it into MapQuest right now. Unfortunately my Nissan Sentra doesn’t come equipped with the fancy-schmancy GPS you have in your Cayenne. I can’t leave until a little later, but I’ll be there.”

He hung up. Ali was still holding the phone in her hand when it rang again. “Ali?”

Helga’s near-baritone usually made people think they were talking to a man. Ali knew better. “What’s up?” Ali asked.

“Are you decent?”

“Not exactly.”

“Get that way,” Helga ordered, “and then meet us downstairs.”

“Us?”

“Victor and me,” Helga said. “We have an appointment with Ted Grantham half an hour from now.”

“With Ted?” Ali asked. “What for?”

“With Ted and with Les Jordan,” Helga replied.

“Who’s Les Jordan?”

“Paul Grayson’s estate planning attorney.”

Far be it for Paul to have one attorney when he could have two, Ali thought. Then she realized she had no room to talk.

“Why are we meeting him?” she asked.

“For a reading of the will.”

“Now?” Ali wanted to know. “Don’t people usually read wills after funerals instead of before?”

“Under normal circumstances that’s true,” Helga said. “But these circumstances are far from normal. Meet us downstairs in fifteen minutes.”

{ CHAPTER 5 }

Victor and Helga arrived together in Victor’s silver Lincoln Town Car. When Ali looked inside the vehicle, she could see that Victor took up more than half of the front seat, with the steering wheel grazing his ample belly. Helga, on the other hand, was so tiny that once Ali settled into the backseat, the top of the diminutive attorney’s hairdo didn’t clear the headrest.

“I’m not sure why we’re doing this in such an unseemly hurry,” Ali said, once her seat belt was fastened. “Yesterday we found out Paul was dead. Today’s the day he and April were supposed to get married. Couldn’t we wait a day or two and give the poor woman a chance to adjust?”

“We’re doing it now because we need to,” Victor said. “Because if the cops are going to pin a murder-for-profit motive on you, we need to know whether or not it will fly, and it may, especially if you’re still a beneficiary under the will. The cops will naturally expect that the will won’t be read until after the funeral, and they know the funeral can’t take place until after the coroner releases the body—sometime next week. In other words, reading the will now gives us an investigational leg up for at least the next several days.”

“We’re also reading it now because Ted Grantham is a spineless wuss,” Helga observed. “When I called and suggested reading the will today, he practically fell all over himself saying yes. He even suggested we go to the house to do it. He said he’d call Les Jordan and April and set it up.”

Ali was dismayed. “We’re going to the house on Robert Lane?” she asked. “Couldn’t we do this somewhere else—anywhere else? Why would Grantham suggest such a thing? Why would you agree to it?”

“Because evidently he doesn’t think April’s in any condition to go elsewhere,” Helga said. “I think he also agreed to reading the will today because he’s nervous. His divorce case is in the toilet, but he still wants to be paid. Grantham may not have drafted the new will, but I’m guessing he knows the terms. He hasn’t come right out and said so—that would be a breach of client privilege—but from the way he’s acting, I’m guessing the new will has been drafted without being put into effect.”

“And I’m still the main beneficiary?”

“Right,” Helga answered. “So Grantham is making nice with us because he thinks you’ll be the one settling Paul’s estate—as well as paying any outstanding bills.”

“He’s doing this because he’s buttering us up?”

“Buttering you up,” Helga corrected. “He also said something about preserving community assets. I think he’s worried about handing things off to you before any of those assets has a chance to disappear. If that were to happen, he’s concerned he might somehow end up being held responsible.”

“What do you mean disappear?” Ali asked.

“You’ve never had the pleasure of meeting April Gaddis,” Helga said with a disdainful sniff. “Ted has met her, and so have I. Prior to meeting your husband and signing on for what she thought would be a very luxurious free ride, her greatest ambition was to become a Pilates instructor someday. She’s gorgeous but not exactly the brightest bulb I ever met. The same goes for some of the bodybuilding pals she likes to hang out with. I wouldn’t call them the salt of the earth, either. April’s bachelorette party the other night was wild enough that the cops had to be summoned to quiet things down—and that’s with her about to give birth.

“Ted’s worried that when some of the more disreputable wedding guests who’ve been staying at the house pack up to go home, some of Paul’s precious objets d’art might end up going home with them. Grantham is lobbying for you to demand a full inventory of the contents of the Robert Lane house—an immediate full inventory.”

“In other words,” Ali said, “Ted’s rooting for the old will over the new one because he expects to hand the whole mess over to me and maybe get paid faster besides. But if the old will is still in effect and I’m the primary beneficiary, doesn’t that give me a clear motive for wanting Paul dead? Doesn’t it make me look that much worse to the cops?”

“That just about covers it,” Victor agreed. “What’s good for Ted could be bad for us.”

“I still don’t like the fact that we’re having the will read now,” Ali said after a pause. “It seems rude and pushy.”

They had come to a stop at a light on Sunset. Victor sought Ali’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “It probably is rude and pushy,” he agreed. “But let me remind you, this is a homicide investigation, Ali—possibly even capital murder. With your life at stake, you by God better believe we’re going to be pushy.”

“All right,” Ali conceded finally. “Fair enough.”

Robert Lane was only a few blocks long and sat on top of a steep hill just up from Sunset Boulevard; it was a winding, narrow, and supposedly two-way street. Whenever Paul and Ali had thrown parties—which they had done often—they had rented the parking lot from a neighboring church down on Sunset and then hired one of the local parking valet firms to ferry guests’ cars up and down the hill.

Since the wedding and reception had both been scheduled to take place at the house, Ali assumed the parking arrangements would have been canceled once the wedding was called off. The sides of the street were full of illegally parked vehicles, most of them bearing media insignia. When Victor pulled up to the gate, Ali was surprised to see that it was wide open. She was even more surprised to see the parking valets very much in evidence although most of the newsies had chosen to disregard the valet parking option.

“Keep your cool, Ali,” Victor advised as he turned in at the gate. He maneuvered his Lincoln into a narrow parking place between a catering truck—if the wedding had been canceled, why a catering truck?—and an enormous RV garishly painted an overall red and blue plaid pattern. On the side was a picture of a muscle-bound, bare-chested man wearing little more than a kilt. Beside him, printed in huge gold letters, were the words TEAM MCLAUGHLIN. SUMO SUDOKU.

Ali had a passing knowledge of sudoku. In fact, the waitresses at the Sugar Loaf had become sudoku addicts and experts, spending their break times working the puzzles in discarded newspapers left behind by customers who weren’t so afflicted.

Puzzles of any kind had never really appealed to Ali, but she had learned enough to understand that sudoku was a game of logic played on a square containing eighty-one boxes divided into nine smaller squares. It was similar to a crossword puzzle only with numbers rather than words. The object was to fill in all horizontal and vertical lines with the numbers one through nine without ever having the same number appear twice in any of the lines. Each of the smaller boxes was also supposed to contain the numbers one through nine with no repetition. Ali assumed that Sumo Sudoku was more of the same, only bigger.

“Your husband’s death is a big story, and everybody is covering it,” Victor cautioned. “That means there may be reporters outside the door. So when we get out of the vehicle to go inside, try to keep quiet. I don’t want any off-the-cuff remarks from anybody, you included, Helga,” he added.

With Ali’s attention focused on the garishly painted truck, she almost missed the group of reporters bearing down on them as Ted Grantham hustled out of the house to usher them inside. “Right this way,” he said hurriedly. “Les isn’t here yet. He called to say he’s tied up in traffic. April should be down in a few minutes.”

Down from what used to be my room, Ali thought, but she said nothing.

“Sorry about all the uproar,” Ted commented, leading them toward the front door, where a hand-lettered DO NOT DISTURB sign had been posted over the doorbell. “But the film crew was already scheduled to be here today as part of the festivities,” he continued. “Since this is the only day they can be here, April decided to go ahead with the shoot after all. Even with Paul gone, she thinks once the program is in the can there’s a chance they’ll still be able to get it on the air—maybe on one of those reality shows.”

“What shoot?” Helga asked.

“The Sumo Sudoku shoot,” Ted answered. “Surely you’ve heard of Sumo Sudoku. It’s Paul’s latest brainchild. April’s, too, for that matter. It’s all the rage around here and supposedly the next big thing. You play it with rocks. When Tracy McLaughlin of Team McLaughlin takes the RV down to the beach and sets up a match there, it’s amazing. People line up to play; they’re even willing to fork over good money for the privilege.”

Only half listening to Ted, Ali stepped through the double doors with their elegant frosted glass and into the spacious foyer. It was a strange experience. This light-washed entryway with its hardwood floor and antique credenza had once been part of her home. Most of the house had been decorated in accordance with Paul’s unrelentingly modern sensibility. In the face of all that brass and glass, Ali had gravitated to the one exception—a beautifully wrought, bird’s-eye maple credenza that had occupied the place of honor in the entryway. She had loved the slightly curved lines of the piece and complex patterns in the grain of the wood. In a way, the credenza had seemed almost as much of an interloper in Paul’s house as Ali herself had been.

Now the credenza was covered with a collection of fragrant condolence bouquets, all of them complete with unopened envelopes from various senders. At least one of the vases had been carelessly deposited on the polished wood, leaving behind a distinct and indelible water mark. Seeing the stain saddened Ali. She made a halfhearted effort to rub it out but it didn’t go away. It would take someone wiser in the ways of cleaning to make the offending moisture ring disappear.

With no one paying any attention to her, Ali ventured a few steps into the living room. In anticipation of the wedding, most of the furniture had been removed—replaced by a dozen or so rows of cloth-covered banquet-style chairs arranged so they faced a wooden arch at one end of the room. On either side of the arch stood ranks of candles and immense baskets of flowers—an avant-garde mix of traditional and fragrant lilies punctuated with an occasional bird-of-paradise.

Ali wasn’t the least bit surprised by this somewhat odd combination. Bird-of-paradise wasn’t exactly commonplace in bridal floral arrangements, but Paul had always preferred it to any other flower. He would insist on sending it on occasions when other people—Ali included—would have preferred roses or gladiolas or even snapdragons. The oddly angular buds with their comical topknots and brilliant colors had never spoken to Ali the way they had to him.

The same could be said of Paul’s choices in furniture—unabashedly modern and not especially comfortable—and art. On this early Saturday morning, with most of the furniture removed in honor of a wedding that would never happen, only the artwork remained. The big splashy original oil canvases had bold colors and plenty of panache. Ali knew the paintings came with top gallery pedigrees and spectacular price tags. What they lacked was heart.

Just like the rest of the house, Ali thought. No wonder she had never felt at home here. If it hadn’t been for Elvira Jimenez doing her cooking magic in the kitchen, the house on Robert Lane could just as well have been a museum of modern art.

The far wall of the living room was lined with French doors that led out onto a spacious terrace. Through the open doors, Ali saw the terrace was stocked with a dozen or so linen-covered cocktail tables and even more chairs. Empty buffet tables, chafing dishes at the ready, were situated at both ends of the terrace. Again, Ali wasn’t surprised that Paul would have selected this spot as the site of his now canceled wedding reception. Paul had always loved entertaining on the lavish terrace with its unobstructed if sometimes smog-obscured view of the city. Ali had usually gravitated toward the smaller and more private tree-and-bougainvillea-lined patio out back by the pool house.

With the three attorneys settled in the library in a low-voiced huddle, Ali wandered out onto the terrace. The grassy lawn below the stone balustrade was a beehive of activity. Someone was using a handheld dispenser to lay out a complicated pattern of white chalk lines on Paul’s carefully tended grass. Ali looked around for Jesus Sanchez, Paul’s longtime gardener. He had always taken great pride in the fact that his grass could have been plunked down on the eighteenth green of any self-respecting golf course without anyone knowing the difference. Ali more than half-expected Jesus to appear out of nowhere, bellowing a loud objection to the chalk-spreader’s desecration.

Moments later Jesus did in fact appear around the corner of the house above and behind Ali, but he wasn’t making any kind of fuss about the chalk on his grass lawn. Instead, he was totally occupied by two young men who were pushing a pair of heavily laden wheelbarrows loaded with perfectly round rocks down the steep path that led from the back of the house to the lawn below.

As one of the men made the corner, the wheelbarrow wobbled in his hands. The next thing Ali knew, the load of rocks came spilling down the hill and onto the flagstone terrace. Some of them bounced almost head high while one of them smashed to pieces, sending shards of granite flying in every direction. One needlelike piece seemed headed directly for Ali’s throat. It missed her by an inch. Seconds later, a man vaulted off the path and over the rail, landing on the terrace next to her.

“Are you all right?”

Ali was shaken but unhurt. “I’m fine,” she said.

Nodding, the angry man turned back to the frightened workman who was still clinging to the handles of his empty wheelbarrow.

“You stupid jerk! Don’t you know how to do anything? You could have killed this poor woman!”

Only then did Ali recognize him. The man doing the yelling had to be Tracy McLaughlin, the same tall blond guy pictured on the RV. The big difference was that now he wore regular khakis rather than a kilt.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked Ali again. “It’s a good thing that eight broke into a million pieces. Otherwise it might have taken your head right off. I’m not surprised, though. The kind of piss-poor help we’re having to put up with here today…” He shook his head in disgust. “Come get these, will you?” he shouted up at the men waiting on the path. “And then go back to the truck. Thank God I have a spare eight there. It’s got a crack in it, but it’ll have to do.”

As the one man came to collect his scattered load, the other made his way down to the grass. “Don’t put them there, you stupid asshole,” Tracy shouted at him. “Don’t you know anything? Those are the fours. They belong on this side.”

As the man hefted the rocks out of another wheelbarrow and onto the ground, the truth about Sumo Sudoku finally came home to Ali. When Ted had said it was played with rocks, Ali had envisioned something the size of marbles. These smooth, round hunks of granite were more like boulders, with large numbers chiseled into the surface. From the size and obvious weight of the “fours,” Ali could only guess how much damage the stray eight might have done had it hit her full on.

Ali was still shaken from her near miss when she saw a young woman, blond and very pregnant, emerge from the living room. She walked over to the debris field left by the broken rock and kicked at some of it. “What’s this?” she wanted to know.

Helga had said April Gaddis was gorgeous, and that was true. Even without makeup and with her hair in disarray, she was a fine-featured beauty except for her eyes. They were red and puffy from a combination of weeping and lack of sleep. And she was pregnant enough that the silk robe she wore didn’t quite cover her expanded middle. She was beautiful but utterly distraught and very, very young.

“One of my rocks,” Tracy explained. “That cretin up there didn’t know how to work a friggin’ wheelbarrow. He lost his whole load and it came crashing down on the terrace here. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill this lady. A miracle really.”

As the workman in question scurried to load the remaining rocks back into his wheelbarrow, April looked at Ali uncertainly.

“What are you doing here?” April asked. At least she didn’t try to pretend that she didn’t know who Ali was.

“The lawyers,” Ali said, quickly forgetting her near miss with the exploding rock. “We’re supposed to be meeting with the lawyers this morning in the library.”

April shrugged. “I’m not in any condition to deal with this stuff right now. All I was trying to do was sneak down and get some breakfast from the buffet, but there are way too many workmen here already. I had no idea the crew would be this big.”

Ali had sometimes imagined how she would react in what she had thought was the unlikely event she would ever come face-to-face with April Gaddis, her rival. Ali had scripted any number of biting remarks, but faced with the young woman and seeing her obvious desolation, Ali forgot all of them. Instead, Ali tried to focus on the homespun wisdom passed along to her in the e-mail from Phyllis in Knoxville.

“I’m sorry we’re meeting like this, April,” Ali said kindly. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Ali’s words seemed to sap all of the young woman’s strength. April staggered over to a nearby table, where she sank onto a chair and made a halfhearted attempt to smooth her hair.

“No one told me you’d be coming,” she said accusingly.

“Ted Grantham is the one who set up the meeting,” Ali returned. “He should have told you.”

“He didn’t.” April seemed close to tears.

“I’m sorry,” Ali said.

April probably could have handled a fight, but she was unable to cope with kindness. Her lips trembled, her face crumpled. Burying her head in her hands, she began to sob.

“I can’t believe any of this is happening,” she said despondently. “This was supposed to be my wedding day. I can’t believe Paul is gone, just like that—with no warning at all. Instead of our wedding guests, the house is full of lawyers who are here about his will. Paul’s will, for God’s sake! What am I going to do without him? How will I manage? What’ll happen to me? What’ll happen to my baby?”

April’s unbridled grief over losing Paul struck Ali as utterly raw and real—and refreshingly different from her own conflicted emotions. Learning about Paul’s death—seeing him dead—had left Ali more empty than sad. Having him dead made her own life far less complicated. She hadn’t cried. In fact, she hadn’t shed a single tear, not even in the coroner’s office. For that she felt guilty. In a way, being a party to April Gaddis’s uncompromising despair made Ali feel better. She was relieved to know that Paul’s sudden death meant something to someone—even if that person was the one who had unceremoniously booted Ali out of her home and out of her marriage.

And where were April’s friends? Why was she all alone? Without thinking about it, Ali sat down next to the grieving woman, laying a compassionate hand on her shoulder. What this very pregnant twenty-five-year-old was facing now was territory Ali Reynolds knew all too well. She had been there once, too, only she had been a few years younger than April when it had happened to her.

Ali had been a happily married twenty-two-year-old and pregnant with Chris when her first husband, Dean Reynolds, had been diagnosed with glioblastoma and died within months. Ali knew what it meant to be expecting a baby who would most likely be and indeed was a fatherless child on the day he was born. She remembered lying awake at night, pregnant, with her back hurting, and with the baby hurtling around inside her womb, and asking those very same questions over and over: What will become of us? How can I raise this baby on my own? Why is this happening to me?

During those dark, sleepless nights she hadn’t known that she would be able to make it; that despite being a single mother she’d somehow manage to go back to school to finish her education and then go on to have a life and career that most people would have thought of as charmed. Back in that terrible time, there had been no easy answers for her, and she didn’t try to pass along any easy answers to April Gaddis, either.

“You’ll manage,” Ali said, patting the weeping woman on the shoulder. “Being a single mother is tough. There are times when the baby is crying and the responsibility is all on your shoulders and you’ll think you won’t be able to live through one more day, but you will. There are times you’ll question God and times when you’ll rail at Him. But some day, on a bright fall afternoon, you’ll be standing on the sidelines of a soccer field cheering like mad when that baby of yours kicks his first goal. That’s when you’ll know God was right; that’s when you’ll know everything you went through was worth it.”

April raised her head. Her bleak eyes met Ali’s. “But the divorce didn’t go through,” she said. “Paul and I weren’t even married. What if he left me out of his will? He said he was going to rewrite it. He told me he had, but what if he didn’t? Where will the baby and I live? What am I going to do? What?”

Ali could see that April’s grief had her operating on a very short loop. “That’s why we both have attorneys,” Ali counseled gently. “I’m sure that’s what they’re doing right now—they’re inside sorting things out.”

“But I don’t even have an attorney,” April said. “I never thought I needed one.”

Oh, honey lamb, Ali thought, if you were messing around with Paul Grayson, how wrong you were!

“It’s going to be okay,” Ali said with more conviction than she felt.

“Are you sure?” April asked.

Ali nodded. “Now what about you? You look a little queasy. You said you were looking for something to eat?”

Faced with a crisis, Ali automatically reverted to the coping skills she had learned at her mother’s knee. In the Edie Larson school of crisis management there was nothing so bad that it couldn’t be improved by the application of some well-prepared food served with equal amounts of tender loving care and judicious advice.

April nodded. “I called down to the kitchen, but no one answered. The cook’s probably out overseeing the caterers for the film crew.”

Ali stood up. “Someone in your condition shouldn’t be running on empty. Let me go ask Elvira to fix you something. An omelet, maybe? Elvira’s huevos rancheros are wonderful, but probably not for someone as pregnant as you are.”

“Elvira doesn’t work here anymore,” April said. “She quit, or else Paul fired her. I’m not sure which.”

Ali was surprised to hear Elvira was gone—surprised and sorry, both. “But you do have a cook,” Ali confirmed.

April nodded.

“Why don’t I go find her,” Ali offered. “What’s her name?”

“We’ve gone through half a dozen cooks since that first one left,” April said. “Sorry. I don’t know her name.”

“What would you like then?”

“Toast,” April said uncertainly. “And maybe some orange juice.”

“How about some bacon?”

“Oh, no. I don’t eat anything that had a face. I’m a vegan.”

That was, of course, utterly predictable. “Whole wheat?” Ali asked.

“Yes, please. With marmalade. And coffee. Have her make me a latte—a vanilla latte.”

Ali wasn’t sure a dose of caffeine was in the baby’s best interests, but she set off for the kitchen without saying anything. On the way she caught a glimpse of Ted Grantham, Victor Angeleri, and Helga Myerhoff still huddled in the library, still conferring. In the spacious kitchen, Ali found a heavyset black woman standing in front of the stainless steel sinks and working her way through a mountain of dirty dishes.

“The breakfast buffet’s out by the pool house,” she said impatiently. “That’s where the film crew is. There’s food and coffee out there. Help yourself.”

She sounded exasperated, overworked, and underappreciated if not underpaid. Having another stranger wander into her kitchen was more than she could handle.

“This is for April—for Ms. Gaddis,” Ali explained. “She asked me if you could make her some toast—whole wheat toast with marmalade, orange juice, and a vanilla latte.”

The woman shook excess water off her hands and then dried them on a tea towel. “Very well,” she said with a curt nod. “Do you want to wait here for it or should I bring it to her?”

“It might be best if you brought it,” Ali said. “We’re out on the terrace.”

“You want some coffee, too?”

“Yes, thank you,” Ali said. “That would be nice.”

Ali returned to the terrace to find April sitting exactly where Ali had left her. She seemed to be absorbed in watching the ongoing rock-hauling and arranging process down below, but when Ali sat down next to her, she realized April was really staring off into space, seeing nothing.

“Breakfast’s on its way,” Ali said.

April nodded without answering.

“So when’s the baby due?” Ali asked. She hoped that drawing April into a conversation might help her out of her solitary reverie and back into the present.

“Two weeks,” she said. “Paul wanted to go to the condo in Aspen on our honeymoon, but my ob-gyn said I shouldn’t fly this close to my due date. We were going to drive over to Vegas instead.”

“Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?”

“A girl. Paul wanted to name her Sonia Marie. I don’t like that name much,” April added, “but I guess I’ll use it anyway. I wanted something a little more modern. You know—like Hermione from Harry Potter.”

To Ali’s way of thinking, Sonia Marie was a better bet than Hermione any day, but Paul was gone now. Soon enough April would realize that, when it came to her child, she was the one who would be making the decisions—all of them. By virtue of being run over by a freight train, Paul Grayson no longer had any effective say in the matter.

“Breakfast is coming,” Ali said. “It’ll be right out.”

“Thank you,” April said. Then, after a pause she added, “Thank you for being so nice to me.”

You have a lady named Phyllis to thank for that, Ali thought. Someone you’ve never met and most likely never will.

She said, “This is a very tough situation, and we’ll probably have to work together to sort it all out. It’ll be better for all concerned if we can be civil to each other.”

April nodded. “Did the cops tell you Paul was murdered?”

“Yes.”

“Who would do such a thing?” April asked as the tears started up again. “I just can’t imagine it. How could they be so cold-blooded as to put him on the train tracks and just leave him there to die?”

“I can’t imagine that, either,” Ali said. And it was true. The idea was as unfathomable for her as it was for April.

“They think whoever did it left him there and then escaped by walking down the train tracks,” April continued. “That’s why they didn’t find any footprints at the scene. They must have planned it that way so there wouldn’t be any evidence. They think the killer had an accomplice who met him somewhere down the tracks, and that’s how he got away. They said he was probably still in the area when Paul died. I guess the engine on the Camry was still warm when the cops got there. Can you imagine doing something like that and then standing around waiting for it to happen?”

April’s words chilled Ali. If the killer had been somewhere nearby when the crash occurred, then he was probably still there when the emergency vehicles were dispatched to the scene as well—at the same time Ali herself was driving past on the freeway.

That meant the cops would go looking for someone who might have given the escaping killer a ride. That also meant Detectives Sims and Taylor wouldn’t have far to look, especially if the old will was still in effect. They’d come after Ali—with a vengeance.

As someone with the three necessary ingredients—motive, opportunity, and an unidentified accomplice—Ali would be exactly what the detectives wanted and needed, a prime suspect.

{ CHAPTER 6 }

It turned out April was hungry enough that one order of toast and marmalade wasn’t enough to do the job. Ali went back to the kitchen for a second helping. When she returned with it, she was surprised to find a camera crew had arrived. Someone was sweeping up the broken rock, and others were setting up cameras on the side of the terrace, where the city of L.A. would serve as a backdrop. She returned to the table just as Tracy McLaughlin came jogging up the stairs and back onto the terrace.

Earlier, when he’d been giving grief to the groundskeepers, he’d been clad in a T-shirt and a pair of khaki Bermuda shorts. Now, he was dressed in what looked like the same kilt he’d worn for the RV mural. Tucked under one arm, like a football, was a ball of granite—a four, Ali estimated. Nodding briefly in April’s direction, he marched over to the camera crew. He put the ball down on the flagstone terrace. When he straightened, he brushed a long lock of blond hair off his forehead and then stopped to confer with a member of the crew. Meanwhile, the ball of granite set off on its own and rolled drunkenly across the terrace. It came to rest near the leg of Ali’s chair. A five-inch-tall numeral 3 had been sandblasted into its otherwise smooth surface. Having it roll in her direction seemed far less dangerous than having it bounce.

Leaving the camera crew, McLaughlin hurried over to retrieve it. “Sorry about that,” he said.

“This is Tracy,” April said to Ali. To Tracy she added, “And this is Ali.”

No last names were mentioned or seemed to be necessary.

“Glad to meet you,” Ali said.

He nodded. “Same here.”

Just then a sweet young thing, a Hispanic woman in a very short skirt and very high heels, came through the French doors from the living room. Ali recognized her as a former intern from the station, although she couldn’t remember the name. She wore a lapel mic and was dressed in a business suit—interviewer rather than intern attire. Obviously her career had taken an upward swing since Ali had last seen her. As she headed for the camera crew, so did Tracy.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” he said. Grabbing his ball, he hurried after her, smoothing his unruly hair as he went. Something about seeing the woman seemed to penetrate April’s fog and she suddenly realized that, of all the people on the terrace, she was the only one wearing a robe.

Abruptly, she pushed her chair away from the table. “I’ve got to go get dressed,” she said.

Since no one had come to summon Ali, she stayed where she was. A few seconds later, Tracy McLaughlin, still holding his granite ball, and Sandy Quijada—she announced her name at the beginning of the interview—stepped in front of the camera for an old-fashioned stand-up.

“This is Tracy McLaughlin,” Sandy said, smiling engagingly into the camera. “You’re generally credited with inventing Sumo Sudoku. Do you mind telling us how that all came about?”

“Just because someone is strong doesn’t mean he’s stupid,” Tracy told her. “It’s one of the oldest clichés in the book. I mean, how many times have you heard the words ‘dumb as an ox’? If you’re a jock, people automatically assume you’re also a dolt. Sumo Sudoku is a game that mixes brains and brawn.”

“How?” Sandy asked.

Not exactly insightful, Ali thought.

“Sudoku is a game of logic,” Tracy replied. “Regular sudoku is usually played with a paper and pencil. Or a pen if you’re very good.”

“Like a crossword puzzle,” Sandy supplied.

“Right,” Tracy said. “Only with numbers instead of words. It’s done on a square layout of eighty-one squares arranged in a nine-by-nine matrix. Numbers from one to nine are placed in the squares so that all values occur without repetition in each horizontal line, in each vertical line, and in each of the nine three-by-three submatrices that fit within the nine-by-nine square.”

Sandy frowned slightly, as though the word “submatrices” was leaving her in the dust. “So how is Sumo Sudoku different?”

Not a dumb blonde, Ali thought. But dumb nevertheless.

“For one thing, it’s played outdoors,” Tracy explained patiently. “Instead of using paper, we use grass or sand or even gravel. It has to be played on level ground so the numbers stay wherever they’re placed. And instead of using a pencil to fill in the numbers, we use rocks like this.” He hefted the granite ball into the air and held it up to the camera so that the sandblasted number 3 was showing.

“This is a number three rock. It weighs thirty pounds. The number one rocks weigh ten pounds. The number nine rocks weigh ninety pounds.”

“That’s a lot of rocks,” Sandy marveled.

Tracy nodded. “It is,” he agreed. “The total weight of the playing pieces is four thousand fifty pounds. Not exactly your grandfather’s game of checkers.”

“I’ll say.” Sandy beamed.

“So when we set up for a game, the grid is made up of individual squares that are two feet on each side, so a full layout is eighteen feet per side. As I said, the terrain should be flat enough to prevent placed markers from rolling on their own, but it may be flat or sloped, grassy or sandy—slightly damp sand is better than dry. Like golf, you must play the terrain as well as the basic game.”

“Here you’re going to play on grass?” Sandy asked.

If Tracy McLaughlin had a sense of humor, it wasn’t apparent in the dead seriousness of his responses. “That’s right. The game is prepared by placing all the markers ten feet from the edge of the grid. The judges will place the starting pieces in position. They are marked with an International Orange adhesive tag and may not be moved for the duration of the round. The remainder of the pieces will remain untouched and on the sidelines until the starter’s signal. Markers may be moved at will during the round, but doing so more than once will slow the competitor. Markers may be carried or rolled. Speed is essential. So is accuracy.”

Listening to him drone on, outlining the rules, it occurred to Ali that she was listening to an engineer masquerading as a bodybuilder. Sandy’s attention seemed to be wandering, too.

“So how will today’s match work?”

“What’s all this?” Victor Angeleri demanded. His sotto voce greeting to Ali provoked an angry frown and an exaggerated shushing motion from a woman on the sidelines with more tattoos and piercings than clothing.

Ali rose to her feet and hurried inside with her attorney on her heels. “Mr. McLaughlin is outlining the rules for Sumo Sudoku,” she said, once in the living room. “It’s supposed to be the next big thing.”

Victor stopped and looked back out on the terrace. “Really? Next to what?”

“Beach volleyball, for all I know,” Ali answered. “But from what I’m hearing, I’m guessing the world is safe from Sumo Sudoku. What about the will?”

“Les just got here,” Victor told her. “It’s time.”

Victor ushered her into Paul’s study—what used to be Paul’s study. An unfamiliar man was seated behind Paul’s ultramodern mirrored glass and stainless steel desk. He rose when Ali entered the room. “Les Jordan,” he said. “You must be Ms. Reynolds.”

Ali nodded.

“Sorry to be meeting under such unfortunate circumstances.”

Ali nodded again. She looked around. Usually there were only three extra chairs in the room—two captain’s chairs and a leather sling-backed contraption that was supposedly ergonomically superior to any other chair in the house. It was also Ali’s least favorite. Helga was seated next to the wall in that one. It would probably soon be Helga’s least favorite as well since her feet barely touched the floor. But today, with four lawyers already present, three extra swivel chairs from the game table in the family room had been crammed into the study as well.

Ali took one of those while Victor and Ted Grantham settled into the two captain’s chairs. “I expect Ms. Gaddis should be joining us any moment,” Mr. Jordan said seriously. “If you don’t mind waiting…”

It wasn’t lost on Ali that, while they waited for April to put in her appearance, Ali was sitting in a roomful of attorneys, all of them chalking up billable hours at an astonishing rate.

And it’s all Paul’s fault, she thought. If he hadn’t gone and gotten himself killed, if he’d tended to business, if he’d kept his pants zipped…

“Would you care for some coffee?” Mr. Jordan asked.

There was something about being in her former home and being offered coffee by a visitor, especially a visiting attorney, that rubbed Ali the wrong way. “No thanks,” she said. “April and I had coffee together out on the terrace a few minutes ago.”

It was worth the price of admission—whatever that might be—to see four attorneys watching her in drop-jawed amazement. Before any of them replied, however, two newcomers showed up in the library doorway. One was a relatively attractive woman of indeterminate age. Her face was a tight-skinned mask that spoke of too many dollars spent on a high-priced plastic surgeon. Ali recognized the type—a Hollywood socialite wife—or more likely ex-wife—with more nerve than money. The bow tie–wearing man at the woman’s side was, Ali realized at once, yet another attorney—making the grand total five in all. Five too many.

“Good morning, Mrs. Ragsdale,” Les Jordan said smoothly, rising to his feet. “Come in, please. I didn’t realize you would be here or that you’d be bringing someone with you. I’ll send out for more chairs.”

“We’ll only need one,” the woman said. “My daughter won’t be attending this meeting after all. She’s not feeling up to it.”

“Well then,” Les said, “with all due respect, you probably shouldn’t be here, either, Mrs. Ragsdale. Client confidentiality rules and all that.”

Dismissing him with a look, Mrs. Ragsdale turned away from Les Jordan and addressed the other people in the room. “My name’s Monique Ragsdale,” she said. “April Gaddis is my daughter. And this,” she added, indicating the man beside her, “is Harlan Anderson. I’ve retained him to be here on the baby’s behalf—on Sonia Marie’s behalf. Regardless of whether or not we’re dealing with an old will or a new one, Mr. Anderson and I are here to make sure that my granddaughter’s interests are protected.”

Leaving Harlan standing, she strode into the room, settled her designer-clad self into one of the game room chairs, crossed her long high-heeled legs, and then gave Les a cool appraisal. “Shall we get started then?” she asked.

Ali knew at once that Monique was one tough cookie. Short of someone bodily throwing her out of the room, she and her attorney weren’t leaving.

Les looked questioningly at Ali. “By all means,” Ali said. “Let’s get on with it.”

Les Jordan sighed. First he went around the room, making all the necessary introductions, saving Ali for last.

“I know who she is,” Monique said shortly. “I’ve seen her before. On TV. Now tell us about the will.”

“The truth is, a new will was prepared,” Jordan continued. “It’s been drawn up, but it was never signed. We expected to finalize this after the divorce hearing yesterday. Obviously that didn’t happen, so the most recent last will and testament, the one that’s still in effect, is the one that was drawn up eight years ago shortly after Paul’s marriage to Ms. Reynolds here.”

A file folder had been lying on the table in front of him. He opened it now and began to read. Ali only half listened. She was familiar with the provisions. Shortly after the wedding, she and Paul had signed similar documents. Ali had left behind a trust for Chris. Paul had named some charitable bequests. Other than those, they had left everything to each other. Ali remembered that they had signed the wills in some other attorney’s office. At the time, it had seemed that Paul was going out of his way to protect Ali’s interests. Now, though, under these changed circumstances, being Paul’s sole beneficiary opened several cans of worms, not the least of which, Ali realized, would be Monique Ragsdale.

As Les Jordan read through the provisions—the charitable bequests as well as the personal ones—Monique became more and more agitated. The bottom line was clear. Ali Reynolds was still Paul Grayson’s wife, and since much of what they owned was community property, it went to Ali.

“You mean to tell me that April and her baby get nothing?” Monique demanded. “How can that be? You drew up the new will. Why wasn’t it signed?”

Les Jordan was exceedingly patient. “Paul and I had an appointment to sign the will yesterday afternoon after the divorce was final. He wanted to do it that way. Thought it would be cleaner somehow. We were scheduled to meet here at the house so he and April could both sign new documents. Obviously that didn’t happen.”

“I knew Paul Grayson,” Monique declared. “He was an honorable man. I can’t believe he meant to leave either his intended bride or his child unprovided for.”

Honorable? Ali thought to herself. With Paul Grayson’s legal widow sitting right there in the room and with his pregnant not-bride sitting somewhere upstairs, that seemed an odd thing to say. You could call Paul any number of things, but honorable certainly wasn’t one of them.

“Intended and legally married are two different things,” Jordan pointed out.

“But still,” Monique continued. “The only thing that prevented him from marrying April was his tragic and untimely death. In fact, I happen to believe that’s the whole reason he’s dead. That whoever killed him did so just to make sure the marriage between my daughter and Paul Grayson never happened.” The pointed look she cast in Ali’s direction at the end of that little speech spoke volumes.

Ali’s cheeks flushed. It was galling to have to sit in the room and have your husband’s mistress’s mother come right out and accuse you of murder. Ali was about to open her mouth to defend herself when Victor touched her arm. With a slight warning shake of his head he admonished her to keep quiet.

“We’re all dealing with a good deal of emotional upheaval at the moment, Ms. Ragsdale,” he said soothingly. “For right now, though, I think it would be best if we all refrained from tossing around unfounded allegations.”

Les Jordan nodded in agreement. “Mr. Angeleri is right,” he said. “We need to keep from being drawn into making any kind of accusations. As for the baby, there are laws on the books in the state of California that are specifically designed to deal with cases like this—laws that protect the interests of in utero or omitted offspring. No doubt some funds would be made available from the estate to support the child and monies held in trust until he or she—”

“She,” Monique supplied.

Jordan nodded. “Until she reaches her majority. Most likely a guardian ad litem would be appointed to protect the child’s interests in the meantime.”

“That’s fine and good for the baby,” Monique Ragsdale objected. “But what about my daughter? What happens to her? Does that mean she could be evicted and put out on the street?”

“No one here is suggesting any such thing, certainly not at this time,” Les Jordan said. “But the truth is, as I told you earlier, your daughter is merely an intended wife as opposed to a wife in fact. Unless Mr. Grayson has made some kind of specific provisions for her, through the purchase of life insurance or something of that nature, I don’t know of any legal remedies that would come into play that would allow your daughter to go against the will. That’s not to say there aren’t any, but none come readily to mind.”

“What if you went ahead and finalized the divorce?” Monique’s question was addressed to Ted Grantham.

“Excuse me?” he asked.

Monique was undaunted. “Harlan here has found a similar case in New Jersey where the divorce was finalized after the husband’s death. That cleared the way for the property agreement to stand in court and made for simplified estate planning. The divorce also automatically negated the old will. In this case, that might work to Sonia’s benefit.”

“But not to mine,” Ali said sharply.

“This isn’t about you,” Monique said firmly. “It’s all about the baby.”

“And what about me?” April asked. “Divorce or no, it sounds like I’m left with nothing.”

Until April spoke, no one else gathered in the room had noticed her unannounced arrival. How long she had been outside the library door listening was anyone’s guess. She clearly had changed her mind about going upstairs to dress since she stood in the doorway still wearing her nightgown and robe.

Monique leaped to her feet and hurried to her daughter. “You shouldn’t be here,” Monique said. “You should be upstairs resting.”

“I don’t need to rest,” April protested. “I deserve to be part of this discussion. After all, it’s my life, too. I need to know what’s going on instead of the bunch of you talking about it behind my back. Besides, I already heard what he said. According to Paul’s will everything goes to her.” She nodded in Ali’s direction. “It’s so not fair. How can this be happening? It’s like a nightmare or something. And where are all my friends? Who sent them away?”

“I did,” Monique said. “And I’m sure others have called, but I sent them all to the answering service. And I posted a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign out at the front door. I didn’t want people bothering you at a time like this. And having too many people running around would just get in the way of the filming.”

“But I need my friends,” April returned. “I need the company more than I need the rest. You had no right to send my friends away.”

All of which answered one of Ali’s earlier questions as to the whereabouts of April’s friends. And Ali noticed something else. Out on the terrace April had been grieving, but she had been a grieving grown-up. Now, with her mother in the room, April seemed to have reverted to some childhood script. She sounded even younger than she was—more like a petulant, demanding teenager than an adult.

Ignoring her mother’s advice, April made her way into the crowded room, where she sank into one of the swivel chairs. Pulling the gaping robe more tightly around her, she stared at Ali. “You were nice to me before,” she said flatly, “but I guess this means things have changed. When do I have to leave, before the baby’s born or after?”

“No one has said a word about your having to leave,” Ali said. “And certainly not right now. With a baby due in a matter of days, you need to stay where you are until the lawyers can help us get things sorted out.”

“How long does sorting-out take?” April asked. “And what’s there to sort?”

Since Les Jordan had been effectively chairing the meeting, Ali looked at him for guidance.

He shrugged. “Uncomplicated estates can be settled in a matter of months,” he said. “Complicated ones can take much longer than that, especially if other matters arise—like needing to liquidate property, for example. And there are always other legal issues that can cause indefinite delays.”

He didn’t spell out exactly what kind of “legal issues” he meant, but Ali had a pretty clear idea he was thinking about criminal proceedings. She guessed that everyone else in the room, with the possible exception of April herself, was making a similar assumption. Ali might be Paul’s widow and the major beneficiary of his will, but she also knew that she wouldn’t be allowed to inherit a dime as long as she was considered a suspect in his death. Until she was cleared, settling the estate would be stuck in neutral—and accumulating legal fees like crazy.

“What about the funeral?” April asked.

“What about it?”

“I’m twenty-five years old,” April said. “I don’t know anything about planning funerals.” I didn’t either, Ali thought, but I figured it out.

“You don’t need to worry about any of that,” Monique told her daughter. “I’ll handle it all.”

“No, you won’t,” April said. Her reply was forceful enough that it took everyone by surprise, most especially her mother. “Since I wasn’t Paul’s wife and since I’m not his widow, it isn’t my place to handle it. And it isn’t yours, either.”

April looked at Ali as she spoke. Monique, on the other hand, seemed utterly astonished by this small but dry-eyed and very determined rebellion. Monique was so surprised, in fact, that Ali wondered if there had ever been another instance in which April had drawn a line in the sand and told her mother no in such unequivocal terms. Before Monique had a chance to say anything more, Ali stepped into the breach.

“My first husband died of cancer when I was about your age,” she told April. “My son was born two months after his father died, so I do know a little of what you’re going through. Planning Dean’s funeral was hard work, but I needed to do it. And you’ll need to do it, too. Funerals are really for the living, but they’re also a major part of the grieving process. I’ll be glad to help you plan it, if you want me to.”

“Wait a minute,” Monique objected. “April is my daughter. You can’t just come horning in like this—”

“Mother,” April said. “Stop.” And then, to Ali she added, “Yes, I’d like you to help me. How long does planning a funeral take?”

“Not that long. Other than choosing a casket or an urn and deciding on cremation or not, you really can’t do much until after the coroner releases the body. In the case of a homicide, that could take several days. Only after the body is released can you establish a time for the services, arrange for flowers, get the announcements into the paper, and all of that.”

“I’ve never even been to a funeral,” April said. “Where do people hold them? At a church somewhere? Here at the house?”

“Not at the house,” Ali said quickly. “And Paul wasn’t someone I’d call a churchgoing kind of guy. So maybe the funeral home would be best for the service itself with a catered reception here at the house afterward.”

“Do you send out invitations or something?” April asked.

She really is young, Ali thought.

“No, someone writes an obituary with an announcement at the end telling the time and place of the services and whether or not they’re open to the public. That goes into the Times. Then whoever wants to come shows up.”

April nodded. “You said funeral home. Which one?”

Ali remembered the form she had signed, the one the clerk in the coroner’s office had handed her.

“When I went to Indio to do the identification, I signed a form in the Riverside County Coroner’s Office. Once they’re done with the body, it authorizes them to release it to the Three Palms Mortuary here in Beverly Hills,” Ali answered. “I chose them because, years ago, they handled the services for Paul’s mother. They did a good job. The facility is lovely, the chapel is spacious, and I remember the people were nice to deal with. And the funeral chapel is relatively close—only a mile or so away, on Sunset. But if you’d rather use someone else…”

“No,” April said. “I’m sure they’ll be fine.”

“Wait a minute, April,” Monique interjected. “This is ridiculous. You can’t just let her walk in and take over everything. For God’s sake, stand up for yourself, April. Take charge!”

“I am standing up for myself,” April returned. “I’m going to do this my way, and Ali is going to help.” She looked around at the faces of the legal eagles gathered there. “Is there anything else?”

Les Jordan shook his head. “Not that I know of,” he said. “Not at this time.”

“Good. I’m going back upstairs,” April said. “And now I really am going to get dressed. I want to go out and check on the sudoku shoot.”

The arms on the game chair were low. With April’s bulging belly throwing her center of gravity off-kilter, it was a struggle for her to rise to her feet. Victor stood and gave her a hand up. Ali expected Monique to get up and follow her daughter out of the room, but she didn’t. She stayed right where she was.

“April is my daughter,” she said. “I’m not going to stand by and let you walk all over her and control the purse strings.”

“No one is walking all over her,” Les Jordan pointed out. “We’re simply apprising her of the legal ramifications of her situation.”

But Ali understood at once that Monique wasn’t addressing the attorneys. She was talking to Ali directly, telling her to back off.

“Are we done here?” Victor asked.

“As far as I know,” Les said.

“Good. We’ll be going then. Come on, Ali. Helga.”

Ali rose to her feet, aware of Monique’s glare fastened on her. She walked past Monique toward the doorway, then turned and came back. “Your daughter’s going through a terrible time right now,” Ali said. “I have no intention of walking all over her. I’m trying to help.”

“She doesn’t need your help,” Monique insisted. “Why would she? She has me.”

Exactly, Ali thought as she followed Victor and Helga out the door. Poor baby. Why would April need anyone else?

{ CHAPTER 7 }

When Victor, Ali, and Helga emerged from the house, they discovered that Victor’s Lincoln was blocked by a second huge RV, this one with the logo SUMO SUDOKU DRAGONSLAYER TEAM. In the process of shoe horning the second RV into the circular drive, the driver had taken out one of the gateposts and one side of the RV as well. Jesus, the gardener, and the guy who was apparently the driver were involved in a heated conversation about the incident with the entire discussion taking place in high-volume Spanish.

As the newly reinstalled mistress of Robert Lane, Ali supposed she should take a hand in the discussion, but since Jesus appeared to have the situation under control, she didn’t. Ali had concerns that were far more compelling than fixing a broken gate.

She and Helga got into the Lincoln, and Victor waited outside until the damaged RV had been moved out of the way. Off to one side of the house, in the yard outside the pool house, Ali caught a glimpse of people looking on as a film crew followed the action of a bare-chested man who bent over, reached down, picked up one of the sudoku rocks, and then lugged it off. So the Sumo Sudoku contest was under way.

“Have you ever heard of a postmortem divorce?” Ali asked.

“It’ll never happen,” Helga replied. “For one thing, we’d be stupid to sign off on it. Just losing the marital deduction would cost a fortune in estate taxes. Besides, April’s smarter than that—smarter than I gave her credit for, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she looked around that room full of lawyers, figured out you were the softest touch in the place, and snuggled right up to you, driving her mother crazy in the process.”

“Aren’t you being a little cynical?” Ali asked. “April’s in a tough position. I happen to know from firsthand experience what she’s going through about now.”

“Don’t fall for it,” Helga insisted. “She’s just buttering you up because she figures you’re the one who’ll be doling out the money for her baby.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Ali asked. “Wasn’t Ted Grantham trying to do the same thing—buttering me up—in order to be sure that his bill gets paid?”

“That’s different,” Helga returned. “April has a way better hand than Ted Grantham does. He isn’t eight and a half months pregnant, and she is. Believe me, April is going to use that as a club. She’ll play on your sympathy for all she’s worth. She’s got you pegged as being too nice to throw her out in the cold. Besides, she won the first round fair and square.”

“What first round?” Ali asked.

“When you said you’d let her stay on in the house until after the baby is born. When it comes time for her to actually leave, I predict you’ll have to evict her. And I agree with Ted, by the way. While settling the estate is in limbo, you need to request an inventory and appraisal of everything in the house. I’ve known plenty of women like April Gaddis in my time. She’ll figure out what’s worth stealing and what isn’t and she’ll make off with anything that isn’t nailed down. And requiring a paternity test wouldn’t be out of line, either.”

It was ironic for Ali to find herself in the position of having to defend her dead husband’s pregnant girlfriend to Helga Myerhoff, Ali’s own divorce attorney. She was relieved and glad to change the subject when Victor opened the door and clambered into his seat.

He looked over at Ali and shook his head in seeming disgust. “What part of ‘whatever you say may be held against you’ don’t you understand?”

“Excuse me?” Ali asked.

“Your blog,” Victor said. “My assistant just called. She’s been reading your blog on the Web—reading all about it, as they say. You have to understand it’s not just what you say to the cops that can be held against you, Ali. It’s what you say anywhere to anyone. Fang? You really called Paul Grayson Fang?”

“He’s been Fang in my blog for a long time,” Ali protested. “Since long before somebody killed him.”

“Believe me, Detectives Sims and Taylor are going to love that. For right now, you’re to say nothing more in your blog about this case, understood? For as long as this is an active investigation, commentary from you is off the table.”

“Yes,” Ali said. She felt stupid and chagrined. “And about Sims and Taylor…”

“What about them?” Victor asked sharply.

“They’ve evidently been in touch with April,” Ali said. “She told me about it earlier, when we were out on the terrace.”

“What did she say?”

“That they think Paul’s killer escaped by leaving the car on the railroad tracks and then walking down the ties far enough so he was able to exit the tracks without being detected. They’re speculating that he met up with an accomplice somewhere in the vicinity and they took off from there,” Ali said.

Victor expelled a long sigh. “Which explains why they didn’t find any footprints at the scene.”

Ali nodded. “Yes,” she said.

“That would also mean that the killer or killers were still in the general area at the time Paul died. Which, according to the receipts from the gas station and the restaurant in Blythe, would have placed you in the area as well.”

Ali nodded again. She liked the way Victor immediately connected the dots even if she didn’t like the dots he was connecting. “Yes,” she said.

“My guess is they’re already going after your phone records then,” Victor mused. “Trying to see who all you’ve contacted recently, to see if they can get a handle on who you might have enlisted as an accomplice.”

“My phone records?” Ali demanded. “Isn’t that illegal?”

“It’s illegal to listen in on your phone calls without a warrant, but it’s perfectly legal to look at your billing information to see who you called and who called you, as well as where you were and what cell phone towers were in use when those calls occurred.”

“They can look at my phone records until they’re blue in the face,” Ali said. “They’re not going to find anything. They’re going to have to look elsewhere.”

“If they look elsewhere,” Victor responded.

“What do you mean, if?”

“Sims and Taylor have a high-profile case on their hands, one their bosses are going to want cleared in a hell of a hurry. They also have a likely suspect—you. I think there’s a good chance that they’ll work like crazy to make whatever evidence they have fit what they think happened, rather than looking very hard for what else might have happened or who else might have been involved.”

“What other suspects are there?” Ali asked.

“You tell me,” Victor returned. “April would have to be dumb as a stump to knock Paul Grayson off without knowing in advance that she was going to inherit.”

“What about April’s mother?” Ali asked.

“Ms. Ragsdale may bear looking into,” Victor conceded.

“I think so, too,” Helga agreed. “That woman is a piece of work. The very idea of our agreeing to a postmortem divorce is ridiculous.”

A few minutes later, Victor dropped Ali off at her hotel. A glance at her watch told her that, depending on traffic, her mother would probably be arriving within the next hour or so. She went upstairs to await Edie’s arrival. While Ali waited, she logged on and found her in-box once again brimming with messages. Before she read any of them, however, she wrote a post of her own.

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

Saturday, September 17, 2005

Ali’s first instinct was to begin her post with the words “On the advice of my attorney…” but then she remembered what Victor had said: “Anything you say can and will be held against you.” So she went for something much less descriptive and also, to her way of thinking, much less real.

For the time being commentary from Babe will be suspended due to my involvement in a complex personal matter. As time allows, I will continue to post appropriate or interesting comments from readers. In the meantime, thank you for your loyalty and your interest.

Posted 11:12 A.M., September 17, 2005 by Babe

When she began reading through the e-mails, most of them had to do with the posting from Phyllis in Knoxville. Some correspondents seemed to agree that Phyllis had the right idea.

Dear Babe,

Phyllis is right. Be nice to Twink and be nice to yourself. As ye sow so shall ye reap.

ANNA

Dear Babe,

You suffered a terrible loss, too. More than one. Please know that you’re in my thoughts and prayers.

LESLIE IN IOWA

Surprised by the number of people offering their condolences, Ali replied to all of them without necessarily posting them. Not all of the notes were kind, however.

Oh, great. Another Southern California celebrity murder by another “abused” media wife. The gossip columnists will go nuts. No doubt you’ll hire yourself some high-priced attorney and get off scot-free. You people all make me sick. I hope you rot in hell.

That one wasn’t signed and didn’t merit a response.

Dear Babe,

When I read the part about the homicide detectives interviewing you, I couldn’t believe it, but then the cops always suspect the spouse, although usually the killer is the husband instead of the wife. Does that mean they think you did it? Are they going to arrest you or are you just a person of interest? If they do arrest you, my nephew, Richard Dahlgood, is an attorney in L.A. I don’t know what he charges, but if you want to get in touch with him, let me know and I’ll give you his numbers.

VELMA T IN LAGUNA

Ali wanted to tell Velma that she had all the legal assistance she could handle about then. She had no doubt that Velma’s nephew was probably far more affordable than the hulking Victor Angeleri. But she was paying the man too much to disregard his advice. She replied to Velma with a carefully noncommittal thank-you.

Dear Velma,

Thank you for your concern. Please don’t worry about me. I have the situation well in hand.

BABE

The next e-mail stunned her.

Dear Ms. Reynolds,

Please forgive me for contacting you through your blog. I tried calling your home number in Arizona. I left a message there, but it seems likely you’re here in California at the moment. My name is Sheila Rosenburg. I’m a local (L.A.-area) producer for Court TV. We would like to be in touch with you whenever it might be convenient for you regarding a possible interview. My contact information is listed below.

SHEILA ROSENBURG

The very idea that Paul’s death had now become fodder for the “true crime” network was nothing short of chilling. If Court TV was on the job, could Fox’s Greta Van Susteren be far behind? And in that fanatical crowd, Ali knew producers and commentators could make as much of a story about what wasn’t said as they did about what was.

Dear Ms. Rosenburg,

Thank you for your interest. I’m not granting any interviews at this time. Should that change, I’ll let you know.

REGARDS,

ALI REYNOLDS

The next one was a stunner.

Hey, Ali,

How’s it going. Long time no see. I have a line on a possible job offer for you that’ll put you back where you belong—on live TV. If you’re going to be in L.A. anytime soon, let me know and I’ll see what I can do to set up an interview.

JACKY

Jacky was short for Jack Jackson, Ali’s agent—at least he had been her agent. The words that came to mind now were: more nerve than a bad tooth. In actual fact, Jacky had been Ali’s agent for a long time—from her first on-air job out of college in Milwaukee to her move from Fox News in New York to the L.A. anchor desk. Ali had gotten the L.A. job on her own and without any help from Jacky, but he had been glad to take his cut of the action. Then. But once she’d been let go—once she’d been booted off the air and once she’d made it clear that she wasn’t going to take her age-based firing lying down—Jacky had disappeared off the face of the planet. He had stopped taking Ali’s calls, hadn’t returned her e-mails, either.

She had understood what was going on well enough. In television circles, network executives counted for something. Paul Grayson had been the eight-hundred-pound gorilla, and no one had wanted to piss him off. No doubt Jacky had read about what was going on and had decided to distance himself, leaving Ali and her stymied career to her own devices. Now, with Paul gone, Jacky must have reached the sudden conclusion that Ali Reynolds was bankable again. No doubt he expected to be welcomed back with open arms. And his assumption that she’d want to have him back rankled worse than anything.

Screw you, Ali thought. No vultures allowed. With that she deleted Jacky’s message.

The phone rang a few seconds later—the room phone. “There’s someone down in the lobby who would like to see you, Ms. Reynolds,” the smooth voice of the concierge said. “She says she’s your mother. Would you like me to send her up?”

“Yes,” Ali said. “Please do.”

Ali stood in the open doorway of her room to greet Edie Larson when she arrived a few minutes later, dragging an immense roll-aboard bag behind her.

“I hope it’s okay if I bunk with you,” Edie said uncertainly.

“It’s fine,” Ali said, gesturing toward the king-sized bed.

“Did you know Dave Holman was coming?” Edie asked. “I ran into him down in the lobby. He was going to rent a room here, but then he found out how much they cost and almost had a heart attack, so he’s gone to find someplace else to stay.” Edie stopped in the middle of the room and turned around, slowly examining the plush surroundings. “Are you sure you can afford this?”

“Yes,” Ali said, thinking back to her lawyer-filled morning and the news that over time she was bound to inherit a good deal of Paul Grayson’s considerable fortune. In fact, she could afford to stay here now far more easily than she could have before. She closed the hallway door and turned to face her mother.

“So how are things?” Edie Larson asked. “And how are you?”

For some reason, those two questions, coming from Edie, were enough to cause Ali’s emotional dam to break. All the tears she hadn’t shed in the coroner’s office—all the tears she had put on hold and hadn’t shed during her visit to the house on Robert Lane—burst through now. Sobbing, she let herself be pulled into her mother’s arms—held and comforted—while Edie patted her shoulder and crooned soothing words.

“Shush now,” Edie murmured. “It’s going to be all right. You’ll see. Now then, have you had any lunch?”

This was so typically Edie Larson that Ali had to smile through her tears. Edie’s daughter might be a crazed killer on her way to the slammer, but Edie would move heaven and earth to be sure Ali was properly fed beforehand.

“Not yet,” Ali said.

Edie heaved her oversized suitcase up onto the bed and unzipped it. “Now then,” she said. “Let me hang up my clothes and put things away. I’ll be able to think better once I get organized.”

“When you finish, maybe we can go downstairs and have something to eat.”

“Bad idea,” Edie said. “We’d probably be better off ordering from room service.”

“How come?” Ali asked.

“Because there are a lot of people milling around down in the lobby who looked like news people to me. I asked one of the helper guys, a doorman, I think, what they were doing. He said they were looking for you.”

“For me?” echoed Ali.

“Not by name,” Edie answered. “He said they were here because there’s a ‘murder suspect’ reportedly staying at the hotel right now. He said they’re trying to get a glimpse of her. This may be California,” Edie added, “but I’m assuming that even in L.A. there’s not more than one murder suspect at a time staying in a place like this.”

When Ali had worked the news desk, one of the rules had been that suspects weren’t mentioned by name until they’d actually been charged with a crime. But that wouldn’t help her. Her face had already turned up on camera the night before as she and Victor were leaving the coroner’s office. And people had noticed. People had recognized her. She didn’t know how they had managed to trace her to the hotel. Most likely someone had followed Victor’s Lincoln when they left Robert Lane. Now, knowing they were here, Ali felt besieged.

“Room service sounds good to me,” she said.

Half an hour later, Ali’s cell phone rang. “How do people stand this traffic day in and day out?” Dave Holman wanted to know. “And it’s not just during rush hour, either. It lasts all day long.”

“Where are you?” Ali asked.

“Motel 6. That’s a little more my speed than the place you’re staying.”

“Where?”

“Highway 101 and some other freeway, I-210, I think. The good thing is, I should be able to make my way back there from here on surface streets. The people driving on the freeways are nuts.”

Ali had come to L.A. from New York. The metro area had seemed different to her but not entirely alien. Dave hailed from Sedona. She could see how foreign the city must seem to someone accustomed to living in small-town Arizona.

“Our room number is 703,” she told him. “When you get back here to the hotel, come directly up to the room. Whatever you do, don’t ask for me by name. Mom says there are reporters down in the lobby. One of them might be listening.”

“No kidding,” Dave returned. “I may be a hick, but when I met up with Edie a while ago down in the lobby, I did notice one or two reporters had been added to the mix.”

“So we’ll have lunch up here,” Ali said. “From room service. What do you want?”

“A burger. Medium rare. No tofu!”

Ali laughed at that. “No tofu it is.”

She called room service and ordered a burger for Dave and tortilla soup for Edie and herself. When she put down the phone, she found Edie studying her daughter’s reflection in the mirror.

“Have you met her?” Edie asked.

“Met who?”

“April Gaddis,” Edie replied. “Paul’s fiancée.”

“How do you know her name?” Ali asked.

Edie reached into a capacious purse and pulled out a handful of newspapers. “I stopped for coffee at that truck stop on the far side of Palm Springs and picked up a couple of newspapers,” she replied. “I wanted to know what we were up against before I got here.”

Edie laid the papers on the desk and then pulled out a brand-new spiral notebook. She opened the notebook to the first page, which was blank. “When Dave Holman is working a homicide, I know he always keeps a casebook,” Edie added, picking up a pen. “I think we should do the same thing. I’m going to write down everything so we don’t forget details. So tell me. What’s April like?”

Under any other circumstance, Ali might have found her mother’s businesslike approach amusing, but this wasn’t funny. As Edie sat with her pen poised over paper, it was clear she wanted answers.

“Very young, very pretty, very pregnant,” Ali said finally.

“And she was supposed to get married today,” Edie said.

Ali nodded.

“Is she considered a suspect in Paul’s murder?” Edie wanted to know.

“Probably not,” Ali said. “No motive. Had the divorce been finalized and the wedding ceremony performed, it might be a different story, but when the will was read this morning, I was still Paul’s legal wife and primary beneficiary. If April was going to knock him off, surely she would have been smart enough to wait until they were actually married.”

“Is she that smart?” Edie asked.

Ali thought about what Helga had said—about April being smart enough to throw herself on Ali’s mercy. “I think so,” Ali responded.

“Who else would have a motive then?” Edie asked. She was approaching the problem in her accustomed manner—with no nonsense and plenty of common sense. “Is there a chance there’s another man in the picture?” she added. “If money isn’t the motivating factor, maybe something else is—like jealousy, for example. From what I see on TV, jealousy works.”

Ali had thought about April Gaddis and Paul Grayson primarily in terms of the two of them cheating on her. The idea that they might have been cheating on each other had never crossed her mind.

“It’s possible, I suppose,” Ali said dubiously. She wasn’t entirely convinced.

“Of course it is,” Edie declared. “If Paul would cheat on you, he’d cheat on her, too. That’s what your father says: Once a cheat, always a cheat. So the first thing we have to do is find out everything there is to know about April Gaddis.”

“We should ask Christopher about that,” Ali said. “He knew about April long before I did. She’s related to some friend of his. April was working for Paul as his administrative assistant, but I don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg—the job or the affair. I think it’s likely that he got her the job so she could earn enough money to support herself. That way there wouldn’t be a paper trail linking money from him to her.”

“Right, a little prenuptial nepotism never hurt anybody,” Edie observed. “So I’ll ask Christopher about April.”

“I met her mother,” Ali supplied.

“April’s mother?” Edie asked. “You have?”

“Her name’s Monique Ragsdale. She came to the house this morning to meet with the attorneys. She claims she’s looking out for the interests of the baby. I suspect she’s mostly looking out for herself. She came hoping we’d agree to a postmortem divorce decree.”

“You can’t divorce someone after they’re dead, can you?”

“Helga doesn’t think so,” Ali said.

There was a knock on the door. When Ali opened it, the room service trolley was waiting out in the hallway, and so was Dave Holman. His broad-shouldered, military bearing was something Ali really needed about then—something she welcomed. Reaching past the waiter, she gave Dave a brief but heartfelt hug.

“Thanks for coming,” she said.

“Wouldn’t have missed it,” he said.

While the waiter set up a table out on the deck, Dave prowled the room. “This one’s a little nicer than mine,” he said. “There’s no room service at Motel 6, but there’s a Denny’s up the block, so I’ll live.” He peered over Edie’s shoulder at the notebook.

“Just trying to get an idea of who all’s involved,” she explained.

“Good work,” he said.

All through lunch, Edie and Dave continued to pepper Ali with questions while Edie took copious notes. Once again Ali recalled what Victor had told her: “Anything you say…” But surely what she told her own mother and her good friend Dave couldn’t hurt her, could it? Especially since everything she said was the truth.

They were just finishing lunch when the phone rang. “Ted Grantham here,” he said. “This is a bit awkward, but…”

“What is it?”

“April called while Les and I were having lunch,” he said. “I didn’t get the message until I came back to the office. She said she was having a problem with her mother about planning the funeral. She wanted to talk to you about it if you wouldn’t mind coming back up to the house to see her.”

“Of course,” Ali said. “I’ll be glad to.”

“Glad to what?” Edie asked when Ali got off the phone.

“April wants me to come back up to the house and talk about funeral arrangements.”

“With you?” Dave demanded.

“Yes. With me.” Ali was already searching the room for her purse and her keys.

“How come?” Dave wanted to know.

“Because she’s twenty-five years old and doesn’t know how to go about handling all those details.”

“Shouldn’t her mother help her with that?” Dave asked.

“April doesn’t want her mother involved.”

“Wait a minute,” Dave said. “Your dead ex-husband’s girlfriend is arguing with her own mother about Paul Grayson’s funeral arrangements, and she expects you to walk right into the middle of it? What’s wrong with this picture?”

“You don’t understand,” Ali said. “You haven’t met Monique Ragsdale. I have.”

“I do understand,” Dave said. “All too well. Stay out of it, Ali. Run, do not walk, in the opposite direction.”

Ali looked at Dave. He was a nice enough man, but he had no idea what it was like to be pregnant with someone’s baby and to have that person snatched out of your life. No matter who April Gaddis was or whose baby she was carrying, at this point it was impossible for Ali to feel anything but compassion for her.

“April asked for my help. I’m going to give it to her,” Ali said.

“Well then,” Edie declared. “If you’re going, so are we.”

“All right,” Dave said glumly. “But when it all goes to hell, just remember—I told you so.”

Ali called down to the desk for her car. “This is Ali Reynolds,” she added after relaying her valet parking ticket number to the bell captain. “Are there still reporters down there looking for me?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I’m afraid there are.”

“Is there a chance you could smuggle me out of the building without my being seen?”

“Sure. I could come up and get you in the service elevator and take you out the back way, through the kitchen.”

“Would you?”

“Of course.”

Dave shook his head the whole way down in the service elevator and raised a disapproving eyebrow at the size of the tip Ali handed over to the bellman, but the ploy worked. Ali was relieved that in the paparazzi bidding wars, her tip was large enough to allow them to exit the hotel without meeting up with even one of the waiting reporters.

With Edie in the backseat of the Cayenne, Ali drove back up the hill to Robert Lane. The broken front gate was still open, but filming had ended for the day. The Sumo Sudoku RVs were nowhere in evidence. The film crews had pulled up stakes and gone home, too. Leading the way to the front door, Ali was surprised to find it ajar. The DO NOT DISTURB sign had been removed. She paused long enough to ring the bell, but no one answered.

The entire entryway was awash in banks of floral bouquets, even more than had been there earlier.

“Hello?” Ali called. “April? Anybody home?”

There was no answer.

With Dave and Edie trailing behind, Ali ventured farther into the house. They found Monique Ragsdale lying sprawled at the bottom of the stairway. While Dave bent over the stricken woman and checked for a pulse, Ali dialed 911.

“Is she still breathing?” Ali demanded.

“Barely.”

“Nine-one-one,” the operator responded. “What are you reporting?”

“Someone’s fallen,” Ali found herself yelling into the phone. “She’s fallen down a flight of stairs.”

“Is she conscious?” the operator asked.

“No! She’s barely breathing. Send someone. Hurry.”

“Units are on the way,” the operator said. “They’ll be there soon.”

Not soon enough, Ali thought. Not nearly soon enough.

“And your name is?”

“Ali,” she answered. “Alison Reynolds.”

“You just stay on the line with me, Ms. Reynolds. Help is on the way.”

{ CHAPTER 8 }

Ali remained on the phone with the emergency operators while Dave stayed with Monique. Edie was dispatched to the upstairs bedrooms for a blanket to cover the injured woman. While she was at it, she searched through the rest of the house to see if anyone else was home.

“No one’s here,” she reported. “No one at all.”

“Not even the cook?” Ali asked. “Did you check the kitchen?”

“I looked everywhere,” Edie replied. “The whole house is empty.”

The EMTs arrived within minutes. As they worked to shift Monique onto a board in order to load her onto a gurney, Ali spotted a cell phone and a key ring lying on the floor. She grabbed the phone, opened it, and hit the “redial” button. The words “April Cell” appeared on the screen.

“Where will you take her?” Ali asked one of the EMTs.

“The ER at Cedars-Sinai,” he said.

Ali pressed the “talk” button and was disappointed when, instead of being answered, her call to April went straight to voice mail.

“April,” Ali said urgently. “It’s Ali Reynolds. Call me back as soon as you get this message. Your mother has fallen down the stairs. The EMTs are taking her to Cedars-Sinai. You may want to meet us there.”

When she finished the call, Ali slipped the phone into her pocket.

“You shouldn’t have touched that,” Dave observed.

“Why not?” Ali asked. “I needed to get hold of April to let her know what’s happened.”

“If this turns out to be a crime scene, you’ve contaminated some of the evidence.”

“A crime scene?” Ali repeated. “What crime scene? She fell.”

“After she and her daughter quarreled,” Dave pointed out. “You should put it back.”

Ali looked around at the field of debris being left behind by the EMTs. The crime scene was contaminated, all right, and not just by her.

“I’m not putting it back,” Ali insisted. “I told April to call me back on this number when she gets the message.”

Dave shot her an exasperated look and then went to greet the pair of uniformed police officers who had arrived on the scene as the gurney was being wheeled out the front door.

Ali was still holding her car keys. She thrust them into her mother’s hands. “I’m going to the hospital,” Ali said. “Once Dave finishes with the cops, the two of you can come to the hospital in my car.”

“But how do we get there?” Edie wanted to know.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Use the GPS. You should be able to key Cedars-Sinai into it, and it’ll lead you straight there.”

“But—”

“No buts, Mom,” Ali returned. “I’m going.”

By the time she got outside, the doors on the ambulance had already slammed shut. Knowing she wouldn’t be allowed to ride in that anyway, Ali went looking for an alternative. By then a fire department supervisor had arrived on the scene. After some persuading, Ali managed to convince the driver to take her along to the hospital.

“You’re a relative?” he asked.

Mentally Ali thought through her actual connection to Monique Ragsdale: “the mother of my murdered husband’s pregnant girlfriend.”

That would sound more than slightly suspect. “Yes,” Ali said. And let it go at that.

By the time Ali arrived at the entrance to the ER, Monique had already been wheeled inside and out of sight. Ali started toward the registration desk and then stopped. There was no point in even talking to those people. She knew nothing—no social security numbers, no insurance information. Saying she was a relative might have been enough to bum a ride to the hospital, but it wasn’t going to wash with some sharp-eyed receptionist whose main purpose in life was to ascertain who would be responsible for authorizing lifesaving treatment and/or paying the bill.

Walking to one of the few unoccupied chairs in the room, Ali took Monique’s phone out of her pocket and once again hit “redial.” Still April didn’t answer.

Where the hell are you? Ali wondered in frustration. Why don’t you answer?

Gradually, the sights, sounds, and, even more, the smells of the waiting room assailed her. She had been pregnant the whole time Dean was sick. While he struggled with cancer, she had struggled with morning sickness, sitting in ER and hospital waiting rooms and clutching her own barf bucket. Being there brought all the memories back with awful clarity.

Around the room people sat huddled in their own private miseries. An older woman, in a wheelchair and on oxygen, sat with her eyes closed while the old man next to her periodically patted her hand. A few feet away from Ali, a feverish-looking toddler wailed inconsolably while his young mother, speaking in Spanish, tried in vain to comfort him. Then, with no warning, the anguished wail suddenly devolved into a spasm of projectile vomiting.

Ali knew that active puking or bleeding was the key to getting ER attention, and this was no exception. A nurse appeared from behind a curtained doorway, collected the sick baby and his mother, and then disappeared again. In less than a minute, a janitor, wearing gloves and a face mask, was there to clean up the mess. Meantime, a hugely pregnant young woman, also Hispanic, walked into the lobby on her own. At the receptionist desk, though, she was hit by a contraction that brought her to her knees. Someone grabbed a nearby wheelchair and whisked her away as well.

Living and dying, Ali thought. Coming and going. That’s what hospitals are all about.

She tried April’s number again, with the same result, then Ali closed her eyes and tried to shut all this out; tried to make it go away. But it didn’t work. She was back in Chicago, lost in that awful time more than twenty years ago. Back in her own peculiar version of hell.

“Ms. Reynolds.” A voice from far away pierced her reverie. “Ms. Alison Reynolds. Would you please come to the registration desk?”

As Ali rose to answer the summons, a phone rang. It wasn’t her ring and so at first she didn’t realize it was for her. Then Monique’s phone began to vibrate as well as ring.

“Mom?” April asked.

“It’s not your mother,” Ali interjected. “It’s me. Ali. Where are you? Did you get my messages?”

“I went for a drive. I had to get away for a while. The walls were closing in on me. I couldn’t stand to be in the house a minute longer. But what are you doing on my mother’s phone? I saw that she had called three times. I didn’t bother listening to the messages. There’s no point. She’s always bossing me around and saying the same thing, over and over.”

“The messages weren’t from your mother,” Ali said firmly. “They’re from me, April, all of them. Your mother’s been hurt. She’s in the ER at Cedars-Sinai. You need to get here as soon as you can. Where are you?”

“Hurt? What do you mean, hurt?”

“She fell down the stairs at the house. She must have hit her head, either on the way down or on the tile floor at the bottom of the staircase.”

There was a pause—a long pause. “Is it like, you know, bad?” April asked.

“I don’t know how bad it is,” Ali returned. “Since I’m not a blood relative, the people here at the hospital won’t tell me anything.”

By now Ali had reached the registration desk, where a woman seated in front of a computer terminal glared at Ali impatiently, waiting for her to finish the call.

“You brought Ms. Ragsdale in?” the receptionist asked. “We’re going to need some information.”

Ali thrust Monique’s cell phone in the woman’s direction. “There’s no point in talking to me because I don’t know anything. This is April Gaddis, Monique Ragsdale’s daughter,” she added. “You should probably talk to her.”

The receptionist took the cell phone and handed it over to the same nurse who had come to collect the puking toddler. About that time two uniformed LAPD officers—a man and a woman—made their way into the ER. Ali recognized them at once. They were the same officers Ali had passed as she sprinted out of the house on Robert Lane intent on hitching a ride to the hospital. Unfortunately, three other people followed the two cops. Two of them carried cameras—one still and one video. The reporters were still on the hunt, and this trio had just gotten lucky.

The officers spotted Ali standing near the reception desk and hurried toward her. “Ms. Reynolds?” the female officer asked. “Could we speak to you for a moment, please?”

The flurry of activity that marked the arrival of the cops and the cameras caused every head in the waiting room to swivel curiously in Ali’s direction. The room went totally silent as everyone strained to hear her answer.

“Yes, of course,” she said. “How can I help?”

“I’m Officer Oliveras. We understand you’re the person who found Ms. Ragsdale at the bottom of the stairs?” she asked.

“Yes,” Ali answered. “That’s correct.”

“Can you tell us how you came to be there?” That question came from Officer Oliveras’s partner, one Dale Ramsey.

“Monique’s…that is, Ms. Ragsdale’s daughter, April Gaddis, sent a message to me and asked me to come there—to the house. April said she needed my help.”

“With what?” Ramsey asked.

“With making funeral arrangements,” Ali began, then she paused and looked around the room. All ears seemed to be cocked in her direction. “It’s all rather complicated,” she added.

Officer Oliveras didn’t smile. “Maybe you’d rather speak to us in a somewhat more private setting,” she offered. “Our squad car is right outside.”

The idea of being closeted in a vehicle with two more inquisitive cops didn’t sound all that appealing, especially if there were photographers here ready to capture each and every vivid detail on film.

“No,” Ali said quickly. “This is fine. I was sitting over there in the corner. Maybe we could do this there.”

She led the cops into an area where the distinct odor of puke, barely covered by some astringent cleaning solution, still lingered in the air. Officer Oliveras followed Ali while Officer Ramsey rounded on the reporters.

“All right, you bozos,” he said. “Enough! Get the hell out of here. Can’t you see there are sick people here? You’re botherin’ ’em.”

“So,” Officer Oliveras said to Ali. “We’re given to understand that the house where this happened, the house on Robert Lane, actually belongs to you?”

“Supposedly,” Ali said. “But all that’s pretty much in a state of confusion right now. You see, my husband died the night before last. Because our divorce hadn’t been finalized and because his will hadn’t been changed, the house evidently comes to me.”

“And Ms. Ragsdale is the mother of your ex-husband’s intended bride.”

“Yes,” Ali said. “That’s correct.”

“And you know her?”

“We’ve met,” Ali admitted. “Only this morning. We were at a meeting together there at the house—a meeting with our several attorneys.”

“Where you discussed this will situation—where your husband left everything to you and nothing to Ms. Ragsdale’s daughter, the mother of your husband’s baby?”

“Yes,” Ali said, although her answer was barely audible. It was difficult to speak when what she was hearing loud and clear in her head were Victor Angeleri’s words: “What part of ‘whatever you say’ don’t you understand?”

“Should I have an attorney with me when I’m answering these questions?” Ali asked.

Officer Oliveras’s face darkened. “It’s up to you,” she said. “If you feel you need one, that’s fine, but at this point, all we’re trying to do is get a handle on who all was there at the house this morning and why.”

“We gathered there for a reading of my husband’s will,” Ali answered after a pause. “I was there along with April Gaddis, my husband’s fiancée; Ms. Ragsdale; and then four attorneys. No, wait. There were five attorneys actually, counting Ms. Ragsdale’s.”

Ali reeled off each of the several attorneys’ names while Officer Oliveras took notes.

“You say this last one, Mr. Anderson, is Ms. Ragsdale’s attorney?” Oliveras asked. “Why would she need one? Is she a beneficiary under the will?”

It didn’t seem wise to mention the possibility of a postmortem divorce. That wasn’t necessarily lying. “No,” Ali said finally. “Mr. Anderson was there ostensibly to protect the rights of the unborn baby. My understanding is, however, that regardless of whether or not the baby is named in the will, she’ll still benefit from it.”

“The baby?” Oliveras asked.

Ali nodded.

“You already know the baby’s a girl then?”

“Yes.”

Officer Ramsey sighed and shook his head impatiently, as though all the marital back-and-forthing was boring him to tears.

“If you and Ms. Ragsdale met just this morning, it’s fair to assume you didn’t have any particular bone of contention with her?”

“No. None at all.”

“Was anyone else there?”

Ali did her best to recall everyone else—the cook; Jesus, the gardener; Tracy McLaughlin and the Sumo Sudoku people along with the accompanying film crew. Of those the only name she knew for sure was that of the interviewer, Sandy Quijada.

“All right now,” Oliveras said. “Tell me again why was it you went back to the house this afternoon.”

“April called and invited me over. Or rather, she called Ted Grantham’s office and left a message asking me to come over and help her work on making funeral arrangements.”

“For your ex-husband?”

“Yes.”

“You must have a pretty cordial relationship with your husband’s fiancée,” Oliveras observed. “It seems to me she would have asked someone else for help with that kind of thing—her mother, for example.”

This was exactly what Dave had said when he had warned Ali to stay away. And, as he had predicted, things were indeed going to hell.

At that moment April herself came charging through the ER’s automatic doors. Her eyes were wide, her skin deathly pale. Panting, she raced up to the receptionist, who, after only a few murmured words of conversation, immediately summoned the nurse who was still holding Monique’s cell phone. With no more formalities than that, April was handed the phone and then ushered through the curtains and back into the treatment rooms.

Across the crowded waiting room another baby started to cry. An ambulance arrived, sirens blaring, and discharged a new gurney along with a new set of stricken relatives into the mix. But Ali paid almost no attention to any of that. She knew without having to be told that Monique Ragsdale’s condition had to be grave at best. The only thing that rushed anyone past loyal ER gatekeepers was the reality that someone in one of the back rooms was hanging by a thread between life and death.

“I guess,” Ali said vaguely. “She was probably just feeling overwhelmed. That was April, by the way—the woman they just took back into the treatment rooms.”

Officer Oliveras exhibited no interest in April, however. She was still focused on Ali, until there was yet another flurry of activity near the front door. To Ali’s immense relief, Victor Angeleri barged into the room and stopped just inside the door. With a graceful pivot that belied his size, he took in the entire room at a glance and then strode toward the corner where Ali was huddled with the two cops.

“What’s going on here?” Victor Angeleri demanded.

Once again the accidental audience in the ER subsided into a spellbound silence.

“How did you get here?” Ali wanted to know. “Who called you?”

“That’s immaterial. The point is, what’s going on with these officers? What kinds of questions are they asking you, and did they read you your rights?”

“You’re Ms. Reynolds’s attorney, I assume?” Officer Ramsey inquired. The two men were about the same height, but Victor outweighed the younger man by a good third.

“Yes, I’m her attorney,” Victor declared forcefully. “And until I have a chance to confer with my client, this discussion is over.”

Somewhere a flash went off. Ali had no doubt that every word of the conversation was being recorded for posterity—or, more likely, for the evening news.

Edie Larson and Dave Holman rushed through the ER doors and joined the mix. “Sorry it took us so long to get here,” Edie said. “I just couldn’t figure out how to make the GSP thingy work.”

But seeing her mother’s face answered at least one of Ali’s questions. No doubt Edie Larson had been the one who called Victor Angeleri into the fray. Some other time, Ali might have reacted badly to this kind of parental interference. This time she was simply grateful.

April staggered through the curtains and reentered the waiting room. She seemed dazed and uncomprehending. Excusing herself, Ali hurried over to her. “Are you all right?”

“They’re taking her to surgery,” April managed. “The doctor said she hit her head. Her brain’s swelling. If they can’t relieve the pressure, she may die.”

With that, April buried her head in Ali’s shoulder and began to weep. “How can this be happening on top of everything else?” she sobbed. “I can’t believe it!”

“This would be Ms. Gaddis then?” Officer Ramsey asked, sidling over to them.

Ali simply looked at him. “Yes,” she said, “but as you can see, this is not the time to speak to her. What do you want to do, April? Go to the surgical floor waiting room? Go home? What?”

“The surgery will take hours,” April managed. “I think I need to go home.”

“You can’t go home,” Officer Ramsey interjected. “It’s a crime scene.”

“Crime scene?” April repeated. “My home is a crime scene? What are you talking about?”

“One of our forensics teams is going over it right now. We think it’s possible that what happened to your mother is actually a case of attempted homicide.”

“But they told me she fell,” April objected.

“She may have been pushed. Until we complete our investigation, that house is off-limits and no one goes there.”

“What am I going to do then?” April wailed. “Where do I go?”

“Call your hotel, Ali,” Victor ordered, taking charge. “See if they have a room available where she can stay.” Then he rounded on Officer Ramsey. “As far as asking questions of Ms. Gaddis? Right now that’s off the table. She’s in no condition to be interviewed by anyone. She’s pregnant, her fiancé has been murdered, and her mother is undergoing emergency surgery. If you ask her even one question, buddy-boy, I’ll have you and your partner up on charges of police brutality so fast it’ll make your head swim.”

Officer Ramsey seemed ready to object, but Oliveras silenced him with a single but definitive shake of her head. “All right,” she said. “We can talk to her later. Just call and let us know where she ends up.”

The cops disappeared shortly thereafter. Their departure removed a lot of the drama from the room. With their attention lagging, the other occupants turned to their own, more pressing physical ailments and bodily concerns.

Ali and company made the return trip to their hotel room in much the same way they had exited hours before—through the back door and, with the help of the bell captain, up the service elevator. An hour later April was wrapped in a thick terry-cloth robe and tucked into a bed in the darkened bedroom of a two-room suite—the only room available on that floor—just down the hall from the one Ali was sharing with her mother. Once April was settled in, Ali went out into the living room, closing the bedroom door behind her.

“Is she asleep?” Victor asked.

“Resting,” Ali said. “Not asleep. She asked the hospital to call my cell once her mother’s in the recovery room. Then we’ll take April back to the hospital.”

Victor Angeleri was seated at the desk in the corner, staring morosely at the telephone. He nodded absently.

“You were talking to someone on the phone?” Ali asked.

He nodded again.

“Did you find out why those cops are so interested in talking to me?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Somebody’s leaked the contents of Grayson’s will to the press,” Victor replied. “That means that now the whole world knows that despite your marital difficulties, you’re still your husband’s primary beneficiary. As far as John Q. Public is concerned, that makes you a prime suspect in Paul Grayson’s murder. And the cops are going to be operating on that same wavelength. I expect we’ll be hearing from Detectives Sims and Taylor again real soon.”

“How can information about the will be out in public?” Ali demanded. “The will hasn’t been filed in court, so it isn’t a matter of public record. Who would have leaked it?”

“Good question. Presumably one of my erstwhile colleagues from this morning’s meeting. I think I can make a fairly educated guess as to which one.”

“But isn’t that illegal?” Ali objected. “Doesn’t it violate attorney-client privilege?”

“Of course it does,” Victor returned. “And once I figure out who’s responsible, you can bet I’ll have his cojones, but for right now we have to live with the consequences of those revelations and with the fact that you’re now a suspect in two incidents rather than just the one.”

“Two?” Ali asked.

“One homicide and one attempted homicide.”

“So now I’m supposedly responsible for what happened to Monique Ragsdale, too? How come? I barely know the woman.”

“By showing up this morning armed with that cockamamie postmortem divorce attorney, Monique Ragsdale as good as declared war on you. That’s certainly how it’s going to look—as though the two of you were in some kind of a turf dispute. I can see exactly how it’ll play out in court, a David and Goliath routine. Monique will be portrayed as a sympathetic character, selflessly trying to protect the welfare of her daughter and her unborn grandchild. You’ll be depicted as the greedy ex-wife defending her territory and her pocketbook by taking the bothersome grandma out of the picture.”

“But Monique fell down the stairs,” Ali objected. “That’s not my fault.”

“What if she was pushed?” Victor returned. “I know how cops think. You’re already on their radar as a suspect in Paul’s death. They’re going to operate on the premise that if you’re good for one homicide, you’re good for another.”

“But I have an ironclad alibi,” Ali objected. “I left the house at the same time you did. You and Helga brought me back here to the hotel. I was here in my room all afternoon, first with my mother and later with Dave Holman. How could I possibly be responsible?”

Victor shrugged. “The cops have already decided that at least two people were involved in what happened to your husband. If you had an accomplice in that case, you’d be likely to have an accomplice for this one as well.”

“But I didn’t do it,” Ali insisted. “Mom, Dave, and I went to the house together. That’s when we found her.”

“Do you know how many people who ‘discover’ bodies end up being the doers?” Victor asked. “And tell me this. If you went to the house and no one was home, how did you get inside?”

“Through the front door. I rang the bell, but no one answered. Then, since the door was open, we went in.”

“Didn’t that strike you as unusual, that the door would be left open like that?”

“I didn’t think about it at the time because I thought April was home. With all the people involved in the shoot, there had been people coming and going all day long.”

“Do you still have keys to the house?”

“Probably,” Ali answered. “Back home in Sedona somewhere, but I certainly didn’t bring them along, and I doubt they’d work anyway. I expect Paul would have changed the locks as soon as I moved out. I’m sure I would have.”

“All right,” Victor said. “Now tell me about the telephone.”

“What telephone?” Ali asked.

“Come on. Don’t play dumb. Monique’s cell phone—the one you lifted from the crime scene. That’s called evidence tampering. When the cops find out about it—if they find out about it—they’re going to go nuts.”

“The EMTs were busy hauling Monique off to the hospital when I noticed the phone was lying there on the floor,” Ali explained. “By then I knew April wasn’t home. I needed to reach her so I could let her know what was happening. I was sure her cell phone number would be in her mother’s call records, and it was. How else was I supposed to find her number?”

“You could have called Ted Grantham back,” Victor pointed out. “But you didn’t. For right now the cops haven’t noticed the phone issue. If they end up figuring out you took it, then we’ll have to decide how to handle it. Now, what’s the deal with Dave Holman?”

“What about him?”

“Are you an item or what?”

“Dave’s good friends with my parents, and he’s a friend of mine, too—a homicide detective for Yavapai County over in Arizona. But we aren’t an ‘item.’”

“What’s he doing here then?”

“He drove over from Lake Havasu to help out.”

“He should go home,” Victor said simply. “So should your mother. I have my own team of investigators working on this case. What I don’t need is a bunch of people—amateurs or otherwise—blundering around and muddying the waters. Having your mother and Dave here is going to be more of a hindrance than a help. Anything you say to them is going to be fair game for whatever detectives are doing follow-up on either one of these two cases. They’ll ask Dave or your mother what you’ve said, and they’ll end up being required to answer truthfully. So you can’t confide in them—not at all. Understand?”

“It’s too late,” Ali said bleakly. “I already did.”

And for the first time in all this, she actually felt afraid.

{ CHAPTER 9 }

Victor finally left. For a long time afterward, Ali sat alone in the living room area of April’s suite mulling her situation. What if Monique Ragsdale didn’t survive? Would Ali really be a suspect in her death as well? Could the cops turn Monique’s mere threat of litigation into a motive for murder?

From what Ali had seen, Monique’s fall had looked like an accident, but was it really? And speaking of accidents, what about the Sumo Sudoku boulder that had come flying in Ali’s own direction? That, too, had appeared to be nothing more than an accident caused by an overloaded wheelbarrow, but what if it wasn’t?

Pushing away that worrisome thought, Ali decided to track down how much of the story had surfaced in the media. Rather than switching on the television and possibly waking April, Ali did as she had so often done in the months since she had fled L.A., her former job, and her foundering marriage—she turned to her computer and to her blog and to the cyber support network from cutlooseblog.com that had sustained her through some pretty dark times.

Dear Ali, or I suppose I should say, Dear Babe, When they booted you off the air months ago, I always knew you’d be back on TV here in L.A. eventually. I just didn’t think it would be like this.

I saw what they showed on the news the other night when you were leaving the coroner’s office in Indio. That young woman they replaced you with was so damned smug as she was reading the story. I wanted to slap her. She didn’t come right out and mention you by name and say you were a suspect in whatever had happened to your ex, but people recognized you. I recognized you, even though you weren’t wearing makeup or anything. And that big guy, Victor, was there with you. Anybody who follows criminal cases in Southern California knows what he’s all about. Why would you need a big-time defense attorney if you weren’t a defendant?

All I’m trying to say is there are lots of us out here who are still real fans of yours and who think you’re being sold down the river. Again. So be strong. Know that people—people you don’t even know—are praying for you every day. I’m one of them.

CRYSTAL RYAN, SHERMAN OAKS, CA

She didn’t post Crystal’s note, but wanting to say something in reply—something that wouldn’t get her in trouble with Victor Angeleri—Ali penned a simple response that said nothing yet covered all the bases.

Dear Crystal,

Thank you for your support.

ALI REYNOLDS

Dear Babe,

Have you called my nephew yet? From what they’re saying on the news, I think you’d better. It sounds like things are getting more complicated all the time.

VELMA T IN LAGUNA

Yes, Ali thought. Things are getting more complicated. No, I haven’t called your nephew, and I probably won’t.

She sent Velma the same note she had sent to Crystal. That was Ali’s best bet for the moment—respond but do not engage. Keep a low profile.

Dear Ms. Reynolds,

After what happened to you, I can’t believe you’d do the same thing to my uncle. You should be ashamed.

ANDREA MORALES

Ali studied that one for a very long time. She had no idea who Andrea Morales was, much less who the woman’s uncle might be or what Ali could possibly have done to him. In the end, she felt she had to defend herself by sending a response.

Dear Andrea,

I’m sorry, but I’m unaware of who your uncle is or what it is you believe I may have done to him. If it’s something for which I should offer an apology, please let me know. I would appreciate it if you could supply some additional information which would allow me to be more knowledgeable about this situation.

Thank you.

ALISON REYNOLDS

The next one, unsigned, was even more disturbing.

Hmmmm. Let me get this straight. Your soon-to-be-ex-husband died unexpectedly without having a chance to unload you by slipping loose from that little gold tie that binds? Too bad somebody didn’t warn the poor guy about black widows. I think he was married to one. RIP, Fang. You deserved better. As for you, “Babe”? I hope you get what you deserve.

LANCE-A-LOT

Black widow, Ali thought. Thanks-a-lot. Let’s hope this one doesn’t hit the blogosphere. If it does, it’ll go like wildfire.

She didn’t reply to that one.

Ali’s cell phone rang just then. She hurried to answer it, thinking it would be the hospital. It wasn’t.

“Aunt Ali?”

She recognized the voice of ten-year-old Matt Bernard. Months earlier, Matt’s mother, Ali’s childhood friend Reenie Bernard, had been murdered. In the messy aftermath of Reenie’s death, her husband, a professor at Northern Arizona University, had taken off on sabbatical with a new wife in tow and had left his two children, Matt and his younger sister, Julie, in the care of their maternal grandparents in Cottonwood. Ali had stayed in touch with Reenie’s two kids as much as possible. Thanks to their grandfather’s pet allergies, Ali was also looking after their cat, the plug-ugly, one-eared, sixteen-pound wonder, Samantha.

“Hi, Matt.”

“How’s Sam?”

“Sam’s fine,” Ali said. She didn’t know that with absolute certainty, but she felt confident in saying so.

“Grandpa and Grandma are driving to Sedona tomorrow afternoon after church,” Matt went on. “I was wondering if Julie and I could come by your house for a while to visit and play with Sam.”

That was the weird thing about cell phones. Callers dial numbers with a complete mental image of where the other person is and what he or she is doing. No doubt Matt was envisioning Ali in her spacious mobile home in Sedona, curled up on her living room sofa with Sam right there beside her. Instead, Ali was several hundred miles away, sitting in a hotel room, and embroiled in a set of circumstances that might well keep her from returning to Sedona for some time. Ali didn’t want to go into any of those messy details with Matthew Bernard right then. Or ever.

“Oh, Matt,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I’ve been called out of town. I won’t be there tomorrow.”

“Who’s taking care of Sam then?” he asked.

“My dad,” Ali said. “He loves cats, and they love him. If you’re coming up in the afternoon, after the Sugar Loaf is closed for the day, maybe you could visit with Sam at my parents’ house.”

Matt sounded dubious. “Wouldn’t your father mind?”

Ali thought about Bob Larson, a man who adored animals and little kids. “As long as it’s after hours, I’m sure he’d be thrilled to have you, but why don’t you call him and ask?”

“I think that would be weird.” Suddenly Matt seemed stricken with an uncharacteristic case of shyness. “I mean, I don’t really know him.”

“By the time you and Julie spend Sunday afternoon with him, you will know him,” Ali countered. “He may be my father, but he’s also a really nice guy.”

The call waiting signal beeped in Ali’s ear. She glanced at the readout—Chris’s cell phone. As soon as she saw the number, she felt guilty. She hadn’t called her son—deliberately hadn’t called him—when things started going bad. She had considered the mess to be her problem. With Chris starting a new job and a new life, she hadn’t wanted to embroil him in her difficulties. But then, she hadn’t much wanted Edie Larson and Dave Holman to be dragged into the situation, either.

Ali ended the call with Matt as soon as possible, but by then, Chris had left an irate voice-mail message: “Mom. What the hell is going on out there? Call me.”

“I knew you were busy,” she said, once she had Chris on the phone. “I didn’t want you to worry. How much have you heard?”

“I just got off the phone with Gramps, who had talked to Grandma. I know Paul is dead. I know April’s mother fell down a flight of stairs and could very well die, and that the cops think you’re a suspect in both cases.”

“That just about covers it then,” Ali said as lightly as she could manage. “Sounds like you’re completely up to date.”

“Mother!” Chris exclaimed accusingly.

Chris hardly ever called her “Mother.” It usually meant that the two of them were on the outs. And the reverse was true when Ali called him Christopher. This time she was the one who had crossed their invisible line.

“Tell me now,” Chris ordered. “I want to hear it from you.”

And so Ali did—she told him everything.

“I’m guessing April’s mom is the one who came up with the idea of pushing for a postmortem divorce,” Chris said when she finished.

“Either she did or her lawyer did,” Ali said. “I’m not sure which.”

“If anybody would know the ins and outs of divorce, Monique Ragsdale would probably be it,” Chris said.

“What do you mean?”

“Monique’s had several,” Chris replied. “Divorces, that is. Scott Dumphey, one of the guys I used to play basketball with in college, is good friends with Jason Ragsdale, April’s stepbrother. That’s how I found out about Paul and April in the first place—through Scott.”

The comment made it clear to Ali that there was a whole lot she didn’t know about April Gaddis’s family situation.

“April has a stepbrother?” Ali asked.

“‘Had’ is the operative word,” Chris corrected. “Jason is a former stepbrother. From what I remember of the story, Jason’s dad was a widower, an optometrist with a fairly decent nest egg, when April’s mother arrived on the scene with April in tow. When Monique dumped the poor guy a couple of years later, his nest egg was a whole lot smaller.”

Ali had no way of knowing if any of this information would prove useful or not. Nonetheless, she used a piece of hotel notepaper to jot down all the relevant names.

“What about April’s dad?” Ali asked.

“What about him?” Chris returned. “I’m assuming he was several husbands ago.”

The little tidbit of information made April’s way of dealing with the world much more understandable. She had been raised by an often-married gold digger of a mother. With that in mind, it was entirely reasonable for her to grow up thinking that someone else’s husband—anyone else’s husband—was fair game. If that was how Monique had gotten ahead in the world, why wouldn’t her daughter try doing the same thing? Given that context, April’s involvement with Paul Grayson must have seemed like business as usual.

“Anything else you can tell me about April?”

“Dropped out of college after only a semester or two,” Chris replied. “According to Scott, she’s not all that bright. At least he didn’t think so.”

Even with the door to April’s room pulled shut, Ali wasn’t prepared to comment on that either way.

“What’s going to happen now?” Chris asked. “And should I call in to work and have them get me a substitute teacher so I can drive over to help out?”

“No,” Ali said. “Absolutely not. Mom’s here. So’s Dave Holman.”

“He is? What’s Dave doing there?”

“Grandma called him and he came.”

“She called him, but she didn’t call me.”

Chris sounded understandably hurt.

“I’m sure she was thinking the same thing I was—that we didn’t want to bother you or take you away from what you’re doing.”

“Thanks a lot,” Chris said. “To both of you. Like mother like daughter, I guess, but I’m a grown-up now. I get to choose, remember?”

Ali would have said more, but call waiting buzzed again. The readout said Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. At the same time, her phone was telling her she was running out of battery power.

“Sorry, Chris,” Ali told her son. “There’s another call. I have to take it.” She switched over.

“April Gaddis?” a male voice asked.

“No. April’s in the other room, lying down.”

“This is the contact number we were given, and it’s about her mother. Can you put her on the line, please?”

The caller’s voice sounded so distant, so impersonal, that Ali knew without hearing another word that the guy wasn’t calling with good news.

“Just a moment,” Ali said quickly. “She’s resting, but I’ll get her for you.”

With the low-battery alarm still sounding, Ali hurried into April’s darkened room. The young woman lay on her side, snoring softly. Ali shook her awake. “April,” she said. “There’s a call for you.”

April took the phone. “Yes,” she said. “What is it? Is my mother all right?

But of course Monique Ragsdale was anything but all right. She had died on the operating table, most likely as a result of the brain injury. With a slight whimper, April dropped the phone. As soon as it fell, Ali Reynolds knew she was now a suspect in two separate homicides.

Sobbing, April buried her face in the pillow. “Mom’s gone,” she wailed. “So’s Paul. I’m all alone now. What’s going to happen to me? What’s going to happen to the baby?”

Ali reached down and patted April’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “But you’ll be all right. We’ll figure it out.”

Then Ali picked up the phone, took it into the other room, plugged it into the charger, and called Victor Angeleri at home. “You need to know what’s happened.”

In the end, Ali stayed behind at the hotel for yet another meeting with Victor. Her mother and Dave were the ones who volunteered to take April back to the hospital to handle whatever paperwork needed signing. After several phone calls, Victor managed to locate Detectives Tim Hubbard and Rosalie Martin, the two L.A. homicide cops who were now in charge of the Monique Ragsdale investigation.

“Look,” Victor said once he had Detective Hubbard on the phone. “I don’t like the circus atmosphere any more than you do, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. My client is willing to cooperate and give you a voluntary statement, but it needs to be on our terms. I’d rather do it here at the hotel, where we have some control over the media. How about if you come to us?”

In the end, that’s what happened—the detectives agreed to come there. For the next two hours, and with a tape recorder running, they went over the whole story again, in great detail. They wanted to know who was at the morning meeting at the house on Robert Lane. Both detectives seemed intrigued by the pre-funeral reading of Paul Grayson’s will, and they seemed especially interested in the fact that Paul Grayson’s murder had left Ali holding a bagful of monetary goodies.

“What was Ms. Gaddis’s reaction to that?” Rosalie Martin wanted to know.

Ali shrugged. “What you’d expect. She was upset.”

“What about her mother, Ms. Ragsdale?” Detective Hubbard asked. “Was she upset, too?”

“I’m sure she was worried about her daughter—and the baby,” Ali told her.

“Which put the two of you on opposite sides of the fence.”

Ali glanced in Victor’s direction. He gave a slight shake of his head, and Ali said nothing more.

With the topic of the will pretty much exhausted, Hubbard moved on to other issues. The two cops seemed to have missed the Sumo Sudoku craze entirely and had to have the concept explained to them. When it came to the names of the players and the film crew, however, Ali wasn’t able to offer much detail.

“What about workmen?” Detective Hubbard asked.

“Jesus Sanchez is the gardener,” Ali said.

“What can you tell us about him?”

Ali shrugged. “Not much. He more or less came with the house. He was working there long before Paul and I bought the place. Most of the time he works alone, but today he had a crew working with him. I didn’t know any of them.”

Was this the time Ali should mention her near-encounter with the falling boulder, or would the cops see that as nothing more than a lame attempt on her part to deflect their suspicions away from her? She decided to let it go.

“What about the cook?” Detective Hubbard asked.

“I met her, but she’s new. I don’t know her name.”

“What about address information or contact numbers for the two of them?”

“Jesus and the cook? I’m sure Paul had the information, probably in his office somewhere, but I don’t. We were getting a divorce, remember?”

“We’ll see what we can find,” Hubbard said. “Now about the house. Does it have a security system?”

“Of course,” Ali told him.

“But it wasn’t alarming when you got there this afternoon and found Ms. Ragsdale at the bottom of the stairs?”

“No. The front door was half open but the alarm wasn’t sounding. I assumed someone must have switched it off.”

“Why would that be?”

“Maybe with so many people coming and going throughout the day, it was easier to turn it off.”

“Isn’t that unusual?”

“It would have been for me,” Ali said. “But I’m not sure about how April runs the house.”

“Your house,” Hubbard added.

Ali didn’t like it that Hubbard seemed so eager to come back to the idea that the house on Robert Lane ultimately belonged to Ali.

“April Gaddis is the one who’s been living there most recently,” Ali returned. “Maybe she’s not all that worried about security.”

“Maybe not,” Hubbard agreed. “And no one else was there at the house when you arrived?”

“No one. Not the cook. Not the gardener.”

“What time did you get there?”

“Four or so. I don’t remember exactly.”

“The nine-one-one call came in at four-fifteen.”

“So around four.”

“The people who were with you at the time you found Ms. Ragsdale were your mother and this friend, one Dave Holman.”

“Yes,” Ali said. “That’s correct.”

“And he’s a police officer?”

Ali nodded. “Dave’s a homicide detective with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department in Sedona.”

“I’ve heard about Sedona,” Hubbard said. “The crystal place. So he drove all the way over here from there?”

“From Lake Havasu, actually,” Ali replied. “He’s divorced. He was there visiting his kids.”

“When did he arrive?”

Ali was a little puzzled by this segue into questions about Dave Holman. “Early afternoon,” she answered. “In time to have lunch.”

“And he was with you most of the afternoon?”

“Yes.”

All this time, Detective Rosalie Martin had been sitting back and letting her partner do most of the questioning. Now she leaned forward once more.

“You mentioned that you came and went from the hotel via the service elevator?”

“Yes,” Ali said.

“Why was that?”

“Because the lobby was full of reporters. I wanted to avoid them if at all possible.”

“Couldn’t it also be because you didn’t want to be observed, period?” Rosalie asked. “Not just by the reporters but by anyone?”

Her not-too-subtle implication was clear and Victor balked. “This interview is over,” he announced. “My client has been more than cooperative. She’s answered all your questions. If you want to know whether or not she left the hotel in the course of the afternoon, I suggest you avail yourselves of the hotel’s security tapes. I’m sure those cover the service elevator as well as the public ones.”

The cops left shortly thereafter. Victor turned to Ali. “Has anyone ever told you you’re a hell of a lot of trouble?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I’m pretty sure several people have mentioned it.”

“By the way,” Victor said. “My assistant did a LexisNexis search on you. We need to talk about the man you shot last March.”

Having already been questioned by the cops for more than an hour, Ali was surprised when Victor began grilling her as well.

“What about him? Ben Witherspoon was a vicious man who broke into my house and attacked me. I shot him, all right, but since he attacked me in my own home, the shooting was ruled self-defense, and I’d do it again in a minute.”

“What about the lady who tried to force you off the highway? She’s dead, too, isn’t she?”

“Yes, but—”

“Do you happen to see a pattern here?” Victor asked.

“I do see a pattern,” Ali said, her temper rising. “You seem to be giving me hell about all kinds of things that have nothing whatsoever to do with what’s going on here. Why? Aren’t you supposed to be my attorney?”

“I am your attorney. It’s my job to look down the road, see what’s coming in our direction, and do what I can to mitigate it. All those reporters down in the lobby—the ones who aren’t getting a chance to interview you—are doing exactly the same thing I did. They’re checking out every available bit of Ali Reynolds’s history they can, including every archived posting on cutlooseblog.com. By the time you wake up tomorrow morning, regardless of whether or not you’ve been officially charged with a crime, you’re going to be on trial in the media for everything you’ve ever said or done. They’re going to turn you into this year’s big story. You’ll be cast as a former media elite who considers herself above the law and is probably getting away with murder.”

“All I did was defend myself. Bringing up those old cases isn’t fair.”

“No, it’s not,” Victor agreed. “But that’s how it’s going to play out, especially if charges are brought in either one of these new cases.”

“What about innocent until proven guilty?”

“Don’t be naive, Ali,” Victor said. “You know as well as I do, perception is everything, and the media are the ones who control that. Even if we prove you innocent in a court of law, dodging the criminal charge will only be the start of your problems. Next on the agenda will be a wrongful death suit where the burden of proof will be far less stringent. As Paul Grayson’s primary heir, you’ll make a very inviting target. Where’s your gun, by the way?”

“My Glock? It’s in the safe in Mom’s and my room, but it’s also legal. I have a valid license to carry.”

“Valid or not, leave your gun in the safe,” Victor advised. “If you end up being questioned again, you’ll be way better off if the cops don’t find a weapon on your person.”

Before Ali could reply, the door opened and Dave Holman ushered April into the room. She looked ghastly. “I think she needs to lie down,” Dave said.

As Ali rose to relieve Dave of his charge, Victor gathered his briefcase and stood as well. “I’ll be going then,” he said. “Hopefully for the last time today.”

Ali led April into the other room, where she flopped down onto the bed without even stripping off her clothes. “Are you all right?” Ali asked.

“I’m tired,” April said. “My back hurts. I need some sleep.”

Ali left her there and returned to the other room, closing the door behind her. She found Dave standing by the window. “I don’t think your attorney likes me,” Dave said.

“That’s fair enough,” Ali said, “since I’m not so sure I like him very much at the moment, either. How was it?”

“The hospital?” Dave shook his head. “Not a good scene,” he replied. “I felt sorry for April. It’s a lot for someone her age to handle.”

Ali nodded and looked around the suite, realizing for the first time that Edie hadn’t returned with Dave. “What about Mom?” she asked.

“Said she was dead on her feet,” Dave replied. “Told me to tell you she was going to bed and not to worry about waking her when you come in. She said she’ll take out her hearing aids and won’t hear a thing.”

“Why wouldn’t she be tired?” Ali returned. “I’m sure she got up at the usual time this morning and drove all the way here. Now it’s way past her bedtime.”

“What about your bedtime?” Dave asked. “And what about dinner? Did you have anything to eat?”

“Not since lunch.”

“I’ll take you to dinner then.”

“What about the reporters?”

Dave grinned. “Don’t worry. I’m not stupid. I’ve learned the drill. You call the bellman, go up and down in the service elevator, and hand over the tip. How do you think I got April in and out without being seen? And then there’s my secret transportation device.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m sure the reporters have spotters keeping an eye on your Cayenne. And I don’t doubt there was a huge flap when Victor took off in that enormous Lincoln of his. But it turns out nobody pays the least bit of attention to a beat-out Nissan Sentra. It’s right up there with one of Harry Potter’s invisibility cloaks.”

Ali was genuinely surprised. In the months since she’d stopped working, she had returned to her long-neglected habit of reading for pleasure. She had allowed herself the guilty indulgence of reading the entire Harry Potter series and had enjoyed it far more than she had expected.

“You read Harry Potter?” she asked.

Dave rolled his eyes. “I’ve got kids, don’t I? Now, are you coming to dinner or not?”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Somewhere no one will expect to find you,” he said. “Denny’s. And don’t give me any grief about it. After forking over a fortune in tips this afternoon, it’s the best I can do.”

“Are you kidding?” Ali asked. “If you’re offering a Grand Slam, I’m there.”

{ CHAPTER 10 }

In the months Ali had been back home in Sedona, she had become reacquainted with the small-town intimacy of the Sugar Loaf Café. Now she found herself disappearing in the bustling anonymity of a corporate-run restaurant. The colorful, multipage plastic menus were the same everywhere. So was the food. The meal Ali ordered was good, but it didn’t come close to measuring up to one of Bob Larson’s.

“Victor thinks you should leave,” Ali told Dave over dinner. “You and Mom both. He’s afraid that having you poking around will somehow ‘muddy the waters.’”

“Tough,” Dave Holman replied. “I don’t like Victor. Victor doesn’t like me. That makes us even. I have three weeks of vacation coming. I called the office this afternoon and told Sheriff Maxwell I’m taking ’em. I’m here for the duration. And if things get settled sooner than that, I’ll camp out over at Lake Havasu and visit with my kids.”

“How are they doing?” Ali asked.

While Dave had been off serving in Iraq with his reserve unit, Roxanne, his now former wife, had taken up with a sleazy timeshare salesman. Months earlier, when the new husband had been transferred to Lake Havasu, Roxanne had moved, taking Dave’s kids with her. He had been devastated.

“Medium,” Dave replied glumly. “Gary, the cretin, lost his job. Got caught in some kind of corporate hanky-panky. Roxie didn’t tell me any of the gory details, and I’m probably better off not knowing. The thing is, Gary is currently unemployed, and they may end up having to move again. I’m not sure where—Vegas, maybe. The kids are sick about it. So am I.”

“Have you thought about taking Roxie back to court and trying to get custody?” Ali asked.

Dave shook his head. “Are you kidding? I’m a man. I’ve got about as much chance of winning a custody fight as I do of winning at Powerball. And since I never buy a lotto ticket, that’s not likely to happen. But let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about you.”

“What about me?”

“This is serious, Ali. Really serious.”

“Victor has already pointed that out,” Ali responded. “Several different times. And it could be serious for you, too. Earlier the LAPD cops were asking a lot of questions about you. So was Victor, for that matter.”

“Screw Victor,” Dave said. “But it makes sense. If the cops are looking for you to have an accomplice, then I could be a likely subject. Who better than a renegade homicide detective to figure out a way to cover up a murder?”

“So what do we do?” Ali asked.

“We fight back.”

“But you can’t do that, can you? You’re a cop.”

He smiled grimly. “You’d be surprised at what I can do. What did you tell the two homicide dicks?”

“I told them exactly what happened, that you and Mom and I were all together at the hotel this afternoon, right up until we went over to the house and found Monique at the bottom of the staircase. I got the impression that they were going to go check out the hotel’s security tapes to see whether or not I was telling the truth about my comings and goings.”

“Did they tell you what time Monique took her header?” Dave asked.

“No. Why?”

“Because she may have been on the floor for a long time before we found her. If she fell before I got to the hotel, we could still have a problem on that score.”

“Is there any way to find out?” Ali asked.

“Officially, no,” Dave replied. “Unofficially, maybe. I’m assuming they asked you who all was at the house today.”

Ali nodded.

“You’d better tell me, too, then,” he said. “Give me the whole list. As far as I’m concerned, it’s time we started running our own parallel investigation.”

“But—” Ali began.

“Victor Angeleri is looking out for you,” Dave said, “but the man is being paid good money to look out for you. Nobody’s paying my freight. I’m the one who has to look out for me. If you don’t want to have anything to do with this, fine. I’ll do it on my own.”

“What do you need exactly?”

“I need you to tell me whatever you told them. In detail.”

Knowing she had been leaving April’s room for the night, Ali had dragged her computer along with her when she headed out. Now, at Ali’s request, Dave went out to his Nissan and retrieved Ali’s laptop. For the next hour or so, Ali told the story one more time, using her air-card network to pluck appropriate telephone numbers and addresses off the Internet. Dave’s method was far more low-tech. He jotted his notes expertly on a series of paper napkins, including the part about her close encounter with the boulder.

“You’re sure it was an accident?” Dave wanted to know.

“I think it was an accident,” Ali told him. “It looked like an accident, but with everything else that’s gone on…”

“We’d better check it out,” Dave said.

When they finally finished the grueling process, Ali was a rag. “I’ve got to go back to the hotel,” she said. “It’s time.”

By then it was late enough and the lobby deserted enough that Ali risked venturing in through the front door. Upstairs, walking toward her room on what was posted as a nonsmoking floor, she was surprised to find the corridor reeking of cigarette smoke. She was tempted to call back down to the lobby to complain, but then she thought better of it. The last thing April or Edie needed was someone from hotel security pounding on doors and waking everybody up.

Inside the room, Ali found that her mother hadn’t bothered to close the blackout curtains. Even without turning on a light, there was plenty of illumination for Ali to find her way around the room. Her mother was sound asleep, clinging to the far side of the single king-sized bed. Ali undressed and climbed in on the other side. By the time her head hit the pillow, she was asleep. She awakened to the click of the door lock and the smell of coffee as Edie let herself back into the room. A glance at the clock told Ali it was past seven.

“Sorry to wake you,” her mother apologized. “I’ve been up since four, and I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to go downstairs to get some coffee and the newspapers.”

She unloaded two paper cups and a stack of newspapers onto the coffee table while Ali got up and staggered into the bathroom.

“You must have gotten home late,” Edie observed over the top of a newspaper when Ali emerged.

“Dave took me to Denny’s for dinner,” Ali answered. “And you’re right. It was late when I got home. Anything in the paper?”

“Lots,” Edie replied. “Help yourself.”

Ali settled onto the couch and picked up one of the other papers where Monique Ragsdale’s death, under suspicious circumstances, was front-page news. Her relationship to network executive Paul Grayson, who had been murdered two days earlier, was laid out in tabloid-worthy detail. The cops were cagey. The public information officer mentioned that detectives had identified several people of interest in the case but that no arrests had been made at this time.

Edie was evidently reading something similar. “I’m assuming you’re one of the ‘persons of interest’?”

“Who else?” Ali responded. She said nothing more.

When the first cup of coffee was gone, she called room service and ordered breakfast for two along with more coffee—a full pot this time. Then, with Edie still preoccupied with the hard-copy newspapers, Ali booted up her computer.

Dear Babe,

My name is Adele Richardson. I used to watch you when you were on the news here in L.A. and I’ve been a fan of cutlooseblog.com from the time you started it. And I’m sure you know the reason. Something very similar happened to me. Not the job thing but a very similar marriage disaster. Over the months I’ve admired the way you’ve picked yourself up and gone on, reaching out to help others along the way. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that you’re one of my heroes. And, because of you, I’ve started reading other blogs as well. Who knows? Maybe you’ve turned me into an addict. Are there twelve-step programs for people addicted to reading blogs?

Anyway, I read your last post and I’m smart enough to read between the lines. As long as you’re caught up in any kind of legal proceedings, I’m sure your attorney won’t let you do any posting. But I’m also selfish enough to miss having cutloose as part of my morning routine. So I’m writing to you today with a proposition. Maybe you’ll think I’m being too forward. If so, all you have to do is press the delete button.

I was a journalism major in college. Then, during my senior year, I got engaged and realized that for me, marriage and kids and a career in journalism just wasn’t going to work, so I switched over to elementary education. I’ve been teaching third grade in Escondido for the past fifteen years. It turns out that marriage and elementary education didn’t work out very well, either, but how was I to know?

So here’s the nervy part. Unlike you, I’m not famous, but I am a survivor. My husband ended up getting caught up in online gambling. We lost everything, including the house, our savings, and most of my retirement account as well. I’m divorced now. Slowly but surely I’m rebuilding my life—just as you’re rebuilding yours.

Sometimes one of the bloggers I read needs to take a break to go on vacation or to have a baby or even because there’s some kind of health crisis. A lot of the time, they just put their blog on hiatus for a while and then go back to writing it when they’re good and ready. Others invite guest bloggers to sit in and take over for them in the meantime. That way, regular readers don’t get out of the habit of checking the site every day.

And that’s why I’m writing to you today—to see if you’d like me to be your guest blogger for the next little while—until you’re able to come back. Yes, I suppose I could just kick over the traces and start my own blog, but I’ve followed what you do on cutloose, and I’d really like to make a contribution and help you.

I’m assuming you can see from this that I’m not exactly illiterate. From reading your blogs, I know we share similar opinions on many issues, although you probably can’t tell that from what I’ve written here. (I do have an unfair advantage, since, through reading your columns, I know you far better than you know me.)

You don’t have to answer right now. In fact, you don’t have to answer at all, but if you’d like to have me do a couple of sample blog postings for you, I’d be glad to audition. Let me know.

ADELE RICHARDSON, AKA LEDA

Ali was touched by Adele’s offer. She was also provoked by it. Based on Victor’s advice, she had announced she was putting cutloose aside for the time being, and Adele was responding to that in a kind and supportive fashion. But included in that kindness was an implicit agreement with Victor’s take on things—that Ali Reynolds needed to sit down and shut up. This morning that didn’t seem likely.

Dear Adele/Leda,

Thank you for your kind offer. I’ve been rethinking my position. In the past I’ve used cutloose as a way of responding to and dealing with events that were going on in my life at the time. As you so correctly pointed out, the legal ramifications occurring in my life right now make that difficult since there are things happening—the things that are most important to me—that I won’t be able to discuss. But I don’t think I can walk away from cutloose entirely.

From your note, I see you have an interesting perspective about having had your life blow up and figuring out a way to move on afterward. And that’s the whole point of cutlooseblog.com—to support women who find themselves in those difficult circumstances. So do send me your comments, and I’ll be glad to post them, but for right now, cutloose is back in business, and I’d better go to work.

BABE

About then room service showed up. Edie let the waiter and his serving cart into the room. “Shall I see if April’s ready for breakfast?” Edie asked.

Ali had ordered a fruit plate along with a basket of pastries. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty,” she said.

Edie bustled off down the hall. She returned a few minutes later with a puffy-eyed April in tow. Her hair was in disarray, and she was wrapped in a terry-cloth robe that once again didn’t quite cover her middle. The faint odor of cigarette smoke entered the room when April did.

“Thanks for waking me,” she said, helping herself to a coffee cup and a plate of pastries. “The baby was jumping around all night. I hardly got any sleep at all, but now I’m starving.”

April had been starving the day before, too. Ali remembered how, while she was pregnant with Chris, she’d also been hungry all the time. “Help yourself,” she said.

Settling into the room’s only armchair, April set her coffee on a nearby end table and perched a loaded plate on her belly. “The cops said I won’t be able to go back to the house until they’re done with it,” she announced, buttering a blueberry muffin. “They say it’s a crime scene. I thought Mom just fell down the stairs, but they’re thinking she was pushed.”

Ali simply nodded.

“One of my friends, Cindy, runs a shop called Motherhood in Bloom,” April continued. “I thought I’d call her later this morning to see if she can bring some stuff by here—underwear, bras, and some new maternity clothes. I’ve got to have something to wear. And what about colors? I don’t have anything in black. Or should I wear navy? Would that be better?”

Ali and her mother exchanged glances. As far as Ali was concerned, April’s preoccupation with her wardrobe seemed very cold-blooded. Edie was the one who answered. “For the services, you mean?” she asked.

April nodded. “And for interviews, too,” she said. “Last night at the hospital I happened to run into someone named Sheila Rosenburg. She wants to set up an interview with me.”

Happened to run into her? Ali thought. That was no accident. “An interview for Court TV?” she asked.

April nodded again. “You know Sheila then?”

Ali had flat-out refused Sheila Rosenburg’s offer of an interview, and she hoped April would do the same, but it wasn’t Ali’s place to tell her so. It’s April’s decision, not mine, she reminded herself.

“I know of Sheila Rosenburg,” Ali answered aloud, “but I don’t know her personally. I’m concerned that she’ll try to turn your mother’s death and Paul’s into some kind of media circus.”

April seemed unconcerned. “Some people pay for interviews,” April replied, reaching for another pastry. “And she said she knew of an author who might be able to get me a book contract—you know, so I can write about all this while it’s going on, sort of like a diary or a journal. She said people are really interested in true crime. It might even end up being a bestseller. I wouldn’t have to do the actual writing, either, since I’m not that good at it. My name would be on the cover of the book, but the publisher would hire somebody else to do that part of it, a ghostwriter, she called it.”

Ali was appalled. Shocked and appalled, but her mother was the one who spoke up.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” Edie asked. “I know this is all happening to you, April, but it’s also happening to your baby. It’s going to be part of Sonia Marie’s history, too. Do you want to bring a child into the world with that kind of notoriety?”

It’s also happening to me, Ali thought, but there didn’t seem to be any point in mentioning it. April was totally absorbed in her own concerns.

“Maybe not,” April agreed, “but I think I’m going to need the money.”

“Surely we’ll be able to work something out so you won’t have to lay all our lives bare for the world to see,” Ali said.

“I hope so,” April said. She stood up. “I’d better go make that call. Those detectives said they’d be by to see me later this morning, too. I’d like to have some clean clothes to wear before they get here.”

April went out and closed the door behind her.

“Whoa!” Edie Larson said. “That girl is a lot tougher than she looks.”

Ali nodded. “Maybe she’s a chip off her mother’s block.”

“And smoking while she’s pregnant?” Edie shook her head.

At that juncture Edie’s cell phone rang with a call from Bob Larson back in Sedona. While Edie brought her husband up to date, Ali’s phone rang, too. It was Chris.

“Sorry I was so cranky last night,” he said. “I felt like you were leaving me out of everything.”

“I’m sorry, too,” she said.

“So do you want me to come out there or not?”

“Not right now,” she said. “I’ll probably need you to come over later, but for now I think Grandma and I have things under control.”

“All right then,” he said. “But remember, keep me posted.”

Edie was still chatting on the phone, so Ali returned to her computer.

Ms. Reynolds,

You fired my uncle yesterday without giving him even so much as a day’s notice much less two weeks. And then you have the gall to say you have no idea what you could have done or whether or not you should apologize? How dare you?

ANDREA MORALES

But I didn’t fire anyone, Ali thought. What the hell is this woman raving about?

Then, sitting staring at the words on the computer screen, Ali had a sudden flash of memory. She remembered coming home late one night to find the house alive with the smells of cooking meat and masa. Following her nose and the sound of voices and laughter to the brightly lit kitchen, Ali had found Elvira and several others, women and girls both, clustered in the kitchen busily making dozens of tamales in advance of Paul’s annual Cinco de Mayo celebration. One of the women had been Jesus Sanchez’s wife, Clemencia. Had one of those girls been his niece, perhaps? Ali had a dim memory that one of them had been named Andrea, but she wasn’t sure.

Still puzzled, Ali sent off a four-word reply:

Dear Andrea,

Who is your uncle?

REGARDS,

ALI REYNOLDS

Ali worked her way through a long list of well-wishing e-mails, most of them begging her not to abandon her blog. Because many of the notes touched on Paul Grayson’s death, she didn’t post any of them but answered each one directly with the same kind of non-engagement strategy she had employed earlier. It was gratifying to know that her readers were as reluctant to give up on her as she was on them. Finally, she turned to write her response.

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

Sunday, September 18, 2005

In my last post I said I was going to step away from cutloose for a time, but it turns out that was a lie. I don’t want to step away. I’ve heard from many of you this morning. Most have wished me well and urged me not to abandon ship. So I’m not going to.

I’ve been doing this for more than six months now—yes, last week was my half-year blogiversary. In the past, there has always been a sense of immediacy to what I’ve written. My posts have offered me a way to examine things that were going on in my life. I’ve been amazed to learn that what I’ve written has resonated with so many people, some of whom have shared similar experiences.

This morning one of my fans wrote and offered to stand in for me for as long as necessary. While I appreciate Leda’s kind offer, hearing from her brought me up short and made me realize I’m unwilling to give up my forum. So cutlooseblog is back. For right now, there are things I simply won’t be able to discuss. I probably won’t be able to post comments from you regarding those issues, either, and I beg your understanding in that regard.

But there is something I can say. My mother is sitting right here beside me as I write this. We’re in a hotel room several hundred miles away from both our homes, away from her business and from her husband, my father, who is working two jobs—his and hers—to keep their restaurant afloat while she’s here backstopping me—her daughter. Their daughter.

So this post is for parents—for my parents and for all those other parents out there—the ones who stick with their offspring through thick and thin; who don’t turn their backs on their children no matter what; who realize that regardless of how old their kids may be, their children are still their children.

Thanks, Mom and Dad. You’re the greatest.

Posted 11:10 A.M., September 18, 2005 by Babe

By the time she finished writing her post, there were several new e-mails. The third one of those was from her old fan Velma.

Dear Babe,

When I first started reading cutloose, I didn’t even know what a blog was. Now I read several of them. One of the ones I read daily, besides yours, is called socalcopshop. It talks about stuff going on here in the L.A. area that hardly ever makes it into the regular papers. You might want to check out this morning’s post. Do you know this guy? Can you sue him?

VELMA T IN LAGUNA

Even as Ali searched for the Web site, she had an inkling of what she would find there, and she wasn’t disappointed. The moment she saw the headline, her heart sank.

BLACK WIDOW OF ROBERT LANE RIDES AGAIN

Alison Reynolds, already a person of interest in the grisly homicide of her estranged network executive husband, Paul Grayson, is now the target of a new police investigation as police look into the mysterious death of the woman who, had she and he both lived, would have become Paul Grayson’s new mother-in-law. Monique Ragsdale, now deceased, was the mother of April Anne Gaddis, Mr. Grayson’s intended bride, whom he was scheduled to marry in a ceremony at his Robert Lane mansion early yesterday afternoon.

Sources close to the investigation state that the two women may have clashed during a meeting earlier in the day, prior to Ms. Ragsdale’s fatal plunge down the stairway of the house formerly owned by Ms. Reynolds and her husband. Rather than the site of a joyous celebration, the house is now surrounded by crime scene tape as investigators attempt to get to the bottom of what happened.

Mr. Grayson disappeared from a pre-wedding bachelor party on Thursday night. His bound body was found later near the wreckage of a vehicle that had been left on the train tracks west of Palm Springs.

At least one anonymous source claimed that because divorce proceedings between Mr. Grayson and Ms. Reynolds were never finalized, she is allegedly her husband’s sole heir, leaving his pregnant fiancée unprovided for. This was supposedly the basis for the alleged confrontation between Ms. Reynolds and Ms. Ragsdale.

Messy divorce proceedings between Ms. Reynolds and her estranged husband have played out in a very public fashion after she was fired from her position as an evening newscaster by the local affiliate of her husband’s network. For the past six months she has vented her side of the story as an ongoing saga in posts to a feminist-leaning Web blog called cutlooseblog.com.

In that same six-month period, Ms. Reynolds has been questioned as part of four separate homicide investigations. In two of those she has been exonerated and the cases are considered closed. The other two are still under active investigation, one by the LAPD and the other by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.

In view of Ms. Reynolds’s mounting legal difficulties, her blog has reportedly gone on hiatus.

Posted 7:55 A.M., LMB

No, it hasn’t, Ali thought to herself. Cutloose is definitely back.

Ali scanned back through the post. There were enough journalistic weasel words—“alleged,” “supposed,” “reportedly”—along with the ever-so-useful anonymous sources routine, that the article probably wasn’t actionable. So, no, Velma, I probably can’t sue this guy. As for the signature? LMB. There was no additional information about him available, but Ali had a suspicion that he and the guy who had sent her the poison-pen note earlier, Lance-a-lot, were one and the same.

She looked back through her discarded mail. Sure enough, his address was still there. She started to send him a terse note about publishing unfounded speculation, then she changed her mind. Instead, Ali deleted her half-written e-mail and permanently deleted his e-mail address as well. If Lance-a-lot wanted attention, he sure as hell wasn’t going to get it from her.

Ali was disheartened to know, however, that his cutesy pet name for her, Black Widow, was out. Even though the man’s allegations were groundless, she understood that other media outlets would most likely pick up on Lance’s lead and run with it.

Ali was about to turn off the computer to go shower and dress when another e-mail popped up. Ali recognized the address—Andrea Morales.

There were only two words in Andrea’s message:

Jesus Sanchez.

So she was right, this Andrea was that Andrea—the one from the kitchen tamale-making project. But what was this about someone firing Jesus? It made no sense. It was his TLC that kept the grounds of the Robert Lane mansion in pristine order. Why would anyone fire him? Ali sent off yet another immediate reply.

Dear Andrea,

Please believe me that I know nothing about this. Your uncle’s work for us has always been more than satisfactory.

Below you’ll find my relevant contact information.

Give me a call at your earliest convenience so we can discuss this and sort it out. Thank you.

REGARDS,

ALI REYNOLDS

Ali slammed shut her computer and started into the bathroom. “What’s going on?” Edie asked.

“I’m going to shower and get dressed,” Ali said. “Somebody fired the gardener yesterday, and Jesus’s niece thinks it’s my fault.”

“I’m not surprised,” Edie replied. “You’re as bad as George Bush. It looks like everything is your fault.”

Yes, Ali thought. Isn’t that the truth.

A few minutes later, dressed but with a towel wrapped around her wet hair, Ali hurried down the hall to April’s room and knocked on the door. A young woman Ali had never met before opened the door. The room was strewn with a collection of clothing and garment bags. April stood in front of a mirror wearing a full-length navy blue maternity smock complete with wide pleats, a white Peter Pan collar, and matching white cuffs.

“This is my friend Cindy Durbin,” April explained. “Even though it’s Sunday and she’s supposed to be off work, she brought over some clothes for me to try on. What do you think?” April turned in front of the mirror. “Is this too retro?”

Ali nodded curtly in Cindy’s direction. The outfit was retro, all right. It looked like it could have stepped right out of Lucille Ball’s 1950s costume closet for the old I Love Lucy shows that were still in perpetual reruns on TV Land.

“It’s fine,” Ali said.

April turned from the mirror and studied Ali’s face, which must have betrayed some of her roiling feelings. “What’s wrong?” April asked.

“Someone fired Jesus Sanchez, the gardener, yesterday,” Ali said. “Did you do it?”

“No,” April responded. “Mom did. His salary and the cook’s both came out of what Paul kept in petty cash. Other than my credit cards, that’s the only real money I have right now. Mother said I couldn’t afford to keep paying them because I’d run out of money that much sooner. She said she’d take care of getting rid of them for me so I wouldn’t have to do it. Why, did we do something wrong?”

Yes, you did something wrong, Ali thought, but there didn’t seem much point in discussing it.

“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll fix it. What’s the cook’s name?”

“Henrietta, I think,” April said. “Henrietta Jackson.”

“Where does she live? How long had she worked for you? Do you have a phone number for her?”

“No. Paul probably had that information, but I don’t. It would be in his office.”

And that’s locked up behind a wall of crime scene tape, Ali thought. How convenient.

“That’s all right,” she said. “I’ll find her.”

“Why?” April asked. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to hire them back,” Ali replied. “Or, if nothing else, I’ll at least offer them severance pay.”

“But who’s going to pay it?” April objected. “I can’t.”

“Then I guess I will,” Ali said.

With that, she stalked out of the room and slammed the door shut behind her.

{ CHAPTER 11 }

With her temper flaring, Ali stormed back into the room she was sharing with her mother, where she was surprised to find Edie seated at the desk in front of Ali’s open laptop. Dave Holman had arrived and taken over the easy chair. He was also finishing up the leavings from their breakfast cart.

“No breakfast buffet at Motel 6,” he explained, polishing off the last remaining croissant. “Who lit a fire under you?”

“Monique Ragsdale fired both the cook and the gardener yesterday to keep April from spending some of her precious stash of cash. She sent them packing and blamed it all on me.”

“So?” Dave said.

“We’re going to find them and hire them back.”

“But they can’t go back to the house,” Dave objected. “The place is a crime scene.”

“The fact that it’s a crime scene isn’t their fault,” Ali replied. “If nothing else, I can offer them severance pay. Did anyone call?”

Edie nodded and handed Ali her cell phone. “Andrea Morales,” Edie said. “She wants you to call her back.”

“The gardener’s niece,” Ali explained as she scrolled through her received calls and punched the appropriate number.

“Andrea?” Ali asked.

“Yes.”

“This is all a terrible misunderstanding. Your uncle never should have been fired in the first place. Is it possible for you to put me in touch with him?”

“Why?” Andrea asked bluntly.

“Because I want to offer him severance pay at least and possibly his job back,” Ali answered. “There’s some confusion with my husband’s estate at the moment. The right hand doesn’t necessarily know what the left hand is doing.”

“The woman who fired him knew perfectly well what she was doing,” Andrea countered. “She told him he should get his stuff together and get the hell out. She said you were the boss now, and that you didn’t want to pay him anymore.”

“But I will pay him,” Ali insisted. “Can you put me in touch with him?”

“My uncle’s English isn’t so good,” Andrea said. “He’ll need someone to translate.”

“Would you?”

“I guess,” Andrea agreed.

“So where is he?”

“Here,” she said. “Well, a few blocks away.”

“Where’s here?” Ali asked.

Andrea didn’t answer the question directly. “Let me ask him if he wants to talk to you. I’ll call you back.”

Ali hung up and turned to face Dave. “Now how do I find Henrietta Jackson?”

“Who’s she? The cook?” Dave asked.

Ali nodded.

“And that’s all the information you have on her—just her name? No address? No phone number?”

“Paul probably had more information than that, but it would be in his office and—”

“And the house is a crime scene,” Dave finished for her.

“Exactly.”

Dave busied himself with making phone calls, but Ali didn’t listen to what he was doing. She was thinking about Paul Grayson. She had always had her own money, but Paul had handled the bill paying for everything, including the household accounts. She had never realized until today that the help had been paid in cash. Despite the fact that they had been in this country for years, it probably meant that either Jesus or his wife, Clemencia Sanchez, or both of them were illegals, living and working beneath the INS radar.

For the first time Ali wondered about Elvira Jimenez, Paul’s former cook. Was the same true for her? Was she, too, working without proper papers? And what had happened to her? After years of working in the household, why had she been let go? And what about Henrietta? The woman’s distinctive accent placed her as being from somewhere in the southern United States. She certainly wasn’t an undocumented immigrant, so was she working in an underground economy simply to avoid paying taxes? And if Ali did manage to find Jesus and Henrietta and offer them their jobs back, what kind of liability would she be incurring?

“Your cook has no driver’s license as far as I can find,” Dave announced a few minutes later. “At least, she doesn’t have a California driver’s license.”

“How did you do that?”

“I know people who know people,” he said.

“What about Jesus Sanchez? Could you find him?”

“I thought his niece was going to put you in touch with him.”

“What if she doesn’t? What if I need to find him on my own?”

A moment later, when Ali’s phone rang, her concern about locating Jesus Sanchez proved entirely accurate. “My uncle doesn’t want to see you,” Andrea Morales announced.

“I just want to talk to him,” Ali began.

“He doesn’t want to talk to you,” Andrea returned forcefully. “He said no, and that means no.” With that, she hung up.

Ali was stunned. Because of Jesus’s limited English skills and because Ali spoke only rudimentary Spanish, communications between the two of them had always been minimal at best. As far as Ali knew, however, there had never been any kind of ill will.

“Andrea Morales,” Dave was saying into his phone as Ali put down hers. “You’ve dozens? Give me the addresses.”

Minutes later, though, armed with a phone book and the list of addresses, Dave was able to match one specific Andrea Morales with the received call number logged into Ali’s cell phone. “There you are,” he said triumphantly. “Andrea and Miguel Morales, two-twenty-four South Sixth, Pico Gardens.”

Ali knew from her days on the news desk that Pico Gardens had a reputation for being a center of gang-related activities. It was also known as a haven for newly arrived illegal aliens.

“Let’s go,” Ali said. She went over to the wall safe, opened it, and removed both her Glock and the small-of-back holster she had purchased to carry it.

“Go where?” Dave asked. He eyed her weapon uneasily. “And is that really necessary?”

“In Pico Gardens?” Ali returned. “Yes. If a couple of gringos are going there, being armed is probably the only sensible idea. Andrea told me that Jesus lives somewhere nearby—within a few blocks of where she and her husband live. Jesus drives an old blue van. If it’s parked on the street, I’ll recognize it.”

“It didn’t sound as though Jesus is eager to talk to you,” Dave pointed out.

“Doesn’t matter,” Ali said. “I want to talk to him.” Ali turned to her mother. “Are you coming along?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” Edie said. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll hang around here. I’ll use your computer to surf the Net.”

The idea of her mother, Edie Larson, “surfing the Net” was still strange to Ali. Amazing even. “Be my guest,” she said.

“I’ll also look in on April from time to time,” Edie added. “Just to make sure she’s okay.”

When Dave and Ali left the hotel, they attempted the back door exit that had worked flawlessly for them the day before, but the media folks had wised up. A reporter, one lowly enough to be relegated to hanging around by the reeking kitchen Dumpster, and her equally low-on-the-totem-pole photographer were lying in wait just outside the door.

“Hey, Ms. Reynolds,” the reporter called, holding her microphone aloft and rushing up to the car. “Is it true you’ve been brought in for questioning in two homicide cases? Do you have any comment?”

Of course I don’t have a comment, Ali thought. She said nothing as Dave opened the door on his Nissan. It was too bad they hadn’t taken her Cayenne on this trip. Now the media would have information on what had previously been their stealth vehicle.

The photographer focused his camera on Dave. “Out of my way,” he said with a snarl, but the photographer didn’t take the hint. He was still snapping away as Dave scrambled into the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut behind him.

“What jackasses!” he exclaimed. “Were you ever that bad?”

“I don’t think so,” Ali said. I hope not, she thought.

The reporter and photographer were legging it for the front of the building and, presumably, some vehicle, when Dave peeled out of the back driveway and bounced over the edge of the curb into the street.

“Are they going to catch us?” Ali asked.

“Not if I can help it,” Dave returned. “Now which way?”

Without her GPS or a detailed map to rely on, Ali had to think for a moment before she was able to get her bearings and direct him onto the southbound ramp of the 405 and from there onto the 10.

“How’s your Spanish?” Ali asked as they sped down the freeway.

“I speak menu Spanish fairly well. Why?”

“Because Jesus speaks almost no English and I speak almost no Spanish.”

“Maybe his niece, Andrea Whatever, would translate for us.”

“I doubt that,” Ali said. She picked up her cell phone and scrolled through her phone book until she located the name Duarte.

During her time as a newscaster in L.A., one of Ali’s PR roles had been serving as the station’s goodwill ambassador to the cancer community. Because of her own tragic history with Dean’s death from cancer, she had been a likely and willing candidate. She had served on boards and walked in Races for the Cure and Relays for Life. But she had also done a lot of hands-on caregiving, work that had nothing to do with public relations and never made it into the news. One such case had been a three-year-old leukemia patient named Alonso Duarte.

Lonso’s father, Eduardo, had worked at Ali’s television station in the capacity of janitor. His wife, Rosa, had worked as a maid for a series of hotels. Once Lonso was diagnosed, the station had broadcast a series of stories about his battle and about his family’s plight as well. They had helped raise money to fill in the gap between the bills and what medical insurance actually paid. The station’s official involvement had eventually ended, but Ali had remained a part of the family’s support system during Lonso’s many hospitalizations and chemo treatments. The last Ali had heard, the boy had been in remission for four years.

Eddie Duarte had been working at the station the night Ali had been let go. He, of all people, had been drafted to carry her box of personal possessions out to her car. At the time he had offered to testify on her behalf in any wrongful dismissal suit. Since negotiations on that score were still pending, Eddie’s testimony in the matter had so far been unnecessary. As far as Ali knew he was still on the station’s payroll, but since he was a nighttime janitor, she worried about calling during the morning hours and waking him. But she did it anyway—called him and woke him.

“Ali,” he said, when he finally realized who she was. “So good to hear from you. How are you? I heard about your husband. I’m so sorry.”

Sorry for what? Ali wondered. Sorry because Paul’s dead or sorry because he was such a jerk?

“Thank you,” she said. “How is Rosa? How’s Lonso?”

“Rosa’s fine and Lonso’s great. He even got to play peewee league this year—second base.”

For a child who had been hovering at death’s door five years earlier, this seemed like nothing short of a miracle.

“But what about you?” he asked. “I don’t work for the station anymore. I got hired on with another company. If you need me to testify…”

“We may still need you to do that, but right now, I need something else,” Ali said.

“Name it,” Eddie said.

“I’m trying to find my old gardener,” Ali said. “There’s been a misunderstanding. I need to hire him back, but I don’t speak enough Spanish.”

“You need me to translate?” Eddie asked.

“Yes,” Ali said. “Please.”

“Where? When?”

“Soon,” Ali said. “As soon as possible. But I’m not sure where. He lives somewhere in Pico Gardens, but we’re not there yet, and I don’t have an address.”

“The only place I know there is that old Linda Vista Hospital, the abandoned hospital they use for movies and TV shows,” Eddie said. “I could meet you there—out front in the parking lot. It’ll take me about forty-five minutes to get there.”

“Great,” Ali said. “Maybe by then we’ll have found him.”

“Who’s Eddie?” Dave asked.

“Long story,” Ali returned. “A very long story.”

With Ali on the phone and Dave preoccupied with dodging other drivers, they were in the wrong lane and had missed the fork onto I-10 East. Half an hour after leaving the tony environs of Wilshire Boulevard, they were driving around the desolate, graffiti-marred streets of Boyle Heights. It was a neighborhood of houses that had been built in the early part of the twentieth century and were somehow still holding together. Some of them appeared to be in reasonably decent shape. Others were little more than crumbling wrecks.

They started by locating the Morales household on Sixth and then circled out from there, searching for Jesus Sanchez’s van. As they turned up South Chicago, Ali pointed. “There it is,” she announced. “That’s his van.”

The aging, much dented Aerostar was parked in the driveway of a decrepit duplex.

“Now that we know where to find Jesus, let’s go back to the hospital parking lot and wait for my interpreter to show up.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“Don’t worry. Eddie will be here.”

Once they were parked and waiting, Ali told Dave the Eddie Duarte story from beginning to end. She was just finishing when her phone rang.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Edie Larson said. “If I weren’t down here in the lobby seeing it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it myself.”

Ali switched her phone to “speaker” so Dave could hear both sides of the conversation. “Seeing what?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

“Lights, camera, action,” Edie replied grimly. “April is down here in the lobby in a blue and white maternity outfit with perfect makeup and perfect hair. She’s doing a sit-down interview with some young woman with very long blond hair and an astonishingly short skirt. I saw the logo on one of the cameras. It said Court TV.”

“The blonde would be Sheila Rosenburg,” Ali said. “So April is doing the interview after all.”

“And against our advice,” Edie added. “But there’s more. I told you when you left that I was going to go check on her and see if she needed anything. Only when I opened my door, there was a man coming out of her room, so I ducked back inside ours. He was a young man, by the way, a very good-looking young man.”

“Probably one of her friends,” Ali said.

“That’s what I thought right up until he kissed her good-bye,” Edie returned. “Believe me, it was a lot more than a ‘just friends’ kiss. But when he turned away from her, I recognized him. I had seen him before.”

“Where?” Ali asked.

“On his Web site.”

Ali felt like she was bumbling around in the dark. “What Web site?” she asked.

“Ever since you told me about all that Sumo Sudoku nonsense, I’ve been curious about it,” Edie answered. “I mean, why would Paul and April want to have a bunch of supposedly brainy bodybuilders cluttering up their wedding day? In my experience, weddings are stressful enough without having a film crew and extra people mucking around under hand and foot at the same time. So this morning, I looked up some Sumo Sudoku Web sites and that’s where I found him. The guy’s name is Tracy McLaughlin.”

Ali was stunned. “You’re saying you think April has been messing around with Tracy McLaughlin? Are you kidding?”

“I’m not kidding,” Edie replied. “Do you know if there’s been a paternity test?”

Ali remembered how pleased Paul had been when he learned April was pregnant—pleased and excited.

“I have no idea,” Ali said.

“If there hasn’t been one, there probably should be,” Edie said. “As Paul’s executor, if you’re going to be forced into setting up a trust fund for Paul’s supposed catch colt, you’d best be sure the baby is really his.”

Edie Larson had always been a keen observer of human behavior. One of the spooky things about Ali’s mother, something that had always left her daughter more than slightly mystified, was her innate ability to see through things that went over other people’s heads. Aunt Evelyn, Edie’s twin sister, had always claimed that Edie had eyes in the back of her head. As a child, Ali had believed it was true. Maybe it still was, but this seemed like too much.

“Based on seeing the man in a hotel hallway, you’re convinced Sonia Marie is really Tracy McLaughlin’s baby rather than Paul’s?” Ali asked.

“I’d bet money on it,” Edie declared. “You should have seen the little love tap and the kiss the man laid on April’s tummy as he was saying good-bye. That was a daddy-style maneuver if I’ve ever seen one.”

That meant Paul was cheating on Ali with April, and April was cheating on Paul with Tracy McLaughlin. This was, Ali supposed, entirely predictable.

“What goes around comes around,” she said. “So what do we know about Tracy McLaughlin?”

“Only what was on his Web site, and I’ve got his bio right here,” Edie replied. “Says he came to Hollywood from Des Moines, Iowa, determined to be a stuntman. He ended up in a stunt that went bad and spent the next six months in a full body cast. When he got out of the cast, he went into bodybuilding to regain his strength. He worked puzzles while he was laid up and invented Sumo Sudoku once he got better as a way of proving to people that he had recovered completely. But that’s not all.”

“What’s not all?” Ali asked.

“You’ll never guess who put up a major part of the capital to get Sumo Sudoku off the ground.”

“Paul?”

“You’ve got it. He’s one of the original investors in the organization. There are ten people who put up big bucks to get it started. I don’t recognize any of the other names, but you may. I think that’s why they were holding the Sumo Sudoku tournament at the house on the same day as the wedding. I’m sure Paul knew there would be lots of media coverage. That way the tournament would generate lots of interest…”

“And lots of buzz,” Ali finished. “In this town, buzz is everything. Once something is the current ‘in’ thing, then it’s everybody’s ‘in’ thing. Get one appearance on Jay Leno and you’re on your way.”

A gray Chevrolet Impala pulled up and stopped beside Dave’s Nissan. “I’ve gotta go, Mom,” Ali said. “My translator is here.”

Leaving the Chevy idling, Eddie Duarte hurried over to Ali’s door, reached in, and gave her a swift hug.

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

“No problem,” Eddie returned. “Now where’s this guy you need me to talk to?”

With Eddie following in his Chevy, Dave and Ali drove back to South Chicago Street, where Jesus Sanchez’s distinctive blue van was still parked in the driveway. Dave drove half a block beyond the Sanchez house and then stopped in a parking spot that was large enough for both his Nissan and Eddie’s Impala. Before they could open their doors, however, a big unmarked Crown Victoria came careening around the corner and grabbed the spot just behind Eddie. Dave watched in his mirror as two people exited the vehicle and hurried past the van and into the fenced yard.

“Hey,” Dave began. “I think I know them. Aren’t they the two homicide detectives who came to the hospital to talk to April last night?”

Ali turned and looked. Sure enough, Detectives Tim Hubbard and Rosalie Martin hurried up onto the duplex’s shaded front porch and rang the bell. “They talked to me, too,” Ali said. “What are they doing here?”

“Same thing we are,” Dave replied. “Looking for answers.”

“Which means we’re too late then,” Ali said.

“Looks like,” Dave agreed. “They’ll recognize you. You stay where you are, and I’ll let your friend Eddie know what’s going on.”

While Ali watched, the two detectives tried ringing a doorbell. Then they knocked—and knocked some more. Finally a woman Ali recognized to be Jesus’s wife, Clemencia, came to the door and slipped out onto the porch. She stood there talking to the two detectives for several long minutes, alternately shaking her head and gesturing. A little later, an LAPD patrol car pulled up as well. A young Hispanic officer exited the vehicle and hurried up onto the porch, where he joined in the conversation.

By then Dave had returned. “The new guy is probably here to translate,” Dave muttered. “That means they have the same language problem we do.”

They waited and watched for another fifteen minutes. Finally, the clearly frustrated detectives and the patrolman stepped off the porch and returned to their two separate vehicles. As they drove away, Dave let out a sigh of relief.

“If Jesus is there, he refused to come out and talk to them, and they didn’t go in after him. That means Hubbard and Martin were only here on a fishing expedition, and they went away empty-handed. If they’d had enough for a search warrant, it would have been a different story.”

“Let’s go then,” Ali said, opening her door. “I know Clemencia. At least I’ve met her. Maybe she’ll talk to me.”

Dave Holman didn’t budge. “Are you coming or not?” Ali asked.

“You and Eddie go on ahead,” Dave said. “And you’d better make it quick. If Hubbard and Martin come back with a warrant, this may be your only chance.”

“And what are you going to do?” Ali asked.

“I’ll let you know if it works,” Dave replied.

Ali scrambled out of the Nissan and motioned for Eddie Duarte to join her. A moment later, they were standing on the porch in front of a sun-bleached mahogany door. Ali pressed the doorbell, but there was no answering ring from inside. While she waited, Ali edged over to one of the windows. The curtains had been pulled shut, but there was enough of a space left between them that Ali was able to see into the living room, where a stack of taped cardboard boxes and a collection of mismatched luggage gave evidence of hurried packing. Apparently Jesus and Clemencia Sanchez were headed out of Dodge.

Convinced the doorbell wasn’t in working order, Ali tried knocking instead. Nothing happened then, either.

“Her name is Clemencia,” Ali told Eddie. “Call out to her. Tell her we know she’s inside. Tell her I’m here. Say I need to talk to her and that we aren’t going away until I do—that we’ll stay here all afternoon if necessary. Tell her that the neighbors already saw the cops come and go, and they’re watching us now.”

It was several long minutes before Clemencia Sanchez finally came to the door. She pulled it open slightly and then slipped outside. The look she leveled in Ali’s direction was nothing short of venomous.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“Where’s Jesus?” Ali returned. “I need to talk to him.”

Ali knew for sure that Clemencia understood that much English, but the woman deliberately turned away from her, looking instead to Eddie as though she expected understanding from him rather than a translation, which he nonetheless provided.

“He’s gone,” Clemencia answered. “He went away.”

“Gone where?” Ali asked.

Clemencia shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. He isn’t coming back.”

“But I want to give him his job back,” Ali said. “He should never have been fired in the first place. It was a mistake.”

Unimpressed, Clemencia shrugged again. Ali tried another tack.

“The cops that were here before. What did they want?”

Clemencia’s dark eyes sparked with sudden fury. Her nostrils flared. “Jesus knew they would come for him, and they did. That’s why he left, thank God. He went away before they got here.”

“But why would they come for him?” Ali asked.

“Because that awful woman fired him,” Clemencia said in a barrage of angry Spanish. “You wanted him gone, but she was the one who did the dirty work for you. And when he was ready to leave and went to turn in his keys, there she was—at the bottom of the stairs.”

“Monique had already fallen before Jesus left? Why didn’t he call for help?”

“Because he thought she was already dead,” Clemencia answered. “It looked to him like she was dead. And Jesus knew what the cops would think—that since she fired him, he killed her. He dropped his key ring, and he’s sure they found it. They’ll find his fingerprints there, too, and they’ll blame him.” For the first time, Clemencia’s fury seemed to dissolve into something closer to despair. She stopped speaking and blinked back tears.

At the time the EMTs had been moving Monique to the gurney, Ali had been too busy to pay any attention to the key ring. She had been focused instead on the phone. But she remembered it now. And she knew, just as the detectives had, that the keys had belonged to Jesus Sanchez because his name had been on the ring as well. Paul Grayson had been a great one for wielding his P-Touch labeler. Everyone who had access to the house or the grounds, Ali included, had been issued appropriate sets of keys with their names clearly visible.

She also understood why Jesus had chosen to disappear. She knew full well that the U.S. Constitution aside, all men are not created equal. Hispanics or blacks accused of crimes often found themselves on an entirely different legal track than Anglos did—one with an automatic presumption of guilt rather than innocence. In fact, she thought wryly, the same thing held true when media babes ended up accused of crimes they may not have committed.

“I’d like to help,” Ali said quietly.

Without needing or waiting for Eddie to translate, Clemencia replied, “Why?”

“Because I know what it feels like to be suspected of doing something you haven’t done,” Ali said. She scrounged in her purse until she found one of Victor’s cards. She handed it over. “If Jesus wants an attorney, have him call this man.”

Clemencia studied the gold-embossed card then handed it back. “We could not afford someone like this,” she said.

Just then Ali remembered Velma T’s nephew. Maybe Jesus and Clemencia wouldn’t find him quite as daunting. “There’s another man I could recommend then,” Ali said. “I’ll forward his information to your niece, Andrea.”

“But still…” Clemencia objected. “We can’t afford to pay for any attorney.”

“I can afford it,” Ali said. “And I will. Be sure to tell Jesus that when you talk to him. And be sure he knows that if he wants it, he still has a job.”

With that, she turned and walked away.

{ CHAPTER 12 }

Eddie Duarte stayed on the porch for several minutes after Ali returned to the car and while she was giving Dave a brief summary of what had transpired.

“You gave Jesus Sanchez Victor Angeleri’s card?” he asked incredulously. “Who’s going to pay the bill? I’d hate to think what his hourly billable rate is.”

“She didn’t take it,” Ali said. “But I’ll pay for whatever attorney they do hire.”

“So now you’re setting out to save the world?”

“Only the parts of it I’ve screwed up,” Ali responded.

“Excuse me,” Dave returned. “As far as I can tell, you had nothing at all to do with the fact that Monique Ragsdale took a header down those stairs.”

“No, but if it turns out she was pushed—”

“She was,” Dave interjected.

“You know that for sure?” Ali asked.

Dave nodded. “I have a source who confirmed it as a suspected homicide while you were busy with Clemencia.”

“Then whoever’s responsible is probably connected to me as well,” Ali asserted. “And if Jesus is being wrongly blamed for what happened to her? Well, I’m connected to him, too.”

“I hope your husband left you a ton of money then,” Dave said. “It sounds like you’re going to need it.”

Eddie Duarte approached Ali’s side of the car and tapped on the window. She rolled it down.

“What did Clemencia say after I left?” Ali asked.

Eddie frowned. “She told me that you’re as evil as your husband.”

That revelation hurt Ali’s feelings. Personally, she had to agree about Paul—he was evil—but Ali didn’t like being tarred with the same brush.

“I told her I knew you were a good person,” Eddie continued. “And that if you said you would do something, you would do it. I’m not sure she believed me, though.”

Why would she? Ali thought. “Thank you for saying that, Eddie, and thank you for coming,” she added. “I really appreciate your help.”

“Not that it did much good,” Eddie said dejectedly and, offering a good-bye, returned to his car.

“Where to now?” Dave asked. “Back to the hotel?”

Ali nodded.

“How did you find out Monique’s death is now classified as a homicide?” Ali asked. “Who told you?”

“Ken Nickerson is one of my good old buddies from the Marines. We served together in Iraq. Now he works for LAPD.”

“Ken’s the one who got you Andrea Morales’s address information?” Ali asked.

“That’s right. While you were talking to Clemencia, I called him up and asked him straight out if they had autopsy results back on Monique Ragsdale, and they did.”

“Already?” Ali asked.

Dave nodded. “Preliminary,” he said. “It may be Sunday, but since it’s a high-profile case, the guys over on North Mission Road really got their rears in gear on this one.”

“And?” Ali asked.

“Bruising on her arms and on her back. Defensive wounds and definite signs of a struggle. No sexual assault. They took scrapings from under her nails. There could be identifiable DNA found in those. The real problem for Jesus Sanchez is that the cops found something at the crime scene that links him to Monique’s death.”

“I know,” Ali said. “Keys with his name on them. I saw them, too. According to what Jesus told Clemencia, after he was let go, he came to the house to turn in his keys. That’s when he found Monique at the bottom of the stairs. I’m sure he was upset at seeing her like that, and I don’t blame him. I know how I felt when we found her later on. He must have panicked and dropped his keys. Later on, when he realized what had happened, he knew the cops would find them and come looking for him—which they did. That’s probably why he took off.”

“The big question is, were the keys under the victim or were they beside her?” Dave asked. “If they were under, it means the keys and Jesus were probably there either before she fell or at the same time. In that case, things are looking pretty grim for poor old Jesus. If the keys were found nearby, they could have been dropped at the same time or either before or after the fact.”

Ali thought about that. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I don’t remember seeing them until after the EMTs put Monique on the stretcher. It could be they were right there in plain sight the whole time, and we just didn’t notice them.”

“One way or the other, why is it you think it’s your responsibility to hire a defense attorney for Mr. Sanchez?”

“Shut up and drive,” Ali returned.

The fact that Dave Holman did so made Ali like him better.

“And that’s not all,” he said a few minutes later.

“There’s more?”

“Actually, yes. It turns out your Sumo Sudoku pal’s Web site bio didn’t tell the whole story.”

“What did he leave out?”

“That when he was eighteen he went to prison for grand theft auto. It’s not the kind of thing somebody puts on a résumé when he’s out trolling for well-heeled investors.”

“What if Paul suspected something was going on between April and Tracy? What if he started looking into McLaughlin’s background and found out some of this stuff?” Ali asked.

“Sounds like possible motive to me,” Dave said.

“Except the cops aren’t looking in that direction.”

“Not yet,” Dave said. “But there’s no reason we can’t point them that way.”

Without missing the critical merge, it didn’t take nearly as long to get back to the hotel as it had taken to drive to Pico Gardens. “Are you coming up?” Ali asked, as they drove up to the entrance.

“I think I’ll take a pass,” Dave said. “I want to go back to my place and call my kids. I try to talk to them on Sunday afternoons.”

“Just drop me at the front door then,” Ali said. “At this point I don’t care if the lobby is teeming with reporters. I’m tired of sneaking around. I’ll just brazen it out.”

“Good girl,” Dave said. “I’m glad to hear it. Maybe you can afford to keep handing over those terrific tips. I can’t.”

The hotel lobby was completely devoid of reporters as Ali made her way upstairs, leading her to conclude that something more interesting must have turned up as fodder for that evening’s news broadcasts. Back in the room she was surprised to find her mother wasn’t there. Ali tried calling Edie’s cell phone. When the call went to voice mail, Ali hung up. Maybe Edie had decided to take advantage of being in L.A. by going to a movie. Edie preferred what her husband called “arty” films to his shoot-’em-ups, but the former seldom made it to the screens of Sedona’s single multiplex.

Kicking off her tennies, Ali returned her Glock to the safe and raided the honor bar for a Diet Sprite. While there she noticed something odd. Her mother carried her daily allocation of vitamins in a series of ziplock sandwich bags, which she carefully saved each day, packing them away for future use. One of those plastic bags lay in the armoire next to the TV remote. It contained a single cigarette butt.

Ali picked up the bag and examined the contents. The filtered stub was unremarkable in every way. There was no lipstick residue that might indicate that whoever had smoked it was a female. For Edie, a lifelong vociferous nonsmoker, to see fit to keep the remains of a cigarette in what was a clearly designated nonsmoking room could only mean Edie was playing detective in her own right.

Replacing the bag, Ali took her soda to the couch, sat down, picked up her computer, logged on, and googled Richard Dahlgood, Velma T’s nephew. There were several hits, all of them concerning appearances in state and federal courts on behalf of various clients. From everything Ali was able to glean from those reports, Dahlgood seemed like the real deal.

The first e-mail she sent was to Velma T in Laguna.

Dear Velma,

A friend of mine may well be in need of your nephew’s services. Please let him know that if he is contacted in regard to defending someone named Jesus Sanchez, he should be in touch with me so arrangements can be made for handling any necessary retainer. My contact phone number is listed below.

ALI

Next Ali wrote to Andrea Morales.

Dear Andrea,

I spoke to your aunt, Clemencia Sanchez, earlier today. It seems likely that your uncle, Jesus, may require the services of a defense attorney. A friend of mine has recommended someone named Richard Dahlgood. Although I don’t know the man personally, he does appear to have a considerable defense practice here in the L.A. area. His contact information is listed below.

If your aunt and uncle are interested in engaging Mr. Dahlgood’s services, please let me know so I can make arrangements for payment of any required retainer. Also, please let your uncle know that he is back on my payroll at the moment regardless of whether or not he is able to return to work. Also tell him the house on Robert Lane is currently off-limits to all of us due to the ongoing police investigation. I will need to know where his pay envelopes should be delivered.

Also, if he has any information concerning the whereabouts of Henrietta Jackson, the cook who was fired along with him, or of my former cook, Elvira Jimenez, I would appreciate knowing how to reach them. I’m concerned that Elvira may have been let go under circumstances similar to what happened to your uncle.

REGARDS,

ALI REYNOLDS

Several readers weighed in on Ali’s legal issues. Those she responded to briefly and let go. Several others addressed her earlier post about her mother.

Dear Babe,

I read several blogs a day and have been a fan of yours for some time. Not all mothers are created equal. You’re lucky. Your mother sounds wonderful. Mine was poison. I’m glad she’s dead.

ALMA

That one Ali posted. As she kept reading, she found that the people who had written in were divided almost fifty-fifty on either side of the good mother/bad mother spectrum. By the time she had worked her way through that set of correspondence and added several more posts, Ali found herself agreeing with Alma’s assessment. Ali Reynolds really was lucky.

As the afternoon waned, Ali realized she was hungry. Edie had not yet returned. Ali tried calling her mother’s cell again—to no avail. Once again the call went straight to voice mail. Just to be sure, Ali checked her own phone to see if she had missed receiving a message. She hadn’t. She checked the room phone for messages as well. No luck. Finally she called down to the desk. Edie hadn’t left a note there, either. And then, just to cover all the bases, she tried April’s phones, too, both her room and her cell. Again, no answer.

Feeling the first inkling of concern, Ali transferred over to the bell captain. “This is Ali Reynolds,” she said.

Her reputation for generous tipping had preceded her. For Ali Reynolds no ticket number was required. “Right, Ms. Reynolds,” the bell captain said at once. “Would you like me to have your vehicle brought around to the back?”

“No,” she said. “I’m actually calling about my mother’s vehicle. Is it there?”

“Do you have the valet number for that one?”

“No,” Ali replied. “It’s a white Oldsmobile Alero with Arizona plates.”

“Oh, that one,” he said. “It was self-parked. She left like she was headed to a fire sometime right around one. It was busy, and we were totally backed up here. She was in such a hurry that she almost ran down one of my guys.”

“Was she alone?”

“As far as I know.”

Off the phone, Ali tried to imagine where Edie would have been going in such a hurry. As an out-of-town driver, she wasn’t familiar with the L.A. area. Wherever it was, it was likely she would have needed detailed directions. If she hadn’t asked one of the parking valets for help, maybe she had done so online.

Ali returned to her computer and checked out the search page, looking for the most recent searches. She expected to find a listing for MapQuest or one of the other online map providers. What she found instead was a list of several Iowa-based searches, including one for the Des Moines Register. Iowa. Tracy McLaughlin had been sent up for grand theft auto in Iowa.

Ali grabbed her phone and dialed Dave.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“We may have a problem,” Ali said. “I can’t find my mother, and I’m pretty sure she’s been playing detective. While I was gone, she was looking up something in the Des Moines Register.”

“Smart woman,” Dave said. “She must have been tracking Tracy McLaughlin, too.”

“She may be smart, but she’s also not here,” Ali said. “At the hotel.”

“Where’d she go?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I have no idea. The parking valet said she left in a hell of a hurry, but she didn’t leave a note, and she’s not answering her cell.”

“How long has she been gone?”

“She left the hotel a little after one,” Ali replied.

“Have you called your dad?” Dave asked. “Maybe she’s called him.”

“I can check,” Ali said.

“Good. You do that,” Dave said. “In the meantime, I’m on my way. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Ali was waiting at the hotel entrance when Dave pulled into the driveway in his Nissan. “Well?” he asked as she settled into the passenger seat.

“Dad hasn’t heard from her,” Ali reported. “His first thought was that she’d probably gone to see a bargain matinee. That was my idea, too, but the movie would be over by now. Dad’s worried, and so am I. Should I call the cops and report her missing?”

Dave shook his head. “It won’t make any difference. They’re not going to go looking for her right now anyway. We’re better off looking ourselves. Where do you think she might have gone?”

“Mom’s from out of town,” Ali replied. “She doesn’t really know her way around L.A. The only map she has in the Alero is that big atlas. I know she used MapQuest directions to get to the hotel, but there were no MapQuest searches on my computer.”

“So wherever she went, if she drove herself, she must have known where she was going,” Dave concluded.

Ali nodded. “Right. And the only two familiar places I know about for sure are the hospital and the house on Robert Lane. If April went into labor, she could have gone to Cedars-Sinai. I’m pretty sure that’s where Mom said April plans to deliver. But it’s possible she might have gone to the house for some strange reason, too.”

Dave put the Nissan in gear. “The hospital isn’t going to tell us anything. Let’s try the house first. Have you tried calling April?”

“I did,” Ali told him. “Both her room and her cell. No answer.”

“Try again, just in case.”

Once again both of April’s phones went to voice mail. Ali tried Edie’s phone again with the same result. By then Ali was feeling the first tinge of real panic.

When they reached the house on Robert Lane, they found it deserted. Crime scene tape was still draped across the front door, warning people not to enter. There was no sign of Edie’s Oldsmobile anywhere and no sign of any other vehicles, either.

“She’s not here,” Ali concluded. “And I’m beginning to get a bad feeling about this—a really bad feeling.”

“Don’t worry,” Dave said. “Not yet. I’m sure she’s fine. Let’s try the hospital next.”

At Cedars-Sinai, Dave drove through the parking garages, prowling the stalls and searching for the Alero, while Ali went inside to the patient information desk and tried to bluff her way into finding out whether or not a patient named April Gaddis had been admitted. It was like banging her head on a brick wall. No one would tell her anything. Period. When Ali caught up with Dave again, she learned that his garage search had been equally fruitless.

“Back to the hotel then?” Dave asked.

“I guess,” Ali said. “Is it time?”

“Time for what?” Dave returned.

“To call Missing Persons?”

“After less than five hours?” Dave responded. “Believe me, they’ll laugh you off the phone. At this point they probably wouldn’t even bother taking a report. Your mother’s an adult. Adults are allowed to disappear whenever they want to. They can and do. Let’s go back to the hotel and wait awhile longer. Maybe she’ll turn up. Besides, since the hotel was where you last spoke to her, that’s a reasonable place to try picking up her trail. Didn’t you say she was watching an interview at the time?”

Ali nodded. “Yes. The one with Sheila Rosenburg from Court TV.”

“Since April and your mother are both among the missing,” Dave suggested, “there’s always a possibility that they’re together. What if your mother and April are doing something perfectly harmless? Maybe once the interview was over they decided to go shopping. After all, April’s expecting a baby. Maybe your mom wanted to get her something nice.”

Ali shot that idea down without a moment’s hesitation. “Mom hates shopping,” she said.

“All right then,” Dave said. “Let’s track down this Sheila person. Maybe one or the other of them would have mentioned to her where they were going or what they planned to do next.”

“Maybe,” Ali agreed, but she didn’t think the idea sounded very promising.

Back at the hotel Ali was relieved to find that the media were still absent. Up on the seventh floor and on the way down the hallway from the elevator, Ali stopped off just long enough to tap on April’s door. There was no answer. Ali was in the process of unlocking the door to her own room when her phone rang. The number showing in the readout was her parents’ home number in Sedona.

“Hello,” Ali said.

“Did you find her?” Bob Larson demanded.

“No,” Ali said. “Not yet. We’re still looking.”

“Well, I just got off the phone with Chris, and we’ve made up our minds,” Bob said. “We’ve got a contingency plan all lined up. I’ve found a substitute short-order cook who’ll come in and cover for me, and Chris is going to leave his conference early and call for a substitute, too. Kip will stay here and look after Samantha. Once we get the details squared away, we’ll throw our stuff in my car and be under way.”

“Under way where?” Ali asked. “You mean you’re coming here?”

“Of course I’m coming there,” Bob said determinedly. “My wife is missing. Do you think I’m just going to sit around on my butt and twiddle my thumbs?”

The idea of her father and Chris driving across the desert in Bob’s doddering Bronco seemed downright ludicrous. When it came to dependability, Chris’s far newer Prius would have been a better choice.

“Dad,” Ali reasoned. “Are you sure you want to do that? I mean, she isn’t officially missing.”

“You haven’t reported it?”

“Dave said it’s too soon. No one will pay any attention.”

“I’m paying attention,” Bob Larson countered. “Your mother’s as dependable as the day is long. She wouldn’t run off somewhere without letting one of us know. She just wouldn’t.”

That, of course, was Ali’s opinion, too. Leaving without a word was totally out of character for Edie even if that assessment wouldn’t carry much weight with the LAPD.

“Do what you need to do,” Ali said at last.

“I was planning on it all along,” Bob said with a growl. “Edie and I had already discussed it. And don’t think I’m asking for permission, either.”

“Of course not,” Ali agreed. “But I’m glad you’re not coming alone.”

“Me, too,” Bob said. “I’m not as young as I used to be.”

Once Bob was off the phone, Ali called down to the desk. She made arrangements for April to be moved out of the more expensive two-room suite to one room and then reserved two more rooms as well—one for her parents and another for Chris. At this rate, she’d soon be occupying the whole floor. It was just as well that Dave was bunking at Motel 6.

A chastened Ali let Dave into her room, where he immediately appropriated her computer and hunkered down over it. “What was she using to search?” he asked.

“Google.”

“Good. I’ll see if I can track down her search history. In the meantime, see if you can locate that Sheila person from Court TV.”

Ali had to bite her lip. She had already gone over her mother’s search history, but she kept her mouth shut and began looking for Sheila’s number. Before she found it, however, the phone rang.

“Ms. Reynolds?”

“Yes.”

“My name’s Richard Dahlgood. I understand you’re a good friend of my aunt Velma’s.”

That wasn’t entirely true, but it was close enough.

“Yes,” Ali said. “I do know her.”

“I’ve just had a very strange phone call from someone named Andrea Morales,” Dahlgood continued. “She said her uncle might possibly be in need of legal representation in a criminal matter and that, if I took him on, you would be responsible for any expenses that were incurred.”

“Yes,” Ali said. “That’s correct.”

“So you know who this person is then, what he might be accused of, and all that?”

“I do.”

“I have to say, Ms. Reynolds, it’s very unusual for someone to assume someone else’s legal obligations in this fashion.”

“Unusual but not out of the question.”

“No, but I would have to have a signed authorization from my client—once I meet him, that is—giving you permission to have access to the bill. Billing information is also highly confidential.”

By then Ali had had it up to here with her bevy of attorneys, all of them standing around with their hands out.

“Please tell Ms. Morales that her understanding is correct and that if she makes arrangements for the client to meet with you, you’ll come prepared with whatever paperwork is necessary for me to handle the bill.”

“If it’s a criminal charge, the costs could be considerable,” Dahlgood warned.

Not nearly as considerable as Victor Angeleri’s, Ali thought as she ended the call.

Finally Dave set Ali’s computer aside. “There’s nothing here,” he said. “How about if I go downstairs and see if I can make friends with hotel security. Maybe their surveillance tapes will show us something. Are you all right holding down the fort here?”

Ali nodded. “I’ll be fine,” she said.

He went out, leaving Ali alone. She sat still for a few minutes then ended up pacing. Her third pass across the room brought her face-to-face with the television armoire and the baggie with the cigarette butt. She picked it up and looked at it.

Suddenly, remembering the hint of stale cigarette smoke in April’s room, that cigarette butt made a whole lot more sense to her.

Her mother had been telling her about seeing April and Tracy McLaughlin sharing a romantic interlude in the hallway. And her next comment had been something about doing a paternity test. Maybe the cigarette butt had belonged to Tracy McLaughlin. Maybe Edie hoped enough genetic material could be located on the filter to develop a DNA profile to prove for certain whether or not Tracy McLaughlin was the father of April’s unborn child.

Grabbing her cell phone and room key, Ali dashed out of the room and hurried down to the lobby. She found Dave Holman and a uniformed security guard closeted in a windowless room behind the front desk, where they were surveying a bank of security monitors.

Dave was surprised to see her. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

For an answer, she waved the baggie in front of him.

“What’s that?”

“Evidence, most likely,” Ali replied. “At least it’s evidence as far as my mother is concerned. I told you Mom was playing detective. I’m guessing this cigarette butt belongs to Tracy McLaughlin, and she thought we could use it as part of a paternity test.”

Dave took the bag from her hand and held it up to the light. “It could mean a whole lot more than that.”

“What?”

“Terry’s a convicted car thief, and a vehicle theft was involved in your husband’s murder. Terry had a business connection with Paul Grayson, but he also has a possibly illicit relationship with Paul’s bride-to-be. This is sounding like a whole lot of motive to me.”

“But how does the cigarette play into this?” Ali asked.

“The duct tape. Didn’t you tell me your husband was bound with duct tape?”

Ali nodded. “That’s what I was told, but I saw it, too. Not the tape itself, but the marks it left on his face. Why?”

“Most bad guys still haven’t figured out that using duct tape in the commission of a crime is a really bad idea. Glue from the tape almost always captures the criminal’s DNA right along with the victim’s. Say somebody tears the tape with their teeth. They also leave behind traces of their saliva. And there’s DNA in the tiny pieces of skin that slough off the bad guy and onto the tape as it’s being applied. If the duct tape used on Paul hasn’t already been examined for DNA evidence, you can bet it will be. Crime labs can usually find DNA evidence. The big problem comes when it’s time to match that evidence to a known perpetrator, and that’s what Edie may have given us.”

“Since Tracy’s been in prison, won’t they have a record of his DNA profile?” Ali asked.

“Not necessarily,” Dave said. “For one thing, those databases are relatively new. McLaughlin could well have been let go without having to leave a sample.”

Ali looked at the cigarette again. “When Mom grabbed this, she wasn’t thinking about the possibility that McLaughlin might be a killer. She was thinking about the baby.”

“And from the looks of things, I’d say she gave him hell about it, too.”

Ali was dismayed. “She did? When?”

“Down in the lobby. After the interview. It’s on one of the security tapes. Come take a look.”

Dave led Ali over to the monitors. On one of them, Ali saw a frozen image of her mother, standing flat-footed, hands on her hips, glaring up into Tracy McLaughlin’s face. The security guard pressed one of the controls. Suddenly Edie Larson was in motion. Her mouth moved. Her hands gestured furiously. No words could be heard, but then, they didn’t need to be.

Ali knew her mother. Edie had never been one to hold back on delivering her opinions. Here she was giving a suspected killer a piece of her mind.

Watching the video sent a surge of fear through Ali’s body. She had done the same thing once—she had bearded a suspected killer long before anyone else had tumbled to what had happened. In the process Ali had put herself in harm’s way and had come closer to dying that day than she cared to remember. Now Edie Larson had done the same thing—put herself in harm’s way.

“What now?” she asked.

“I think it’s time to file that missing person’s report,” Dave said.

{ CHAPTER 13 }

Upstairs, the first call Ali made was to Missing Persons at LAPD—with predictable results. Carolyn Little, the Missing Persons cop Ali had spoken to on Friday, wasn’t available on weekends, and no other officer came on the line, either. Instead, an indifferent clerk with minimal typing skills and an even smaller sense of urgency took the information on the disappearance of Edie Larson.

“You be sure to let us know if Ms. Larson turns up, now,” the clerk said cheerily when she finished. “If we don’t hear from you by this time tomorrow, an officer should be in touch. If not tomorrow, then the day after.” Click.

Ali flung down the phone. “So much for getting any help from LAPD,” she muttered.

“What did you expect?” Dave asked.

Shaking her head in disgust, Ali dialed the number she had for the Riverside Sheriff’s Department. If she had reached the younger detective, she might have achieved better results, but at seven o’clock on a Sunday evening, talking with Detective Sims was the best she could do. He was a long way from sympathetic.

“I’m a homicide detective,” he said. “If you’ve got a missing person on your end, you need to call LAPD.”

“We already did that,” Ali told him. “They’re not exactly interested.”

“Why should I be?”

“Because we think my mother’s disappearance may have something to do with my husband’s homicide and with one of my husband’s acquaintances—a guy named Tracy McLaughlin.”

“What about him?” Sims asked.

The way Sims asked the question made it clear McLaughlin was already a known entity, but Ali wasn’t eager to give up any additional information without first having some assurances from the detective that he would intercede with the LAPD on Edie Larson’s behalf.

“You know Tracy McLaughlin went to prison for car theft?” Ali asked.

“That’s what I like about all you hotshot media types,” Detective Sims grumbled. “You think that just because we’re cops, we must be too dumb to wipe our own butts. Of course I know McLaughlin got sent up for grand theft auto. Served five and a half years. In a homicide involving a stolen vehicle, don’t you think that’s the kind of thing that would have come to our attention once we started investigating your husband’s friends and associates? And what the hell does that have to do with the fact that your mother has apparently taken a powder?”

“My mother’s a responsible person,” Ali returned. “She wouldn’t leave of her own volition without letting one of us know. I talked to her shortly before she disappeared. She said she thought Tracy McLaughlin was somehow involved with April Gaddis, my husband’s fiancée.”

“Talk about yesterday’s news,” Sims returned dismissively. “Of course they were involved. April and Tracy have been friends for years. According to what April told us earlier, she was the one who brought Sumo Sudoku to her husband’s attention in the first place.”

Being friends and having a romantic encounter in a hotel hallway were two entirely different things, but Ali suspected that if she hinted at a possible romantic connection between April and Tracy, Detective Sims would most likely discount that as well.

“Before my mother left she was involved in a verbal confrontation with Tracy McLaughlin. We saw that on a security tape. She also collected a cigarette butt and left it in a plastic bag,” Ali continued. “Dave Holman and I believe that may have come from Tracy McLaughlin as well. If DNA from that could be linked to the duct tape found on my husband—”

“Who says there was duct tape?” Detective Sims demanded. “How would you know about that?”

“I saw it, remember?” Ali reminded him. “When I identified the body. I’m no expert, but the marks I saw on his face certainly looked like they could have come from duct tape.”

“Oh,” Sims said. “I see.”

“So are you checking the duct tape for DNA evidence?” Ali insisted.

“Of course we’re checking it,” Sims replied with an impatient snarl. “But this isn’t exactly CSI Miami. In our neck of the woods it generally takes a while for our people to develop a DNA profile. We don’t try to get the job done in sixty minutes minus commercials, so don’t expect us to have lab results tomorrow or next week or even next month. We’re also required to maintain chains of evidence. If and when we decide we need a DNA sample from Mr. McLaughlin, you can be sure we’ll be able to obtain one on our own without help from either you or your mother. In the meantime, we have leads and we’re working them. Now, if you don’t mind, this is supposed to be my day off.”

With that Sims hung up, leaving Ali holding the phone.

“What?” Dave asked.

“I don’t think Detective Sims is going to help us find Mom or Tracy McLaughlin,” Ali said.

“If we can’t go through official channels, we’ll have to try some unofficial ones,” Dave said, reaching for his phone.

“Your pal at LAPD?”

Dave nodded. “If he’s home. He said something about going camping on his days off.”

While Dave worked his phone, Ali stood in the middle of the room, holding her cell phone and thinking. She remembered something Helga had said the day before as Victor had been driving them from the hotel to Robert Lane. Scrolling through her cell’s phone book, Ali located Helga Myerhoff’s number and dialed it.

“Yesterday, when you were talking to me about April Gaddis,” Ali said, “I seem to remember that you mentioned something about her wanting to be a Pilates instructor.”

“Yes,” Helga answered. “That’s right.”

“And that some of her friends weren’t exactly nice people?” Ali pressed.

“Bit of an understatement,” Helga replied. “Have you ever heard of The Body Shop in Century City?”

“Car repairs?” Ali asked.

“Not exactly,” Helga said with a snort. “Although it’s located in a building that once held an auto dealership, it’s got nothing at all to do with cars. It’s a twenty-four-hour upscale fitness club where network bigwigs and wannabe bigwigs can mix and mingle, see and be seen. It’s also one of the hot, in-crowd places at the moment. Supposedly the gym comes complete with one-on-one personal trainers, an organic juice bar, and with personal chefs available upon request. More than that, though, it also operates as a convenient pickup joint. That’s where April first met Paul, by the way. She worked there as a receptionist.”

Makes sense, Ali thought. For an undereducated and beautiful young woman like April Gaddis, who was also ambitious and determinedly upwardly mobile, The Body Shop sounded like the perfect manhunt launching pad.

“The Body Shop’s biggest appeal is that it’s both respectable and edgy,” Helga continued. “As you already know, some of Hollywood’s best-known heavy hitters are afflicted with complicated substance-abuse issues. For these relatively respectable guys, it’s a lot more convenient if they can meet up with their drug supplier at some fashionable watering hole rather than having to buy their next hit from a street dealer at some dingy intersection in L.A.”

“What about Tracy McLaughlin?” Ali asked.

“The Sumo Sudoku guy?” Helga asked. “The one in the kilt?”

“That’s the one,” Ali said. “Did he work there, too?”

“He may have,” Helga said. “I don’t know for sure, but I’ll tell you this. I liked looking at the guy. He might be a bit young for me, but I wouldn’t mind taking him home for a day or two to check out whatever it is he keeps under that kilt.”

Ali was glad that Dave wasn’t hearing Helga’s part of the conversation.

“Why all this sudden interest in Tracy McLaughlin?” Helga asked. “What’s going on?”

“My mother’s missing,” Ali said. “This morning she witnessed what looked to her like a bit of hanky-panky going on between April and Tracy. Early this afternoon one of the hotel security cameras recorded a confrontation between McLaughlin and my mom, but by the time I got back to the hotel to talk to her about it, she was gone—not just from our room, but from the hotel, too. The parking attendant told us he saw her peel out of the hotel garage sometime after one. I’ve tried calling her. No answer, and she hasn’t called me back, either.”

“Have you reported her missing?”

“Yes,” Ali said. “Not that it did much good. No one at LAPD is particularly interested.”

“So what can I do to help?” Helga asked.

“When you were doing your investigation of Paul, did Tracy McLaughlin’s name come up?”

“I remember looking into the Sumo Sudoku thing because S and S Enterprises was one of your husband’s newer business ventures. That name could have been mentioned, but I don’t remember it in particular. I’d have to check with one of my investigators—and I probably won’t be able to talk to him until tomorrow. Is there anything I can do in the meantime—anything I can do tonight?”

“I don’t know,” Ali said. “I can’t really think straight right now.”

“If you come up with something you need,” Helga said, “don’t hesitate to call. Have you told Victor?”

“Not yet,” Ali said.

“I’ll call him,” Helga said. “He’ll want to know what’s going on.”

Ali put down the phone. Dave had finished a series of calls and was once again hunkered over her computer.

“Google S and S Enterprises here in L.A.,” Ali told him. “See what you get.”

“S and S Enterprises holds all rights to Worldwide Sumo Sudoku,” Dave said a few minutes later. “S and S was incorporated back in April with Paul Grayson named as executive director and CEO.”

That announcement hit Ali hard. She had left Robert Lane early in March. No doubt negotiations for S and S Enterprises had been well under way long before Ali’s departure, but she had known nothing about it. Sumo Sudoku had never been mentioned. In the scheme of Paul’s betrayals, this one seemed relatively small, but it was a betrayal nonetheless.

“Who else is on the board of directors?” Ali asked.

“Guy by the name of Jake Maxwell,” Dave replied.

“He worked with Paul at the network,” Ali explained. “I always thought of him more as a rival than a friend, but there are lots of shifting loyalties in television, and things change. Jake showed up at court last week when the divorce was supposed to be final. He came there to back Paul up. He was also the official host of Paul’s bachelor party from the night before.”

Dave was still studying the computer screen. “This is interesting,” he said. “S and S leases all the RVs that the various teams use. In other words, all the Sumo Sudoku guys are ultimately employees of S and S, but they’re hoping to create team rivalries that will attract media attention.”

“Sort of like professional wrestling?” Ali suggested.

Dave nodded. “Just about that real. According to this, the company was incorporated with the stated intention of obtaining coverage for the sport on one or the other of the sports-oriented cable channels. No doubt that’s why they scheduled the filming around Paul’s wedding—to garner additional media attention.”

“And that’s why they went forward with the shoot anyway, even though Paul was dead,” Ali added. “That’s how the business works. The show must go on no matter what.”

“I’ll say,” Dave agreed.

“So let’s go see him,” Ali said.

“Go see who?”

“Jake,” Ali said. “Jake Maxwell. The person we really need to see is Tracy, but we don’t have any idea where to find him, so Jake is our next best choice.”

“I’ve got a call in for Tracy’s vehicle records,” Dave said. “I’m waiting for someone to get back to me.”

“Fine,” Ali replied. “But in the meantime, since Jake is clearly part of all this, maybe he can point us in the right direction.”

“Where do we find him?”

Ali picked up her purse. “He and his wife, Roseanne, live out in Westlake Village.”

“Where’s that?” Dave asked.

“Not that far. Out on 101.”

“Do we need to call first?” Dave asked.

“I think we’ll just show up,” Ali returned. “And we’re probably better off if I drive.”

“Amen to that,” Dave said. “You drive. I’ll handle the phones.”

They left the hotel a few minutes later and headed for the 405 with Ali behind the wheel of her Cayenne.

“Have you had anything to eat since breakfast?” Dave asked as they went.

Thinking about her mother, Ali shook her head. “I’m not hungry,” she said.

“Too bad,” Dave said. “Edie would want you to eat, and we’re eating. Pull up at the next Burger King you see.”

Ali did as she was told, and much as she didn’t want to admit it, eating a Whopper did help. Back in the car, Sunday evening traffic turned what should have been a forty-minute drive into an hour and ten, most of which Ali drove in silence.

“What’s going on?” Dave asked finally. “Worried about your mom?”

“That,” Ali said, “and trying to get over being pissed off.”

“What about?”

“This whole S and S Enterprises thing,” she returned. “Obviously it was going on long before I left home last March. That kind of stuff doesn’t happen in a day or even a month, but I didn’t know a thing about it even though Jack and Roseanne Maxwell did.”

“So?”

“Once I was in Sedona, Roseanne sent me a sugar-coated e-mail in which she pretended like she and I were the very best of friends and she thought Paul was a cad, while at the same time Jake and Paul were starting a business together. I’ll never forget her cutesy little message. She kept harping on how awful it was that I was reduced to living in a trailer and having to wait tables for a living. She even offered me a place to stay—in their newly remodeled casita.”

“I take it you turned her down.”

“Do you think?” Ali asked with a curt nod. “But now it grates on me that I have to go see this woman and make nice with her when what I’d really like to do is smack her upside the head.”

“We’re doing this for your mother,” Dave reminded her. “Stay cool.”

Ali had no difficulty driving them to Jake and Roseanne’s sprawling, ranch-style house built on a grassy hillside outside Thousand Oaks. At the bottom end of the long, paved driveway, an ornamental iron gate blocked the way. Ali pressed a button and a disembodied voice spoke to them through an intercom attached to the gatepost. Half a minute later, the gate swung open.

Jake Maxwell himself stepped through the tall front door and came out into the circular parking area to meet them.

“Ali,” he gushed, taking her hand in both of his. “What an unexpected pleasure. How good to see you, although I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now.”

And you don’t know the half of it, Ali thought.

When Dave emerged from the far side of the car, Jake frowned slightly. “And who’s this?” he added.

“Dave Holman is a friend of mine,” Ali replied without any further explanation. “We have some questions for you.”

“What kind of questions?” Jake asked.

“About S and S Enterprises,” Ali returned. “And about a guy named Tracy McLaughlin.”

Jake glanced warily from Ali to Dave and back again. It was something that wouldn’t have been apparent over a phone line. Clearly Jake had been caught off guard. Ali was glad they’d put good manners aside and hadn’t called in advance to warn Jake of their impending arrival.

“What about Tracy McLaughlin?” Jake asked.

“We were wondering if you knew where we could find him,” Ali said casually. “A few loose ends came up after the shoot ended yesterday. I wanted to ask him about them.”

“What things?”

Before Ali could answer, the door behind Jake opened. A woman wearing a pair of tight pedal pushers tottered out onto the front porch on a pair of very high heels. She was carrying a tall goblet filled with red wine.

“Didn’t know we had company,” she said, coming to an uncertain stop and standing, weaving, with one hand poised on her hip. “I just told Kimball to open another bottle,” she said. “Anybody want to join me for a little drinky-poo?”

Kimball (Ali had no idea if Kimball was the man’s first or last name) was a professionally trained butler with a British accent and an imperious air who had been Jake Maxwell’s aide-de-camp for as long as Ali could remember.

Ali stared. Whoever this smashed young woman was, she sure as hell wasn’t Roseanne Maxwell. And why she felt free to order Kimball around was another issue entirely.

“Go back inside, Amber,” Jake said brusquely. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

Amber pouted. “I was just trying to be hosp…hosp…” she began before finally subsiding into tongue-tied silence.

“Hospitable,” Jake finished for her impatiently. “Now do as I said. Go back inside and wait.”

As in “Sit!” and “Stay!” Ali thought.

Without another word, the woman staggered back into the house, slamming the door behind her. Jake looked back at Ali.

“One of Roseanne’s friends,” he explained unconvincingly. “She’s staying here while she’s waiting for her new house to close. I’m afraid she had a bit too much wine with dinner. But I’m forgetting my manners. Won’t you come in?”

Amber’s appearance had fueled Ali’s curiosity. Based on her own unfortunate marital experience, nothing short of a loaded weapon would have kept her from accepting Jake’s rather halfhearted invitation.

“Thank you so much,” Ali said, and headed for the door, leaving both Dave Holman and Jake to trail along behind her.

She saw signs of change the moment she stepped inside the entryway. For years a flattering oil portrait of Roseanne Maxwell had held sway just inside their front door. That painting was no longer there. Instead, a large rectangle of slightly lighter cream paint showed where the painting had once hung. Over the massive river-rock fireplace another painting—an unframed canvas Ali recalled as featuring a modern rendition of what appeared to be sunflowers—was also missing from its place of honor. Amber was nowhere to be seen, but from some distant corner of the house came the muffled sound of a television drama.

“Don’t tell me Roseanne isn’t home,” Ali exclaimed. “She was really kind to me last spring when everything was so awful. I wanted to thank her.”

“She’s in New York right now,” Jake said a little too quickly. “She went with one of her friends. They’re busy buying next year’s clothes and taking in a couple of shows.”

“Do let her know I’m sorry we missed her,” Ali said. “If she returns before I leave, we’ll have to have lunch.”

“Of course, of course,” Jake murmured. “Now, can I get you something?”

Dave shook his head. “No, thanks,” he replied.

“Some ice water would be nice,” Ali said.

While Jake summoned his majordomo and issued the drink order, Ali examined her surroundings. Two pieces of Dale Chihuly blown glass were missing from the ebony sideboard in the dining room. Their absence along with the missing paintings led Ali to only one conclusion. Most people don’t pack their precious artwork when they go off on a weeklong shopping excursion. Roseanne’s departure had to be more serious than that.

Kimball appeared, bearing a silver drinks tray complete with an ice bucket, a collection of Baccarat crystal glasses, Voss bottled water, a decanter of wine, and a bottle of Oban single-malt scotch. With a slight bow, he deposited the tray on a side table. Then, without bothering to ask, he poured Jake a rocks glass with a tall, two-finger scotch. Meantime, Jake settled himself comfortably on a nearby love seat and crossed his legs, revealing a pair of very expensive Italian loafers.

“So what’s all this about Tracy McLaughlin?” he asked.

He was trying so hard to be nonchalant and casual that an imp got into Ali Reynolds. She decided to go for the gold.

“I suppose you’ve heard about Paul’s will?” she asked.

“Yes,” Jake said with a thoughtful nod. “I heard that you got left holding the bag. It’s got to be really tough, dealing with a complicated mess like that. And then, with everything else, to have April’s mother fall down the stairs…”

“It’s been tough, all right,” Ali agreed. “And it’s likely to get even tougher. Dave and I have reason to believe that the child April is carrying might not be Paul’s after all. Since you and Paul were so close, I was wondering if you’d have any insight into that?”

Jake’s face registered astonishment. “If it’s not Paul’s, whose baby is it?”

“She,” Ali corrected. “The baby is a she. But that’s what we’re trying to determine—the identity of the baby’s father. It’s also why we’re looking for Tracy McLaughlin.”

Jake allowed himself a generous slug of neat Oban. “You’re thinking Tracy might be the baby’s father?” he asked.

“It’s possible,” Ali said. “So what can you tell us about him?”

Jake peered into his glass, studying the contents. “I suppose you know that he had a bit of a rough start.”

“As in being sent to prison for grand theft auto,” Ali returned. “Yes, we’re aware of that.”

“After he got out, he came out to California, where he eventually developed this Sumo Sudoku idea. And it was a great idea—he got a trademark on it and everything. Unfortunately, at the same time, Tracy was also developing a bit of a gambling problem. Finally, he was in so deep that Paul and I bought him out. We gave him enough of an advance to pay off his debts. After he’s earned that back, he’ll get royalties.”

“Which is how the guy who invented the whole thing ends up doing grunt labor,” Ali said. “That’s why he wears a kilt, lugs rocks around, and drives a leased RV.”

“Something like that,” Jake said.

“So is Tracy mad about that—about losing control of his brainchild to someone else?” Dave asked.

“I don’t think so,” Jake answered. “He wanted his debts paid off a lot more than he wanted to run things.”

“What if Sumo Sudoku happens to get picked up by one of the sports networks?” Ali asked. “What happens then? Would Tracy make money?”

“We’d all make money.”

“Which is why,” Ali said, “even with Paul dead, April was determined to go forward with the shoot.”

Jake sipped his scotch. “I suppose,” he said. “But I still don’t see what makes you think the baby might be Tracy’s. I mean, I’ve never seen any evidence of them hanging out together.”

“How did Tracy get hooked up with you and Paul to begin with?” Ali asked.

“Touché,” Jake said after a pause. “Now that you mention it, I guess April was the one who introduced us.”

Somehow Ali didn’t find that the least bit surprising.

“Do you have any idea where Tracy McLaughlin lives?” Dave asked. “We’d like to talk to him if at all possible, the sooner the better.”

“No idea,” Jake answered. “None at all. He lives a pretty marginal lifestyle, if you know what I mean.”

“So he’s still gambling?” Dave asked.

“I suppose.”

“And he’s still broke?”

“Most likely.”

“But he would need a place to park that huge rig of his. And since your name is on the lease of that very valuable piece of equipment, I would imagine you’d know where that secret parking place might be.”

“Sorry,” Jake said. “I have no idea.”

It was a simple answer, but as soon as Ali heard it, she knew it was a lie.

“Does he have another vehicle?” Ali asked. “Something a little smaller and easier to park?”

“Probably,” Jake answered, “but I’m not sure what.”

“So you just turn these guys loose with your leased RVs and don’t pay any attention to where they go or what they do with them?”

“Their contracts dictate that they have to be out in public doing events for a set number of hours per week, mostly up and down the West Coast. Some of the contests we set up—like the shoot at the house yesterday. Some of the others are just pickup games—on the beach, in parks, wherever. But with the advertising on the RVs, our guys are doing their job wherever they are, even when they’re just driving up and down the Five. After all, name familiarity is the name of the game.”

“So you’re still moving forward with this Sumo Sudoku thing?” Ali asked.

“Of course,” Jake replied with absolute confidence. “There’s no reason not to.”

There might be, Ali thought. I’m your new partner and I may not be quite as interested in it as Paul was.

Amber, her empty wineglass in hand, meandered into the living room from somewhere else in the house. “Oh,” she blurted vaguely, looking at Ali and Dave. “Are you still here?”

Ali took the hint and stood up. Dave followed suit while Amber staggered toward the drinks tray. Clearly the woman had had more than enough, but that didn’t keep her from refilling her glass.

“Amber,” Jake said warningly.

“What?” Amber seemed defiant. She dropped onto a sofa, slopping a splotch of vivid red wine onto the white silk. “What?” she said again.

Jake shook his head wearily and said nothing. Obviously Amber was a bit of a handful.

“We’ll be going then,” Ali said. She walked as far as the door before pausing and turning back toward their host. “When did you say Roseanne will be back?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” Jake said uneasily. “This week sometime. It was pretty open-ended. You’ll let us know when the funeral is, won’t you?” he asked. “She’ll want to be home for that.”

“I’m sure she will,” Ali agreed. “Tell Roseanne I’ll give her a call as soon as the services are scheduled.”

Outside, the sun was down. The warm September evening had cooled under a blanket of damp marine air that had rolled in off the Pacific.

“What now?” Dave asked as they climbed into the Cayenne and buckled up.

“I’m not sure,” Ali said.

She put the car in gear and drove to the bottom of the driveway. The gate opened and closed, letting them back onto the roadway. Ali drove a hundred yards or so up the road and pulled off into the approach to yet another driveway.

“What on earth are you doing?” Dave asked.

“Wait,” Ali said. “Let’s see what happens.”

Less than a minute later, the gate to the Maxwells’ place swung open and a silver Jaguar XJ convertible with the top down nosed out of the driveway and onto the road.

“Bingo,” Ali said. “There he is.”

“What are you going to do?”

“We’re going to follow him,” Ali said, putting the Cayenne in gear and pulling out well behind the Jag. “I’m guessing he’ll lead us straight to Tracy McLaughlin.”

“God help me,” Dave groaned. “Do you know anything at all about pursuit driving?”

“Not a thing,” she answered. “But I know a lot more about California drivers than you do, so you watch him and I’ll drive.”

Both of which were easier said then done.

Ali raced through two lights that were in the process of turning red in an effort to keep Maxwell’s Jaguar in sight as he turned onto the 101 and headed back toward the city. By the time Ali merged onto the freeway, he was in the far left lane and passing everything in sight. Ali headed for the left lane as well.

“We’ll never catch him,” Dave protested. “Or else we’ll be killed.”

“We’ll catch him, all right,” Ali said determinedly. “And with all this traffic, he’ll never know it’s us.”

She managed to stick with the speeding Jag for the next hair-raising ten minutes or so until Maxwell finally swerved back into the far right-hand lane and onto the Fallbrook Avenue exit. Dodging through traffic, Ali followed suit, making it onto the ramp with bare inches to spare. Once there, she slowed and dropped back far enough to allow another car to merge in ahead of them at the light.

Back on surface streets it was easier to keep the Jag in sight while maintaining a safe distance. A mile and a half later, Jake Maxwell turned into a well-lit commercial parking lot.

“Geez!” Dave grumbled. “This guy has spent the last half hour driving like a bat out of hell and endangering life and limb. And for what? To go to Wal-Mart? What’s he going to do, buy a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk?”

But instead of turning up the aisle of parked vehicles that would have led toward the store’s main entrance, the Jag turned left and headed off across the outermost boundary of the parking lot, stopping at last in a far corner of the property where several hulking motor homes and campers had pulled up and parked for the night. The fluorescent glow of the parking lot lights revealed that one of the assembled RVs sported a more-than-life-sized portrait of a smiling Tracy McLaughlin wearing his distinctive Sumo Sudoku kilt. Hooked onto a tow bar behind it was a spanking-new Honda Element with the paper temporary plate still in its back window.

Dave stifled his series of complaints and sat bolt upright. “I’ll be damned!” he exclaimed with undisguised admiration. “I don’t believe it. You were right all along. Maxwell led us straight to Tracy.”

“Yes, he did,” Ali agreed. “Now what?”

“Pull over, park, and kill your lights and engine,” Dave directed. “We’re going to hide and watch.”

{ CHAPTER 14 }

So what’s Jake Maxwell’s deal?” Dave asked as they waited in the parking lot. “When you’re doing a homicide investigation, you always go after the first person who lies. So how come Jake told us he had no idea how to get hold of Tracy when he obviously did?”

“And why didn’t he just call him?” Ali asked.

“That’s easy,” Dave replied. “I’m guessing he’s worried about leaving a phone record trail.”

“He lied about Roseanne, too,” Ali said.

“That’s his wife?” Dave asked.

Ali nodded. “She may be shopping in New York, but I doubt it. Several important pieces of artwork—valuable pieces—are missing from Jake’s walls and shelves. That tells me something’s up between him and Roseanne that has nothing to do with next year’s wardrobe and a whole lot to do with his pal Amber.”

Learning that Roseanne Maxwell had most likely joined the ranks of Hollywood’s cast-off and obsolete wives should have elicited more sympathy from Ali, but she couldn’t summon it. The condescending comments Roseanne had e-mailed to Ali months earlier still rankled too much.

“Can you reach Roseanne?” Dave asked.

“Maybe,” Ali replied. “I used to have her phone numbers and her e-mail address in my database, and they may still be in my computer back at the hotel. The problem is, that was months ago. If everything else has changed, her numbers may have changed as well.”

“When you have a chance, try getting in touch with her,” Dave said. “She may be able to help us.”

The door to Tracy’s RV opened. Jake emerged and slammed the door shut behind him. He stood for a few seconds as if undecided about something, then hurried back to his Jag. He peeled out of the parking place so fast that the car wobbled dangerously and almost careened into one of the parked RVs before he got the vehicle back under control.

“How much do you think he had to drink?” Dave asked.

“I don’t know,” Ali returned. “I doubt the scotch we saw him drink was the first he’d had this evening.”

“I doubt that, too,” Dave agreed. “And he’s obviously of the opinion that speed limits are posted for advisory purposes only. Let’s make his life a little more interesting, shall we?”

With that Dave picked up his phone. “Yes,” he said when someone answered. “I’m at the Wal-Mart here on Fallbrook Avenue. A guy just took off out of the parking lot in a silver Jaguar XJ,” Dave said. “He’s heading back toward Highway 101 and driving like a maniac. Almost smashed into a parked RV on his way out of the lot. The way he’s driving, he may be drunk.”

After repeating the Jag’s plate information and leaving his cell phone number, Dave closed his phone with a grin. “Let’s hear it for the California Highway Patrol,” he said. “Considering the mood Jake’s in at the moment, any interaction with cops should prove interesting to all concerned. In the meantime, let’s go have a chat with Tracy McLaughlin.”

“What about?” Ali asked.

“Let’s start with your mother,” Dave suggested. “Again, the one thing we need to establish is if he’s lying to us or telling the truth. That means we ask him questions where we already know the answers.”

“Like whether or not he spoke to my mother?”

“For starters,” Dave said. “And you take the lead. Tracy’s an ex-con, which means he probably thinks of himself as a cool macho dude. He’s likely to underestimate you and say more than he should. Try to be conversational with him and get him to talk.”

“You mean sort of like what I did for years when I was conducting television interviews?” Ali asked.

Dave looked chagrined. “I suppose so,” he returned. “Something like that. Sorry.”

They approached the RV with Dave staying in the background. As Ali mounted the steps and knocked, she noticed a hint of cigarette smoke lingering in the outside air. It reminded her of the smoke she had smelled in the hotel hallway the night before.

“Who is it?” an invisible voice demanded.

“Ali Reynolds,” she replied. “I’m Paul Grayson’s wife…his widow actually,” she corrected. “We met yesterday morning before the Sumo Sudoku shoot. I was having coffee with April Gaddis out on the terrace at the house on Robert Lane.”

After a few minutes, the door opened, allowing more secondhand smoke to spill outside. Tracy McLaughlin’s hulking figure stood backlit in the doorway. He held the burning stub of a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other.

“That’s right,” Tracy said. “I remember you now. What do you want?”

“I’m looking for my mother,” Ali said at once.

“Your mother,” he repeated belligerently. “Who the hell’s your mother?”

It had not been Jake Maxwell’s first scotch, and this was not Tracy McLaughlin’s first beer.

“Let me give you a hint,” Ali said. “Her name’s Edie Larson. She’s in her early sixties. Gray hair. Wears glasses and a hearing aid. She’s gone missing.”

“Name doesn’t ring a bell,” Tracy muttered. “There are lots of women like that. I’m afraid I don’t know your mother from a hole in the ground.”

“That’s funny,” Ali said. “I could have sworn I saw a hotel security surveillance tape where you were talking with her earlier this afternoon—arguing with her, in fact. She seemed to be quite upset about something. The digital readout on the video shows that the confrontation happened—shortly before she disappeared.”

Dave emerged from the shadows.

“Who are you?” Tracy demanded when Dave came into view.

“A friend of Edie’s,” Dave replied. “And we have reason to believe Edie had pegged you as possibly being the father of April Gaddis’s baby.”

“Well, she’s wrong about that,” Tracy McLaughlin declared. “Besides, it wasn’t any of her business to begin with. I tried to tell that crazy old woman that she had it all wrong and to get off my case, but she wouldn’t listen.”

“So you’re claiming you’re not the father of April’s baby after all?” Ali asked.

“I’m saying you’re talking to the wrong person. You should be asking April about this, not me.”

“But you’re saying the baby might not be Paul’s?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“What are you saying?”

“It’s complicated.”

“It’s not complicated at all,” Ali said firmly. “Either the baby is Paul’s or she’s not. And if she isn’t, she won’t be eligible to receive monies from his estate.”

“So what does any of this have to do with me?”

“What it has to do with is fraud,” Ali replied. “And with whether or not you’re a co-conspirator.”

“I don’t know anything,” Tracy insisted. “I haven’t done anything.”

“What about this afternoon?” Ali asked.

“What about it?”

“What happened after you saw my mother?”

“I left the hotel.”

“Where did you go?”

“A couple of places,” he said.

Dave moved closer. “Ms. Reynolds isn’t a police officer,” he said. “But I am. At this point you’re not being charged with anything, Mr. McLaughlin, so it might be smart for you to cooperate. If you have an alibi for this afternoon—a verifiable alibi—you might want to give it to us before things get any more complicated.”

“What do you want from me?”

“We want you to tell us about what you did this afternoon. All of it.”

“Do I need an attorney?” Tracy asked.

“Not right now,” Dave said. “That’s what I told you a minute ago. At the moment, finding Ali’s mother is our highest priority. Compared to that, everything else takes a backseat.”

Tracy had tossed one cigarette butt aside. Now he paused long enough to light another smoke. “I knew April was going to be doing that Court TV interview,” he said at last. “I wanted to see how it worked out. You see, that same woman has been in touch with me—”

“Sheila Rosenburg?” Ali asked.

Tracy nodded. “She’s been talking to all of April’s friends. And that’s what April and I are—friends.”

What kind of friends? Ali wondered, although she thought she knew.

“Anyway,” Tracy continued, “I wanted to see what the interview would be like—if the reporter would be on April’s case and accusing her of something or other—before I agreed to do one myself. So I came into the lobby and was watching everything that was going on when that woman—your mother—showed up and started giving me a hard time and causing a scene. I left before anyone had a chance to call security.”

“Why was that?” Ali asked.

“It just seemed like a good idea to get the hell out of there before there was any trouble. Besides, I didn’t want to disrupt what April was doing.”

“You still haven’t told us where you went,” Dave said. “We need names and addresses. We also need the names of any people who might have seen you there.”

Tracy’s reluctance to discuss the matter was obvious in the sullen way he sucked on his cigarette and said nothing.

“We’ve been told that you had a bad enough gambling habit that you had to sell your Sumo Sudoku idea to the highest bidder,” Dave said. “Men can change, but they seldom do. So what’s the story here, Tracy? Are you back in the game again? Did you spend the afternoon at a casino someplace? Or was it somewhere less obvious—like an illegal card room, maybe? And how deep are they into you again? In some circles, gambling on credit can be a very dangerous undertaking.”

The look of surprise that flashed over Tracy’s face made it clear Dave had nailed him. “Where’s the card room?” Dave asked.

“Upstairs over a strip club on Santa Monica called the Pink Swan,” Tracy answered. “I was there all afternoon. I got there about two, and then came directly here.”

Ali remembered the name from newspaper accounts about Paul’s death. She also remembered Helga’s account of the health club called The Body Shop. She wondered if the Pink Swan was a step up or a step down.

“The Pink Swan,” she mused. “Isn’t that where Paul’s bachelor party was held?”

Tracy nodded. “I believe so.”

“You weren’t at the bachelor party?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I wasn’t invited,” Tracy answered. “I mean, Paul and I had a business relationship but we weren’t really buddies or anything.”

“Especially since it sounds to me as if you used to screw around with his bride-to-be,” Ali put in.

Tracy looked at her, but he didn’t bother denying it.

“This Pink Swan place,” Dave persisted. “Would they have you on this afternoon’s surveillance tapes? Would we be able to see what time you arrived there and when you left?”

“That’s the whole point of a place like the Pink Swan,” Tracy said. “There are no surveillance tapes.”

A piece of the puzzle fell into place. If the Pink Swan was a surveillance-free zone, Ali realized, that might explain why no one had any record of Paul’s exit from there. And who had been in charge of choosing the venue for the bachelor party? Presumably Jake Maxwell.

A pair of matching RVs nosed into the aisle and parked side by side directly across from Tracy McLaughlin’s. Once the newly arrived vehicles were in place, several people exited. Laughing and talking, they set off across the parking lot toward the store entrance.

Tracy glanced at his watch. “Look,” he said impatiently, “I’m tired. I had a big match today, and I have another one early tomorrow morning. Could we do this some other time?”

“My mother’s missing now,” Ali insisted. “What did Jake Maxwell want when he came here a little while ago?”

“It was just a scheduling glitch,” he said. “One of the other guys canceled a match. Jake was hoping I could step in for him.”

“So when Jake has a problem, he comes to you with it?” Dave asked.

Tracy nodded.

“Why didn’t he call? You do have a cell, don’t you?”

Tracy shrugged. “Maybe he wanted to get out of the house for a while.”

“And maybe he didn’t want there to be a record of his calling you,” Dave suggested.

“Look,” Tracy said, “I’m here, minding my own business, not bothering anyone—”

“Is that what you were doing when you spent last night in April’s room?” Ali asked. “Minding your own business?”

Clearly her pointed question surprised Tracy McLaughlin. He didn’t deny that, either.

“I already told you we were friends,” he said. “That’s what she needed last night—a friend.” He tossed his dying cigarette out into the parking lot. Ali scurried down the stairs. She retrieved the smoldering butt, ground it out, and put it in her pocket.

“What are you doing?” Tracy demanded.

“You said you weren’t the baby’s father,” she said. “It may take a few weeks to get a real answer, but your DNA should prove it one way or the other.”

“I didn’t give you permission to take that,” Tracy began. He started down the stairs after her, but Dave stepped up and blocked his way.

“I’m not a police officer,” she said. “You tossed your trash out into a public parking lot. If I want to clean up your litter, that’s my call, not yours. And if I’m willing to pay for a paternity test, that’s my call, too.”

Ali stepped around to the back of the Honda and studied the temporary plate. “While we’re at it,” she added, “tell us about this vehicle. I see you just bought it—on Friday. But I was under the impression you were having a tough time financially. So where’d the money come from for a new car?”

“That’s none of your business,” Tracy said. “I want you to leave now, before I have to call the cops.”

“I already told you,” Dave said. “I am a cop.”

“More cops then,” Tracy said.

“By all means, call away,” Ali said. “With everything that’s gone on the past few days, I think they’ll be interested in hearing what we all have to say.”

Without another word, Tracy McLaughlin returned to his RV, slamming the door shut behind him.

“The DNA thing certainly got a reaction,” Dave observed. “Now what? Back to the hotel?”

“Sure,” Ali said, but once she was behind the wheel, she steered away from the entrance to the parking lot and tucked the Cayenne in among the vehicles parked near the front of the store.

“What now?” Dave asked.

“Let’s just watch for a while and see if he stays put,” Ali answered. “It worked once with Jake Maxwell. Maybe it’ll work again with Tracy.”

And it did. Less than twenty minutes later, a dark-colored Ford Windstar minivan pulled into the lot. It stopped next to Tracy’s RV. The Cayenne was parked too far away for Ali and Dave to be able to make out exactly what was happening.

“Stay here,” Dave said. “I’ll try to get closer.”

While he was out of the car, Ali’s cell phone rang. “Any sign of your mother?” Bob Larson asked. Ali heard the edge of panic in her father’s voice.

“Not so far,” Ali returned.

“Damn,” Bob muttered. “I’ve got a really bad feeling about this.”

Ali did, too, but she didn’t want to say so. “We’ll find her,” Ali told her father with far more confidence than she felt. We’ve got to!

As the call ended Dave ducked into the passenger seat and then leaned back, breathing a sigh of apparent relief. “Thank God they didn’t see me,” he said, “but now we know how they do it.”

“Do what?”

“How Sumo Sudoku can support all those very expensive RVs.”

“What are you talking about?” Ali asked.

“The sudoku thing is probably nothing but an elaborate cover. I’m guessing they’re really using the RVs as part of a drug distribution network, transporting drugs up and down the West Coast with their cargoholds full of something besides those round granite rocks. I’m guessing they’re moving heroin or else coke. They just unloaded a bunch of stuff from Tracy’s RV and stuck it in the minivan. My guess is that Jake Maxwell came racing over here tonight to let Tracy know that we had been nosing around and that they needed to make arrangements to get rid of the goods sooner rather than later.”

“Are you telling me Jake Maxwell and Paul got involved in some kind of drug-smuggling group?” Ali asked.

“That’s how it looks.”

By then the load transfer was finished and the van was pulling away from Tracy’s RV. “They’re leaving,” Ali said. “Shouldn’t we follow them?”

As Ali reached for the key, Dave caught her hand in midair and kept her from turning the key in the ignition.

“Absolutely not!” he declared. “There were three of them at least. Four counting McLaughlin. That means we’d be outmanned—no offense—and probably outgunned, too. This is way more than you and I can handle on our own.”

“We call the cops then?”

“No,” Dave said.

Ali was exasperated. “You mean we’re just going to let them get away?”

“For right now,” Dave answered. “If we’ve stumbled onto a big-time drug-smuggling program, you’ve got to understand—these people aren’t to be trifled with. You try bluffing guys like that or crossing them, and they’ll blow you away without a second thought. From the looks of it, this could be a very big operation, which means we’re going to have to go higher up the food chain than the local LAPD cop shop.”

“What do you mean?”

“Once I get back to the hotel, I’ll call in the Marines.”

“The Marines?” Ali repeated.

“One Marine in particular—Ezekiel Washington, if I can find him. ‘Easy’ for short,” Dave added. “When he’s not deployed with the reserves, he works for the DEA here in L.A. Once they get wind of this, they’re going to want to take down the whole thing—not just Tracy McLaughlin and the guys loading the van.”

They were on the 101 by then. For a while Ali drove in thoughtful silence. What Dave had said about drug dealers killing people without compunction had hit her hard. “Do you think my mother’s somehow mixed up with this drug business?” she asked finally.

“She may have blundered into it the same way we did,” Dave replied somberly.

Ali felt her stomach clutch. “We’ll be lucky to see her alive, won’t we?”

As the hours had worn on, Ali had managed to keep her worst fear at bay. Now, having spoken it aloud, she felt like she was drowning in self-reproach. Whatever befell Edie Larson would be all Ali’s fault. If she hadn’t let herself be bamboozled into marrying Paul Grayson in the first place, none of this would have happened. It was bad enough to learn that he’d been unfaithful to her. That much she had somehow suspected, and having it verified hadn’t been all that much of a shock. But for him to have been involved in the drug trade, too? That was way beyond anything she had ever thought Paul capable of, but then she guessed she hadn’t known him nearly as well as she thought she had.

But blaming herself and agonizing about her mother accomplished nothing. She forced herself to turn back to the McLaughlin interview.

“What about the Pink Swan?” she asked.

“If it’s a topless place with illegal gambling and they don’t do surveillance tapes, that means they appeal to a clientele with plenty to hide.”

“It’s also the place where Jake hosted Paul’s bachelor party.”

“I’ll turn Easy on to that, too. But from the sound of it, the Pink Swan is probably already on the DEA’s radar.”

“And then there’s Roseanne,” Ali added thoughtfully. “I wonder about her.”

“Maxwell’s wife?”

Ali nodded. “If I didn’t know what was going on, I wonder if Roseanne did.”

“Too bad we don’t know where to find her.”

“Maybe somebody does,” Ali said determinedly. She passed Dave her phone. “Punch the green button. That’ll give you my list of made calls. Look for Helga Myerhoff.”

“Your divorce lawyer?” Dave asked. “How come?”

“She specializes in high-profile divorce cases. If Roseanne and Jake are splitting the sheets, you can figure there’s a lawyer involved—or a whole bevy of them. Helga’s more likely than anyone else to know which ones.”

Dave found the number, pressed it, and then handed the phone to Ali.

“I didn’t know they were getting a divorce,” Helga said, once Ali had said her piece. “But I can’t say I’d be surprised.”

“Because Jake’s involved with another woman?” Ali asked.

“Because they’re broke,” Helga returned. “Relatively speaking, of course.”

Jake Maxwell hadn’t looked broke earlier that evening. Anything but.

“Even in somewhat straitened circumstances, however,” Helga continued, “everyone I know would have been panting after Roseanne Maxwell and hoping to land her as a client.”

“How can Jake Maxwell be broke?” Ali asked.

“Lost his job, bad investments, gambling?” Helga said. “Take your pick. There are lots of ways to go broke in this town.”

“You’re saying Jake lost his job?” Ali asked.

“You didn’t know that? It happened several months ago now—some kind of corporate job consolidation move. Paul and Jake ended up going head-to-head for the same job. Paul got the job—Jake Maxwell got a golden handshake. That’s why I was a little surprised when he showed up at court on Friday to be in Paul’s corner, but then sometimes people turn out to be better than you think they are.”

Or worse, Ali thought.

“Getting back to Roseanne,” Helga finished. “I do have some connections. If she’s holed up somewhere, someone I know will know where to find her.”

“Thanks.”

“Victor wanted you to call. Have you talked to him yet?”

“No.”

“If you’re driving all over hell and gone, you should probably let him know from you exactly what you’re up to.”

Ali knew what Victor would say—stay put; don’t talk to anyone; let the cops look for her mother.

“I’ll call him,” Ali agreed. Eventually.

Once off the phone, she recounted to Dave everything that had been said. “Makes sense,” he said. “If Jake was needing to make some quick cash, someone may have made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

“But Paul wasn’t broke,” Ali returned. “Why would he be mixed up in it?”

Dave shook his head. “I have no idea.”

By then they were pulling into the hotel entrance. “Do you want me to come up?” Dave asked.

“No,” she said. “Dad and Chris will be here soon. I’m going to take a shower and put my feet up for a few minutes. I may even try closing my eyes.”

“Good idea,” Dave said. He hopped out of the Cayenne and headed for his own car.

Ali handed her car keys over to the parking valet and headed straight into the lobby. If there were reporters waiting there, she’d tough her way through them.

Opening the door to her room Ali hoped, through some miracle, Edie would be there waiting for her, but of course she wasn’t. The room was empty—dark and empty. Ali slipped off her shoes, sank onto the couch, and, as promised, rested her feet on the coffee table. She had spent the last hours busily doing something—playing detective and trying to find her mother. Now, in the quiet stillness, the awful reality began to sink in. Perhaps Edie really was lost to her—lost to all of them. Perhaps there would be no more of Edie’s steaming, soft-centered homemade sweet rolls at Sedona’s Sugar Loaf Café. Perhaps Ali would never again sit over a hot cup of coffee, listening to and often disregarding her mother’s good advice. Perhaps she would never again witness one of her parents’ never-ending rounds of good-natured teasing.

It was that realization—that losing her mother would be harder on Bob Larson than on anyone else—which finally goaded Ali to action. She picked up her computer and logged on.

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

Sunday, September 18, 2005

My mother is missing. Edie Darlene Larson, age 61, of Sedona, Arizona, disappeared from a hotel lobby in L.A. early this afternoon. She was last seen driving away from the Westwood Hotel on Wilshire in her white 2003 Oldsmobile Alero. Edie is five foot seven, has medium-length gray hair, fair skin, and weighs approximately 140 pounds. She also wears two hearing aids. (She’ll kill me for printing that.) Anyone with information about Edie should contact LAPD’s Missing Persons Unit—and me!

Posted 10:23 P.M., September 18, 2005 by Babe

There was far more she wanted to say, would have said, but this was a case where less was more. She deliberately made no mention of Edie’s encounter with Tracy McLaughlin. If, as Dave suspected, this whole thing was tied to a drug-smuggling ring, it was better to leave that out. Ali stripped off her clothes and was about to step into the shower when her cell phone rang. Grabbing it off the counter, she was amazed to see her mother’s name in the caller ID readout.

Sick with relief, Ali shouted into the phone, “Mom! Is that you? Are you all right? Where are you?”

Except there was no answer. Ali could hear a rustling sound and distant voices, but no one was talking directly to her. Maybe it was just a bad connection. Frustrated, Ali punched the volume button on the side of her phone. “Mom. Can you hear me?” she called again.

There was more rustling and then she heard her mother’s voice. “What in the world do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m trying to talk to you,” Ali answered. “Where are you? What’s going on?”

Someone else—another woman—was speaking in the background. Alice could hear the voice but not clear enough to make out any of the individual words.

“You need to let me go,” Edie said clearly and firmly. “This is stupid. It makes no sense.”

That’s when Ali realized she was listening in on what people at the Sugar Loaf called Edie’s infamous “bra calls.” Because that’s where Edie Larson always carried her phone—in her bra. At work her apron pockets usually overflowed with order pads and pencils. When she had added a cell phone into the mix, it hadn’t worked, so she had opted for stowing her phone in the only other available spot—tucked inside her bra. Because Edie didn’t always remember to activate her key guard, she occasionally made accidental calls, burning up minutes and inadvertently revealing all kinds of mundane details of life in a restaurant to several different hapless recipients.

Ali knew at once, however, that this call was no accident. Whoever was with Edie had no idea she was in possession of a cell phone. They also had no idea she had figured out a way to signal for help. And instead of dialing 911, Edie had simply punched “send.”

There was a murmured answer in response to her mother’s comment, but nothing Ali could make out.

“Why are you doing this?” Edie demanded, sounding more agitated. “Where are we? In a basement somewhere?”

So her mother had been blindfolded or maybe even unconscious. She had no idea where she was, and she was being held there against her will.

Ali strained to hear the other woman’s response, but it was totally inaudible.

Then Ali heard her mother’s voice again. “Untie me,” she said. “Let me go. I’m sure we can sort all this out.”

There was a momentary pause followed by a burst of outrage. “We’re not going to sort it out. We’re not sorting anything. Stop telling me what to do, damn it! Just stop it!”

And now that she heard the voice clearly, Ali knew whose it was—April’s. The voice belonged to April Gaddis. How could that be?

“Please, April,” Edie said aloud. “Be reasonable.”

But April had evidently moved beyond reason. “Shut up!” she screamed. “Shut the hell up!”

April’s shout was followed by the sounds of a brief struggle complete with lots more rustling and a sharp clatter. In her mind’s eye, Ali imagined the phone falling out of Edie’s bra and skittering across some hard surface. In her ears, the noise was deafening, but Edie’s attacker didn’t seem to notice. There were other sounds, too—the horrifying thumps of something heavy landing on human flesh. Knowing her mother was most likely bound and helpless, Ali cringed at each one. At last the struggle ended in a terrible groan and a spate of ragged breathing.

“There now,” April said very clearly. “Maybe now you’ll finally shut the hell up and stay where I put you.”

Ali heard a door slam shut followed by an awful silence on the other end of the line. By some miracle the call was still connected.

“Mother?” Ali called. “Are you there? Can you hear me?”

But of course there was no reply. If Edie Larson was even still conscious, she couldn’t hear her daughter’s voice.

For a moment longer Ali stared at the phone in an agony of indecision. The phone in her hand was her only connection to her mother, but where was she? If Ali dialed 911 on her room phone, what would she say to them? “My mother’s been attacked somewhere in L.A. I have no idea where.” Or, was it possible there was an emergency operator somewhere who could trace the call between Ali’s cell phone and wherever it was her mother was being held, injured, perhaps, or maybe even unconscious? But how long would that take? And even if Ali managed to maintain the connection for a while, could she keep it going long enough? What would happen when Edie’s phone ran out of battery power and turned itself off?

Closing her eyes, Ali tried to decide what to do. Wherever April had taken Edie, it had to be a place to which April had ready access. And Edie had mentioned something about a basement. This was California, an area where basements weren’t all that common, but Ali knew where there was at least one basement—a huge one—in the bottom of the house on Robert Lane.

More than half of the space had been and still was devoted to Paul’s extensive wine collection, but there had been several other rooms as well, including a decommissioned redwood-lined sauna that Paul had considered turning into a safe room. Thinking about the way the heavy door had slammed shut behind April as she’d left, Ali had the sudden sense that she knew the answer. She wasn’t confident enough in her idea that she was willing to place an emergency call based on it, but she did know for sure that there wasn’t a moment to lose.

With the call still connected and on speaker, Ali dressed and strapped on her Glock. She paused only long enough to call for her car before grabbing for her purse.

Riding down in the elevator, Ali realized that taking on someone as seemingly deranged as April all by herself was nothing short of stupid. Once more she considered ending the one call and dialing 911. But again, what would she tell them? Let’s see. How about: “My mother’s been attacked by my dead husband’s pregnant fiancée who may or may not be holding her prisoner somewhere in my house on Robert Lane”? Did that sound like a call emergency operators were likely to take seriously? And even if they did, if April had come unhinged, what would she do if a bunch of cop cars came screaming into the yard? With Edie possibly injured and alone in the house with April, that was a risk Ali wasn’t prepared to take.

While she was riding down in the elevator, the call ended on its own. Either her mother’s phone had run out of power, or Ali’s had simply lost the signal. Frustrated, Ali tried calling Dave. He didn’t answer, so she left a terse message.

“On my way to the house. I think April’s there, but I’m not sure. I also think she’s lost it. Wherever she is, I believe she’s holding Mom prisoner. Call me as soon as you get this message. Please.”

Scrambling into the Cayenne, Ali rammed it into gear. Heading for the house, she was reasonably confident that in a fair fight—a one-on-one altercation—she would be able to take April.

And I have no intention of fighting fair, Ali told herself grimly. None whatsoever!

{ CHAPTER 15 }

Ali should have been pulled over a dozen times between the hotel and the house. She drove at breakneck speeds, passing like a maniac, going through lights that were already turning red. She almost hoped she could provoke an observant traffic cop into following her. Maybe having cops there was a good idea after all, and that was one way to summon some police presence without having to explain her soap opera existence to some emergency operator. But it didn’t happen. When Ali finally sped through the broken gate and pulled to a stop in the paved driveway, she was still on her own. Dave hadn’t called her back, and she couldn’t take the time to call him again.

It’s now or never, she told herself.

Before Ali ever stepped out of the car, she considered drawing her Glock but decided against it. Her plan was to try talking first. The Glock would come into play only as a last resort.

Ali was disappointed to find no sign of April’s bright red Volvo there in the driveway, and no sign of Edie Larson’s Olds, either. It was possible both cars were parked in the spacious five-car garage. Maybe that was where they had been parked when Ali and Dave had come to the house earlier and decided no one was there. It was also possible, Ali realized, that she was wrong and there was no one at the house now, either.

Hurrying up onto the porch, Ali reached past a tangle of crime scene tape and tried the front door. It was locked. Ali headed for the back of the house, wondering as she went if the alarm system had ever been reengaged. She tried the slider from the pool patio into the family room. No luck. That was locked, too. Finally she tried the door into the kitchen. The knob turned easily in her hand.

“I wondered how long it would take you to get here,” April said.

Ali stopped just inside the door. April was across the room, seated on a chair at the kitchen table. A pistol Ali recognized as one of Paul’s lay nearby on the tabletop, well within April’s reach. Ali knew that had she come into the house with her own weapon drawn, they both might have died in a hail of gunfire.

“What’s going on?” Ali demanded. “What have you done to my mother?”

“She kept trying to tell me what to do. I got sick of it. So I decided to show her a thing or two.”

“My mother told you what to do so you’re holding her prisoner in the basement? Are you nuts?”

“Maybe,” April conceded. “Maybe a little.”

Ali took a step into the room. As soon as she did, April picked up the gun and pointed it in Ali’s direction. “Don’t come any closer,” she said. “Put your hands behind your head and stay where you are.”

“Is my mother hurt?” Ali asked.

“I didn’t hit her that hard,” April said. “I was tired of listening to her. I just wanted her to shut up.”

“I asked you if my mother’s all right.”

“She’s still breathing, if that’s what you want to know,” April allowed. “I came upstairs to get more duct tape. When I went back down, I found her phone. I heard it ringing. Someone named Bobby called—whoever that is.”

Bobby was Robert Larson, Ali’s father, although Edie hardly ever called her husband by that pet name to his face.

“And that’s when I saw Edie had called you,” April continued.

“You’re right,” Ali agreed. “She did call me, and I heard everything that was said between you, April. All of it. And when she mentioned being in a basement, I knew you had to be holding her here at the house. But why? What do you think you’re doing? What’s this all about? Whatever it is, we’ve got to put a stop to it.”

“We?” April returned bitterly. “There you go doing the same thing your mother did—ordering me around, telling me what to do. Why does everyone think they can get away with that? It’s been that way all my life. It’s like people think that just because someone is pretty they’re also stupid. I’m not, you know.”

“What exactly did my mother tell you to do?” Ali asked.

“She told me to stop smoking—like I was in junior high. She sounded just like my mother. Exactly like my mother. It was like a flashback or something.”

“So your mother was always ordering you around, too?” Ali asked the question more to sustain the conversation than anything else. She knew she needed to keep April talking while she figured out what to do next.

“Are you kidding?” April demanded. “Don’t try to tell me you didn’t notice. She was the worst one of all—talking to the lawyers, firing the cook and the gardener, acting like it was her house and her life instead of mine.”

For the first time it occurred to Ali that April herself might have been responsible for her mother’s fatal plunge down the stairs.

“Your mother was trying to look out for you,” Ali said reasonably. “For you and your baby both.”

“Screw the baby,” April said. “I never even wanted a damned baby. I never should have told Paul about it in the first place. He’s the one who talked me into keeping it. If it had been up to me, I would have had an abortion just like I did those other times. But as soon as Paul knew about it, he was wild to get married, have the baby and everything.”

April’s words hit Ali hard. She remembered that she and Paul had talked some about having kids shortly after they married, but Chris was already a teenager by then. Ali had been happy with the way her career was going. She hadn’t wanted to start the motherhood program over again, especially knowing full well that no matter how much paid help she’d have had, most of the responsibility for the new arrival would fall to her. She had already raised one only child. She hadn’t wanted to do that again, but she certainly hadn’t wanted to have two more children, either. So she hadn’t exactly said no to Paul, but she hadn’t ever stopped taking her birth control pills, either. The upshot of that had been that Paul had resented Chris—resented everything about Chris—and had never really accepted him.

Once Ali had learned about April, she had moved out of the house. In the months since then, she had blamed Paul for everything that had been wrong with their marriage. Now, though, standing with her fingers locked around the back of her neck, facing her husband’s armed mistress across an expanse of kitchen, Ali Reynolds came face-to-face with her own culpability. For the first time she had to admit that it had taken two people to destroy her marriage—three, counting April.

But that wasn’t the real issue here. The real bottom line had to do with April and her gun. If she had gone totally off her rocker, was anyone going to come out of this confrontation alive?

“You killed your mother?” Ali asked.

“What if I did?” April replied. “It was an accident. We were arguing in the upstairs hallway. It got physical. I pushed her and down she went.”

April’s dispassionate confession was calm, conversational, and utterly chilling.

“But she was still alive when she landed,” Ali argued. “She was still alive hours later when we found her. Why didn’t you try to help her? Why didn’t you call for an ambulance?”

“Because I didn’t want to help her,” April returned. “Because I was tired of having her scream at me. I just left her where she was and went shopping. I figured someone else would find her eventually, and I was right.”

“My mother never screamed at you,” Ali said.

“No,” April agreed. “But every time I was around her, she kept telling me what I should and shouldn’t be doing for the baby. Smoking is bad for the baby. Drinking is bad. Eating spicy food is bad. Coffee is bad. I’m sick and tired of the damned baby. She’s not even born yet, and even Sonia Marie gets to tell me what to do.”

She really is crazy, Ali thought. Totally nuts!

“How did my mother get here to the house?” Ali asked.

“She figured it out,” April said.

“Figured what out?”

“About my mother. She came to my room after the interview while I was changing clothes. She saw the scratches on my arms and asked me about them, so I decided to get rid of her, too. And since she liked the baby so much, I used the baby against her. I came here to the house and then I called Edie. I told her where I was and that I needed her to come quick and pick me up because my contractions had started. Worked like a charm. She couldn’t get here fast enough. She was surprised when I pulled the gun on her, though. I think she thought I was kidding. I wasn’t.”

So Edie’s ability to see through people was what had gotten her in trouble.

“My arms are getting tired,” Ali said. “My hands are going to sleep. Can I put them down now?”

“Stay on that side of the room then,” April ordered. “Over against the sink. Don’t come any closer.”

“What about Paul?” Ali asked, changing the subject ever so slightly. “Did he ever tell you what to do?”

“Sort of,” April admitted. “I didn’t mind that much because he was nice about it, at least at first. It got worse after I moved in here. That’s when I really noticed it. He started sounding more and more like my mother. He was closer to her age, you know—closer to hers than he was to mine.”

“You killed him, too, then?” Ali asked.

“Of course I didn’t kill him,” April said indignantly. “I keep telling you, I’m not stupid. Why would I kill Paul when we weren’t married and he hadn’t even signed his new will yet? That makes no sense.”

“I thought you didn’t know whether or not he had signed it.”

“There are a lot of things I know that people don’t think I know,” April returned with a grim smile. “That’s the one nice thing about people thinking I’m stupid. They always underestimate me.”

April had already nonchalantly admitted to one murder, and Ali knew she had most likely attempted another. Given that, when she denied having been involved in Paul Grayson’s death, Ali had to concede there was a possibility April was telling the truth.

“So what are you going to do now?” Ali asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve admitted to me that you killed your own mother. You’ve attacked mine, and you’re holding her prisoner. You’re holding me at gunpoint. How is this all going to end, April? Do you have a plan?”

“Not really,” April said with a shrug of her shoulders. “After everything that’s happened, I really don’t care that much one way or the other.”

To Ali’s ear, that sounded very much like an implied suicide threat. Dealing with someone in that distraught state who was also armed with a lethal weapon was a very bad idea.

“What if I’ve called the cops?” Ali asked.

April shrugged again. “If you had, they’d be here by now.”

“What if I’ve called someone else?”

“You’re bluffing.”

“Tell me about Tracy McLaughlin.”

“What about him? He’s a friend of mine and a lot closer to my age than anybody else around here.”

“How good a friend?” Ali asked.

“That’s what your mother wanted to know, too,” April said bitterly. “She even asked me if Trace was the father of my baby. Of course he isn’t. You think I’m dumb enough to try passing somebody else’s baby off as Paul’s? What if he’d asked for a paternity test? What do you think would have happened to me then? If the baby wasn’t his, I would have been out in the cold, just like I am anyway. So what does it matter?”

“Look,” Ali said, trying to sound reassuring. “Let’s go down to the basement and check on my mother. Once I’m sure she’s all right, we can work together to figure out what’s best for you and for your baby.”

“You still don’t get it, do you?” April said. “It’s over.”

“What’s over?”

“There’s not going to be a baby. I’m going to end this whole thing today. Now. What kind of a life would Sonia Marie have with her father dead and me in prison? Even if the cops arrest Jesus Sanchez, sooner or later they’re going to figure out what really happened, the same way your mother did. Then they’ll come after me. What’s the point?”

“You might be in prison, but the baby would be alive.”

“Somehow I don’t think that’s much of a favor. I already told you, there isn’t going to be a baby. Come to think of it, maybe I’ll burn this house down while I’m at it. That would be pretty funny, wouldn’t it? If you’re gone and I’m gone and the baby’s gone, who gets Paul’s money then?” April’s question trailed off in a mirthless giggle.

Before Ali could attempt an answer, her phone rang. She pulled it out of her pocket. A glance at the caller ID window told her it was Dave calling.

“It’s my father,” Ali said to April. “I need to take this call. Otherwise he might come here looking for me.”

April nodded. “All right,” she said. “Answer it.”

Ali pressed the “talk” button.

“Hi, Dad,” she said with forced cheerfulness. “How close are you?”

“Dad!” Dave repeated. “I’m not your father. It’s Dave, for God’s sake. Don’t you ever check the caller ID before you answer? And what the hell do you mean, going over to the house all by yourself?—”

“No,” Ali said calmly, interrupting his angry outburst. “We still haven’t found her. I called in a report to Missing Persons, but I haven’t gone to the cops directly. If you want to, that’s up to you.”

“What’s going on—” Dave stopped abruptly, and then seemed to tumble. “I see,” he said. “It’s April, isn’t it? I’m almost at the house now, just turning up the hill. I’ll be there in a matter of minutes.”

Somehow Dave Holman was managing to sort through what Ali was saying and arrive at what she needed him to hear. God bless this man! she thought.

“Yes, Dad,” Ali said. “It’s a very nice hotel. Don’t worry. You’ll be able to get something to eat. Even if the kitchen is closed when you get there, they have twenty-four-hour room service.”

“The kitchen, then,” Dave said. “You want me to come to the kitchen. Is she armed?”

“Absolutely,” Ali answered. “We’ll find her, Dad,” she added less vehemently. “I know we will.”

“When you see me, try to create a diversion. Or else I will.”

“Okay, Pops,” Ali said. “See you soon.”

She ended the call.

“Turn the phone off and put it on the counter,” April said. “You’re not taking any more calls.”

Ali put the phone down.

“Still,” April added wistfully, “it must be nice having a whole family you can call on and have them come riding to the rescue at a moment’s notice.”

Ali was still standing just to the right of the door. The kitchen window was behind her. If Dave approached the kitchen from that direction, April would see him, and she’d have a shot at both of them. If Ali could manage to distance herself from the door, April’s attention would be split.

“You do have that kind of family,” Ali said. “You’ve had it all along. That’s what my mother was trying to do—help you. Your mother was doing the same thing. They were both trying to give you some hard-won advice to help you through this terrible time.”

As she spoke, Ali moved past the sink, but April noticed.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded. “I told you to stay there.”

Ali’s heart pounded in her chest. Summoning as much nonchalance as she could muster, she reached up in the cupboard and took down a glass.

“I’m thirsty,” Ali said. “I need a drink of water. Do you want some?”

April shook her head.

Taking that as permission, Ali proceeded over to the fridge, where she used the door dispenser to fill the glass with both ice and water. She was relieved to see that April’s attention remained focused on her. Unfortunately, so did the gun. Ali’s move to the fridge meant she was closer to the weapon now, as well. The barrel seemed immense. And it must have been heavy, too. April’s hand seemed to tremble as she tried to hold it steady.

Ali took a deep breath. If she attempted to reason with April, what were the chances she’d simply provoke the disturbed woman that much more? And how much longer would it take for Dave to get here? And when all hell broke loose, where in this high-tech granite and stainless steel kitchen would she look for cover? Ali was far more accustomed to dealing with the world through words than she was with weapons.

“Please, April,” she said. “This is pointless. Put the gun down.”

As Ali had feared, April did the exact opposite. Rather than putting the pistol down, she raised it and pointed it toward herself. Out of the corner of her eye, Ali caught a hint of movement at the kitchen door. Dave was there. He had approached from the opposite side without passing the window and without being seen while April’s life hung in the balance.

Dropping the glass, Ali sprang forward. She reached across the table and slammed one closed fist into April’s wrist. At the same time she straight-armed April in the chest with her other arm. Caught off guard and off balance, April spilled backward. The gun exploded with a roar. So did one of the glass pendant light fixtures over the counter. April landed on her back with a grunt. The force of the fall was enough that the gun bounced out of her hand and went spinning across the floor, where it came to rest against the base of the dishwasher. While April struggled to right herself, Ali scrambled after the gun.

“Ali,” Dave was shouting. “Are you okay? Did she get you?”

Holding the pistol in one hand and shaking her head, Ali struggled to her feet as Dave helped April to hers. April was crying. There was blood on her face from what looked like a series of jagged cuts, but not from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. That meant Ali’s desperate measure had succeeded.

“Why didn’t you just let me do it?” April demanded tearfully. “Why can’t you people just leave me alone? Why don’t you mind your own business?”

It was a moment or two before Ali could find her own voice. Trembling, she examined her body and was more than half surprised to find no gaping wounds.

“I’m okay,” she managed at last. “At least I think I am.”

In the background now, she could hear the sound of approaching sirens. So Dave had called for backup. He just hadn’t waited for reinforcements to arrive before coming to the door. For that Ali was incredibly grateful.

Without another word, Ali left April’s gun on the counter and raced for the stairs that led to the basement. She dashed past Paul’s loaded wine racks and through the media room. Just as she expected, she found Edie in the decommissioned sauna—duct-taped to the slats of the wooden bench. Another piece of duct tape covered her mouth. Her eyes were wide open.

Cringing, Ali peeled the tape off her mother’s mouth, removing a good deal of skin along with it.

“Are you all right?” Ali asked.

“Just let me at that little nutcase,” Edie replied. “I’ll tear her limb from limb. Did I hear gunshots?”

Ali nodded while she struggled to loosen Edie’s other restraints, starting with her arms. “You did hear gunshots,” Ali said. “One, at least. Fortunately she missed. Dave is upstairs with her, waiting for the cops to get here. If they’re not here already, they will be any minute. Are you all right?”

“I’m more mad than hurt,” Edie replied. “She gave me a good crack on the back of the head. I was out for a while, and my head hurts like crazy. What in the world is the matter with that girl?”

There was no way to answer that question.

As Ali worked to free her mother from her restraints, footsteps pounded across the kitchen and down the stairs. “Where are you?” Dave demanded.

“Down the hall,” Ali called back. “In the sauna.”

Dave’s anxious face appeared in the doorway a moment later. “Is Edie here? Is she okay?”

With the last of the tape removed, Edie tried to get to her feet. She stood briefly, but even with Ali helping her, she swayed a little and sat back down abruptly. “I guess I’m still a little woozy,” she said.

“An ambulance is already on the way,” Dave said.

“What’s going on upstairs?” Ali asked.

“When April saw the uniforms, she fought the cops tooth and nail, but they have her in custody now. They’re putting her in a patrol car or an ambulance.”

A uniformed cop showed up in the sauna just then, followed immediately by two more. “Is the other lady all right?” one of them asked.

“I’ll be a whole lot better once you get me out of here,” Edie Larson said, rising again. “I never have liked saunas. They make me feel claustrophobic.”

For good reason, Ali thought.

“Ma’am,” one of the cops said. He didn’t look to be much older than Chris. “Are you sure you should be moving around like this? Wouldn’t you be better off sitting back down and waiting here for the EMTs to come take a look at you?”

“Young man,” Edie said firmly, “I’m not staying in this room for another minute. Now either help me out of here or else get out of the way so I can do it on my own.” With that, Edie turned to Ali. “Call your father,” she ordered. “Let him know I’m all right. If you’ve told him about any of this, he’s probably worried sick.”

That was when Ali knew for sure Edie was all right, too.

As the clutch of uniformed officers helped Edie out of the sauna and down the hall, Dave handed Ali his phone. “Call your dad,” he said.

Bob and Chris had arrived at the hotel by then, and they were jubilant when they heard the news. “I can’t believe you and Dave pulled it off!” Bob Larson exclaimed.

Ali gave Dave a sideways look. “I can’t, either,” she said. “But we did.”

“And everybody’s all right?”

“They’re taking Mom to an ER to be checked out. She has a nasty lump on her head and was a little shaky on her feet. She may have a slight concussion.”

“Which hospital?”

“Cedars-Sinai,” Ali answered. “Ask Chris. He’ll know how to get there.”

“What about you?” Bob asked.

“I’m fine,” Ali said. And she had been fine while she was helping her mother. But now she could feel tears welling up in her eyes as she spoke to her father. “I’ll talk to you later.”

She handed the phone over to Dave, trying to dodge his questioning glance as she did so, trying not to let him see that her hands were shaking and her knees knocking. Ali sank down on the redwood bench, and Dave sat down beside her.

“You’re not fine,” he said, wrapping a comforting arm around her shoulder. “You’re not fine at all.”

{ CHAPTER 16 }

They sat together for some time, with Ali simply leaning into Dave’s shoulder and gathering her strength. “Thank you,” she said at last. “Thank you for being here and thank you for listening to what I meant as opposed to what I said.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “Better now?”

She nodded.

“Good,” he said, “because it’s about time to go back upstairs and give another statement.”

“And call Victor again?”

“I think we can pass on calling Victor this time.”

The officer who took Ali’s statement was one of the Eagle Scout–looking uniforms who had helped Edie make her way back upstairs.

“So this whole thing came about because your mother and this April Gaddis had some kind of disagreement?”

“Evidently,” Ali said.

“And what exactly is your relationship to the perpetrator—or your mother’s, for that matter?”

Ali sighed. “April Gaddis is my dead husband’s mistress. My dead husband’s pregnant mistress. They were supposed to get married yesterday, but he was murdered early Friday morning and died before our divorce became final.”

The young man frowned. Concentrating as he wrote, he made no comment about Ali’s very complicated life, and Ali greatly appreciated his lack of editorial input.

“And the cause of the difficulty between April and your mother?” he continued.

“Mom tried to tell April she shouldn’t be smoking when she’s pregnant.”

“Makes sense to me,” the young cop said. His name was Rich Green, and maybe he really was an Eagle Scout.

Officer Green took the information from both Ali and Dave in a methodical manner. He was thorough. He was patient. He was also slow as Christmas. By the time he finally finished, Ali was ready to strangle him.

“So where did they take April?” Ali asked when the ordeal was finally over. “And what about my mother?”

“They were both supposed to be transported to Cedars-Sinai,” Officer Green told them. “But I believe your mother decided against going at the last moment. Said she had a perfectly good hotel room and that would be fine. All she wanted was to see her husband and get a good night’s sleep.”

That sounded like Edie.

“And April?” Ali asked.

“She went to the hospital.”

“Cedars-Sinai? They have a psych ward there?” Ali asked.

“I’m not sure about a psych ward,” Officer Green returned. “I believe one of the EMTs said something about her going into labor.”

Ali’s heart constricted in her chest. “But I just told you. April Gaddis was holding both my mother and me at gunpoint. She’s been waving a pistol around and threatening suicide. She should be on a suicide watch.”

“I’m sure the EMTs who transported her conferred with the supervisor on the scene before they took her anywhere. Do you want me to call and check?”

Ali could imagine how long it would take Officer Green to navigate through any kind of bureaucratic roadblock.

“No, thanks,” Ali said. “Don’t bother. I’ll find out for myself.”

“The hospital?” Dave asked, following Ali out to where his car was parked directly behind hers.

“You don’t have to come,” Ali said.

“I’m coming,” Dave declared.

“All right then,” Ali agreed. “The hospital.”

It was after two A.M. when both vehicles pulled into the hospital parking lot. The hospital was locked down tight. A security guard met them at the main door and led them to a lobby counter.

“We’re here to see a patient,” Ali said to the clerk seated in front of a computer screen. “She’s on the maternity ward. Her name is April Gaddis.”

The clerk typed something into her keyboard then looked back at Ali with a frown. “Are you a relative?” she asked.

Clearly the clerk was less than prepared to hand out any information. And with the new federal privacy rules, Ali knew she was fighting an uphill battle. She tried to lighten the mood.

“Not a relative,” Ali said breezily. “Just a good friend. I’m going to be the baby’s godmother.”

“Excuse me,” the clerk said, rising. “If you’ll just wait here. I need to check with a supervisor.”

“Not good,” Dave said under his breath. “When they have to go check with a supervisor, it’s never a good sign.”

A few minutes later a formidable black woman emerged from a closed door behind the desk. “I’m a supervisor, Audrey Barker. May I help you?” she asked.

“I came to see April Gaddis,” Ali said. “She’s a patient here—a maternity patient. She was brought here by ambulance a couple of hours ago.”

“And what is your relationship to Ms. Gaddis?” Audrey Barker asked. “Are you a relative?”

“As I already told the other woman, I’m not a relative—just a good friend.”

“Would you happen to know the names of any of Ms. Gaddis’s relatives? She told us her mother is deceased.”

“Monique Ragsdale is deceased,” Ali answered. She was starting to get a bad feeling from all the questions. Surely coming to visit a patient didn’t usually result in the visitors being given this kind of third degree.

“Do you know of any others or how we could contact them?”

“I never met her father,” Ali said. “And as far as I know, April is an only child. She used to have a stepbrother, but not anymore. Why?”

“But you and she are good friends?”

“Yes,” Ali said at once, carefully avoiding meeting Dave’s eye as she said so. “Why?”

“Because,” Audrey Barker said kindly, “I’m afraid I have some very bad news.”

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

Monday, September 19, 2005

First of all, my mother is safe. She was found a few hours after I posted that last message. She was slightly hurt in the process but not enough that she required either treatment or hospitalization. Thanks so much to those of you who wrote to express your concern.

This has been a dreadful week. My husband is dead. So is his girlfriend and so is their unborn baby. My husband was found murdered late last week and I remain a “person of interest” in that homicide. April Gaddis, his girlfriend and the mother of his unborn child, committed suicide after being admitted to the maternity ward of Cedars-Sinai Hospital. I’m able to report her name here because April’s next of kin, her long-estranged father, has now been located and notified.

Overwhelmed by events, April suffered some kind of breakdown. In the process she not only murdered her own mother, she ended up holding two other people at gunpoint. My mother was one of the two. I was the other. When officers finally arrived at the second scene, April was taken into custody and transported by ambulance to the hospital after convincing EMTs she was about to give birth. Once there, she went into the bathroom of her hospital room, supposedly to change clothes. Instead, she somehow managed to hang herself.

During my years in the news business, I remember using the words “senseless violence” on occasion. And the words apply here as well. A whole family has been wiped out—one that would have been my husband’s second family. Four people are dead, including a baby who never had a chance to draw her first breath and a grandmother who never saw her granddaughter’s face.

In the process, my own life has been threatened. So has my mother’s. I’ve also been accused of murder. In the course of all the turmoil, things became so complicated that I was told to avoid blogging entirely for fear I might end up saying something in my commentary that would be considered self-incriminating. (As you can see by this post, I’m not always good about taking advice from attorneys—even when I’m paying them big bucks to give me that selfsame advice.)

Putting all that together, you can probably understand that when I came dragging back to my hotel this morning at a little past four, I was feeling more than a little shattered, to say nothing of exhausted. To top it all off, my faith in the human race was pretty much obliterated. My mother, who had been missing, had been found safe, but I was too tired to count that as a blessing right then. She had been endangered for no other reason than she is my mother, who had come to L.A. to help me with my mounting difficulties. I believe this can be filed under the heading of “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.”

In other words, everything that had happened had been more than I could handle—and then some. So once I finally made it back to my hotel and dropped my car off with the valet, I staggered into the lobby intent on going straight up to my room to go to sleep. Halfway across the lobby I was waylaid and greeted by name by someone I knew but had never met in person.

She was an older lady with bright blue eyes and a halo of thinning snow-white hair. She was sitting on a couch just inside the entrance. Parked next to her was a walker that sported red, white, and blue tennis balls and a tiny American flag. She stood up the moment she saw me. “There you are, Babe,” she said. “How’s your mom?”

Those of you who have been following cutloose for some time will recognize the name Velma T of Laguna. She had read my previous post, the one that said my mother was missing. She was so concerned about what was going on that she ended up doing some detective work of her own. She figured out where I must be staying, and came here—in a cab!!!! When I told her my mother was safe, she simply smiled and nodded. “I know,” she said. “I’ve been praying for her all night.”

I offered to give Velma T a ride back home, but she turned me down. “You look tired, honey,” she said. “You’d better get some sleep. I got here under my own steam, and I’ll get home the same way.”

And so, with my faith in humanity restored by an eighty-eight-year-old bundle of goodwill, I came up here to my room, stripped off my clothes, and slept like a baby. Without moving a muscle. When I woke up late this morning and logged on to my computer, there were 87 messages in my in-box, almost all of them expressing concern for my mother. (Please pardon me if I don’t respond to all of them.) A few of the ones from this morning were from people who had already learned from some other source that my mother had been found. I guess by now I should be accustomed to the amazing immediacy of the Internet community, but I’m still learning. And I’m still grateful.

I have no idea when bodies will be released for burial or to whom, so I have no idea how long it will take for funeral arrangements to be made. As a consequence, I have no idea how much longer I’ll be in the area. But believe me, I’m more than ready to go back home to Arizona. Sedona is sounding pretty inviting to me about now.

Posted 11:43 A.M., September 19, 2005 by Babe

Ali had made arrangements to have brunch in the hotel dining room with her parents and Chris. To get there, she had to make her way through the lobby. Once again there was a gaggle of camera-and microphone-wielding reporters waiting for her.

“Ms. Reynolds, Ms. Reynolds,” one of them shouted as Ali exited the elevator. “Are you all right? Is your mother okay?”

Ali started to walk past without answering, but then, remembering they were only doing their jobs, she relented and decided to get it over with. She stopped and spoke directly into one of the cameras. “My mother is fine,” she said. “So am I.”

“At the time April Gaddis was holding you and your mother at gunpoint, did either of you suspect that she intended to commit suicide?” another reporter wanted to know.

“I did everything in my power to keep it from happening,” Ali answered. “A troubled young woman died unnecessarily. So did her baby. This is a very unfortunate situation for all concerned, including April Gaddis’s grieving family. I’d appreciate it if you’d all respect our privacy. I have no further comment. Neither does my mother.”

“But—”

“No buts,” Ali replied firmly and walked away, leaving a flurry of unanswered questions echoing behind her. She was relieved when she finally made it into the dining room, where the others were already gathered and where her father was perusing the menu.

Edie took one look at her daughter’s face and was immediately on the alert. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Ali said. “Just that bunch of reporters outside.”

Edie nodded. “Such pushy people,” she said. “You didn’t used to be like them, did you?”

“I hope not,” Ali said, “but I probably was.”

She sat down next to her father, who was still engrossed in the menu. “The prices here are higher than a cat’s back,” he announced. “This is highway robbery.”

Bob’s customary grousing was exactly what Ali needed right then. It took her mind off the reporters milling in the lobby.

“Don’t worry about it, Dad,” Ali said. “You’re not paying.”

“I don’t care,” her father returned. “It’s the principle of the thing. The food better be top drawer, or I’m going to have a long chat with the manager.”

As it turned out, the food was fine.

“So when can we go home?” Bob asked, settling in to mow his way through a plate of eggs Benedict that he pronounced almost as good as his.

“Mom won’t be able to leave for a while,” Ali told him. “The three of us—Mom, Dave, and I—are going to need to be available for the next several days while the investigation continues. And I still have to give my deposition for the wrongful dismissal suit.”

“You don’t need to hang around for any of that, Robert,” Edie said. “Someone should be home minding the store. I don’t like having the Sugar Loaf running on automatic with both of us out of town.”

“You wouldn’t mind if I went home?” Bob asked his wife. Then he turned to Ali. “And what about Paul’s funeral? Won’t you need me here for that?”

Ali was having a difficult time imagining how she was going to manage her estranged husband’s funeral, but having to do it under the watchful eyes of both her parents would make it that much harder.

“You and Chris can go home, Dad,” Ali told him. “Mom and I will be fine.”

“I’m not going,” Chris said. “Gramps and I already talked it over. I’ll stay here for a couple more days and drive home with Grandma.”

“Good,” Edie said. “I’m glad that’s settled, as long as you promise you won’t drive the whole way without stopping to rest. You’re not a spring chicken, you know, Bob.”

During breakfast, Dave seemed far quieter than usual. At the café in Sedona, he and Bob teased each other constantly, but this morning Dave didn’t participate in any of the hijinks. When Chris bugged out to go visit some friends and Bob and Edie went in search of the dessert buffet, Ali turned to Dave. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t like being told to buzz off,” Dave replied.

“Who told you that?” Ali asked.

“My good friend Easy. According to him, it’s hands off at the Pink Swan. He says the DEA is involved in some kind of complicated, long-term investigation going on over there. That means the Feds will take a very dim view of anything that upsets their apple cart.”

“But if they’re investigating the place, isn’t there a possibility that they might have surveillance records that would show exactly what happened the night Paul disappeared?” Ali asked.

“They might,” Dave agreed. “But good luck laying hands on them. The Feds aren’t going to lift a finger to help anyone, including LAPD homicide, if they’re running an undercover operation and helping out would tip their hand prematurely.”

“How can that be?” Ali objected. “Paul was murdered. It makes no sense that the DEA won’t help us.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Dave told her grimly. “The Feds don’t have to make sense.”

By then Bob and Edie were returning to the table with their dessert plates piled high. When Helga Myerhoff called a few minutes later, Ali excused herself. Avoiding the hotel lobby, she ducked into the nearest restroom to take the call.

“I heard all about what happened from Victor,” Helga said. “Thank God you and your mother are okay.”

Ali couldn’t help wondering if Victor would be charging Ali for calling Helga and if Helga would be charging Ali for taking the call. As far as Ali could see, in this game the only ones coming out ahead were the lawyers.

“Yes,” Ali agreed. “Thank God.”

“As far as Roseanne Maxwell is concerned, I’ve been asking around,” Helga continued. “If there’s a divorce in the offing at the Maxwell household, nobody I know has heard word one about it. And nobody knows where Roseanne’s disappeared to, either. That includes her best friend, who hasn’t had a call from her. She says Roseanne isn’t answering her phone and that her voice mail message box is full.”

To Ali’s way of thinking and with everything else that had happened, this sounded ominous. Especially for Roseanne.

“Jake told us she was in New York shopping for clothes.”

“That doesn’t compute,” Helga replied. “The friend I just told you about—the one who complained about not hearing from Roseanne—is also the friend Roseanne usually does her NYC shopping junkets with. Since Jake hasn’t done so, the friend is actually thinking of turning in a missing persons report.”

“I hope she does,” Ali said.

“Anything else you need from me right now?” Helga asked.

“You’ll let me know if you hear anything?” Ali asked.

“Definitely.”

Ali ended the call and returned to the dining room, where she discovered her father had managed to pay for brunch after all.

“Thanks, Dad,” she told him.

“Thanks for letting me go home,” he said. “L.A. isn’t for me. It’s too big, too crowded, and way too expensive.”

“Too expensive is right,” Edie agreed. “It doesn’t make a bit of sense for us to be staying at a place like this at whatever king’s ransom they charge per night when a perfectly good house is sitting empty just a few miles away.”

“The house on Robert Lane is still considered a crime scene,” Dave pointed out.

“But for how long?” Edie wanted to know. “With April dead and Ali and me both safe, I don’t see why that’s necessary.”

“It’s a crime scene until LAPD releases it,” Dave told her. “The detectives need to determine exactly what happened to Monique Ragsdale and also what happened to you.”

“But April told us what happened to her mother,” Edie objected. “That’s what I told that first detective who interviewed me this morning. I’m sure it’s what Ali told them as well.”

“The problem,” Dave pointed out, “is that you happen to be Ali’s mother. As far as the investigators are concerned, one or both of you could be lying to protect the other. And until there’s some forensic evidence to back up the story that April is the one who pushed Monique down the stairs…”

“What about the scratches I saw on April’s arms?” Edie asked. “Can’t they be matched up with scrapings taken from underneath Monique’s fingernails?”

“They probably can,” Dave agreed. “But it’s going to take time.”

“And probably a dozen more interviews,” Edie said. “I’ve done enough police interviews in the last couple of days that I’m sick and tired of them.” She glanced at her watch. “How about if they did something else for a change instead of just sitting around asking the same questions over and over?”

That was Ali’s opinion as well. From what she could tell, police work seemed to involve a whole lot more talking than it did anything else.

When brunch was over, Bob and Edie went up to their room to help Bob get ready to head out. Once they left, Dave stood up as well. “If you don’t need anything from me,” he said, “I may drive over to Havasu and see the kids for a while. They’re off school for the afternoon.”

“Go ahead,” Ali told him. “I think you’ve earned a little time off.”

Upstairs, Ali was relieved that she now had a room to herself. Much as she liked her mother, Ali had spent months becoming accustomed to being on her own. And she liked it.

Opening her computer, she stretched out on the couch and logged on. The first message in her in-box came from a familiar address:

Dear Babe,

I guess I’m not as young as I used to be. I just now woke up. Well, a little while ago, I suppose. Long enough that I’ve had a cup of coffee and turned on my computer.

It was such a thrill to meet you last night—this morning really. Most people would have thought I was some kind of crazed stalker or something. Thank you for being so gracious to an old lady who happens to be a big fan of yours.

Knowing from you some of what went on yesterday, I wanted to check out what that jerk at socalcopshop had to say. Sure enough. He’s at it again. Go ahead and read it, but it’ll probably make you mad. I don’t know what LMB’s problem is.

LOVE,

VELMA T

Unable to resist, Ali turned to socalcopshop.com, and there it was.

ALISON REYNOLDS AND HER WEB OF EVIL

Alison Reynolds, the Black Widow of Robert Lane, continues to spin her evil web from her current base of operations, the posh Westwood Hotel. This time her victim is April Gaddis, the unfortunate young woman who was scheduled to marry Ms. Reynolds’s estranged husband on Saturday afternoon.

Overwhelmed by grief and run over by Ms. Reynolds’s army of high-powered attorneys, April Gaddis committed suicide in a room on the maternity ward of Cedars-Sinai Hospital early Monday morning. Not only is Ms. Gaddis dead, so is her unborn child. After finding the mother’s lifeless body, doctors attempted to save the baby but were unable to do so.

Sources close to the investigation say that Ms. Gaddis spent the last several days of her life in the company of Alison Reynolds and her mother. Why would she have turned to her fiancé’s former wife for consolation? Well, let’s see. For one thing, Ms. Gaddis’s mother, Monique Ragsdale, also perished over the weekend as a result of a nasty fall down a stairway in Ms. Reynolds’s Robert Lane mansion. Coincidence? I don’t think so, and neither do LAPD and Riverside County homicide investigators who are working this series of interrelated cases.

Alison Reynolds is the only common denominator in all of them. Who gave this Black Widow a license to kill and who’s going to see to it that she pays for her crimes?

Posted 11:05 A.M., September 19, 2005 by LMB

So Lance-a-lot is at it again, Ali thought. When it came to spinning a web, Ali didn’t hold a candle to April Gaddis, but she resisted the temptation to respond to LMB and tell him so directly. Posting anything on his Web site would only serve to add legitimacy to his claims about her. She sent a note to Velma instead.

Dear Velma,

Thanks for passing along the information about socal copshop. The guy who writes it seems to have it in for me, and I don’t know why.

Thanks, too, for what you did last night. Your loyal support meant more to me than you can possibly know.

If you have a weekend number for your nephew, you might ask him to give me a call. I believe I have information that might be helpful to his client.

ALI

For the next hour or so, Ali sat at the computer sending as many thank-you notes as she could manage to the people who had written to express their concern over the fact that Edie Larson was missing or else their gratitude for her safe return. She posted some of the messages and simply answered the others. Good manners required individual replies wherever possible.

She had finally succeeded in clearing her mailbox and had closed her eyes for a brief nap when the “You’ve got mail” announcement sounded in her ear. The e-mail address, a series of numbers that were most likely a combination of birthdate and zip code, meant nothing to her, but that wasn’t unusual. Most of the e-mail Ali Reynolds received at cutlooseblog.com came from strangers.

Dear Ali,

I’m writing to you through a friend’s e-mail account because I’m afraid my account is being monitored, and as you know, these are very dangerous people. I tried to call your old cell phone but it didn’t work. If you have a new cell phone number please send it to me at this address. I need your help. Please don’t tell anyone that you’ve heard from me, and don’t give anyone this e-mail address, either.

RM

Ali read through the message twice. RM? That could only be Roseanne Maxwell. Had to be. And these dangerous people she mentioned? Dave had said much the same thing about the drug traffickers—that they were dangerous. Ali wrote back immediately, giving Roseanne her new Arizona-based cell phone number.

Then she waited. When her cell phone finally rang, it was after four.

“Don’t call me by name,” the person said, although Ali recognized Roseanne’s breathy delivery as soon as she spoke. “This is a throwaway phone. Don’t bother trying to trace it.”

“What do you want then?” Ali asked. “Why are you calling me?”

“Like I said,” Roseanne told her. “I need your help. I’ve got to disappear.”

“As far as I can tell, you already have.”

“This isn’t a game,” Roseanne Maxwell replied. “I mean I need to disappear for the rest of my life—for whatever life I have left.”

There was a desperate quality in Roseanne’s voice, one that convinced Ali that the woman wasn’t kidding.

“What do you want me to do?” Ali asked.

“I’m staying with a friend up in Valencia,” Roseanne said. “Do you know where that is?”

“Of course,” Ali said.

“Come to the Claim Jumper here in town,” Roseanne said. “I’ll meet you there at six. Be sure nobody follows you. We need to talk.”

In the past several days, every time Ali had reached out to help someone, the effort had turned around to bite her in the butt. “Why should I?” she asked.

“Because you want to know what happened to Paul,” Roseanne said. “You owe it to yourself, and you owe it to Paul.”

I don’t owe Paul Grayson a thing, Ali wanted to say. Instead she replied reluctantly, “All right. I’ll be there.”

{ CHAPTER 17 }

Ali picked up the phone and tried her mother’s room, but the call went directly to voice mail. With her father already on his way to Sedona, it was likely Edie was taking a nap. After the previous night’s misadventures, that was hardly surprising. Ali left a message that she was going to meet a friend at the Claim Jumper in Valencia and let it go at that. And she gave Chris a pass as well. She was glad he was off having fun with his friends. That was fine.

What about calling Dave? Ali wondered. With no strings other than friendship, the man had literally spent days helping Ali and her family at every turn. Now that he was taking some time and several hours to drive back over to Lake Havasu to spend time with his kids, Ali couldn’t, in good conscience, involve him again—either by calling him or leaving a message. In fact, she was determined this was something she would handle on her own.

Besides, how dangerous could it be to meet up with Roseanne Maxwell in what would no doubt be the middle of a crowded restaurant? Still, remembering Roseanne’s concern about Ali’s possibly being followed, she did check the rearview mirror from time to time as she drove north on I-5 just to make sure there was no one suspicious behind her. In actual fact, Ali was far less worried about bad guys following her than she was about one of the stray reporting teams who were still camped out in and around the hotel.

As for Roseanne Maxwell herself? She wasn’t what Ali would have considered to be a frightening proposition. For one thing, she was slight of build with the best curve enhancement and facial redefining money could buy. For Roseanne beauty wasn’t skin deep—it was subcutaneous. For as long as Ali had known the woman, Roseanne had existed on a perpetual round of dieting and not dieting. That was why Roseanne’s having set their meeting at an establishment known for its gigantic serving portions was a mystery in and of itself.

Ali had never been particularly close to Roseanne. Their husbands had been coworkers, competitors for the network job, and partners in the Sumo Sudoku scam. Ali and Roseanne had seen each other socially on occasion, but they definitely didn’t qualify as good friends. Or even semi-friends. And why Roseanne would turn to her in a time of trouble was as much a mystery as where they were meeting.

It was six on the dot when Ali arrived at the Claim Jumper parking lot. The restaurant was jammed, and there was a crowd of people milling about outside, waiting for tables. Ali was about to walk inside and put her name on the list when a woman appeared at her side. Roseanne Maxwell was so changed that Ali barely recognized her.

The last time Ali had seen Roseanne had been at Paul’s annual Christmas party the preceding year. She had been dressed to the nines with her hair piled on top of her head in a sophisticated platinum blond do, but the months since then had been anything but kind to Roseanne Maxwell. Her hair was brown now and cut short as well, shorn off in something that resembled chemo-patient chic. Ali barely recognized her.

The old Roseanne wouldn’t have ventured out of the house without a complete assortment of high-end jewelry adorning her fingers, neck, and ears and a layer of full-armor-of-God makeup on her face. This new Roseanne wore no jewelry whatsoever, and her makeup consisted of a little lipstick and nothing else. Roseanne had stopped smoking years earlier. Without the ongoing attention of her cosmetic surgeon and artfully applied Botox, the telltale lines had reasserted themselves. In less than a year she had aged a good decade’s worth.

Roseanne grabbed Ali’s arm and hugged her close. “I know. I know,” she whispered. “I look like hell. You don’t have to tell me. Come on,” she added. “I came early. I already have a table.”

Ali allowed herself to be led through the crowded restaurant to a secluded table in the far back of the room.

“Nobody followed you, did they?” Roseanne asked nervously.

Taking her phone out of her pocket and turning the ringer to “silent,” Ali shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I checked.”

“I hope you don’t mind meeting me here. Carrie, the hostess, is a friend of mine. I met her in NA. I needed a place to stay, and she happened to have a spare bedroom in her house. So that’s where I’m staying at the moment. And because I can’t risk driving my own car right now, she gave me a lift when she came to work.”

“NA?” Ali asked.

“Narcotics Anonymous,” Roseanne returned. “I’m trying to get straight, if I can live long enough, that is.” She patted her badly cut hair. “Good disguise, don’t you think?”

“Very,” Ali agreed. “Now what’s going on?”

For an answer, Roseanne opened her purse and pushed a ziplock bag across the table. Ali picked it up and studied it. A collection of jewels and gold—diamond-studded rings, necklaces, earrings, and bracelets—winked back at her through the clear plastic.

“What’s this?” Ali asked, handing the bag back across the table.

“My jewelry,” Roseanne said. “I need to sell it—all of it. If I go to a pawnshop, I’ll only get a fraction of what they’re worth. Besides, I’m sure word of it would get back to Jake. Please buy them from me, Ali. I know you’ve got the money to do it, and it’s my only chance to get away. Just give it to me in cash, and then I’ll disappear. No one will ever find me. If they do, I’m dead anyway.”

“Get away?” Ali asked. “From whom?”

“The people who ruined our lives,” Roseanne replied, lowering her voice to a strained whisper. “The people who killed Paul.”

“What people?” Ali demanded. “The drug dealers?”

“You know about them then?” Roseanne asked with a stricken look on her face.

Ali nodded. “A little,” she said. “But not enough. You probably know way more. You should go to the cops and tell them what you know.”

“I can’t,” Roseanne said in a hoarse whisper.

“Why not?”

“Because some of the cops are in on it. I’ve seen them.”

Ali’s first reaction was one of total disbelief. Obviously Roseanne was suffering some kind of paranoid delusion. If she was involved in drugs enough that she had turned to NA for help, maybe that wasn’t too surprising.

“Look,” Ali said placatingly. “I’m sure you have some reason to think so, but—”

“I’m afraid somebody tapped my phone,” Roseanne said. “My old phone. I’m sure they were listening in on everything I said. Who else would have done that but the cops? That’s why I got this new one—a disposable. They’re much harder to trace than the other ones are.”

Ali restrained herself from making a wry comment about conspiracy theories and people wearing tinfoil hats. Roseanne Maxwell was absolutely serious. Painfully so.

“It takes a lot of effort to tap telephones,” Ali pointed out. “Cops can’t do it just for the hell of it. They’d need judges, warrants, and everything.”

“They already have those,” Roseanne said.

“Who’s doing this then?” Ali asked. “And why?”

At that precise moment, Ali’s phone vibrated silently in her pocket. With Roseanne already off the charts about people tapping telephones, Ali thought it best to ignore the call.

Roseanne sighed. “You know about the Pink Swan?”

“Some,” Ali replied. “I know there’s a lot more happening there than meets the eye.”

Roseanne nodded. “When we first started going there, it seemed like it was all fun all the time. Jake always liked to gamble. It was a place where I could go along and do my thing while he was doing his. But eventually he got in over his head, and it got worse after the network cut him loose—a lot worse.”

Ali managed to keep a straight face when Roseanne used the term “cut loose.” It turned out there was a lot of that going around.

“That’s how those people work,” Roseanne continued. “They suck you in a little at a time. Like I said, at first it was just Jake’s gambling and a few recreational drugs for me. It felt like a nice place, a safe place, because we had no idea what else was going on. By the time we figured out the rest of it, we were in way too deep. Jake said we either did what they said or else.”

“So you moved from using drugs to transporting them?” Ali asked.

Roseanne looked at her sharply, then she nodded. “Yes,” she admitted. “That’s where Sumo Sudoku came in. It gave them a whole collection of RVs that they can use to run up and down the West Coast. That way, their loads come and go in plain sight with no questions asked. So far no one has ever suspected they’re hauling anything but those damn rocks.”

No one but Dave and me, Ali thought. “Paul was in on all of this?” she asked.

“No,” Roseanne answered. “Even though April and Tracy McLaughlin were friends, Jake was the one who actually pitched the Sumo Sudoku idea to Paul. When it came time to put the deal together, Paul put up his money. I’m sure he thought we were putting up ours, too. But the money we used didn’t really belong to us because we were broke by then, or we would have been.”

“So the whole Sumo Sudoku thing is really nothing but a cover for moving drugs?” Ali asked.

“It’s actually more than that,” Roseanne admitted. “By involving Paul in the project, they ended up with what looks like a legitimate entity, and there was enough money in the deal for Jake that we were able to hang on to our house. They promised Jake even more—lots more—if he could get Sumo Sudoku some network exposure and have it go national.”

No wonder they needed Paul, Ali thought. “What about the players?” she asked.

“The guys who drive the RVs?” Roseanne returned. “They all have their own particular vices, and the Pink Swan is a one-stop shop when it comes to that kind of thing. Tracy McLaughlin doesn’t do any drugs other than cigarettes and beer. His big thing is gambling. That’s how they hooked him in—gambling debts and forgiveness of same.”

Ali realized this was more or less the same story Jake had told but with a few key differences.

“With so many illegal activities going on, how does the Pink Swan stay in business?” Ali asked.

“They pay off the right people,” Roseanne responded. “I know for sure that several top dogs from LAPD are regulars at the gambling tables upstairs. I know them because I’ve seen them. The Pink Swan’s management makes sure the club and its customers don’t annoy the neighbors. The place is clean, it’s quiet, and the club does a lot of strategic charitable giving. I hear they’re big on putting playground equipment in local parks.”

“What about the DEA?” Ali asked.

“What about them?” Roseanne asked with a shrug. “I don’t know any people from the DEA personally, if that’s what you mean, but they could be there. After all, if people from LAPD can be bought off, why couldn’t people from the DEA? We’re talking about astonishing amounts of money, Ali. Cops who play ball with them can make more money in a year than they’d make in a lifetime of pounding a beat somewhere.”

A harried waitress veered in their direction, but Roseanne waved her away with a shake of her head while Ali thought about what Dave had said about the possibility of an ongoing undercover DEA investigation being conducted at the Pink Swan. Maybe there was something to what Roseanne was saying after all.

“You said you were going to tell me about Paul,” Ali said.

Nodding, Roseanne took a deep breath. “I guess you know what it feels like to be cast aside,” she said finally.

“I’ve met Amber, if that’s what you mean,” Ali said. She might have couched the comment a little more diplomatically. When Roseanne’s eyes filled with tears, Ali was sorry she hadn’t.

“She was at the house?” Roseanne asked. “At my house?”

Ali nodded.

“That didn’t take long. I suppose I should have known she would be,” Roseanne said. “There’s a lot that goes over your head when you’re screwed up on cocaine. I should have figured out what was happening, but by the time I noticed, it was too late. Amber already had her hooks in him.”

Roseanne was right. For Ali Reynolds, the idea of an older wife being shoved aside in favor of a younger one was another all-too-familiar story.

“Amber was always there at the Pink Swan,” Roseanne continued. “And why wouldn’t she be? Her grandmother owns the place. It wasn’t until I got in the program and started trying to straighten out my life that I could see what was what. It seemed to me that if I could just get rid of Amber, Jake and I might be all right. I mean, the two of us have a history together. Even if we lost everything else, I thought we’d at least have each other.”

Why does she want him? Ali asked herself. What’s to hang on to?

“But I didn’t have nerve enough to go to the cops myself,” Roseanne went on. “For one thing, I’m in it, too. So I blew the whistle to Paul instead. I told him everything I knew and everything I suspected about Jake and the others taking Paul for a ride.”

“What happened?” Ali asked.

“At first I don’t think Paul believed me, but he must have started looking into things on his own. Last Wednesday morning he called me and told me that maybe I was right about what was going on, but with everything coming up over the weekend—with both the divorce hearing and the wedding—he had decided not to do anything more about it until after he and April got back from their honeymoon.

“I begged him not to let anyone know I was the one who had told him,” Roseanne continued. “He promised he wouldn’t, but once I got off the phone with him, I got scared. I was afraid he might go to Jake instead. That’s when I decided I needed to disappear. The next day, when Kimball was out getting groceries, I grabbed what I could from the house, then I took off and came here. When I heard Paul was dead, I knew I had been right. If I hadn’t run away when I did, I’d be dead by now, too.”

The waitress returned, more determined this time, with her order pad in hand. Neither Ali nor Roseanne had yet to glance at their menus.

“House salad,” Ali said. “Ranch dressing and iced tea.”

“I’ll have the same,” Roseanne said.

Clearly disappointed by their long delayed but paltry order, the waitress rolled her eyes and stomped off in the direction of the kitchen.

“But what makes you think your phone was tapped?” Ali asked, once the waitress was out of earshot.

“Paul’s dead, isn’t he?” Roseanne asked. “He didn’t know anything about what was going on until I told him, and when I did, someone must have been listening in on my phone.”

Or on Paul’s, Ali thought. If Paul and Jake were partners, and if the authorities managed to get wiretapping warrants as a part of a drug-busting investigation, they’d have gotten warrants for the phones of all parties involved and perhaps even for their spouses’ phones as well. At the time of Paul’s death, Ali had still been his wife. Did that mean Ali’s phone might have been tapped, too?

“That’s why Paul’s death is my fault,” Roseanne continued as her eyes once more filled with tears. “If I hadn’t told him what was going on, maybe he wouldn’t be dead now.”

“If the Pink Swan is a front for a major drug operation, I still think you should go to the cops,” Ali said. “All of LAPD doesn’t hang out around there. Surely there must be someone you could talk to?”

“But how am I supposed to know which ones are crooked and which ones aren’t?” Roseanne returned. “As far as I can tell, they all are.”

That’s when Ali thought of Dave. He was, without a doubt, one of the world’s straightest arrows.

“Look,” Ali said. “I have a friend who’s visiting right now, a cop from over in Arizona. He couldn’t possibly be mixed up in any of this. Why don’t you talk to him?”

“No,” Roseanne said firmly. “No cops. Period. Why do you think they killed Paul? To let the rest of us know that even talking about going to the cops is a capital offense as far as they’re concerned.”

“What about talking to an attorney then?” Ali asked. “I know a top-drawer defense attorney. His name is Victor Angeleri. You’re obviously involved in all this and you know what’s really going on. Why don’t you call him and let him see what kind of deal he could cut for you in terms of witness protection?”

“I don’t believe in witness protection programs any more than I believe in the Tooth Fairy,” Roseanne returned. “That wouldn’t stop them. If they killed Paul, they’ll find me and kill me, too. Even if I get sent to jail, they’ll still come after me. That’s why I’m hoping you’ll help me out. I don’t need a lot of money. I have a place down in Mexico where I can live cheaply for a very long time. I just need some cash to make it work.”

Roseanne pushed the jewel-laden ziplock bag back in Ali’s direction. It lay there on the tabletop between them for the better part of a minute. Then, when the waitress reappeared with their salads and iced teas, Roseanne snatched the bag off the table and stuffed it back into her purse and out of sight.

Once again they waited until the waitress had walked away from their table.

“If these people are so all-powerful and all-knowing, who are they? You may have your suspicions that they’re responsible for what happened to Paul, but do you have any proof?”

“I just know it,” Roseanne said fervently. “I know it in my bones.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“By the time I get proof, I’ll be dead, too,” Roseanne said.

Ali had to admit that was a pretty telling argument. She decided to change tactics. “So these people are all tied in with the Pink Swan,” she said. “Tell me about that.”

“The bottom floor is just your basic topless joint with a bar and nude dancing, and all the rest of it. That one is open to the public. Upstairs is private—an upscale gentlemen’s club they call it. That’s where the real action is—all kinds of action. You can go there and do whatever you want and nobody bothers you, especially no reporters. They don’t come near the place.”

“Who owns it?” Ali asked.

“A lady named Lucia Joaquin. At least, her name is the one on the liquor license. She’s the widow of a major player in one of the Colombian drug cartels. Years ago when her husband was gunned down, she came here with her kids along with a ton of money, money she managed to invest in real estate all over L.A.”

“Drug money?” Ali asked.

“I’m sure,” Roseanne answered with a nod. “But just because she moved out of the country didn’t mean she moved out of the drug business. She’s kept her hand in the whole time she’s been here. Her two sons may work for her, but even though she’s been sick, Lucia is still the real brains behind the outfit. She’s also the one who gave the Pink Swan its name. I’ve never met her, but I’ve been told she always wears pink—from head to toe.”

“What about the sons?” Ali asked.

“Mario and Reynaldo,” Roseanne replied. “They both went to school here in the States. One’s an MBA type and the other’s more of an engineer. Lucia’s money comes rolling in from whatever source. The sons figure out ways to turn all that illicit cash into something more or less legitimate.”

“Like Sumo Sudoku?” Ali asked.

Roseanne nodded. “Exactly.”

“Which one of the sons is Amber’s father?”

“Neither,” Roseanne answered. “There was a third child—a daughter. I don’t know her name. She died years ago. Lucia raised Amber and thinks she can do no wrong. Unfortunately, Amber doesn’t have quite the same work ethic her grandmother has. But she’s going to be loaded one of these days, so I can see why Jake might be interested in her. As for why Amber’s interested in Jake?” Roseanne added. “I have no idea.”

Having met the young woman in question the previous night, Ali could have told Roseanne that Amber came with her own set of problems, but she didn’t.

“So will you help me or not?” Roseanne asked, going back once again to the jewelry.

Ali thought about it. Roseanne had brought her here under false pretenses. She had claimed to have information about Paul’s death, but from Ali’s point of view, what she had offered was little more than unsubstantiated suspicions—none of them enough to make Ali’s trip worthwhile.

“I think my answer is not,” Ali replied. “The only reason you brought me here was to unload your jewelry and get some cash.”

“But—” Roseanne began.

Ali stood up. “If you decide you want to go to that lawyer or to the cops and tell them what’s going on, call me again and we’ll talk. In the meantime, Roseanne, I’m afraid you’re on your own.”

A despairing Roseanne watched as Ali flagged down the waitress. Roseanne was still seated at their table as Ali left. Enough time had passed that only a few stragglers still lingered outside, waiting for tables. Ali started through them and was headed for her car when someone called after her.

“Ms. Reynolds?”

Thinking it was someone who recognized her from her days on the news, Ali stopped and turned back to find the hostess hurrying after her. “Yes.”

“There’s a phone call for you at the hostess desk,” Carrie said. “You can take it back inside. There’s an extension on the wall there by the restrooms.”

Why would someone be calling me here? Ali wondered. The only person who had known she was coming to Claim Jumper was her mother. That was probably the call she had ignored earlier.

“Thank you,” Ali said, allowing herself to be led back into the restaurant. When she picked up the receiver, Ali was amazed to find Dave Holman on the phone.

“What’s going on?” Ali wanted to know. “How did you know to call me here? Did you talk to Mom?”

“Listen to me for a minute,” he said urgently. “Is Roseanne still there?”

“Yes, but—”

“Good,” Dave Holman said, sounding relieved. “I’m glad I got here in time.”

Ali glanced around the restaurant but didn’t see him anywhere. “You’re here? Where? I thought you were on your way to Lake Havasu.”

“Things changed. Roxie had made other plans and didn’t want me dropping in on the kids ‘unannounced.’ In the meantime, I’m in Valencia now. At a pay phone directly across the street from the Claim Jumper.”

“You followed me here? Why? What’s happening? And you still haven’t told me why you didn’t call on my cell.”

“The last few days,” he said, “with everything that’s been going on, I’ve managed to make friends with Bruno Cutler, the head of security at your hotel. Late this afternoon, someone came speeding into the hotel parking garage. He waved what was supposedly an LAPD badge at the garage attendant and said he was there to check on a stolen vehicle. The attendant didn’t think that much about it at the time, but later on, when Bruno was reviewing the garage security tapes, he noticed someone messing around with your vehicle, and he called me.”

“Someone was messing with my Cayenne?” Ali asked. “Who and why?”

“I’ve seen the tape now, too,” Dave said. “And I’m pretty sure I know who it was. You do, too. He drives a Honda Element, and he’s parked outside the restaurant right now. The Element is parked right next to your Porsche.”

“Tracy McLaughlin followed me here?” Ali asked. “How could he? Roseanne was afraid someone might try to follow me, so I checked. There was no one anywhere near me.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Dave replied. “I think McLaughlin stuck a GPS tracking device under your rear bumper. If they were using one of those, there would have been no need to keep your vehicle in sight. The tape shows him taking something small out of his pocket and then reaching up toward the underside of your back bumper—right in the middle of it, straight down from the lock.”

“I don’t understand. Why would Tracy McLaughlin want to find me?” Ali asked.

“I think the people Tracy works for are looking for Roseanne Maxwell. Tracy followed you in hopes you’d lead him to her.”

Which I did, Ali thought with a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach.

“But how could Tracy possibly know I was coming to see her?” Ali asked at last.

“Good question,” Dave said. “That’s why I’m calling you on the restaurant phone instead of your cell. It’s why I’m not using my cell, either.”

Ali stopped short, remembering Roseanne’s concerns about the likelihood of her phone being tapped. Now Dave shared that worry.

“Are you saying someone may have been listening in on my cell phone calls?” Ali asked.

“Affirmative,” Dave replied.

“What should I do then?” Ali returned.

“Where is Roseanne?”

“Still at our table. She rode here with a friend who works at the restaurant. I imagine she’s planning on staying until the friend gets off work.”

“Whatever you do, don’t let her leave,” Dave said urgently. “Did she tell you anything important?”

“She told me a little,” Ali said. “But I thought she was delusional and making a lot of it up.”

“I only wish that were the case.”

“So you’ve found out more?”

“Lots more,” Dave answered, “but let’s not go into that right now. Just wait until I get there.”

“You’re coming in?”

“Yes,” he said. “As soon as I can.”

“What if Tracy spots you?”

“I’ll wait until there’s another fairly large group and try to blend in with them,” Dave said. “He’s waiting for you to come out. With any kind of luck, he won’t be paying that much attention to people going in.”

“What are we going to do?” Ali asked. “Do you have a plan?”

“Not yet,” Dave allowed. “When I come up with one, I’ll let you know.”

“I’ll go back to the table and tell Roseanne to stay put. When you get here, talk to the hostess. Her name is Carrie, and she’s Roseanne’s friend. Carrie will be able to tell you where we are.”

“Will do,” Dave said, and hung up.

Still stunned by the idea that she’d been followed after all, Ali made her way back to the corner table. Roseanne didn’t look up until Ali was standing directly over her.

“What happened?” she asked. “I thought you were leaving.”

“So did I,” Ali returned. “I changed my mind.”

Roseanne brightened. “Does that mean you’re going to buy my jewelry after all?”

“No,” Ali replied grimly. “It means I’m going to try to save your butt.”

{ CHAPTER 18 }

Looking alarmed, Roseanne half rose to her feet. “What’s going on?” she demanded.

“Sit back down and don’t make a scene,” Ali ordered. “We can’t afford it. Tracy McLaughlin evidently found out where I was going and followed me here,” she added. “He’s waiting outside in the parking lot.”

Roseanne’s face turned a pasty shade of white as she sank back into her chair. “He followed you?” she asked in a cracked whisper. “I thought you said you’d checked and that no one was there.”

“I did check,” Ali returned. “But we believe he put some kind of GPS tracking device on my vehicle. He knew exactly where I was without my being able to see him at all.”

“But if they find me here…” With an almost physical jolt, Roseanne suddenly straightened in her chair. “Wait a minute. How did he know you were coming to see me? You must have told him.”

“I didn’t,” Ali said. “At least not on purpose. You may be right, Roseanne. It’s possible my phone is being tapped, just like you said yours was.”

There was a long pause as Ali’s news sank in. “What are we going to do then?” Roseanne asked finally.

“Dave Holman, that friend I told you about, the cop from Arizona, is on his way here right now,” Ali told her. “Once he arrives, we’ll figure out what to do.”

Again, Roseanne attempted to rise to her feet. “I already told you I don’t want to talk to any cops. I’ve got to get out of here. Now.”

More time had passed than Ali realized. Now only two tables in that section of the restaurant were still occupied, but the people seated there seemed to be taking an inordinate interest in the ongoing drama between Ali and Roseanne.

“Sit,” Ali hissed. “With Tracy out in the parking lot, leaving is exactly the wrong thing to do right now. He’ll nail you the moment you step outside.”

“What should I do then? Sit here and wait for him to come inside after me?”

“I don’t know,” Ali replied. “Be quiet and let me think.”

Shaking her head, a trembling Roseanne slid back into her chair. Clearly the woman was petrified, and Ali didn’t blame her. They needed a device that would take Roseanne out of harm’s way without exposing her to whatever danger awaited her in the parking lot. Slowly a plan began to take shape in Ali’s head. If Ali could somehow conceal Roseanne inside the restaurant while at the same time convincing Tracy that she had slipped away…

Before Ali could finish formulating a strategy, Carrie appeared, holding an armload of menus and leading Dave Holman directly to their corner table. Ali was thrilled to see him. Roseanne was not. As Dave took a seat, Roseanne shrank away from him, putting as much distance as possible between his chair and hers. Before the hostess could walk away again, Ali caught Carrie’s arm.

“I guess you know we’re having a bit of a problem here,” she said. “That there are dangerous people actively looking for Roseanne?”

Carrie nodded. “She told me.”

“One of them appears to be waiting for her outside in the parking lot.”

“Oh, no!” Carrie exclaimed. “Should I call the cops?”

“Not just yet,” Ali said. “But what about this? Would it be possible for you to hustle Roseanne into the kitchen and pass her off as part of the help long enough for us to decoy the bad guy away from here?”

Dave looked as though he was about to say something. Then he didn’t.

Carrie seemed to consider. “That wouldn’t be too hard,” she answered. “I could put her in with the guy who washes dishes. He wouldn’t mind having some extra help. I’ll clear it with the kitchen. Let me know if you need anything else.”

Carrie went away again, leaving Ali to make the introductions. Still huddled against the wall, Roseanne refused Dave’s proffered handshake.

“Tracy’s still out in the parking lot?” Ali asked.

Dave nodded. “Yup.”

“Is he alone?”

“As far as I could tell.”

Ali felt a surge of irritation with Dave. He was being uncommonly uncommunicative. She had expected him to arrive with some concrete ideas for solving their problem. Since he seemed to be fresh out of game plans, Ali continued to formulate her own.

“Do you have your cell phone with you?” Ali asked him.

“Yes. Of course.”

“I’m going to call you on it,” Ali said. “And I’m going to use my cell phone to do it. Since whoever may be listening in on my calls doesn’t know we know about them, hopefully they’ll take whatever I say as the gospel.”

Roseanne let out a small moan. “But what about me?” she asked.

“What about you?” Ali returned. “You go to the kitchen and wash dishes like Carrie said until Dave or I come back to get you, but you need to know one thing, Roseanne. Dave and I aren’t helping you out of the goodness of our hearts. This isn’t a free ride.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m sure from what you said earlier that you’d like me to believe you’re a mostly innocent bystander in all this,” Ali returned. “If that were true, though, you wouldn’t be so afraid of going to jail yourself. You claim to be a drug user and nothing more, but I’m guessing that by the time the cops finish investigating this case they’ll be able to charge you with plenty, including conspiracy to distribute drugs if nothing else.” Ali turned to Dave. “That’s a felony, right?”

Dave nodded. “Yes, it is,” he agreed.

“So,” Ali continued, “your best bet for dodging jail time is for you to cooperate now. If Dave and I can manage to get you out of this alive, I want you to promise that you’ll go to that attorney I told you about. Let Victor Angeleri see what kind of deal he can make for you in exchange for your testimony—your voluntary testimony—about the people at the Pink Swan and everything that goes on there, including your suspicions about who was really responsible for Paul’s death.”

“What if I say no?” Roseanne asked.

“That’s easy,” Ali returned. “Dave and I leave now, and you can deal with Tracy and whatever’s supposed to happen to you all on your own.”

“You wouldn’t do that, would you?” Roseanne pleaded. “You couldn’t just leave me alone like that.”

“Oh, couldn’t I?” Ali said, reaching for her purse. “Watch me.”

“No,” Roseanne said, capitulating. “Please don’t leave. I’ll do whatever you say.”

“Fine,” Ali said. “Go to the kitchen. Stay there until you hear from us. Either Dave or I will come get you, or else we’ll let you know that it’s safe to go with whoever we send.”

“All right,” Roseanne agreed reluctantly. She stood up and headed for the swinging doors that led back to the kitchen. Ali glanced around. By then the customers at the other nearby tables had all left. Carrie had made sure that theirs was the only occupied table in that section of the restaurant.

A waitress—a different one this time—came over and took Dave’s order.

“All right,” Ali said once the waitress left. “Here’s my plan. I’ll call you and say that I met Roseanne here because she wanted me to buy some of her jewelry but that she slipped away while I was in the restroom. With any kind of luck whoever’s listening in on my phone will believe she’s gotten away from them, too. Then, later on, we’ll be able to smuggle her out of here and get her to Victor.”

Ali was talking to Dave but he didn’t appear to be paying attention. He seemed to be focused on some distant part of the restaurant.

“Hello!” Ali said. “Are you even listening to me?”

Turning to follow his gaze, Ali saw two men standing talking to Carrie, who was listening carefully and nodding. Eventually they began making their way across the dining room. One was a tall, rangy black man Ali had never seen before. The other she recognized at once—Detective Montgomery Taylor with the Riverside Sheriff’s Department Homicide Division, one of the two detectives who had interviewed Ali in the aftermath of Paul’s death.

“Oh, no,” Ali whispered under her breath. “What’s he doing here? Don’t tell me they’re coming after me again.”

The men walked directly to Ali and Dave’s table. Without waiting for an invitation, they seated themselves. The man Ali didn’t know nodded cordially in Dave’s direction. The two of them shook hands.

“Good to see you, bro,” the man said. “Where is Roseanne Maxwell?”

“In the kitchen,” Dave responded. “Hiding out as a dishwasher. Are the takedown teams all in place?”

The stranger nodded. “Pretty much,” he said. “We’re just waiting for the restaurant to clear out some and for a couple more of my men to arrive on the scene.”

“Roseanne’s in the kitchen?” Detective Taylor asked. “I’ll go make sure we don’t lose her.” With that, he got up and headed for the kitchen.

Feeling lost, Ali watched the detective’s retreating figure. “What takedown teams?” she asked. “Who are these guys? What are they doing here? What’s going on?”

“Sorry,” Dave said. “I didn’t have a chance to tell you, Ali. This is my friend Ezekiel Washington. We call him Easy. He’s with the DEA. I believe you already know Detective Taylor.” Dave waved in the direction of the swinging kitchen door where Taylor had disappeared.

“Glad to meet you,” Easy said with an engaging grin calculated to match his name. “I remember seeing you on the news when you used to be on TV here. I guess you could say I was a fan.”

“Thank you,” Ali said stiffly. “I’m delighted to know that, I’m sure. But you still haven’t told me what’s going on here.”

“We’re in the process of rolling up a major drug operation,” he answered. “We’ve been working on this case for months. We weren’t quite ready to make our move, but with your husband dead and with the possibility of your stirring up the pot on your Web site, we’re having to go ahead and stage our raids now after all. If we wait any longer, there’s a good chance you may write something in your blog that will give away what we’re doing. At this point in the investigation, we can’t afford to have a loose cannon on deck.”

“So now I’m a loose cannon?” an irate Ali demanded of Dave Holman. Then she turned back to Easy Washington.

“Sorry,” Easy said. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. What happened to your husband is terribly unfortunate. It was never our intention that he would be at risk, and believe me, we’re doing everything we can to bring his killers to justice.”

“Not your intention…?” Ali began.

“Mr. Grayson had been working with us for some time, and that’s what it takes to bring down a whole organization like this—time. If you move too fast, you just get pieces of the puzzle—small fry mostly—rather than the people in charge. And that’s what we’re trying to do here—bring down Lucia Joaquin’s entire group, from top to bottom. Mr. Grayson came to us several months ago when he first started having concerns about what was going on with the Sumo Sudoku group. He agreed to do what he could to help, and he understood that it wouldn’t happen overnight.”

Ali could barely believe her ears. “Paul was working with you? Is that why he was killed?”

“Not exactly,” Easy replied. “We’ve known for some time that our communications system had been compromised, so we were careful that our contacts with your husband were done in an untraceable fashion.”

“You’re telling me someone’s been tapping your phones as well?” Ali asked.

Easy nodded.

“But you’re the DEA.”

“Exactly,” Easy said. “And that’s a big part of the problem here. We believe that someone from the Joaquin organization penetrated LEMO and installed a Trojan horse.”

“LEMO?” Ali asked. “What’s that? It sounds like a cartoon for kids.”

“LEMO, not Elmo,” Easy explained. “The Law Enforcement Monitoring Organization. Think of it as the wiretapping central office for all the law enforcement agencies in the western United States, and it happens to be located right here in L.A. If, as we suspect, someone was able to install a keystroke-logger inside the system, they automatically have access to all our passwords and communications. They know exactly who we’ve been listening in on and what we plan to do. They’ve been making a shambles of our operations for months. Evidently they’ve also been doing some unauthorized listening on their own.”

“Including my phones?” Ali asked.

Easy nodded. “And the phones of anyone else whose activities interested them, including Roseanne Maxwell. And that’s where we got in trouble. Your husband was already working for us when Roseanne called and asked him to come to us with what was going on.”

“You’re saying Paul was killed because it seemed like he was going to go to the authorities with what he knew, not because he was already doing so.”

Easy Washington nodded again. “At first I was afraid someone on our side—someone who knew about his involvement with us—had betrayed him, that we had a mole in our midst. That’s why it was so helpful to us initially that everyone thought you were responsible for Mr. Grayson’s death. That took a lot of the pressure off us and gave us a chance to investigate the situation. Now, though, we’re pretty sure that Roseanne’s phone call is what set your husband’s murder plot in motion.”

Ali was struggling to comprehend what was being said. Was it possible Paul really had been actively at work behind the scenes to help out in a DEA investigation? Over time his actions toward her had led Ali to think of the man as an entirely contemptible human being. Easy Washington seemed to consider him to be some kind of hero. For Ali, that didn’t quite compute. And what about April? Had she been with Paul in all this or against him?

“You’re saying Paul was helping you.”

“He was a huge help,” Easy said. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am that we weren’t able to move fast enough to prevent this senseless tragedy.”

Ali stood up.

“Where are you going?” Dave asked.

“Back to the hotel,” Ali said. “This is a bit more than I can handle.”

“You can’t go back to the hotel,” Dave said.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re checked out,” he answered. “With everything that’s going on, Easy and I thought it would be best if you were moved to a different location. Your mom packed up your stuff. I’ve got it all in my car. Your mother and Chris have moved out, too. Chris is staying with friends. I got your mother a room at the Motel 6 just up the corridor from mine. Edie said you probably wouldn’t like it, but there’s a room there for you as well.”

Ali was suddenly more than moderately annoyed. “You moved my stuff?” she demanded.

“Just for the time being,” Easy said reassuringly. “Until we can stage our raids and have all the suspects in custody.”

“You had no right to do that,” Ali announced. “And my mother is right. I have zero intention of staying at the Motel 6. The Westwood is fine with me, thank you very much.”

“Please don’t go back there, Ms. Reynolds,” Easy said. “Desperate people do desperate things. I wouldn’t want to see you hurt. You don’t know what the Joaquins are capable of.”

“I know exactly what they’re capable of,” Ali said. “I’m the one who identified my husband’s body, remember? I want my stuff, Mr. Washington. And I want it now. Not later, now.”

With the possibility of a shooting war about to break out in the parking lot, Ali knew she was being unreasonable, but she was tired of being booted around by people—good intentioned or not—who were busy deciding what she would and wouldn’t do.

“Ali, please—” Dave began.

“Give me your keys, Dave,” Easy interjected, standing up and holding out his hand. “Tracy McLaughlin knows what you look like. I’ll send someone to get her stuff. Where’s your car?”

“Out back,” Dave replied. “Next to the Dumpsters.”

Ali barely waited for Easy to leave the table before she rounded on Dave. “How dare you…”

“Easy and I were worried about you.”

“Like hell,” Ali returned. “You just didn’t want to let me in on what was going on.”

“You can’t go back to the Westwood,” Dave insisted. “What if they send someone there after you?”

“Why would they?” Ali demanded. “Their only interest in me had to do with whether or not I’d lead them to Roseanne, which, sorry to say, I seem to have done unerringly. I led them to her, and I led your friend Easy to her as well. By the way, what about Roseanne? Is she under arrest or what?”

“Probably not at the moment,” Dave answered. “More likely she’ll be taken in for questioning.”

“Will they give her a deal if she cooperates with the authorities?” Ali asked.

“That remains to be seen,” Dave replied. “I know you mentioned to her that she might be able to work out some kind of a plea bargain, but those decisions are best left up to prosecutors.”

“Not to loose-cannon bloggers, right?”

“I didn’t say that,” he returned. “I didn’t say anything of the kind.”

“Never mind,” Ali put in. “You didn’t have to.”

Easy returned carrying Ali’s two suitcases and the computer case as well. “Where do you want these?” he asked.

“In my car,” Ali said. “I’m leaving.”

“No, you’re not,” he answered, putting the luggage down next to the table. “Nobody’s leaving right now. All my men are in place. We’re waiting for the last two parties of diners to leave the restaurant. Once they’re gone and are out of danger, we’ll make our move. As soon as we have Mr. McLaughlin safely in custody, you’ll be welcome to go anywhere you like. Until that time, though, I need you to stay here.”

Time passed slowly. Gradually the restaurant cleared. Finally the door to the kitchen opened. Detective Taylor led Roseanne Maxwell into the room. She was in handcuffs and in tears. “They’re going to take me to jail,” she said accusingly to Ali. “I thought you told me that if I helped them I’d be able to make some kind of deal.”

“I thought so, too,” Ali said. “It turns out I was wrong.”

“What about that attorney you told me about?” Roseanne asked. “What’s his name again?”

“Victor Angeleri,” Ali answered. “He may be more than you can afford right now.”

“What about my jewelry?” Roseanne asked. “Do you think he might take some of that in trade?”

Months ago, Roseanne Maxwell would have been able to afford the best legal representation money could buy. Now she was one step away from selling her worldly possessions on eBay, and most likely she’d end up with a public defender.

“I don’t know about that,” Ali said. “You’ll need to call Victor up and ask him yourself. Maybe you can work it out.”

Easy held up his hand for quiet. Only then did Ali notice he was wearing an earpiece of some kind.

“Okay, people,” he announced. “We’ve got a couple more vehicles to move into place, then it’s a go. I’m going out through the kitchen. Everybody else get down on the floor. Keep your heads well below the level of the windowsills. Stay under tables if it’s at all possible. Nobody steps outside the restaurant until I give the all-clear. Got it?”

Ali paused long enough to watch Detective Taylor help Roseanne to her knees. Then, with her own heart pounding in her throat, Ali dropped to the floor and scrambled under the table where they’d been sitting. She may have been mad as hell about what was going on right then, but she wasn’t stubborn enough to risk her own life because of it.

Lying there on the dingy floor, Ali waited breathlessly to see what would happen next. When nothing did, she turned over far enough to peer up at the table above her. There, in plain view, were several pieces of dead and dying bubble gum, chunks of the stuff that thoughtless diners had unloaded by sticking them to the underside of the table.

For some unaccountable reason, seeing those messy wads of bubble gum while at the same time anticipating the sound of gunfire struck Ali as a kind of grim joke. Unable to help herself, she began to giggle.

Moments later, she was jostled as someone else scrambled into the confined space under the table.

“What’s so funny?” Dave asked. “Are you okay?”

Not quite able to explain it herself, Ali finally managed to stifle her fit of inappropriate laughter. When she did, she found she was still upset with him.

“What are you doing here?” she wanted to know. “I thought you’d be outside playing cops and robbers with your friend Easy.”

“Come on, Ali,” he returned. “I’ve told you before. This isn’t my jurisdiction. I’ve got no more legal right to participate in a DEA operation than you do. And that’s why, when Easy asked me to keep quiet about what was going on, I had to do just that—keep quiet.”

His excuse didn’t sit well with her. “Fine then,” she said. “Here’s an idea for you. How about if you keep on keeping quiet? It seems to me you’ve said enough for one day.”

Dave’s exasperated sigh wasn’t lost on her. He didn’t say, “Women!” but he could just as well have. Turning her back on him, Ali inched forward far enough so she could see the front of the restaurant. The remaining waitstaff had disappeared into the kitchen except for Carrie, who had taken shelter behind the hostess desk.

In the end, all of Easy Washington’s advance preparations for a flawless takedown still weren’t enough—at least not for the one in Valencia’s Claim Jumper parking lot. Before Easy and the last of his officers could move into position, something must have alerted Tracy McLaughlin to their presence. Ali didn’t see the suspect slam his Element in gear and shoot forward across the parking lot, but she did hear the squeal of tires and brakes as the vehicle screeched to a stop just outside the restaurant’s front door.

Seconds later, Tracy McLaughlin charged into the entryway lobby. Stifling a scream, Carrie tried to retreat farther into the restaurant, but he was too fast for her. As she attempted to dart away from the hostess stand, McLaughlin got one arm around the terrified woman’s neck. With his other hand, he held a gun to her head.

Out of the corner of her eye, Ali saw Detective Taylor rise to his feet, weapon in hand. “Drop it,” he ordered.

“You drop it,” Tracy returned. “If you don’t, this woman dies.”

“Don’t hurt me,” Carrie wailed. “Please don’t hurt me.”

For a long moment, the three of them remained in a frozen tableau. Then, moving slowly and deliberately, Detective Taylor grasped the handle of his .38 with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and carefully deposited the weapon on a nearby table.

“That’s better,” Tracy said. “Move away from the table.”

Detective Taylor complied.

“Now,” Tracy went on. “Do you have any way of communicating with those bozos outside? If so, I want you to tell them to stay put so nobody gets hurt.”

Lying there, waiting for what she thought was an inevitable volley of shots, all Ali could think about was a pair of cold-blooded armed killers silently roaming the hallways and classrooms of Columbine High School, stalking their innocent victims. Determined to fight back, she unholstered her Glock.

“Stay here!” Dave whispered urgently in her direction, then he moved away from the spot under the table that had sheltered them both. Staying under the cover of intervening tables, he slithered across the floor of the darkened restaurant in a surprisingly rapid commando crawl.

“Not really,” Detective Taylor replied. “They’re Feds. I’m local. Our radios aren’t compatible.”

“Isn’t that just great,” Tracy muttered.

Anxious to provide a diversion from whatever action Dave was about to take, Ali surprised herself by finding her own voice.

“Let Carrie go, Tracy,” she urged. “Haven’t enough people been hurt already?”

“Who are you?” he demanded, glancing around the room, trying to fix her position. “Are you a cop?”

“You know me, Tracy,” she answered. “I’m Ali Reynolds. I’m the woman you followed here, remember? And the whole place is surrounded by cops. You can’t get away. Give it up. It’s your only chance.”

“No matter what, I’m not going back to the slammer,” he declared. “So come out from wherever it is you’re hiding. Show me your hands.”

Attempting to estimate the distance Dave would have to cover to circumnavigate the dining room and how much time it would take for him to be within striking distance of the armed man, Ali tried to stall a little longer.

“Why should I?” she asked. “So you can shoot me, too?”

“Because if you don’t come out where I can see you, I’m going to shoot her,” Tracy returned ominously. “If that happens, this woman’s blood will be on your hands as much as it is on mine.”

Carrie moaned in protest. Somewhere in the restaurant, Roseanne Maxwell began to sob as well.

Hoping Detective Taylor saw her do it, Ali tucked the Glock into the back of the waistband of her jeans. Then, aware Tracy would have to peer through the gloom in order to observe her every move, Ali raised her hands and slowly rose to her feet. Once upright, Ali stepped forward until she was standing a foot or so in front of Montgomery Taylor and slightly to one side. The move left her Glock’s exposed handle well within the detective’s reach.

“What do you want?” Ali asked, willing Tracy to keep his attention focused on her. “What are you hoping to accomplish?”

At that instant, Dave materialized to the right of the front door. Without being observed, he had managed to work his way all around the restaurant. Now, coming from just outside Tracy’s line of vision, Dave smashed into the two people locked in their life-and-death embrace. The unexpected blow propelled the couple apart, sending Carrie in one direction and Tracy and his weapon in the other.

Carrie screamed. A burst of gunfire pierced the air, but only for a moment, then it was over. In the sudden silence that followed, Detective Taylor grabbed Ali’s Glock and charged forward to help Dave subdue Tracy. Seconds later the room was filled to capacity as more officers raced in from outside.

“Is he dead?” Roseanne Maxwell’s plaintive question came from two tables away. “Please tell me the son of a bitch is dead.”

Ali walked over and helped Roseanne emerge from her hiding place beneath the table.

“I’m afraid not,” Ali returned. “It looks to me as though he came through just fine.”

“Damn,” Roseanne muttered.

Easy Washington appeared. He seemed shaken. His dark skin had taken on a peculiarly ashen hue. “Is everyone all right?” he asked.

“I think so,” Ali said. “I believe everyone’s fine.”

“Too bad,” Roseanne added. “I was really hoping.”

Dave showed up just then with concern written all over his face. He grasped Ali by the shoulders. “What in the world were you thinking, standing up like that?”

“I was trying to get him to look at me instead of you.”

“Are you nuts? You don’t even have on a Kevlar vest.”

“Do you?” Ali returned.

Dave ignored her question. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Perfectly fine.”

And for some strange reason, right that minute, she wasn’t even mad at him anymore. In fact, she felt lighter than air.

{ CHAPTER 19 }

In the aftermath of the Claim Jumper incident, Ali found herself once again on the wrong side of the thin blue line. While Dave went off to confer with the other officers, Ali was interviewed in a cursory fashion by a pair of young uniformed cops who took her statement and then left. They made it clear that most of the team was focused on what had happened to Carrie and on the pivotal roles Dave Holman and Detective Taylor had played in effecting Carrie’s rescue.

Ali was tempted to point out to one of the young cops, “Hey, I helped, too.” Instead, she let it go. In the grand scheme of things the fact that Carrie was safe was all that mattered.

Because shots had been fired in the course of the incident, all weapons on the scene—including Ali’s Glock—were collected by crime scene investigators, bagged, cataloged, and taken away for forensic examination. Ali’s objections about losing possession of her Glock were duly noted and duly ignored. Nobody but Ali seemed to care much that her weapon was going away nor were they willing to say when, if ever, she’d be able to have it back.

The better part of an hour passed before Tracy McLaughlin and Roseanne Maxwell were loaded into separate patrol cars and carted off. For a long time after that, Ali sat drinking free Claim Jumper coffee and being pretty much ignored by all concerned while a small army of people hustled around the restaurant processing the scene. It was frustrating to be right there in what was supposedly the middle of the action and still have so little information about what was going on.

Finally, Ali reached for her computer case and her computer. Minutes later she was logged on to a wire-service news site. What she found wasn’t much but it was a lot more than anyone had bothered telling her.

A joint task force made up of local and federal officers staged a series of coordinated raids at several locations late today targeting what is thought to be a major drug-distribution operation centered in the Los Angeles area. Several arrests were made, including a number of people—both customers and employees—at an exclusive area topless bar called the Pink Swan.

Mason Louder, the Drug Enforcement Agency’s local public affairs officer, has announced that a press conference dealing with today’s operations is scheduled for 10 A.M. tomorrow morning at the Federal Building.

Two of those arrested at the Pink Swan location are thought to be Mario and Reynaldo Joaquin, sons of local real estate magnate Lucia Joaquin. According to sources close to the investigation, Ms. Joaquin, now in ill health and living in semi-retirement in Palm Springs, has long been suspected of maintaining close ties with Colombian drug cartels, in which her deceased husband, Anselmo, was once considered to be a major player.

For years, Ms. Joaquin maintained a high-profile lifestyle and counted among her circle of acquaintances many of Southern California’s media elite, including television network executive Paul Grayson, whose grisly murder late last week as well as the subsequent deaths of both his fiancée and her mother are all thought to be connected to the case and may well be what sparked tonight’s coordinated law enforcement action.

Mr. Grayson’s widow, former L.A. news anchor Alison Reynolds, was originally suspected of having some involvement with his death. Ms. Reynolds’s mother, Edie Larson, who is visiting from Arizona and was interviewed at her hotel late this evening, told reporters that she hoped that the cloud of suspicion lingering over her daughter’s head would soon be lifted.

Ali reread that sentence. “Interviewed at her hotel…”

What hotel? Ali wondered. It sounded as though at least one reporter and probably more had managed to track Edie to her new location at the Motel 6. And yes, Paul’s death was definitely related to the Joaquin organization, but Monique Ragsdale’s death and April Gaddis’s had nothing at all to do with it—at least not as far as Ali knew. That meant the so-called sources close to the investigation didn’t have all their facts straight.

Unable to find any more information elsewhere, Ali turned to her cutlooseblog.com mailbox, where the “new mail” symbol told her she had forty-seven new messages. Daunted by the very thought of starting to mow through all of those, Ali turned instead to her personal mailbox, one she had set up in order to keep her blog life separate from everything else. There she had only three new messages.

The first one was from her father:

Dear Ali,

Back home but from what I hear—and don’t hear—from your mother, obviously I shouldn’t be. I should have stayed there instead. What in the world is going on? Call me.

DAD

Ali didn’t answer the message right then, and she didn’t call, either. Her father was her mother’s problem more than he was Ali’s, and Edie was going to have to handle him on her own.

The second message was from her wrongful dismissal attorney, Marcella Johnson. Like Victor Angeleri and Helga Myerhoff, Marcella, too, worked for the firm Weldon, Davis, and Reed. Although sharing a sky-high hourly rate, the three attorneys had totally different areas of expertise. Despite their inarguable effectiveness, Ali had sometimes found herself wishing she’d hooked herself up with more of a general practitioner attorney rather than three separate and amazingly expensive specialists.

Dear Ali,

My God woman, what are you thinking? Your name has been everywhere this weekend—in the news, in the papers, on the radio. With our case coming up next week, now would have been a good time for you to keep a low profile, but since you didn’t ask my advice on that score, I guess I won’t give it.

When is your husband’s funeral? We’re due in court on Tuesday afternoon, but I’m wondering if I should ask for a continuance. Also, I’m getting a few hints here and there that opposing counsel may be ready to come forward with a deal. Don’t leave town without letting me know and keep your cell phone handy in case I need to reach you.

MARCELLA

Does Valencia count as out of town? Ali wondered.

Dave turned up then, looking agitated. “I just talked to your mother,” he said. “I thought we’d managed to ditch the reporters back at the other hotel, but now it seems they’ve tracked her to the new one, too.”

“I know,” Ali said.

“You talked to Edie?” Dave asked.

“Not exactly,” Ali replied. “I read it online.”

“Online?” Dave asked. “Somebody put your mother’s whereabouts up on the Internet?”

She brought the article back up and pushed the computer over so he could read it for himself.

“Geez!” he said, when he finished. “They’re everywhere.”

“So I guess Motel 6 is out?” Ali asked.

“Easy’s already working the problem, and it’s a good thing, too. When I left him he was on the phone with LAPD, trying to clear it with them so you can go back to your own house tonight.”

“On Robert Lane?” Ali asked.

Dave nodded. “We’re thinking that’s the last place anyone would expect you to be along about now.”

Me included, Ali thought. But if Dave and Easy were still concerned about Ali’s safety, did that mean some member of the Joaquin group had escaped law enforcement’s coordinated dragnet?

“Who’s still on the loose?” Ali asked.

“Jake Maxwell,” Dave answered. “We’re not sure how or where we missed him. Amber and Lucia are still unaccounted for as well. Easy thinks I should pick up your mother and then go to the house and keep an eye on both of you there until we know Jake and the others are in custody.”

As if on cue, Easy sauntered into the room. “Done,” he said to Dave. “LAPD Homicide has cleared the house on Robert Lane. You’ll stay with them and keep an eye out?”

“Absolutely,” Dave said.

Easy came over to where Ali was sitting. “Hold out your hand and close your eyes,” he said.

Ali did as she was told. A moment later, something metallic and shaped like a silver dollar dropped into the palm of her hand. It was smooth on one side while the other side was tacky with the residue of some adhesive that could have been rubber cement.

“What’s this?” she asked, staring down at the shiny disk.

Easy grinned. “A memento,” he said, “just for you. Compliments of the DEA.”

“But what is it?”

“A GPS tracking device Dave removed from the inside of your rear bumper.”

“Don’t you need it for evidence?” she asked.

Easy shook his head. “We have enough evidence, and I think you earned this. It turns out we’ve got several of them from several different vehicles. The warehouse complex out behind the Pink Swan is a veritable jungle of electronic tracking and wiretapping equipment complete with an armload of these. Not only have the Joaquins been keeping tabs on what we’ve been doing, they’ve also been running electronic surveillance on their competition. Our IT guys tell us that the place is an absolute gold mine of drug-dealing intelligence if we’re able to move on it fast enough and before anyone else knows what we have.”

Ali examined the device for a moment or so longer before stuffing it in the front pocket of her jeans. “Are you sure you should be saying all of this in front of a ‘loose-cannon’ blogger?” she asked.

“Sorry about that,” Easy said apologetically. “I was out of line earlier. I think we can trust you. Dave told me what you did to help out in there, and I’m very grateful. He and Monty might not have managed without you. Clearly we were lucky to have you on the team tonight. Still, now that you mention it, it might be better if you didn’t bring up any of the details of this operation in your blog until after tomorrow morning’s news conference.”

“Maybe you should take a look at what’s out there on the Net right now,” Dave said, nodding in the direction of Ali’s computer screen. “Some of it’s already showing up, and she didn’t put it there, either.”

Without a word, Ali turned the screen so Easy Washington could read it. “They don’t have a lot of it straight,” he observed when he finished reading. “Just enough to cause trouble.” He turned back to Ali.

“Have Dave give you my numbers. Once the press conference is over, I may be able to give you an exclusive about all this.”

He was offering Ali an exclusive story about a major drug bust that would appear first on cutlooseblog.com? Ali knew that would be a scoop that would drive her former cohorts in the media—friend and foe alike—utterly nuts. It would be especially galling to the people who were spending tonight doggedly tracking her mother’s every move.

“Thank you,” she said. “So in the meantime you and Dave think I should go back to the house?”

“Only if you want to,” Easy said. “There’s not much sense in your hanging around here. Going to the house makes sense because it’s presumably a spot where no one would think to look for you. For one thing, it’s still officially off-limits due to being a crime scene. But if you’d be more comfortable somewhere else, or if you’d like me to send some officers along to look out for you—”

“No,” Ali said. “The house is fine, and sending extra officers along is unnecessary. The less fuss there is about it, the more likely it is that no one will notice we’ve gone anywhere. For another, Dave will be there. He’s just going by the hotel long enough to pick up my mother. I’m sure you can make better use of your people here. We’ll be fine on our own. Oh,” she added. “Is it all right to use my phone now?”

Easy waggled his hands. “We believe so,” he said. “We’re hopeful that the Joaquins’ entire electronics setup was centered in that one location. At this time, however, there’s always a chance that they have backup equipment somewhere else that’s still in operation.”

“So it’s possible someone else might still be listening in on whatever I say.”

“For the time being, yes,” Easy answered. “Possible but not likely.”

Easy went back outside. Ali packed up her computer, and Dave helped carry that and her luggage out to her car. “Do you want me to come with you?” he asked.

“No. You go get Mom. I’m sure she’s worried sick. Just make sure that no one follows you when you bring her to the house. Although,” she added ruefully, patting the pocket of her jeans where she had stowed the GPS device Easy Washington had given her, “I now know that it’s sometimes harder to know you’re being followed than one would think.”

“I’ll be careful,” Dave said. “Besides, I don’t think the media routinely passes out GPS tracking devices.”

“Let’s hope,” Ali said.

He opened the car door to let her inside and touched her shoulder tentatively as she did so. “Be careful,” he said.

“I will.”

By then it was late enough that, other than a long parade of slow-moving semis, traffic into the city was relatively light. Among all those trucks, the Cayenne might as well have been invisible.

Propped up by cup after cup of coffee, Ali was tired but nonetheless wide awake as she drove. As the miles sped by, she couldn’t help thinking about Paul. Did the fact that he had been working with the authorities at the time of his death mean he was, in fact, some kind of hero?

During that fateful phone call from Roseanne, he had evidently told her that he would go to the authorities but only after both his wedding and honeymoon. That delay—most likely done out of deference for April—had given the Joaquins the ammunition they needed and the opportunity to take him out. The irony was that they had killed Paul because they suspected he might possibly go to the cops when in fact he had already done so. That wasn’t lost on Ali, either. She knew those were facets of the story she would need to address when it came time to write Easy Washington’s promised exclusive for cutlooseblog.com.

Most of the time what appeared in cutloose consisted of opinion—Ali’s opinions and those of her readers. After months of using the blog to revile Paul Grayson for his two-timing treatment of her, it was difficult for Ali to think of him in any context other than worm. She wondered if she’d somehow be able to muster the necessary distance and evenhandedness to write the rest of the story and do justice to it. For that, Ali would have to revert to her old self and to her original training as a journalist—with one minor exception. Well, a major exception, actually. Most of the time reporters were expected to relate what happened without actually being involved. In this situation, Ali could hardly claim to be a disinterested bystander.

Lost in those complicated thoughts and driving on automatic pilot, Ali steered the Cayenne up the familiar steep curves of Robert Lane. When she arrived at the entrance, she was surprised to see that the broken gate had been repaired. It was standing open, but the broken post had been mended and the wrought-iron gate itself had been reattached to the hinges. Once inside the gate she rolled down her window and attempted to use the free-standing keypad to punch in what she remembered as the old gate-closing code. To her surprise, the gate swung shut.

She had decided on her way into town that it would probably be best if, for the time being, she and her mother stayed in the pool house. There were two bedrooms there and it would be better for her to stay in what had been Chris’s apartment for the past several years rather than venturing into the house where April and Paul had been living together in her absence. Eventually Ali would have to deal with April’s things and with Paul’s, too, but not right now. Not tonight. Not with so much of what had happened to those people still far too fresh.

So, after rolling the window back up, Ali headed for the pool house with its attached carport. Even if it was locked, she knew Chris had always left an extra key in the utility cabinet at the front of the carport. As she drove through the yard, the motion-activated security lights came on. Passing the garage, she was surprised to see the garage doors standing open. Before she could react, though, a figure emerged from the garage doorway—a figure carrying a gun. Her first thought was simply, No! Not again!

She knew it was Jake Maxwell before she even saw his face. And when he used the barrel of the gun to rap sharply on the window next to her head, she knew exactly what he wanted and did it at once. She put on the brakes and stopped.

Even though she couldn’t hear him very well through the closed window and over the sound of the engine, it was easy enough to read his lips. “Roll down the window!” he ordered.

With a weapon trained at her head and with her own Glock packed away in some crime scene investigator’s evidence storage locker, Ali had no choice but to comply. She rolled down her window.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

Jake ignored the question. “I need your car,” he said, “and I need it now. Get out.”

There was a splotch of grease on the front of Jake’s otherwise white shirt and grease on his shirtsleeves as well. He had been doing something in the garage, something mechanical. Or at least he’d been trying to. His face was drenched in sweat. He looked desperate. And scared.

In that moment Ali recognized something about the man that she had never known before. Jake Maxwell was a coward. Whatever crimes he may have participated in, it was unlikely he had ever done his own dirty work.

“No,” she said simply. “I won’t.”

Jake was almost beside himself. “I’ve got a gun. What do you mean you won’t?”

Just like in the restaurant, Ali was making calculations in her head. She had probably left the Claim Jumper several minutes before Dave had, although she wasn’t sure by how much. And she had most likely driven faster than he had. When it came to power, his little Nissan didn’t compare with the Cayenne’s V-8. Maybe he had fudged the speed limit coming into town—Ali certainly had—but she doubted it. And once he got to the city, he would be going first to the Motel 6 to collect Edie. How much longer would that take him? Half an hour? Forty-five minutes? Could she stall Jake that long? Ali realized that her best bet was to engage him in conversation.

“What’s going on, Jake?” she said as calmly as she could manage. “Why the gun? We’ve known each other for a long time. You don’t mean this. You wouldn’t hurt me.”

“I’ll hurt you if I have to,” he insisted. “I need your car! Get out.”

“Can’t we talk about this?” she asked.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Jake said. “The cops are after me. So are some other people. Either way, I’m a dead man. Give me your car.”

Ali knew now that Jake was as frightened of the Joaquins as Roseanne had been.

“Surely it can’t be as bad as all this,” Ali said. “Get in. I’ll take you wherever you need to go.”

Much to Ali’s amazement and without an additional word, he walked around the front of the car. There were a few short seconds when she might have jammed her foot on the gas pedal and run him down. That would have ended the confrontation there and then, but something—basic humanity, maybe?—held her back. She was betting the farm that he wouldn’t gun her down in cold blood because she was someone he knew. The problem was, that was her situation as well. Ali couldn’t kill Jake for the exact same reason—she knew him. They had once been friends—at least she had always thought they were.

Ali punched the “unlock” button on the car and let him inside.

“Where to?” she asked.

“Mexico,” he said. “And not down the I-5, either. They’ll be checking the border there. Head for Julian. Know where that is?”

Ali nodded. Julian was in the mountains east of Escondido. If you passed Julian and continued on over that particular range, you came out north of Brawley—and near what was considered to be more of a back-door entrance into Mexico through Calexico. But going that way was anything but direct. Ali suspected Jake was probably right in terms of people not thinking he’d attempt to go that way. There would be far more focus on the main I-5 corridor and far less on secondary routes.

She wondered how closely Jake had been following the situation on the ground as the takedowns happened and whether or not he had any idea that most of the Joaquin organization along with Tracy McLaughlin and Roseanne had all been taken into custody.

“Sounds like you’re headed the same place Roseanne is,” Ali ventured casually. “And considering she knows all about you and Amber, I doubt she’ll be thrilled to see you when you show up.”

“You know about Oaxaca?” Jake demanded. “How?”

Ali hadn’t known where they were headed in Mexico exactly—but now she did. And she also knew from Jake’s reaction that he had no idea Roseanne had been placed under arrest.

“Roseanne told me,” Ali said, goading just to see how he’d react to the news. “She called me because she needed cash in a hurry and wanted to unload some of her jewelry. I took a few pieces off her hands.”

“But she’s still all right?”

“You mean have your friends the Joaquins caught up with her? Not yet.”

From the dismayed look on Jake’s face, Ali knew he was taken aback. “How do you know so much about all this?” he wanted to know.

Ali decided to choose a Joaquin—any Joaquin—to turn into a fall guy. “Reynaldo,” Ali said. “He’s made a deal with the Feds. From what I hear, he’s giving them an earful and spilling his guts about everything that’s been going on around here. By morning the whole organization will be in custody. You sure you want to be the last man standing?”

Once again Jake waved the gun in her direction. “Why are we still sitting here?” he demanded. “I told you to drive.”

Ali’s phone rang just then, startling them both. “Don’t answer,” Jake began, but Ali already had, hoping beyond hope the caller would be Dave and that she would somehow be able to let him know what was going on.

“Ms. Reynolds?” an unfamiliar male voice asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m so sorry to disturb you at such a late hour. My name is Fred Macon. You know, with Three Palms, the mortuary?”

Ali struggled to conceal her disappointment. “What can I do for you, Mr. Macon?”

“Your husband’s remains have just been transported to our facility here. There seems to be some confusion with the paperwork. I had been told that April Gaddis was the person to be consulted about services and so forth, but it’s been brought to my attention that Ms. Gaddis is also deceased at this time, and since yours is the only other contact number available to us…”

“It’s well after midnight, Mr. Macon,” Ali pointed out. “Do we really need to have this discussion right now? Can’t we plan my husband’s funeral during daylight hours?”

“Well, yes, certainly,” Fred Macon said quickly. “There’s one check mark on the form that wasn’t properly handled over in Riverside, however, and it would be a big help to all of us here if we could get that one straightened out as soon as possible.”

“What check mark?” Ali asked.

“Embalming,” Fred Macon said. “It would be helpful to us to know whether or not you intend to have Mr. Grayson’s remains embalmed.”

Paul had died on Thursday night. It was now edging toward dawn on Tuesday morning. That went a long way to explaining Mr. Macon’s middle-of-the-night urgency. Embalming was probably long overdue.

“By all means,” Ali said.

“Thank you,” Fred said. “Thank you so much. So I can note on the file that you gave me a verbal authorization to do so over the phone?”

“Yes.”

“And I can let the office know that you’ll be in touch to finalize arrangements for the services tomorrow…later on today, actually?”

“That, too,” Ali told him.

“And, if you’ll pardon my asking. Our information about Ms. Gaddis didn’t come through what you would call official channels. I just happened to see it on the news and made the connection. Will you be handling arrangements for her as well? If a joint service is required—”

“No,” Ali said. “I believe someone else will be in charge of that.”

“Oh,” Fred said. He sounded disappointed, as though he had somehow missed the opportunity to drum up some extra nightshift business. Ali wondered if perhaps he actually made a commission. “All right then,” he added. “Thanks so much, and again, I’m sorry to disturb you in the middle of the night.”

“That’s quite all right,” Ali said.

She ended the call. “The mortuary,” she explained to Jake. “Calling about Paul’s services. You already knew he was dead when you came to court on Friday, didn’t you?” she added.

“I said drive,” Jake said, but she noted a lack of conviction in his voice, and that uncertainty gave her courage.

“No,” she said suddenly. “We’re not going anywhere. I think you know who the guilty party is. I want to know who killed Paul and why.”

“Ali, I’m telling you,” Jake said menacingly. “If I have to shoot you, I will. Don’t make me do it.”

The window on Ali’s side of the car was still open. With a speed that surprised her and caught Jake totally flat-footed, Ali shut off the ignition, extracted the car key, and flung it out through the open window. She welcomed the tiny whisper of a splash as the leather-topped key landed in the nearby swimming pool and sank to what she knew was the bottom of the diving end.

Jake heard it, too, and was outraged. “You bitch!” he screamed at her. “Are you nuts? What the hell are you thinking? Now we’ll never get out of here.”

That’s the whole idea, Ali thought.

“Maybe it’s time you thought about calling the cops and turning yourself in,” she suggested.

“Goddamn it!” he roared furiously. “Get out! Get the hell out of this car! I was working trying to hot-wire Paul’s Land Rover when you showed up. It’s a lot harder than it looks, but I almost had it. Once I get it running, we’ll take that instead. Go on! Move it. You’re driving.”

Ali did as she was told. She moved. She was headed for the Land Rover when a new set of headlights rounded the last curve on Robert Lane and stopped just outside the gate.

Ali’s heart quickened within her. She was sure the new arrival had to be Dave, that once again he had somehow ridden to her rescue. Then she heard Chris’s voice.

“Mom?” he called. “Is that you? The gate is closed, and I don’t have a clicker. Come let me in.”

Ali’s insides lurched. It wasn’t Dave at all. It was her son. Her baby.

Jake grabbed Ali’s arm from behind. She felt the barrel of the gun press into her back. “We’re coming to you,” Jake called. “Stay right where you are. I have a gun, and I’m not afraid to use it. If you move or make so much as a sound, your mother dies. Understand?”

They came around the corner of the pool house to the spot where Ali could see Chris standing beside Edie’s idling Olds.

She wanted to urge him to run. Or to tumble down the bank of lush pampas grass her neighbors had allowed to flourish on the steep hillside. But with the gun pressed against her spine, and with her arm twisted almost up to her shoulder, she said nothing. It would be bad enough if Jake shot her. The idea that he might hurt Chris was unthinkable.

At last they reached the gatepost. “Open it,” Jake ordered, propelling her forward.

Ali punched the keypad, and the gate swung open.

“In,” Jake said, waving his weapon in the direction of Chris’s car. “You drive. Your mother and I will sit in back.”

“Mom,” Chris asked. “Did he hurt you? Are you all right?”

“Shut up,” Jake said.

Chris did as he was told, too. He shut up and got back into the driver’s seat while Jake heaved Ali into the car and across the backseat. He shoved her hard enough that her shoulder smashed painfully into the door on the far side.

Jake settled in behind her and slammed the door. “Thanks,” he said to the back of Chris’s head. “You couldn’t have come at a better time. Now take us to the Ten and go east, and do it in a hell of a hurry.”

{ CHAPTER 20 }

Mom, who is this jerk?” Chris demanded. “If you hurt her, I swear I’ll—”

“I said shut up and drive,” Jake repeated. “And I meant it.”

Ali rubbed her bruised shoulder. It hurt, but not nearly as much as her bruised ego. How had she allowed this calamity to happen? It seemed to her that somehow, in a week full of disasters, she should have seen this one coming and been able to prevent it.

“I’m all right, Chris,” she said. “Do what he says so no one gets hurt.”

Chris was outraged. “For God’s sake, Mom. How can you say that? The man was holding a gun to your head!”

“And now I’m holding one to yours,” Jake reminded him. “So you’d best pay attention. Turn the car around and get going.”

Chris complied by slamming his foot on the accelerator. He backed away from the gate so fast that he came perilously close to the edge of the road. Then, after pulling a swift U-turn, the Alero sped back down Robert Lane.

“Have a ball,” Chris declared. “Shoot away. Then we’ll all see exactly how well Grandma’s Olds drives with no one behind the wheel! I don’t think this model comes equipped with a self-guidance system.”

Ali knew that “Go ahead and shoot me” often qualify as famous last words. In fact, she suspected they had been included in the Darwin Awards as an often-quoted exit line.

For God’s sake, don’t antagonize him, Ali thought. “Chris,” she cautioned. “Please.”

“Slow down,” Jake said as Chris raced through the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. “The last thing we need is for the cops to come after us because you ran a damned stop sign.”

Chris slowed slightly. They traveled for the better part of a mile in silence.

“So what are you?” Chris asked finally, studying Jake’s face in the rearview mirror. “Somebody who’s just been profiled on America’s Most Wanted? An escaped convict? What?”

“He’s a friend of Paul’s,” Ali supplied. “Used to be a friend of Paul’s.”

“Some friend,” Chris muttered.

Once on the 10 there was far more traffic than there had been on the surface streets, and more semis than cars, all headed east, trying to make as much distance as possible before the blinding sun came up. Ali wondered about the drivers of those various big rigs. How was it that they could tool along, blissfully unaware of the life-and-death drama playing out in Edie Lawson’s innocuous-looking white Alero? Why was it none of them gave the speeding Oldsmobile a second glance?

Watching the lights of the not-quite-sleeping city speed past outside the window, Ali knew it was late but she didn’t know how late. Somehow, in the course of the struggle on Robert Lane, her wristwatch had disappeared. Huddled too far in the corner of the backseat to be able to see the clock on the dash, Ali was damned if she’d ask Jake Maxwell for the time of day. Finally, as they sped through Ontario, she caught sight of a huge neon clock at a Ford dealership. It was 2:12 exactly. No wonder she was tired.

As they drove, Ali couldn’t help being struck by the latest irony in her situation. Earlier that evening and without either her knowledge or permission, someone working for the Joaquin organization had followed her every move by using the very tracking device that, even now, was still in her pocket. Through the soft denim material, she could feel the presence of that smooth round disk. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on your point of view—the people who had been so vitally interested in her whereabouts earlier were now all under arrest. So even though it was technically possible for someone to track her, it seemed unlikely that anyone would do so.

With a sinking heart, Ali realized that all the high-tech GPS technology in the world wasn’t going to save her and her son. When it came to being rescued, she and Chris were on their own.

Still maintaining an uneasy silence, they traveled eastbound for some time. As they approached the merge with the 60, Ali’s hopes rose. Off to the right, she saw the lights of a phalanx of emergency vehicles sweeping onto I-10 ahead of them. When Ali first caught sight of them, she hardly dared breathe. She watched them for a few hopeful moments, praying that the lights were somehow related to what was happening to them, praying that Jake wouldn’t notice. And he didn’t. But by the time Chris negotiated the I-10/60 merge with its tangle of complicated traffic and disappearing lanes, the parade of cop cars or ambulances or whatever that Ali had put such hope in had shot on far ahead and completely out of sight.

Despairing, Ali closed her eyes and concentrated on some straightforward praying.

At last Chris spoke again. “Where are we going?”

“Don’t worry,” Jake replied. “Just stay on the Ten. I’ll tell you where to turn. It won’t be for a while yet.”

“If we’re going very far, we’ll need to stop for gas.”

Ali caught her breath as Jake leaned forward and peered over the front seat.

“All right,” he said finally, having read the gauge for himself. “I guess you’re right. We do need gas. Pull off at the next exit, but find a full-service pump. No one gets in or out of the vehicle while we’re stopped, understand? No one!”

Somewhere in Beaumont they pulled off the freeway and stopped at a convenience mart. While the three of them sat in the car and waited for the slow-moving attendant to fill the tank, Ali was startled by the ringing of her phone. She looked at the readout.

“It’s my mother,” she said. “She was supposed to come by the house tonight. If she did, she’s probably upset that I’m not there. She’ll be worried. She might even call the cops.”

“Answer it then,” Jake said. “But put the phone on speaker first, and don’t try anything funny. Understand?”

Ali understood all too well.

“Alison?” Edie said when she heard her daughter’s voice. “Are you all right? Where are you?”

Sometime earlier—was it hours or days?—with an armed and unstable April Gaddis standing in the kitchen at Robert Lane, Ali had somehow managed to convey the gravity of the situation to Dave by speaking to him in a kind of code. Now, though, with Jake Maxwell’s gun digging into her ribs and with him privy to both sides of the conversation, speaking to Edie in code simply wasn’t possible.

“I’m fine, Mom,” Ali said as reassuringly as possible. “I got called away from the house by an emergency with an old friend. There wasn’t time to let you know. I’m sorry.”

“You couldn’t have called?”

“No. Calling just wasn’t possible.”

“Well,” Edie said, sounding both perplexed and disgruntled, “the gate is shut. A cab brought me over, but I can’t get inside. What am I supposed to do, stand around here all night?”

Ali could have given her the gate code, but she didn’t. If something happened and Ali and Chris didn’t survive, the parked Cayenne would be the only real evidence as to what had happened to them. Ali didn’t want that evidence disturbed.

“Use the cab and find a hotel then,” she said. “I won’t be able to get back there before sometime tomorrow.”

“What about Chris?” Edie asked. “Where is he?”

“Staying with friends,” Ali said.

“It’s just that it’s not like you to be so irresponsible, Ali,” Edie said. “You’re sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine,” Ali said quickly. “I’ve got to go now, Mom. Take care. I love you.”

It hurt to think those might be the last words Edie Lawson ever heard from her daughter, but they were the best Ali could do.

Seconds later they were back under way. “You still haven’t said where we’re going,” Chris reminded Jake.

“That’s because you still don’t need to know.”

“Mexico,” Ali supplied. “Oaxaca. At least that’s what he told me earlier.”

“Shut up!” Jake said.

The barrel of his gun dug deeper into Ali’s ribs, but she was grateful that it was pointed in her direction rather than in Chris’s. He had his whole life ahead of him. As for hers? If she had to gamble her life to save her son’s, that’s exactly what she’d do.

Ali looked out across the darkened desert where mountains loomed black against a star-studded sky. They were only a few miles west of the Highway 111 turnoff and the place where the speeding train had plowed into a parked Camry—the place where Paul had died. Ali couldn’t help wondering if maybe she and Chris were destined to die there as well—in much the same manner.

“I need to take a leak,” Chris said from the front seat.

“Me, too,” Ali added quickly. “I had way too much coffee earlier.”

Jake immediately seemed to assume that their request for a pit stop was nothing but a ploy. And up to a point it was. Although Ali genuinely needed to use the facilities, it was also her sincere hope that in the process of getting in and out of the car, there would be an opportunity for Chris, at least, to get away.

“You’ll just have to wait,” Jake said. “You can hold it for a while.”

Soon, though, and now that she was thinking about it, Ali really couldn’t hold it any longer. She had drunk way too much coffee.

“I really do need to go,” she said.

“I told you, we’re not stopping.”

“Fine,” Ali said. “If you don’t mind sitting in a puddle of urine, neither do I.”

“There’s a rest area coming up in a few minutes,” Chris said. “Maybe we could stop there.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Jake exclaimed. “Stop then. By all means, but the two of you go in and out of the restroom one at a time, and your cell phone stays with me. Give it to me. Yours, too, if you’ve got one,” Jake told Chris. “Hand it over.”

As Chris signaled to merge onto the rest area exit ramp, Jake held out his hand to collect first Chris’s phone and then Ali’s. Chris passed his back. Involved in reluctantly handing over her own, Ali never saw exactly what happened. One moment they were slowing to exit the highway. The next the desert came alive with the flashing lights of a dozen police and emergency vehicles as the Alero gave a sudden violent lurch and veered to one side. Then it staggered forward on the rims of four instantly flattened tires.

“Nail strips!” Jake shouted in a panic. “Keep driving. Keep driving.”

But Chris had already reached another conclusion and slammed on the brakes. As the vehicle slowed and came to a stop, Ali heard a voice she barely recognized as her own, screaming at her son.

“Get out,” she screeched at him. “Go! Go! Go! I’m right behind you.”

But that wasn’t true. Before Ali could touch the door handle, Jake’s fingers clamped down on her wrist. Ali may still have been trapped inside the car, but Chris was in motion before all the words had tumbled out of her mouth. She saw her son land and land hard, thrown forward by a combination of his own momentum and that of the vehicle. Then to her immense relief, he scrambled to his feet. Limping slightly, he raced to cover behind one of several waiting California Highway Patrol vehicles.

After that, in the middle of the chaos—accompanied by a cloud of swirling dust and the blinding flash of lights—there was a moment of utter silence followed by someone shouting, “All right, Maxwell. You’re surrounded. Put down your weapon. Come out with your hands up.”

Jake looked at Ali. “How do they know it’s me? Who told them?”

Ali had no answer for that, but with Chris out of the car and out of danger, she found herself immersed in a well of complete calm—a place where Jake Maxwell’s threats no longer held any sway with her. She was immune.

“It doesn’t matter who told them, Jake,” she told him. “What matters is that they do know. It’s over. You can’t get away. Give it up.”

“You have to believe me, Ali,” he said, after a pause. “I had no idea she was going to kill him.”

“Kill who?” Ali asked.

“Paul. I thought Lucia was just going to teach him a lesson. That’s the way the Joaquins work, you see. They give people lessons, hard enough lessons so you know what they’re capable of, and you don’t need another one.”

The comment came from so far out in left field that it took a moment for Ali to process it. “You mean you knew?” Ali demanded. “You son of a bitch, are you saying you did it?”

“I didn’t. All I did was help get him drunk. I swear to you, I didn’t know anything about Tracy and the rest of it. I never meant for Paul to die.”

“You did mean it,” Ali returned. “You meant it, and he did die. Why? Were you jealous because he got the job and you didn’t? Was that it?”

With that Ali reached for the door handle.

“Wait, Ali,” Jake said. “Don’t leave me, please. I’ll drop the gun if you stay. I promise. They won’t shoot me as long as you’re with me.”

What Ali felt in that moment was a contempt and loathing so complete and all-consuming that there was no room left in her soul for anything else, especially not fear.

“Forget it,” she told him. “You’re on your own.”

“But I have a gun.”

“You may have a gun, buddy-boy,” she told him, “but I know for a fact you don’t have balls enough to use it.”

With that, she opened the car door and stepped out into a world of flashing lights. And even there, in the middle of the sudden chill of the cold desert night, she knew that at least one or two of those flashing lights were bound to be cameras.

Blinded by them, she was startled when a pair of strong arms grabbed her and pulled her behind one of the waiting vehicles.

“Ali. Thank God!” Dave exclaimed. “Are you all right?” In the pulsing light she caught a glimpse of the relief on his worried face.

“I’m fine. Really.”

“Come on, then,” Dave said, leading her away. “It’s too dangerous. Let’s get out of here.”

“How did you find us?” Ali asked. “How did you know where to look?”

Dave didn’t answer. “Later,” he said.

“Where’s Chris?”

“Out of the line of fire. Where you need to be, too.”

Someone shouting over what sounded like a bullhorn was still ordering Jake Maxwell out of the Alero as Dave led Ali to the far side of the concrete restroom complex. There she found Chris sitting on a picnic table with a paramedic applying ice to his ankle.

“The EMT grabbed me and wouldn’t let me loose. It’s just a little sprain, Mom,” he said reassuringly. “It’s nothing. How are you?”

Ali hurried over and hugged him. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m completely fine.”

She turned back to Dave. “But how did you know…”

“Ask your son,” Dave said. “Once he realized you were in trouble, he punched his phone’s redial, and the last number dialed happened to be your folks’ phone back in Sedona. Fortunately Bob was there and answered. Chris was wearing his Bluetooth mini earplug. That allowed Bob to overhear everything that was going on in the vehicle without Jake having any idea anyone was listening in. Bob immediately put another call through to us—a conference call—so we could all monitor the situation.”

Ali remembered giving Chris a tough time when he had returned from a weekend skiing trip to Aspen with a telephone earpiece attached to his head. Now it appeared that an even smaller mini earplug might well have saved both their lives.

“And knowing what was up,” Dave added, “Easy was able to get one of his electronic techs working the Pink Swan warehouse scene to reinitiate your GPS.”

“So, from all that, you knew where we were the whole time,” Ali said.

Dave nodded. “Pretty much,” he said. “But none of that would have happened if Chris here hadn’t used his head.”

Flooded with relief and gratitude, Ali gave her son another hug. She and Chris had been in danger, all right, but not nearly as much as she had supposed.

“But you were here waiting for us,” Ali said a moment later. “How did you do that? You and Easy were still in Valencia when I left. I thought you were going to pick up my mother.”

“Fortunately, we were unavoidably delayed. And after that, it took some doing,” Dave said. “And some pretty amazing police car driving on Easy Washington’s part. Of course, it helps to have CHP cars clearing traffic ahead of us all along the way.”

“So that was you?” Ali asked. “The flashing lights I saw merging off the Sixty onto the Ten just as we got there?”

Dave nodded. “Our first intention was to do this in Beaumont when you stopped for gas. Then we decided there would be less risk to the general public if we did it here at a rest area instead, so we cleared out as many civilians as we could, and here we are. Which reminds me. You should probably give your dad a call and let him know you’re okay.”

But Ali’s phone had bounced out of her hand the moment the tires had gone flat. She had no idea where it was now—none.

“Let me use yours, Chris,” she said, holding out her hand.

He shook his head. “I was on the phone the whole way here,” he said. “I’m out of battery.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Dave said, taking out his own phone. “Here. Use mine.”

Bob was overjoyed to hear his daughter’s voice. “Does your mother know?” he asked. “She’s been worried sick and on the phone to the restaurant the whole time.”

Ali had reached Edie and was talking to her when Easy Washington came trotting around the corner of the building. “All clear,” he said. “Maxwell is in custody. Is everyone here okay?”

“Just my ankle,” Chris said, “but it’s nothing serious.”

“And you?” Easy asked Ali.

“I’m fine,” she said. “One hundred percent.”

“The Alero’s going to have to be towed,” Easy said. “And Dave’s car is still at the Claim Jumper. I’ll have one of my guys load you into a Suburban and take you back. The rest of us have one more stop before the evening is over.”

“What stop?” Ali asked.

“In the Old Las Palmas area of Palm Springs,” Easy replied. “That’s where Lucia Joaquin lives. She and her granddaughter, Amber, are the only ones still at large. We’ve had Lucia’s place under surveillance all night long. There’s been no unusual activity, so we’re hoping she has no idea we’ve managed to roll up her entire operation in the course of the last several hours. And now we’re going to nail her.”

“She’s the one who ordered Paul’s murder?” Ali asked.

Easy nodded. “I believe so.”

“Then I want to go, too,” Ali said. “I want to be there.”

“You can’t,” Easy objected. “It’s impossible. I’m not allowed to put civilians in danger. It’s absolutely against regulations.”

“I’ve been in danger all night,” Ali pointed out. “So has Dave. So has Chris.”

“Yes,” Easy agreed. “But that wasn’t my fault.”

“Please,” Ali said quietly. “After all we’ve been through tonight, shouldn’t I be able to be there to see her taken into custody?”

Easy Washington shook his head. At first Ali was convinced he was turning her down, then he called over his shoulder to one of his men.

“Hey, Sal. Does anyone here have a couple of extra Kevlar vests? A small and a large. We’ve got someone here who’s going to need one.”

{ CHAPTER 21 }

The Kevlar jacket was bulkier than Ali could have imagined. And hotter, too. Minutes after donning it, she and Dave climbed into the backseat of Easy Washington’s black Suburban.

In the rush of donning the vest Ali had lost track of her son.

“Where’s Chris?” she asked. “I thought he was coming along.”

“He’s on his way to an ER in the ambulance,” Dave answered. “The EMT insisted his ankle has to be X-rayed and refused to take no for an answer. By the way,” Dave added, “did anyone ever tell you Chris is one hell of a kid? Really used his head tonight. He did a great job with your dad and us on the phone.”

“Yes,” Ali agreed. “He is one hell of a kid.”

In the front seat, Easy was on the radio and cell phone both, coordinating his troops. At the rest area Ali had caught sight of several officers she had met in the course of the previous several days, cops she knew from L.A. and Riverside, in addition to Easy’s own crew from the DEA. This was clearly a complicated, task-force-style operation with Ezekiel Washington calling the shots.

“I’ve never been to Palm Springs,” Dave said, studying a map Easy had handed him. “We’re going to a street called Via Hermosa.”

Via Hermosa was a name-brand Palm Springs address, and Ali remembered visiting several of the venerable old mansions there years earlier as part of various charitable functions. She took the map from Dave long enough to point to the general area.

“Old Las Palmas is part of old Palm Springs,” Ali explained. “Big houses. Big lots.”

“Big bucks?” Dave asked.

“That, too, but I would guess Lucia Joaquin can afford pretty much anything she wants.”

Ali thought about the other massive old places she had seen in old Las Palmas—the eight-or nine-bedroom luxury homes with their many-car garages, their lush furnishings and equally lush grounds. She didn’t know which house Lucia lived in, but it had to be one like that.

And the more Ali thought about it, the more the whole idea of Lucia Joaquin offended her. She resented the idea that a woman, clad in pink from head to toe and closeted in absolute luxury, could sit at home in total comfort and safety while sending her minions off to do her bidding—up to and including committing acts of cold-blooded murder. While one of her worker bees had left a trussed and helpless Paul Grayson—who she merely suspected might go to the cops—to die on the train tracks, Lucia had been a few miles away, probably sleeping peacefully in her bed.

“Where do people like Lucia come from?” Ali asked Dave finally.

He shook his head. “They’re vermin,” he said. “They crawl out from under rocks.”

They had turned off I-10 and onto Highway 111. As they sped through the night with the blue and red lights pulsing overhead but with no siren, Ali tried not to look at that particular part of the desert, but she couldn’t help it. Her eyes were drawn to the black pool of unrelieved darkness where she knew the train track ran. What a desolate place it was—what an awful place to die.

Easy returned his radio to its holder. “Okay,” he said, “here’s the deal. We have yet to locate Amber, the granddaughter, but we’re pretty sure Lucia is inside the Palm Springs house. It’s possible she’s there alone, but it’s also possible there’s a caregiver with her. The place sits on an acre and a half, and the whole thing is surrounded by a twelve-foot rock wall with only one gate. Since Lucia isn’t in the best of health these days, she’s not going to be climbing over that fence. As long as we control the gate—which we do—we also control access.”

Dave nodded. Ali said nothing.

“I’ve got a trained tactical team in place and primed to do the heavy lifting,” Easy continued. “These are guys who know what they’re about and we’re going to let them do it. I’ve put my second in command in charge. Since the two of you are here on my say-so, I’m not letting either one of you out of my sight for even so much as a minute. And you’re not going any closer to the action than I say, got it?”

“Got it,” Dave said at once.

“Ms. Reynolds?” Easy asked. “I don’t believe I heard a response from you.”

“Got it,” Ali said.

“Good. I know you’re anxious to see the takedown. Considering the circumstances, I can’t say that I blame you, but you’re not to go near that woman until my guys have the situation under control.”

“Yes,” Ali said. “I understand.”

She looked at Dave. He sat there alert but seemingly at ease, with the palms of his hands resting squarely on his knees. If he was concerned about the coming confrontation, his impassive face betrayed none of it. But then, Ali realized, he was a Marine. Clearly he would be accustomed to going into potentially dangerous combat situations. She was not. Her heart pounded in her chest. Sweat dribbled down the back of her neck and soaked her shirt under the arms. Despite the fact that she had said she wanted to be here and see Lucia taken into custody, it was clear to Ali that she wasn’t ready at all—and probably never would be. And she missed having her Glock, missed it more than she could have imagined.

“How long before it all starts?” she asked.

She had aimed her question at Dave, but Easy Washington was the one who answered. “Depends on how long it takes us to get there,” he said.

Ali had always been under the impression that it took approximately forever to drive from the Palm Springs turnoff on I-10 into the city itself. Tonight it seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. Long before Ali had managed to prepare herself, Easy was already turning off Palm Canyon and headed toward Old Las Palmas. Ali closed her fists and let her fingernails dig into the flesh at the base of her palms. She may have been petrified about whatever was coming, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to show it.

As they approached Via Hermosa, cop cars and roadblocks seemed to be everywhere—all kinds of cop cars from all kinds of jurisdictions. But Easy and his Suburban had the secret code or maybe it was a magic charm. Every time the Suburban came close to stopping, they were waved on through the barricade.

When they finally came to a stop, it was on the far side of a wrought-iron gate with a massive wall on either side that seemed to stretch out of sight in both directions. The sky was starting to brighten almost imperceptibly on the far horizon while the view in through the gate was nothing short of idyllic. A lit fountain, spilling water, was the centerpiece of a bricked courtyard. Curtains of blooming bougainvillea framed a pillared front porch. The massive double doors, made of some kind of metal, gleamed in the light of equally massive sconces. It was an impressive entryway, one that made a statement. It also looked like a fortress.

Motioning for Dave and Ali to stay inside, Easy stepped out of the vehicle. Once again he had a phone clapped to one ear and an earpiece in the other. “Okay,” Ali heard him say. “We’re in place now. If everyone’s ready, it’s a go. On your say-so. Right.”

What followed seemed to Ali like a moment of anticipatory silence. Then, as if on cue, all the officers standing outside the Suburban—all the ones she could see, Easy included—seemed to glance in the same direction at the same time, looking off over their shoulders, back toward downtown. And then, through the open car door, Ali heard the sound that had obviously captured their attention—the distinctive rat-ta-tat-tat of an approaching helicopter.

Ali’s first assumption was that the aircraft was some kind of support vehicle brought in to serve as backup for the officers on the scene, but as it flew directly overhead, it laid down what sounded like a spray of automatic gunfire. At the sound of it, the officers on the ground all dove for cover.

“Holy shit!” Dave exclaimed. “We’re taking fire.”

The helicopter dropped to the ground on the far side of the gate, easing down beside the lighted fountain. Behind it, one of the massive double doors flew open and two women emerged—Amber and a white-haired woman, dressed all in pink and leaning on a cane. Amber hurried her forward. The two of them walked under the churning helicopter blades without ducking their heads, as though they were totally accustomed to them. As they approached the cockpit, Amber pulled herself inside and then reached back to help the older woman.

By then Easy’s assault team was moving forward. Weapons at the ready, they crouched behind a growling Hummer that paused for only a moment before ripping the gate off its hinges and clearing the way for the team to spill inside the compound. As they surged forward, though, the helicopter had collected its passengers and was already lifting off. As it rose from the ground, another spray of bullets came through the craft’s open door.

Instinctively, Ali and Dave ducked as bullets smashed into the front of the Suburban and whined past them in the empty air. The windshield splintered. And then there was another sound—an ugly, guttural groan of pain—the sound of someone hit and badly hurt. Outside the open front door, Easy Washington seemed to spin in place. Then, slowly, he fell backward.

Over the roar of the helicopter engine, Ali heard a group of shouted commands followed by yet another blast of gunfire, this one from the officers on the ground. At first it seemed as though it made no difference. For a time the helicopter continued to rise unimpeded. Then it seemed to hesitate slightly. The blades stopped spinning abruptly as the craft tilted drunkenly over to one side. Then, slowly to Ali’s fear-fueled mind, it began to fall to earth.

Ali saw two somethings, one pink and one not, spill out onto the ground and land, like limp rag dolls, on the hard brick of the courtyard. And then the helicopter crashed down there as well—smashing almost silently and eerily in the exact same spot. Immediately it burst into flames.

As the flames rose in the air, Dave vaulted out of the Suburban with Ali right behind him. By the time Ali reached the ground, Dave was on his knees lifting his friend’s dreadfully limp body. Already drenched in Easy’s bright red blood, Dave was cradling the man and doing his best to apply pressure to a wound at the base of Easy’s chin.

“Find a phone!” Dave yelled at Ali. “Call nine-one-one. Hurry!”

Without knowing how she found it, Ali’s fingers closed around the telephone Easy Washington had dropped when he fell.

“Nine-one-one,” the operator said. “What are you reporting?”

“A man’s been shot,” Ali shouted into the phone. “A man’s been shot and there’s been a helicopter crash.”

“What is your location?” the woman wanted to know. “You’re calling on a cell phone. I need the exact address.”

“Somewhere on Via Hermosa in Palm Springs,” Ali returned. “Right next to the burning helicopter.”

Three people died last night and three DEA officers were wounded, one critically, when gunfire erupted and a fleeing helicopter crashed in the normally quiet Old Las Palmas neighborhood of Palm Springs during a DEA-led task-force operation targeting a highly sophisticated network of alleged drug traffickers.

After a month long investigation and after staging numerous arrests all over Southern California, officers turned their attention to the home of a longtime Palm Springs resident thought to be the ringleader of the group. Both the unidentified woman and her granddaughter along with their pilot perished when the helicopter in which they were attempting to flee crashed during take-off. One unidentified DEA officer is hospitalized at Eisenhower Memorial Hospital with what are thought to be life-threatening injuries.

The gun battle came at the end of a long day of stunning high-profile arrests that netted several members of L.A.’s media elite along with some people thought to be highly placed members in law enforcement circles. Much of the operation centered around a trendy Beverly Hills topless club known as the Pink Swan.

One suspect was arrested and two carjacking victims were rescued at the Morango rest area on I-10 when officers, alerted by one of the hostages over a cell phone, managed to throw down nail strips, which disabled the fleeing vehicle. One of the two victims, both of them Arizona residents visiting in California, was slightly injured during the operation. The other was released unharmed.

It was almost noon that same day when Ali looked up from reading the online news report and considered those words, the understated and dispassionate journalese that toned down the very real drama of the story.

“One was slightly injured.” That would have been Chris and his sprained ankle. The one who was released “unharmed” was Ali herself. And the “critically injured” officer was Dave’s friend Easy Washington, who had been struck in the neck by a stray bullet. The theory was that one of the bullets fired from the helicopter had ricocheted off the Suburban’s engine block. It had glanced off Easy’s Kevlar vest and had slammed into his inferior thyroid artery.

The other thing the words didn’t do justice to was the frantic lifesaving effort that had ensued. Dave had been in the thick of the action and only his knowledgeable application of pressure to the wound had saved his gravely injured friend’s life. Ali’s last glimpse of a blood-spattered Dave had been as the EMTs helped him into the waiting ambulance along with Easy.

A little past noon Edie Larson emerged from the pool house. Carrying a cup of coffee, she set it on the patio table next to Ali’s computer and then she sat down next to her daughter.

“How are things?” Edie asked. “Any word about Dave’s friend?”

“No,” Ali said. “At least they’re not updating his condition anywhere here.”

“And you haven’t heard from Dave?”

“Not so far.”

“You will,” Edie said confidently.

Ali studied her mother. Edie’s face looked far more worn than usual. “You never let on that you knew about the whole thing when I was talking to you on the phone,” Ali observed.

“No, I didn’t,” Edie agreed. “I was afraid I might give something away. I knew Dave and the others were working hard with Dad and Chris to get the two of you out of there, but I wanted you to hear the sound of my voice. I wanted you to know that you weren’t all alone out there.”

Ali had pictured her mother standing outside the gate of Robert Lane during what she had thought might be their last-ever phone call. Now she knew that, in actual fact, Edie had placed the call from the safety of an LAPD squad car.

Ali reached out and covered her mother’s hand. “Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” Edie returned. “But knowing you were out there with all those bullets flying…” Edie shook her head. “Oh, my. I was terrified.”

“So was I,” Ali admitted. And with good reason, she thought.

Edie stood up. Her freshly poured cup of coffee was already gone. She could drink coffee hotter than anyone Ali knew.

“Is there any food in the house?” Edie asked, nodding toward the big house where none of them had stayed. “The pool house fridge has coffee and a bottle of ketchup but that’s about it.”

“Probably,” Ali said, “but I don’t know for sure.”

“I’ll go check,” Edie said. “Chris was still asleep on the couch when I came through the living room, but I know we’ll all feel better if we have a decent breakfast under our belts.”

Vintage Edie Larson, Ali thought.

Once Edie was in the house, Ali continued scanning the various online news Web sites. There were three that included pictures of Dave dragging her away from the Alero during the rest area confrontation. The captions on two of those identified her as an “unidentified carjacking victim.” In the third, the usual suspect and journalistic busybody LMB, the blogger at socal copshop.com, identified her by name in the caption of a particularly unflattering photo. In it, Ali looked downright ghastly.

Knowing that some of her cutloose fans were bound to see the photo and worry, Ali decided it was time to face up to her blog and write something about what had been going on.

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Years ago I remember reading a poem by Rudyard Kipling in which he said “the female of the species is more deadly than the male.” In the last few days, I have seen this statement borne out on several different fronts.

In recent days I had the misfortune of seeing my former husband’s fiancée choose to end her own life and that of her unborn child rather than face the consequences of her own murderous actions. April Gaddis took her mother’s life. Then she threatened my life and my mother’s as well. Days earlier, someone had referred to me as a “Black Widow.” April Gaddis may not have been married prior to her death and she may not be directly responsible for Paul Grayson’s murder, either, but I still believe the term applies—to her.

Yes, my husband, Paul Grayson, was murdered, and it turns out his death was merely the tip of the iceberg. Because there’s been another Black Widow at work in Southern California for a very long time. Lucia Joaquin was in fact a widow—the widow of a known drug kingpin—and a successful drug trafficker in her own right. I’m not sure how Paul got caught in her web of evil, but he did. She’s dead now, too, as is her only granddaughter. They both perished when the helicopter in which they were attempting to flee crashed and burst into flames.

I owe the fact that I am writing this today to the heroic efforts of a friend of mine, a guy named Dave Holman, who has come to my rescue more than once in the last few days. Dave is a police officer in Sedona, Arizona. He’s also a member of the Marine Corps Reserves. Last night I watched him work frantically to save the life of a friend of his, a wounded DEA officer, who is also in the Marine Reserves. In the past I don’t believe I’ve ever spent much time wondering about the Marine Corps motto Semper fidelis. Now I’ve seen it in action.

I’ve looked at my new e-mail list. It’s stuffed to the gills. In fact, my server is probably rejecting e-mails as I write this, claiming my mailbox is full and my bandwidth is over its limit. As I’ve indicated, I’ve had my hands full for the last few days. I’ll get around to answering the mail when I can. Please be patient.

Posted 1:05 P.M., September 20, 2005 by Babe

P.S. Amazing!! My attorney just called. My former employers have settled my wrongful dismissal suit! For an undisclosed sum. The terms of the settlement dictate that I’m not allowed to discuss the amount. What I can say, though, is that it’s generous enough that I won’t be having to look for a day job anytime soon. cutlooseblog.com will continue indefinitely.

Ali was starting to slog her way through the mail when Chris, still limping, ambled out onto the patio. His hair was standing on end. The way he looked reminded her so much of how he had looked as a child that it made her heart melt, and it took real effort on Ali’s part to keep from leaping up and hugging him.

“Where’s Grandma?” he wanted to know.

“Making breakfast,” Ali answered.

“Great. I’m starved.”

Chris stretched and headed for the kitchen. As soon as he opened the back door, Ali caught a whiff of her mother’s baking coffee cake wafting through the air. Ali followed her son’s lead. Then, once she was inside the house, she heard the sound of a hair dryer coming from the living room, and she followed that as well.

Wielding a whining hair dryer, Edie stood over the bird’s-eye maple credenza in the front entryway. Nearby, a mound of bulging black plastic bags lay stacked by the front door.

Ali spoke to her mother three times before Edie noticed her. She switched off the noisy hair dryer and then turned her hearing aids back on.

“What are you doing?” Ali asked again.

“I asked your father what to do about this water mark,” Edie said. “Someone must have put a vase down without wiping off the bottom. Dad says to try the hair-dryer routine first. If this doesn’t work, he says I should bring it home and he’ll refinish the top for you there. Or else Kip will. Dad says he’s pretty good with his hands.”

As far as Ali could see, the ring wasn’t getting much better, but she appreciated her mother’s effort more than she could say.

“And I got rid of the old dead flowers,” Edie added. “They were falling all to pieces, dropping petals everywhere, and stinking up a storm. Hope you don’t mind.”

Ali didn’t mind at all. She was delighted to find that the bouquets that were to have marked Paul and April’s wedding had been swept away in the flower-clearing operation along with all the condolence bouquets. The catering tables and chairs had been collected and stacked at one end of the living room.

“Your yard man,” Edie said, nodding toward the chairs and tables. “He helped me with that. What’s his name again?”

“Jesus.”

“Yes, that’s it. Jesus. He said he needed to finish doing something out front, but that as soon as he’s done, he’ll come collect the bags of dead flowers and put them on his compost heap.”

Of course, Ali realized.

Jesus had come back to reclaim his job, just as she had asked. Crime scene tape aside, he must have been the one who had repaired and reassembled the broken gate.

“He said I should tell you that the lawyer you sent him to was very good.”

Right then, with Marcella Johnson’s big touchdown on the scoreboard, Ali was glad to hear that another of her many attorneys had turned out to be a positive for someone.

“Good,” Ali said. “As much as I’m paying in legal fees at the moment, it’s only fair that we end up with decent representation and a few wins on our side.”

“Jesus and I were having a bit of a communication problem,” Edie continued. “As you know, my Spanish isn’t all that good and I had my hearing aids turned off because the hair dryer was so loud, but I think he said a friend of his is coming over a little later. He mentioned her name, but I didn’t quite catch it. Olivia maybe?”

“Elvira?” Ali asked. “My old cook?”

“That could be it. I just didn’t hear him properly.”

They had finished their breakfast of cheese baked eggs and coffee cake when the doorbell rang. When Ali went to answer it, she found that the bags filled with dead flowers had magically and quietly disappeared. She opened the door to find Elvira Jimenez standing nervously on the front porch.

“Why, Elvira,” Ali exclaimed with pleasure. “How good to see you again. Come in.”

Elvira hung back. Ali went out and gave her a welcoming hug.

“I should not have come,” Elvira said.

“Of course you should have,” Ali said. “Our other cook just left. If you’re not working somewhere else, maybe you’d like your old job back.”

Chris appeared in the doorway. When Elvira saw him, her face broke into a broad smile, and she allowed him to lead her into the house.

“You’re too skinny,” she told him, patting his belly affectionately. “Someone needs to give you more cookies. And tortillas.”

Chris took her into the kitchen, where Elvira sniffed the air. Nodding appreciatively in the direction of the coffee cake, she held out her hand to Edie Larson.

“I believe I have met you other times when you were here,” Elvira said.

“Yes,” Edie agreed. “It’s nice to see you again. Won’t you sit down?”

Elvira looked uncomfortable. Her eyes slipped from one face to another, finally coming to rest on Ali. Elvira shook her head and remained standing.

“Jesus said I should come,” she said at last. “And his niece. She said the same thing.”

“I’ve spoken to Andrea,” Ali said, hoping to find some common ground that would ease Elvira’s obvious discomfort. “She’s a nice girl.”

Elvira’s dark eyes bored into Ali’s. “A nice girl?” she asked.

“Of course,” Ali said.

“Some people would not call her that—nice,” Elvira ventured. “She got pregnant once when she wasn’t married. She had to have an abortion.”

Ali shrugged. “Those things happen,” she said. “It’s important to the girl it happens to and to her family, but it’s not important to the rest of the world.”

“But it is important,” Elvira said urgently. “It’s a sin—a mortal sin.”

Ali saw at once that she had stepped into something. So did Edie.

“It’s considered a mortal sin by some people,” Edie said kindly. “And I, for one, happen to agree with you.”

Elvira smiled wanly. Then she reached into her threadbare cloth bag and pulled out a worn leather wallet. From it she removed a photo—a wallet-sized photo—of a newborn baby with a knitted pink cap perched on top of her head. Elvira handed the photo to Ali, who studied it for a moment. The baby had dark hair and fair skin, but there was something striking about the eyes.

“My great-granddaughter,” Elvira explained. “My granddaughter’s daughter.”

Of course, the baby wasn’t pretty at all. She was in fact wrinkly and more than a little ugly, but there are times when white lies are not only acceptable, they’re downright necessary.

“Congratulations,” Ali said, handing the photo on to Chris. “She’s very pretty.”

Chris glanced briefly at the photo and then, in turn, handed it along to his grandmother. Edie took one look at it then settled heavily onto one of the kitchen chairs.

“Oh, forevermore,” she breathed. “Not another one!”

“Another one?” Ali asked. “What you do you mean?”

“Don’t tell me you can’t see it!” Edie exclaimed. “This child has her father’s eyes. She looks exactly like Paul Grayson.”

{ CHAPTER 22 }

The story came out gradually over the course of the next few days while Ali went about the job of handling Paul’s funeral. It had to be done and since there was no one else to do it, Ali did. Fortunately, April’s father came forward and insisted on handling April’s final arrangements. Ali was relieved to learn that he wanted nothing at all to do with a joint service. That meant Ali didn’t have to worry about giving Fred Macon of the Three Palms Mortuary any more business, either.

But Ali did have to worry about Jesus Sanchez, who finally came forward and told her what he knew—and far more than Ali wanted to hear. He told her about how his niece, without his knowledge, had come to a party at the pool house. Paul had served drinks to Andrea and several of her young friends and then had taken advantage of the situation when Andrea was too drunk to see straight. When Andrea had turned up pregnant, Paul had paid for her abortion and given her money over and above that as well. He had also promised her father, Jesus, that it would never happen again. But it had—as everyone now knew—with Elvira’s young visiting granddaughter, Consuela.

Paul had tried the same program with Consuela that he had used successfully with Andrea. He had offered to pay for an abortion plus a five-thousand-dollar premium. Except Consuela wouldn’t go for it because it turned out she was a good Catholic girl. The trait had skipped Consuela’s own mother and had jumped a generation, going straight from Elvira to her granddaughter. The baby, Angelina, was now a month and a half old.

A few months earlier, Ali Reynolds would have taken some satisfaction in learning that Paul Grayson had been screwing around on April at the same time April had been maintaining her long-term cozy friendship with Tracy McLaughlin. But Ali’s paradigms had inalterably shifted that night out there in the desert—the night when she and her son had almost died. What had been important to her before no longer seemed to matter.

Ali’s concern now, knowing that Consuela’s child existed—that Angelina Rojas existed—was seeing to it that Angelina was properly provided for. Once again she found herself huddling with attorneys, trying to sort out reasonable support arrangements for this baby who could by no means be called a “love” child but who nonetheless deserved to have a very real claim on her father’s assets. And the fact that Ali was prepared to be more than fair—that she was determined, in fact, to be downright generous with her former husband’s assets—made a complicated situation far easier to handle than it would have been otherwise.

The negotiations went forward in utmost secrecy. That was the one thing Ali insisted upon—for Angelina’s sake, until she was old enough to choose for herself. Until she was old enough to ask her own questions and hear the answers.

Edie and Chris stayed until Friday, after the funeral on Thursday. Knowing Ali would most likely be listing and selling the house, they helped her sort and pack. Paul’s clothing—the expensive suits that he had reveled in—went to Goodwill, with the exception of the blue pinstripe Hugo Boss, which Paul would wear in his casket. April’s things were packed into boxes and taken to her father to do with as he saw fit.

Ali herself went through the house, sorting out what she wanted and what she didn’t. Most of it she didn’t. The art would go to an auction house. So would most of the furniture, dishes, and glassware, with the exception of the comfortable leather chair and sofa from the family room and the water-marred bird’s-eye maple credenza from the entryway. Those and everything else Ali wanted, she stacked in the family room until such time as she was ready to call for a moving van. As for the wine cellar? Ali managed to locate a company that specialized in moving fine wines and made arrangements for Paul’s entire collection, racks and all, to be moved to Sedona.

She talked to Dave on the phone from time to time during the course of that week and had offered to come over, but Dave said that wasn’t necessary. He stayed on in Palm Springs at Easy’s bedside, and since Ali wasn’t Easy’s friend, she thought it best not to intrude.

By Monday evening of the following week, Paul was buried and the house was more or less sorted out. Ali had blogged some but not much. She had done enough to let people know she was alive—enough to let them know she was okay. But everything that had happened had left her more traumatized than she would have thought possible, and she wasn’t ready to talk about it just yet—not nearly.

She was sitting in the mostly packed family room, surveying the debris field and having a solo glass of wine, when the doorbell rang. Startled out of her solitude, Ali hurried to the front door, looked out through the peephole, and was delighted to find Dave Holman standing on her doorstep.

“Hello, stranger,” she said, unlatching the security locks and opening the door wide. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m on my way back home to Sedona tomorrow,” he said. “I wanted to stop by tonight and see how you were doing and if you needed anything.”

“How’s Easy?” Ali asked, leading Dave into and through the house.

Dave shrugged. “Out of the woods for now,” he answered. “At least, he’s out of the ICU. That’s major progress.”

“So he’s going to make it?”

“His doctors seem to think so,” Dave said. “And his wife thinks so, too. She says he’s too damned stubborn to die, and maybe that’s true.”

Ali nodded.

“And I hear the grand jury has already started handing down indictments,” Dave continued.

Ali nodded again, but without really knowing what was what. She had spent little time following the stories that had surfaced in the media in the aftermath of the Joaquin arrests at the Pink Swan and Amber’s and Lucia’s deaths in the Palm Springs shootout. Ali found she had scant interest and even less patience left over for people who had allowed themselves to be caught up in Lucia Joaquin’s machinations.

Someone else might have been fooled by Ali’s studied indifference to the subject at hand, but not Dave Holman. “What’s going on with you?” he asked.

At the door of the cluttered family room, Dave paused long enough to survey the damage. Then he stepped forward and moved a stack of boxes off the leather couch, clearing himself a place to sit while Ali poured a glass of wine from one of Paul’s most cherished bottles.

“According to Paul’s complicated and computerized grading system,” she said, handing him the glass, “this is a rare five-hundred-dollar-a-bottle Bordeaux. It’s supposed to be top of the line.”

Dave took a tentative sip and smacked his lips. “I don’t think I’ve ever tasted five-hundred-dollar wine, but it’s not bad. Not bad at all.”

They sat for a minute or so in silence. “You still haven’t answered my question,” he reminded her.

“Have you ever read Ernest Hemingway?” Ali asked finally.

“Not my style of reading material,” Dave said. “Why?”

You may not read Ernest Hemingway, Ali thought fondly, but if you’re not a character straight out of Hemingway, I don’t know who is.

“I keep remembering a story of his I read once,” Ali continued aloud. “I’m not sure, but I think the title was something like ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.’”

Dave took another sip of his wine. “And?” he prodded.

“As I recall, Francis was a big-game hunter who took his bitch of a wife along with him on an African safari.”

“Sounds like fun,” Dave said. “Please tell me the story has a happy ending. Just say the bitchy wife dies.”

“That’s the whole problem,” Ali said. “She doesn’t die. She and her husband have a huge fight—or several of them, more like it. He finally tells her to go piss up a rope. Then he walks out into the bush to shoot his buffalo and his wife kills him.”

“So he was happy between the end of the fight and the time his wife kills him?” Dave asked. “That’s it? That’s his short happy life?”

“Pretty much,” Ali answered.

Dave helped himself to another sip of wine. “Does this story have a point?” he asked.

“Sort of,” Ali said. “Here I was just getting used to the idea that maybe I was wrong about Paul. I was beginning to think that if he was helping Easy catch the bad guys, maybe Paul wasn’t as bad as I thought. Then whammo. Out of the blue I find out he has a brand-new baby, a baby no one—including April Gaddis—knew anything about.”

“All that means is what goes around comes around,” Dave said. “I suppose that’s fair.”

“For everyone but the baby and her mother,” Ali said.

“What are you going to do about it?”

Ali told him.

“You’re doing all this without even the formality of a paternity test?”

“I don’t need a paternity test,” Ali said. “All you have to do is look at Angelina’s eyes. She looks just like her daddy.”

Dave shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “I never met the man. I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”

Ali nodded. “I guess you will.”

“And what are you going to do?” he asked.

Ali waved vaguely in the direction of the goods stacked haphazardly in the family room. “Call for a truck, have this stuff dragged back home to Sedona.”

“You’re not going to stay here?”

“Why would I?” Ali said. “I don’t fit in here anymore.”

“What are you going to do when you get home?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about cutloose?” Dave asked. “I’ve been checking your blog. There’s nothing new on it—hasn’t been for days.”

“I haven’t had that much to say,” Ali said quietly. “For the first time in my life, I’m at a loss for words. I don’t have a clue what I should say about any of this.”

It was true. She had tried to respond to the avalanche of e-mail that had poured in, but her heart hadn’t been in it. Not even when she was writing to people she knew, like Velma T in Laguna.

“Maybe you could try talking about how lucky you are,” Dave suggested.

“Lucky?” Ali asked in dismay. “I’m supposed to be lucky?”

“Sure,” Dave said with a grin. “My ex is still alive and giving me hell. Yours is giving you hell, but at least he’s dead. So no matter what Paul Grayson has done so far, he won’t be doing it anymore.” Dave raised his glass. “So here’s to cutloose,” he said, “because you are cut loose—finally. And here’s to your going back home and going to work. People are waiting to hear from you, Ali, Dave Holman included.”

“Thank you,” Ali said, raising her own glass in return. “Thank you very much.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J. A. Jance is the Top 10 New York Times best-selling author of the Joanna Brady series, the J. P. Beaumont series, three interrelated thrillers featuring the Walker family, and Edge of Evil, the first in a series featuring Ali Reynolds. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.

ALSO BY J.A. JANCE

ALI REYNOLDS MYSTERIES

Edge of Evil

Web of Evil

JOANNA BRADY MYSTERIES

Desert Heat

Tombstone Courage

Shoot/Don’t Shoot

Dead to Rights

Skeleton Canyon

Rattlesnake Crossing

Outlaw Mountain

Devil’s Claw

Paradise Lost

Partner in Crime

Exit Wounds

Dead Wrong

J.P. BEAUMONT MYSTERIES

Until Proven Guilty

Injustice For All

Trial by Fury

Taking the Fifth

Improbable Cause

A More Perfect Union

Dismissed with Prejudice

Minor in Possession

Payment in Kind

Without Due Process

Failure to Appear

Lying in Wait

Name Withheld

Breach of Duty

Birds of Prey

Partner in Crime

Long Time Gone

Justice Denied

WALKER FAMILY THRILLERS

Hour of the Hunter

Kiss of the Bees

Day of the Dead

TOUCHSTONE

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by J.A. Jance

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jance, Judith A.

Hand of evil : a novel of suspense / by J.A. Jance.

p. cm.

“A Touchstone Book.”

1. Reynolds, Ali (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Arizona—Fiction.

3. Suspense fiction. I. Title.

PS3560.A44H36  2007

813'.54—dc22           2007016986

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5460-8

eISBN: 978-1-4516-7577-1

ISBN-10: 1-4165-5460-2

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonSays.com

For TLG.

HAND OF EVIL

{ PREFACE }

When the car door slammed shut on his hand, the universe came to a stop and nothing else mattered. Nothing. He dropped to his knees, howling in agony while a nearby coyote, startled by the sound, responded with a howl of its own. Rigid with pain, at first he couldn’t even reach for the door handle. By the time he did, it was too late. The door lock inside the vehicle had already clicked home.

“Please,” he begged. “For God’s sake, open the door.”

But the answer to that was no—an unequivocal no. The engine turned over and the car began to move.

“You can’t do this,” he screamed. “You can’t!”

By then the pavement was moving beneath him, slowly at first, then faster and faster. He held out his other hand, trying to brace himself or somehow pull himself back to his feet. For a moment that almost worked and he was close to upright, but then the speed of the car outdistanced his scrambling feet and he fell again, facedown this time, with the full weight of his body pulling on the exploding pain in his fingers.

As the speed of the vehicle increased, so did his agonized screams. The parking lot’s layer of loose gravel scraped and tore at him, shredding his blue-and-white jogging suit; shredding his skin. By the time the hurtling car bounced over the first speed bump, he was no longer screaming. Plowing face-first into the second one momentarily knocked him unconscious.

He came to when the car door opened. Once his trapped hand was released from the door frame, he fell to the ground. He couldn’t actually see the car or even the ground for that matter. He seemed to have been struck blind. Nor could he differentiate the pain in his crippled hand from the agony in the rest of his tortured body, but his ears still worked. He heard the car door slam shut again and felt the spray of gravel from the tires as it drove away into the night, leaving him in absolute darkness.

He lay there for a long time, knowing he was barely alive and feeling his life’s blood seeping out through layers of damaged skin. He tried crawling, but he couldn’t make that work.

“Help,” he called weakly. “Somebody, please help me.”

In the wilds of Phoenix’s South Mountain Preserve, only a single prowling coyote heard the dying man’s final whispered plea for help. The coyote was on the trail of his dinner—an elusive bunny—and he paid no attention.

No one else did, either.

Sybil Harriman strode through the early morning chill and reveled in the sunlight and the clear crisp air. Across the valley, she could see the layer of smog settling in over the rest of the city, but here it was cold and clear—cold enough to see her breath and make her nose run and her eyes water, but not cold enough to scare her away from walking the full course of the park’s Alta Trail and back to the parking lot along the Bajada.

She had been warned that Alta was “too difficult” for someone her age, and that she certainly shouldn’t walk it alone. So she did so, at least twice a week. Because she could. And as she walked along, huffing and puffing a little, truth be known, she was also drinking in the view and the cactus and the birds—birds so different from the ones she’d grown up with back in Chicago—and she was also thinking about how wrong she’d been and wishing things had been different.

Herman had wanted to move here the moment he retired from working for Merck. She was the one who had fought it, saying they should stay where they were in order to be closer to the kids and grandkids, although a lot of good that had done. Finally, when Herm’s arthritis had gotten so bad that he could barely walk, she had relented. Now she was sorry they hadn’t come sooner, while Herman would have been able to reap some of the benefits of desert living.

His arthritis had improved so much once they were in Arizona it was unbelievable, but then the rest of it had happened. The dry climate could do nothing at all to stave off the ravages and gradual decline that was Alzheimer’s. As for the kids? Once Herm died, it had been plain enough that what they wanted more than anything was to get their greedy little hands on their father’s money. Well, thanks to the trust Herm had wisely insisted on setting up, they weren’t getting any of that, not until Sybil was damned good and ready. And that was another reason she walked every single day. She was determined to live as long and as well as she could.

Let ’em wait, she told herself fiercely as she marched along. They can wait until hell freezes over.

When she returned to Chicago for Herm’s funeral, her friends there hardly recognized her. They thought she had dropped the excess weight she had carried all those years in a fit of sudden grief. In actual fact, the process had been much less abrupt than that—and much more permanent. She had started by walking four miles each day on the flat but circular streets in their Awatukee neighborhood. Later she had forced herself up and down the steeper grades and gradually more and more difficult trails throughout South Mountain Preserve.

Sybil was one of the early birds this crisp January morning. She had seen not a soul on her morning walk—at least no other humans—in the course of her almost three solitary hours. There had been plenty of bunnies, however, and scads of other early birds—doves, quail, skittish roadrunners, breakfasting cactus wrens, finches, colorful hummingbirds, hawks, and even an ebony-feathered, red-eyed phainopepla. Now, as she approached the spot where the trail crossed San Juan Road, it was close to midmorning and the sun was high.

San Juan Road had been closed indefinitely for some strange reason, so there shouldn’t have been any traffic. Still, Sybil was too much of a city girl to cross a road or a street without looking both ways. And that’s when she saw it—what appeared to be a pile of rags or trash lying in the middle of the roadway some thirty or forty yards northeast of the now abandoned San Juan parking lot.

Offended that someone would toss out a load of garbage and leave it there in the road, Sybil headed in that direction. She was determined to clean up the mess and haul it off to the nearest garbage containers. Ten yards or so away from the debris field, however, she saw the blood.

With a trembling hand, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed 911. “Emergency operator. What are you reporting?”

Sybil was closer to the mess now—much too close—and wished she wasn’t. There was blood everywhere. It was hard to tell that the flayed and bloody pulp inside the pile of shredded clothing was even human, but she knew it was.

“A body,” she managed at last. “I’ve just found a human body lying here in the middle of the road.”

She didn’t hear the panic in her voice, but the operator evidently did. “Calm down,” the operator advised her. “What is your name and your location?”

Sybil took a deep breath and forced herself to get a grip. “Sybil Harriman,” she replied. “I’m in the park—South Mountain Preserve. The body is just to the east of the abandoned parking lot on San Juan Road.”

“Units are on the way,” the operator told her briskly. “Are you sure the person is dead? Did you check for a pulse?”

Sybil looked at the mound of bloody flesh, searching for wrists. One hand, virtually skinless, was little more than a bloody stump. The other hand contained a relatively recognizable thumb, but the four fingers seemed to have been mashed flat. Sybil knew at once there would be no pulse in either one of those two mangled wrists nor would there be any possibility of bringing the bloodied victim back to life.

“He’s dead,” she whispered to the operator. “Sorry. I’ve got to hang up now.”

Sybil snapped the phone shut. Then, gagging, she staggered over to the edge of the road and promptly lost the single banana she had eaten for breakfast.

As she straightened up and waited, listening for approaching sirens, Sybil Harriman knew it was the last banana she would eat for a very long time.

{ CHAPTER 1 }

With her laptop asleep and perched virtually untouched on her crossed legs, Ali Reynolds stared into the flames of the burning gas log fireplace. She was supposed to be working on her blog, cutlooseblog.com, but on this chilly January morning she wasn’t. Or maybe she was. She was trying to think of what to say in today’s post, but her mind remained stubbornly blank—right along with her computer screen.

Ali had started cutloose in the aftermath of the sudden and almost simultaneous ends of both her television newscasting career and her marriage. Back then, fueled by anger, cutloose had been a tool for dealing with the unexpected bumps in her own life. To her surprise, what had happened to her was far more commonplace than she had known, and what she had written in cutloose had touched chords in the lives of countless other women.

Since the murder of Paul Grayson, Ali’s not quite, but nearly ex-husband, cutloose had morphed into something else entirely. For weeks now it had focused on grief and grieving—on the pit-falls and setbacks that lie in wait for those attempting to recover from the loss of a loved one or even a not-so-loved one. Ali had learned enough from her readers that she could almost have declared herself an expert on the subject if it hadn’t been for the inconvenient reality that she had zero perspective on the topic. She was still too deep in grief herself. As her mother, Edie Larson, would have said, drawing on her endless supply of platitudes: She couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

Because Ali was back in her hometown of Sedona, Arizona, grieving. She grieved for a phantom of a marriage that had evidently never been what she had thought it was and for a job she had loved but which had come with zero job security and no reciprocal loyalty.

Having people write to her and tell her that “someday you’ll be over it” or “it doesn’t matter how long it takes” wasn’t helping Ali Reynolds. She couldn’t yet tell what she was supposed to be over. Was she supposed to be over Paul’s death or over his many betrayals? How long would it take her to move beyond the shock of learning of the child—a little girl—her husband had fathered out of wedlock while he was still married to Ali? Ali hadn’t even known of Angelina Roja’s existence until after Paul’s death, and looking out for the financial welfare of the child and her mother had made tying up Paul’s estate that much more complicated.

There were times Ali felt downright resentful when she heard from widows—real widows whose husbands had been faithful, honorable men—who were struggling with their own overwhelming sense of loss. It was all she could do sometimes to keep from writing back to them and saying, “Hey, you, don’t you know how lucky you were? At least your dead husband’s not driving you nuts from beyond the grave.”

Sam, Ali’s one-eyed, one-eared sixteen-pound tabby cat, shifted uneasily on the back of the couch behind her and let one paw fall on Ali’s shoulder. Sam’s presence in Ali’s life was supposed to have been temporary. Sam had belonged to Matt and Julie Bernard, children of Ali’s murdered friend, Reenie Bernard. When the children had gone to live with their grandparents, Sam had been unable to join them and Ali had taken Sam in. Ali had never liked or particularly disliked cats. She had never thought about them much one way or the other—and Sam was anything but outgoing or sociable. But now, almost a year since Sam’s unexpected arrival, Ali had started thinking of the animal in terms of “my cat” rather than “their cat.”

Ali turned and scratched the seemingly permanent frown lines on Sam’s ugly forehead. “How about if you do the blog this morning?” she asked.

Sam simply yawned, closed her one good eye, and went back to sleep. When the doorbell rang, Sam leaped to life. Spooked by newcomers of any kind, the cat scrambled off the couch and disappeared from view. Ali knew from past experience that it would probably be several hours before she’d be able to coax the wary feline back out of hiding.

Putting the laptop on the coffee table, Ali hurried to the door. She was expecting Kip Hogan, her parents’ handyman, to drop off her refinished bird’s-eye maple credenza. That and the comfy leather sofa were the two pieces of furniture she had brought to her mountaintop mobile home with her from her former home digs in L.A. The top of the credenza had been damaged when someone had carelessly deposited a wet vase on it. Now, after careful sanding and varnishing, Ali’s father assured her that the wood had been restored to its former glory.

Except, when Ali looked out the peephole, Kip Hogan was nowhere in sight. The man on Ali’s front porch, a wizened but dapper-looking elderly gentleman in a suit and tie, was holding a small envelope. He looked somewhat familiar, but she couldn’t quite place him. In the old days, growing up in small-town Arizona, Ali wouldn’t have hesitated at opening the door to a stranger, but times had changed in Sedona. More important, Ali had changed. She cautiously cracked the door open but only as far as the length of the security chain.

“May I help you?” she asked.

“Ms. Reynolds?” the man asked. He wore a brimmed leather cap, which he tipped respectfully in Ali’s direction.

“Yes.”

“A message for you, madam,” he said politely. Removing a soft leather driving glove, he proffered the envelope through the narrow opening. “From Miss Arabella Ashcroft.”

Ali recognized the name at once. “Thank you.” She took the envelope and started to close the door, but the man stopped her.

“If you’ll forgive me, madam, I was directed to wait for an answer.”

Using her finger, Ali tore open the creamy white envelope. It was made from expensive paper stock, as was the gold-bordered note card she found inside. Written across it, in spidery, old-fashioned script was the following: Dear Alison, Please join me for tea this afternoon if at all possible. 2:30. 113 Manzanita Hills Road. Miss Arabella Ashcroft.

A summons from Miss Arabella, one of Sedona’s more formidable dowagers, was not to be taken lightly or ignored.

“Of course,” Ali said at once. “Tell her I’ll be there.”

“Would you like me to come fetch you?” the messenger asked, gesturing over his shoulder at the venerable bright yellow Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud idling in Ali’s driveway.

“Oh, no,” Ali told him. “I can get there on my own. I know the way.”

And she did, too, despite the fact that it had been twenty-five years earlier when she had last had afternoon tea with Arabella Ashcroft and her equally daunting mother, Anna Lee, at the imposing Ashcroft home on Manzanita Hills Road.

Ali’s visitor bowed slightly from the waist and backed away from the door. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll tell Miss Arabella she can expect you.” He tipped his cap once again, turned on his heel, and marched away. Once he drove out of sight, Ali closed the door. Then, with both the note card and envelope in hand, she returned to the couch lost in a haze of memories.

On a Friday afternoon two weeks before Ali had been scheduled to graduate from Cottonwood’s Mingus Mountain High School, she had bounded into her parents’ diner, Sedona’s Sugarloaf Café, for her after-school shift. All through high school she had helped out by waiting tables after school and during Christmas and summer vacations. As she tied on her apron she spotted an envelope with her name on it propped up next to the cash register. There was no stamp or return address, so obviously it had been hand delivered.

“What’s this?” she had asked Aunt Evie, her mother’s twin sister and her parents’ full partner in the restaurant venture.

“It’s still sealed, isn’t it?” Aunt Evie had asked. “How about if you open it and find out?”

Ali had opened the envelope on the spot. Inside she had found a note card very similar to the one she had received just now: “Please join my daughter and me for tea, this coming Sunday, May 21, 2:30 P.M. at our home, 113 Manzanita Hills Road, Sedona, Arizona.” The note had been signed Anna Lee Ashcroft, Arabella’s mother.

“Tea!” Ali had exclaimed in disbelief. “I’ve been invited to tea?”

Taking the note from Ali’s hand, Aunt Evie examined it and then handed it back. “That’s the way it looks,” she said.

“I’ve never been invited to tea in my life,” Ali said. “And who all is going? Are you invited?”

Aunt Evie shook her head.

“Is anyone else I know invited, then?” Ali asked. “And why would someone my age want to go to tea with a bunch of old ladies in the first place?”

“You’ll want to go if you know what’s good for you,” Aunt Evie had said severely. “But this doesn’t give us much time.”

“Time for what?” Ali had asked.

“To get down to Phoenix and find you something appropriate to wear,” Aunt Evie had answered.

Ali’s high school years had been tough ones for the owners and operators of the Sugarloaf Café. Things had been so lean during Ali’s junior year that she had turned down an invitation to the prom rather than admit she didn’t have a formal to wear and couldn’t afford to buy one.

By the end of her senior year, things were only marginally better, but she was astonished when Aunt Evie took the whole next day—a Saturday—off work. She drove Ali to Metrocenter, a shopping mall two hours away in Phoenix, where they spent the whole day at what Ali considered to be the very ritzy Goldwater’s Department Store putting together a tea-appropriate outfit. Aunt Evie had charged the whole extravagant expense—a stylish linen suit, silk blouse, and shoes—to her personal account. The loan of Aunt Evie’s fake pearls would complete the outfit.

At the time, Ali had been too naive to question her aunt’s uncharacteristic behavior. Instead she had simply accepted Aunt Evie’s kindness at face value.

The next week at school, Ali had held her breath hoping to hear that some of her classmates had also received invitations to the unprecedented Ashcroft tea, but no one had. No one mentioned it, not even Ali’s best friend, Reenie Bernard, so Ali didn’t mention it, either.

Finally, on the appointed day, Ali had left her parents and Aunt Evie hard at work at the Sugarloaf doing Sunday afternoon cleanup and had driven herself to Anna Lee Ashcroft’s Manzanita Hills place overlooking downtown Sedona. Compared to her parents humble abode out behind the restaurant, the Ashcroft home was downright palatial.

Ali had driven up the steep, blacktopped driveway and parked her mother’s Dodge in front of a glass-walled architectural miracle with a spectacular view that encompassed the whole valley. Once out of the car, Ali, unaccustomed to wearing high heels, had tottered unsteadily up the wide flagstone walkway. By the time she stepped onto the spacious front porch shaded by a curtain of bloom-laden wisteria, her knees were still knocking but she was grateful not to have tripped and fallen.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, Ali rang the bell. The door was opened by a maid wearing a black-and-white uniform who led her into and through the house. The exquisite furniture, gleaming wood tables, and lush oriental rugs were marvelous to behold. She tried not to stare as she was escorted out to a screened porch overlooking an immense swimming pool. Her hostess, a frail and seemingly ancient woman confined to a wheelchair and with her legs wrapped in a shawl, waited there while another somewhat younger woman hovered watchfully in the background.

Ali was shown to a chair next to a table set with an elaborate collection of delicate cups, saucers, plates, and silver as well as an amazing collection of tiny, crustless sandwiches and sweets.

“So,” the old woman said, peering across the table at Ali through a pair of bejeweled spectacles. “I’m Mrs. Ashcroft and this is my daughter, Arabella. You must be Alison Larson. Let’s have a look at you.”

Feeling like a hapless worm being examined by some sharp-eyed, hungry robin, Ali had no choice but to endure the woman’s silent scrutiny. At last she nodded as if satisfied with Ali’s appearance. “I suppose you’ll do,” she said.

Do for what? Ali wondered.

“Your teachers all speak very highly of you,” Anna Lee said.

Ali should have been delighted to hear that, but she couldn’t help wondering why Anna Lee Ashcroft had been gossiping about her with Ali’s teachers at Mingus Mountain High. As it was, all Ali could do was nod stupidly. “Thank you,” she murmured.

“I understand you want to study journalism,” Anna Lee continued.

Ali had discussed her long-held secret ambition once or twice with Mrs. Casey, her journalism teacher, but since going to college seemed like an impossible dream at the moment, Ali was trying to think about the future in somewhat more realistic terms—like maybe going to work for the phone company.

“I may have mentioned it,” Ali managed.

“You’ve changed your mind then?” Anna Lee demanded sharply. “You’re no longer interested in journalism?”

“It’s not that,” Ali said forlornly, “it’s just…”

“Just what?”

“I still want to study journalism,” Ali said at last, “but I’ll probably have to work a couple of years to earn money before I can think about going to college.” It was a painful admission. “My parents really can’t help out very much right now. I’ll have to earn my own way.”

“You’re telling me you’re poor then?” Anna Lee wanted to know.

Ali looked around the room. Even out on this screened patio, the elegant furnishings were far beyond anything Ali had ever seen in her own home or even in her friend Reenie Bernard’s far more upscale surroundings. Ali had never thought of herself or of her family as poor, but now with something for comparison she realized they probably were.

“I suppose so,” Ali said.

Without another word, Anna Lee Ashcroft grasped the handle of a small china bell and gave it a sharp ring. Almost immediately a man appeared bearing a tray—a silver tray with a silver tea service on it. Remembering the scene now, Ali couldn’t help but wonder if that man and the sprite who had delivered that morning’s envelope weren’t one and the same—albeit a few decades older.

The man had carefully placed the tea service on the table in front of Anna Lee. She had leaned forward and picked up a cup. “Sugar?” she asked, filling the cup to the brim and handing it over with a surprisingly steady hand.

Ali nodded.

“One lump or two?”

“Two, please.”

“Milk?”

“No, thank you.”

Arabella moved silently to the foreground and began deftly placing finger sandwiches and what Ali would later recognize as petit fours onto delicately patterned china plates. Mrs. Ashcroft said nothing more until the butler—at least that’s what Ali assumed he was—had retreated back the way he had come, disappearing behind a pair of swinging doors into what Ali assumed must lead to a hallway or maybe the kitchen.

Ali juggled cup, saucer, napkin, and plate and hoped she wasn’t doing something terribly gauche while Anna Lee Ashcroft poured two additional cups—one for her daughter and one for herself.

“I don’t have a college education, either,” Anna Lee said at last. “In my day young women of my social standing weren’t encouraged to go off to college. When Arabella came along, her father sent her off to finishing school in Switzerland, but that was it. Furthering her education beyond that would have been unseemly.”

No comment from Ali seemed called for, so she kept quiet and concentrated on not dribbling any tea down the front of her new silk blouse.

“But just because my daughter and I don’t have the benefit of a higher education,” Anna Lee continued, “doesn’t mean we think it’s unimportant, right, Arabella?”

Arabella nodded but said nothing. Sipping her tea, she seemed content to let her mother do the bulk of the talking, but there was something in the daughter’s wary silence that made Ali uneasy.

“You must be wondering why you’ve been asked to come here today,” Anna Lee continued.

“Yes,” Ali said. “I am.”

“This is the first time I’ve done this,” Anna Lee said, “so it may seem a bit awkward. I’ve been told that most of the time announcements of this nature are made at class night celebrations or at some other official occasion, but I wanted to do it this way. In private.”

Ali was still mystified.

“I’ve decided to use some of my inheritance from my mother to establish a scholarship in her honor, the Amelia Dougherty Askins Scholarship, to benefit poor but smart girls from this area. You’ve been selected to be our first recipient—as long as you go on to school, that is.”

Ali was stunned. “A scholarship?” she managed, still not sure she had heard correctly. “You’re giving me a scholarship?”

Anna Lee Ashcroft nodded. “Not quite a ‘full ride’ as they say,” she added dryly. “What you’ll get from us is enough for tuition, books, room, and some board. If your parents really can’t help, you may need to work part time, but you shouldn’t have to put off starting. In fact, you should be able to go off to school this fall right along with all your classmates.”

And that’s exactly what Ali had done. The scholarship had made all the difference for her—it had made going on to college possible. And everything else in Ali’s life had flowed from there.

So Alison Larson Reynolds owed the Ashcrofts—owed them big. If Arabella Ashcroft wanted to summon her to tea once again some twenty-five years later, Ali would be there—with bells on.

{ CHAPTER 2 }

It was late morning when Phoenix PD homicide detectives Larry Marsh and Hank Mendoza arrived at the crime scene in South Mountain Preserve. “What have we got?” Hank asked Abigail Jacobs, the patrol officer who along with her partner, Ed Whalen, had been the first officers to respond to Sybil Harriman’s desperate call to 911.

“We’ve got a dragger,” Officer Jacobs told them. “From what I’m seeing it looks like somebody slammed this poor guy’s left hand in a car door and then dragged him for the better part of a mile—through the parking lot and over several speed bumps. The bloody trail starts way back there by the park entrance.”

“Any ID?”

“Not so far. From what’s left of his clothing, it looks like maybe he was out jogging. We’ve got no ID and no cell phone, either.”

“Too bad,” Hank told her. “These days cell phones work better than anything. Any idea when it happened?”

“The witness found him here about ten A.M.”

“You’re sure it’s a him?”

“Yes, and whoever he is, he’s wearing the remains of a fairly expensive watch,” Abbie Jacobs replied. “A Patek Philippe, and that’s still working.”

“A what?” Larry Marsh said.

Hank Mendoza laughed. “The poor guy’s beaten to hell but the damned watch is still running. But then again, you wouldn’t know a Patek Philippe from a hole in the ground. You’re still wearing your Wal-Mart special Timex.”

“It works,” Larry replied. “And nobody’s tried to steal it.”

“Turns out nobody tried to steal this one, either,” Abbie said, looking down at the mangled hand. “And I for one don’t blame them.”

“Blood’s all dry,” Hank observed. “My guess is this happened sometime overnight. Isn’t the park supposed to be closed at night?”

“Supposed to be,” Officer Jacobs agreed with a shake of her head that left her thick, braided ponytail swinging back and forth. “But declaring it closed and keeping it closed are two different things,” she said. “Kids manage to get in here overnight all the time. Last Halloween we had to rescue a bunch of kids. They were here having a midnight kegger and ran afoul of a herd of javelina. The javelina were not amused.”

“So you patrol out here a lot then?” Hank asked.

Abbie Jacob nodded.

A van with the medical examiner’s logo on the door slowly made its way up the road and stopped nearby. Associate ME Todd Rangel, still munching the last of a Sonic burger, heaved his bulky frame out of the van.

“Sorry to be late to the party, boys and girls,” he said to the group gathered around the battered and bloodied corpse. “But a man’s gotta eat. What have I missed?”

“Not too many meals,” Hank muttered under his breath. Larry elbowed him in the ribs, warning him to silence. Of all the people in the county ME’s office, Todd Rangel won no popularity contests with the homicide cops who were obliged to work with him. The man was overbearing and self-important with a tendency for bossing people around. He was also uncommonly lazy. Todd Rangel’s idea of teamwork was to order someone else to do the heavy lifting.

“Officer Jacobs here says she thinks it’s a dragger,” Larry told the ME, moving aside to allow Rangel access to the corpse. “She says she followed a trail of blood for the better part of a mile from back toward the entrance.”

Shading his eyes with one hand, Rangel looked in the direction Larry was pointing. “I’ll check that out by car a little later,” he said.

Hank Mendoza shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Big surprise,” he mouthed to Abbie Jacobs, who barely managed to suppress a grin.

“Robbery?” Rangel asked.

“Could be, but probably not,” Larry said. “His wallet’s missing, but as you can see, the watch isn’t.”

Rangel nodded. “Or maybe it was too bloody and the perp didn’t want to risk taking it off.”

“Maybe.”

“You guys got what you need from right around here or can I go to work?” Rangel asked.

“Go ahead,” Hank said. “Knock yourself out.”

While they had been talking, several uniformed officers, including Abbie’s partner Ed Whalen and a crew of crime scene techs, had been moving along the roadway and using traffic cones to mark off the bloody strip in the pavement. Leaving Todd Rangel alone with the body, the detectives walked over to Whalen and the others. One of the techs was wielding a camera and snapping photos of bloodstained tire tracks. Another was carefully making plaster casts.

Suddenly, a few feet away, another crime scene tech raised a shout. “Hey, come look at this,” he said.

Led by Officer Whalen, the detectives hurried over to the edge of the pavement. There, on the shoulder of the road and partly concealed in a clump of dried grass, lay a shiny handgun.

“No rust,” the tech told them. “That means it hasn’t been here long.”

Whalen leaned down and threaded a pencil through the trigger guard and lifted the weapon out of the grass. “Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special,” he said.

“Has it been fired?” Detective Marsh asked.

Whalen raised the revolver to his nose and sniffed. “Not anytime recently,” he said.

“Bag it anyway,” Hank Mendoza ordered. “Just because no one’s fired it doesn’t mean it isn’t related.”

“Where’s the witness?” Larry asked.

“She wasn’t feeling too well,” Abbie replied. “I offered to call an ambulance and have her taken to a hospital to be checked out, but she said she just wanted to go home and lie down. I have her address in Awatukee. Want to stop by and see her?”

“Absolutely,” Detective Marsh told her. “Hank and I will pay her a visit and find out what she knows.”

“It won’t be much,” Abbie said. “She was just out walking and, like, found the body.”

Larry cringed. Cops who overused the word like tended to make him feel older than his years.

“Come on, Hank, let’s go and see if she’ll, like, tell us something.”

Hank rolled his eyes again. Fortunately, Officer Abbie Jacobs didn’t even, like, notice.

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Sometimes, when you’re trying to get out of a hole, the first thing you have to do is stop digging. And maybe, in the course of the last few weeks, we’ve all fallen into the same rut and have been digging it deeper day by day. I know for sure I’ve fallen into a rut.

Yes, grief is important. It’s also tough. And depressing. And draining. And it’s very hard work. For weeks now I’ve felt as though both my feet were nailed to the floor. My mother has hinted that perhaps a visit to a doctor and a prescription of antidepressants might be in order, but I’m not there yet. Give me another few months. If I’m still in the same fog, maybe it will be time to reconsider.

But this is my blog, and for right now, I’m changing the subject.

When I was in high school, finances in our family were very tight—and I do mean very! I had wanted to go to college, and I had a GPA that made my going to college a reasonable assumption, but my family didn’t have the financial wherewithal to make that happen. Both my parents had lived through enough hard times that they were adamantly opposed to my taking on any kind of debt. Since student loans were out of the question, then, and since I wasn’t anywhere near National Merit Scholarship material, I had pretty well decided that I’d have to take time off from school long enough to earn some tuition money.

But then a miracle happened. Someone I didn’t even know offered me a scholarship—an unexpected scholarship, one I hadn’t heard of much less applied for. And that scholarship made all the difference.

When my friends went on to college that fall, so did I.

This morning I received an invitation to tea from the daughter of the woman who gave me that helping hand so long ago. And I’m going. This afternoon. As soon as I finish posting this, I’m going to shower and put on my makeup. I’ll dress up in my Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and go there to say a much deserved thank you to someone whose unsolicited kindness opened up a world of opportunity for me.

I’m hoping that while I’m out there counting my blessings, maybe I’ll find that some of the clouds that have been obscuring my view of the sky come complete with silver linings.

posted 11:14A.M., by Babe

Ali was out of the shower, dressed, and mostly made up when the doorbell rang again. This time Kip Hogan, his customary Diamondback baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, stood waiting outside her front door. Beside him, resting on a four-wheeled dolly and swathed in a layer of quilted gray moving blankets, stood Ali’s fully restored bird’s-eye maple credenza.

“Hi, there,” Ali said, opening the door. “Come on in.”

“Afternoon, ma’am,” he returned, lifting the brim of his cap. “Sorry I couldn’t get here earlier. Something came up. Where do you want this?”

“Right here,” Ali told him, pointing. “In the entry. Are you sure you can move it by yourself? Chris will be home from school in a little while. I’m sure he’d be glad to help.”

Christopher, Ali’s son and current roommate, was a recent UCLA graduate and a first-year teacher at Sedona High School.

“No need, ma’am,” Kip told her. “I can handle it just fine on my own.”

Ali moved back out of the way and made room for Kip to bring the credenza inside. Now he was a familiar and far less scary character than he had been months earlier when Ali’s father had first brought the man home.

In the aftermath of one of the year’s final snowstorms, Ali’s father, Bob Larson, had taken his grandson snowboarding. While grandstanding for Chris, Bob had attempted a flawed turn that had resulted in a terrible spill. Bob’s injuries had been serious enough that he had been thrown into the hospital briefly and then confined to a wheelchair on a temporary basis. Needing help with the most basic of tasks and loathe to listen to Ali’s mother’s not undeserved blitz of “I told you so’s,” Bob had found Kip Hogan.

Ali had no idea how long Kip Hogan had been living rough in a snowbound homeless encampment up on the Mogollon Rim before Bob Larson dragged him into the Sugarloaf Café for all to see. Ali and her mother were accustomed to the fact that Bob Larson brought home various human “projects” on occasion. At first glance, Kip had definitely looked the part. He had been gaunt and grimy, unshaven and taciturn. Ali’s initial expectation had been that he’d eat a square meal or two and then be on his way. That was what had happened to any number of Bob Larson’s new friends, but Kip had defied the odds. Ali’s father had been off the injured list for months now, but Kip had stayed on, staying clean and sober. He had made himself indispensable, helping Ali’s parents with chores around both the house and the restaurant.

Months of eating decent food had put flesh on the man’s scrawny frame. Still, Ali was surprised to see Kip was strong enough to singlehandedly wrestle the credenza off the dolly and move it into place. When he finished, he stood back and admired his handiwork. Then, frowning, he removed a hankie from his pocket and used it to wipe a speck of invisible dust off the refinished top. After stuffing the hankie back in his pocket, he ran a single finger along the smooth grain of the wood.

“Thank you so much,” Ali said admiringly. “It’s absolutely beautiful.”

Kip looked at her and grinned. In all the time Ali had known the man, this was the first occasion she ever remembered seeing his face with an expression even vaguely approximating a smile. And that’s when she realized what was so different about him on this particular day. Kip’s nose still looked like it had been broken half a dozen different times in as many directions, but the gaps where teeth had been missing had now been filled by a partial plate. He looked years younger—and almost civilized.

“Never tried my hand at this kind of work before,” he said, self-consciously erasing the unaccustomed grin. “I couldn’t have done it if your dad hadn’t showed me how.”

“You’re right,” Ali agreed. “Dad’s a good teacher, but I know you’re the one who did all the work, and I’m so grateful.”

Nodding, Kip picked up the dolly. “You’re welcome,” he said. “I’d best get going.”

Ali watched while he loaded the dolly back into Bob Larson’s beloved 1970s vintage Bronco. As Kip drove away, Ali remembered her father mentioning that someone he knew up in Flagstaff was thinking about starting a low-cost dental clinic. While Kip had been busy repairing the water damage to Ali’s credenza, Bob Larson had been busy repairing Kip.

Ali’s scholarship from Anna Lee Ashcroft had seemed to her like a bolt out of the blue. Now she wondered if maybe it hadn’t been an example of karma in action. Bob Larson had spent a lifetime evening the score for that unexpected scholarship with his own countless random acts of kindness to people less fortunate than he.

With her blond hair freshly blow-dried and with a coat of properly applied makeup on her face, Ali left her house half an hour later to drive to Arabella’s place on Manzanita Hills Road. The sky overhead seemed bluer and the rock-lined canyons redder than she remembered seeing them in months. Maybe the curtain of gray that surrounded her was starting to lift just a little.

Ali drove uptown and then on up into what had been one of Sedona’s pioneering subdivisions, dating from the early 1950s. In the intervening years since her last visit, lots of houses had sprouted on the winding streets and cul-de-sacs on the lower part of the hillside. Those various homes, nice though they were, somehow betrayed their dated heydays like so many beads on a retrospective architectural necklace. But the Ashcroft place, situated at the top of the ridge and overlooking them all, was by far the oldest and still the undisputed top of the heap.

Ali saw the first small differences almost at once. The paved surface of the narrow, steep drive had once been a ribbon of pristinely smooth blacktop. Now the pavement was scarred with numerous webs of patched cracks and pockmarked with all sizes of potholes.

She pulled into the circular driveway at the top of the hill and gazed out at Arabella Ashcroft’s unparalleled view. As a high school senior, Ali had been dazzled by the low-slung house with its massive windows set in deep, shady overhangs. She hadn’t been experienced enough back then to recognize the stylish home’s origins. Now she did. Clearly the Ashcroft place was a variation on a Frank Lloyd Wright theme—a Frank Lloyd Wright copycat if not the real thing.

In Ali’s memory the place had loomed large so as to seem almost palatial. Compared to where her parents lived in a humble two-bedroom apartment behind the restaurant, the Ashcroft place was still large and lush. What had really changed was Ali’s own perspective. She had spent almost a decade living in the oversize grandeur of Paul Grayson’s Beverly Hills mansion, in a place where appearances always outgunned substance. It was that experience that accounted for the startling reduction of Anna Lee Ashcroft’s once seemingly massive house.

There was still an undisputed air of quality about the place, but there were also signs of slippage. Some of the paint in the window surrounds was chipped and flaking. A few of the red roof tiles had evidently come to grief. The replacements didn’t quite match the color of the original, giving the roof a somewhat spotty, freckled look.

The aged wisteria Ali remembered still covered the wide front porch, helping to shade it from the afternoon sun. Now, though, it wasn’t blooming. Instead, its gnarled limbs were bare and gray in the high desert’s January chill.

Ali stepped onto the porch, where the front doors could clearly benefit from some of Kip Hogan’s newly acquired refinishing skills. The varnish was faded and peeling. This time, when she rang the bell, no uniformed maid appeared. Instead, the door was opened by the white-jacketed, white-haired man who, in a somewhat different outfit, had also delivered Ali’s invitation earlier that morning. Seeing him this way confirmed Ali’s earlier suspicion that this was the selfsame butler who had served tea on Anna Lee Ashcroft’s screened porch all those years earlier. Back then, as a high school senior, Ali had thought of him as downright ancient. Years later, he didn’t seem to have changed all that much.

“Good afternoon, madam,” he announced with a stiff but polite half bow. “So good of you to come. Miss Arabella is waiting in the living room. Right this way, please.”

The foyer was familiar but surprisingly chilly. The entryway rug was the same one Ali remembered. Back then she hadn’t been all that impressed by it. Now she realized she should have been. It was a fine old Aubusson, thin and threadbare in spots, its intricate designs faded and worn down by decades of use. Ali recalled that a massive crystal vase had stood on the inlaid wood entryway table facing the door, and a similar-size vase stood there now. On Ali’s previous visit, the vase had brimmed with a huge bouquet of fresh-cut flowers. Now it stood empty and forlorn. A thin film of dust fogged the surface.

The butler turned to his left, pushed open a pair of heavy double doors, and led Ali into a living room that, although still spacious, seemed much smaller than Ali remembered. The furniture and rugs, though, were virtually unchanged—at least the fabrics and placement were the same—but again Ali noted subtle differences. Thirty years ago the silk-upholstered couches and chairs and polished wood end tables had been evidence of a stylish elegance. Now, like the well-used rug in the foyer, these things, too, had a dated and somewhat shabby air. For a moment Ali felt as though she had wandered into a time capsule—a museum diorama devoted to some long faded glory—rather than into a house occupied by living, breathing inhabitants.

All those small details, taken together, left Ali thinking that perhaps Arabella Ashcroft had fallen on hard times. Yes, there was a shiny Rolls-Royce stowed in the garage and it might well tool around town driven by a trusted family retainer who filled in as butler and chauffeur and probably chief cook and bottle washer as well, but the look of the place made Ali wonder if there weren’t times when Arabella Ashcroft had difficulty finding the wherewithal to fill the gas tank. Maybe, in the course of all those intervening years, there had been a complete reversal of fortunes between the well-to-do, sophisticated Ashcrofts and the awkward, small-town girl who had benefited from their largesse.

The living room was considerably warmer than the foyer had been, and the air in the room was alive with the sharp scent of mesquite wood smoke and the crackle of a roaring fire. Roving wintertime burn bans may have caused most of Sedona’s wood-burning fireplaces to morph into ones fired by gas, but not this one.

At the far end of the room, two overstuffed leather chairs sat in front of the immense river rock fireplace. What appeared to be a tree-size log blazed on the hearth. A gray-haired woman, dwarfed by the huge chairs, sat upright in one of them. In front of her, on a rolling cart of some kind, was the one thing in the room that didn’t quite fit—a sleek white computer monitor. Coming closer, Ali recognized the computer as an iMAC. The computer was almost identical to the one in Chris’s room and included a wireless keyboard and mouse.

“Ms. Reynolds,” the butler announced with all due ceremony.

The woman immediately moved the computer aside. Smiling and looking for all the world like her mother, Arabella Ashcroft stood to meet her arriving guest, pulling a shawl around her shoulders with one hand and offering the other one in greeting. Her dark gray hair was pulled back in a simple French roll. She peered at Ali through thick, eye-distorting horn-rimmed glasses. She wore a pair of slacks and a blue cashmere sweater with a matching cardigan. Her outfit was topped by a single strand of pearls. Ali guessed that the pearls, unlike Aunt Evie’s, were real, and she didn’t doubt for a minute that the sweater set had cost a bundle at one time, too. As they shook hands, however, Ali noticed that the wrist of one sleeve of the cardigan had been carefully mended. Not even Ali’s thrifty mother did that kind of mending anymore.

“My goodness,” Arabella exclaimed, staring at Ali for a long moment. “How extraordinary! I had forgotten how much you resemble your Aunt Evelyn!”

Ali Reynolds was Scandinavian on both branches of her family and had inherited a full complement of tall, blue-eyed blondeness that had served her well in her television news career. And she was accustomed to being told how much she resembled her mother just as Arabella Ashcroft favored hers. Ali wasn’t nearly as used to being told she looked like her Aunt Evelyn.

“Since my mother and Aunt Evie were twins, I don’t suppose that’s too surprising,” Ali observed with a smile.

“No,” Arabella agreed. “I suppose not. Please, sit down.”

Ali sat and so did Arabella. During that previous visit, Arabella had lingered in the background while her mother did the talking. Now it appeared as though Arabella had come into her own and moved out of Anna Lee’s shadow.

“Evie and I were good friends at one time,” Arabella continued wistfully. “We drifted apart the way friends sometimes do. Still, I was terribly saddened to hear of her passing.”

The fact that Aunt Evie and Arabella Ashcroft had once been friends was news to Ali, but surprise was quickly overtaken by a renewed sense of loss. Growing up Ali had felt blessed to have two mothers rather than one. Edie Larson and her never-married sister, Evelyn Hansen, had not only looked alike, they had worked together on a daily basis as partners in the Sugarloaf. In many ways—including their devotion to Ali—they had been very much alike, but they had also been subtly different.

Edie Larson was always the solid, practical one of the pair—quiet and down to earth. Edie never took shortcuts. She cooked everything from scratch, and her recreational reading consisted almost entirely of cookbooks. She liked to see art films—tea-and-cookies films, as Bob called them—and documentaries occasionally, but that was about it.

Aunt Evie had been a vivacious and outgoing Auntie Mame kind of character. She was someone with eclectic tastes, a fondness for practical jokes, and a real sense of fun. She had loved movies and books—all kinds of movies and all kinds of books. She had read voraciously, everything from potboilers to highbrow literary fiction. She had devoured musicals and knew the lyrics to countless Broadway hit songs. Even though Ali had been living in California at the time Aunt Evie had succumbed to a massive stroke, Ali had felt her lively aunt’s loss more than she would have thought possible. To this day Ali’s MP3 player was filled with the songs and music from Aunt Evie’s huge collection of tapes, records, and CDs. Chris had spent most of a previous Christmas vacation loading them into his mother’s player.

Hearing Aunt Evie’s name mentioned in passing brought back afresh the pain of losing her. “I miss her, too,” Ali said.

“I’m sure you do.”

Arabella turned to the waiting butler. “You may bring the tea now, Mr. Brooks.”

“Very well, madam,” he said, nodding his assent. With that, he turned and disappeared the way he had come, silently closing the heavy double doors behind him.

“So,” Arabella said.

Ali remembered that other long-ago interview. Anna Lee had begun hers in exactly the same way, but back then, Ali, dressed in her unaccustomed finery, had been ill at ease and unsure of what she should say. This time she was far more confident.

“I’ve been terribly remiss,” Ali said at once. “I should have stopped by years ago to thank both you and your mother for what you did for me when you awarded me that wonderful scholarship. I want you to know that your single act of kindness made a huge difference in my life.”

Arabella waved aside Ali’s gratitude. “It’s not necessary,” she said. “Not at all. You may have been our first scholarship recipient, Ms. Reynolds, but you certainly weren’t the last. My mother derived a lot of enjoyment from the process, and so have I.”

“Ali. Please call me Ali.”

“And you must call me Arabella. I have to say that searching out possible scholarship winners is a bit like having a new treasure hunt every single year,” the woman continued brightly. “We’ve resisted having a formal application process. Mr. Brooks works with me on this, you see. The two of us are a team. We track down deserving students and ferret them out on our own by talking to teachers and students and by asking questions in the community. That way we don’t end up having to ignore a deserving student just because of some hard-and-fast official guideline. In fact, although traditionally most of our recipients have been female, one of our recent winners happens to be a boy who’s majoring in nursing.”

The butler reappeared, bearing a familiar silver tray polished to a gleaming finish. In addition to the tea service and a collection of sandwiches and sweets there was also a silver cocktail shaker and a pair of long-stemmed glasses.

“Care for a pre-tea martini?” Arabella asked.

“No, thanks,” Ali said. “It’s a little early for me.”

“Not for me,” Arabella said, smiling her thanks as Brooks poured her drink from the shaker and handed it over. “One of my little indulgences,” she added.

There was something almost sly in the way Arabella said the words. Then, once the glass was in her hand, she stared into its depths for a long time without saying anything more. The silence went on long enough that it left Ali feeling slightly uncomfortable and made her wonder what, besides the freshly poured martini, Arabella Ashcroft was seeing there.

{ CHAPTER 3 }

Once tea had been properly served, Brooks politely retreated once more. Only then did Arabella pick up the threads of their conversation.

“As I was saying, we’ve had many scholarship winners over the years. Two doctors, several teachers, a psychologist. One of our girls just got tapped to do some work for the human genome project—you know, that X-prize thing. I’ve tried to keep up with that DNA stuff, but I just can’t wrap my mind around some of it. Your exploits are a lot more interesting to me and a lot more understandable. I have your blog bookmarked on my iMAC,” Arabella added. “I read cutloose every day. It’s been a real eye-opener for me, an eye-opener and an inspiration.”

Exploits! Arabella’s unexpected use of the word caused a hot flush of embarrassment to bloom at the base of Ali’s neck. It spread from her collar to the roots of her hair. She had never given much thought as to how what was going on in her life—her very public firing and her equally public divorce proceedings—might play back home. Yes, she had realized that her family members—her parents and her son—would be affected by all of that, but she hadn’t considered that it might also reflect badly on people like the Ashcrofts, who had demonstrated such faith in her when they had awarded that very valuable college scholarship.

“Surely people don’t think you and your mother are somehow responsible for the things that have happened in my life.”

Arabella laughed. “Oh, no. Nothing like that. Not at all. But it is why I wanted to speak to you today,” she added. She paused long enough to refill her cocktail glass, emptying the shaker in the process.

Mystified and still more than slightly embarrassed, Ali waited, wondering where the rambling conversation was going.

“I was particularly taken by the way you dodged the bullet last fall,” Arabella continued. “How, when your husband was murdered over in California, the cops were so eager to blame it all on you.”

It turned out there had been more than just metaphorical bullets flying back then. There had been plenty of real bullets, too, and Ali had counted herself very fortunate to have avoided being hit by one or more of them. So, although Ali didn’t much like the turn the interview was taking, she answered politely nonetheless.

“For one thing, I had a whole stable of high-priced lawyers,” she said. “That’s always a necessary ingredient.”

“Yes,” Arabella said thoughtfully. “I suppose that’s true. Don’t get me wrong. I know there are times lawyers are a necessary evil, but I’m not keen on having what you call a ‘stable’ of them lingering in the background and soaking up money. As you no doubt know, they’re usually far too expensive.”

She sipped her drink and then continued. “I got the impression from reading cutloose that you didn’t stand around holding your breath and leaving everything to your attorneys, either. It seems to me you were quite…I think these days the term is called ‘proactive’…about the whole situation. I believe the relationship between you and your husband had been troubled for some time prior to his death. I happen to know from personal experience that when someone is busy making our lives difficult, it’s not so surprising that we might occasionally wish them dead.”

Ali nodded but said nothing.

“So when someone like that does die—someone like your good-for-nothing husband, for example—I trust you don’t go around carrying a load of guilt over it. That would be completely unnecessary—and, under the circumstances, entirely counterproductive.”

Arabella looked at Ali sharply, as though waiting for an answer or a denial or something. In fact Ali was too struck by Arabella’s comment to respond at all. It seemed to her that Arabella had read cutloose, looked beyond the words, and glimpsed the darkest part of Ali’s soul, a blemish no amount of soap could wash away.

Ali had indeed wished Paul Grayson dead on more than one occasion, thinking that having him dead would somehow make things easier for her. Now that he was dead, Ali was stuck with all the accompanying consequences. Not only was Paul dead, as were his fiancée and their unborn baby, but there was also another mother and another young baby fathered by Paul to consider. And even though none of that was actually Ali’s fault, still…

“Yes,” Ali admitted finally. “I guess I do feel somewhat guilty.”

“You shouldn’t,” Arabella told her cheerfully, “but I suppose that’s all to your credit. In fact, I’m actually glad to hear it. I’ve suspected all along that’s the kind of person you were and are—which is to say—relatively nice. After Bill died, I never felt a moment’s worth of guilt—not a single one.”

The log in the fireplace burned through and tumbled between the andirons with a resounding crash, sending a shower of sparks spiraling upward.

Ali wasn’t sure where the conversation had gone. She seemed to have missed something. “Who’s Bill?” Ali asked. “Did you have a husband who died, too?”

“Good heavens no,” Arabella said with a laugh. “Not a husband. Thankfully I’ve never had one of those. In my case it was a brother who died—a stepbrother, actually, an older stepbrother. And I didn’t kill him,” she added hastily. “Not that I didn’t want to, but in the end he took matters into his own hands and saved everyone else the trouble. He got himself all drunked up and drove off the side of a mountain. I understand in your case that someone else got rid of Fang for you without your having to lift a finger, either. I loved that you called him Fang, by the way. I thought that was inspired, and I always loved Phyllis Diller. You must have, too.”

At a loss and not quite able to make the connections, Ali reverted to her old journalism training and asked questions. “When did your stepbrother die?” she asked. “Recently?”

“Oh, no,” Arabella replied. “It’s years ago now—right around fifty. I was actually out of the country when it happened, and I didn’t hear about it until much later, so I’ve managed to blot out the exact date. After all, at my age I’m entitled to a few senior moments. Still, I’m sure I’ll be able to track down all those gory details should I need them. Mother kept a file I’ll be able to use for research, but that’s one of the things I wanted to ask you about—changing names and details. When you’re writing about an ugly situation—a real-life situation—is it preferable to write it as it happened, or are you better off changing names and such to keep the legal beagles from coming after you?”

“I’m sorry,” Ali said. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I’m thinking about writing a book, you see,” Arabella said. “And I’m wondering if I should fictionalize some of it or all of it—you know, change names to protect the innocent and all that?”

That depends on whether or not what you’re writing is the truth, Ali thought.

She said, “Look, we’re getting into some pretty murky territory here. What you’re talking about could have legal ramifications—adverse legal ramifications. You should probably consult an attorney, one who specializes in libel.”

“I’ve already told you, hiring attorneys isn’t an option at this time,” Arabella replied. “But I will say that the idea that I might decide to write a book is the very last thing Billy thought would happen when he came barging in here asking for a handout.”

Now Ali was really confused. “Billy?” she interjected. “I thought you just told me he was dead.”

“Bill Junior is dead,” Arabella replied. “Billy is his son, my nephew, and a chip off the old block if ever there was one. Every bit as contemptible as his father and his grandfather. DNA is spooky that way, don’t you think? I wonder if the human genome project is looking into that? Billy’s my nephew, but until he showed up Sunday afternoon, I hadn’t ever laid eyes on him. Looks just like his father. That gave me a bit of a shock.”

“How old is he?” Ali asked.

“Billy? Late fifties.”

“And you’d never met him before?”

“Never.”

“So why did he look you up after all this time?”

“Money,” Arabella answered. “He’s gone through what my father left him. He came here under the mistaken impression that I still had loads of Mother’s money, and that I’d be happy to give him some of that, too. It turns out, of course, that Mother’s money is pretty much gone, and I wouldn’t give him any of it even if it wasn’t. When I told him he wasn’t getting a dime’s worth of what I had left, things went from bad to worse.”

“How so?” Ali asked.

“He threatened me.”

“With bodily harm?”

“It sounded like bodily harm to me. He said that someone in my condition, whatever that is, shouldn’t be left living on my own with only an aging butler to look after me. I told him Mr. Brooks is quite capable—he’s only seventy-six by the way—and we’re managing quite nicely. Have been for years. At which point Billy ran his finger across the table and said the place could use some dusting—the arrogant twit. Who cares about dusting anyway?”

Ali immediately regretted her own critical thoughts about how things were slipping a bit in the housekeeping department. She said nothing.

Arabella continued. “He went on to tell me that if I was going to insist on staying in this big, drafty old house, I should let him do a reverse mortgage on the place so I could hire some adequate help and do some fix-up kinds of repairs. That was when I told him I wasn’t interested and he could put his reverse mortgage scheme where the sun don’t shine.”

Ali managed to suppress a smile. “What happened then?”

Arabella sighed. “That’s when the nicey-nice long-lost nephew act ended. The gloves came off, and he went downright ballistic. I’m afraid having a dreadful temper is DNA-related, too. His father was the same way. Billy came right out and told me that if I refused to listen to reason and do what he said, he’d go to court to have me declared incompetent. He said that once that happened he’d see to it that I was locked away in one of those dreadful assisted living places.”

She shivered slightly and rubbed the tops of her arms as though a chill draft had blown across her shoulders. “I wouldn’t last a week in one of those,” she added.

“Wait a minute,” Ali objected. “You’re anything but incompetent.”

Arabella smiled a little sadly. “Thank you for saying that,” she said.

“I didn’t just say it; I mean it!” Ali declared. “It sounds to me as though Billy was trying to blackmail you, and blackmail happens to be illegal. Did you call the cops?”

“No,” Arabella answered.

“Why not?”

“Because, if I did, I’m sure he’d convince them that, as my last living blood relative, he was just watching out for my best interests, that he was looking after his dotty old auntie.”

“People who know you would never believe that,” Ali said.

“They might,” Arabella allowed. “Billy came off as a really slick operator. Probably a good salesman as well. If he takes me to court, he seems entirely capable of convincing some unsuspecting family court judge that I’m a complete nutcase—which I am on occasion, I’m told. And it would be that much easier if he brought up my past, which, of course, he’s threatening to do.”

“Your past?” Ali repeated. “What about your past?”

Arabella sighed. “I was institutionalized for a number of years when I was much younger,” she said. “It was a very dark period of my life. Once it was over, Mother and I never spoke of it. Mother liked to tell people I’d gone to finishing school.” Arabella gave a short, brittle chuckle. “I suppose that was close to true. That place almost finished me, all right, and I’ve spent years trying to put it behind me. Billy’s showing up here and threatening to put all that unpleasantness out in public…” She shook her head and drifted into silence.

Ali was outraged. “Your nephew has no right to bring all that up.”

“But he did,” Arabella said, sipping her drink. “He has. And now I have to figure out what to do about it.”

“You could just ignore it,” Ali said. “Of course, I’d beef up security around here. Billy sounds like a bully. If you don’t engage, maybe he’ll just go back under his rock.”

“And maybe he won’t,” Arabella returned. “I ordered him out of the house. I rang the bell and asked Mr. Brooks to show him out. The last thing he said to me before I sent him packing was that he’d be back.”

“When was that?” Ali asked.

“Sunday afternoon, late.”

“And have you heard from him since?”

“No, thank heaven. I thought I would have by now, but I’ve been thinking about him this whole time and thinking about what happened. There are times when not remembering takes a lot more effort than people think, and I’ve been doing that for years. But here, in less than an hour, that spiteful little worm brought it all back up. He’s such a little know-it-all, but that’s the thing. He only thinks he knows it all. He doesn’t, and I do.”

She took another sip of her drink, emptying the glass in the process. “I’ve barely slept the last two nights,” Arabella said. “And when I have managed to sleep, the nightmares are back. And so, sometime in the middle of the night, I made a decision, and that’s why I wanted to see you today.”

“What decision?” Ali asked.

“I’m not going to sit around waiting for the other shoe to drop. Instead of letting Billy tell the story, I’m going to tell it myself. Who knows, if I manage to sell it to a publisher, I might even make some money on it. There’s not much of that left, and a little infusion of cash wouldn’t hurt the bottom line. What do you think?”

Ali took a deep breath. It seemed to her sometimes that almost every person she met was writing a book. “What kind of book are we talking about?” she asked.

Arabella shrugged. “One of those family sagas,” she said. “One with all the usual ingredients—madness, mayhem, infidelity, incest.”

“All of it based on your own family’s history,” Ali said.

“Of course.” Arabella beamed. “With a family like mine, I wouldn’t have to make up a thing.”

Ali wasn’t at all sure what was going on between Arabella and her long-lost nephew. There was a good chance that Billy’s unexpected visit was part of some long-simmering family dispute that came complete with potential extortion and other disgruntled would-be heirs as well. It seemed reasonable to think that there were family secrets involved that might be better off left secret.

“Do you think that’s such a good idea?” Ali asked.

“What?”

“Doing this kind of family exposé?”

Arabella stiffened. “Why shouldn’t I?” she demanded. “Who would it hurt? My parents are both dead. My stepbrother is dead. I’m not. If I want to tell the story, it’s my business and my story, not Billy’s.”

“Why?” Ali asked.

“Why do you write cutloose?” Arabella asked in return.

Ali had to think about that for a moment. “Initially it was to stay in touch with my fans and to be able to write about things as I see them,” she answered at last. “But once I started writing about what was going on in my life, I discovered there were a lot of people who had been through the same kinds of things I had. And sharing ideas with them helped me somehow, and I think it helped some of them, too.”

“Exactly,” Arabella said. “Now, what do you know about incest?”

The question took Ali aback. “Not much,” she said.

“I know rather a lot about it,” Arabella said quietly. “Far too much as a matter of fact. From the inside out.”

For a moment Ali was too stunned to speak. Taking advantage of the silence, Arabella reached past her iMAC, picked up the small wooden-handled bell, and gave it a sharp jangle.

“Mr. Brooks,” she said, when the butler appeared noiselessly in the double doorway. “I do believe this calls for another round of martinis. Would you care to join me now, Ali?”

“Yes,” Ali agreed. “I believe you’re right. Martinis are definitely in order.” Then, once the butler left the room, Ali repeated the single word as a question. “Incest?”

Arabella nodded. Reaching across her computer keyboard, she picked up a slim leather-bound volume that had been lying on the far side of the computer table. She handed the book to Ali.

“It’s my diary from back then,” she said. “I’ve kept it through the years. It’s a talisman, you see, a tiny concrete piece of evidence that proves it all happened. It isn’t something I just made up.”

Ali looked down at the book. The word DIARY was embossed on the cover in gold letters. “But why are you giving it to me?” Ali asked.

“Because I want you to read it,” Arabella said. “And after you read it, I want you to tell me what you think.”

“You were the victim of incest?” Ali asked.

Arabella nodded. “For years,” she said.

“And the perpetrator?”

“Bill, of course,” Arabella answered. “My stepbrother. He was almost ten years older than I was.”

“Were you his only victim?”

“Probably not,” Arabella said dispassionately. “I’m the only one I know of for sure, but there may have been others.”

“You never told your parents?”

Arabella shook her head. “It was years before I told my mother. I never mentioned it to my father, which was probably a good thing.”

“Why?”

“Because he had a sister, too,” Arabella said. “A younger sister. I never knew her because she died long before I was born. She committed suicide when she was only fourteen years old. She hanged herself in a closet. I learned about her for the first time a few years ago when a second cousin sent me a copy of a genealogy study he was doing.”

“Are you saying that, based on that snippet of information, you suspect that your father victimized his younger sister the same way your stepbrother victimized you?”

“I know he did,” Arabella said fiercely.

“Do you have any proof?”

“Not enough to hold up in a court of law.”

And not enough proof to put it in a memoir, either, Ali thought. “Better make it fiction, then,” she said.

“But if you live in a family of monsters like that,” Arabella continued without acknowledging the comment, “you know things. You know them in your soul. If you don’t figure them out on your own, you don’t survive.”

Just running her fingers across the diary’s cover made Ali wary. “Maybe I shouldn’t read this,” she suggested.

“Please,” Arabella said. “I really need you to, so we can discuss it.”

Mr. Brooks returned bearing two cocktail shakers on a tray. He poured Ali’s first martini and Arabella’s third and handed them over. After two martinis, Ali would have been crawling on the floor. Arabella, sipping her third, appeared to be relatively unfazed.

“What’s the point of all this?” Ali asked after Mr. Brooks left them alone once again. “You said yourself that your brother’s been dead for years. Why not leave the past in the past? Chances are your nephew won’t be stupid enough to bring any of this up. If he does, you can counter it when the time comes. There’s no need to…”

“Bill was my stepbrother, not my brother,” Arabella reminded Ali. “And yes, he’s been dead for a very long time, but I’m not dead. And as long as I’m alive, what Bill did to me isn’t dead, either. What about all those other little girls who are trapped in similar situations? What about them? I used to read all those Bobbsey Twins books. Do those even still exist anymore?”

Ali shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Well, the Bobbsey Twins lived in a perfect family in a perfect world. When I read those books, I kept hoping I’d find someone in the stories who was more like me, someone whose family wasn’t perfect, but I never did. None of the books I read even hinted that what was happening to me had ever happened to anyone else. As far as I knew, I was the only one.

“And I believe that’s one of the reasons I’ve been so drawn to cutloose,” Arabella added. “I’ve read it from the very beginning. When you got fired from your job and your husband dumped you, I’ll bet you thought you were the only one who had suffered those kinds of calamities, but you weren’t. I’ve also seen you take the bad things that happened to you and transform them into good for someone else.”

“But…”

Arabella waved aside Ali’s objection.

“I know there are lots of young women out there who are in the same situation right now that I was in at their age. If I can write this book—if I can get it all down and somehow get it published, maybe they’ll realize they aren’t alone. I want them to be able to believe that they can overcome whatever bad stuff is happening to them; that they can go on with their lives and be successful. I also want adults to pay more attention to what’s going on right under their noses.”

“Writing a book is hard work,” Ali counseled. “The idea of eventually getting it published…”

“That’s why I want you to read the diary,” Arabella said. “I value your opinion. After you read it, we can talk and you can tell me what you think. Maybe you’ll still say I’m better off letting sleeping dogs lie. But the fact that Billy thinks he can use this as a club over my head really offends me. I was the victim, Ali. If I keep quiet about this—if I let Billy push me around—then I’m a victim again. Or still.”

Ali opened the diary and fanned through the pages. A few of them had been written on. Most of them were blank.

“As you can see, reading it won’t take long,” Arabella added. “I was given the diary on the occasion of my ninth birthday, and I wasn’t very good about keeping it up. You’re far more faithful at writing cutloose than I ever was at keeping the diary.”

Ali didn’t want to accept this assignment. She didn’t want to have anything to do with Arabella Ashcroft’s benighted book project. On the other hand, considering what Arabella and her mother had done for Ali all those years earlier, she didn’t feel as though she had a choice.

“All right,” she agreed at last, reluctantly slipping the diary into her purse. “But I’m not making any promises that I’ll be able to help.”

“Wonderful,” Arabella said with a brilliant smile. “I can’t ask for more than that.”

Just then the double doors swung open and the butler entered the room once more. “Would you like me to clear now, madam?” he asked. He had evidently decided on his own that three martinis amounted to Arabella’s limit. He was cutting her off.

“Yes, Mr. Brooks,” Arabella said. “Thank you. That would be very nice. And after that, feel free to take the rest of the evening off. I don’t think I’ll be needing anything more. I’ll just toddle off to bed.”

Ali noticed that Arabella’s tongue seemed slightly thick—that she was stumbling over the words.

After that many martinis, I wouldn’t be needing anything more, either, Ali thought. I’d be comatose.

Mr. Brooks led Ali back through the front hallway and out into the front driveway where he opened the door to Ali’s Porsche Cayenne SUV. “Do come again,” he said graciously.

Ali smiled and nodded. “I will,” she said.

Still she drove away feeling uneasy. What have I gotten myself into now? she wondered. And how much of Arabella’s story was the truth and how much was drunken rambling?

Ali’s intention was to head straight home, but a phone call from an escrow officer at the title company detoured her. Left to unload her deceased husband’s real estate holdings, Ali’s first plan had been to empty the house on L.A.’s Robert Lane and then list it. In talking to a real estate agent, however, the suggestion had been made that she consider selling it on a turn-key basis with all the furnishings and artwork intact. Ali had thought finding a buyer on those terms was unlikely, but in that respect she was wrong. Within days she had a full-price offer.

The buyers were people who had just won an amazing Power-ball jackpot and who wanted to move up into newer and classier digs without having to do any of the work on their own. They were ready to buy everything, pots and pans and linens included. In the back of Ali’s mind, the distrustful, snarky part, she wondered if her agent had been straight with her. It seemed likely that the agent must have known that those particularly needy purchasers were out there. It made Ali wonder if maybe the advice from the Realtor had been less impartial than it should have been. Maybe she could have gotten more.

But the truth was, Ali Reynolds was glad to be done with the Los Angeles house and was more than ready to let it go. She had balked at unloading a few items—the Limoges china she had chosen when she and Paul married; the leather couch from the family room; and Paul’s extensive wine collection along with the water-damaged credenza. Other than those, however, Ali had accepted the purchasers’ offer and had let everything else go without a second thought.

“I know our closing appointment is scheduled for tomorrow,” said Linda Highsmith of Highsmith Red Rock Title. “But the papers are here now, ready to be signed. Unfortunately, I have a conflict tomorrow. I know it’s late, but if you could possibly come by this afternoon…”

“Sure,” Ali said. “I’ll be right there.”

It was close to five. Most of the uptown area was a maze of road construction. Once through that, the traffic on Sedona’s main drag to the far side of town was maddeningly slow as well, so Ali wasn’t “right there” nearly as fast as she thought she’d be, but Linda was delighted when she finally did show up.

“I really appreciate this,” Linda said, ushering Ali into a conference room. “It’s only a parent/teacher conference, and I didn’t find out about it until just this afternoon. I suppose I could have handed the closing off to someone else, but…”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ali said. “I’m glad to get it out of the way today.”

The whole process took the better part of an hour. “Once the purchasers sign and the sale is recorded, the funds will be deposited in the account you’ve designated,” Linda explained as they finished up. “This is only our good-faith estimate of the moneys due to you. The actual amount may vary slightly from this.”

Alison Reynolds looked down at the line Linda indicated. The amount written there was more than substantial. It amounted to more money than Ali ever would have imagined accumulating in her lifetime.

And Linda Highsmith, who had also grown up in Sedona, seemed to be thinking much the same thing. “Small-town girl makes good,” she said with an envious smile. “It must feel pretty incredible.”

Ali nodded and smiled back as best she could, but the truth was, it didn’t feel all that terrific. This unexpected real estate windfall was coming to her not because she personally had earned or deserved it, but because she had married well—from a financial point of view, at least, and because Paul had died before their divorce became final. In Ali’s book, neither of those two items really qualified as “making good.”

“I guess that remains to be seen,” she said.

{ CHAPTER 4 }

The truth was, Ali left the title company office knowing she had money coming her way, but feeling more burdened by that fact rather than less. Ali briefly considered going by to see her parents, but decided against it. She usually enjoyed being around Bob and Edie Larson, but the last time she had seen them, her mother had been all over her about being “down in the mouth.” Edie had asked several pointed questions about what Ali was doing to “get herself back on track.”

Not wanting to risk being lectured by the parental units, Ali drove back home where she was delighted to see Chris’s Prius already parked in the driveway. Chris’s energy and cheerfulness were usually welcome antidotes for her current bout with unaccustomed torpor.

“Hey, Mom,” he said, looking up from the evening news as she walked in. With his blond hair suitably moussed and spiked, the six-foot-one Christopher could have easily passed for one of the new breed of weather reporters showing up on the tube. Chris had gotten in the habit of watching television news back in the old days when his mother was often on screen. Ali was pretty much over her own TV news addiction. Chris wasn’t. He sat on the couch with Sam stretched out next to his leg.

“My night to cook,” Chris told her. “Pizza’s on the counter in the kitchen.”

Ali had grown up in a household at the back of a restaurant. Her parents were both professional cooks. As a consequence learning to cook had never been a priority—she had never needed to. When she had been married the first time, to Chris’s father, she had cooked enough to get by, but that was all. When she had married Paul, she had moved into a place where yet another professional cook, Elvira Jimenez, had held sway over the kitchen. Besides, Ali’s news anchor duties had precluded her being anywhere near home during meal prep time.

The upshot of all that meant that not only was Ali not a capable cook, neither was her son. Between them, they subsisted on takeout and leftovers sent over from the Sugarloaf.

Ali went over to the counter and scooped up a napkin and a piece of still steaming pepperoni pizza. She stared down at the message book beside the telephone.

“Dave called?” she asked.

Dave was Detective Dave Holman, a fellow alum of Mingus Mountain High, where he had graduated a year before Ali. He had served in the U.S. Marine Corps and, along with his work as a homicide detective for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department, he was still a member of the Marine Reserves. During the years Ali had been away from Sedona, Dave had established a firm friendship with her parents. Now he was her friend as well. Months earlier, during that awful time in California after Paul’s murder, Dave had been at Ali’s side every step of the way.

“Yup,” Chris said. “Wanted to know if you’d be home later. Said he’d like to stop by. I told him as far as I knew you’d be here. I also told him if he’s not too good to turn up his nose at pizza he’d be welcome to have dinner. Tuesday is the two-for-one special, so we have plenty.”

Pizza was their usual Tuesday night fare, and Chris usually spent the remainder of the evening playing city league basketball down at the high school gym. Much as Ali enjoyed her son’s company, she was also accustomed to having the house to herself on the evenings he played ball, taking advantage of the solitude to work on her blog entries and go through her readers’ comments. Tonight, if time allowed, she had planned to delve into Arabella’s diary. There was a part of her that resented the fact that Chris had seen fit to invite company over without consulting her first, especially when he had no intention of being at home.

“Oh,” Chris added. “And Gramps called. He wanted to know if you knew where Kip went.”

“Kip?” Ali returned. “I have no idea. He was here earlier this afternoon, but I haven’t seen him since.”

“That’s what I told Gramps—that since the credenza was there in the entryway, Kip must have come by. He said not to worry; something probably came up. I could hear Grandma grousing in the background—that Kip had probably fallen off the wagon and gone out and wrecked Grandpa’s precious Bronco. There’d be hell to pay if that happened.”

Bob Larson’s vintage Bronco was precious all right. Ali reached for the phone. “Did Grandpa want me to call?”

Chris unfolded his long legs from the couch, dislodged Sam, and came over to the counter where he collected another piece of pizza.

“Depends on how brave you are,” he said. “It sounded to me like he and Grandma were going at it pretty hot and heavy. If I were you, I’d wait awhile and give them a chance to cool off.”

Ali found a soda in the fridge and brought it to the counter. She was several bites into her pizza before she spoke again. “I signed the papers on the Robert Lane house,” she said.

“The sale went through then?”

“As long as the buyers sign, too.”

“Good,” Chris said. “I’m glad that’s all behind you.”

Except it wasn’t all behind Ali. Selling the house would go a long way toward allowing Ali to finally straighten out Paul Grayson’s financial obligation to his daughter—an out-of-wedlock child whose mother had refused, on religious grounds, Paul’s offer to pay for an abortion. That whole issue was still an unsettling obstacle to Ali as she attempted to move forward and consign her deceased husband to where he belonged—as a fading image in her rearview mirror.

Something in Ali’s facial expression must have betrayed what she was thinking. “Are you okay?” Chris asked.

“Of course, I’m okay,” Ali answered abruptly. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Don’t bite my head off,” Chris replied. “And I asked because you don’t look okay. You look upset. You’ve been upset for weeks now.”

You’re almost as bad as my parents, Ali thought.

“I’m okay,” she repeated, but just because she said it didn’t necessarily make it so. She got up from the table, tossed the rest of her pizza into the disposal, and made a show of loading the few dirty dishes into the dishwasher. Once that was done, she went into the bedroom to get out of the tea-drinking attire she’d worn to Arabella Ashcroft’s house and into something a little more comfortable—a pair of well-worn sweats. When she emerged, Chris had disappeared.

Without knowing when Dave would show up, Ali was reluctant to start reading Arabella’s diary. Instead, she reached for her laptop, but before she had time to log on, the doorbell rang. Peering outside, she found Dave Holman standing on her front porch. With his hands stuffed in his pockets, he had turned away from the door and seemed to be staring off at the last of the sunlight on the distant red rock formations.

Determined not to let him gripe at her about her current emotional state, Ali opened the door with a flourish and was going to make some smart-mouthed comment. When she glimpsed the grim set of Dave’s lean, square-jawed face, she stifled.

“Come in,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

Stepping inside, Dave grimaced. “It’s that apparent?”

“Evidently,” Ali responded. “What’s up?”

“It’s Crystal,” he said. “She ran away.”

Crystal was Dave’s twelve-year-old daughter. Dave’s three kids—sixteen-year-old Rich and two daughters, including eight-year-old Cassie, lived with their mother, Roxanne, and her second husband, a time-share salesman with a none-too-sparkly reputation.

“From Lake Havasu?” Ali asked.

Dave gave Ali a look and then dropped heavily onto the sofa. “From Vegas,” he said. “They moved to Vegas the first of October, remember? Cassie and Rich seem to have adjusted all right, but not Crystal. Roxie called me about it just a little while ago.”

Listening to the news, Ali took a hit in the guilt department. She had been so caught up in her own miseries that she hadn’t been paying any attention to her friend’s difficulties. The last Ali remembered Dave’s kids had still been living in Lake Havasu with their mother and her new husband. She had no recollection about them having moved to Vegas.

How come I didn’t know about any of this? What kind of a friend am I? Ali wondered.

“How long has Crystal been gone?” Ali asked.

Dave’s face was bleak. “Since early this morning,” he said. “Rich dropped her off at school, but she never showed up for any of her classes.”

“A twelve-year-old truant on her own in Vegas?” Ali asked. Not good, she thought. Not good at all!

“They’ve issued an Amber Alert,” Dave continued. “But only just now—an hour or so ago. Somehow the school didn’t notify Roxie that Crystal wasn’t at school, and nobody worried when she didn’t show up at home as soon as school was out. When it comes to parental supervision, Roxie runs a pretty loose ship. Until it was almost bedtime, everyone assumed Crystal was off at a friend’s house. And she’s thirteen, by the way,” Dave added. “Not twelve. Just turned. Her birthday was last week. I’m terrified thinking about what might happen to her, and with a twelve-hour head start, she could be anywhere by now.”

Las Vegas was less than three hundred miles away—a drive of a little under five hours. The way Dave looked right then, he could probably make the trip in far less time than that. Ali stood up, brought the pizza box over from the counter, and offered him some. Absently he took a slice of the cooled pie and bit into it.

“If all this is happening in Vegas, what are you still doing here?” Ali asked. “I would have thought you’d be on your way by now.”

“Roxie asked me not to come,” Dave replied. “Told me not to, actually. She said she had enough on her plate right now without having to worry about me showing up and making things worse.”

“But you’re a cop,” Ali objected. “How could you possibly make things worse?”

“You’d be surprised,” Dave said grimly. “You don’t know Gary, her jerk of a husband.”

Ali didn’t know Gary Whitman personally, but what little she knew about the man wasn’t good. He had been new to town—a hotshot time-share salesman—when he had taken up with Roxanne Holman, wining and dining her while Dave was off doing his second tour of duty with the reserves in Iraq. The affair had started then. The actual divorce hadn’t happened until months later, after Dave got back home from his deployment.

Just being divorced had been hard enough on Dave, but the previous fall, when Roxanne and Gary had moved from Sedona to Lake Havasu and taken the kids with them, Dave had been devastated. Ali vaguely remembered Dave mentioning that there had been trouble of one kind or another with Gary’s employment situation in Lake Havasu, but that was all she could recall. She had no idea that another move had occurred, and right that minute, none of that seemed particularly important.

“Forget about Gary Whitman,” Ali said now. “He doesn’t matter. What does matter is figuring out where Crystal could have disappeared to and why. And how do we go about bringing her back home?”

“I suppose Roxie’s right in a way about wanting me to stay here,” Dave admitted. “I can make more inquiries—official inquiries, that is—by going through channels on this end than I could as boots on the ground in Nevada, where I’d be outside my jurisdiction.”

Ali knew from personal experience that being outside his jurisdiction hadn’t kept Dave Holman from riding to Ali’s rescue when she had needed his help in California a few months earlier. Surely, with his own daughter at risk, there could be no question now about what he should do.

“You have to go,” Ali declared urgently. “I don’t know what you’re waiting for.”

Dave blew out his breath as though trying to relieve some pressure. “Rich said pretty much the same thing his mom did when I talked to him a little while ago—that I shouldn’t come. He says Gary and Roxie fight about me all the time as it is. He said if I come up, it’ll only make things worse.”

“All the more reason for you to go,” Ali insisted. “True, you may not be able to do anything to help find Crystal, but at least you can be there as moral support for Cassie and Rich, and they’re the ones who need it. What did Rich tell you, by the way? Did he have any idea why Crystal might have taken off?”

“Not really. According to him she’s been quite the handful since they got to Vegas. She’s already been suspended from her new school—twice.”

“Suspended twice from middle school?” Ali asked. “What did she do?”

“I have no idea,” Dave said. “Roxie hadn’t mentioned it to me, and Rich didn’t say, either. But here’s what I don’t understand. It used to be that, of all the kids, Crystal was the one who actually liked going to school. At least, I thought she did. Up until this year, she was always a straight-A student. I can’t imagine what’s gotten into her.”

“Divorces are difficult for kids,” Ali offered. “And middle school especially can be tough, especially if you’re the new kid on the block. In that case it can be downright brutal. I’m sure you’ve heard about ‘mean girls.’ But tell me about the Amber Alert. I know a little about them, but I don’t know how they work.”

“It’s like an all-points bulletin for missing kids,” Dave replied, “except more so. The announcements don’t just go out to law enforcement agencies. They’re posted on radio and television and on road signs on the interstates. They also go to bus depots and airports so busline and airline personnel are also on the lookout. The problem is, for it to do any good, it should have gone out within hours of Crystal’s disappearance.”

“So why are you still here?” Ali asked.

Dave heaved himself off the sofa and walked over to the window, where he seemed to stare outside. With the now all-enveloping darkness, his brooding features were reflected back into the room by the windowpane.

“I didn’t tell you the real reason Roxie doesn’t want me to come,” he said softly. “She’s scared.”

“Of her husband?” Ali asked. “Because of what Gary might do if you show up?”

“No,” Dave said softly. “Of me. She’s scared about what I might do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Because I told her I was going to get in my car, come to Vegas, and kill that son of a bitch of a husband of hers. It was bad enough that the slimeball destroyed my family the first time. Then he took them to Havasu. Now he’s dragged them all off to Vegas. You can’t just move kids around like that, hauling them from place to place like so much excess baggage. It’s too hard on them. Crystal used to be a really good kid. If she’s screwed up now, I’m blaming it on him. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all Gary Whitman’s fault.”

“You may have said you were going to kill him, but I don’t think you meant it,” Ali said.

“Didn’t I?” Dave returned gloomily. “I’m not so sure. Maybe I did mean it. But the point is, I did say it. Roxanne heard me and so did Gary. So that’s the deal. First thing tomorrow morning Roxie plans on going to court to swear out a restraining order against me. If I come anywhere near her and Gary, I’ll go to jail.”

“Screw Roxie and Gary!” Ali said forcefully. “And screw going through ‘official channels on this end.’ You need to be there, Dave. Let the cops look for Crystal. That’s their job. The people who need you the most right now are Rich and Cassie. You’re their father. In order to help them, you don’t need to go anywhere near the house. You just said Rich took his sister to school. That means he has his driver’s license now, right?”

Dave nodded.

“So go to Vegas,” Ali told him. “Check into a hotel somewhere close but not too close to where they live. Call Rich and Cassie and let them come to you and be with you.”

“But I’m used to doing things,” Dave objected. “I’m used to taking action. If I’m just sitting around in a hotel room somewhere, I’ll feel utterly useless, even more than I feel right now.”

“Being there for your kids is doing something,” Ali insisted. “So is setting a good example about how to behave in the face of a crisis.”

Dave seemed to consider what she had said before he responded. “I just thought that if Roxanne wouldn’t let me come to the house, there wasn’t much point in my going.”

Ali shook her head. “You mouthed off when you probably shouldn’t have, but so what? From what I can see, Roxanne isn’t very high in decision-making skills, either. So go. Be there for your kids—for all your kids.”

Dave looked down at his watch. “If I left now, I could be there by midnight.”

“Yes,” Ali agreed. “You could. And if you’re really worried about taking a potshot at Gary Whitman, you could always leave your gun at home. Take some more pizza and leave the gun.”

Dave accepted another piece of cold pizza and gave her a halfhearted grin. “Maybe I’m not that worried,” he said. Pizza in hand, he started toward the door; then he stopped and turned back. “I guess I already knew what I should do,” he added. “I just needed someone to point me in the right direction. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Ali said. “That’s what friends are for. But drive carefully. You won’t be of much use to your kids if you end up in a wreck somewhere between here and there. And call me. The moment you hear something about Crystal, call me. Day or night, it doesn’t matter.”

Dave sobered, his grin disappearing as suddenly as it had come. “I will,” he declared. “I’ll call day or night and let you know what’s happening.”

For a while after Dave left, Ali sat on the couch absently stroking Sam’s soft fur and wondering if she had given her friend the right advice. She had no doubt that Dave Holman was capable of using deadly force when necessary, but she also wasn’t at all convinced that his threat toward his ex-wife’s new husband was real. It seemed more likely that what he had said was nothing more than bluster, an empty emotional outburst provoked by his daughter’s unexplained disappearance.

Faced with a choice between blogging about this current crisis or perusing Arabella’s diary written sixty or so years earlier, Ali voted for immediacy by reaching for her laptop. Once it booted up, she began working on her post for the next day’s installment.

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

We’ve all seen the headlines and watched stories like this unfold on the airways. A young girl, a teenager, inexplicably disappears on her way home from school or from a friend’s house. Eventually, concerned parents go to the police and report her missing. If they’re really lucky, an Amber Alert is issued, and their child is found.

Sometimes the missing child turns out to be nothing but a common runaway. Once she is reunited with her anxious parents, the family is left to cope with whatever it was that caused her to leave home in the first place. Sometimes the difficulties seem relatively minor—problems with a friend at school, a bad report card, or maybe a case of puppy love gone awry. Sometimes the reasons are much more troublesome and the finger of blame points directly back to unsavory conditions existing in the home itself. In families plagued by drug or alcohol abuse or where domestic violence and/or sexual molestation are the order of the day, leaving home can seem like—and sometimes is—the child’s only viable avenue for survival. And when runaway children are returned to homes like that, it’s often only a matter of time before they bolt once more.

We’re also all too familiar with other endings to this story—horrific instances where missing children disappear and never return home. They simply melt into the ether. Days or weeks or months later their remains are found and identified—close to home or far away. At that point what was once a missing persons case is suddenly transformed into a homicide.

Today a friend’s thirteen-year-old child has gone missing. She never made it to school this morning even though she was dropped off right outside the campus. She wasn’t reported missing until late this evening, a good twelve hours after she was seen walking in the direction of her first morning class. An Amber Alert has been issued, but her father fears too much time may have passed before that happened.

Yes, the clichés are all there. The girl is from a broken family—a divorced family—with the distraught father living in one state and with the mother, children, and new stepfather living in another. Some people are probably thinking this is nothing more than a custody dispute gone bad. But it isn’t that, not at all.

It’s bad enough for families to have to face this kind of crisis when a marriage is solid and intact. It’s even tougher to contemplate doing so when the marriage bond has been severed and the crisis must be faced alone.

And that’s where my friend is tonight—facing the loss of his daughter on his own. His former wife has a new husband, and the two of them are together in this difficult time. My friend is alone—alone and angry; alone and grieving. He came to talk to me earlier this evening. I did what I could to bolster him, but there’s only so much anyone else can do.

I have no idea how these events will sort themselves out in the course of the next few days. If it is a family dispute of some kind and if his daughter has simply run away, she may turn back up on her own when she gets cold enough or hungry enough or even tired enough. But it may turn out that something else is going on here—something more ominous than that. If foul play is involved, it’s likely the story will go public. For right now, and out of deference to my friend’s privacy and that of the other family members, I’m not identifying any of the players. There may come a time when that will change, when posting the missing girl’s information on this Web site may be used as a possible means for bringing her home.

In the meantime, though, I’m going to hope and pray that doesn’t happen.

While the post took its sweet time about uploading, Ali turned to her new mail list. There, along with a mountain of spam, was an e-mail from one of her regulars, Velma Trimble in Laguna Beach, California. Under the name of “Velma T in Laguna” she usually sent correspondence to the comment section of cutlooseblog.com. It was odd for her to write to Ali directly.

Dear Babe,

You’re the only person I can think of to write to tonight. You see, today I went to the doctor to get the results back from the biopsy for the lump on my left breast. It took almost two weeks to get the results back. I don’t know why it takes so long, but today was the day.

I had pretty well prepared myself for the fact that it was going to be bad news, and it was. Since I have a computer, I had gone to the various Web sites and looked up what I could expect in terms of treatment options—surgery, radiation, chemo. What I wasn’t prepared for was to be told not to bother.

“At your age,” this little whippersnapper doctortold me, “there’s really not much point.” He’s probably all of forty-five and he should count himself lucky I didn’t whack him over his head with my walker. The problem is, I can’t get in to see an oncologist without a referral from my primary physician. And if he does give me a referral, what’s he going to say? “Here’s Velma, but don’t bother doing anything to fix her because she’s a useless eighty-something and curing her cancer isn’t going to be cost effective.”

What I want to know is this: Did this happen because Medicare reimbursements are so low that the doctor can’t be bothered? Maybe he’d rather treat full-fare patients. Or does he just hate old people in general? (Surprise, he’s going to be one someday himself. I wonder how he’ll like it?) Or does he just hate me? Personally.

Should I go to the trouble of trying to see another doctor—not easy when you have to go by cab or bus because you can’t drive anymore (another bad thing about getting old) or should I just take him at his word, decide he’s right, I’m a hopeless case, and that the sooner I turn toes up the better off we’ll all be?

You’re probably wondering why I’m asking you these questions. I can’t very well ask my son, because he would definitely be in the toes-up corner. Unfortunately my doctor and my son are friends. They belong to the same club and play golf together. That’s how I ended up with him for a doctor—my son recommended him. I even signed a form saying it was okay for him to let my son have access to my medical information. That was before all this happened, of course.

Please write back and let me know what you think. I really value your opinion.

Sincerely,

VELMA T IN LAGUNA

Ali was absolutely outraged. When she had been in California dealing with the avalanche of crises that had accompanied Paul Grayson’s death, she had been overwhelmed by everything that had been coming at her. On the night when she had been at her very lowest ebb, a single bright spot had appeared. Velma T had managed to track Ali down at her hotel. Sporting a walker decorated with patriotic items—including red, white, and blue tennis balls—the woman had caught a cab and come all the way across L.A. to offer her support and to let Ali Reynolds know there was someone in her corner.

This was a sprightly, outgoing woman. And this obnoxious doctor was writing her off because she was eighty-eight?

Ali’s first husband, Dean, had died of glioblastoma when he was in his twenties and while Ali was pregnant with Christopher. During her high-profile years as an L.A. area newscaster, Ali had done lots of work with the cancer community—helping with fund-raising and doing guest appearances. One of the side benefits of that had left Ali with a good deal of knowledge and with a whole list of cancer treatment contacts she could call on for help and information.

The idea of Velma, a most likely impoverished old woman trying to fight her way through the cancer treatment morass on her own, left Ali feeling physically ill. And suspecting that Velma was spending this worrisome, sleepless night in front of her computer screen, Ali wrote back at once.

Dear Velma

I’m so sorry. Receiving a cancer diagnosis is always devastating no matter how old you are or how young or how young at heart.

Although I’ve dealt with my share of medical professionals, I have no idea why your primary care physician thinks treatment options are off the table at this time. It may be that you were in such a state of distress that you simply didn’t understand exactly what he was saying. On the other hand, there may be other physical and medical conditions involved that make it risky for you to undergo treatment of any kind. There’s always a chance that, as you suggested, your doctor is simply an uncaring jerk. Another possibility that tends more to aluminum-foil-hat conspiracy theories would have to do with your doctor having a conflict of interest in treating you due to his chummy relationship with your son.

Although I no longer live in southern California, I still have many contacts in the local cancer care medical community. I’ll be in touch with some of them first thing in the morning and see what, if anything, I can do.

In the meantime, go ahead and worry. You are right to be upset and scared, but try to take things one step at a time and let me and others do what we can to help.

My thoughts and prayers are with you.

ALI

{ CHAPTER 5 }

Hoping Velma would find the note reassuring and comforting, Ali spent the next hour or so looking through her database and thinking about who she should call on Velma’s behalf. In the process, something struck her. It seemed to her that Velma Trimble and Arabella Ashcroft were being plagued by similar scourges—young, overly officious males who appeared to be attempting to micromanage the lives of older female relatives.

In Velma’s case her son appeared to be conspiring with her doctor to direct her medical care without bothering to take Velma’s own wishes into consideration. And Arabella’s nephew, Billy—a blood relation Arabella claimed to have never met prior to his unannounced visit the previous Sunday—was now threatening to expose Arabella’s unfortunate history as a mental patient in hopes of having her locked away.

Ali couldn’t help wondering about motive. Was it possible both these overreaching people were after the same thing—their elderly relative’s moolah? She didn’t know Velma’s son’s name, but she did know Arabella’s nephew’s—William Ashcroft. For Ali, turning to the Internet for more information was as natural as breathing. Her very first attempt at Googling the name came up winners. The article, dated three weeks earlier, came from the San Diego Ledger.

1.5 MILLION JUDGMENT IN REVERSE MORTGAGE SCHEME

Reverse mortgage guru and long-time real estate developer William Cowan Ashcroft, III, was found liable for $1.5 million in damages on behalf of the relatives of three elderly clients whose families claim were defrauded out of valuable real estate holdings in exchange for promises of payments that were never forthcoming.

A jury of five women and one man assessed Ashcroft $500,000 in real damages and an additional $1,000,000 in punitive damages with the proceeds to be divided evenly among the three plaintiff families. He was also held liable for the plaintiffs’ legal expenses, which are thought to be considerable.

Helen Sampson, one of the plaintiffs in the case, was jubilant with the outcome. “William Ashcroft is a worm who specialized in cheating the frail and infirm. He had zero compunction about stealing my Aunt Claire’s home right out from under her and putting her out on the street. I’m grateful that the jury has given us this moral victory, but it’s still only a fraction of what Claire’s property was worth and what she and Ashcroft’s other victims should have had coming to them.”

Thomas Rago, Mr. Ashcroft’s attorney, expressed dismay at the finding and declared that he would be appealing the jury’s decision.

Billy, you low-down son of a bitch, Ali thought. No doubt the reverse mortgage offer to Arabella had been little more than a ruse. He may have taken possession of the property, but if his previous track record was any indication, his promised payments wouldn’t have been forthcoming. The longer Ali thought about it, the more she understood that, faced with rising legal costs and the need to pay off the judgment, Billy Ashcroft had come to Sedona planning on talking his well-to-do old aunty into giving him the cash he needed. When Arabella had proved to be anything but a soft touch, he had resorted to extortion instead.

After printing that article, Ali returned to her search page. There were twenty-nine other entries for William Cowan Ashcroft III, and she fully intended to read every one.

As the steamy windows turned the interior of the Explorer into a cozy cocoon, Curt Uttley reclined the driver’s seat, lay back, and enjoyed it. How he enjoyed it. He had known she’d be good just from watching the downloaded film clip from the BJV section of his now favorite Web site, www.afterschoolspecial.com, and this was special all right. It was very special indeed.

He didn’t focus on how old the girl was because if he did that, he might end up thinking about his own kids—his two sons, one a year older and one a year younger than this very hot, hot, hot little girl on her knees before him on the floorboard of his car. What Curt thought about instead, as he moved her face ever so slightly to achieve a better angle, was how impossibly good she was at what she was doing. And he wondered how much longer he could possibly hold off before letting go. Fortunately for him, she hadn’t demanded that he use a condom. That made it all the better.

He had seen the clip and then had made it his business to find her. With the help of what she’d posted on her Web page, that had been almost too easy. And it had taken only a matter of weeks after first making contact for Curt to reel her in. That was what was so wonderful about little girls—they believed what they wanted to believe.

Now, though, within seconds of climaxing, Curt was startled out of his pink haze by the unwelcome flash of headlights in his rearview mirror. He had pulled off I-17 near Mund’s Park into a secluded area that he often used for these kinds of late-night trysts where it was essential not to be disturbed. He liked this spot in particular because it was far enough from town that he’d never seen anyone else anywhere around. But there was someone here now.

Terrified that a cop was coming, Curt pushed the girl away and then peered desperately through the steam-covered glass while he pulled up his pants. He could make out a single pair of headlights, but that was it. No flashing reds, thank God.

“What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong? Don’t you want me to finish?”

“Shut up,” he ordered. “Someone’s coming. Get your clothes on.”

He could see several figures making oddly jerking motions in front of the stationary headlights. They seemed to be milling around some central object, but he couldn’t tell what that object was or what they were doing. While the girl wiggled back into her clothing, Curt rolled down the window and peered outside. What he saw made his blood run cold. There were at least three men standing over a fourth one who was lying prone on the ground. As Curt watched they passed something that looked like a baseball bat from hand to hand, then they took turns smashing the club into their helpless victim, laughing and jeering at him as they did so.

The ugly sound of wood thudding into flesh left Curt petrified. A cop showing up was one thing, but what would these murderous thugs do if they spotted the Explorer parked only a matter of yards away?

“What’s going on?” the girl asked again. “What’s wrong?” Except, she didn’t just ask—she screeched really.

He hit her hard with the back of his hand, just to shut her up, but it was too late. The sound of her voice had carried, and one of the bat-wielding attackers had heard her. Still holding the weapon raised in his hand, he had turned and was peering off into the darkness—staring toward the very spot where Curt had parked.

Petrified, Curt sprang into action. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here!”

He turned on the engine, switched the lights to what he hoped was a blinding bright, and hit the gas.

“What are they doing to that man?” the girl wanted to know as they raced past. “It looks like they’re hurting him. We need to call someone. We need to call the cops.”

She was already reaching for her cell phone. “Put that thing away,” he ordered. “We’ll call for help, but don’t call on that.”

As Ali scrolled through William Cowan Ashcroft III’s checkered past, time slipped away from her. She was half asleep with the computer still perched on her lap in front of her when the ringing telephone startled her awake.

A glance at the clock told her it was after eleven. In her current frame of mind a late-night phone call couldn’t mean anything but bad news, especially with Chris still not home. She answered with her heart in her throat.

“Hi, Ali,” Bob Larson boomed cheerfully. “How’s my favorite daughter?”

Of course Ali was Bob Larson’s only daughter.

“Hope I didn’t wake you,” he continued. “Is Chris there?”

Relieved that her father was on the phone and that something terrible hadn’t happened to her son, Ali tried to erase the hint of panic she was sure had been obvious in her voice. “No,” she said quickly. “He’s still down at school playing basketball. They don’t usually finish up until after ten, and he often stops off for a beer or something afterward. Why?”

Bob sighed. “That probably explains why he isn’t answering his cell. I guess it’ll have to wait until morning then.”

“What’ll have to wait?” Ali asked.

“Going to pick up the Bronco,” Bob replied.

“The Bronco? Why?” Ali asked. “Where is it?”

“At Sunset Point,” Bob answered.

Sunset Point was the first rest area south of Sedona on I-17. “What’s it doing there?” Ali asked.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” her father said with a growl. “I can’t imagine what got into Kip that he went off and left it there. It’s a miracle somebody didn’t steal it. My friend Jack Riggs called a little while ago just after he spotted it. Jack was taking his wife down to Phoenix to catch a plane. He stopped to take a leak, and that’s when he noticed my Bronco sitting in the parking lot. He says it has a flat tire, but the key was still in the ignition. He said he put the keys under the floor mat for safekeeping until I can get there to pick it up. I want to go right away. Changing the tire is no problem, but I can’t drive two cars by myself. I need someone else to take me there, and your mother’s already gone to bed. I was hoping Chris would give me a hand so I can drag the Bronco home before someone decides to strip the damned thing.”

When Bob finally paused for breath, Ali realized it was one of her father’s longest speeches ever. Clearly he was very upset. After all, his one-owner 1972 Bronco was his baby.

Bob had purchased the Bronco new and at an end-of-year bargain price in early 1973. Buying it with minimum down and on credit, the Bronco was the first and only brand-new vehicle Bob Larson had ever bought from a dealer. By dint of mechanical know-how and a whole lot of stubbornness, he had managed to keep the Bronco running for decades and for more than three hundred thousand tough miles.

Ali knew that other than burning down the Sugarloaf, no betrayal on Kip Hogan’s part could have hit Bob Larson as hard as the hired hand’s casual disregard of Bob’s beloved vehicle. Thinking about it now, Ali decided even that might not have hurt as much. At least the restaurant was insured. The Bronco was long past qualifying for comprehensive coverage. A five-hundred-dollar deductible would have amounted to full replacement value.

So clearly the Bronco needed to be brought home. Chris was out having fun, and Edie Larson’s early-morning baking duties at the Sugarloaf exempted her from any late-night excursions. That left the job up to Ali.

“No problem, Dad,” she said. “I can take you.”

“You can?” he replied eagerly. “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Thanks. I really appreciate it. Don’t come to the house. I’ll wait out by the restaurant so we don’t wake your mother.”

Ali jotted off a note and left it on the counter for Chris in case he beat her home. Then she pulled on a fleece-lined jacket and hurried out to her Cayenne. When she pulled up in front of the Sugarloaf a few minutes later, she found her father pacing back and forth in the parking lot.

“You still haven’t told me what your Bronco’s doing at Sunset Point,” she said as he settled into the seat and fastened his belt.

“How should I know?” Bob asked irritably. “The last I saw it was this morning when Kip headed out to go see you. He put that credenza in the back and took off. Then he was supposed to pick up a load of groceries and clothes and blankets and deliver them to the folks up on the Rim. He did come to your place, didn’t he?”

“Yes, but not this morning,” Ali said. “He didn’t show up with the credenza until after lunch. He said something came up.”

“Something must have come up all right,” Bob sniffed. “When Kip didn’t turn up this afternoon, your mother was convinced he fell off the wagon.”

“Do you think Kip stole the Bronco?” Ali asked. “Did you call the cops?” she asked.

“No, I didn’t call the cops,” Bob grunted in return. “Why would I? What would I tell them if I did call? That I’m afraid the guy I loaned my truck to turned around and stole it from me? The cops in town already think I’m some kind of bleeding-heart, do-gooder fruitcake. And when I say cops, I don’t mean Dave Holman, by the way,” Bob added defensively. “Not him. No, I’m talking about the guys on the city police force. I’m guessing the local gendarmes would treat this whole thing as some kind of joke, starting from the premise that I probably deserve it. I’ve heard that several of them are of the opinion that by taking in street people like Kip Hogan I’m just asking for trouble. It’s one thing to hear that kind of stuff from my wife. I sure as hell don’t need to hear it from our local civil servants.”

Finished with his second rant in a row, Bob crossed his sturdy arms across his chest and subsided into an angry, wounded silence.

“Do you think something bad could have happened to Kip?” Ali suggested.

“If it hasn’t,” Bob replied, “it sure as hell is going to happen once I catch up with him.”

“Did you try calling his cell phone?” Ali asked.

“The man doesn’t have a cell phone,” Bob pointed out irritably. “He’s a street person, remember—an ex-street person. I offered to buy him a disposable, but he couldn’t be bothered. I think he actually likes being unavailable.”

Ali knew this wasn’t the first time one of Bob Larson’s human rehab projects had gone sour on him. She also knew her mother wouldn’t be out of line for pointing it out or for being upset about it, either. Driving back toward the freeway, it seemed like a good idea to change the subject.

“Your friend said that there’s nothing wrong with the Bronco,” she said.

“It has a flat tire.”

“But it hasn’t been wrecked or anything?”

“Not as far as I know,” her father answered. “Maybe it’s out of gas. The gas gauge stopped working years ago. Who knows? Just drive,” he answered with a sigh. “There’s no way to tell how bad it’ll be until we get there.”

Crystal Holman crouched on the toilet in the locked bathroom stall for the better part of an hour, shivering and hoping the guys with the bats wouldn’t come looking for her there. She had no idea where Curt had gone. The last she had seen of him, he was using a pay phone in the parking lot.

A woman came into the restroom and tried the stall door. A few minutes later, she returned and tried again. Finally a man came in and pounded on the door. “You’ve gotta get out of there. Other people need to use it.”

Crystal peeked out through the crack. The man was wearing a uniform of some kind—a blue shirt with the name Jimmy sewed on the pocket.

Finally, Crystal opened the door and walked out past Jimmy. Past the woman. Out in the mini-mart, she looked around for Curt, but he wasn’t there and neither was anyone else she recognized. Pulling her lightweight jacket close, Crystal darted outside and surveyed the deserted gas pump area. In the sallow glow of the overhead lights, there was no sign of Curt or his SUV. Thankfully, there was no sign of the guys with the bats, either.

Out of the corner of her eye, Crystal caught sight of Jimmy emerging from the restroom area. Before he could spot her, she rounded the corner of the building and melted into the darkness. All Crystal Holman wanted right then was to find a place to hide.

When they pulled into the parking lot, Ali was relieved to see the Bronco sitting awash in sickly yellow light at the far end of the row reserved for passenger cars. At first glance it seemed unharmed. As Jack Riggs had reported, the right rear tire was flat. Closer examination revealed that Bob’s tool chest, gas can, and spare tire had been lifted. As for the flat tire? It was much more than flat—it was in tatters. Bob squatted down to check on it.

“Looks like he drove on it flat for a long time,” he muttered. “So the rim’s ruined, too. That means it’ll have to be towed,” he said resignedly. “Thank God we belong to Triple A. A wrecked rim, no spare, a stolen gas can, and a stolen set of tools—that’s bad enough. If we had to pay extra for towing, your mother would really have my hide.”

She may still, Ali thought.

Bob hauled out his cell phone and his wallet. As he made the call, Ali walked around the Bronco looking for and not finding any sign of additional damage. “What are all those boxes in the back?” she asked once Bob was off the phone.

He placed his hands against the back window and peered inside. “So he didn’t even make the delivery,” Bob muttered.

“What delivery?”

“On Tuesdays he goes to Basha’s and collects some of their throw-aways—outdated food they can no longer sell—and takes it up the mountain.”

“Where people are still living,” Ali confirmed.

Bob nodded. “Nobody makes too big a deal about it. He just goes by, picks it up, loads it into the Bronco, and drops it off. The food’s still usable. This way it doesn’t go to waste and people who would otherwise go hungry have something to eat. He takes along any blankets and clothing that have come in during the week. That was what was on the schedule for today—your credenza and his run up the mountain.”

Ali nodded. “I had expected him this morning, but he didn’t drop off the credenza until after lunch. I told him I thought he did a beautiful job, by the way.”

“He did,” Bob agreed. “Fat lot of good it does any of us, though,” he added bleakly. “I taught him a useful skill, but if he’s back on the sauce it’ll all go to waste.”

Ali shivered against the cold. “What did Triple A say?” she asked.

“They’re sending a truck. Should be here in less than an hour. You don’t have to wait with me. Go on back,” Bob said. “I’ll be fine.”

“No,” Ali told him. “You won’t be fine. I’ll wait, too. We both will—in the car. It’s too cold to stand around out here. If you catch pneumonia, Mom will come looking for me with a club and a skinning knife.”

Knowing she was right, Bob headed toward the Cayenne without further argument. Ali had unlocked the doors and was about to climb inside when she heard the sound of a helicopter passing overhead. Months earlier, a low-flying helicopter had played a pivotal and almost fatal part in a Palm Springs area shoot-out. Before that, helicopters had come and gone overhead without Ali’s ever paying the slightest attention. Since then, however, the noise of approaching helicopter rotors sliced into her consciousness with hair-raising clarity.

Ali stopped dead and stared up into the star-studded sky until she located the flashing lights of the chopper. It was headed south, flying fairly low and fast, following the general path of the freeway and moving toward Phoenix. Bob paused with one foot in the Cayenne and followed his daughter’s troubled gaze.

“Medevac,” he explained. “Probably taking some poor sick bastard to one of the big hospitals in Phoenix.”

Despite her father’s reassurances, Ali noticed that when she reached to turn the key in the ignition, her hand was trembling. She knew for a fact that her involuntary tremor had nothing to do with the icy temperatures. Not looking at Bob, she quickly turned up the heater and switched on the heated seats.

“Where would Kip go?” Ali asked, more to take her mind off the rapidly disappearing helicopter than because she wanted to know the answer.

“You mean if he isn’t timed out in a bar someplace?” Clearly Bob Larson was still bent out of shape by his missing handyman. Just because his precious Bronco wasn’t irretrievably broken didn’t mean he was prepared to let Kip Hogan off the hook.

“I mean where did he come from before he ended up in that homeless encampment up on the Rim?” Ali asked. “He must have family somewhere.”

“Probably,” Bob agreed. “But I have no idea where. All in all I’d have to say Kip was a pretty close-mouthed son of a bitch.”

“But everybody’s from somewhere,” Ali objected.

Her father gave her a disparaging look. “You don’t understand, Ali. If you’re going to work with certain kinds of people—with the Kip Hogans of the world—you have to get used to taking them at face value. You have to go with what they tell you—with what they want to tell you. You can assume whatever they say is a bunch of baloney, but you have to treat it like it’s the truth, otherwise you lose them. Understand?”

“I think so,” Ali said, but she wasn’t at all sure she did.

They sat in the car in an extended period of silence while the heater gradually warmed up the SUV’s interior. “I’m going to miss him,” Bob said at last. “He was a big help around the place. Your mother can call me an old fool until hell freezes over, but even she would have to agree with me on that one. Kip Hogan was an excellent worker, and right up until today he was totally dependable.”

“At least you didn’t lose the Bronco,” Ali commented, hoping to lift his spirits.

It took a little over an hour for the tow truck to show up and another hour after that to get the Bronco hauled to the secured area of a local garage. By the time Ali dropped her father off at her parents’, it was after one in the morning. Back home, Ali parked next to Chris’s Prius. Glad he was there, she was happy to creep into her own room and tumble into bed, where she fell asleep immediately. It seemed as though she’d been sleeping for only a matter of minutes when the phone rang again. As she fumbled to answer it, the clock on her bedside radio showed it was four-fifteen.

“Hello.”

“Ali,” Dave Holman said quickly. “I’m so sorry to wake you, but you said I should call you day or night.”

Ali switched on her bedside lamp and sat up. “Where are you, and did you find Crystal?” she asked. “Is she okay?”

“I’m in Vegas,” Dave said. “I just checked into the hotel, and we sort of found Crystal. That’s why I’m calling you.”

“Sort of?” Ali repeated. “How can you sort of find her? Either you have or you haven’t.”

“She called me on my cell a little while ago and wanted me to come get her.”

“Great!” Ali exclaimed. “That’s wonderful!”

“Except she’s in Mund’s Park and I’m in Vegas,” Dave returned.

Mund’s Park was a way station on I-17, a few miles south of Flagstaff. It was forty miles and an hour’s drive from Sedona.

“It would take hours for me to get back to where she is,” Dave continued. “I offered to have the sheriff’s department send a patrol car to pick her up, and she totally freaked—like I was trying to have her arrested or something. And that’s why I’m calling you. Would you go pick her up, Ali? If you could take her to your place long enough for me to get back there…”

“I’ll be glad to,” Ali responded. “Where is she again?”

“That’s the thing,” Dave answered. “She called on her cell phone. She said she’s all right, but she wouldn’t tell me exactly where she was until I promised I wouldn’t send a cop car for her. We finally settled on my calling you. She said you should call on her cell and she’ll give you directions about where to come to get her. Jeez, Ali! The idea that she’s out there in the dark and the cold all by herself…”

Dave’s final sentence faded away, but Ali had heard the hard edge of anger in his voice—anger and relief and frustration all mixed together. By then she was already scrambling out of bed.

“I’m on my way,” Ali said. “Just let me find a pencil so I can write down the number.” While Ali searched frantically through the debris on her bedside desk, a concerned Chris appeared in her doorway.

“Mom,” he said. “I heard the phone. Is something the matter?”

“It’s Dave,” Ali said, waving him aside. “Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep.”

Giving his mother a disapproving shake of his head, Chris disappeared back down the hallway.

“Okay,” Ali said. “I’ve got a pencil finally. Give me the number.”

She took it down. “All right,” she said. “I’ll call her as soon as you hang up.”

“I really appreciate this, Ali,” Dave said. “You have no idea how much.”

“Let’s just say it’s a little bit of payback,” she said with a laugh.

“I’m not going to cancel the Amber Alert or tell Roxie what’s happened until after I hear back from you and know for sure she’s in your car,” Dave continued. “Is that all right with you?”

“Sure,” Ali said. “That’s fine.”

“Thanks again,” Dave said. Then he hung up.

Ali immediately dialed the number he had given her. “Hello.” Ali could tell it was the voice of a young girl. “Who is this?”

“My name is Ali Reynolds. I’m a friend of Dave Holman’s. Is this Crystal?”

“Are you a cop?” the girl asked without answering.

“No, I’m not a cop,” Ali replied. “I’m a friend of Dave’s. Now tell me, is this Crystal Holman or not?”

“Yes,” a small voice answered.

“Where are you?”

“Mund’s Park.”

“I know you’re in Mund’s Park,” Ali said. “Your father already told me that much. Where in Mund’s Park?”

“The restaurant is closed right now,” Crystal said. “Just pull into the parking lot and wait there. I’ll come to you. What kind of a car will you be driving?”

“It’s an SUV,” Ali said. “A blue SUV.”

“Okay. Just pull into the restaurant parking lot and turn your lights off and on,” Crystal said. “I’ll be able to see them and come to you.”

Mund’s Park, a natural clearing in the forest of the Mogollon Rim, had once been the summer headquarters for a major cattle-grazing operation homesteaded by a guy named James Mund, but the cattle were long gone. Now Mund’s Park’s wintertime major claim to fame was as the only gas station stop on I-17 between Verde Valley and Flagstaff. There were a few hardy souls who lived there year-round, but many of the residents were of the “summer only” variety. That meant that during the winter months a lot of cabins and campers sat empty, and Ali knew that unoccupied homes were often attractive to certain segments of society.

“Did you break into someone’s house?” Ali asked.

Crystal said nothing, and that was answer enough. No wonder she didn’t want her father to send a cop car to pick her up.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Ali told her.

Ending that call, she redialed Dave’s number. “Okay,” she said. “I’ve talked to Crystal. She told me where to meet her.”

“Thank God,” Dave breathed.

The relief in his voice was heart-wrenchingly apparent. Ali could find no good reason to mention the breaking-and-entering part of the equation. As a law enforcement professional, Dave would probably figure that out on his own soon enough.

“Drive carefully,” he urged.

“Don’t worry,” Ali said. “I will.”

Before Ali left the house, though, she stopped in the hallway closet long enough to strap on her holstered Glock. Ali had a license to carry a concealed weapon. If she was going to go driving around by herself in the middle of the night, she was going to have her nine millimeter along—just in case.

Better to have it with her and not need it than the other way around.

{ CHAPTER 6 }

Out in her frigid car, Ali turned on her heated seat and once again headed for I-17. This time she merged into the northbound lanes rather than the southbound. She actively disliked doing nighttime driving on that particular stretch of the freeway. For one thing, during the winter, it was often icy in spots—icy or snowy or both. This time snow wasn’t the issue. There had been a single big blizzard just before Christmas, but by now most of that had melted away. All that was left lingered along the highway in murky gray strips or lay in a patchwork of shady spots off in the woods. The real danger that particular night consisted of wandering herds of elk who liked to make leisurely nighttime crossings of the highway, meandering across the busy lanes with zero regard for oncoming vehicular traffic.

As she approached the Mund’s Park exit, Ali saw flashing emergency lights. As she slowed for the turn, it was clear from the collection of vehicles that someone had come to grief on the far side of the southbound lanes. Tow trucks had probably removed the damaged vehicles, but a few cops were still in attendance busily completing paperwork.

Ali pulled into the deserted restaurant parking lot and flashed her lights. She was feeling tired and more than slightly resentful toward her teenaged charge. For the better part of five minutes, nothing happened, then a figure materialized out of the darkness on the far side of the Cayenne and tapped sharply on the window. Ali rolled it down.

“Crystal?”

“Yes.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes. Hurry. I’m freezing.”

Ali unlocked the passenger door and a shivering Crystal Holman scrambled inside. “Are you all right?” Ali asked, switching on the interior light.

Crystal didn’t answer. Her teeth were chattering. She was wearing jeans, tennis shoes with no socks, a rhinestone-decorated lightweight denim jacket, and a black T-shirt that didn’t come close to covering her bare middle. No wonder she was cold. What might work as outerwear for school in wintertime Las Vegas wasn’t nearly enough for wintertime Mund’s Park.

Ali reached in the back and collected the featherweight wool shawl she kept there. When she handed it to Crystal, Ali caught a glimpse of the girl’s face. In the tearstained remains of layers of makeup, Ali noticed the clear outline of a hand on Crystal’s right cheek. “You’re hurt,” Ali said. “Who hit you?”

“I’m all right,” Crystal said.

“If you’ve been assaulted, we should call and report it.”

“No. We don’t need to report anything. Can we please just get out of here?”

“Not until your father knows you’re safe,” Ali said.

“You call him, then,” Crystal said, huddling in the far corner of the seat. “I don’t want to talk to him right now.”

Dave answered his cell the moment it rang. “Got her,” Ali said.

She heard Dave’s heartfelt sigh of relief. “She’s okay?”

From what Ali could see, Crystal was a long way from okay. “Medium,” she said.

“Put her on the phone,” Dave said. “I want to talk to her.”

Ali held the phone in Crystal’s direction. She sat with her arms crossed, staring straight ahead, and refused to take it.

“That would be a no,” Ali said into the phone.

“She won’t talk to me? What the hell’s going on with that girl?” Dave demanded.

“I’m not sure,” Ali said. And she wasn’t.

“I’ll get in the car, head back down there, and straighten her out,” Dave said.

Ali doubted Crystal was in any condition to be “straightened” just then.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ali told him. “You’ve already driven five hours tonight. We don’t need you to crash and burn driving another five back to Sedona. Let Roxie and everyone else know that Crystal’s safe. Get yourself a decent night’s sleep. I’ll take Crystal home with me. You can pick her up in the morning.”

Although it already is morning, Ali thought.

“You’re sure you don’t mind?”

“Not at all.”

Ali knew Crystal was frightened and upset. She had come to get the girl, and Ali was prepared to be sympathetic and understanding, but Crystal’s adamant refusal to speak to her father was puzzling. Still, the warmth in the vehicle had worked its magic. At least Crystal’s teeth were no longer chattering.

“You should have talked to him,” Ali said. “You put your whole family through hell, Crystal. He just wanted to hear the sound of your voice so he could tell for himself that you were all right. Are you going to call your mom?”

“He’ll call her,” Crystal said defiantly. “Can’t we just go? Do we have to sit here all night?”

“You need to fasten your seat belt,” Ali reminded her.

“My mom doesn’t make us wear seat belts,” Crystal replied.

By then, Ali’s sympathy was pretty much stretched to the breaking point. I can’t help it if your mom’s an idiot, Ali thought. “Either fasten your seat belt or get out and walk,” Ali said firmly. “It’s up to you.”

“But you told my father you were taking me home,” Crystal argued.

“Yes, I did, but seat belt use is required in this state, and it’s nonnegotiable. I won’t break the law by letting you ride in my vehicle without one. So you choose. It’s either use your seat belt or get out. Which is it?”

With an exaggerated sigh, Crystal flung herself around in the seat, located the seat belt, fastened it, and then settled back into the seat. “Satisfied?” She scowled.

Ali shoved the Cayenne into reverse. Moments after exiting the deserted parking lot, they were back on the freeway. As they headed south, Ali wanted to know more about what Crystal had been up to, and since kindness didn’t seem to work, maybe a touch of toughness would.

“Whose house did you break into?” Ali asked evenly.

“Who says I broke in?” Crystal returned.

“Do I look stupid to you?” Ali wanted to know. “You weren’t standing around outside dressed like that the whole time you were waiting for me, and if you’d been loitering over by the gas station, somebody would have called the cops.”

There was a pause. “I didn’t hurt anything,” Crystal said finally. “I was cold and hungry, and I didn’t have any money. Only there wasn’t any food in the house. Not even crackers.”

Since being tough was working, Ali didn’t let up. “Well, boo-hoo-hoo,” she said with zero sympathy in her voice “Everybody should leave some food lying around the house so whatever burglars happen to break in won’t have to go hungry. Why did you run away?”

“You’re not a cop. You can’t ask me all these questions.”

“No, I’m not a cop,” Ali agreed. “I’m just the poor dope who’s spending a couple of hours of her beauty sleep saving your butt from freezing to death. So consider this a replay of the seat belt situation. Answer the questions or I’ll stop the car and let you out.”

There was another long period of silence. Finally Crystal said, “I wanted to come see my dad. I wanted to come live with him.”

“But you wouldn’t talk to him on the phone just now.”

“He’s mad at me.”

“If you wanted to come live with him, you should have asked; you should have discussed the custody situation with the adults in your life instead of running away.”

“There wasn’t any use in asking,” Crystal said. “Mom wouldn’t let me.”

“How did you get here?” Ali asked. “It’s a long way from Vegas to Mund’s Park.”

Again there was a pause before Crystal answered. “I hitchhiked,” she said at last.

Ali was appalled. “Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?”

“I didn’t have enough money for a bus ticket,” Crystal explained. “And the guys who gave me rides were mostly pretty nice. The one who gave me a ride from Boulder City even bought me lunch in Kingman.”

“For free?” Ali asked.

“What do you mean?”

“He gave you lunch for free?”

Crystal shrugged. “Pretty much,” she said.

“What does ‘pretty much’ mean?”

“All he wanted was a blow job,” Crystal said.

Ali almost wrecked her car. “He what?”

“A blow job. You know what that is, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Ali replied grimly. “I do know what blow jobs are.” Why the hell do you?

Crystal shrugged again. “So I gave him one. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“You gave him a blow job for what, a Subway sandwich?”

“No. KFC.”

Ali could barely believe her ears, and she knew when or if Dave heard the full story, it would totally break his heart.

“I suppose you know what that makes you then,” Ali said. “If you’re selling sex for money or food, you’re a prostitute.”

“Blow jobs aren’t sex,” Crystal asserted. “That’s what the boys at school say—that you can save your virginity for marriage and still do blow jobs now. Just ‘friends with benefits.’ No problem.”

For a moment, Ali was beyond speechless. When she was finally able to reply, she measured her words very carefully. “Some boys will say anything to get what they want out of a girl. But if I were a nice man looking for someone equally nice to marry, a blow-job virgin wouldn’t be first on my list.”

Ali waited for Crystal’s response. When none was forthcoming, Ali glanced in her direction. The enveloping warmth of the vehicle must have affected Crystal because she had nodded off in mid-conversation. With her body sagging against the car door, she sat there with her eyes closed and her mouth slightly open, breathing deeply. Ali realized that she probably hadn’t even heard Ali’s parting remark.

As Ali drove on through the cold winter night, her heart went out to Dave Holman. He has no idea what he’s up against.

In the cold hard predawn darkness, a single vehicle, an SUV, slowed and then rolled to a stop in the middle of the Burro Creek Bridge on U.S. 60 north of Wickenburg. While the driver stayed behind the wheel, two people got out. For a few moments they milled indecisively around on the bridge deck. Finally they went to the rear of the vehicle and pulled something heavy from the luggage area.

They carried it over to the guard rail, hoisted it, and then shoved it over the side, letting it plummet to the floor of the canyon, hundreds of feet below.

The driver honked the horn impatiently. “Let’s go!” he yelled. “Somebody’s coming. We’ve got to get out of here.”

By the time Ali drove back into Sedona, it was already after six. Ali started to drive straight home. Then, at the last minute, she pulled into the Sugarloaf parking lot instead. As soon as the car stopped, Crystal stirred, sat up, and looked around.

“What are we doing here?” she asked sleepily.

The tough-broad act seemed to be working, so Ali kept at it. “You said you were hungry earlier. I’m willing to buy you breakfast, but on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“The people who own this place are my parents. They’re also friends of your father’s. So, when we walk in the front door, I want you to turn right just past the cash register, go straight into the restroom, and use soap and water to scrub that god-awful mess of makeup off your face.”

For a moment it looked as though Crystal was getting ready to argue, but the air in the parking lot was heavy with the scent of Edie Larson’s freshly baked sweet rolls. Eventually they carried the day.

“All right,” Crystal allowed gracelessly. “I’ll do it.”

It was early yet. When they entered the Sugarloaf, only the corner booth was occupied, filled with a bunch of regulars, a crew of construction worker bees who had to be on shift by 7 A.M.

As soon as Ali slipped onto one of the stools at the counter, Edie Larson came over, bringing an empty mug and a steaming pot of coffee. “If you’re not a sight for sore eyes,” she said, pouring Ali’s coffee. “An answer to a maiden’s prayer. And who in the world is that with you, the person who just disappeared into the restroom? She looked like something the cat dragged in—or maybe not even that good.”

“That’s Crystal Holman,” Ali answered. “Dave Holman’s thirteen-year-old daughter. There was some kind of family altercation up in Vegas. Crystal came to see her dad. I picked her up over in Mund’s Park about an hour ago.”

“A family altercation,” Edie repeated. “You mean she ran away from home?”

Edie always seemed to be two steps ahead of everyone else in any given conversation.

“More or less,” Ali answered. “She looked like the wrath of God. I sent her into the restroom to wash several layers of dead makeup off her face.”

“Looked like someone beat her up, too,” Edie observed, then she examined her daughter. “You don’t look so hot yourself,” she added.

“Gee, Mom, thanks,” Ali said. “But why am I the answer to a maiden’s prayers?”

“It’s your father,” Edie said. “He left me a note. He was out half the night on some wild goose chase trying to locate that Bronco of his. I know it was after one before he ever got to bed, so when my alarm went off this morning, I turned his off. I thought it would be better for all concerned if he had a chance to sleep in. With me in the kitchen slinging hash, we’re going to be short-handed out front. I was wondering if you could pitch in for an hour or two—just until your dad wakes up and can drag his tail over here.”

Ali, too, was dead on her feet and ready to be in bed. And this was part of the good news/bad news dynamics of being back home in Sedona—she was always close enough to be called on to help her parents in an emergency—if only for a couple of hours.

“What do I do with Crystal?” Ali asked.

“Does she know how to bus tables or wash dishes?” Edie asked.

“I doubt it,” Ali said.

“There’s no time like the present to learn,” Edie said. “You know where the sweatshirts are. Get one for you and one for her.”

When Crystal emerged from the restroom, her face was scrubbed clean. Except for the still visible bruise on her cheek, she looked altogether better. By then Ali had donned a Sugarloaf Café signature sweatshirt and had another one lying on the counter.

“What’s this?” Crystal asked, picking up the shirt as she slid onto her stool.

“Your uniform,” Ali answered.

“Uniform? What for?”

“For working here,” Ali replied. “If you want breakfast, you’d better be prepared to bus tables and wash dishes.”

“No way,” Crystal returned.

“No work, then no breakfast,” Ali answered.

“But I’m too young to work in a restaurant,” Crystal said.

“You’re too young for hitchhiking and a lot of other things I could mention, but that didn’t stop you,” Ali replied. “Now, put on the sweatshirt.”

Without another word, Crystal unfolded it and pulled it on over her head.

“What do you want to eat?”

“French toast. Bacon. And maybe one of the sweet rolls they have back there on the counter.”

“She’ll have French toast, bacon, and a sweet roll, please,” Ali called to her mother, who had retreated to the kitchen to oversee the grill. Ali turned back to Crystal. “When you finish eating, please clear the dirty dishes off the counter and tables and put them in that plastic dishpan over there. Then please reset the tables with clean silverware and new place mats and napkins. When the dishpan is full, please take it back into the kitchen. My mother will show you how to run the dishwasher.”

Several new customers and the Sugarloaf’s other morning waitress, Jan Howard, entered at once, all of them talking and laughing. Leaving Crystal to wait for her breakfast, Ali stood up, collected an order pad and a coffeepot, and headed off down the counter.

In the next little while Crystal wolfed down an order of French toast and bacon, two sweet rolls, a glass of orange juice, and a glass of milk. Then, pushing her plate aside, she gave Ali a single questioning look before she, too, went to work.

It turned out that, under Edie’s and Jan Howard’s tutelage, Crystal was a much quicker study than Ali would have anticipated. By the time Bob Larson turned up, a little before nine, she had learned to do a credible job of busing tables and running the dishwasher back in the kitchen.

As soon as Bob saw Ali working behind the counter, he came straight to her station. “What are you doing here?” he wanted to know.

“Pinch-hitting for Mr. Lazy Bones,” Ali returned.

Just then Crystal pushed through the swinging door from the kitchen and emerged carrying a tray loaded with clean glasses.

“And who’s that?” Bob wanted to know, nodding in her direction.

“You should probably ask Mom about her,” Ali suggested. “She can tell you the whole story.”

“If she’s speaking to me, that is,” Bob said mournfully.

“She turned off your alarm clock,” Ali said. “She fixed it so you could sleep in. If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.”

Without another word, Bob turned and headed for the kitchen. “Have you heard anything from Kip?” Ali asked after him.

Bob stopped and shook his head. “Not a word,” he said, then disappeared through the swinging door. A few minutes later Edie emerged. She had shed her cooking apron and had changed into a clean sweatshirt of her own. “You two go on home now and get some sleep,” she said, collecting Ali’s order pad. “I’ll take over from here.”

Shortly after that, Ali and Crystal headed out the door. Crystal was still wearing her uniform sweatshirt, a gift from Edie. As Ali climbed into the Cayenne, she felt as weary as she remembered feeling in years. Once they got to the house, Ali gave Crystal a stack of bedding and directed her to the sofa. Then she handed her one of Chris’s T-shirts to use as a nightshirt. Ali was in the bedroom pulling on her own nightgown when her cell phone rang.

“I’m just coming into Flagstaff on I-40,” Dave said. “How are things?”

“Well, I’m certainly glad to know you took my advice and slept overnight in Vegas,” Ali said. She walked over to the alarm key pad and turned it on. “Crystal and I just finished up helping out with breakfast at the Sugarloaf. Now we’re hoping to get some sleep.”

“Crystal helped out at the restaurant?” Dave asked. “Are you kidding?”

“You’d be surprised how far hunger goes in producing willing compliance,” Ali told him. “You can come by here a little later to pick her up, but give us a couple of hours before you do. Neither one of us has had much sleep.”

“That makes three of us,” Dave said. “I’ll go home, then, too. Give me a call when you’re ready. That way you can wake me up instead of the other way around.”

“How’s Roxie taking all this?”

“Long story,” Dave said. “Let’s not go into it right now.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Ali was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. Sometime later a ringing telephone jarred her awake. “Ms. Reynolds?” a stranger asked.

“Yes. Who is this?”

“Your EMS operator. Your system is alarming. Could you please give me your password, and are you all right? Do you need us to summon some assistance? I see on my screen that someone has gained access to your home through the front door…”

Ali reeled off her password and scrambled out of bed, pulling on her robe as she went. She hurried out into the living room. Crystal’s blankets and pillow lay abandoned on the sofa. Her clothes and shoes were nowhere to be seen. Obviously Crystal had taken off on her own. Where the hell had she gone?

“It wasn’t someone coming in,” Ali told the operator. “It was someone going out—a guest going out who had no idea that opening the door would set off the alarm.”

“You’re all right then?”

“I’m fine,” Ali said. Fine but pissed!

“You’ll key in the end-alarm code then?”

“Yes,” Ali said. “Yes, I will.” And she did. Then she threw on a tracksuit and a pair of tennies and raced outside to the Cayenne. She caught up with Crystal halfway down the hill and pulled up beside her. Seeing Crystal in one of Chris’s ski jackets didn’t improve Ali’s frame of mind.

“There’s nothing like being an ungrateful pain in the ass,” Ali told her. “Just where do you think you’re going?”

“To see my friends,” Crystal returned.

“It’s a school day,” Ali said. “Your friends are all in school. At least they should be.” And you should be, too, Ali thought. “Get in.”

“I’ll walk over and see my dad then,” Crystal said. Defiance seemed to be the order of the day.

“Not in my son’s ski jacket, you won’t,” Ali said. “Now, either get in the car or I call the cops and have you arrested for petty theft.”

“You wouldn’t,” Crystal said.

“Yes, I would,” Ali told her. “I don’t know what makes you think people don’t mean what they say. Do you see the phone in my hand? Do you see me dialing nine-one-one?”

Crystal favored Ali with a long stare. Finally, with a disparaging shake of her head, she flounced around the front bumper to the Cayenne’s passenger side door and climbed in.

“Take off the jacket,” Ali said, once Crystal was inside.

“Why should I?”

“Because I told you to.”

“But it’s cold,” Crystal objected.

“Too bad,” Ali returned.

Crystal removed the jacket and then flung it into the backseat. “Besides,” she added. “I was just borrowing it. It wasn’t really stealing.”

“You didn’t have my son’s permission to take it,” Ali pointed out. “That makes it stealing the same way taking food or money for sex—even sex you don’t think is sex—is called prostitution.”

When Ali glanced in Crystal’s direction again, she noticed that for the first time the girl’s tough-as-nails demeanor seemed to have crumpled a little.

“Don’t tell my father I took it,” she whimpered suddenly as tears sprang to her eyes. “Please don’t tell him about the other, either—about, you know, the hitchhiking.”

Ali knew full well that Crystal’s running away had been a cry for help. Something was definitely wrong in this young woman’s life. But Ali also knew that she was dealing with a master manipulator, and she had no intention of being routed by this sudden case of deliberately staged waterworks. She didn’t relish having to tell Dave what his darling daughter had been doing, but someone was going to have to tell him—and Ali’s first choice for that job was Crystal herself. Things were never going to get better for Crystal unless she accepted some responsibility for her own actions.

“If you don’t want me to tell him, then you’d better,” Ali said.

“I can’t,” Crystal said softly.

“Why not?”

“Because when he finds out what I’ve done, he’ll probably kill me.”

“And most of the parents I know wouldn’t blame him if he did,” Ali returned. “Seat belt,” she added.

This time Crystal fastened hers without a murmur of objection, so maybe they were making progress. “Where are we going?” she asked.

“Where you said you wanted to go,” Ali countered. “To see your father.” And they headed into town.

Forced to move out of his house in the aftermath of his divorce, Dave Holman had taken up residence in the basement apartment of an old house on Sky Mountain. His landlady, a well-to-do widow with a penchant for traveling, was happy to have a dependable tenant to look after the place while she was off on one of her year’s several cruises or staying for months at her flat in London. Dave, on the other hand, was glad to rent from someone who was seldom around and who gave him very little grief.

Pulling up the steep driveway with its tricky turnaround, Ali was reminded of Arabella’s place. This house was comparable to the Ashcroft’s in size and elevation but the view from that one was three hundred and sixty degrees. This one, built into the hillside, was only one-eighty and looked off to the east.

When Ali stopped the car, Crystal reached for the door handle. “Are you coming in?” she asked.

“Not right now,” Ali said. “Please tell your dad what’s going on. He’s a good man, Crystal, and he needs to know. Let him help you.”

Crystal nodded. “Okay,” she said.

Dave must have heard them drive up. The door to his downstairs apartment swung open and he came striding through it, walking with a cell phone pressed to his ear. As Crystal exited the car, Ali saw a storm of warring expressions distort Dave’s handsome face. He was at once furious and grateful; angry and concerned. As he hurried forward to gather his daughter into his arms, gratitude won the day.

“Thank you,” he mouthed silently to Ali over the top of Crystal’s head.

Ali nodded.

“Will you come in?” he asked aloud.

“No, thanks,” Ali said. “I’m sure you two have a lot to talk about. I’d just be in the way. I’ll leave you to it.”

Good luck, she thought. You’re going to need it.

{ CHAPTER 7 }

Having had her whole day blown out of the water, Ali was eager to get back home. She had yet to make any of the cancer treatment calls she’d promised to make on Velma’s behalf, and she had yet to touch Arabella Ashcroft’s diary.

With Crystal safely in her father’s keeping, a relieved Ali turned around and drove back down the mountain. It was early afternoon and almost time for the Sugarloaf to close for the day. Still as she started to drive past the restaurant, she was surprised to see several more vehicles in the parking lot than should have been there at that time of day, including a City of Sedona police car. Knowing that there was little love lost between her father and the local constabulary, Ali made a U-turn and then went back to the parking lot, where she pulled in beside the patrol car.

The CLOSED sign was in the window, but the door was unlocked. Ali let herself inside. Her father was seated in the corner booth along with two uniformed City of Sedona police officers. One of the officers was new to Ali. The other one, Kenny Harmon, she did know. As a rookie patrol officer, Kenny had given Bob Larson his one and only speeding ticket—for doing forty in a thirty-five. Kenny’s presence accounted in large measure for the thunderous look on Ali’s father’s face. The fourth person in the booth was a woman. Her back was turned to Ali, but she seemed to be doing most of the talking.

“We’re closed,” Edie Larson called from the kitchen when the bell over the door announced Ali’s entrance. Edie appeared in the swinging door, wielding a mop. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

“What’s going on?”

Edie jerked her head in the direction of the only occupied booth. “That’s Sandy—Sandy Mitchell. She’s one of the clerks over at Basha’s. She’s also Kip Hogan’s girlfriend. Your dad’s helping her file a missing persons report.”

Ali did know Sandy. She had been a grocery clerk at Basha’s for years. The idea that she was involved with Kip—the idea that anyone was involved with Kip—was news to Ali. No wonder he’d gone to the trouble of having his teeth fixed.

“Kip was supposed to see her last night, only he didn’t show up. She came by here after work today looking for him. That’s when your father finally decided maybe it was time to call the cops. There’s still a little coffee left. Want some?”

“Coffee would be great,” Ali said, accepting her mother’s offer and grabbing a seat at the counter.

“Have you had lunch?”

Ali shook her head. “I thought you were closed.”

“We don’t have to be open for me to make you a sandwich. Tuna? And I’ve got a container of stew for you to take home for dinner.”

Ali nodded. “Thanks,” she said. “A sandwich would be very nice, and Chris adores your stew.”

Edie rolled her eyes. “Why do you think I made it?” she asked.

Seated at the counter in the almost deserted restaurant, it was easy for Ali to hear everything being said at the corner booth.

“So that’s the last time you saw him,” Kenny was saying. “When he came by the store late yesterday morning to give you some flowers.”

Sandy nodded tearfully. “It was our two-month anniversary,” she said.

“Did he mention anything about what his plans for the day might be? Did he mention where he was going or what he was going to do?”

“He said he needed to deliver some furniture. Then he was going up to the Rim, but he didn’t have to say so,” Sandy added. “He always goes up there on Tuesday afternoons. I was upset about what had happened with those kids earlier. He offered to put the trip off until today, but I told him he should go ahead. People were counting on him. I told him I’d be fine. I needed him to go so I could write up the incident report.”

“What incident report?” Ali asked her mother.

“There were some college kids up for the day who came into Basha’s yesterday expecting to buy booze. They came through Sandy’s register and were all bent out of shape when she carded them and wouldn’t let them buy,” Edie explained. “They were still at the store and giving Sandy grief about it when Kip showed up and shut them down. Kip can be pretty intimidating on occasion.”

Ali regarded that as a bit of an understatement. Even with new teeth and carrying a bouquet of flowers, Kip Hogan would have been scary as hell.

“We usually meet up at an AA meeting on Tuesday evenings,” Sandy was saying. “That’s where we met—Alcoholics Anonymous. He wasn’t there, though, and he didn’t come by later, either. I worried about it some overnight, but this morning, at work, when I heard about Mr. Larson’s Bronco being found, that really scared me. Kip knows how much Mr. Larson loves that car. He’d never do anything to jeopardize it, especially not considering the way the Larsons have treated him. He told me once they were more like family than his own family.”

“So Mr. Hogan does have family then?” the cop asked.

“I guess,” Sandy answered.

“Any idea where we might find those family members?”

Sandy shook her head. “He never said.”

Kenny, pen in hand, turned to Ali’s father. “Did Mr. Hogan ever mention to you where he was from?”

“No,” Bob answered. “Not to me, anyway.”

“You think he had something to hide?”

“If we live long enough, we all have something to hide,” Bob Larson said.

Ali could tell from her father’s tone of voice that Bob was fast running out of patience.

“Where was his driver’s license from?” Kenny asked.

Bob glanced guiltily at his wife before he answered. “He told me he had a driver’s license,” Bob said. “I guess I never actually saw it.”

“You just took his word for it?”

Bob looked pained. “I had hurt my leg,” he said. “I needed someone who could drive for me.”

“Good lord!” Edie muttered under her breath, taking a seat next to her daughter. “There’s no fool like an old fool.”

“So you don’t even know what state it would have been from or whether or not it had been suspended.”

Bob shook his head.

The other cop seemed content to let that one go. “Forget it, Kenny. You told us he doesn’t have a cell phone, Mr. Larson. Is there a chance that he might have made any long-distance calls that showed up on your bill—calls that might lead us to some other people who know him or who knew him in the past?”

“I don’t remember that he did,” Bob replied.

“Believe me, if there’d been an unexplained call on the phone bill, your father would have remembered,” Edie told Ali in a pained whisper. “He goes over every line of every bill every month, but he couldn’t be bothered with asking whether or not Kip had a driver’s license? As soon as the cops leave, I think I’m gonna kill the man and be done with it.”

By the time Edie’s rant was over, the cops were ready to leave. “This doesn’t give us a whole lot to go on, but we’ll see what we can do,” Kenny said. “You say your Bronco’s still up at Franco’s Garage?”

“It’s still there,” Bob answered. “Along with the goods Kip was supposed to drop off at the homeless encampment up on the Rim. They evidently weren’t good enough for the creep who took my tools, gas can, and spare tire.”

As the two cops left, Edie followed them to the door and locked it behind them. She went over to the booth where Bob was still sitting with Sandy, who had burst into tears. “Where could Kip be?” Sandy wailed. “Something terrible has happened to him. I’m sure of it.”

Edie slipped into the booth next to her and put her arm around Sandy’s shoulders. “I’m sure the cops will do everything they can to find him,” she said kindly. “Won’t they, Bob?”

“Absolutely,” Bob agreed, but only after Edie nudged his ankle under the table. “Of course they will.”

Sandy turned her tearstained face in his direction. “Do you think so?” she asked. “Really?”

“Definitely,” Bob declared with what sounded like absolute confidence. “No doubt about it.”

A few minutes later, when Bob stood up to walk Sandy out to her vehicle, Edie turned to her daughter. “So, where’s your charge?” she asked.

“Dave’s home now,” Ali said. “I dropped her off with him.”

“Does he know what she’s been up to?” Edie asked.

“Crystal’s supposed to tell him.”

“What if she doesn’t?” Edie asked.

“Then I’ll probably have to,” Ali allowed. “I don’t want to be stuck in the middle of it, but I’ll do it if I have to.”

Edie clicked her tongue. “It’s going to break Dave’s heart when he has to take her to a doctor to have her tested for STDs.”

Ali looked at her mother in surprise. She had always been baffled by her mother’s uncanny ability to see everything and know everything, and the fact that Edie Larson was conversant on the subject of sexually transmitted diseases seemed to be another case in point.

“Crystal told you what she’d been up to?” Ali asked.

“She didn’t have to tell me a thing,” Edie Larson returned. “All I had to do was look at her. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”

By four that afternoon, Ali had made several calls to California. Then with Sam curled contentedly on the couch beside her, Ali was ready to reply to Velma Trimble’s e-mail:

Dear Velma,

I’m so sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you. Things have been crazy around here. I’ve spoken to several doctors in your general area. The one that’s getting the highest marks is a concierge medical practice in Costa Mesa called Cancer Resource Specialties. I guess you’d call them a cancer care clearing-house.

You pay a set fee to join their practice, and none of that fee would be covered by either insurance carriers or by Medicare. Cancer Resource then provides routine medical care. After all, people with cancer still get the flu. On the cancer front, however, they arrange for referrals to appropriate specialists all over the country. They help organize appointments with oncologists, arrange for scans and MRIs, put patients in touch with surgeons, pain management specialists, and whatever else may be needed. In other words, you pay them to know all the stuff you need to find out right now when you don’t have the time or the energy to track it all down on your own.

The woman who started Cancer Resource is an internist named Dr. Nancy Cooper. I met her several years ago at a luncheon and found her to be very impressive. She got involved when she realized how dealing with the ins and outs of a cancer diagnosis can simply overwhelm both the patient and the patient’s family. Her whole focus is trying to coordinate care and smooth out some of those rough spots.

As I said at the beginning, this service is relativelyexpensive, but I have no doubt it’s well worth whatever she charges. Her fee scale is listed on her Web site. Check it out. If this is more than you can afford, let me know and I’ll see what other options may be available.

ALI

With that out of the way, it was only natural for Ali to turn to the blog. The cutloose mailbox was brimming over with comments, all of them dealing with her last post, the one she had written just after she had learned of Crystal’s disappearance. Without knowing the girl had been found, Ali’s readers were still hanging in limbo—still waiting to hear. Scanning through the outpouring of commentary, Ali was interested to see that responses often touched on opposite sides of the same story.

Dear Babe,

My father was an abusive drunk. My mother was a doormat who would never say a word when he lit into us kids with a belt or a spoon or whatever else came readily to hand. I thought nothing could be worse than staying where I was, so when I was fifteen I ran away from home. How wrong I was. By the time I was eighteen I’d had three abortions and was strung out on heroin. I’m clean and sober now, but I also have hepatitis C and am HIV positive. My father sobered up years ago. My younger sister says he’s a different person now. She thinks I should come home—that I should forgive him and let bygones be bygones. It’s not fair. He got his life back. Mine is over. I hope your friend finds his daughter before it’s too late. I hope it’s not his fault that she ran away.

DAWN

Ali studied that one for a long time. There was so much hurt in the words, she hardly knew where to begin in crafting a response:

Dear Dawn,

The life you have is the life you have, and it isn’t over until it’s over. Don’t give up too soon. And your sister may be right. Forgiving your father may make it possible for you to forgive the other person in your life who needs forgiveness—yourself.

I think your comment is an important one, and I’d like to post it on the blog, but I won’t do so without your express permission. Please let me know.

BABE

The next one came from the parent of a missing child.

Dear Babe,

I’ll be praying for the girl’s safe return. My daughter Sally disappeared when she was twelve—on January 11, 1966—forty-one years to the day before your friend’s daughter went missing. That’s why, when I read your post, it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. We still don’t know what happened to our Sally or if she’s dead or alive. Part of me knows that she’s dead—has always known that she’s dead. But another part of me still hopes that someday the front door will slam open and she’ll be standing there saying, “Mama, I’m home.”

Please let us know if your friend’s daughter returns safely.

LOUANN

Ali posted that comment and skimmed the rest. More comments came clicking in while she was reading. In the end, there were so many that it simply wasn’t feasible to respond to them all individually. She replied in her post instead.

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

Wednesday, January 11, 2006, supplemental

The response to my last post about my friend’s missing daughter has been absolutely overwhelming. Thank you all for your concern, for your prayers, and for your kind comments.

First and most important I want you all to know that what was lost has been found. My friend’s daughter is home. She’s safe. And, externally at least, she doesn’t seem to have been harmed. However she did run away from home. Why she did that remains to be seen, and I’m sure she and her family will be addressing that and other issues in the course of the next few days—and most likely for sometime after that as well.

She was found and brought home last night, but things were so hectic today that I didn’t get around to picking up my computer until just now. When I did so, I was utterly stunned by the huge number of messages I found there. As always, the thing that astonishes me is the number of people I’ve heard from who wrote to express their concerns, people who have dealt with similar problems in their own lives. Of the messages I’ve skimmed I’ve posted only the one from LouAnn.

The sheer volume of mail on this topic precludes me from answering each of them on an individual basis. I’ll be posting more and responding individually when appropriate and as time allows.

Babe, posted 4:55P.M.

By then it was late afternoon. When Chris came home after school, he went directly to the kitchen to dish up and zap a bowl of his grandmother’s beef stew. “The last I knew you were heading out to find Dave Holman’s missing daughter,” Chris said while he waited for the microwave. “How did that work out?”

“Not all that well,” Ali said. “I brought her home here, and while I was sleeping this morning, she tried to sneak off in one of your ski jackets.”

“As in steal?” he asked.

“Exactly,” Ali replied.

“So she wasn’t particularly grateful.”

“You could say that,” Ali agreed. “Not particularly.”

“How old is she again?”

“Thirteen.”

“And you did get my jacket back?” Chris asked.

“Yes.”

“So where is she now?”

“I dropped her off at her dad’s.”

Chris grinned. “So, now she’s his problem.” He pulled his bowl out of the microwave. “I don’t remember ever being quite that difficult.”

“I don’t remember it either,” Ali said. “Because I don’t think you ever were that difficult—not even when you were sixteen, which, as I remember, wasn’t a banner year.”

“Does that mean the next time I leave the kitchen a mess, I’ve got some slack coming?” he wanted to know.

“Get out of here,” Ali said. She plucked a small pillow off the couch and threw it at him. Sam, who disapproved of pillow fights, disappeared into the bedroom while Chris, bowl in hand, headed for the basement studio they had carved for him out of what had once been Aunt Evie’s two-car garage. Later, Ali heard him head out for the evening. She didn’t ask him where he was going, and he didn’t offer to tell her.

In the deepening twilight, Ali helped herself to her own bowl of stew. Only after dinner had been eaten and cleared away and with the house quiet once more, did she realize that she no longer had any viable excuse for avoiding Arabella Ashcroft’s diary. By agreeing to take the volume with her, she had tacitly agreed to read it—whether or not she wanted to—and it was time to start.

Ali adjusted the living room lights and turned on the gas log in the fireplace. Then, after retrieving the diary from her purse, she settled onto the leather sofa. She had no more than sat down when Sam joined her there, snuggling up against her leg and purring noisily. Comforted by the big cat’s solid presence, Ali opened the gold-embossed book. Shuffling through the book, she found that the vast majority of the pages were blank, but the pages that had been used were covered in a blocky, immature cursive. Ali turned to the first one.

Happy birthday to Me,

Happy birthday to Me,

Happy birthday dear Bella.

Happy birthday to me.

Because it is my birthday and I’m nine whole years old today. And I got just what I wanted for my birthday—abright blue parakeet. I think I’m going to call him Blueboy, and I’m going to teach him to talk. Parakeets can talk, you know, almost as well as parrots, you just have to know how to teach them. I would have taken a parrot, but mother says they’re a lot bigger and a lot more trouble.

I didn’t really want a diary, but Miss Ponder gave it to me anyway. Miss Ponder hasn’t been here very long, but she’s the nicest governess I’ve ever had. The others were all stiff or mean or old, and they never gave me any presents. Miss Ponder isn’t mean at all and the way she listens when I talk makes me want to tell her stuff I wouldn’t tell anyone else. Like the fact that I want to be a writer when I grow up. That’s why she gave me this diary. She says writers need lots of practice before they can actually write books and that lots of famous writers started out by keeping a journal. Or a diary. So that’s what I’m doing. Starting out.

That initial diary entry wasn’t at all what Ali had expected. She had thought she’d encounter something terribly graphic or terribly grim or both, and she hadn’t wanted to inflict those gory details on herself. She didn’t really want to know exactly how little Arabella Ashcroft, incest survivor, had been victimized by her older brother. What Ali had discovered instead, was a profound and completely unexpected connection between herself and the nine-year-old child who had penned those innocently bittersweet words some six decades earlier.

Ali Larson had been around nine years old when she, like Arabella, had been bitten by a similar ambition. Ali Larson had decided in fourth grade that she wanted to be a writer. And through some combination of luck and determination, and with the timely help of Arabella’s mother, Ali had done just exactly that—she had become a journalist. And now she was writing every day in her blog with people reading what she had written and, more important, responding to it in very personal ways

For whatever reason, Arabella’s ambitions had never come to fruition. And maybe that’s what this was all about. Maybe that was one of the reasons Ali had been put in touch with Arabella at this juncture in their lives. Maybe, even at this late date, Ali Reynolds could somehow help Arabella Ashcroft realize her long-buried dream. Or perhaps Ali was involved with Arabella, just as she was with Velma T, in order to sort things out between these two aging women and their interfering younger relatives—Velma’s son and Arabella’s nephew.

Before Ali managed to turn to the next entry in the diary, her phone rang. “What am I going to do with her?” Dave Holman asked.

He sounded exasperated beyond bearing. Having spent several long hours with Crystal Holman, Ali knew the girl came complete with a tangle of complications, none of them with easy answers. Before Ali tried to reply, though, she needed to know which one of Crystal’s many thorny issues Dave’s question addressed. Was it primarily due to Crystal’s being a runaway? Was it about her precocious and generally blasé attitude toward sexual activity and the need to have her checked out for possible STDs? Maybe the real answer was all of the above.

“It’s like I don’t even know her anymore,” Dave went on. “She’s not the same kid she used to be. She won’t look me in the eye. When I ask her questions, she won’t give me a straight answer about anything.”

“Did you ask her why she ran away?”

“Of course.”

“What did she tell you?”

“All the usual BS,” Dave replied. “She hates her new school. She doesn’t have any friends. Her teachers are stupid. Gary Whitman is a jerk. Her mother likes Richey better than she likes her. It’s all pretty typical teenage angst. My God, Ali. I know I wasn’t the easiest kid to deal with when I was her age, but I never pulled anything like this.”

Listening to Dave’s recitation of what Crystal had told him, Ali couldn’t help thinking about Arabella Ashcroft. She had been molested and had never told anyone, most especially her parents. Would things have been better for Arabella if she had told? And did anyone else have the right to tell Dave about what was going on with his daughter if Crystal couldn’t bring herself to do it? Yes, Crystal was a child, but even children had a right to some privacy.

As for Dave? He was an experienced homicide cop, used to interrogating crooks and getting them to answer tough questions. Evidently his tried-and-true questioning techniques weren’t working very well on his own daughter.

“Did you talk to her about hitchhiking?” Ali asked. “About how dangerous it is?”

“Are you kidding? I talked about that until I was blue in the face,” Dave returned. “But I don’t think she was listening. I tried to explain to her how lucky she was that something terrible hadn’t happened to her on the way here.”

Something terrible did happen, Ali thought. She lost her innocence. She sold her body for a ride, and the damage to her self-respect will probably last a lifetime.

“Did she tell you about the guy who hit her?” Ali asked.

“She said it was a boyfriend, and that she’s broken up with him now,” Dave continued. “But she’s still threatening to run away, especially if I’m going to take her back to Vegas. So what happens when I have to go to work in the morning, Ali? I’m due to testify in court tomorrow or the next day. The county courthouse is in Prescott. That means I have to be in Prescott as well. What do I do with Crystal while I’m gone? Lock her up in the house? And if she were to let herself out, all she’d have to do is walk down to the bottom of the hill and stick out her thumb. She’ll be long gone in a matter of minutes.”

“You’re right to be worried,” Ali said. “But since you have to work, and since Roxie is the one with custody, couldn’t she or Gary drive down from Vegas to pick Crystal up?”

“They have jobs, too,” Dave replied. “Besides, Roxie has taken the position that this whole thing is somehow my fault, that I must have encouraged Crystal to run away. Now that Crystal’s here, Roxie says it’s my responsibility to get her back home. While I was talking to Roxie on the phone, I could hear Gary talking in the background, muttering something about ‘custodial interference.’”

“You think they’ll try to make some kind of official issue out of this?”

“I’d bet money on it,” Dave said. “The sooner I can get it handled, the sooner it’ll go away, but the earliest I’ll be able to drive back up to Vegas will be Saturday morning—unless the court appearance finishes up earlier.”

“Does Crystal want to go back?” Ali asked.

“What do you mean?” Dave asked.

“When I picked her up last night, I got the impression that she was hoping to come live with you on a permanent basis.”

“Crystal’s old enough to have some say in the matter, but not by pulling a stunt like this, and for right now the divorce decree is very clear. It specifies that Roxie gets full custody and I get to pay full child support. If Crystal were to come to live with me, Gary and Roxie would have to lose some of the child support. Believe me, that’s never going to happen.

“Besides,” he added, “if it did, what would I do with her? Where would we go? This is only a one-bedroom place, but it’s as much as I can afford. I’m fine here on my own, but it would never work for two people. Tonight, Crystal is in the bedroom, and I’m camping out on the couch. That’s not feasible in the long run. If she was going to stay on here permanently, I’d have to find somewhere else to live. You take what I make, deduct what I pay in child support, and figure out how much is left. Not very much. Not enough to pay for a decent two-bedroom apartment. We’d end up in one of those trailer parks down by Oak Creek. They’re probably okay, but they’re not the kinds of places where I’d like to raise my daughter.”

Ali could hear the distress in Dave’s voice. Buffeted by indecision, he was unable to see his way clear in any one direction.

“Why don’t you bring Crystal here tomorrow and let me look after her for the day?” Ali suggested finally. “Better yet, bring her along to the Sugarloaf when you come to breakfast tomorrow morning. I’ll come down to the restaurant and pick her up. She can stay with me until you get back from Prescott. Ditto for Friday.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t mind?” Dave asked. The relief in his voice was obvious. “I mean, you’ve already done so much…”

“Hey, Dave,” Ali said. “Hello!!! It’s Ali Reynolds, remember me? Remember everything you did for me when we were out in California? We’re a long way from being even. Besides, isn’t that what friends are for?”

“As long as you’re sure you don’t mind.”

“I don’t,” Ali said. “See you in the morning.”

Ali had planned on returning to Arabella’s diary, but she changed her mind, closed the slim volume, and returned it to her purse.

If I’m going to be dealing with Crystal Holman all day tomorrow, Ali told herself firmly, I’d better try to get some sleep.

{ CHAPTER 8 }

For the second day in a row, Ali was at the Sugarloaf bright and early. Dave’s aging Nissan was already parked outside, and he and Crystal were seated in one of the booths. Ali stopped off at the counter where her mother had just picked up a freshly filled coffeepot. She poured a cup for her daughter.

“Any word on Kip yet?” Ali asked.

Edie shook her head. “Not so far. Your father’s worried sick about him. I’m still of the opinion that the man’s off on a toot somewhere and he’ll be back once he sobers up. Even Kip Hogan is smart enough to see he’s got a good thing going here. If your dad’s soft-headedness isn’t a good thing, I don’t know what is. Chicken-fried steak?”

Ali nodded. “Sounds great,” she said. Then, taking her coffee, Ali walked over to Dave and Crystal’s booth. “May I join you?” she asked.

Dave greeted her with a grateful smile. “Sure. Have a seat.”

Crystal, looking like a clown in a pair of her father’s oversize sweats, was anything but cordial.

“So I guess you’re stuck babysitting me today?” she demanded, shoving her emptied plate and silverware aside. “Aren’t I a little old for that?”

“Crystal!” Dave admonished. “Ali’s a good friend of mine, and she’s doing me a huge favor by looking after you today. There’s no need to be rude.”

At this rate, it’s going to be a very long day, Ali thought. Time to put on the tough-broad act again. “That depends,” she replied.

“On what?” Crystal wanted to know.

“On you,” Ali said. “I can keep you company today or I can be your babysitter. If you insist on acting like a baby, then I suppose I’ll be forced to treat you like a baby.”

The slightest hint of a grin tweaked the corners of Dave’s mouth. Meantime Crystal favored Ali with a sour stare before turning her attention fully on her father. “If you don’t want to leave me at your place alone, why can’t I go to Prescott with you?” she wheedled. “Why do I have to stay here with her?”

Having Ali there seemed to give Dave some much needed backbone where his headstrong daughter was concerned. “Because I said so,” he answered. “Because I’m going to Prescott on official police business in an official county vehicle. I’m not allowed to bring along passengers.”

“But…”

“No buts,” Dave said.

“Crystal,” Ali said cheerfully. “I’m not nearly as bad as you think I am. Besides, since your dad’s paying for breakfast, you won’t even have to wash dishes.”

Crystal pulled a face. Out of her line of sight Dave winked at Ali and then glanced at his watch. “If I’m going to be on time, I need to go collect my wheels and head out.” He stood up and extracted his wallet from his pocket. “See you later.”

Crystal crossed her arms. “Whatever,” she said.

After Dave left, Ali and Crystal sat silently in the booth with Ali sipping her coffee and with Crystal staring out the window. Crystal was the one who finally broke the silence.

“Are you his girlfriend or what?” she asked.

“Your father and I are friends,” Ali said. “Good friends. Ever since high school.”

“Dad made fun of Mom for living in a trailer, but now he’s hanging out with someone who does, too, and who works in a café. I can hardly wait to tell Richey and Cassie that Dad is dating a waitress.”

“Helping my parents out on occasion doesn’t necessarily make me a waitress—but what would it matter if I was?” Ali asked. “There’s nothing wrong with being a waitress. On the other hand, behaving like a spoiled three-year-old and insulting people isn’t a good way of showing you don’t need a babysitter,” Ali said.

“But I don’t need a babysitter,” Crystal insisted. “And you can’t keep me here against my will. Isn’t that like false imprisonment or something?”

“Maybe you’d prefer real imprisonment,” Ali replied. “If you run away while your father has left you in my care, I’ll have an Amber Alert posted on you so fast that you’ll never make it to the freeway. When the cops catch up with you, you’ll be in trouble and so will whoever’s giving you a ride. By the way, did you happen to tell your father what you used for bus tokens to get here?”

Crystal turned away and didn’t answer. Meantime, Edie showed up with Ali’s breakfast.

“How are you doing?” Edie asked Crystal. “Do you want anything more?”

“Maybe another sweet roll,” Crystal said.

“So what are we going to do then?” Crystal wanted to know once Edie left their table. “Sit around in this stupid place all day?”

“Get you some decent clothes maybe?” Ali asked. “Your father’s don’t exactly suit you.”

“Where from?” Crystal asked sarcastically. “Wal-Mart?”

Obviously Wal-Mart didn’t measure up, but Ali pretended cluelessness. “Sure,” she said. “If Wal-Mart’s okay with you, it’s fine with me.”

Ali had almost finished her chicken-fried steak and Crystal had mowed through her second sweet roll when the front door crashed open and a distraught Sandy Mitchell staggered inside. Dodging around the counter, Sandy pushed her way into the kitchen and fell into Bob Larson’s arms.

“They think they found Kip,” she sobbed. “He’s in Phoenix at St. Francis Hospital. He may not make it.”

Leading Sandy by the arm, Bob brought her back out of the kitchen and eased her onto one of the stools at the counter. Everyone else in the restaurant fell silent, listening.

“Where?” he asked. “Where did they find him?”

“Up by Flagstaff somewhere,” Sandy said. “They said it looked like someone had beaten him with a baseball bat and left him for dead along I-17. They airlifted him to Phoenix to the trauma center at St. Francis. They’ve brought in a surgeon from the Hyde Neurological Institute. They’ve already done one round of brain surgery. They may have to do another one today.”

Ali remembered being at Sunset Point to retrieve her father’s crippled Bronco and hearing the low-flying helicopter pass overhead. But that had been the night before last. How could it have taken this long to connect the dots between the Sedona missing persons report and a severely beaten trauma victim?

“Can you drive down there with me?” Sandy continued. “I’m not sure I can do this by myself. I’m so upset right now that I almost wrecked the car twice just getting here.”

Bob glanced around the crowded restaurant. It was already full and more customers were clustered near the door waiting to be seated. With Bob out front, Edie had ducked back into the kitchen.

“I can’t go right now,” Bob said. “Later on today, yes, but not right now.”

“I’ll take her,” Ali offered. “Crystal and I can give her a ride down to Phoenix, and you can bring her back home this evening.”

“Is that all right with you, Sandy?” Bob asked.

Sandy nodded. “If Ali doesn’t mind.”

“Crystal and I were planning on doing some shopping today, and the shopping is definitely better in Phoenix,” Ali said. “We’ll be happy to give you a ride.”

Crystal rolled her eyes.

“All right,” Bob said. “It’s settled then. You go with Ali. I’ll come down this afternoon as soon as the restaurant closes.”

With that, he returned to the kitchen and resumed possession of his spatula. Once Edie returned to the counter, she went straight to Sandy.

“Have you had anything to eat today?” she asked.

“No,” Sandy said, shaking her head. “Not yet.”

“Have something then,” Edie urged. “You need to keep up your strength, and you know what hospital cafeterias are like. They’re expensive and the food stinks.”

Sandy left the restaurant a little while later with a fully stocked care package of food. Ali took Crystal and stopped by her own place long enough to make sure Sam had food and water and to straighten up.

If Ali was going out in public in Phoenix, she was determined to look reasonably decent. In the privacy of her bedroom, she applied her makeup. Then she changed out of her casual around-Sedona sweats in favor of a pair of tight-fitting jeans and a bright magenta long-sleeved T-shirt, both of which looked terrific on her newly Mr. Bowflexed figure, thank you very much.

With Ali’s recent history in mind, she no longer left home without taking her Glock. To finish off her outfit she slipped on her small-of-back holster and topped that with a hip-length denim jacket. At the last moment, thinking her computer might come in handy for keeping Crystal entertained, Ali dragged that along out to the car. Then they drove to Sandy’s place in Oak Creek RV Haven, a low-rent trailer park that had almost washed away in the previous summer’s severe flooding.

While they waited for Sandy to emerge from a camper trailer that made Kip’s LazyDaze seem spacious by comparison, Ali called Chris’s cell phone. She knew he was in class and couldn’t answer, but she left him a message so he’d know what was going on. Then she turned to Crystal. “How about if you ride in back?”

“Do I have to?”

Ali had to bite back a sarcastic reply. Crystal’s a child, Ali reminded herself. A very troubled child.

“You don’t have to ride in back, but I’d appreciate it if you would,” Ali said. “I know you think your life sucks at the moment, and I’m not saying it doesn’t. But so does Sandy Mitchell’s. The man she loves is in the hospital and may be dying. She’s really upset right now and may need to talk.”

“All right,” Crystal agreed grudgingly. She got out of the front seat and into the back one, slamming both doors as she went.

“Seat belt,” Ali said.

With an exaggerated sigh, Crystal complied. Once she was belted in, she pulled an iPod from the pocket of her father’s oversize sweats, plugged in her earphones, and went away. Ali couldn’t help being struck by the fact that Crystal had run away from home with no clothes but with plenty of electronic gear—both a cell phone and an iPod.

A few minutes later, Sandy emerged from her trailer carrying a small suitcase. “I decided to bring some extra clothes along in case I end up having to stay over.”

And that, Ali decided, was the difference between a child of the twenty-first century and a grown-up from the twentieth.

“Good thinking,” she said. “You’ll probably need them.”

Intent on making their next-of-kin notification, Detectives Larry Marsh and Hank Mendoza stepped up onto the flagstone porch and rang the bell.

The bell was answered by a man wearing a white jacket who was anything but friendly. “Yes,” he said. “May I help you?”

“We’re looking for Ms. Ashcroft,” Larry said. “Ms. Arabella Ashcroft.”

“And who might I say is calling?”

Larry produced his ID wallet and passed it inside. “I’m Detective Larry Marsh and this is my partner, Hank Mendoza. We’re with the Phoenix Police Department. Homicide.”

Larry heard a woman’s voice calling out from somewhere deep inside the house. “Was that the doorbell, Mr. Brooks? Is someone here?”

“One moment, please,” the man said. “Let me check and see if now would be a convenient time for Madam to see you.”

He closed the door quietly but very firmly in their faces.

“Madam,” Hank repeated. “Was that what I think it was—a real live butler?”

“So it would seem,” Larry replied. “And I don’t think we passed the approved visitor test.”

Several minutes elapsed, leaving the cops with little to do but admire the view. “How much do you think a place like this is worth?” Hank asked.

Larry was always perusing the real estate sections of newspapers in hopes of finding someplace cooler to go when he retired. He had researched the Sedona market and had learned that his pension would come up short when it came to retirement housing in that particular area.

“With a view like this and with as much property? I’m guessing the place is worth a bundle.”

The cops were about to give up and go away when the door opened once again. “Sorry for the delay,” the butler said, with a stiff half bow. “Madam will see you now. This way.”

The two officers followed the butler into a spacious living room where a hint of morning wood smoke from the fireplace still lingered in the air. A woman with a halo of silvery hair stood next to the cooling fireplace.

“Good morning,” she said, while the butler hovered attentively nearby. “I’m Arabella Ashcroft. You wanted to see me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Larry said solicitously. “I’m afraid we have some bad news for you.”

“What kind of bad news?” Arabella asked. “Mr. Brooks said you’re with Homicide. Does that mean someone has been murdered?”

“Yes,” Larry said. “It does. Your nephew, William Ashcroft, was found murdered Tuesday morning in the South Mountain Preserve.”

Arabella staggered slightly and raised her hand to her chest. “Oh, my goodness,” she said, making her way to a nearby chair. “This is dreadful. Billy’s dead? How can that be? He was here just the other day, and he was fine then, perfectly fine. What day was that when he was here, Mr. Brooks? Do you remember?”

“It was Sunday,” the butler replied. “Sunday afternoon.”

“As far as we can ascertain, Ms. Ashcroft, you’re his only living relative,” Detective Marsh continued. “We understand he has an ex-wife, somewhere, but so far we’ve been unable to locate her. We found you through Mr. Ashcroft’s phone records.”

“Oh, dear,” Arabella said. “I’m forgetting my manners. Do sit down. Make yourselves comfortable. And would you care for something to drink—coffee, tea?”

“Coffee would be great,” Hank said, settling onto a couch.

Detective Marsh nodded in agreement. “I’d like coffee, too, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all, is it, Mr. Brooks,” she said. “Do bring them some. And while you’re at it, you might bring me something a bit stronger. This has been a terrible shock.”

“I think it was those kids,” Sandy Mitchell said as they headed south on I-17. “And that means that everything that happened is all my fault.”

“Which kids?” Ali asked.

“You know. The ones I carded at the store. The one was especially obnoxious. He was making a scene and giving me all kinds of grief. And then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there’s Kip, standing there holding a bouquet of flowers and looking sweet and funny and fierce all at the same time. At first the kid just ignored him. I think he thought it was some kind of joke. Then Kip grabbed his sleeve, lifted him off the ground—Kip’s very strong you know—and told him to get out or he’d…” Sandy looked uncomfortable, and gestured with her head toward the backseat where Crystal was sitting.

“Or he’d what?” Ali asked.

“You know. Shove those flowers up his…” Sandy stopped then continued, “That’s when the kids finally got it—that Kip meant what he was saying. So they left. Didn’t even finish buying the rest of their groceries. Just left them there on my check stand.”

Somehow Ali doubted that the phrase shove up your ass was something that would offend Crystal Holman’s thirteen-year-old, none-too-tender sensibilities, but it was nice that Sandy Mitchell thought it might. Besides, Crystal appeared to be lost in her music and was paying no attention to anything being said in the front seat.

“It was really wonderful,” Sandy continued wistfully. “When he chased them off like that, I felt like I’d been rescued by a knight in shining armor.”

Sandra Mitchell was sixty-something if she was a day. She’d put on some hard miles. She was a dumpy plain jane, yet Kip Hogan—the very scary Kip Hogan—had made her feel like some latter-day Guinevere. To Ali’s way of thinking, that was nothing short of astonishing.

“I know the kids left the store then, but I don’t know if they left the parking lot. I’m wondering if they didn’t follow Kip when he left the store. I’m betting they waited around until he was alone and then they beat the crap out of him. Three to one isn’t a fair fight.”

“And where exactly did the cops find Kip?” Ali asked. “You never did say.”

“Just off the freeway at Mund’s Park,” Sandy said. “Around eleven somebody called nine-one-one from the gas station on the other side of the interstate and reported a fight in progress. Cops were dispatched to the scene. That’s where they found him. He was in such bad shape that they took him out in a helicopter.”

Yes, Ali definitely remembered seeing the helicopter when she’d been with her father at the rest area. She also remembered seeing emergency vehicles still assembled around Mund’s Park when she had gone there to pick up Crystal. She had assumed she was seeing the tail-end of some traffic mishap. Now it seemed otherwise.

Using the rearview mirror, Ali glanced into the backseat. For some reason, Crystal had removed her earphones. She was sitting with her arms folded across her chest, staring out the window. She seemed to be hearing none of the conversation, but something about her bearing put Ali on edge. She was listening, all right, listening with avid attention, but without wanting anyone to know what she was doing. Ali wasn’t her mother’s daughter for nothing.

“Crystal,” Ali said. “Did you see anything out of line that night?”

Crystal jumped and feigned ignorance. “What?” she asked.

“You were at Mund’s Park that same night Kip Hogan was attacked. Did you see any of that?”

“No,” Crystal answered without hesitation. “I didn’t see a thing.”

Ali knew for a fact that the girl was lying, but if Crystal had witnessed some of the horrific attack on Kip, it was possible she was lying for good reason—because she was petrified.

Sandy was quiet for a long time. When she spoke again, she seemed not to have noticed any of the byplay between Ali and Crystal.

“I didn’t want to tell your dad about this because I didn’t want to upset him,” Sandy said. “But the person at the hospital told me that Kip is in very serious condition. Critical condition. What if they’re trying to locate his next of kin in case they need to pull the plug?”

“What do you know about his family?” Ali returned.

“Not much,” Sandy admitted. “All he said was that they were estranged—that he hadn’t spoken to his mother in years.”

“Did he tell you why?” Ali asked.

“No.”

“And he never gave you any kind of a hint as to where he was from?”

“No. I’m pretty sure he grew up somewhere here in Arizona. I picked that up from little comments he made now and then, but he never said where exactly.”

As a journalist, Ali knew that the Internet had, at the click of a mouse, made searches available to a lot of non-law-enforcement people who would never have been able to access the information before. And Ali did have her trusty computer along, but in order to begin a search, she needed to have a snippet of information.

“We could probably find out,” Ali said. “Is Kip his real name, or is it short for something?”

“I don’t know,” Sandy answered. “We never really talked about that, either.”

It occurred to Ali that there was a lot Sandy and Kip had never discussed, and maybe that was all right. Maybe at some point, it was best just to disregard the past and move on. Sometimes that was the only way to move on.

Ali reached over and engaged the Cayenne’s hands-free cell phone. A moment later, Dave Holman’s voice came through the speakerphone.

“Just hanging out in the courthouse lobby,” he replied in answer to Ali’s question about what he was doing. “We’re all waiting to find out if the case is going to go to trial today. I was about to give you a call.”

Quickly Ali explained where they were going, what they were doing, and why. “Since you’ve got a spare moment, could you maybe check with the department of licensing and see if Kip Hogan has a valid driver’s license?”

“He must,” Dave said. “He’s been driving your dad’s Bronco all over hell and gone for months now.”

“Those would be my mother’s sentiments exactly,” Ali said. “It would also be nice to know who, if anyone, is listed as next of kin, and if Kip is his given name or if it’s a nickname.”

“Wait a minute,” Dave said. “Why are you asking about next of kin? Since the assault took place in Coconino County, they’ll probably want to have their people handle that end of things.”

“We’re on our way to the hospital, and someone there asked Sandy. They need the information, too.”

“All right,” Dave agreed. “I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, how’s it going?”

As in how’s it going with your daughter from hell? Ali thought.

“You’re on speakerphone, Dave,” Ali told him. “Crystal’s right here. Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

“Crystal?” Dave asked.

“I’m fine!” Crystal answered abruptly.

In the annals of woman-speak, it was a cold, two-raised-eyebrows fine—the most dangerous kind. Ali knew that things between her and Dave’s temperamental daughter were anything but fine. Unfortunately Dave Holman was totally oblivious to the reality of the situation.

“Excellent,” he said enthusiastically. “I’m delighted to know that two of my favorite people are spending some quality time together.”

The speakerphone didn’t come close to transmitting the sneer Crystal Holman leveled at the back of Ali’s head. The rearview mirror did.

“I’ll see what I can do about Kip, though,” Dave added. “Since I’m right here in the courthouse, I should be able to get someone to help me. I don’t know how long it’ll take, and if my case gets called…”

“Check if you can; don’t if you can’t,” Ali said. It was her way of letting Dave off the hook.

“Thanks so much, Detective Holman,” Sandy said. “I really appreciate anything you can do.”

As they approached the hospital, Sandy grew more and more apprehensive. Ali didn’t blame her. Hospitals affected her that same way.

“How much do you think all this is going to cost?” Sandy asked. “I mean, I know for sure that Kip doesn’t have any insurance. What if they ask me to pay his bill?”

After dealing with her first husband’s glioblastoma, Ali happened to have more than a passing knowledge of how much brain surgery had cost twenty or so years ago. It was far more expensive than that now. Combine that with ICU care and medevac costs, and there could be little doubt that the price tag on Kip’s injuries already amounted to a budget-busting sum.

By then they had pulled up next to the hospital entrance.

“Don’t sign anything at all,” Ali cautioned. “If that means you don’t get any information on his condition right away, we’ll just have to live with it. But remember; sign nothing.”

“Aren’t you coming up?” Sandy asked.

“In a little while,” Ali said. “Write down my cell phone number so you can call if you need to, but first Crystal and I have a couple of errands we need to run.”

As soon as Sandy exited the Cayenne, so did Crystal, slamming her way out of the backseat and into the front one. “What errands?” she said. “Is this when we go to Wal-Mart and buy me some different clothes?”

“No,” Ali said. “This would be where the two of us have a little heart-to-heart chat. I want you to tell me everything you know about what happened in Mund’s Park.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Crystal said. “I didn’t see anything.” But the sullen look she shot back in Ali’s direction was a dead giveaway.

“Let’s not play games,” Ali said. “I know you saw something. You can either tell me the truth, or I’ll find a cop who will ask you the same questions. In fact, I’m sure the homicide detectives from Coconino County will be delighted to talk to you.”

“Why do you keep threatening me with stuff?” Crystal asked. “Why don’t you just leave me alone?”

“Crystal,” Ali urged. “This is an attempted homicide. If Kip Hogan dies it’ll be more than attempted. Don’t you want to help?”

“Why should I?” Crystal returned. “It’s none of my business.”

Ali’s phone rang then. It was Dave. Since they were still parked, Ali answered the call without putting it on speaker.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Dave said. “Rudyard Kipling Hogan.”

“That’s his name?” Ali asked.

“Yup. No wonder no one’s ever seen his driver’s license. With a handle like that, I wouldn’t show it to anyone, either.”

“What about a home address?”

“I checked on that. He listed a homeless shelter in Phoenix as his permanent address.”

“And next of kin?”

“None listed. He’s an organ donor, though. I told the person in records what the deal was. She’s faxing the information to both Coconino County and to the hospital down in Phoenix as well.”

“Thanks,” Ali said. “You’ve been a huge help.”

“Are you there yet?” Dave asked. “It sounds pretty grim. Any word on how he is?”

“When we know something, I’ll call,” Ali said.

Behind her, a cabdriver laid on the horn and motioned for her to move out of the way.

“Gotta go,” Ali said. “I’m blocking traffic.”

She hung up the phone, drove forward far enough to turn onto Thomas, and then looked across at Crystal. “Well?” Ali demanded. “What’s it going to be?”

“I already told you,” Crystal said. “I didn’t actually see anything, not really.”

“You must have seen something,” Ali returned.

Driving West on Thomas, Ali turned off onto a side street and then threaded her way through a neighborhood until she reached an almost deserted parking lot at Encanto Park. Once she turned off the engine, she focused her attention on Crystal.

“Please tell me,” Ali said.

Crystal gave a resigned shrug. “Well, the guy who gave me a ride from Flagstaff pulled over there at Mund’s Park so we could…well, you know…do it. And we were, or at least I was, when all of a sudden he started cussing and said, ‘We have to get the hell out of here. Something’s wrong.’ By the time I sat up, he was already hauling ass. I thought there were cops coming or something, but when we drove away, all I saw were three guys standing there in the headlights. They were sort of standing in a circle, and one of them was holding something. It looked like a baseball bat, but I’m not sure. Then I realized there was someone else there, too, a fourth guy, only he was lying on the ground. I could see he was covered with something that looked like tar, but it was probably blood.”

Ali nodded. “What happened then?” she prompted.

“I was scared,” Crystal said. “I just wanted to take off and get as far away from there as possible. Curt said we had to call nine-one-one.”

“Curt?” Ali asked.

Crystal nodded. “That’s his name, Curt. I had a cell phone and so did he, but Curt said we shouldn’t use them. Instead, we drove across the freeway to a gas station. There was a phone booth out back. While Curt made the call, I went inside and hid in the restroom. I was afraid they’d seen me when we drove past and that they’d come there looking for me—for us. When I came out, Curt was gone and so was his car. I didn’t see the guys with the bat, but they could have been there. I knew I couldn’t hang around the gas station any longer without people asking questions, so the minute I could, I made a run for it. That’s when I broke into the house. I stayed there for a while, but it was cold and I was hungry, so I finally called my dad.”

“Could you identify the vehicle the bad guys were driving?” Ali asked.

“No.”

“So you don’t know how they left Mund’s Park or which way they went?”

Crystal shook her head. “While I was still in the restroom, I heard the sirens. I knew Curt must have gotten through because the cops were already there. And a little later, while I was hiding in the house, I saw the helicopter land and take off.”

“If you knew the cops were there, why didn’t you talk to them?” Ali asked. “Why didn’t you tell them what you’d seen?”

“Because I knew they’d want to know who I was and what I was doing there.” Crystal’s voice cracked. “And because I knew they’d tell my dad,” she said with a sob. “You won’t tell him about me, will you? Please?”

The tough-talking, smart-mouthed Crystal seemed to have disappeared completely, leaving behind a girl who was little more than a child—a scared, lost child. She broke Ali’s heart.

“Somebody needs to tell him,” Ali said softly. “But I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

{ CHAPTER 9 }

Ali put the Cayenne in gear and pulled out of the parking space.

“Where are we going now?” Crystal wanted to know.

“Back to the hospital,” Ali said.

“Do we have to?” Crystal asked.

“Yes, we have to,” Ali returned. “In case Sandy needs us. Now tell me again about the guys you saw at Mund’s Park—the ones with the bat. Would you recognize their faces?”

Crystal hesitated before she answered. “Probably not,” she said finally. “We were driving pretty fast when we went past them. I only saw them for a second or two.”

Crystal’s momentary pause had already alerted Ali’s natural lie-detecting system. She suspected that everything Crystal had said after that pause was a fib, but for the moment Ali seemed prepared to let that statement go unchallenged.

“From what you did see, would you say they were older or younger?” she asked.

“Older, I guess,” Crystal returned. “Maybe a couple of years older than my brother Richey.”

You did see them well enough after all, Ali thought. She said, “So they might have been in high school then, or maybe even in college?”

Crystal nodded.

“What about Curt, the guy who gave you a ride?” Ali asked.

“What about him?”

“Is it possible that he saw the attackers better than you did?”

“I suppose,” Crystal agreed reluctantly.

“We need to find him,” Ali said.

Crystal stiffened in her seat. This time there was no hesitation at all. “Why?” she demanded. “Why do you need to find him?”

“Because Curt is a witness to a crime,” Ali responded firmly. “An eyewitness to an attempted homicide, and so are you. Maybe Curt got a better look at the bad guys’ faces than you did. Maybe he’d be able to recognize them. In any event, the cops working the case are going to want to talk to both of you. In order to find the men who tried to kill Kip Hogan, the detectives will need your help.”

By then they had arrived once more at the hospital garage.

“I can’t,” Crystal insisted. “I know Curt’s first name, but that’s all. And I don’t know how to find him, either.”

“What kind of a car does he drive?”

It was almost as though Ali’s questioning had toggled some kind of switch. Crystal immediately retreated into her shell. She shrugged and didn’t answer. While they’d been at the park, Ali had felt she was making progress with Crystal—as though she was getting somewhere. Now she wasn’t.

“What kind of car?” Ali insisted.

“I don’t know,” Crystal answered angrily. “And I wouldn’t tell you if I did. I mean, he could get in trouble, too, couldn’t he—for being with me like that?”

“Yes, he could be in trouble—and most likely would be,” Ali conceded. Big trouble, she thought. “No matter what the boys at your school may say, having oral sex with a minor—and you are a minor, by the way—is a crime. What you and Curt did together, even if it was consensual, makes him a sexual predator. I’m sure he knew it was wrong, and so did you. Otherwise you wouldn’t be so worried about your father finding out.”

She glanced at Crystal, who stared straight ahead and didn’t reply.

“Even so,” Ali continued, “let’s give the guy some credit. Curt was still willing to do the right thing—at least as far as calling in and reporting the assault on Kip was concerned. He went to the trouble of driving across the freeway to that gas station and placing the nine-one-one call. What we need for him to do now is come forward and tell the cops anything else he might know. And regardless of whether or not your father finds out about what you and Curt were doing, you need to do the same thing, Crystal. You need to talk to the investigators and tell them what you saw.”

“No,” Crystal insisted. “I won’t talk to them. I don’t have to. And I don’t want to go into the hospital, either. You go see Sandy. I’ll just wait for you in the car.”

Ali couldn’t help but marvel at the fact that in the space of a few minutes—the time it had taken to drive several city blocks—Crystal Holman had managed to do another one-eighty, from a tearful little girl to a recalcitrant, hostile teenager.

“No,” Ali replied simply. “You’re not waiting in the car.” Ali climbed out of the Cayenne and then reached into the backseat to collect her purse and computer bag, both of which she slung over her shoulder. Then she walked around to the far side of the car and opened the passenger door for Crystal. “You’re coming with me,” she said.

“You’re not my mother. You can’t make me do anything if I don’t want to,” Crystal returned.

Ali was unimpressed. “Oh?” she said. “Watch me. All I have to do is call the cops and report you as a truant. Children your age are supposed to be in school, you know.”

“You wouldn’t do that,” Crystal objected. “Besides, you told my dad you’d look after me.”

“I am looking after you, honey lamb,” Ali returned in a tone that brooked no further argument. “Which is why you’re getting your sorry butt out of my car right now and coming into the hospital with me. Move it!”

There was a long pause, during which Ali wondered what would happen if the confrontation turned physical and she had to reach into the car and bodily drag Crystal out of the passenger seat. Would someone see her and call the cops, reporting the incident as child abuse or an assault or both? At that point, she didn’t much care.

Finally Crystal reluctantly complied, slamming the car door behind her and flouncing off through the parking garage with Ali hurrying after her.

Ali remembered visiting St. Francis Hospital years before when she had been a little girl. Back then it had been a single stand-alone building. Now the medical center was a whole campus of buildings complete with multiple parking garages and a valet parking stand. Ali found Sandy waiting alone in the main hospital lobby. While she sat down next to Sandy, Crystal stalked off to the far side of the room, where she found a chair that allowed her to sit with her back to them.

“What’s going on?” Ali asked.

“Kip’s still in surgery,” Sandy answered. “That’s all they’ll tell me, and I guess I’m lucky to know that.” She subsided into silence and blew her nose into an already soggy tissue. “It’s not fair,” she added. “I mean, just because Kip and I aren’t married they treat me like I’m nothing. Like I have no right to know anything about what’s going on.”

The new hospital privacy rules may have been news to Sandy Mitchell, but Ali had already stubbed her toe on them on more than one occasion. Before Ali could respond, her phone rang.

“I’m still hanging fire at the courthouse here in Prescott,” Dave said. “And I still don’t know if I’m going to get called as a witness today or not, but I’ve talked to Lee Farris. You remember him, don’t you?”

Homicide Detective Farris was Coconino County’s counterpart to Yavapai County’s Detective Dave Holman. Farris had been part of the joint investigation into the death of Ali’s best friend from high school, Reenie Bernard.

“Yes,” Ali said. “I remember him.”

“Now that Kip’s case has turned into an attempted homicide, the missing persons interview Sandy did with the City of Sedona just isn’t going to cut it. Lee is on his way down to Phoenix right now. He’s coming to the hospital in hopes of reinterviewing Sandy and gleaning some additional information. I told him she’d probably be there at the hospital most of the day. I didn’t have a cell phone number for her, so I gave him yours. Hope that’s okay with you.”

“It’s fine,” Ali said.

“Lee had heard about the confrontation that happened at Basha’s the other day, the one between Kip and those kids who were hassling Sandy. He’s hoping Sandy will be able to do sketches of them. Coconino County contracts with a composite artist based in Phoenix. Lee is trying to make arrangements to have the artist meet up with Sandy there in Phoenix at the hospital rather than having her drive up to Sedona and back.”

“Okay,” Ali said. “I’ll let Sandy know.”

“And how are things with Crystal?” Dave asked.

Ali glanced warily across the room to where Crystal sat with her shoulders hunched and her back still turned to Ali and Sandy.

“We’re doing okay,” Ali said guardedly. “Not great but okay.”

“She’s not giving you any trouble, is she?”

“Nothing I can’t handle,” Ali told him.

When Crystal’s cell phone buzzed with the IM announcement, she almost jumped out of her skin. And she checked behind her to make sure no one was watching. When she saw Curt’s initials in the sender’s window, her heart skipped a beat. She had been scared something bad might have happened to him. She was glad to know he was safe, and she wanted to warn him about what was going on—about Kip Hogan and the fact that the cops might be looking for Curt.

“RUOK?” she typed.

“Y”

“WRU?” Where are you?

“FNX”

“CNICU?” Can I see you?

“Y”

“WN?” When?

“W8” Wait. “WN I CN” After a while, she added a plaintive request. “CNUTAKMEHOME?”

“EZ” Curt told her. “NO PROB”

Only a few minutes after Joanna was warned about the impending arrival of the composite artist, the woman herself appeared on the scene. She was stocky with short gray hair and dragging a heavy-duty roll-aboard computer case behind her. She spoke briefly to the receptionist, who nodded and then pointed in Sandy’s direction. Ali stepped forward to intercept her.

“Ms. Mitchell?” the woman asked.

“No. I’m Ali Reynolds, a friend of Sandy’s. That’s her over there.”

But the woman was focused on Ali. “Ali Reynolds? Wait a minute,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re Alison Reynolds. I remember you. Weren’t you on the news over in L.A.?”

Ali nodded.

“Madeline Havens with Composite Systems,” the woman said, holding out her hand. “I used to live there, too—in L.A. Did someone tell you I was coming?”

“They didn’t mention you by name,” Ali said, “but for some reason Madeline Havens sounds familiar. I seem to remember that I did a story on you once, but the details escape me.”

Madeline grinned. “You did do a story on me. In fact, you did several, and it’s ironic, because what happened to me isn’t all that different from what I understand happened to you a little later on. For years I was an in-house composite artist for LAPD. Then, when the new chief came along, all of a sudden and despite glowing performance reviews, they let me go and replaced me with a whole bevy of private contractors.

“So I did the same thing you did—filed suit for wrongful dismissal—and went freelance. It turns out I’m an EEOC triple threat: age—fifty-one; sexual orientation—lesbian; and race—Indian—Paiute, not East Indian. Took the bastards to court and won big-time. Now I’m a private contractor myself—I do composites for smaller jurisdictions, the ones that don’t have budgets big enough to support in-house artists. Our company has even been able to undercut the guys who replaced me at LAPD on occasion. That felt particularly good. So, what are you up to these days?”

Ali thought about that. It didn’t seem like she was doing much. “Some blogging,” she said. “And I’m trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up.”

“No sense in rushing,” Madeline said. “Fifty’s the new forty, you know.”

With that, Madeline turned her attention to Sandy. Once they had been introduced, she took the seat next to her. Within minutes, armed with both a laptop computer and an old-fashioned sketchbook, Madeline had engaged Sandy in conversation and gone to work. Her computer was stocked with images of hundreds of individual physical features—eyebrows, eyes, hairlines, hairstyles, chins, noses, lips. Once Sandy selected individual features, Madeline incorporated those into a handmade sketch.

Ali found the process fascinating. With Sandy providing the details and with Madeline Havens skillfully combining them, the image of a young man gradually emerged on paper. He was in his early to mid-twenties with wide-set eyes, a long crooked nose, and a brush-cut hairstyle. In the drawing there was an odd disconnectedness in his expression that reminded Ali of photos she had seen of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber. There was something about his angry, dead-eyed expression that made Ali’s blood run cold.

As Ali watched the image materialize she realized that, good as it might be, the information Sandy was providing merely placed the guy at the confrontation in Basha’s. Crystal, however, had been at the scene of the almost fatal attack in Mund’s Park. Would she recognize the subject of the drawing as one of the toughs she had seen there?

Enthralled by the sketching process, Ali had momentarily stopped paying attention to Crystal. Now, though, wanting to show the drawing to Crystal, Ali discovered to her dismay that the girl was no longer there. While Ali had been otherwise occupied, Crystal had simply vanished.

When Crystal reached the park, Curt’s car still wasn’t there. She stood there for a moment, undecided. What if Ali came looking for her?

Looking around for a place to hide, Crystal spotted a thick clump of sharp-leaved dusty bushes close to the parking lot. She ducked into them. The ground underneath was dirty and dusty and strewn with garbage—dead drink containers and empty grease-covered McDonald’s wrappers—that had been totally invisible from the outside. But the fact that the trash had been invisible from the outside meant that Crystal was, too. As she settled in, her nose began to run. Her eyes itched like fire. She was grateful to have her father’s long-sleeved and oversize sweats protecting her from the smelly, prickly leaves while she waited—seeing without being seen.

The parking lot was full of people. Two vans with signs that read SUNSHINE DAYCARE pulled up and parked in the two spots closest to Crystal. Several women and seven little kids clambered out of them. While the attendants pulled out a series of multiple-child strollers and began loading children into them, Crystal caught sight of the Explorer. It pulled into the lot and stopped a few parking places beyond the vans.

The women and kids and strollers were right there in front of Crystal—only a few feet away. If she popped out of the bushes right then, Crystal knew she’d startle them and draw way too much attention to herself. So she waited, willing them to move on; willing her itchy nose not to sneeze. But then, just as the crowd started moving out of the way, something happened in one of the middle strollers—one containing three toddlers. The middle child began howling and whacking away with one little fist at the child on his right. The whole parade came to a stop, while the lady pushing the stroller tried to figure out what was going on.

Come on, Crystal urged silently. Get out of the way.

But they were still there, milling in front of her, when beyond them, Crystal saw the door of the Explorer come open. A man stepped out. Crystal could barely believe her eyes. It wasn’t Curt—it wasn’t him at all. But the man driving Curt’s truck was someone Crystal recognized. She had seen him once before as a frightening figure caught in the Explorer’s headlights—someone wielding a baseball bat.

Crystal gave a sharp intake of breath. One of the women seemed to notice. She looked around, frowning, but then her charges drew her attention once again, and she turned back to the kids in her stroller. Moments later the whole group moved on, clearing the way between Crystal and the Explorer.

Shaking with dread and afraid of being seen, Crystal stayed where she was and waited. While she watched, the man who wasn’t Curt pulled a phone out of his pocket and began pressing buttons. A moment later, Crystal’s cell phone buzzed, announcing a text message. The vibration startled her so much that she could barely pull the phone out of her pocket. With her breath coming in short, shallow gasps and with her fingers trembling so much she almost dropped the phone, Crystal read the message:

“WRU?” Where are you? CU wanted to know.

CU was Curt’s handle, but he wasn’t the one who had been sending Crystal messages. The man in the parking lot, the man driving Curt’s Explorer, was the one who had offered to give Crystal a ride back home to Sedona. So what did all this mean? If Curt wasn’t here—if he wasn’t the one driving his truck or using his phone, Crystal wondered, where was he? Was he dead? Had those awful men from Mund’s Park used a baseball bat on Curt the same way they had on Kip Hogan? She had seen two of them get Curt’s SUV. Had they found Curt while Crystal was hiding in the restroom and taken him away? If they had killed Curt and almost killed Kip, what would they do to Crystal if they ever found her?

Without ever emerging from the bushes, Crystal used her trembling fingers to key in her response.

“UHA.” Under house arrest. “SRY.”

Over in the parking lot, the man who wasn’t Curt muttered something under his breath and kicked the tire. Then he jumped into the Explorer, slammed the door behind him, and drove away.

Watching him go, Crystal Holman was smart enough to know that one thing and only one thing had saved her—that howling little boy who had been so intent on beating up his seatmate. If it hadn’t been for him, Crystal knew she would have been a goner.

When Ali first noticed Crystal was gone, she wasn’t all that concerned. Thinking she might have simply responded to a call of nature, Ali got up and went across the lobby to the women’s restroom. Unfortunately it was empty. Crystal wasn’t there and no one else was, either. With rising apprehension, Ali hurried over to the lobby entrance where a uniformed security guard was stationed just outside.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Did you see a girl come out this door in the last few minutes? She was wearing a pair of oversize sweats.”

“Blue sweats? Long blond hair in a ponytail?”

Ali nodded. “That’s the one.”

“Sure, I saw her,” the security guard said. “Just a couple of minutes ago.” He pointed. “Headed off toward Thomas on foot.”

Ali headed that way, too. As she did so, she pulled out her cell phone and scrolled through the call history until she found a number that had to be Crystal’s. When she reached Thomas, she paused on the sidewalk and looked in both directions. Nothing, and when Ali called Crystal’s cell phone, there was no answer on that, either.

She had ended the call and was hurrying back toward the parking garage when her phone rang. Hating the idea of having to tell Dave what was really going on and that his runaway daughter was once again on the lam, Ali was relieved to see her son’s name in the caller ID window.

“Hey, Mom,” Chris said. “I’m at lunch. I thought I’d call and see how things are going down there. How’s Kip?”

“Still in surgery,” Ali told him. “And everything else is a disaster. Believe it or not, Crystal just took off again.”

“You mean she ran away?”

“Evidently. There’s a woman here working with Sandy on a set of composite drawings. I got caught up in that. Crystal must have realized I wasn’t paying attention and made her getaway. I never expected her to pull a stunt like that.”

“You should have,” Chris counseled. “She’s a teenager after all.”

“You never did any of this stuff,” Ali countered.

“Don’t be so sure, Mom,” Chris said with a laugh. “Most of the time I was lucky and didn’t get caught.”

By then, Ali was back at her car. “I’m hanging up now,” she said. “I’m going to drive over to the freeway and see if I can spot her between here and there. Maybe Crystal’s trying to hitch a ride back home.”

Once in her Cayenne, Ali drove straight to I-17. Heading north, she checked entrance and exit ramps as far as Bethany Home Road, all to no avail. Frustrated beyond bearing but still stalling on making the necessary call to Dave, Ali was on her way back to the hospital when her phone rang again.

Ali was almost sick with relief when she heard the missing girl’s voice. “Crystal!” she exclaimed. “Where are you?”

“I’m scared. Can you come get me, please?”

“Where are you?”

“At the park where we went earlier this morning. The parking lot by that little lake.”

“What are you doing there?”

“It doesn’t matter. Just come get me,” Crystal insisted. “Please.”

There were dozens of questions Ali wanted to ask, but Crystal sounded so upset—so desperate—that Ali stifled all of them. “I’m on my way,” she said grimly. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

More furious than she was relieved, Ali swung into the parking lot with a squeal of tires. At first Crystal wasn’t visible, but as soon as Ali stopped the car, the girl emerged from beneath some oleanders and came sprinting toward the Cayenne. Once inside, she fastened her seat belt without having to be reminded.

“What in the world were you thinking?” Ali demanded. “Why did you leave the hospital? What are you doing here?”

But whatever was going on with Crystal and no matter how scared she was, she wasn’t prepared to give a straight answer. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she half-sobbed. “Can’t we just go back to the hospital?” she begged. “Please. I won’t do it ever again. I promise.”

For two days Ali had done her best to be understanding and sympathetic toward this troubled child. Now she was in no mood for Crystal Holman’s latest set of drama-queen histrionics.

“I should hope not,” Ali said.

Crystal sat huddled miserably on the far side of the car, but instead of watching where they were going, she seemed to be concentrating on traffic in the rearview mirror. Her verbal response, when it finally came, was the last thing Ali expected.

“Thank you,” Crystal said.

For what? Ali wondered. For picking you up or for giving you hell?

“Are you going to tell me what you were up to?” she asked.

“I just needed to get out of the hospital for a while,” Crystal said. “I needed to be by myself.”

“That’s probably a lie,” Ali said. She held out her hand. “Now give me your cell phone.”

“My cell phone?” Crystal repeated with a gasp. “Why?”

“Give it to me,” Ali repeated.

“You’re taking my cell phone away? How come?”

“Because having a cell phone is a privilege, not a right,” Ali replied. “At the moment, as the person who’s supposed to be looking after you, I’m declaring that your behavior doesn’t warrant any privileges.”

After a long moment’s hesitation, Crystal sighed, plucked her cell phone out of the pocket of her sweats, and dropped it into Ali’s open palm.

“Are you happy now?” Crystal wanted to know.

“Hardly,” Ali answered. “I’m not going to be happy until I can hand you back over to your father and turn you into his problem instead of mine.”

Back in the hospital lobby, Detective Lee Farris had arrived on the scene and taken charge of the situation. He had moved Sandy Mitchell and Madeline Havens to the far corner of the room and had commandeered both a small table and a power outlet for Madeline’s computer. By then all three sketches had been completed. While Lee began questioning Sandy, Madeline used a tiny portable scanner/printer to run off copies of the composite drawings.

With no one paying particular attention to her, Crystal wandered over to the printer and picked up one of the sketches. She looked at it for only a moment. Then, turning deathly pale, she let the paper slip from her hand. “I’ve gotta go to the restroom. I’m gonna be sick.”

As she raced away, Ali picked up the fallen sketch, which turned out to be the one of the empty-eyed man she had seen earlier. Crystal may not have picked the sketch out from a law-enforcement-approved montage, but her reaction was enough to convince Ali that for Crystal Holman, the chilling likeness was of someone she recognized.

Ali followed Crystal as far as the restroom door, where the very convincing sound of retching made it clear that Crystal really was sick. Before Ali could storm inside and confront her about any of it, however, Crystal’s cell phone vibrated in her pocket. When Ali went to answer, she discovered it was a text message rather than a voice call, a message from someone called CU. Does that C stand for Curt? Ali wondered.

“WHERE R U?” the message read. “WENT TO PARK. U DIDNT SHOW.”

The words confirmed Ali’s worst suspicions. Crystal hadn’t gone to the park just to get away from the hospital. She had gone there to meet this person who was now text-messaging her. And wasn’t it possible that this was also the same guy Crystal claimed she couldn’t contact, Curt with no last name? And why was he so eager to be in touch with Crystal now? Ali was reasonably sure he was looking for a second helping of whatever sexual favors Crystal Holman had been offering.

Staring at the screen, Ali wanted to reach through the phone and grab CU by the neck. Much as she would have enjoyed strangling him, she also knew someone needed to convince him to come forward and tell the authorities whatever he knew about Kip Hogan’s attackers. Since Detective Farris was fully occupied with interviewing Sandy Mitchell at the moment, Ali decided to take matters into her own hands. And fingers.

Ali and Chris had been sending text messages for years. When she had been working late hours at the station, text messaging had afforded her the simplest means of staying in touch with her son. And because she had been considered “in the know” on that topic, she had done a series of stories designed to help clueless parents have some idea of what their kids were doing and saying with their now ubiquitous cell phones.

Ali hesitated for a moment. Would she be able to reply without letting CU know that someone other than Crystal was responding? What’s there to lose? she wondered.

“WENT,” Ali said, keying in her response. “CAUGHT.” Ali had had to think a minute. “UHA.” She was pretty sure that meant under house arrest, but she had no way of knowing if CU understood what she was saying.

“WAYN?” That one was easy. Where are you now?

“HOSPITAL”

“ST FRANCIS?”

“Y” YES.

Inside the restroom the toilet flushed. That meant Crystal would be coming out soon. “L8R,” Ali wrote. “PAW” Ali knew that was universal teen speak for “parents are watching.”

Ali shoved the phone back into her pocket just as Crystal emerged from the restroom. “Better?” Ali asked.

Crystal nodded wanly. Either the girl really was sick, or she was doing an excellent job of faking it. She went over to a love seat and lay down on it, covering her eyes with her arm. Meanwhile, the phone was once again vibrating in Ali’s pocket, announcing the arrival of another message.

Just then Bob Larson bounded into the hospital lobby. Ali hadn’t expected him until much later—not until after the restaurant closed in the early afternoon and he had a chance to drive down.

“My Bronco’s still in the shop,” Bob explained. “Franco gave me a loaner and your mother let me off early, so here I am. What’s happening?”

Crystal’s phone vibrated impatiently. “Detective Farris from Flagstaff is here interviewing Sandy,” Ali told him. “And we now have a set of composite drawings of the guys Kip confronted the other day.”

“Are they the same ones who beat him up?” Bob asked.

“Could be,” Ali answered. “We don’t know that for sure.”

Bob glanced at Crystal, who was still sprawled on the love seat. “What’s going on with her?” he asked. “Is she okay?”

“She claims to be sick,” Ali said. “But I’m not sure I believe her.” With that, Ali walked over to the love seat.

“Sit up, Crystal,” she ordered. “I need to talk to you.”

Crystal uncovered her eyes, but she didn’t move. “What?” she asked.

“I have errands to run,” Ali told her. “My dad’s here. He’s your babysitter for the moment, and he’s going to watch you like a hawk. If you know what’s good for you, by the time I get back, you’ll have spilled your guts to Detective Farris. Otherwise I’ll tell him you’ve been withholding information in a homicide investigation. I believe that qualifies as a felony, by the way.”

With that Ali turned and headed toward the door with the phone still vibrating in her pocket and with her father padding along after her.

“Aren’t you being a little tough on her?” Bob Larson asked.

“Not nearly tough enough,” Ali replied. “And I’m serious. Keep an eye on her. She’s already run off once today, and she’ll do it again if you give her half a chance.”

“But where are you going?” Bob wanted to know.

“Out,” Ali said. “There’s something I need to do.”

“When will you be back?”

“When I can.” Realizing that she, too, was sounding like a rebellious teenager, Ali hurried outside and extracted Crystal’s vibrating telephone.

“RUOK?” CU wanted to know. “IWSN”

Ali’s stomach tightened into a knot. IWSN was a parental red flag for I want sex now.

You turd, she thought. “ME2,” Ali wrote.

“WAW” That translated into where and when?

Headed for her car in the garage, Ali scrambled for an answer. She needed a place with enough vehicle traffic that her Cayenne would blend in. She also needed a spot where, conceivably, Crystal could arrive on foot.

“CFEE SHP ON THOMAS,” Ali wrote.

“CUT” That would be IM-speak for see you there.

And I will see you there, you worthless jerk, Ali thought grimly. I just won’t be the thirteen-year-old you’re expecting.

{ CHAPTER 10 }

It took less than three minutes for Ali to exit the parking garage and make it to the parking lot of the dingy coffee shop across from the hospital. She pulled into a space next to a uniform store and waited. Minutes later, and even though she was expecting it—waiting for it—she was shocked when a white Ford Explorer nosed slowly through the parking lot without stopping.

Suddenly meeting up with CU was no longer a remote possibility. It was all too real. What would she say to Curt? Apprehensive about the coming confrontation, a combination of fear and rage swept through her. Ali’s heart sped up. Her hands began to cramp.

A few minutes later, the Explorer was back. Again it didn’t stop, but the second time through the lot, Ali managed to jot down the license number. The third time it pulled into a space directly in front of the restaurant and stayed there for several minutes with the engine idling. No one got in or out, and the tint-darkened windows made it impossible for Ali to see inside. With her palms wet with sweat, Ali gripped the steering wheel. She had managed to lure CU out into the open, but she had no idea what his next move would be or hers, either.

With her full attention focused on the Explorer, Ali jumped involuntarily when Crystal’s phone sprang to life and buzzed again.

“HERE,” CU wrote. “WAU?” Where are you?

“TRYING TGTHOOH,” Ali added. Trying to get the hell out of here.

“TRY HARDER,” CU wrote back. “TYPO.” Take your panties off.

The idea that he was trying to lure someone as young as Crystal out of the hospital for quickie sex made Ali furious. Stymied by the tinted windows, Ali was almost to the point of exiting the Cayenne to see if she could get a better look inside the Explorer. That’s when her own phone rang. She had to put Crystal’s phone down before she could answer.

“Ali?” a woman said. “Arabella Ashcroft here. Have you read it yet?”

“Read what?” Ali asked.

“The diary,” Arabella answered impatiently.

Guiltily Ali realized that the mostly unread diary was still where she had left it the night before—in her purse.

“No,” Ali admitted. “I’ve been caught up in a crisis. I haven’t had a chance.”

“That’s probably just as well,” Arabella replied. “Things have changed on my end, too. I don’t need you to read it after all. If you’d be so kind as to just drop it off here when you have a chance.”

Crystal’s phone was buzzed again. “CNT W8 ALL DAY. MYB.” Move your butt. Clearly CU was running out of patience.

“I’ll have to get back to you on this,” Ali said to Arabella. “I’m in Phoenix right now and busy.”

“Certainly,” Arabella said. “At your convenience. There’s no rush.”

“PLS,” Ali wrote. Please. But by then the Explorer was already backing out of the parking place. As it eased south on Third, Ali made a split-second decision. She put the Cayenne in gear and followed. Traffic was a mess. It was all she could do to keep the Explorer in view while at the same time trying to remain unobtrusive. There was sweat on her face now, slipping down her forehead and dripping into her eyes; soaking the back of her shirt.

Despite CU’s apparent impatience with Crystal—or at least with the person he thought was Crystal—the man didn’t seem to be in that big of a rush to leave the neighborhood. Ali’s frantic reality slipped into a strange slow motion. Time seemed to stand still. She followed the SUV as the driver made his way back across Thomas and cruised around the hospital grounds, probably checking to see if Crystal was actually on her way. He stopped briefly at a passenger loading zone right next to the hospital entrance. For a heart-stopping moment, Ali was afraid he was going to leave the Explorer with the valet and go inside looking for Crystal. Finally, though, he drove away and headed west on Thomas. Hoping to stay out of sight, Ali delayed as long as she could before turning onto Thomas several car lengths back and following him into what was fast turning into afternoon gridlock.

Intent on her pursuit, Ali was startled when her phone rang while she was stopped at the light at 19th and Thomas. Grabbing it up, she was relieved to see Dave’s number in the readout.

“Court just recessed for today,” he told her. “I didn’t get called, which means I’ll have to be back here tomorrow. So where are you? Should I head for Phoenix or back home to Sedona?”

Ali was in full crisis mode, and the very sound of Dave’s calm, unruffled voice helped her get a grip.

“You should probably come on down to Phoenix—to the hospital,” she said.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can, but you sound funny. Are you all right?”

Ali was a long way from all right. The light changed and traffic inched toward the freeway, but the Explorer didn’t make it through on that cycle, and neither did Ali.

“I’m stuck in traffic,” she said. “And I need your help.”

“Name it.”

“I need you to run a plate for me.”

“Run a plate?” Dave repeated. “Have you switched over to cop lingo now?”

Ali read off the letters and number. “Please,” she added when she finished. “Just run it.”

“You realize it’s against regulations to run a plate for private use?”

Ali took a deep breath. “It’s about Crystal,” she said.

“Why didn’t you say so?”

Ali hung up. The Explorer turned onto the eastbound I-10 entrance ramp at Thomas and waited for the metered traffic light to allow it to merge onto the crowded freeway. Ali followed suit. Once on the freeway, the Explorer cut in and out of traffic, forcing Ali to do the same. Even so, it took the better part of an anxiety-ridden hour of nail-biting to travel from there to where the Explorer exited onto eastbound U.S. 60.

While she waited for Dave to call back, Ali worried about what she would tell him. She had used a possible connection to Crystal to galvanize him to action. Ali knew that sooner or later she would have to tell him what was really going on with his wayward daughter. Crystal wasn’t ever going to tell him. That would be up to Ali. Between worrying about telling Dave about Crystal’s issues and dreading the coming confrontation with the driver of the Explorer, Ali’s stress level was off the charts.

“Got it,” Dave said when he finally called back. “The 2001 Ford Explorer belongs to Curtis Wilson Uttley of 101 Blue Spruce Circle, Flagstaff, Arizona. Who is he? What’s going on?”

So CU was Curtis Uttley. That made sense, but before Ali could answer, she realized that the Explorer was headed for the exit ramp at McClintock. With traffic the way it was, Ali realized she could either drive or talk. She couldn’t do both.

“Thanks, Dave,” she said. “I’ll have to get back to you.”

At the light, the Explorer turned right on the red and headed south. Unfortunately, the vehicle two cars in front of Ali decided to go straight through the intersection. Ali was forced to wait interminably until the light finally turned green. By the time she made the corner, the Explorer had vanished.

For the next several minutes, Ali cruised the neighborhood streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of where the Explorer had gone. A Roto-Rooter truck was parked in front of one of the houses, but that was the only sign of life. Ali saw no pedestrians on the street, no joggers or kids out riding bikes, no people she could have asked for help in tracking down exactly where the missing SUV had gone.

Shaking with a combination of frayed nerves, letdown, and frustration, Ali eventually had to give it up and head back to Phoenix. On the way, she picked up her phone and called Dave back.

He answered right away. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

“I was driving,” she said. “Traffic was bad.”

“Tell me about Curtis Uttley’s vehicle. Where did you spot it? Was he driving it or was somebody else?”

“I was following it, but I lost it over in Tempe,” Ali said. “And I have no idea who was driving it. I couldn’t see inside. Why?”

“Because that vehicle is listed on a BOLO, a be-on-the-lookout-for, in a missing persons case out of Flagstaff,” Dave said. “Curtis Uttley reportedly left there on Tuesday night, supposedly to visit one of the casinos down in Scottsdale. He evidently has a bit of a gambling problem. His wife didn’t bother reporting him missing until today. Now tell me,” Dave added. “What’s going on?”

Ali felt her heart constrict as she found herself wondering if the CU who had been sending text messages to Crystal’s phone had been someone else and not the real Curtis Uttley at all. She had been pretending to be Crystal. Maybe someone else had been pretending to be Curtis Uttley. Clearly turnabout was fair play.

“I’m afraid this particular missing person may have far more serious problems than gambling,” Ali said.

“Why?” Dave asked. “What makes you say that?”

Ali didn’t answer directly. “Are you on your way here now?”

“As a matter of fact I am,” Dave said. “Why?”

“Because,” Ali told him. “We need to talk.”

Ali returned to the hospital to find Madeline Havens gone. Crystal was closeted with Detective Farris in a small conference room just off the lobby, and Bob Larson was still commiserating with Sandy Mitchell. If there had been any change in Kip’s situation, no one had bothered to come let Sandy know. That was where things stood when Edie Larson appeared on the scene.

Bob seemed surprised to see his wife. “What are you doing here?” he wanted to know.

“I had to come,” Edie declared. “No one’s exactly burning up the phone lines between here and Sedona letting me know what’s going on.”

“That’s because we don’t know. They’re not telling us anything,” Bob returned. “If he’s out of surgery, they may have taken him to the ICU.”

“Why don’t we find out then?” Edie asked. “Which way is the ICU? Let me go rattle a few cages.”

“I’ll go with you,” Bob offered, and off they went.

Once they were gone, Ali walked over to the conference room door and pushed it open. To Detective Farris’s obvious annoyance, Ali let herself into the room and placed Crystal’s cell phone on the table between them.

“What’s this?” Farris demanded. “Can’t you see we’re busy here?”

“Let me guess,” Ali said. “Crystal has told you that she was with some guy the other night but that she has no idea who he was or how to get in touch with him, right?”

Farris studied Ali somberly for a moment then nodded. Ali, in turn, directed her remarks to Crystal. “A woman from Flagstaff reported her husband missing this morning,” Ali continued. “His name is Curtis Uttley. Sound familiar, Crystal? And it happens that somebody using the name CU has been sending you text messages all afternoon. He’s been trying to be in touch; wanting to meet up with you in person. In fact, he came here to the hospital a little while ago, looking for you. He was driving a white Ford Explorer. Does that ring any bells?”

Crystal’s cheeks paled. “He, like, actually came here?” she asked.

Ali nodded. “He actually did,” she returned. “You didn’t happen to have your phone in your possession, but I did. So I’ve been texting him back for you. And because you weren’t straight with me and didn’t tell me what I was really dealing with, I followed him all the way to Tempe before I lost him. What do you think would have happened to me if I’d caught up with him?”

Refusing to meet Ali’s gaze, Crystal studied her hands and said nothing. “So what’s the deal, Crystal?” Ali prodded. “Did you tell Detective Farris exactly what you and Curtis Uttley were doing there in Mund’s Park the other night?”

“Making out,” Detective Farris supplied.

“I thought that’s what she’d say,” Ali said. “Actually they were doing quite a bit more than that, Detective Farris. So maybe it’s time you started the interview over again from scratch. And maybe this time Crystal will be kind enough to tell you what was really going on up there at Mund’s Park—and I do mean all of it. Like how she got there from Vegas and how she hooked up with Mr. Uttley. And don’t bother telling Detective Farris that you didn’t get a look at Mr. Hogan’s attackers. I know from hearing you barf your guts out in the ladies’ room that you recognized at least one of them. I’m guessing Curtis Uttley did, too, and that’s why he’s gone missing. He’s hiding out.”

Ali waited to see if Crystal would say anything. She didn’t.

“You might want to move along with that interview,” Ali continued. “With any luck, you’ll be finished before your father gets here.”

“Dad’s coming?” Crystal asked faintly.

“Yes, he is,” Ali said. “And believe me, he’s going to get an earful.”

With that, Ali left the conference room. Out in the lobby, Bob and Edie were nowhere to be seen. Sandy sat alone, deeply immersed in reading what seemed to be a Bible. Rather than interrupting her, Ali found a chair in a relatively quiet corner and turned on her computer. She planned to check for cutloose correspondence. Instead, on a whim, she logged on to the Internet and Googled Curtis Uttley. It turned out there were any number of listings, most of them talking about Curtis’s reputation as a trophy-winning coach of girls’ softball and soccer teams. The most recent mentions came as a result of coaching teams in the Flagstaff area. Previous items came from towns in Texas, Kansas, and California.

A rolling stone gathering no moss, Ali concluded. And with an endless supply of adolescent girls. What more could a pedophile want?

Edie Larson emerged from the elevator and went straight over to Sandy. She placed one hand on her shoulder. After a whispered conversation, Sandy stowed her Bible, stood, and accompanied Edie back to the elevator. Ali rose and made as if to follow them. From the back of the elevator, Edie discouraged her doing so with a single shake of her head. Feeling a little rejected and still angry with Crystal, Ali returned to her computer screen.

She had scanned the first list and was halfway through the second when she found the Web site, AskCoachCurt.com. Coach Curtis Uttley answers your team sports questions. Ali immediately logged on to the site and scrolled through a series of essays. How to Be a Team Player; Get Off the Bench and Get on the Field; Winning Isn’t Everything; It’s Never Too Early to Look for a Scholarship. There at the bottom of the page was one final note. For individual questions or coaching advice, feel free to write to CoachCurt@askcoachcurt.com.

So this is how he meets girls, Ali thought. Then he reels themin with text messages that never show up on computer screens that parents might actually see.

Going back to the original list, Ali made a note of each town mentioned in the coaching articles. It would probably be worthwhile to contact school and recreation folks in each of those areas to see why a teacher who was also a winning coach had suddenly moved on. Ali had a feeling that Crystal Holman wasn’t Coach Uttley’s first teenage conquest and that, rather than confronting him, the authorities in the other towns had simply passed him along and turned him into someone else’s problem.

And now he’s mine, Ali thought.

She wrote and posted the next blog entry while sitting in the hospital lobby.

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

Thursday, January 12, 2006

It’s been a long day. I’m in a hospital lobby, waiting for a friend whose loved one is hovering between life and death. Sitting here is giving me some time to reflect on some of the things I’ve learned today, and they aren’t pretty.

What I want to do is speak to every parent with an adolescent or pre-adolescent child and say to those parents: WAKE UP!!! If your child has a computer, check it out. Find out what chat rooms he or she visits, and find out what’s going on there. Find out who’s on your child’s buddy list. Who sends e-mails to your child’s address and what do those e-mails say? And what does your child say back? Does this sound like an invasion of your precious offspring’s privacy? You bet it is. It’s also called parenting.

The same rules apply to your child’s cell phone. What comes and goes on your son or daughter’s text messages is private. It’s also possibly deadly. Today I’ve caught glimpses of some of the people out there, evil people—who are trolling the cyber-ether for innocent children to victimize—your children. And yes, you should be very afraid for your children.

And if looking over your son or daughter’s shoulder when they’re online annoys them? Fine. You can tell them from me that being a parent is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.

Babe,

posted 6:07 P.M. January 12, 2006

Dave Holman arrived at the hospital a few minutes later. “Where’s Crystal?” he wanted to know.

“In a conference room talking to Detective Farris,” Ali told him.

“Lee is interviewing her? How come? She’s involved in this?”

Wrestling with how much to tell and when to tell it, Ali nodded. “Before I picked her up the other night in Mund’s Park, she may have seen something.”

“What?”

“She was in the car with Curt Uttley,” Ali said. “They were there at the time of the attack.”

“What were they doing there?” Dave asked. “Car trouble? How is Kip, by the way?” he continued without waiting for Ali to answer. “And where’s Sandy?”

Ali knew it was only a matter of time before she’d have to tell Dave the whole story, but right that moment she was grateful for any delay that spared her from doing so.

“Kip’s out of surgery and back in the ICU,” Ali said. “That’s where Sandy is, too, along with my folks. They’re all up in ICU.”

“I need to let Sandy know that we’ve finally got a lead on Kip’s family. He has a daughter named Jane Eyre Hogan. Her married name is Braeton. She was born April 1, 1974. Her mother’s name was Amy Sue Laughton Hogan. Jane was raised by her grandmother, Elizabeth Hogan, a retired Kingman High School English teacher.”

“Raised by her and most likely named by her, too, I’ll bet,” Ali offered. “Anyone who would stick a poor little boy with a name like Rudyard Kipling wouldn’t hesitate at naming a baby girl Jane Eyre. Elizabeth Hogan must be quite unusual, though. Mostly it’s maternal grandmothers who pick up the child-raising responsibilities when the parents take a hike.”

“But I ran into a brick wall trying to find her,” Dave continued. “Elizabeth Hogan left Kingman long enough ago that there’s no longer a valid forwarding address. She may actually be dead by now, although there’s no sign of a death certificate anywhere I could find. The records clerk over in Coconino County had better luck with the daughter—Jane Hogan Braeton. I have an address for her here in Phoenix—down in Chandler, actually. The clerk tried to call the information in to Detective Farris, but his phone is turned off, probably because he’s doing the interview. I told her I’d pass it along as soon as I saw him.”

Dave looked expectantly toward the conference room door. Ali’s first instinct had always been to leave the tale telling to Crystal, but she seemed incapable of telling the truth to anyone about anything. Now, with a few minutes of relative privacy, Ali knew it was time to come clean.

She took his hand and led him toward the room’s most distant seating. “Listen, Dave,” she said, changing the subject. “We need to talk about your daughter, and you’re not going to like what I have to say.”

“What has she done now?” Dave asked.

“It turns out she’s been doing lots of things.”

By the time Ali finished giving him her account of what had been going on, Dave was crushed—crushed, livid, and irate all at the same time.

“You mean to tell me she’s been screwing around like this right under Roxie’s nose?” he demanded. “How’s that possible? And she calls herself a blow-job virgin? I can’t believe it. She’s only thirteen, for God’s sake!”

“I know,” Ali agreed.

“And where do I find this worthless son of a bitch Curt Uttley so I can put him out of his misery?” Dave demanded. “He’s probably hiding out in Tempe somewhere near the same place where you lost whoever was driving that Explorer. Take me there. I’ll find him if I have to take the neighborhood apart brick by brick. What’s the address?”

“I never saw exactly where he went, so I can’t give you an address,” Ali said. “The Explorer turned onto a residential street and disappeared—probably into an attached garage. Once the door was shut, there was no way to tell which one it was.”

“I’ll figure it out,” Dave said determinedly.

Just then Lee Farris left the conference room and came over to where Ali and Dave were sitting. “Did you tell him?” Lee asked. “About what she was doing in Mund’s Park?”

Ali nodded.

“Sorry about that, Dave,” Farris said. “She claims she met the guy over the Internet.”

“At askcoachcurt.com?” Ali asked.

Frowning, Farris gave Ali an appraising look. “How did you know that?” he asked.

“Lucky guess,” she said.

Farris turned back to Dave. “According to what Crystal told me just now, while she and Uttley were parked there, they witnessed part of the attack on Kip Hogan. Uttley drove across the freeway to report the incident. Crystal thinks Mr. Hogan’s assailants came there looking for Uttley and Crystal both. When Crystal came out of the restroom, she broke into a house, looking for a place to hide. She was afraid the assailants might come after her, too. And it turns out one of them did—earlier today. She saw him.”

“Today?” Ali asked.

“Crystal said she heard from Uttley late this morning—at least she thought it was him. He offered to give her a ride back to Sedona. She went to a park down the street to meet him, but he didn’t show. Crystal was being cautious and was keeping out of sight because she was afraid you might come there looking for her as well. The Explorer parked, but the guy who got out of it wasn’t Uttley. The driver turned out to be one of Mr. Hogan’s attackers.”

“She recognized the guy?”

Farris nodded. “And it scared her to death.” He held out one of Madeline Haven’s composite sketches. “This one,” he added. “She says this is the guy.”

Ali recognized the sketch, too. It was the same one Crystal had dropped earlier. Looking at it and seeing the man’s dead-eyed stare, a cold chill ran down Ali’s spine. If this was the man who had come looking for Crystal, he was most likely also the man Ali had followed. For miles. Only being caught at that stop-light had kept her from catching him—or him from catching her. When Ali glanced in Dave’s direction, he was staring at her.

“If Crystal hadn’t been hiding from you at the park, the guy probably would have caught up with her. And if you hadn’t confiscated her phone, he definitely would have caught her the second time. Thank you, Ali,” he said, crushing her in a bear hug. “Thank you so much.”

“Taking the phone was pure luck,” Ali said with a laugh. “I wanted to get her attention. Since spanking her wasn’t an option, I did the next best thing—I took away her lifeline.”

“Thank you,” he said again.

“I saw you come in, Dave,” Lee Farris said. “I told Crystal you were here, but she wouldn’t come out to talk to you. You should probably go talk to her.”

“What the hell am I going to say?” Dave asked despairingly as he stood up. “Any suggestions about what a father should say to a sexually active thirteen-year-old?”

“That’s easy,” Lee said with a sympathetic chuckle. “You could always threaten to lock her up for the next four years. That’s what I told my daughter when she went off the rails in middle school. It’s not fatal. And eventually Gina figured out I was right.”

Dave started toward the conference room moving like a death-row inmate taking his last walk.

“Crystal sees herself as a drama queen,” Ali called after him. “Don’t fall for it. You don’t have to be mad, but you do need to give her a dose of reality. Tell her the first order of business will be taking her to a doctor to be checked for STDs. Maybe that will get her attention. She’s operating under the idiotic notion that oral sex isn’t really sex. Somebody has to get the truth through to her.”

Dave stopped and looked back at Ali, his haggard face full of regret. “You always wonder how you’ll do the birds-and-bees talk with your kids,” he said. “I never imagined it would turn out like this.”

Crystal’s a long way beyond birds and bees talking, Ali thought. She’s into birds and bees doing.

“I know you didn’t,” Ali told him kindly. “All you can do now is play the hand you’ve been dealt and hope for the best.”

Nodding, Dave started away and then stopped once more. “I almost forgot, Lee. You need to turn your phone on and check with your records clerk. They believe they’ve got a line on Kip’s family.”

While Dave headed into the conference room to talk with his daughter, Farris plucked his phone out of his pocket and dialed. “But first we need to get a line on whoever’s driving Curtis Uttley’s Explorer. So tell me again, Ms. Reynolds. Where were you exactly when you lost him?”

Ali started to tell him, but by then someone had answered his call. “Okay,” Farris said. “I’m still down in Phoenix, but I’m going to need you to put out a BOLO on a white Explorer registered to one Curtis Uttley of…”

“He was?” Farris resumed. “Really? When did this happen?” He listened for a moment more and then added, “And they’ve got detectives headed here? All right. Give them my number so we can coordinate. Yeah, I’ll keep my phone on. I was doing interviews and didn’t want to be interrupted. And Mojave County will be following up on tracking down his cell phone? That’s probably the best way to pinpoint the location of whoever has it. The problem is, that could take some time.”

There was another pause before Farris continued. “Yes, Detective Holman’s still here in Phoenix, and yes, he did mention something about that, but he didn’t have a chance to go into any details. Okay, shoot.” For the next several minutes, Farris jotted lines into a notebook. Finally he closed it and put it away. “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got all that. Tell the sheriff that with everything happening down here right now, I’ll probably have to stay over tonight.”

Farris closed his phone and turned to Ali. “So much for Curtis Uttley,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Ali asked.

“I mean he’s over,” Farris said. “Dead as a doornail. One of the construction workers on the new Burro Creek Bridge found what everybody thought was an unidentified jumper down in the bottom of the canyon yesterday morning. Except when they got around to doing the autopsy this afternoon, it turns out he wasn’t a jumper at all. Signs of restraints on his ankles and wrists, and the guy was dead before he ever hit the ground. The ME says his injuries are mostly blunt force trauma. So somebody beat the crap out of him the same way they did Kip Hogan. And tonight when the Mojave County ME finally got around to running the dead guy’s fingerprints through AFIS, guess what? Curtis Uttley’s name came up because of the thumbprint on his California driver’s license, which he hadn’t bothered to change.”

“They killed him?” Ali asked.

Farris nodded.

“And they took his vehicle,” Ali added. “Just like they took my dad’s truck after they attacked Kip.”

“Looks like,” Lee Farris agreed. “Luckily for your dad, they blew a tire on that Bronco of his or it would still be gone. It also looks like you’re real lucky you didn’t catch up with this creepo today. His losing you was the best thing that could have happened. Otherwise we’d probably be looking for you now, too.”

Half sick to her stomach, Ali knew it was true. She hadn’t been following Curt Uttley—she had been following Curt Uttley’s killer, and if she had managed to catch him, no doubt she’d be dead as well. So far both she and Crystal had been incredibly lucky.

There’s only one question, Ali thought. Will the killers give up or will they come back and try again?

{ CHAPTER 11 }

The door to the conference room opened. Dave Holman emerged from the room. His daughter did not.

“We’ve had our little father/daughter chat,” he said. “Crystal says she’s too embarrassed to come out, and maybe that’s a good thing.”

Folding a piece of paper and stuffing it in his jacket pocket, Dave looked from Lee’s face to Ali’s. “What’s up?” he asked.

“Uttley’s dead,” Farris said without preamble. “Somebody killed him and threw him over the guardrail where they’re building that new bridge at Burro Creek.”

Dave took a few seconds to process that. “Thank God for small blessings,” he said. “Saves me the trouble.”

Farris nodded. “I’m on my way to Tempe right now to see what I can do about tracking down our bad guys.”

“Me, too,” Dave Holman said.

“No,” Farris objected. “Absolutely not.”

“What do you mean, no?” Dave argued. “At this stage of the investigation, the more feet on the ground the better.”

“Not your feet,” Farris returned. “We need uninvolved feet, Dave. We need people with no ax to grind. Uttley’s murder happened in Mojave County. They’ve got a pair of detectives headed this way. We’ll be able to use them. The attack on Mr. Hogan happened in my jurisdiction, and I’ll be working the case as well. What I want you to do is walk away and let us handle this.”

“I’m supposed to ignore that one of these guys was hanging around here looking for my daughter?”

“That’s all the more reason for you not to be involved,” Farris returned.

“I’m off duty,” Dave pointed out. “What I do on my own time is none of your business.”

For a long tense moment, the two men squared off, staring eye to eye. Afraid punches might be thrown, Ali held her breath. Lee Farris was the first to blink.

“Look,” he said with a conciliatory sigh. “You know you’re too close to this part of the investigation to be unbiased, but there is something you could do. How about if you head down to Chandler and see if you can locate Mr. Hogan’s daughter? You’re a cop, but you’re also one of his friends. It would be a big help to me, Dave. That would mean one less thing I’d have to worry about.”

Dave thought about that for a time. “All right,” he said at last. “Fine.”

“Good,” Farris said. “Thanks. You have all the information you need?”

Dave nodded. “I’ve got it,” he said.

With that, Detective Farris strode off. As soon as he was out of sight, Dave, too, headed for the lobby door, with Ali trailing behind. “Where are you going?” she asked. “Chandler?”

Dave shook his head. “Tempe,” he said grimly.

“But I thought you said…”

“I lied,” Dave said. “Besides, I still have these.” He reached into his pocket and unfolded the three composite sketches. “I’ll stop by a Kinko’s on my way and make a bunch of copies, then I’ll start canvassing gas stations and grocery stores in the area. Even bad guys have to eat and buy gas. If the driver of that Explorer could access a garage door with an opener, chances are he lives somewhere around there. Somebody is going to recognize him.”

“What about contacting Kip’s daughter?” Ali objected.

“I’m sorry,” Dave said. “Getting these guys off the street is a hell of a lot more important than doing a next-of-kin notification.” He opened a small notebook, tore out a page, and handed it to Ali. “If it’s so important to you, you do the notification. You’re Kip’s friend every bit as much as I am. Or maybe your father can do it. We’re dealing with a bunch of cold-blooded killers, Ali. They’re out there looking for Crystal. Right now, finding them is my first priority.”

“What about Crystal?” Ali asked.

“What about her?”

Dave, suddenly focused on the hunt, was prepared to head out without uttering a word to his daughter. “You can’t just walk away and leave her here,” Ali said.

“I can’t very well take her with me, either,” Dave said. “Could I leave her with you awhile longer?”

As Dave’s friend, Ali had listened sympathetically to his version of how the wheels had come off his marriage. The way he told it, Roxanne had been largely to blame. In that instant though, as he prepared to walk away without a word, Ali understood the end of the marriage wasn’t all Roxie’s fault. Whenever duty called—whatever kind of duty—Dave would have been off and running, leaving Roxie holding the bag, juggling the three kids and trying to keep the home fires burning.

In two days, Ali had had more than a bellyful of Crystal Holman, and she wasn’t eager to sign on for more. “Did you make any progress when you talked to her?” Ali asked.

“Some I suppose,” Dave said with a shrug. “We called her mother from the conference room and talked to her together. Roxie says she and Richey will drive down tomorrow and take Crystal home. But that’s tomorrow. Tonight I can’t very well take her along to Tempe with me. It’s too dangerous. What if something were to happen to her?”

What if something happens to you? Ali wondered, but by then, Ali knew she was stuck. “All right,” she agreed. “I’ll keep Crystal with me for the time being, and when I go back to Sedona, I’ll take her to my house.”

“Thank you,” Dave said. “Thanks for everything.”

“You’re welcome,” Ali said. “But you’re not leaving without telling her what’s going on. You’re her father, Dave. She needs to hear it from you, not from me.”

“All right,” he agreed reluctantly. “I’ll tell her.”

When Ali and Dave turned back toward the conference room, they were both surprised to see that Crystal, looking isolated and resentful, was standing silently in the doorway. There was no telling how long she had been there or how much she had heard.

While Ali watched, Dave hurried over to her. Crystal greeted everything he had to say with a temper tantrum of stormy objections. Eventually he wore her down.

“Please, Crystal,” Dave begged. “I need to help catch these guys.”

“All right,” Crystal said, relenting. “But it’s just for tonight. She treats me like I’m a baby or something. I’m glad she’s not my mother.”

And that, Ali thought with genuine gratitude, makes two of us.

Jason Gustavson could hardly believe that the crazy bitch had followed him all the way home from Phoenix, but now, watching the evening news, he was putting it all together. It was terrible luck that the girl was somehow connected to the guy from the store, but that was the problem with small towns. Everybody knew everybody. Everyone was connected to everyone else.

Thanks to the eager news reporter standing in front of St. Francis Hospital, he knew the man they hadn’t quite managed to kill was being treated there. Jason fully intended to go there and finish the job. He’d take care of him and of the others, too—the girl who had somehow gotten away and the crazy broad in the blue Cayenne, who had driven like a maniac to keep up with him.

After a lifetime of keeping his urges bottled up, Jason had finally given himself permission to be real. He wasn’t appalled by what he’d done. He was proud of it. He’d finally stood up for himself. All his life he had talked about doing something spectacular. Time after time, he’d laid out plans and then given them up. This time, he was moving forward. This time he was really doing it. The other guys were petrified, of course. They were scared shitless of the cops and of Jason, too, and they weren’t wrong.

On his way to the bathroom, Jason felt the slightest twinge of guilt for the Roto-Rooter guy. After all, he was just a poor jerk out doing a dirty job to support his family, but he was also in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because of that, he would be the first to die.

Jason found Tom Melman on his knees in the bathroom, replacing the broken toilet. When the door opened behind him, he didn’t look up. “I’ll be done in a few minutes,” he said, “then I’ll get your water turned back on.”

He may have heard a click because he started to turn around, but the bullet from the silenced .38 plowed into the back of his head and exploded out the front. He fell face-first into the uninstalled Toto. If it hadn’t been for the blood splatter all over the room, he might have been a frat boy who’d had way too much to drink.

Clint Homewood was next. He was sprawled on the beanbag chair in his room, totally engrossed in his PlayStation game and listening to his tunes. “How’s it going, Jas,” he asked as the door opened. “Want to play?”

But Jason Gustavson no longer had any interest in virtual bullets. He’d become enamored with the real thing. “Not right now,” he said, and he pulled the trigger. Again, shooting from mere inches away, there was no question of missing, and he didn’t. The PlayStation fell to the filthy, pizza-box-and beer-can-littered floor and so did Clint. Something about seeing him lying there with his shattered head next to a half-eaten pepperoni made Jason smile.

“Hey,” Mitch Warren called from out in the hall. “What’s going on? Did you hear a funny noise?”

Jason had planned to take Mitch in his room, lying on his bed. Instead, Jason confronted his second roommate in the hallway. When he pulled the trigger, Mitch clutched his gut and crumpled to the floor, moaning. Jason was tempted to leave him there, but he was tired of loose ends, so he pulled the trigger again and put Mitch out of his misery. Then, stepping over the body, he left his roommates’ wing and headed for his own room in the master suite on the far side of the house.

Jason Gustavson had a few last-minute items to pull together before he could finish this. It might very well be his last evening on earth, and he planned to make it memorable.

“Come on,” Ali said, once Dave had disappeared through the lobby door.

“Where?” Crystal asked.

“Your father has work to do, and so do we.”

“Like what?” Crystal wanted to know. “What do we have to do?”

“First we have to go upstairs and talk to my parents and tell them where we’re going. Then we need to track down Mr. Hogan’s daughter and let her know what’s happened to him.”

“Why?” Crystal asked.

“Because your father asked us to for starters, and we’re going to tell my parents because that’s what responsible people do—they let other people—people who love them—know where they’re going and when they’ll be back.”

“But I’m hungry. Can’t we have something to eat first?”

Ali reminded herself that this was a child who could mow her way through two Sugarloaf sweet rolls at one sitting. “Sure,” Ali said. “We’ll find something on the way.”

They took the elevator up to the ICU floor, where they found Bob and Edie Larson seated side by side in a small waiting room. Sandy wasn’t visible.

“They let her in to see him?” Ali asked.

“Thanks to your mother,” Bob said.

“How’s Kip doing?”

Bob shook his head wordlessly and swiped at his eyes with a pair of balled fists. Edie reached over and patted his knee. “Not very well,” she said. “He’s on a ventilator. I don’t think he’s going to make it.”

Ali never remembered seeing her father quite so broken up. Kip had worked for the Larsons, but he and Bob had become good friends as well—and Kip was a friend Bob didn’t want to lose.

“Dave found out that Kip has a daughter,” Ali said.

“A daughter?” Bob asked incredulously. “Are you serious? He never once mentioned having kids.”

“I have her address,” Ali continued. “She lives down in Chandler. Dave asked me…us actually,” she revised, motioning toward Crystal, “to contact her and let her know what’s going on.”

Bob nodded. “If she’s going to get here before it’s too late, you should probably just call her.”

Ali shook her head. “Dave wanted her to be notified in person, and I think he’s right.” She motioned to Crystal. “Let’s go.”

Edie got up and followed them as far as the elevator. “We won’t be able to stay much longer,” she told her daughter. “Sandy’s brother is supposed to be coming a little later, but if we have to go back home…”

“It’s all right,” Ali said. “I’ll make sure Sandy isn’t left here by herself.”

“Good,” Edie said.

Moments later, Ali and Crystal descended to the lobby and walked out into the unexpected chill of a cold desert night. They stopped at a Jack in the Box just shy of the freeway.

“Did your father tell you why he was going to Tempe?” Ali asked while they waited for their to-go order.

Crystal shrugged. “He just said he was going. He didn’t say why. When he’s working on a case, he never does.”

“Curt Uttley is dead,” Ali said quietly.

Crystal gave a small involuntary gasp. “He’s what?”

“He’s dead, Crystal. Someone trussed him up with rope or duct tape. Then they beat him to death and dropped him off the Burro Creek Bridge between Wickenburg and Kingman. That’s who your father is looking for in Tempe. The people who did that. He’s afraid they’re looking for you, too.”

Crystal was uncharacteristically silent, and in that bit of quiet, Ali had a sudden stroke of inspiration. Crystal Holman had been lying to everyone all along, and she probably still was. “Did you see them?” Ali asked quietly.

“See who?”

“Did you see those men, the ones with the bats, meet up with Curt Uttley at the gas station?” Ali asked. “Did you actually see what happened?”

Once again Crystal didn’t answer, but a brief grimace passed across the girl’s features and a vehement denial followed.

“Why do people keep asking me stuff like that?” Crystal declared. “I’m telling you, I didn’t see anything!”

“Excuse me, Crystal, I already know you’re a liar, and I happen to think you’re lying about this, too. But if your father is going to put his life and his job on the line trying to track these guys down, don’t you think somebody deserves to know the truth about what went on?”

Another long period of silence followed as they drove through the relatively light nighttime traffic with the computer-generated voice of the dashboard GPS issuing its bland directions as they went.

Finally Crystal let out a long breath. “Curt had finished making the call and was going back to his SUV when all of a sudden three guys came rushing at him out of nowhere. I saw the whole thing. It looked like they were arguing or something. And then Curt and two of the three got into Curt’s car and drove away. Another car followed them.”

“Willingly?” Ali asked. “Did Curt Uttley get into the car because he wanted to or because they forced him to?”

Crystal didn’t respond.

“Well?” Ali prodded.

“I think they made him go,” Crystal admitted at last.

“And you saw the other car? What kind? What make and model?”

“I don’t know,” Crystal said. “I don’t really know all that much about cars.”

“Why didn’t you tell someone about this at the time?” Ali asked. “Why didn’t you report it? Curt Uttley may have been a pedophile and a worthless excuse for a human being, but if you had called the cops right then and told them what you knew, maybe they could have done something about it. Maybe they could have saved him.”

“I was scared,” Crystal whimpered. “I was afraid they’d come after me, too. I mean, I saw what they were doing to that other guy. They were hitting him with a bat. I didn’t want to get hit. And I was afraid to have my dad find out what was going on. But then, this morning, when I got the text message from Curt, I was really happy to hear from him and know he was okay.”

“He isn’t okay,” Ali pointed out. “He’s dead, and he might not have been if you’d reported what happened in a timely manner.”

“Don’t you think I know that now?” Crystal whispered. “I knew it this afternoon as soon as that guy got out of Curt’s car. I knew it right then. I’ll never be able to think of anything else.”

Ali knew Crystal had been scared, and that she still was. No wonder she’d been so difficult. Still, now that they were moving forward, Ali kept up the questions.

“Did you tell Detective Farris any of this?”

“No,” Crystal admitted. “But that’s why I don’t want to go back to Vegas. Daddy’s a cop. He won’t let anything bad happen to me. My stepfather…” Again her voice faded away.

“What about your stepfather?”

Crystal shrugged. “He’s pretty much useless. He wouldn’t be able to keep me safe if they came there looking for me. Not ever.”

Ali wasn’t sure Dave could keep his daughter safe, either. She wasn’t sure anyone could.

By then they had finally arrived at the address listed on Dave Holman’s piece of notebook paper. It turned out to be in a golf course development on the far east side of Chandler. Par 5 Drive was a quiet cul de sac that evidently backed up to a fairway on the Desert Steppes Golf Course. In the glow of neatly spaced streetlamps the houses themselves seemed spacious and commanding, but it appeared that only a few feet separated one house from its next-door neighbor. The distinctly California-like density led Ali to believe this was a relatively new development.

She pulled up to a curb and stopped in front of the house. “Here we are,” Ali said.

“Do I have to come in?” Crystal asked. “Can’t I just wait in the car?”

“We’ve already been over this once today, and I think you know the answer,” Ali told her. “Yes, you’re upset, but you’ve proved to be untrustworthy. Come on.”

Caught up in the conversation with Crystal, Ali had given no thought to what she would say to Kip Hogan’s long-lost daughter. Ali was still scrambling for ideas when she pressed the doorbell. In the far reaches of the house the drone of a television set was abruptly silenced. A few minutes later, the porch light flipped on, the door opened a crack, and a tall black man peered out at them.

“Yes?” he asked cautiously.

“Is this the Braeton residence?” Ali asked.

“It is,” he said. “And I’m Jonathan Braeton. Who are you and what can I do for you?”

His voice was wary, but it was also cultured and smooth. His response to unexpected late evening visitors wasn’t rude, but it wasn’t especially cordial, either.

And why would he be? Ali wondered. After all, it was eight-thirty at night, and the man was faced with a pair of complete strangers who had appeared unannounced on his doorstep. Police officers doing this kind of thing at least had official ID to offer. Ali had nothing.

“I’m sorry to intrude,” she stammered. “My name is Alison Reynolds from Sedona, and this is Crystal Holman. We’re looking for a Jane Hogan Braeton. I’m a friend of her father’s.”

“Really,” the man said. “You don’t say.”

He stepped back from the door then, but he didn’t open it. Instead, he engaged the security chain. “Janie,” he called. “You may want to come hear this.”

A woman’s voice called from somewhere in the background. “What?”

“There’s someone here who claims she’s a friend of your father’s.”

“A friend of my father’s?” the woman repeated. “I don’t have a father. Is she nuts?”

“You’d better come see for yourself,” he told her.

Ali hadn’t been particularly surprised when a black man had answered the door. After all, interracial marriages had been on the scene for a long time. What she hadn’t expected at all, however, was that Kip Hogan’s daughter would also turn out to be an African American. Because she was. Her skin was several shades lighter than her husband’s, but she was still clearly black.

If Kip Hogan is her father, her mother was or is black, Ali decided. Or else she’s adopted.

Not the least intimidated, Jane Braeton refused to hide behind the half-open door. Instead, she disengaged the security chain and flung the inside door wide open. For a moment she stood framed in the doorway with her husband directly behind her.

Jonathan Braeton was tall and rangy and in his early to mid-forties. Jane was short and stout and looked to be ten years younger than her husband. The top of her head barely reached the height of her husband’s broad shoulders. He was wearing a sweatsuit with a towel casually draped around his neck and looked as though he had just finished a workout. She was still dressed for work in a skirt, blouse, blazer, and stockings. But no shoes.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “What do you want, and what kind of a scam are you trying to pull?”

“It’s about Kip Hogan,” Ali offered. “That’s how we know him. Or, as he’s listed on your birth certificate, Rudyard Kipling Hogan.”

“Words on a birth certificate do not a father make,” Jane returned. “Mr. Hogan has been out of my life for a very long time, and I want him to stay that way.”

“He’s been hurt,” Ali said. “Gravely injured in fact. A gang of thugs beat him up with a baseball bat. He’s in the ICU at St. Francis Hospital. That’s why we came to let you know, so you could go visit him.”

Jane Braeton crossed her arms. “What makes you think I’d want to? You claim you know Kip Hogan?” she asked.

“Yes,” Ali said.

“And does it look to you like he could possibly be my father?”

“Well, no,” Ali admitted. “It doesn’t, but…”

“You’re right. He isn’t. And how badly hurt is he?”

“Very,” Ali said. “He had brain surgery this morning. He’s on a ventilator. According to what my mother was able to learn, he may not make it.”

“What was this, some kind of barroom brawl?”

“It didn’t happen in a bar. It happened along I-17 south of Flagstaff. A couple of days ago three young punks came to the grocery store in Sedona where Kip’s girlfriend, Sandy Mitchell, works as a check-out clerk. They were underage and tried to buy booze. When she carded them, they started hassling her. Kip showed up in the middle of it, stuck up for Sandy, and put a stop to it. Afterward, the kids evidently lay in wait for Kip and took a baseball bat to him.”

“I’ve wanted to take a bat to him myself,” Jane Braeton said. “Let’s let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Janie,” Jonathan Braeton admonished. “Remember, what goes around comes around. We owe Elizabeth more than that. You can’t just turn your back on the man.”

“Why not?” Janie returned. “That’s what he did to us, didn’t he? He walked away from his own mother, for heaven’s sake! He never looked back and never lifted a finger to help her. As far as I can see, he never gave a damn about anyone but himself, and I don’t see why we should care about him, either.”

“Janie…”

“Don’t you start with me about it,” Jane said fiercely. “You weren’t there. You don’t know what it was like. You don’t have any idea.”

“Still,” Jonathan said calmly after a short pause, “let’s remember our manners. We don’t need to broadcast this discussion to the whole neighborhood. How about if we invite these nice ladies in out of the cold, offer them something warm to drink, and have this discussion in a civilized fashion?”

Jane Braeton looked as though inviting Ali and Crystal into her home was the last thing she wanted to do, but eventually she acquiesced. Stepping back, she motioned them inside. “Won’t you come in,” she rasped. She might just as well have been eating glass.

Jonathan, on the other hand, was far more welcoming. “Have a seat,” he said, leading Ali and Crystal into a spacious, comfortably furnished living room. “Now, what can I get you?” he asked. “Hot tea? Cocoa?”

Ali and Crystal settled on matching chintz-covered easy chairs. “Cocoa,” Crystal said at once. After a pointed look from Ali, she added a tardy, “Please.”

“Thank you,” Ali said. “Cocoa sounds nice. I’ll have some of that, too.”

Jane took a seat on a nearby sofa and leveled her questioning gaze on Crystal. “I suppose you’re a friend of Mr. Hogan’s as well?” she asked.

Crystal shook her head. “Not really,” she said.

“She’s with me,” Ali said. “I apologize for bringing her along, but I didn’t have anywhere to leave her.”

“Oh,” Jane said.

After that an uneasy silence enveloped the room. It took only a few minutes for Jonathan to return, bringing with him a tray laden with two cups and saucers. He handed one to Crystal. She held it nervously, with the bottom of the delicate china cup clattering on the saucer. For a moment Ali was reminded of herself, all those years ago, nervously sipping her first cup of Anna Lee Ashcroft’s tea.

Jonathan sat down next to his wife. “Call her,” he said.

Jane looked at her watch. “It’s too late,” she said. “She’s probably already asleep.”

“Call her,” he urged again. “Wake her up. He’s her son after all. What if this turns out to be Elizabeth’s last chance to see him? You wouldn’t want to be responsible for her missing that opportunity.”

With an angry shrug, Jane Braeton rose abruptly and stalked off to another room, slamming the door shut behind her.

“I had no idea Kip’s mother was still alive,” Ali said. “No one was able to sort out where she went after she left Kingman.”

“She’s in her nineties,” Jonathan explained. “She lives in an assisted living facility down in Queen Creek. She has macular degeneration, Parkinson’s, you name it. Having to put Elizabeth there almost broke Janie’s heart, but eventually it reached a point where it was too much. We could no longer have her here at home, not even with live-in help.”

He stopped and steepled his fingers in front of his chin before adding thoughtfully, “I suppose you can see that Janie’s family situation is a bit…shall we say…problematic. I won’t presume to go into all that. It’s Janie’s story and it’s entirely up to her whether or not she decides to share it. But tell me more about Mr. Hogan. How did you come to know him?”

For the next several minutes Ali explained about how Kip Hogan had come into her parents’ lives straight from the homeless camp on the Mogollon Rim; how Kip had helped care for Bob Larson in the aftermath of his snowboarding accident; and how he had stayed on and continued to work around the place long after Bob was back on his feet. She ended by telling him about the refinished bird’s-eye maple credenza—the last job Kip had completed before he had been assaulted.

“So he was trying to straighten himself out then,” Jonathan said.

“Yes,” Ali said. “Very much so. He’s been attending AA regularly and he has a steady girlfriend, Sandra Mitchell. She’s been at the hospital all day. She’ll be devastated if she loses him. My parents will be as well.”

Ali had known for sure how much Bob was affected. Her mother might not admit it, but the very fact that Edie had jumped into her Alero and driven down to the hospital was a strong indication that she, too, cared about Kip Hogan and what happened to him.

Just then the door came open down the hall and Jane Braeton marched back into the living room. She was wearing shoes now—a pair of stylish black pumps. She had a purse in one hand and a coat slung over the other arm.

“You’re right,” she said grudgingly to her husband. “She wants to go. The night supervisor said it’ll take forty-five minutes or so for an attendant to get Elizabeth out of bed and dressed. They’ll bring her down to the front entrance.”

Jane paused and gave Jonathan a searching look. Then she turned to Ali. “I suppose my husband has been running off at the mouth and giving you my whole life history?”

“I did no such thing,” Jonathan protested. “I told them that was up to you.”

Jane sighed. She tossed her purse onto the coffee table and then sat down on the couch. “I could just as well, I suppose,” she said. “My version will be mercifully shorter than Elizabeth’s will be. Do you mind getting me a cup of tea, Jon? I think I’m going to need it. And maybe our guests would like some more cocoa.”

“Would you care to help me?” Jonathan asked Crystal.

To Ali’s surprise, Crystal leaped willingly to her feet and followed Jonathan into the kitchen.

{ CHAPTER 12 }

Jane waited until the door swung shut behind them. She sighed again. “I suppose you can tell I don’t much like talking about this,” she said. “It’s painful to have to acknowledge that you were unwanted. Not entirely unwanted. Elizabeth Hogan wanted me, and I bless her for it, but she was the only one who did.”

Puzzled, Ali nodded but said nothing.

“The man you know as my father, Kip Hogan, was a native of Kingman. Both his father’s people and his mother’s, the Brownings, came from there as well. Kip’s father and grandfather both worked for the railroad. His dad was a brakeman who died in a train accident when Kip was only three. As for his mother? Since the family name was Browning, when their first child turned out to be a girl, they decided to name her Elizabeth Barrett. It was supposed to be a joke, but Elizabeth ended up having the last laugh. She was the first girl in her family ever to go to college. She went to Flagstaff back when Northern Arizona University was still the Northern Arizona State Teacher’s College. She graduated from there with a teaching certificate and eventually a full-fledged degree in English. She went back home and taught English at Kingman High School for her entire career.”

“Hence Rudyard Kipling Hogan,” Ali offered.

Jane nodded and smiled apologetically. “Exactly. So Kip grew up there. He was a typical teacher’s kid, which is to say he was a born hell-raiser. He never even finished high school. Instead, he dropped out and volunteered for the army, then got shipped to Vietnam. Elizabeth always told me he was different when he came back—different—but at first he seemed to be okay. He came back home and hired on with the fire department. That’s where he was working when he met my mother.”

“Amy Sue,” Ali said.

Jane gave her a shrewd look. “Yes,” she said. “Amy Sue Laughton Hogan. She said she was from Virginia, but that was probably a lie. Everything else she said was a lie, so why would that be any different? She showed up in town on a Greyhound bus with nothing but a couple of suitcases. She rented herself a room, went to work in one of the local dives, and set her cap for Kip Hogan. And voilà, next thing you know, she tells him she’s pregnant. By then, he’s trying to be the man, so he trades shifts, takes two days off from work, and off they go to Vegas to get married. That was July fourth, 1973.”

The kitchen door swung open. Jonathan came in with his tray, two cups and saucers—a new one for Ali and one for his wife, and no Crystal.

“That poor little girl is starving,” he said to Ali. “I’m making her some toast and cheese. I hope you don’t mind.”

Having fed her one meal on the way here, Ali wondered if Crystal had a hollow leg. Jane Braeton, on the other hand, sent a grateful smile in her husband’s direction. Seeing it, Ali realized that keeping Crystal in the kitchen was a ploy on Jonathan’s part, a way of giving his wife some privacy in order to tell a story she most likely wouldn’t want to relate in front of a thirteen-year-old girl.

Jane waited until Jonathan returned to the kitchen before she continued. “They were in Vegas on their honeymoon when a train derailed coming through Kingman. A tanker loaded with liquid propane was involved, and the resulting BLEVE was huge.”

“The what?” Ali asked.

“A boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion,” Jane explained. “On July fifth a rail car loaded with liquid propane caught fire and blew up. It was Kingman, Arizona’s darkest day. Eleven firemen and one civilian were killed. Several others—firemen and police officers—were seriously injured, and ninety-some-odd civilian bystanders also suffered burns.”

Ali remembered the story now but only vaguely. She had been in junior high when it happened. For days the fire had been headline news all over Arizona. Geographically Sedona was a long way away from Kingman. Eventually the story had faded, but Ali understood that for a small town like Kingman, one which had suddenly lost a whole troop of its finest young men, the fire had to be a tragedy whose tentacles still held.

“So, when all hell broke loose, Rudyard Kipling Hogan was off in Vegas honeymooning with his brand-new wife,” Jane went on. “They headed back as soon as they heard the news and arrived while the fire was still burning. Kip went to the site and looked at the damage, but he never even suited up. Instead, he left again without a word and without even bothering to unpack his suitcase. He didn’t give a damn if Amy Sue was pregnant or not. He left her that very day and never came back. Elizabeth always said it was because of the guilt—that he couldn’t stand the idea that he was alive when his friends were dead.”

“So your parents were married for two days?” Ali asked.

“Let’s just say that Kip and Amy Sue were married for two days,” Jane allowed. “Elizabeth told me that she was shocked and disappointed when her son took off like that. He left Amy Sue with nothing—no money for rent, no place to stay, no car, nothing. Even though Kip wasn’t prepared to do the right thing, Elizabeth was. She let Amy Sue move in with her, and everything was peachy keen until I was born a good month or so earlier than anyone except Amy Sue expected. Once I was there in the hospital nursery for all to see, it was pretty clear that Rudyard Kipling Hogan wasn’t my father.”

“So your mother was white then?” Ali asked.

Jane paused, sipped her tea, and then nodded. “Apparently,” she said. “I did some checking after the fact. I’m pretty sure Amy Sue was already pregnant on the day she arrived in Kingman. She targeted Kip to be her fall guy, her baby’s daddy. The problem was, he was the wrong color, and by the time she figured that out, it was too late. She stayed in the hospital for three days after I was born and didn’t even bother giving me a name. She came home to Elizabeth’s house long enough to drop me off. She left the house in the middle of the night that first night without saying good-bye to anyone. I’ve never heard from her since. I have no idea if she’s dead or alive.”

Tears welled in the corners of Jane Braeton’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” Ali murmured.

Jane shook her head as if shaking off the momentary sadness that had overtaken her. Then she continued. “For the longest time, Elizabeth didn’t even let on to anyone that Amy Sue had bailed. She was afraid if people found out, some busybody from social services would decide she was too old to be raising a baby and take me away.”

“And she’s the one who named you?” Ali asked.

Jane allowed herself a bleak smile. “Right. Jane Eyre Hogan. Who else but an Elizabeth Barrett Browning would name me that? Elizabeth hired a former student of hers, a Mexican lady named Roseann Duarte, to look after me. And those are the people who raised me, Elizabeth Hogan and Roseann. Elizabeth was never my mother, but she’s the only mother I’ve ever known. She took care of me, loved me, and saw to it that I got a good education. My husband is right. I do owe her, and that’s why we’re doing this. That’s why we’re going to the hospital tonight, and that’s the only reason—not because some stranger’s name is on my birth certificate.”

Jane looked at her watch and stood up. “We should probably get going.”

Crystal emerged from the kitchen with Jonathan right behind her. “Do you want me to come with you?” he asked. “I can help with the wheelchair, whatever.”

Jane shook her head. “No,” she said. “We’ll be fine.”

“All right,” Jonathan agreed. “You and Elizabeth do what you have to do, but drive carefully.”

“I will,” Jane said. “I always do,”

Crystal was strangely subdued on the drive back to the hospital. Lost in her own thoughts, Ali let her be. Having heard Kip’s story through Jane Braeton’s point of view, Ali felt a whole lot more empathy for the man. He had come home from Vietnam damaged. Even without knowing that Amy Sue was playing him for a fool with her shotgun wedding routine, the added trauma of surviving the fire in which so many of his buddies had perished had been more than Kip could handle. His fragile ego had shattered, and he had spent decades wandering in the wilderness until Bob Larson had offered him a way out.

“They’re nice people,” Crystal said.

At first Ali thought she meant Bob and Edie Larson.

“I mean, they asked us in and gave us food and everything. While we were out in the kitchen, he was asking me about school. Did you know Jane is a teacher?”

“No,” Ali said. “I didn’t.”

“English,” Crystal said. “Junior high.”

That figures, Ali thought. What else would someone named Jane Eyre do?

“Kip Hogan ran away, too, didn’t he?” Crystal said thoughtfully.

“Yes.”

“How old was he?”

“I’m not sure,” Ali said. “I don’t know how old he is now. He was probably in his twenties or thirties.”

“So grown-ups run away sometimes, too.”

“Yes.”

“And his family is still mad at him about it.”

“Mad and hurt both,” Ali said.

“How come?”

“How come they’re mad?” Ali asked.

“I mean how come he ran away?”

Since Jonathan Braeton had respected his wife’s right to privacy, Ali could hardly do less.

“There was an accident,” she said. “An accident and a huge fire and lots of firemen died. Kip was working in the fire department at the time, and a lot of the people who died were friends of his.”

“So he was mad at himself for not dying, too?” Crystal asked.

Coming from someone Ali had dismissed as being totally self-absorbed, it was a very perceptive question.

“Pretty much,” Ali said.

“But nobody did anything to him? Nobody hurt him?”

“I don’t think so,” Ali said. “You heard what happened. Even after all these years, his mother’s on her way to the hospital right now to see him.”

“So, she still loves him.”

“So it would seem.”

“Oh,” Crystal said.

Ali’s phone rang. A glance at the readout told her it was Dave Holman. She tossed the phone to Crystal. “It’s your dad,” Ali said. “Why don’t you talk to him.”

“Hi, Daddy,” Crystal said. “We’re on our way back to the hospital. We just finished talking to Kip Hogan’s daughter.”

Not exactly, Ali thought. But close enough.

“She was nice,” Crystal said. “And so was her husband. She’s going to pick up Kip’s mother from somewhere and take her to the hospital so she can see him. Where are you? Really? A big fire? Will it be on the news?”

“What’s on the news?” Ali asked.

Crystal waved her hand for Ali to be quiet.

“Are you coming back to the hospital then?” There was a pause followed by Crystal’s disappointed, “Oh. Okay. Here she is.” Crystal shoved the phone in Ali’s direction. “He wants to talk to you.”

“What fire?” Ali demanded.

Crystal didn’t answer. Dave did. “We managed to locate Curt Uttley’s Explorer, or what’s left of it anyway, but I’m afraid we were a day late and a dollar short. The Explorer was parked in the garage of a house that burned to the ground late this afternoon.”

“Whose house?” Ali asked.

“The house belongs to some well-to-do guy from Minneapolis named Karl Gustavson. He bought it for his son, Jason, who’s going to school at ASU. According to the neighbors, the kid lives there with two roommates.”

“What happened?”

“Gas leak. At least that was what the Tempe Fire Department had said on a preliminary basis. Now they’re saying that there could have been some explosives involved as well.”

“Does Lee Farris know you’re there?”

“He wasn’t happy about it when I turned up a few minutes after he did, but he’s over it now.”

“How bad a fire?” Ali asked.

“Very,” Dave said. “The home is gutted, a complete loss. One of the firefighters told me they know of at least one fatality. We’re waiting for someone to go inside and check. Right this minute, what’s left is still so hot and so unstable that no one can get near it.”

“If no one’s been inside, how do they know there’s a fatality?”

Dave sighed. “Believe me,” he said, “there are ways to tell. I had planned on coming back to the hospital, but right now, I don’t know when I’ll get away. Depending on the time, I’ll either come there or else go straight back to Prescott.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ali said. “Crystal is with me, and we’ve got it covered.” She closed the phone.

“He always does that,” Crystal said. “The cases he’s working on are always more important than we are.”

Ali couldn’t help leaping to Dave’s defense. “I’m sure that’s not true,” she said.

“Yes, it is,” Crystal replied. “Coach Curt is dead. If Dad doesn’t care about me either, I could just as well go back to Vegas.”

Ali had no idea how to respond to that. If Coach Curt was a preferred alternative to going home to Vegas, Crystal’s family life back home with her mother had to be far worse than anyone knew.

It was almost ten by the time they returned to St. Francis Hospital, where they discovered that getting inside the facility at night was a lot more difficult than it had been during the day. A seemingly humorless security guard had set up a check-in stand just inside the sliding lobby doors. All visitors arriving between the hours of 10 P.M. and 6 A.M. had to present valid identification, sign in, list the name of the patient they intended to visit, and be issued a visitor’s pass. Since Crystal was only thirteen, she had no photo ID available.

Ali was still trying to argue her way past the gatekeeper when Jane Braeton showed up pushing a wheelchair. In it sat a tiny, white-haired woman who had to be Kip’s mother, Elizabeth Barrett Browning Hogan.

“What’s the problem?” Jane stopped the chair directly behind Ali.

“Crystal doesn’t have any ID,” Ali explained. “They’re not going to let her in.”

“Who are these people?” Elizabeth wanted to know, turning her head back and forth in the direction of each of their voices. “What’s wrong?”

“These are the people I told you about, Nana,” Jane said. “The ones who drove down this evening to let us know what had happened to Kip. This is…” She paused, having forgotten Ali’s name.

“Alison Reynolds,” Ali supplied, reaching out and taking Elizabeth’s trembling and icy-cold hand. “And this is my friend, Crystal. The problem is, she’s thirteen and, as a consequence, doesn’t have any photo ID. They won’t let her into the hospital without it, so I guess we can’t go up.”

“Who won’t let her go up?” Elizabeth asked.

“The security guard here,” Jane said. “The one who issues the visitor’s passes.”

“Where?”

Jane had maneuvered the chair so it was parked directly in front of the desk and then began searching for her own ID. Elizabeth, in the meantime, moved her head around until she found a spot where her macular degeneration still allowed her some degree of sight.

“Young man,” she said briskly. “You are a young man, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said with an uncomfortable grin. “Yes, ma’am, I suppose I am.”

“And these people here, the woman and the girl with no photo ID, are people I’ve only just met. They drove all the way from here down to Chandler to let me know that my son has been injured and is in your hospital. Do you have any children?”

“Yes, I do,” he replied.

“And how old are they?”

The guard looked ill at ease, as though he was uncertain whether or not he should answer his pint-size wheelchair-bound inquisitor. Finally he did. “One is four and the other is six months,” he said.

“And you,” she said. “When were you born?”

The security guard turned to Jane, hoping for assistance. Aside from holding up both her own and her mother’s photo IDs, she wasn’t giving him any.

“Well?” Elizabeth prodded. “When?”

She may have been old and blind, but she was still sharp. Evidently her years of practice in herding high school students had made Elizabeth Hogan more than a match for the hapless security guard.

“Nineteen seventy-seven,” he said.

“See there?” she crowed. “I haven’t seen my son since July the fifth, nineteen seventy-three. That was before you were born—longer ago than you are old. Until today, that is. Today I have a chance to see him again, and that wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for these very kind people. These women aren’t criminals—as you can plainly see—especially this young girl here. And they’re not here to harm anyone, either. I can vouch for that personally. Now, are you going to let them come into the hospital or not? Because if you don’t, I’m afraid I’m going to have to take this matter up with your superiors.”

Since keeping unwanted visitors out was the security guard’s primary function, reporting him to his superiors for actually doing his job seemed like an idle threat. Much to Ali’s surprise, the man caved.

“Who is it you ladies are going to be visiting?” he asked.

Elizabeth beamed at him. “My son,” she said. “Rudyard Kipling Hogan. I call him Rudy, but you may have him listed as Kip. He always hated his given name.”

“And what’s this young lady’s name again?” he asked, peering across the desk.

“Crystal,” Ali supplied quickly. “Crystal Holman.”

The guard took the other names off the sign-in sheet. “Mr. Hogan is up in the third floor ICU,” he said as he finished filling out the set of four stick-on badges. “There you go.”

With Ali leading the way, they headed for the elevators.

The downstairs lobby had clearly received a recent upgrade that made it seem more like an upscale hotel lobby than a hospital. Renovations had not yet made their way to the ICU waiting room. It was as small and unremittingly grim as all the other hospital waiting rooms in Ali’s experience. It was also surprisingly chilly.

There were only three people gathered in the room, no doubt prepared to maintain a long, overnight vigil. The first, Sandy, sat at a small table in the middle of the room. A Bible lay open on the table in front of her, but her chin rested in her hand and she appeared to be dozing. The second was a middle-aged woman, a few years older than Ali, who sat in the farthest corner of the room, knitting frenetically. The only sound in the room came from the industrious click of her needles. The third occupant, a balding, potbellied man, sat on a stiff-backed chair staring up at a wall-mounted television. The set was on and tuned to CNN, but the volume was muted. The lips of the broadcasters moved but nothing emerged. The only news available was whatever scrolled silently and with endless repetition across the bottom of the screen. Still, the man watched it with avid attention, as though his very life depended on what he saw there.

Something alerted Sandy to the newcomers’ arrival. She blinked awake and made as if to rise, then glanced down at her watch and subsided back into the chair.

“Hi, Ali,” she said wearily. “Thanks for coming back. I must have dropped off for a couple of minutes. It’s too soon to go back in. They only allow visitors in to see patients for ten minutes at a time once every hour.”

Ali looked around the room. “Where’s your brother?” she asked. “I thought he was coming to be with you.”

“Phil’s heart’s in the right place,” Sandy said, excusing him. “But he’s never been very dependable.”

“Is this her?” Elizabeth Hogan asked from behind Ali. “Is this Rudy’s girlfriend? Move me closer, please, Jane. I want to get a look at her.”

While Jane Braeton obliged, Sandy sat up straighter in her chair and tried to smooth her hair. “Rudy?” she asked.

“This is Elizabeth Hogan,” Ali explained. “Kip’s mother, and Jane Braeton.”

“So you’re Kip’s daughter?” Sandy asked, looking questioningly at Jane Braeton.

Jane glanced in Ali’s direction and shook her head. “Not really,” she replied.

She had parked Elizabeth’s chair so the old woman’s knees were almost touching Sandy’s. Elizabeth leaned forward. Once again she moved her head from side to side as if trying to find a place where Sandy’s face would be in focus.

“Has Rudy been good to you?” she asked.

“You mean Kip?”

“My son, yes.”

Sandy’s eyes filled with tears. “Yes, he’s been very good to me, Mrs. Hogan. And he wouldn’t have gotten hurt and wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t been defending me. That’s why those punk kids attacked him. I feel like this is all my fault.”

Elizabeth reached out and touched Sandy’s knee. “I’m sure that’s not true,” Elizabeth said kindly. “These things happen and they’re nobody’s fault. What do the doctors say?”

“To me, very little,” Sandy replied. “After he came out of the OR, Ali’s mother talked them into letting me come up here to wait. They’ve let me go in to see him, but since I’m not a blood relative or his wife, they won’t tell me anything about his condition. What I do know is he hasn’t regained consciousness yet, and that’s probably a bad sign.”

Elizabeth nodded. “You may be right,” she agreed. “It isn’t a good sign, but let’s go see about getting some real information, Janie. Which way is the nurses’ station?”

Sandy pointed. Watching Jane and Elizabeth’s progress toward a glassed-in window, Ali noticed the red-lettered sign posted above it: NO CELL PHONES NO EXCEPTIONS. Since Ali’s computer air card was essentially a cell phone, technically that meant no Internet access, either.

Crystal plucked an extra blanket from a stack on a table by the doorway. Then, stuffing her earphones in her ears and turning on her iPod, she curled up in a chair as far from everyone else as she could manage.

Meanwhile Sandy studied the two women who were speaking in low tones to the woman stationed behind the glass partition. “She’s the charge nurse,” Sandy explained. “What about the one pushing Elizabeth’s chair? Is she a nurse, too?”

Ali simply shook her head and didn’t really answer. “Long story,” she said.

The other woman in the waiting room checked her watch, put down her knitting, and went over to the swinging door that led back to the unit. She paused. “Are you coming?” she asked the man in front of the silent television set.

“Not right now,” he said. “You go ahead. But you need to think about what the doctor said,” he added. “You need to think about letting him go.”

A look of absolute fury washed across the woman’s face. “No,” she said. And then again, more fiercely. “No!”

Abruptly she turned and disappeared behind the swinging doors. The man stayed where he was and as he was, still gazing up at the TV, oblivious to the fact that the discord between him and his wife had been witnessed by a roomful of strangers.

“They’re divorced,” Sandy whispered to Ali. “It’s their son. Motorcycle accident. He and Kip had the same surgeon.”

Jane Braeton turned away from the window and gestured for Sandy to join them. As Sandy left the table, Ali sat down next to where she’d been sitting. Part of a discarded Arizona Reporter lay there. Out of a lifetime’s habit, she picked up the local news section and scanned the headlines. A small article near the bottom of the page caught her eye: DRAGGING VICTIM REMAINS IDENTIFIED.

A homicide victim who had been dragged behind a vehicle and whose body was found on a deserted roadside in South Mountain Park on Tuesday morning has been identified by the Maricopa Medical Examiner’s officer as California real estate developer William Cowan Ashcroft, III.

The familiar name leaped out at Ali from the printed page. William Ashcroft? As in Arabella’s nephew, William Ashcroft, the one she had called Billy? Instinctively Ali reached for her phone, but then, mindful of both the cell-phone-use prohibition and the lateness of the hour, she left the phone where it was and returned to the article.

Phoenix Police Department spokesman Shannon Willis said that Mr. Ashcroft had been visiting the area on business for a number of weeks prior to his death. So far detectives working on the homicide have acquired few leads.

Mr. Ashcroft was reported missing by his business partner on Wednesday after he had failed to appear at a meeting scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. Anyone with knowledge of the victim’s activities in the days prior to his death is asked to contact the Phoenix Police Department.

The words brought back Arabella’s mysterious phone call from earlier in the afternoon, the one where she had suggested things had changed and it was no longer necessary for Ali to read the diary she had entrusted to Ali two days earlier. Billy—the nephew who had tried to extort Arabella’s money—was dead. Was that what had changed Arabella’s mind?

Without a moment’s hesitation, Ali reached into her bag and extracted the small, leather-bound volume.

Since so much had happened between the time Ali had read the first entry, and now she reread it. She expected that other entries would deal with the incest situation in detail. They did not. Going on, Ali was surprised to discover that most of the month’s worth of entries that existed in an otherwise blank book dealt primarily with Arabella’s birthday present, her prized parakeet, Blueboy.

Evidently Miss Ponder, the governess, had been enlisted to help in the process of teaching Blueboy to talk. She had also encouraged Arabella to do some research into the proper care and feeding of parakeets—covering their cages at night, making sure that their water and feed were fresh, cleaning the cages—something Arabella had clearly prided herself in doing on her own. The Ashcroft household Arabella had grown up in appeared to be long on servants and short on loving familial connections. In that world of old-fashioned educated-at-home wealth, the arrival of a blue-feathered parakeet had been a cause for celebration in the life of what must have been a very lonely little girl.

Miss P says that in order to teach Blueboy to talk, we have to start with something simple, but it also has to be something that keeps his interest. She said a whistle might be easier than a word to begin with, so she suggested I whistle first—you know the kind of wolf whistle that boys give pretty girls—and follow that with one or two words, and always the same words. Pretty Baby is what I chose. A whistle and Pretty Baby.

And I think she’s right. The first time I tried it, Blueboy was just sitting in his cage, but as soon as I whistled at him, he cocked his head to one side like he was really listening to me. Like he was interested. Miss P says that when I whistle first, it lets Blueboy know that I’m really talking to him. It’s like when Mother rings the bell, that means the butler is supposed to come or the maid.

I’ve never had a pet before. Ever. Father has his horses but those are racehorses so they’re not pets at all, and the only people who get to be around them are the grooms and the jockeys and the trainers. Regular people never get to ride them or even touch them.

The next two entries were full of harmless chatter about Miss Ponder and the parakeet. In the one after that, however, Arabella’s diary took a turn that hinted something was amiss.

Mother told me this afternoon that Bill is coming home for Thanksgiving. This week. I loved it when he went away to school in September and everyone said he wouldn’t be back until Christmas. But Father wants him here, so he’s coming home anyway. He’ll be here in two days. I already know Christmas will be ruined. Now Thanksgiving will betoo. I hate him. HATE HIM. Why couldn’t he just stay where he was?

Maybe it won’t happen again. Maybe I should tell Miss P. I can talk to her about things I can’t tell anybody else, but she probably wouldn’t believe me. She really likes Bill. She told me once that she thinks my brother is very handsome. She wouldn’t think that if she knew what he’s really like.

Maybe I should run away, but I don’t have any money and I don’t know where I’d go. And if I do run away, what will happen to Blueboy? I can’t carry a suitcase and a bird-cage at the same time. I guess I have to stay.

The final entries were short and scribbled so hurriedly that it was hard to decipher them.

Father fired Miss P. I don’t know why. She just left in a taxi.

Followed by:

Blueboy is dead. He killed him.

And that was it. End of story. He who? Ali wondered. Arabella’s faulty pronoun reference left the parakeet’s killer’s identity a mystery, but Ali suspected that she knew who was responsible. Had there been something going on between the now ex-governess and the stepbrother she had previously referred to as “handsome?” That was unmentioned, but it was certainly a possibility.

The diary had contained far less damning information than Ali had expected. And it had stopped almost in mid-entry, coming to an end without coming to a conclusion. Dissatisfied, Ali closed the book and returned it to her purse. Days earlier she hadn’t understood why Arabella wanted her to read it. Now that Ali had read it, she still didn’t know why, but she was reasonably sure why Arabella had changed her mind on that subject and why she wanted the diary back.

It’s because Billy’s dead, Ali told herself. And I’m wondering if Arabella had something to do with it.

{ CHAPTER 13 }

Emerging from being caught up in the diary, Ali glanced around the waiting room and realized that things had changed. The once-hourly ICU visitation schedule had evidently ended. Sandy Mitchell was again seated at the table. So was Kip’s mother. She sat with her wheelchair pulled up close to Sandy’s knees, and the two of them seemed lost in a low-toned conversation. Jane Braeton sat off to one side, absently thumbing through a dog-eared magazine. The other woman in the room, the mother of the injured motorcyclist, was back at her station, knitting away with single-minded concentration. Her husband—her ex-husband—continued his stolid vigil in front of the silenced television news. Crystal, with her earphones still attached, was curled up in a chair and appeared to be sound asleep.

The atmosphere in the room was so quiet and subdued that when Ali’s cell phone rang it startled everybody, including the nurse who said nothing but gestured pointedly toward the overhead sign that prohibited the use of cell phones. Leaping to her feet, Ali hurried out of the room and down the corridor. She didn’t answer until she was standing in the elevator lobby and well out of earshot of the charge nurse.

“I just wanted to set your mind at ease,” Dave Holman told her. “I think it’s over.”

“What do you mean?” Ali asked.

“One of the Tempe Fire Department guys just came out of the burned-out house. He’s located three separate sets of scorched human remains of gunshot victims along with one weapon. So we think we’re looking at a double homicide/suicide.”

“You’re sure one of the dead guys is the one who was after Crystal?” Ali asked.

“Reasonably sure,” Dave replied. “Right now it’s all tentative, pending positive ID of the remains, of course, but that’s where we are right now. I thought you’d be relieved to hear it.”

Three people were dead, but if one of them was the guy who had attacked Kip and had tried to lure Crystal out of the hospital, Dave was right. Ali was glad to hear it. She didn’t let herself think about how close she herself had come to tangling with him, and she was glad Dave didn’t mention it.

“Who are they?” she asked.

“Students at ASU. A kid named Jason Gustavson and his two roommates. The house actually belongs to Jason’s father. Daddy is on his way here tonight, flying by private jet from Minneapolis, so I’d say the family’s probably loaded. The thing is, you can have all the money in the world and your kid may still turn out to be a total screw-up.”

“And a killer besides,” Ali added.

“That, too,” Dave agreed.

The elevator door opened. A man in a wheelchair with a canvas computer case perched on his lap rolled out of the elevator and into the corridor where Ali was pacing with the phone to her ear. The man paused to study the signage then turned toward the ICU. In that split second when his face was no longer averted, Ali recognized him. First she noticed his brush-cut blond hair and crooked nose. Then the eyes. For an electric moment their gazes met, and Ali felt herself being scrutinized by that peculiar dead-eyed stare she had found so chilling in Madeline Havens’s hand-drawn likeness. Finally he shrugged, looked away, and continued down the hallway.

Too shocked to speak or move, Ali struggled to suppress an involuntary gasp. Dave had just finished telling her that three people were dead in Jason Gustavson’s home in Tempe, but if this was Jason, he was definitely back among the living and looking far too hale and hearty to have survived a horrendous house fire.

“Ali?” Dave asked into the suddenly silent phone. “Are you there? Did I lose you?”

The man was still well within earshot, and Ali barely trusted herself to speak. “I think he’s here,” she managed to croak.

“What?” Dave asked.

“Which one’s Jason?” she asked. “Which one of the drawings?”

“The one with the crooked nose and the funny eyes…”

“He’s not dead,” Ali whispered. “He’s here.”

“Where?” Dave demanded. “At the hospital?”

“Here on the floor. On the ICU.”

“What?”

“Call the cops,” Ali urged. “I’ve gotta go.”

By then Gustavson was rolling purposefully down the hall, and Ali understood his intentions. If there were weapons in the computer bag, Crystal, Sandy, and Kip himself were all in mortal danger. And no officers Dave could summon now would arrive in time to help—unless Ali could somehow manage to stall him. The only good thing about that was that although she knew who he was, the reverse was not true. At least she hoped so.

Ali shoved the phone in her pocket and started down the hallway. She needed a way to slow him down without sparking a confrontation. “Hey,” she called after him. “Hey, you. Did anyone ever tell you that you look like John Denver?”

It was the lamest of ploys because, of course, Jason Gustavson looked nothing at all like John Denver, but it was enough to cause him to hesitate.

The chair stopped moving, and he turned to face her. “Are you talking to me?” he asked. He was wearing a clean, freshly pressed blue denim shirt with the words ROTO-ROOTER embroidered across the pocket, a spare he’d found in the Roto-Rooter van.

As Ali hurried to catch up, her phone rang. She ignored it.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Has anyone told you that?”

But by the time she reached the wheelchair Gustavson had shifted the computer bag on his lap. He picked up the .38 semiautomatic that had been concealed beneath it and pointed it at her. Compared to Ali’s little Glock, the gun looked enormous, and it put her at a distinct disadvantage. Her Glock was still holstered. The .38 was in Jason Gustavson’s hand and pointed directly at her.

At sight of the weapon, Ali stopped short and took two quick steps backward, instinctively placing her own body between the wheelchair and the entrance into the ICU waiting room.

“No, lady,” he said with a sneer. “I don’t believe anybody ever told me that before. If they had, I wouldn’t have believed it for a minute. And I don’t think you believe it, either. Now, get out of my way.”

“What do you want?” Ali demanded loudly. This was a man who had already killed at least three people—probably four—and Ali was all that was standing between him and several more innocent victims. She needed to raise an alarm that would alert the unsuspecting people in the waiting room and at least warn them that trouble was coming.

The sound of her own voice surprised her. She was scared to death—petrified—yet her voice was steady and, considering the circumstances, amazingly calm.

“Move it,” he said.

Ali didn’t budge. Mere seconds ticked by, but Ali’s mind was racing. What will it feel like when the bullet smashes into me? How much of a mess will I leave on the wall? How much on the floor? Will it hurt when I fall down? At least I’ll already be in the hospital.

“I know who you are,” Gustavson was saying. “You’re the dumb broad who followed me home this afternoon in that blue Cayenne. You’re also the one who kept poor little Crystal on such a tight leash all day long. That doesn’t matter, though. I wanted her, and I’m still going to get her. As for that other woman, that busybody old hag from the grocery store? I didn’t see her name on the sign-in list, but since her boyfriend’s still here, I’ll bet she is, too.”

So much for thinking Jason didn’t know who Ali was. He must have followed her and the others in through the lobby.

Ali knew she needed to keep him talking. She tried to imagine how the authorities would respond to Dave Holman’s request for help. She couldn’t hear any sirens, but surely cops were on their way. There were ceiling-mounted video surveillance cameras throughout the hospital. Once help arrived, Ali knew the responding officers would be able to see what was going on. They’d probably try to treat this as a standard hostage situation by shutting down the hospital elevator system and trying to localize the problem on a single floor before attempting any kind of negotiation, SWAT team action, or rescue maneuver. But Ali already knew this was no ordinary hostage event. Jason Gustavson wasn’t interested in hostages. He was a spree killer out shopping for victims—the more the better.

“Why?” Ali asked. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because I’m sick and tired of having human scum tell me what to do,” he explained. “Gustavsons aren’t raised to take orders or to have lowlifes like that jerk in the store bossing me around. Do you know who I am? Do you have any idea who my father is?”

Somewhere in the background the hospital PA system crackled to life with a series of incomprehensibly coded announcements. Ali’s phone continued to ring intermittently—stopping now and then only to resume seconds later. And there were other phones ringing as well, landline phones in the waiting room and at the nurses’ station. But those sounds might just as well have been coming from a distant planet. Shutting them all out, Ali remained focused on Jason Gustavson—and on his gun.

“I have no idea who your father is,” she returned coldly. “And I don’t care. What I do know is that there are innocent people on this floor—doctors, nurses, patients, and visitors. They’ve done nothing to you, Jason. They don’t deserve to die.”

The fact that she knew his name seemed to startle him. “And who’s going to stop me?” he asked after a short pause. “You?”

“If she doesn’t, then I will,” a male voice said from behind Ali.

Without turning to look Ali knew at once that the man who had been watching the muted TV news—the man whose son was about to be taken off life support—had heard the uproar out in the hallway and had come to Ali’s aid.

“This man’s a killer,” she announced matter-of-factly to her newly arrived ally. “Two of the people in the waiting room and one of the patients in the ICU witnessed what he did. That’s why he’s here—he came after them.” Then to Jason she added, “I’ve called the police. They’re already on their way. You won’t get away with this.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” he returned. “I don’t care if I don’t get away with it. That’s not the point. In fact, I’d rather be dead than have to live in a place where inmates like you are put in charge of the asylum. Let’s go.”

“My son’s in there,” the older man said quietly but firmly. “The only way you’re getting inside the ICU is through me.”

Jason laughed, stood up, and shoved the wheelchair out of the way. He had used it as a prop to give him credibility inside the hospital hallways. Now it was no longer needed. The visitor badge clipped to his shirt said he was visiting Kip Hogan, 3rd floor, ICU.

“Oh, really?” Jason returned, waving the gun menacingly. “Hey, old man. I don’t give a rat’s ass about you or your son, but if you want to die a hero, that’s up to you.”

Jason was no longer paying any attention to Ali. Dismissing her as a possible threat, he was focused instead on the man behind her, trying to assess what he might or might not do. In typical male fashion, it didn’t occur to him that Ali, too, might be armed and dangerous. All she needed was a chance to unholster her weapon.

Ali stepped aside and turned to face her would-be rescuer. He wasn’t a particularly impressive specimen. About her father’s age or maybe a little older, he was sallow-faced, paunchy, and visibly out of shape. His thin, sandy, comb-over hair was standing straight up. But out of shape or not, he stood there in the hallway, calm and determined, helping Ali face down an armed assailant. It took only a second or two for Ali to realize that his presence offered the momentary diversion she needed.

“I said get going,” Jason growled.

Keeping her left hand out of sight, Ali made a slight movement with her fingers, hoping to let her ad hoc partner know that she needed to pass in front of him. She couldn’t be sure if he understood or not, but he nodded slightly.

“All right,” Ali said. “I’m going.”

She ducked into the waiting room. As soon as she was inside, she stationed herself behind the wall just inside the doorway and managed to extract her Glock from its holster.

Ali had expected to find the waiting room full of people, but to her astonishment and immense relief the place was empty. Completely empty. The glass partition into the nurses’ station was blacked out, blocked by something Ali would later learn was a mattress. Windows in the swinging doors that led into the ICU itself were also darkened, as though someone had lowered a set of shutters. With any luck they were barricaded as well.

The wave of gratitude Ali felt was almost overwhelming, but she couldn’t afford to give in to it; couldn’t afford to let down her guard. With the gun clutched tightly in a two-handed grip, she stood just out of sight, holding her breath and waiting to see what would happen.

Again she became aware of the cacophony of sound. Her cell phone was still ringing somewhere, but she was no longer holding her purse. The sound seemed to be coming from somewhere out in the hallway. A new announcement blared over the PA system. This one came in plain English rather than hospital Newspeak.

“Mr. Gustavson, we have you surrounded. Put down your weapon.”

Whatever Jason Gustavson had in mind, he had no intention of it happening in the hallway. Ali heard the sound of something sliding along the smooth tiled surface of the hallway. “There, old man,” Jason said. “Help me out. You carry the bag. Now!”

Out in the hallway, Ali caught a glimpse of the older man stooping down to pick up the computer bag. As he straightened and started into the waiting room, Ali held her breath. She knew she would have one chance only—one shot. She was reasonably proficient with her weapon. In recent months, once she had finally wrested her Glock from the authorities in California, she had put in hours of target practice at a shooting range outside Sedona. Ali knew instinctively she couldn’t afford a shot that would simply disarm her assailant. This was a survival-of-the-fittest moment, a time to kill or be killed.

Ali’s helper stepped into the waiting room, carrying Jason’s bag. The killer’s gun, at the end of a fully extended arm, appeared next. Taking aim from that, Ali waited for one more fraction of a second before squeezing off a shot. The bullet hit Jason square in the chest. He grunted with surprise but he didn’t go down. The force of the blow knocked the wind out of him. He dropped the .38. It went spinning away from him and came to rest under the chair where Crystal had been sleeping minutes earlier.

After what seemed like only a moment, Jason seemed to catch his balance. He came roaring back into the waiting room, pausing in the doorway, clutching his chest, and looking for his weapon—looking for any weapon.

I hit him! Ali thought desperately. Why the hell isn’t he dead?

That’s when she realized that he had come to the hospital fully prepared for a shoot-out, carrying weapons and wearing a Kevlar vest.

He turned on her then, holding out his hand. “Give it to me,” he demanded. “Give me that gun.”

There were noises out in the hallway now, running footsteps, voices shouting. But before any of the arriving cops made it to the doorway, something else happened. Moving faster than Ali would have thought possible, the old man—the paunchy, out-of-shape old man—turned on Jason Gustavson and head-butted him back out into the hallway where he came to rest against the far wall.

“Get down,” one of the cops shouted unnecessarily. “On your stomach. Hands behind your head.”

Ali hurried over to her rescuer who, still gripping Jason’s computer bag, stood in the doorway and stared out into the hall. Then he limped across the room and put the bag down on what had been Crystal’s chair.

His face was bright red. He was breathing heavily, and his hair was still standing on end, but he was grinning from ear to ear.

“Are you all right?” Ali asked.

“Hurt my leg when I tackled him,” he muttered. “But damned straight I’m all right! Those vests may be bulletproof, but they sure as hell ain’t headproof. Not by a long shot!”

With chaos still reigning in the hallway behind him, the man wrapped his pudgy arms around Ali’s body and held her close. Hugging him back, Ali realized that right that moment, this unassuming, quiet man with his dying son had become her greatest hero. He had come to her rescue when there was no one else to step up. Ali had no doubt that his actions had saved her life and probably several others as well—and she didn’t even know his name.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

He gave her another squeeze. “You’re welcome,” he said. “It’s nice to do something useful for a change.”

The next several minutes were frenetic. While the cops handcuffed Jason, someone removed the makeshift barricade that had temporarily barred the way into the ICU. When the swinging doors opened, the lady with the knitting needles shot out through them. She bodily booted Ali out of the way and fell into her ex-husband’s arms.

“Bernie, Bernie, Bernie,” she murmured. “How could you do something so stupid and wonderful at the same time? How could you? There’s a security monitor in the nurse’s station. We saw the whole thing. It’s a miracle you weren’t killed.”

When Crystal emerged, she was crying. “Thank you,” she said, giving Ali a shy hug. “If it hadn’t been for you…” She shuddered and fell silent.

“It’s all right,” Ali said. “They’ve got him now. He won’t be able to come after you again.”

Except it turned out that wasn’t true.

A uniformed cop had just approached Bernie and, with a latex glove-covered hand, tapped him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Mr. Bernstein,” the cop said, pointing. “Is that Mr. Gustavson’s suitcase…computer case?”

Bernstein. That was the first Ali remembered hearing Bernie’s last name, but it was one she would never forget.

With some difficulty, Bernie extricated himself from his former wife’s fierce embrace long enough to nod in the direction of the chair. “That’s it,” he said. “I put it down over there to keep it out of the way.”

From the moment Jason Gustavson had moved the computer case to reveal his .38, Ali had assumed the case had held an arsenal of reserve weapons. It seemed likely the cops were of the same opinion. Ali watched as the young uniformed officer went over to the chair, picked up the computer case, and opened the zipper. She also saw the look of horror that washed across his face when he saw what was inside. Moments later the whole east wing of St. Francis Hospital was being evacuated.

As they were hustled out of the waiting room toward the emergency exit, Ali managed to grab her own computer from the chair where she’d left it earlier. On the way down the hallway, she heard her cell phone ringing. The phone was still in her purse, which she had inadvertently dropped in the hallway during the confrontation. She made no effort to retrieve either the purse or the phone. Those as well as her Glock were now part of a crime scene investigation. She knew from past experience that it could take weeks if not months to regain her property from evidence impounds.

As patients, visitors, and workers alike were being herded outside and away from the building, the bomb squad van arrived along with a phalanx of ambulances and aid cars. Those were lined up outside the ER doors and were used to transport the hospital’s most seriously ill patients—Kip Hogan and Danny Bernstein among them—to other facilities. Meanwhile everyone else gathered in anxious groups where, dazed and shivering from fear as much as cold, they tried to make sense of what had happened while a collection of news helicopters clattered noisily overhead.

For more than an hour, they stood outside, waiting for an explosion that never came. Finally the bomb squad, still wearing protective gear, emerged from the hospital and put something in their armor-plated van. As they drove away, the people outside applauded ecstatically.

Caught up in the emergency evacuation, there had been no time for investigators to take statements from anyone. Instead, they placed Ali and the others under the watchful eye of uniformed officers.

Standing in the dazed crowd, waiting to be interviewed, Ali knew that sooner or later someone from the media would pick up on her involvement in the situation. When that happened, there would be all kinds of unwanted attention. The same would be true for Bernie Bernstein as well. For the moment, Ali reveled in her anonymity. She wasn’t dead. Neither was Crystal or anyone else for that matter, and for that Ali Reynolds was incredibly grateful.

Jane Braeton came by and sought Ali out. “They’ve trans-ported Kip to Phoenix Providence,” she said. “I have Elizabeth and Sandy in my car. I’m going to drop Sandy off with Kip and take Elizabeth back home. This has been a very long night for her. She’s tired. It’s all been too much.”

Ali nodded. “I’m sure it has.”

“But she needed to be here,” Jane added. “She wanted to be here. It’s an answer to thirty years of prayers. So, thank you, Ali. Thank you for everything. You go, girl.”

With that Jane Braeton disappeared into the crowd. Watching her walk away, Ali was amazed by the difference those few critical hours had made.

Moments later, Crystal sidled up to Ali. “Can we go sit in the car, please?” she asked. “I’m freezing.”

Ali put one arm around the girl’s shoulder. She was shaking convulsively. Her teeth were chattering.

“Of course,” Ali said. “Come on.”

After telling the watching cop where investigators could find them, Ali and Crystal made their way through the crowd to the parking structure, where they walked up the stairs to the Cayenne parked on the second level. With her shoulder aching from the added weight, Ali was happy to unload her laptop. Once in the car, she started the engine and activated the heated seats.

“You saved all of us tonight,” Crystal said thoughtfully a short while later. “If it hadn’t been for you and that old man, I’d probably be dead by now. So would Kip and Sandy.”

“Bernie,” Ali interjected. “The old man’s name is Bernie Bernstein, and you’re probably right. What he did made all the difference.”

“I heard two of the nurses talking,” Crystal mused. “Bernie’s son, Danny—the one who was in the motorcycle wreck?”

Ali nodded.

“They said Danny probably isn’t going to make it, but his father helped us anyway. He helped you. How come?”

Ali shrugged. “Because he wanted to, I guess,” she said. “He thought it was important, thought it would make a difference.”

“And why did you do it?” Crystal asked.

Ali considered for a moment before she answered. “Because I could,” she said finally. “Because I didn’t think anyone else would.”

“When I was watching, when he was pointing the gun at you, I kept thinking that if you died, it would be my fault, just like it’s my fault Coach Curt is dead.”

The events of the evening seemed to have made an impression on the girl. She was far more subdued. As a consequence, Ali hoped that Crystal might be in a place where she’d be willing to listen to reason.

“What happened isn’t your fault,” Ali told her. “Yes, you and Curt Uttley were both in the wrong place at the wrong time and for all the wrong reasons, but Jason is the one who murdered Curt, not you. And I’m sorry Curt’s dead, but since he was a pedophile who went prowling the Internet looking for young women to prey upon, he wasn’t exactly blameless.”

“But he didn’t deserve to die,” Crystal protested.

“You’re right. If he’d been arrested for child molestation or statutory rape, he probably would have gone to prison. What he did to you wasn’t a capital offense, but men like that do deserve to be in jail, Crystal. It’s against the law,” Ali added.

Crystal’s phone rang. “Hi, Daddy,” she said in a voice that was choked with emotion. “Yes, I’m okay. I’m with Ali. It was cold, so we’re sitting in her car in the parking garage. Yes, I love you, too. Do you want to talk to her? Here she is.”

Crystal handed the phone to Ali. “Thank God you’re both safe!” Dave exclaimed. “I’ve been worried sick. I’ve been trying to get through to you, but the circuits are busy. Why don’t you answer your damned phone? You need to call your parents. Your dad managed to get through to me. He heard about what happened at the hospital and he’s frantic.”

“I can’t call anyone,” Ali said. “I lost my phone.”

“Lost it. Where?”

“It was in my purse. I dropped it during the struggle out in the hallway—a hallway that’s now a crime scene. My purse and phone—and my driver’s license, most likely—are all in some crime scene investigator’s evidence bag. At least I had my car keys in my pocket and not in my purse. Where are you?”

“Seventh and Thomas,” Dave said. “I’ve been on my way for the better part of an hour—ever since you hung up on me. But with all the emergency vehicles, traffic’s a mess. I could probably get there faster if I just parked the car and got out and walked. Have they interviewed you yet?”

“Not so far. They’re too busy with the bomb squad.”

“And you shot the guy?”

“Tried to,” Ali replied. “He was wearing a vest.”

“More’s the pity,” Dave said.

“If the third victim in that house fire wasn’t Jason, who was it?” Ali asked.

“We still don’t know about that,” Dave answered. “Since Jason’s vehicle was there and so was Uttley’s we assumed…”

“Did Jason have a job?” Ali asked.

“A job? Are you kidding? Not as far as I know. He’s a playboy kind of student who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and goes through life with a Platinum AmEx in his pocket. I doubt he’s ever done an honest day’s work in his life. Why?”

“Because when I saw him, Jason was wearing a Roto-Rooter shirt—a uniform shirt.”

“You say Roto-Rooter—as in stopped drains? Let me get back to you on that,” Dave said.

Ali closed the phone and gave it to Crystal.

“Is my dad coming?” Crystal asked.

“He’s trying to,” Ali said. “He’ll be here soon, but traffic’s not helping.”

“At least he’s coming,” Crystal murmured. “I’m glad.”

“I need to call Chris and my parents,” Ali said. “Can I use your phone for a few minutes?”

“Sure,” Crystal said, handing it back. “They’re probably really worried.”

Crystal Holman had done yet another about-face. When it came to dealing with teenagers, it was getting harder and harder for Ali Reynolds to keep score.

{ CHAPTER 14 }

It was almost 4 A.M. before Ali finally left the grounds and headed home. By then many of the displaced patients were being readmitted to St. Francis.

She should have been sleepy, but she wasn’t. After everything that had happened, Ali wasn’t sure she’d ever sleep again. The preliminary interview had lasted until well after three, but the detectives had cautioned that there’d probably be more to come at a later date.

For Ali, the best part about leaving the scene at that late hour meant that the crisis was pretty much over and most of the media folks had disappeared hours earlier. In other words, although Ali Reynolds’s name would no doubt be mentioned in reporting on the incident, her photo would be mercifully absent.

On the drive back to Sedona, Ali mulled over everything she had learned. Yes, she had shot a man—she had tried to shoot him, that is. And yes, if he hadn’t been wearing a bullet-resistant vest, she probably would have killed Jason Gustavson. If that had happened, maybe Ali would have been sorry, but she doubted it. At this moment, instead of being dead, he was now being held in the Maricopa County jail, where he was expected to be charged with several counts of homicide and several more of attempted homicide.

It was chilling to think that this privileged young man had somehow turned into a murderous monster who had taken the lives of both friends and strangers with zero compunction. One of his presumed victims was a Roto-Rooter plumber named Tom Melman, now declared missing. The married father of two had been dispatched to Gustavson’s Tempe house earlier that afternoon to install a new toilet. His missing company van had been traced to the parking garage at St. Francis Hospital, where it had been found in a space only a few slots away from Ali’s Cayenne.

“So you’re saying he followed me here?” Ali had asked the detective.

He nodded. “Looks that way—followed you into the garage at least.”

“But how did he know it was me? How did he know I was driving a Cayenne?”

“Jason has a girlfriend who works Records for Maricopa County. When she heard he was possibly involved in the hospital situation, she came forward and spoke to her supervisor, and believe me, she will be dealt with. He evidently called her earlier this afternoon requesting information about you. He claimed it was for a friend who had seen you and was hoping to hook up.”

“How did he get my name?”

“He didn’t have your name. We’re theorizing he must have noticed you following him home from Phoenix earlier. All he had when he called in was a partial plate number.”

That was the whole problem with living in the information age, Ali decided. If critical information ended up in the wrong hands, it could do incredible damage. But of course, she and Dave had been doing exactly the same thing—trying to locate Curtis Uttley. It seemed best not to mention that.

By the time Ali turned off I-17 and headed toward Sedona, she was back to thinking about Arabella Ashcroft’s diary. Nothing in it had been even obliquely worthy of blackmail, yet Ali was convinced that there was some connection between what had been written in the book and the fact that Billy Ashcroft was now dead. But what was Ali’s responsibility in this regard? She had raised hell with Crystal for not stepping forward and sharing vital information with the authorities after the vicious attack on Kip and the kidnapping of Curt Uttley. If Ali had reason to believe Billy’s failed extortion scheme had something to do with his death, didn’t she have a moral obligation to come forward as well?

But for the time being, the whole question was moot since Arabella’s diary had been collected along with all the other hallway debris as part of a major crime scene investigation.

Once back home Ali entered her bedroom and found Sam curled in regal splendor on her pillow. When the bedside lamp came on, the cat decamped at once, however, hopping off the bed with an annoyed huff and stalking away as if to say Ali had been out past her curfew and was now persona non grata in her own bed.

“Hey,” Ali called after her. “Come back. It isn’t my fault I’m so late.”

But Sam wasn’t interested in doling out forgiveness. Giving up on the cat, Ali crawled into bed, where she fell into a deep, dreamless slumber. It was after eleven when she finally staggered out to the kitchen the next morning. Even in its thermal carafe, the coffee Chris had made before he left for school was dead cold when Ali tasted it. She’d had nothing at all to drink the night before—except for far too much coffee and cocoa, which hadn’t kept her awake. Even so she felt groggy and tired and nowhere near ready for the onslaught of attention she knew was likely once her connection to the St. Francis Hospital incident was made public.

Determined to have a robe day, Ali went to make a new pot of coffee. There she found the note Chris had left for her on the counter.

“Welcome home. I know you got in very late. I pulled the phone jack out of the wall so you could sleep. Love, Chris.”

Grateful that her son was so thoughtful, Ali plugged in the phone. Immediately it began to ring.

“You’re awake then,” Edie Larson said. “I’ve been trying to call you off and on all morning.”

“What’s going on?”

“Kip didn’t make it,” Edie said. “Sandy Mitchell just called. She and Kip’s mother…How did they ever find his mother, by the way? Anyway, the two of them were both there with him a little while ago this morning when they took him off life support.”

“I’m so sorry,” Ali murmured.

“I am, too,” Edie agreed. “And your father’s really broken up about it. It gave Dad a lot of satisfaction to think he had helped Kip back from the edge. Now it’s all for nothing.”

Ali thought about the look on Elizabeth Hogan’s face as Jane Braeton had wheeled her into the ICU.

Not for nothing, Ali thought. But too little too late.

“Anyway,” Edie continued, “Bobby just went home to shower, then he’ll head down to Phoenix to bring Sandy home. Did Dave reach you?”

“No.”

“He called here a little while ago. He was on his way back to Prescott to testify in that trial. He said to tell you that Crystal’s at home sleeping, and Roxie’s supposedly coming down from Vegas later today to pick her up. Crystal wasn’t a problem when she was here at the restaurant, but from what I’m hearing about everything that’s gone on the past few days, it sounds like she’s a kid who could use some serious counseling.”

Edie Lawson’s instinctive diagnosis of Crystal Holman’s mental issues had Ali’s wholesale agreement, although she had no intention of going into any of the particulars. All Ali said was, “Yes, I think counseling is definitely in order.”

During their conversation Ali’s call-waiting signal had buzzed several times. Those had been easy to ignore. Now though, when someone rang the doorbell, Ali ended the call. While Sam scampered for the nearest hiding place, Ali pulled her robe tight around her and went to answer. Arabella Ashcroft’s butler, Leland Brooks, stood on Ali’s front porch while the yellow Rolls-Royce idled in the driveway.

“So sorry to disturb you, madam,” Mr. Brooks said through the screen when Ali opened the inside door. “Miss Arabella was most interested in being in touch with you this morning. Something about a borrowed book, I believe. She’s been calling to ask about it, but your telephone seems to be out of order and your cell phone keeps going to voice mail.”

On the way home from Phoenix Ali had struggled with what she should do. She knew she would most likely call someone down in Phoenix to report her suspicions, but not until after she’d had at least one cup of coffee.

“I’m so sorry,” Ali told the waiting butler. “I don’t have access to Miss Ashcroft’s book right now. I can’t answer my cell phone since I had to leave it down in Phoenix last night.”

Mr. Brooks glanced warily over his shoulder in the direction of the Rolls.

“Is she with you?” Ali asked.

He nodded. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “As I said, she’s rather upset about this. I’ll be glad to relay the information, however.”

Clad in only a bathrobe with her hair a mess and no makeup on, Ali was hardly in any condition to receive guests—especially guests who were accustomed to entertaining in the manner Arabella Ashcroft did. Still, Ali felt an obligation to give the woman the bad news about the missing diary in person.

“No,” Ali said. “I’m not exactly prepared for company, but I’m the one who should tell her what happened to it. Please ask her to come in, Mr. Brooks.”

The butler bowed. “Of course, madam,” he said. “I shall extend your invitation.”

While he was gone, Ali hurriedly swiped all the loose papers off both the dining room table and the coffee table. She stowed those and the computer in her bedroom. By the time she emerged, Mr. Brooks had ushered Arabella to the front door. She didn’t look nearly as put together as she had the other day. She seemed anxious and ill at ease. The butler handed her off to Ali and then returned to the waiting Rolls. Arabella allowed herself to be led inside. When she spoke, though, she sounded like her old self.

“You’re most gracious to invite me in this way,” Arabella said. “I shouldn’t have come. It’s quite rude to show up unannounced like this. I’ve never done it before—ever.”

“It’s fine,” Ali assured her. “Please do come in. I’m sorry you weren’t able to reach me by phone. As I told Mr. Brooks, I ended up leaving my cell phone down in Phoenix last night. My landline is back in service now, but it was temporarily out of order.”

Once seated on the couch, Arabella glanced curiously around the room. “Evie always said she was going to buy a mobile home,” she remarked. “I must say, it looks quite solid and not the least bit mobile.”

Ali laughed. “Mobile homes should probably just be called manufactured homes. Most are only mobile until they’re delivered,” she explained. “Once they’ve been set up on a slab or a foundation, they usually stay put.”

“Barring tornadoes or hurricanes,” Arabella said.

“Yes,” Ali agreed. “Barring those. Now how do you take your coffee—black, cream and sugar?”

“Black by all means,” Arabella said.

Ali went out into the kitchen. As she filled coffee mugs and set them on a tray, she wrestled with how best to break the bad news. In the end Arabella beat her to the punch.

“Where is my diary?” she asked as Ali carried the coffee into the living room. “I must have it back.”

“Arabella,” Ali said. “I’m so sorry. I don’t have it.”

“You don’t have it!” Arabella exclaimed. “What do you mean? Surely you haven’t lost it!”

Ali set the tray on the table. “It isn’t lost,” she said soothingly. “But I don’t have it here. There was a problem in Phoenix last night—at one of the hospitals. You may have seen it on the news. I was there, and, as it happens, so was the diary. It was in my purse. I lost my purse in all the confusion. I’m sure the police have the purse and the diary, too.”

“How could you be so careless!” Arabella declared angrily. “I want it back, and I want it back today!”

Arabella’s abrupt change of mood took Ali by surprise. Surely this wasn’t that big a deal. The diary had been under wraps for more than half a century. Why was it so essential that she have it back immediately?

“Please, Arabella,” Ali continued hurriedly. “I didn’t do it on purpose. My purse, my cell phone, and your diary were picked up during the evidence sweep. I’m sure they’ll all be returned in good time. Besides, when you gave it to me the other day, it didn’t seem like you were in that big a hurry. I was under the impression that I could read it at my leisure.”

“Did you read it?” Arabella asked sharply.

“Yes.”

“I hoped you wouldn’t. I told you not to.”

“I thought I was supposed to read it so I could help you decide about the book you’re writing.”

“I’m not writing a book,” Arabella said at once. “I’ve changed my mind about that, too.”

“Why?” Ali asked. “What changed your mind? What’s going on?”

“I want my diary back. How can that be so difficult to understand?”

“Have the police talked to you about what happened to your nephew?”

“Two very nice detectives from Phoenix came to notify me that Billy was dead,” Arabella said, softening a little. “Yesterday, I think it was, or maybe the day before.”

“And did you tell them what was going on between the two of you?”

“I told them Billy wanted to do a reverse mortgage for me. Once I had time to think it over, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea.”

“Wait a minute,” Ali objected. “You told me the other day that Billy threatened you; that he was going to try to have you declared incompetent and put away somewhere.”

“He wouldn’t have,” Arabella said. “He’d never do such a dreadful thing.”

Of course not, Ali thought. Especially if he’s dead.

“The cops need to know what was going on between the two of you,” Ali said aloud. “And I’m going to tell them.”

Arabella looked at Ali in dismay. “The things I said to you were relayed in the strictest confidence.”

“You may have thought it was in confidence, but I’m not an attorney,” Ali said. “There’s no attorney/client privilege when you talk to me, and no expectation of privacy, either. Concealing information in a homicide investigation is a felony.”

“Surely you don’t think I had something to do with Billy’s death.”

“Did you?” Ali asked.

Arabella stared at her and didn’t answer.

“Did you?” Ali prodded again.

“You wouldn’t really go to the police, would you?” Arabella asked.

“Yes, I’m afraid I would. I’ve just spent two days giving my friend’s teenage daughter hell for not coming forward and giving pertinent information in another set of homicides. It would be hypocritical for me to keep quiet in this one.”

“Even after everything Mother and I did for you?”

“I’m sorry, but yes. Even after all that. Not because I want to; because I have to. And no matter how much it costs, you need to find yourself an attorney.”

Leaving her coffee untouched on the table, Arabella surged to her feet. She stood and straightened her sweater, the same mended cardigan she had worn on the previous occasion. Ali reached out to help her, but Arabella would have none of it.

“Leave me alone,” she said, drawing away as if Ali’s very touch was poisonous. “If you’re determined to go to the authorities, we have nothing further to discuss.”

She walked unassisted as far as the door. At the entryway table, she turned and looked back. “I know something about killing,” she said. “I tried to kill my brother Bill once, you know. He came into my room, grabbed Blueboy out of his cage, and squashed him flat. Squeezed my poor little bird in his fist until he was dead. He told me if I ever told anyone, he’d do the same thing to me—squeeze me until I was dead, and he put his hand around my throat to show me he could do it. So I stole a knife from the kitchen and hid it under my pillow. That night, when he came to my bedroom the way I knew he would, I pulled out the knife and stabbed him. I was just a kid, and I think it surprised the hell out of him. He went to the hospital, but the son of a bitch didn’t die. Damn him anyway, he didn’t die.”

Arabella’s unsolicited confession was as chilling as it was fierce.

“What about Billy?” Ali asked. “What about your nephew?”

“What about him? Believe me, if I had wanted to kill him, I would have.”

But did you? Ali wondered.

Arabella turned and stormed out the door. Ali watched through the sidelights as Leland Brooks hurried forward, offered Arabella his arm, and then carefully led her back to the waiting Rolls. They might have been an old married couple making their way together across treacherous terrain. Once he closed the car door, he turned and looked back toward where Ali was standing. Then, with a shake of his head, he climbed into the driver’s seat.

As they drove out of sight, Ali couldn’t help wondering if Arabella Ashcroft was capable of murder. Certainly she was capable of attempted murder. She had said as much herself. And what about Arabella’s lies? Either she had lied to Ali when she said Billy had threatened her or she had lied to the cops when she said he had not. And since Billy Ashcroft was definitely dead, the cops needed to get to the bottom of the situation one way or the other.

For a long time after Arabella left, Ali struggled with what she should do. Yes, she owed her education to Anna Lee and Arabella Ashcroft. And yes, her whole career had come about as a result of their generosity. But if Arabella had murdered her nephew in cold blood—dragged him behind a car until he was dead—Ali couldn’t just keep quiet. She couldn’t.

She tried calling Dave, but he was probably in court. His phone went straight to voice mail. Instead of leaving a message, Ali went into her bedroom and located everything she’d emptied out of her jacket pocket the night before. There, along with her car keys, she found a collection of business cards that belonged to a series of Phoenix PD detectives. She picked one at random—Detective Mike Ryan. She dialed his number hoping he’d be able to put her in touch with whichever investigators had been assigned to the William Ashcroft homicide.

It’s a homicide investigation, she told herself firmly as Ryan’s extension began to ring. I don’t have a choice.

While Ali waited for someone to call her back, she turned her attention to the blog. The situation at the hospital was an ongoing investigation. That meant there was little she could say, but she felt obliged to say something.

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

Friday, January 13, 2006

I know my name is showing up in the news in reference to what happened last night at St. Francis

Hospital down in Phoenix. I know many of you are worried about me. My mailbox is brimming with e-mails asking me if I’m okay and letting me know that the blog stopped opening earlier this morning due to too many hits on the server. So I’m posting this and hoping you’ll be able to read it sometime soon.

I’m fine and I’m very grateful to be alive. My friend’s daughter, who was targeted in the attack, is also safe and back home with her family.

Yes, it’s true. I’m the same Ali Reynolds who was involved in the hostage situation at the hospital, but because of the nature of the ongoing investigation, I’ve been advised to say nothing more on that topic. If you’re connected to one of the media outlets and you’re reading this post, please understand that if you do happen to reach me, all you’ll be given for the trouble is the usual “no comment.”

I know that readers of my blog are accustomed to more information than this, but for right now this will have to do. Once again, let me say thank you for your concern, your prayers, and your e-mails.

More on all of this later. With the way investigations of this magnitude go, however, I expect that means MUCH later.

Babe, posted 1:05P.M.

Evidently the server was still having difficulties. It took a very long time for Ali’s post to upload. When it finally did, she turned to answering some of her voluminous e-mail. It was relatively mindless work that kept her from watching the telephone and waiting for it to ring. Detective Ryan had told her that someone involved in the Ashcroft investigation would get back to her, but she wondered how long that would take.

One at a time she made her way through the long list of received mail, discarding the spam and answering most with a brief one-or two-sentence response. Halfway to the bottom, she found a message from Velma. As she scanned down the list she saw it was only the most recent of three from the same address.

Dear Babe,

I’m thinking about all this. Waiting is hard.

VELMA

Closing that one, Ali scrolled down to the first of Velma’s e-mails and opened that.

Dear Babe,

I can’t thank you enough for putting me in touch with those very nice people at Cancer Resource. As you said, it was quite expensive, but I was able to sign up over the Internet and I’ve been assigned a caseworker. She sent me the documents needed to request all my medical records and test results from my primary physician so I could be transferred over to them. She said once I had signed the various releases, they would make arrangements to have my records sent or delivered to one of their consulting oncologists. Once they have them, they’ll make an appointment for me to have a second opinion.

Considering the way things have worked in the past, I expected it would take several weeks to accomplish all this, but the caseworker told me thatthe whole idea is to streamline the process, not slow it down. So the biggest variable will be how long it takes my primary physician to release the records. I just called him and told his office manager that I expect things to be expedited on their end. We’ll see.

Anyway, thank you for sending me to someone who seems to understand that people facing a cancer diagnosis don’t have all the time in the world.

VELMA T IN LAGUNA

That was something Ali remembered from her experience with her first husband, Dean. It seemed as though it had taken forever to get lined up for the various tests and then it took even longer to get the results back, especially if the news was bad. In fact, the worse the news, the longer it took to get it.

She scrolled up the list and read Velma’s next note, one that had been sent on Thursday.

Dear Babe,

I’m still waiting. A courier is supposed to pick up my records today. Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but it seems like there’s a new lump that’s right next to where they did the needle biopsy. And maybe one on the other side, too. If that’s the case, if these damned things are growing that fast, maybe the first doctor was right and there’s nothing to be done. But if I’m sick, shouldn’t I feel sick? If I opt for treatment—surgery or surgeries, chemo, or radiation—I know I’ll for sure feel sick then.

I talked to my caseworker about this. She saidthe best thing to do is to do nothing until we have the information. She’s nice enough, and I know she means well, but it isn’t her body. It isn’t her life. I hate waiting.

VELMA T

After several minutes of thought, Ali finally replied:

Dear Velma,

Waiting is the hardest part. Please keep me posted.

ALI

She had just pushed SEND when her phone rang again.

“Ms. Reynolds?” a male voice asked. “My name’s Larry Marsh, Detective Larry Marsh, with the Phoenix Police Department. This is about the William Ashcroft homicide. Detective Ryan suggested we give you a call. You have some information for us?”

Ali took a deep breath. “Yes, I believe so.”

“And that would be?”

“You’ve spoken to Billy Ashcroft’s aunt, Arabella? Is she under suspicion?”

“I’m sorry. This is an ongoing investigation, Ms. Reynolds. I can’t comment on what we’re doing one way or the other. At this point the field of suspects is wide open. Do you have specific information for us?”

Trying to be helpful, Ali also wanted to be diplomatic. “Did Arabella mention that she wasn’t on the best of terms with her nephew?”

“She didn’t indicate there was any particular problem,” Detective Marsh replied.

“She probably told you he came around offering her a reverse mortgage.”

“Correct,” Marsh said. “Come to think of it, she did mention a reverse mortgage.”

“But I think there was more to it than that,” Ali continued. “I believe Billy was trying to extort money from her and threatened to have her put away in a home somewhere if she didn’t hand it over.”

“Ms. Ashcroft mentioned something to the effect that she and Mr. Ashcroft had discussed her future living arrangements,” Detective Marsh allowed. “Beyond that, however, she didn’t seem upset, and she certainly didn’t mention being threatened.”

“She mentioned it to me,” Ali asserted quietly.

“Were you privy to some kind of interaction between the two of them?” Marsh asked. “Did you actually hear what was said?”

“No,” Ali answered. “Arabella told me about it, and it sounded serious.”

“And what’s the nature of your relationship with Ms. Ashcroft?”

“Mine?” Ali returned. “We’re friends. We’ve been friends for years.”

“So you wouldn’t be in a position to benefit from Ms. Ashcroft’s financial arrangements one way or the other?” Marsh asked.

“Absolutely not.”

“And what about Mr. Ashcroft? Do you know him?”

“I’ve never met him,” Ali said. “And I don’t believe Arabella had either, prior to this week. What I do know is that there had been bad blood between Arabella and Billy’s father. Years ago she actually tried to kill him.”

“Arabella tried to kill Billy?” Marsh asked.

“No,” Ali answered. “She tried to kill Billy’s father—William Ashcroft Junior. He was her stepbrother. He’d been cruel to her, abused her, and killed her pet bird. She got even by stabbing him.”

“And this was when?” Marsh asked.

“November of 1944.”

“I see,” the detective said. “And you know about this how?”

“Because Arabella told me about it, some of it just today.”

“Let me get this straight,” Marsh said. “The two of you must be exceptionally good friends. Not only does she clue you in on her nephew’s current threat, but she also confesses to the long-ago attempted homicide of her brother?”

“Her stepbrother,” Ali said. “Bill Junior was ten or so years older than she was, and he had been molesting her for years. What finally pushed her over the edge was the death of her pet parakeet. Her stepbrother killed Blueboy right in front of her. A matter of hours later, she took after him with the knife.”

“I take it the brother—the stepbrother—didn’t die as a result of her attack?”

“No. He died several years later in an automobile accident.”

“I’m a homicide detective, Ms. Reynolds. I generally don’t deal with cases concerning dead birds—past or present. And you already told me that the stepbrother didn’t die. This ancient history is all very interesting, of course, but can you explain to me how any of it applies to what’s happening in the here and now?”

Ali had contacted the authorities with the intention of letting them know about Arabella’s diary and how she thought it might somehow be connected to Billy Ashcroft’s death. In the face of Detective Marsh’s outright derision, it wasn’t easy to plunge on, but Ali did so.

“I believe Billy Ashcroft’s murder may be connected to Arabella’s diary,” she said.

“What diary?” Marsh asked. “She’s keeping a diary?”

“Was keeping a diary,” Ali corrected. “Back when she was nine, back when this all happened. And when she found out it was missing a little while ago, she was very upset. That’s when she blurted out the story of trying to kill her brother. If you managed to read it yourself…”

Marsh was losing patience. “You said a moment ago that the diary is missing. How could I possibly read it?”

“It’s missing from my house here in Sedona,” Ali said. “It’s not missing from there in Phoenix. It was in my purse last night during that whole mess at St. Francis Hospital. I’m sure it was picked up in the evidence sweep along with my purse and cell phone. It’s probably locked away in an evidence locker somewhere at your department.”

“And you’re asking me to read it?”

“Yes,” Ali said.

“Is there anything else?”

Ali, too, was losing patience. It sounded as though Marsh’s ears were closed and his mind was made up.

“No,” she said. “I can’t think of anything else.”

“Good then,” he told her. “I want to thank you for coming forward, Ms. Reynolds, but I also feel obliged to give you a word of caution. While we appreciate your interest in the case, it’s usually not a good idea for civilians to insert themselves into one police investigation after another…”

“Wait a minute,” Ali interrupted. “If you’re talking about last night, let me remind you that that particular ‘investigation,’ as you call it, came to me.”

“Be that as it may, Ms. Reynolds. My advice is the same. You might want to take a step back from all this and leave it to the professionals. Of course, just in case you happen to come across any additional information, let me give you my numbers….”

“Don’t bother,” Ali said. “I believe I’ve already got your number. That came through loud and clear.”

{ CHAPTER 15 }

In their office cubicle at Phoenix PD, Larry Marsh sat staring at his telephone receiver.

“She hung up on you?” Hank asked.

“Pretty much,” Larry said. “So, where are we?”

“I’m working on tracing the Silver Star that was found under the floor mat in Mr. Ashcroft’s vehicle. The name A. Reed is engraved on the back, but so far no luck tracing Mr. Reed. While Ms. Reynolds was hanging up on you, I was being bitched out by some battle-ax at the VA who read me the riot act and let me know in no uncertain terms that we’re breaking the law.”

“Breaking what law?”

“It turns out that found military medals are supposed to be returned directly to the Defense Department. We’re to make no effort to locate either the serviceman in question or his surviving family.”

“But this is a homicide investigation,” Marsh objected.

“Wouldn’t you think,” Hank agreed. “Which is why I plan on working my way up the chain of command. What about you?”

Marsh stood up. “I think I’m going to take a walk down to the evidence room.”

“How come?”

“Evidently we have Arabella Ashcroft’s diary down there under lock and key. Something weird about a dead parakeet. Ali Reynolds seems to be of the opinion that we should take a look at it, and I guess I will.”

Ali was still fuming long after she put down the phone. She had done her civic duty by reporting her concerns and had felt like a traitor for doing so. Detective Marsh had mocked her suggestion that Arabella’s dead parakeet might somehow be connected to everything that had happened, even though Ali had no idea what that connection might be. Marsh’s attitude had been nothing short of galling. Ali Reynolds wasn’t accustomed to being dismissed as some kind of meddling wacko.

“Leave it to the professionals,” she groused aloud, mimicking Detective Marsh’s snide delivery. “Don’t insert yourself into the investigation.”

But she had already been inserted—by none other than Arabella Ashcroft herself. All her life Ali Reynolds had responded poorly to being told to sit down and shut up, and this time was no exception. Her immediate response to Detective Marsh’s back-off suggestion was to want more information.

To track down the general history of the Ashcroft clan, Ali knew she could spend the next several hours combing through computerized searches. With those, she would come away with the bare-bones outline of what had gone on through the years. Over the weekend and with Chris’s help, she could probably flesh out those reports into something reasonably comprehensive, but what she was looking for right then was a way to jump-start her investigation. To do that, she turned to her computer, all right, but to her address book rather than Google. A few minutes later she was dialing the number for Deborah Springer.

In the realm of female journalists, Mrs. Deborah Springer was legendary. A World War Two widow who never allowed anyone to refer to her as Ms., Deb Springer had gone to work in the L.A. Times secretarial pool to support her three small children. She had gradually boosted herself into doing actual reporting and had spent several years writing the obligatory society postings on the women’s pages. Eventually, though, Deb had beaten the odds and snagged herself a business beat. At a time when “women’s libbers” were just starting to burn their bras, Deb’s hard-nosed reporting had landed her a coveted editorial position. Retired since the mid-1980s, no one knew more about southern California’s movers and shakers than Deb Springer.

Ali had done an interview with the woman on the occasion of Mrs. Springer’s ninetieth birthday. The filming had been done in the lobby area of the assisted living facility in LaJolla where Deb and her now deceased third husband had taken up residence. Ali and Deb Springer had liked each other instantly, and Ali had come away from the interview with a deep respect for this sharp-witted woman who, years after leaving the newspaper business, had lost none of her encyclopedic knowledge of the California business community.

When the interview had ended, Mrs. Springer had given Ali her direct telephone number and invited her to call if she ever wanted to chat. But at least three years had passed since then, and Ali had been away from California and out of the loop for part of that time. As she dialed the number, she worried that she’d hear a recorded message saying that the number had been disconnected. She did not.

“Hello. Hello,” Deb Springer’s cracked voice announced. “Just a minute. Hold on until I get my hearing aid out. There now. Who’s calling, please?”

“Alison Reynolds,” Ali answered. “I used to be on TV in L.A. I did an interview with you.”

“Oh, yes. For my ninetieth. Ali, how good of you to call. I understand they put you out to pasture, too. When is the world going to figure out that women don’t wear out nearly as soon as the old boys think we do? Of course, a lot of very smart men are turned out before their time as well. It’s all very shortsighted, if you ask me, so don’t get me started.”

At the time of the Springer taping, Ali had just passed forty. It hadn’t remotely occurred to her that she was already on the slippery slope of ageism. No doubt Deb Springer had known that even then.

“What can I do for you?” Deb asked.

“I’m working on a research project,” Ali answered. “I was hoping you could help me out.”

“What kind of research?”

“William Cowan Ashcroft,” Ali returned.

“Which William Cowan Ashcroft?” Deb wanted to know. “Number one, two, or three? I know more about Senior than I do two and three.”

Not only was Mrs. Deborah Springer not dead, she was still as bright as she had ever been.

“All of the above,” Ali said. “For argument’s sake let’s start with number one.”

Just then call waiting buzzed. Ali checked and saw the number of the Sugarloaf Café. That meant it was her mother calling. Edie Larson would have to wait.

“I’ve seen pictures of him from back in the early days. You probably would have called him a hunk,” Deb Springer said. “He was good-looking. In fact, he was movie-star handsome—a widowed father with a young son, a single struggling car dealership in San Diego, and a reputation for being something of a bounder when Amelia Askins tapped him to marry her daughter, Anna Lee.”

“Tapped him?” Ali asked. “As in picked him out for an arranged marriage?”

“Exactly,” Deb answered. “A necessary marriage. A hurry-up marriage. Anna Lee was in a family way, you see, and a suitable husband was needed in short order. Bill Ashcroft was a very eligible bachelor who was about to go bust and needed an infusion of cash in order to keep going. Amelia Askins came from old East Coast shipping money, and Anna Lee was her only heir. I’m not at all sure the match was a very good deal for Anna Lee, but for her husband, it was a whale of a bargain. As the Depression deepened and car dealerships were going belly up left and right, Ashcroft was able to buy like crazy. And when World War Two came along, he had diversified enough that he was able to weather that storm as well.”

“And the baby?”

“Her name was Arabella.”

“So Arabella Ashcroft is an Ashcroft in name only?” Ali asked.

“Pretty much. Rumor had it that she was never quite right somehow, and neither was her parents’ marriage. Anna Lee moved to Arizona sometime in the fifties. She and Bill Senior never divorced, but they didn’t live together most of the time they were married, either. I assumed he didn’t divorce her because she might have taken her fortune with her and that would have left him high and dry. As for why Anna Lee didn’t divorce him? I can’t imagine. I certainly would have. She was an attractive woman who deserved better.”

“So it was a marriage of convenience then?” Ali asked.

“On both sides,” Deb said. “Come to think of it, she may have had a few outside interests as well. Sauce for the goose and all that, but right this minute I can’t dredge up any details. Everyone knew what was going on but nobody reported on that back then. It wasn’t considered proper in a family newspaper.”

Bearing in mind what had happened with Ali’s own philandering husband, it seemed as though nothing had changed in the intervening years. Lots of people had known about Paul’s carrying on. No one had mentioned his numerous affairs to Ali.

“Do you know if Bill Ashcroft number one had a sister?” Ali asked.

Deb paused. “I seem to remember he did, a younger sister maybe. I believe she died tragically and at a very young age. I don’t remember if it was an illness, an accident, or what.”

Suicide is tragic, all right, Ali thought. It’s definitely not an accident.

“Tell me about Bill Ashcroft number two,” she prompted.

“People called him The Hand.” Deb Springer returned. “I never met him, but everybody who knew him said he was a piece of work. Nowadays they’d call him an arrogant asshole who was conveniently 4-F and didn’t have to go off to fight in World War Two. Everyone pretty well figured Bill Senior had paid off the doctor.”

“They called him The Hand?” Ali repeated. “Where did that come from?”

“Mostly because he didn’t have one,” Deb replied. “A hand that is. He lost it early on in some kind of accident. Injured it badly enough that the doctors had to amputate. After the operation, he insisted on keeping it. Pickled it in formaldehyde and took it with him when he left the hospital.

“The name came along a few years later. He was running several of his father’s car dealerships, and it came time to fire one of the managers. Bill Junior called the poor guy into his office and told him, ‘You may have been expecting a gold watch, but here’s what you’re getting instead—a wave.’ Then he opened his briefcase, pulled out the jar with his hand in it, and set it on the desk. I was told the poor guy who got fired puked the whole way out the door.”

“Nice,” Ali said.

“Not,” Deb returned. “There was nothing nice about him. He was a wart. From then on, Bill Junior always kept the jar with him, just in case he needed to fire somebody. But he was also a show-off and a drinker. Even with only one hand, he bought himself a Corvette when he shouldn’t have. He had it specially equipped with some kind of leather cuff so he could steer with his left wrist, but nobody was really surprised when he drove himself off a cliff just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. As I recall, nobody was particularly sorry about it, either, including his relatively new wife of less than a year who was already separated from him at the time he died.”

“Less than a year? That was quick,” Ali said.

Deb Springer laughed. “I’ll say. There were rumors at the time that he had a thing for little girls, but as far as I know that’s all they ever were—just rumors.”

Not to hear Arabella tell it, Ali thought.

“Which brings us to number three.”

“After Junior died, Grandpa held his daughter-in-law’s feet to the fire. There was an ugly custody battle. When the legal maneuvering was over, Senior got custody of the baby and raised him himself. After the old man died in the mid-eighties, number three wasn’t much interested in cars. He sold off the car dealership empire his grandfather and father had built and set about squandering the money—something he was evidently very good at. What’s he doing these days? I heard he was caught up in some shady real estate dealings.”

“He’s dead,” Ali said. “Someone murdered him.”

Call waiting buzzed again. Again Ali ignored it.

“There you go,” Deb Springer said. “Good riddance.”

“What about Arabella?” Ali asked. “Do you know anything about her?”

“I seem to remember she had mental problems of some kind. Growing up in a dysfunctional family like that, why wouldn’t she? I believe she was institutionalized for a number of years somewhere up in the Bay Area or maybe in Arizona. I’m not sure which. That’s what prominent families did with troubled children back in those days—they locked them up and threw away the key. I don’t know what became of Arabella once she got out. Or even if she got out. I seem to remember something about a fire at one of those places, but you’ll have to forgive me. I’m not at all clear on the details.”

“You’ve been very clear on the details,” Ali said. “You’ve been a huge help.”

“And what about you, Alison?” Deb Springer asked. “What are you doing with yourself these days?”

It was much the same question Madeline Havens had asked in the lobby of St. Francis Hospital. In terms of elapsed time, an entire day had yet to pass, but it seemed more like years. Ali Reynolds had almost died. So had any number of other people.

“This and that,” Ali said with a laugh. “Trying to stay out of trouble.”

“Don’t,” Deb Springer advised. “Nobody ever accomplished anything worthwhile by staying out of trouble. You need to decide what it is you want to do and then set about doing it.”

Good advice, Ali thought. Remind me to pass it along to Detective Marsh the next time I speak to him. If ever.

The doorbell rang. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Springer,” Ali said. “Someone’s at the door.”

“You go answer it,” Deb said. “But feel free to call me back anytime. It’s fun dredging up all this ancient history. And give me your number. If anything more comes to mind on those appalling Ashcroft boys, I’ll call you back.”

For the second time that day Ali’s robe day was interrupted by the arrival of unexpected visitors. Looking out through the peephole, she saw a young man standing there—an older teenager. Only when he turned his face in her direction did Ali see the family resemblance. The boy looked so much like Dave Holman it was downright spooky. Ali had never met Rich Holman, but this had to be Dave’s son.

Ali opened the inside door. “Richey?” she asked uncertainly through the screen.

He nodded and raised his hand in a halfhearted greeting. “Oh,” he said. “You’re home.” He sounded disappointed to see her.

If you didn’t want me to be home, Ali thought, why are you ringing my bell? “What are you doing here?” she asked.

Rich shuffled his feet uneasily. “It’s my mom,” he murmured. “She’s the one who wants to see you. She’s out in the car. We stopped off down at the Sugarloaf and got directions. Is it okay if she comes in?”

Suddenly Ali understood why Edie Larson had been trying to call so urgently—she must have been hoping to give her daughter a heads-up that Roxanne and Richey were on their way.

“Sure,” Ali said. “Just wait here in the living room. I’ll go get dressed.”

Spooked by the company, Sam beat Ali to the bedroom, but only just. Hurriedly Ali slipped out of the robe, put on a pair of sweats, and smoothed her hair into a slipshod ponytail. Examining herself critically in the mirror, she paused long enough to powder her nose and apply some lipstick.

When Ali returned to the living room, the woman she assumed to be Roxanne Whitman was seated on the couch. Rich was standing in front of the entryway credenza, running an admiring finger over the satiny-smooth wood finish.

“I’m taking a woodworking course,” Richey said to Ali. “This is really a nice piece.”

“Thank you,” Ali said. “A friend refinished it for me.” A friend who’s gone now, she thought.

Richey went to the couch, where he took a seat next to his mother. Although Ali knew of Roxanne Holman Whitman, she had never met the woman in person. Roxie might have been pretty in a garish sort of way, but she was wearing too much makeup, all of it inexpertly applied.

“I’m sorry to barge in on you like this,” Roxie said nervously as her hands fidgeted in her lap. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“It’s fine,” Ali said. “Can I get you something?”

Roxie shook her head. “No, nothing for me. We can’t stay long. Dave would kill me if he knew I was horning into his personal life this way. And he’d really be upset if he knew I’d dragged Richey into it as well, but with everything that’s happened the last few days, I just couldn’t drive myself down here to bring Crystal home and leave town without talking to you first. I wanted to say thank you—thank you for everything you’ve done the last few days, and thank you for saving Crystal’s life last night.”

“You’re welcome,” Ali said. “I was happy to help out. But as far as horning in on Dave’s personal life? I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Of course you do,” Roxanne said, beaming. “Dave seems to think I’m a bit dim, but I understand some things well enough. You never would have done what you did for Crystal—saving her from that killer the way you did—if you and Dave weren’t involved.”

“Mom!” Richey objected, horrified.

“Well, it’s true,” Roxie declared. She was getting into her groove now. Sounding more confident, she was totally undaunted by her son’s squirming embarrassment.

“Since Crystal wants to stay here so much, I thought I should see for myself who the competition is,” Roxie continued. “Dave’s already met Gary, you see. Gary’s my new husband. Fortunately he’s crazy about my kids. It seems only fair, then, that I should meet whoever Dave is lining up to be my kids’ wicked stepmother. That’s a joke. I can see you already care about Crystal a lot, just like my Gary does.”

Ali was dumbfounded. “Excuse me, Mrs. Whitman,” she objected. “You’re mistaken. I’m not being ‘lined up,’ as you say, to be anybody’s stepmother!”

Roxanne was undeterred. “Call me Roxie,” she said with a smile. “Everybody does. Since we’re practically going to be relatives, we should probably be on a first-name basis. And I can certainly see why Crystal liked it here so much. Your place is beautiful, by the way. It doesn’t even look like a mobile home, but then ours is only a single-wide, a fourteen-by-seventy.”

Roxanne’s comment about Ali’s house echoed what Arabella Ashcroft had said earlier, only from the opposite end of the spectrum. While Roxie cast an admiring glance around the room, Richey sat next to her looking as though he hoped a hole would somehow open in the floor and swallow him.

“Mom,” he pleaded. “Can’t we just go?”

“No,” Roxie said. “Since Ali’s such an important part of your father’s life, it’s high time the two of us met.”

“Look,” Ali said forcefully. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Dave and I are good friends—we’ve always been friends. He asked me to look after Crystal because it was an emergency situation with work, and he didn’t have anyone else to ask. I was glad to do it, by the way, but believe me, Dave and I are not involved. And the fact that Crystal’s life got saved last night has as much to do with a guy named Bernie Bernstein as it does with me. I can assure you that Bernie isn’t romantically involved with Dave Holman, either.”

For the first time, Roxanne seemed uncertain. “But I know he was over there in California with you a few months ago when there was all that trouble,” she objected. “And from what Crystal said…”

That was true, Ali and Dave had been in California together—when Dave had come to help her. But they hadn’t been staying in the same hotel room. They hadn’t even been in the same hotel.

“What exactly did Crystal say?” Ali asked.

Roxie shrugged. “Just that you were an incredibly wonderful person, smart, and brave, too.”

At first Ali felt flattered by Crystal’s unlikely praise. Then she remembered. Crystal Holman is a chronic liar.

“She also said that you and Dave are going to get married soon and move in together here,” Roxie continued. “She says the way your mobile is situated on this hill, it has a big basement carved out downstairs. She says there’ll be plenty of room for all three kids to come live with you if they want to. That way they could even go back to their old schools.”

Having spent several days dealing with the spin-meister Ali had come to know as Crystal Holman, Ali suddenly saw this for what it was—Crystal claiming that what she wanted to be true was true, or simply working one parent against the other in typical child-of-divorce fashion. For a moment Ali felt sorry for Roxanne Whitman—and for her daughter as well.

“Only none of it is going to happen,” Ali said. “I’m not sure why Crystal is so dead-set against living in Las Vegas. Maybe you should ask her, but I can assure you her being determined to stay here in Sedona has nothing to do with me.”

It was Roxanne’s turn to be thunderstruck. “You mean you and Dave aren’t…?”

“That’s exactly what I mean—we definitely aren’t!”

“See there?” Richey said. “I tried to tell you that you shouldn’t listen to her. Crystal’s always telling stories like that. You can’t believe a word she says.”

For the first time Ali wondered how much Rich knew about his sister’s secret life.

“Did she ever mention someone named Coach Curt to you?” Ali asked him.

Rich scowled. “Sure,” he replied. “She said he was like this world-famous soccer coach or something and that he was going to turn her into a soccer star and help her win a scholarship to college. Right. I’ll bet she made him up just like she makes up everything else. He probably doesn’t even exist.”

World famous or not, Coach Curt had existed once. Ali was shocked to realize that so far no one—including Dave—had evidently mentioned any of that inconvenient part of the story to Crystal’s mother. No doubt the Coach Curt saga would come out eventually—if and when Crystal was called to testify in court against Jason Gustavson. Ali could imagine that at some point a sleazy defense attorney would find it necessary to ask Crystal exactly what activities she and Coach Curt had been engaged in at the time they witnessed the fatal attack on Kip Hogan.

For right now, though, Roxanne Whitman was blissfully ignorant about her daughter’s unsavory behavior, and Ali Reynolds sure as hell didn’t want to be the one to tell her. Instead, she changed the subject.

“When are you heading back?” Ali asked.

“Crystal’s doing laundry,” Roxanne said. “She didn’t bring much with her when she took off like that. As soon as her jeans are dry, we’ll get going. I usually have to work on Friday. I traded with someone so we could come here today.”

“The earlier you head north the better,” Ali said, meaning every word and wanting them out of town sooner rather than later. “I understand driving from here to Vegas on a Friday afternoon can be a real bear.”

Ali’s phone was ringing again as Roxanne and Richey took their leaves. Ali didn’t answer the phone until after she closed the door behind them.

“Ali,” Edie said. “Where’ve you been? I’ve been calling and calling.”

“I’ve been right here,” Ali began. “I was on the phone. Thanks for trying to warn me.”

“So Roxanne Whitman already stopped by?”

“You’d better believe it,” Ali said. “She came to give me the once-over. She thinks Dave and I are going together—that we’re practically engaged.”

“Well?” Edie returned. “Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Are you dating Dave Holman?”

“No,” Ali answered, exasperated. “Absolutely not.”

“Too bad,” Edie said. “Sorry to hear it. He’s one of my favorite people. Now, what are you doing tonight?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Your father called a few minutes ago. He and Sandy Mitchell are just now leaving Phoenix to come back to Sedona. Considering everything that’s happened the past few days, Sandy probably shouldn’t be left on her own tonight. Her brother, Phil, will be here, but he’s not worth the powder it would take to blow him up. So I told Dad I’d make dinner for them. Dave should be back from Prescott by then. What with the three of them, the two of us, you, Chris, and Athena, it’ll be a tight fit in our little dining room, but the more the merrier. You’ll come, too, right?”

“Dave is coming?” Ali asked.

“Yes. I just talked to him. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No. Of course not,” Ali said. “But who’s Athena?”

Edie took a deep breath. “You don’t know about Athena? Chris hasn’t told you about her?”

“Who’s Athena?” Ali repeated.

“Oops,” Edie said cheerfully. “Me and my big mouth. Well, you didn’t hear it from me. You’d best ask Chris. So there’ll be eight of us for dinner, and we’ll eat around six. I’d better get cracking.”

“Mother!” Ali objected. She was still holding the telephone receiver, but Edie Larson was long gone.

Astonished, Ali put down the phone. Chris had a girlfriend, one Ali knew nothing about? And this mystery girlfriend, this Athena, was coming to dinner at Bob and Edie’s house that very night? How dare Chris not tell her? Ali glanced at her watch. It was an hour at least before Chris would be home from school. She fully intended to corner him on this, but it wasn’t something that could or should be done over the phone.

Frustrated and needing something to take the edge off, Ali did the only thing that made sense—she grabbed Aunt Evie’s old Oreck out of the entryway closet and vacuumed like mad. Vacuumed and fumed.

Later though, once she’d run out of steam, Ali picked up her computer. Arabella had threatened to write a family saga, and from what Deb Springer had said, there were probably enough skeletons in the Ashcroft family closet to fill several volumes. Working alone and with one eye on the clock, Ali set about creating her own Ashcroft history.

She came up with mountains of material, whitewashed in the journalese of the time, but Ali was able to see through it to the uglier ramifications—the corporate takeovers that littered the business pages contrasted with the glowing charitable outreach that was chronicled in the society sections. Ali found a splashy article detailing William Senior’s marriage to Anna Lee Askins. In among the descriptions of the designer bridal dress and the sumptuous reception, Ali unearthed enough code words about the various attendees to make it clear that this was a hastily arranged affair. And the timing of the wedding, juxtaposed with Arabella’s birth date seven short months later, seemed to validate Deb’s claim that Anna Lee had been pregnant at the time she made her vows. That meant that the blue blood running in Arabella’s veins came from Anna Lee’s side of the family rather than William Ashcroft’s.

As far as information was concerned, there was plenty more where that came from, and Ali would have been glad to keep plowing through it, but her phone rang. Caller ID identified Dave Holman’s home number, but since Dave was still in Prescott at the county courthouse, it seemed unlikely that he was the person calling. Ali braced herself for another dose of Roxie Whitman.

“Ali?” Crystal said.

“Yes. Hi, Crystal. How are you?”

“Tired. I slept all morning.”

I wish I had, Ali thought.

“My mom’s here and my brother. We’re getting ready to go,” Crystal said. “Getting ready to go back to Vegas.”

“I know,” Ali said. “Richey and your mother came by earlier and told me you were heading back.”

There was a pause. “They did? They came by your house?”

Crystal sounded almost as surprised and offended as her brother had been.

“Your mother was somehow under the impression that wedding bells were about to ring for your father and me.”

“I’m sorry,” Crystal said. “She shouldn’t have done that.”

“As I told you the other day, your father and I aren’t in that kind of a relationship. I told your mother as much. How are you?”

“They all ganged up on me and they’re making me go back home,” Crystal said. “Even though I don’t want to. Even though I hate it.”

“Why?” Ali asked. “Why do you hate it so much?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“But it does matter, Crystal,” Ali told her. “Your parents both care about you, and I’m sure they want you to be happy. I don’t know what the laws are in Nevada. You may be old enough to have some say in your custodial arrangements. But if you’re fighting with all the adults in your life, if you’re not going to school, and if you’re running away every time you get a chance, people aren’t going to pay attention. Your parents won’t, and neither will a judge.”

“You think a judge might listen to me, really?” Crystal asked. “That he’d let me come stay with my dad?”

Or she, Ali thought. “A judge might,” she said, “but only if you meet them halfway.”

“You mean only if I behave.”

“Well, yes,” Ali said. “Arrangements like this don’t happen overnight, and you’d better behave. For your sake and everyone else’s.”

“I’ll try,” Crystal said finally.

“Has anyone told your mother what’s been going on?” Ali asked. “As in what’s really been going on?”

There was dead silence on the other end of the phone.

“You need to tell her,” Ali said.

“It’s bad enough that my dad knows,” Crystal whispered. “Do I really have to tell my mother?”

“Yes, you really do,” Ali insisted. “She loves you. She’ll want to protect you. She’ll want to protect you from yourself.”

“I’ve gotta go,” Crystal said abruptly. “Thank you for everything.”

“You’re welcome…”

But Crystal was already gone.

“Good-bye,” Ali murmured into her empty receiver. “Travel safe.” Before she could put the phone down, though, it rang again.

“Ali?” her new caller announced. “It’s Deb Springer again. Is this a bad time?”

“No,” Ali told her. “It’s fine.”

“I’ve been racking my brain ever since we got off the phone, and I finally came up with it. The Mosberg Institute.”

“What’s that?”

“The name of the place where they sent Arabella Ashcroft. And it wasn’t the Bay Area, it was located in Paso Robles. I believe it started out as a home for the criminally insane. By the time Arabella went there, it had become a bit more upscale, but it was still a dreadful place. I can’t imagine sending a child of mine into a world of electroshock therapy, ice baths, and God knows what else. I’m sure it wasn’t at all like those posh rehab places they have up and down Malibu these days. But about the Mosberg, I’m fuzzy on the details. I believe it’s closed now, but I seem to remember there was some kind of fire there, and I think several people died.”

The very mention of ice baths and shock treatments caused Ali to shiver. If that had been Arabella Ashcroft’s reality at age nine, no wonder she would have objected to Billy Ashcroft threatening to have her locked up again.

Ali thanked Deb for her help, ended her phone call, and was about to enter Mosberg Institute into her search engine, when she heard Chris’s Prius pull up outside. She closed her computer with a snap.

It was time to turn away from some of the Ashcroft family carrying-ons and pay attention to her own.

{ CHAPTER 16 }

Larry Marsh returned from the evidence room to find Hank on the phone, apparently on interminable hold.

“So where are we?” he asked.

Hank impatiently waved him to silence. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks so much. If he could call me back with that information, I’d really appreciate it.” Hank put down the phone. “Still tracking with the VA,” he explained. “What about you?”

“I read the diary,” Larry Marsh answered. “It could be Ali Reynolds is right and there is something there.”

“What do we do about it?” Hank asked.

“Let’s order up everything available on the other two Ashcroft characters. You take Senior. I’ll take Junior, and we’ll see what gives. We should probably do the same thing for Arabella while we’re at it.”

For the better part of the next two hours the only sounds coming from their cubicle were the click of computer keys and the whir of their printer. It didn’t take long for Larry to hit pay dirt.

“Look at this,” he said. “It’s from a column in the L.A. Times. It squares with what Ali Reynolds said and also with what was in the diary: ‘We are saddened to report that over the holiday weekend, Bill Cowan Ashcroft Junior’s hand was severely injured as a result of a tree-cutting accident at his father’s Brentwood Estate. He was taken by ambulance to the hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery. No further details about his condition are forthcoming at this time, but we certainly wish Bill and his family well.’”

“A tree-trimming accident?” Hank repeated. “With a father richer than God he has his son out cutting trees instead of a gardener? Sounds bogus to me.”

“Right. They came up with the tree story so no one would hear the real one, as in I was messing with my baby sister and she came after me with a knife. When it comes to having the story show up on the news, having a close encounter with an ax is a lot more palatable than the baby-sister angle.”

By then, Hank had finished with Bill Senior and had moved on to Arabella. “What are you finding on her?” Larry asked.

“Not much at all,” Hank told him. “No driver’s license that I can find. No marriage. No kids. No divorces, and almost zero press. The Ashcroft menfolk were publicity hounds. And Arabella’s mother, Anna Lee Askins Ashcroft, was a big deal in her own right. There are articles about her participation in museum galas and plenty of opera and symphony events. Once she moved to Arizona, she was even a big-time supporter of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Compared to the rest of the family, Arabella’s interaction with the public is damned near nonexistent.”

“If she doesn’t have a valid operator’s license, who drives that Silver Cloud we saw in her garage?” Larry asked.

“Arabella Ashcroft is the registered owner all right, but the insurance company lists Leland Brooks as the only driver.”

“That would be the butler?” Larry asked.

Hank nodded. “The butler/chauffeur. He’s been with the family for years. The mother, Anna Lee, died in 1995 after outliving Bill Senior by a dozen years. Since then it’s just been Arabella and the butler.”

Ali had always valued her close relationship with Chris, and the idea that she had been kept in the dark about a potentially serious girlfriend came as a shock. Ali had raised her son alone and had prided herself on the fact they had remained close through those difficult years of teenage angst when many mother/son relationships had run aground. As Chris came into the house and paused to hang up his jacket, it struck Ali as totally unfair that at the moment she knew far more about the details of Crystal Holman’s tempestuous life and intimate relations than she did about what was going on with her very own son.

“Hey, Mom,” he said. “How’s it going?”

There was no sense in attempting to play coy. “Tell me about Athena,” Ali returned.

Chris’s handsome face fell. “Who blabbed?” he asked. “Grandma?”

“Who’s Athena?” Ali insisted. “And what’s wrong with her?”

Chris picked Sam up off the couch and then sat down in the same spot with the cat ensconced in his lap. “What makes you think something’s wrong with her?”

“Because you didn’t tell me about her.”

“I wanted you to meet her first so you could make up your own mind,” Chris said. “I didn’t want you to have any preconceived ideas about her. Besides, you’ve been so busy with Crystal Holman and everything…”

Not that busy! Ali thought. “But Grandpa and Grandma have already met her?” she asked.

Chris shrugged. “We went to the Sugarloaf for breakfast the other morning,” Chris said. “She loves the sweet rolls.”

“But since we’re all meeting for dinner tonight, you also knew that you couldn’t keep her a secret forever. Tell me. Tell me everything.”

“She’s older,” Chris said guardedly.

“How much older?”

“Six years.”

Ali was relieved. It could have been a lot worse. “That’s not so bad,” she said. “Where did you meet her?”

“At school. She teaches math—algebra, geometry, trig, calculus.”

That was a surprise. Chris had fallen for a math major? Ali’s idea of advanced mathematics was balancing her checkbook.

“What else?”

“Mom, what do you mean ‘what else?’ Why the third degree?”

For the first time Ali realized that she had been blessed—or maybe cursed—with some of her mother’s abilities at discernment.

“Because there’s more you’re not telling me.”

“She’s divorced,” Chris admitted. “But that was finalized last summer, before I even met her.”

“Kids?”

“No kids.”

Ali sighed. “That’s a relief.”

“But she’d make a great mother,” Chris put in quickly.

“I’m sure she would,” Ali agreed. “So that’s it? That’s everything?”

Chris paused. “Not exactly,” he admitted finally.

Ali had tried to raise her son to be open-minded. She had welcomed friends of all shapes, sizes, and races into their home.

That’s it, she thought. I’m about to have my very own Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? moment.

“What exactly?” Ali prompted.

For a long moment Chris sat stroking Sam’s silky fur saying nothing. “She was in Iraq,” he said finally. “She went there with the Minnesota National Guard.”

“She’s a soldier, then?”

“Was a soldier,” Chris said. “Her Humvee got hit by an IED while she was riding shotgun. She’s a double amputee. She lost her right leg above the knee and her right arm above the elbow.”

That was not what Ali had been expecting—not even close. For a moment Ali said nothing. She had hoped that Chris would somehow avoid her checkered marital experience and find his way to the perfect suburban life with a lovely wife, a couple of cute kids, and even a dog or cat or two. But this didn’t sound lovely at all. She couldn’t dodge the unwelcome juxtaposition between this and what Deb Springer had told her about Bill Ashcroft Junior’s amputated hand.

“But you wouldn’t know it,” Chris continued cheerfully. “She’s terrific, Mom. I know you’ll like her. She bowls better than I do—left-handed, and she’s hoping to play basketball again, but that’s a lot harder.”

Ali looked at Chris. As he talked about the girl, his face glowed with excitement. And happiness.

“You’re really serious about her, aren’t you?”

Chris paused. “I didn’t mean to be,” he said. “It’s just that she’s different from the other girls I’ve dated. A lot more…I don’t know. A lot more grown up, I guess.”

“What happened to her husband?”

“He was in the National Guard, too. That’s where they met—basic training. She got sent to Iraq; he didn’t. He got involved with someone else while she was deployed. Dumped her with a Dear Jane letter while she was still recovering at Walter Reed. That’s why she left Minnesota and came here. Her ex still lives there with his new wife.”

Ali looked at Chris as though he was a stranger. In the blink of an eye, he had gone from being a boy to being a man—a man whose mind was made up.

“When did you know?” Ali asked.

“Know what?”

“That she was the one.”

“The first time I saw her,” Chris said. “At the very first faculty meeting back in August. She walked in the door, and I knew. It took me a while to work up the nerve to ask her out.”

Love at first sight, Ali thought. That was what had happened to her with Dean, and with Dean it had worked. That instant attraction had sustained them both through all the tough times that had come along later.

“Why didn’t you tell me about her?” Ali asked. “Why have you kept it under wraps all this time?”

Chris chewed on his lower lip before he answered. “To begin with, you were going through that whole divorce mess,” he said. “Then, after Paul died and you were, well, upset, it just didn’t seem fair for me to be falling in love when your life was in the toilet.”

Hearing that made Ali’s heart wince. He had kept Athena a secret from her because he was trying to protect her. That was Chris, all right—thoughtful to a fault.

“It sounds as though you’re taking on a lot,” Ali said.

Chris nodded. “But wait ’til you meet her, Mom. You’re going to love her as much as I do.”

Ali reached over and patted her son’s knee. “I’m sure you’re right,” she said. “And I’m sure I will.”

Eager to change the subject, Chris glanced at Ali’s computer. “Working on cutloose?” he asked.

“I’m actually doing some research on Arabella Ashcroft and her family,” Ali said.

“How come?”

“Her nephew was murdered down in Phoenix this week. I think he was threatening to blow the lid off some long-buried family secret, and I think that’s why he’s dead. So I’m looking into the Ashcroft archives. The problem is, they were prominent members of the California business establishment for decades. I have a feeling there’s going to be tons of material. The trick will be boiling it down and figuring out if any of it is relevant.”

“Want some help?”

“Please,” Ali said. “I’d really appreciate it.”

“Hang on,” Chris said. “I’ll go get my laptop.”

In a little less than an hour of working on the project, Chris had amassed an astonishing amount of material on the Ashcroft clan—their various businesses, charitable events, and forays into southern California’s high society. He gathered the articles from various sources, printed them, and handed them over to Ali, who read through them one at a time.

For ease of study, Ali sorted the assembled articles into stacks, one for each person involved. It didn’t take long for Ali to realize that the Ashcroft menfolk were definitely front and center in all this while the women faded into the background. There was far more information about Anna Lee Askins Ashcroft after she had moved to Sedona than there had been while she was still in California. It was as though she had been forced to move to another state in order to come into her own right.

It was in one of the Anna Lee articles where Ali found a first mention of the Mosberg Institute. Anna Lee was cited several times as a leading benefactress for the Mosberg Institute. Later she was quoted briefly in a much longer article from the Paso Robles Herald, dated March 20, 1956, which discussed the previous week’s fatal fire:

“This is an unspeakable tragedy,” said Mrs. Anna Lee Ashcroft, a longtime Mosberg Institute supporter. “These are vulnerable people and we’re fortunate more lives weren’t lost. And the idea that someone actually set the fire is absolutely appalling.”

Ali was still reading the whole article when Chris closed his computer. “We can do more of this later,” he said. “Right now, I need to go pick up Athena. I promised Grandma we’d come by to help move furniture and set the table.”

The Larsons’ tiny home contained a kitchen and a living room but no formal dining room. To accommodate groups larger than four, it was necessary to move the kitchen table into the living room and drag in seating from elsewhere in the house.

“You go on ahead,” Ali said. “As soon as I finish reading this one article, I’ll shower and dress and be there, too.”

She was about to shut her own computer when a click announced the arrival of an incoming e-mail. Thinking the message might be from Velma T, Ali clicked over to her e-mail account. The address line on her newest message was disturbingly familiar—uttley, t. uttley.

Some relation to Coach Curt? Ali wondered and pressed OPEN.

So your friend’s runaway “daughter is safe at home,” the little slut? I’m sure you didn’t post her name in your blog because you’re protecting her privacy. How can you? She’s a wicked temptress who led a good man into sin. Why should she be protected? Who’s going to protect my two boys? What about their privacy? Their father is dead, and it’s all because of her. My husband’s name is being dragged through the mud in the paper and on the news. That means my boys’ name is there, too.

Curtis and I had our troubles, but we got counseling for them. He came back to church with me and the boys. We were doing fine until she came along, got her hooks into him, and led him astray. And if you don’t believe she’s evil, maybe you’ll want to check out this Web site. I found it on Curt’s computer and couldn’t believe I was seeing such filth. Maybe you should post it on your blog so the people who read it will know the kind of company you keep.

The Good Book says we should pray for our enemies. I am praying for her all right. I am praying that girl will rot in hell.

Sincerely,

THERESA UTTLEY

Here’s the link.

Ali could hardly argue with the idea that the sins of the father ought not to be visited on the children. Coach Curt’s sons were in no way responsible for what their father had done, but the suggestion that Crystal was somehow solely to blame for Curt’s going astray was preposterous.

Shaking her head, Ali hit the link and waited for the URL to load and open. When the image first came on the screen, it was so poorly lit that it was difficult to make any sense of what was there. Ali decided that the filming was being done by someone with very limited know-how using computerized podcast equipment. Eventually, though, the images clarified themselves, and then it was all too clear. A middle-aged man’s sagging, naked body complete with nonsagging equipment stood directly in front of the camera. And a girl—a very familiar girl—was being pulled toward him. “Come to Daddy,” he was saying. “Come to Daddy.”

Filled with revulsion, Ali slammed shut the lid of her laptop, breaking her Internet connection and shutting off the video. She sat there for a very long time feeling sick to her stomach. Gradually she was able to remember what Theresa Uttley had said. Something about Crystal being a temptress and leading Curt Uttley astray. Only someone totally blinded by her own grief and despair could fail to see that Crystal was anything but a temptress here. She was a victim, too—a manipulated, helpless victim.

Who the hell is this jerk? Ali wondered. Gary Whitman, maybe? And once I know who he is, how do I keep Dave from killing him?

The phone rang. Ali had to take a deep breath before she was able to answer. What if it was Dave? What would she say to him? How would she tell him?

“Am I still in the doghouse?” Ali’s mother wanted to know.

Ali was still so shaken by what she’d just seen that it was difficult to get a fix on what Edie was saying. “No,” Ali answered at last. “You’re out of it. Chris and I had a chance to talk. Everything is fine.”

“You’re sure?” Edie asked. “You don’t sound fine.”

“I’m sure,” Ali said more forcefully.

“All right then. I was going to ask Chris to bring along a couple of bottles of wine from that wine cellar of yours, but then I realized Kip and Sandy met in AA, so probably no wine, right?”

“Right,” Ali agreed. “And Chris is already on his way. He’s off picking up Athena right now.”

“Fair enough,” Edie said. “See you in a little. I’ve fallen a bit behind. I know I told you we’d be eating at six, but it’ll probably be closer to six-thirty.”

Wanting to wash the ugly images of Crystal’s victimization from her mind, Ali stood under the shower and let the water fall full on her face. Who is Daddy? she wondered. It was a common enough phrase. Ali knew enough about Dave’s trim physique to recognize his wasn’t the body featured in the offending video, and the man could have been anyone. Vegas was full of men looking for sex with runaways, prostitutes, whatever. Then again the problem could be much closer to home. Ali had never met Gary Whitman in person, so she had no idea what he looked like, but Ali was left with the sinking feeling that Crystal’s stepfather wasn’t in the running for Father of the Year.

And what if that turned out to be the case? Hadn’t Ali just counseled Crystal to go back home to Las Vegas and make a sincere effort to get along with her elders, Gary Whitman included? If Gary was at fault, it was likely Ali had made things worse instead of better. And what would Dave do once he learned about the offending Web site—however Ali managed to tell him about that? Was there something else she could do instead?

What if she called the cops in Las Vegas? What would they do? How would they proceed? Or would they? Ali’s last interaction with cops certainly hadn’t gone very well. What made her think officers in Vegas would be any different? And what would happen to Dave’s kids, all three of them, if their new family situation was blown apart? But then again, if what Ali suspected was going on, hadn’t that already happened?

Still awash in indecision, Ali stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel.

{ CHAPTER 17 }

Larry Marsh was on the phone to the Marin County Sheriff’s Department. Yes, someone would get back to him on the William Cowan Ashcroft situation, but it wasn’t likely to be that day, especially since it would take time to locate the record as well as any remaining evidence of that fatal car wreck. Would tomorrow work, or maybe the next day?

In the background, Hank’s phone rang and soon he was busily taking notes.

“What do you have?” Larry asked.

“My mole in the VA came through with two possibilities,” Hank answered. “Alan Dale Reed of Birmingham, Alabama, got his Silver Star in Vietnam, 1965. The problem is, he died in 2004. Arthur Reed is from Red Bluff, California. His Silver Star came from Korea, circa 1953. As far as I can tell, he’s still alive and kicking and driving.”

“Address?” Larry asked.

“And phone number.”

“Let’s give him a call.”

They used a phone in the conference room and put it on speaker. The way investigations went, Larry expected that they’d run into a nonworking number or that Arthur Reed would also be deceased or unavailable. But he wasn’t. The woman who answered the phone said only, “Just a minute.” Then, “Dad, it’s for you.”

“This is Detective Larry Marsh with the Phoenix Police Department.”

“Wait a minute. You’re not supposed to be calling me. I already told you to take me off your goddamned call list. These police guild and fire department calls are just a ripoff. I’ve got half a mind to report you to the attorney general’s office.”

“Wait, wait, Mr. Reed,” Hank said. “This isn’t a solicitation call.”

“What is it then?”

“It’s a homicide investigation,” Marsh said. “Detective Mendoza and I are homicide detectives with the Phoenix Police Department.”

“You think I killed somebody in Arizona? I’ve never even been to Arizona. You’ve got the wrong guy. I’m hanging up now.”

“No, wait,” Marsh said. “Please, Mr. Reed. Don’t hang up. We’re just looking for information. Maybe you can help us.”

“What kind of information? If this is some kind of trick…”

“It’s no trick. As I said, we’re investigating a homicide…”

“Who died?”

“William Cowan Ashcroft the third.”

“Never heard of him. Wouldn’t know him from a hole in the ground. What does this have to do with me?”

“It’s about your Silver Star, the one you were awarded for service in Korea?”

“What about it?”

“A Silver Star with your name engraved on it was found in the floorwell of Mr. Ashcroft’s vehicle after he was killed. We were wondering if you had any idea how it might have gotten there.”

In the background they could hear a woman’s voice. “Who is it, Dad? What do they want?”

“It’s the cops,” he said. “Somebody else calling about my medals.”

“I thought you got rid of those,” the woman said.

“I did,” he said impatiently. “I told you I would and I did.”

“Somebody else called you about your medal?” Hank asked.

“Yeah, some guy who’s writing a book on Silver Star recipients,” Reed said. “I have no idea how he got my name. Julie here found out I’d talked to him and pitched a fit.”

“Julie?”

“My daughter. If you must know, she and my granddaughter both are certified peace activists. They’re not just against this war; they’re against all wars. So when I had to move in with her a couple of years ago, she wanted me to get rid of all that wartime crap—didn’t want it in her house. Julie’s mother and I had saved them through the years—my medals, uniforms, and all that other stuff—kept them up in the attic. Once a Marine always a Marine, but Connie was gone by then, and since I was moving into Julie’s house, I had to respect her wishes. I got rid of everything.”

“What did you do with them?”

“Took ’em to Goodwill mostly.”

“Even the medals?”

“Except for the Silver Star.”

“What did you do with that one?”

“I gave it away.”

“Who did you give it to?” Larry asked.

“What do you know about the Korean War?” Arthur Reed asked.

“Not much. It was a little before my time.”

“Ever get to Red Bluff? If you do, come by for a beer. If Julie’s not home, I’ll tell you all about it.”

“The Silver Star…” Larry prompted.

“Right. You probably never heard of Hagaru?”

“No.”

“What about Koto-ri?”

“Never heard of that, either.”

“Korean hellholes both of them, ten miles apart. Early December. Cold as hell. Took thirty-eight hours to move that ten miles. They called it ‘advance to the south’ in those days, but that was all bullshit. Nobody wanted to say the word retreat, but that’s what we were doing. Getting the hell out of Dodge because those Chinese were coming at us like crazy. We were all freezing our butts off, but that morning, before we set off, those crazy Brits did a full unit inspection—polished, shaved, everything. We thought they were nuts.”

“What crazy Brits?” Larry asked.

“From the Forty-first Commando. Royal Marine Corps. There weren’t very many of ’em, not more than a hundred or so, but we were glad as hell to have ’em. Especially that day. I was with the Marine Five and we, along with Forty-one Commando, were supposed to bring up the rear. We were, too. Our truck got hit. It went off the road and crashed into an icy river. Ice on top—water cold as hell underneath. Would have drowned for sure, but these two Brits showed up and dragged us out of the drink. Cooks. Not munitions guys. Not signalmen. A pair of dumb-ass cooks. Put us in the back of their truck, dried us out, and saved our sorry lives. And then, when we made it to Koto-ri, they saved us again. Invited us to their damned Christmas party. They had booze. We didn’t. Hell of a party, too.”

Reed’s story seemed to have traveled very far afield. “The Silver Star,” Larry Marsh reminded him again.

“Oh, right. I won that, later. In a firefight in January, but I wouldn’t have been alive to do it if it hadn’t been for those two Brits. So I tracked the one guy down and sent it to him. I sent my Silver Star to him as a thank-you. I figured he’d earned it, too. If it hadn’t been for him, I never would have lived long enough for someone to pin it on my chest.

“In December 2001, we had this reunion—a fiftieth. It was supposed to be a big deal but it got downsized by 9/11. The reunion was held down in Bakersfield. Didn’t even have to go all the way into L.A., and I was able to drive instead of fly. Told Julie I was going to meet an old girlfriend whose husband had just died. That she didn’t mind. So I went. A few of the Forty-one Commando guys made it, and I kept asking everybody who showed whatever became of those two cooks. I finally ran into somebody who knew. He said one of them went back home and opened a restaurant in a place called Brighton. The other one—who turned out to be queer as a three-dollar bill—had immigrated to this country right after the war and had gone to work as a butler for some rich old lady. I kept hoping he’d turn up, but he never did.”

“A butler? Did this butler have a name?”

“Sure,” Arthur Reed said. “It was Brooks—Leland Brooks. Funny little guy, no bigger ’an a minute. He’s not the one who’s dead, is he?”

“No, that man’s name is Ashcroft.”

“Oh, good,” Reed said. “Glad to hear it.”

Larry Marsh, trying to hang up, was already on his feet and headed for the door. “Thank you, Mr. Reed. Thank you so much.”

“You don’t need anything else? I’ve got lots of stories.”

“Appreciate your help,” Hank said. “But I believe we’ve got everything we need.” He slammed the phone down and turned to face his partner. “There you go. Aunt Arabella decides to off her troublesome nephew? Conveniently enough, she just happens to have a trained ex-commando on staff to help her do it.”

“Amazing,” Larry agreed as they headed for the elevator. “I’ve been in homicide for a dozen years. For the first time ever, it looks like the butler did it. Where’s Agatha Christie when you need her?”

By ten after six, Ali was standing in the bathroom fully dressed. Her hair was dry and she was applying the last of her makeup, when the doorbell sounded.

Who is it this time? she wondered. The quiet, recuperative day she had wanted to spend at home had turned out to be anything but quiet or restful.

Ali checked the peephole and was amazed to find that, for the second time that day, Arabella Ashcroft had arrived on her doorstep. She stood on Ali’s front porch wrapped in an old-fashioned but still lush fur coat that appeared to be two sizes too large for her. She was holding a battered briefcase that seemed to have long outlived its expected life span.

Ali opened the door. “Hello, Arabella. What are you doing here?”

“I hope you’ll forgive me for dropping by unannounced again,” Arabella said with a bright smile. “It’s actually rather fun. I may start making a habit of it.”

Ali looked around, expecting to see Mr. Brooks and the Rolls lingering in the background. The yellow Rolls was exactly where she expected it to be. Mr. Brooks was nowhere in evidence.

“I’m sorry,” Ali said. “I’m on my way out. I’ve been invited to dinner.”

“This won’t take long,” Arabella returned. “I wanted to show you something.”

Good manners trumped good sense. Ali stepped back and motioned Arabella into the house. As she wafted in, so did a cloud of gin.

“Where’s Mr. Brooks?” Ali asked.

“I’m afraid he’s otherwise engaged at the moment,” Arabella said.

“You drove here yourself?”

When Arabella set the briefcase down on the coffee table, there was a distinct rattle as though loose contents were rolling around inside. Apparently unconcerned by possible breakage, Arabella smiled conspiratorially in Ali’s direction. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I do drive occasionally. It’s a lot like riding a bicycle. I’m sure I could still do that, too.”

She’s drunk, Ali thought, but there was a singular glitter in Arabella’s eyes that made Ali wonder if Arabella was operating on something more powerful than booze.

“Are you going to offer me a drink?” Arabella asked. “I know you had a martini with me the other day. I find teetotalers very annoying, don’t you?”

The same goes for drunks, Ali thought. It seemed to her that Arabella had already had plenty. “Sorry,” Ali said. “I believe you’ve had enough.”

Arabella sighed and shook her head. “You sound just like Mr. Brooks, but that’s all right. Not to worry.” Popping open the lid of the briefcase, she pulled out an old-fashioned silver flask, unscrewed the lid, and took a drink. “BYOB,” she added. “A premixed martini. Not chilled, but definitely shaken, and better than doing without. I believe in being prepared.”

Ali was losing patience. “Arabella, I don’t want to be inhospitable but as I told you, I was just leaving. What is it you wanted to show me?”

“Evie always said you were smart,” Arabella said. “And, of course, the only way to help you without giving away the game was to help others, too. So all those other scholarship winners have you to thank, but you’re not being smart now. You have no idea who you’re dealing with. Neither did Billy.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Come on, Ali. Didn’t you just finish telling me to go to the cops and confess all my sins or you’d do it for me?”

“I tried,” Ali said. “They didn’t seem particularly interested.”

“But they will be,” Arabella said.

Once again she lifted the lid on the briefcase. When she pulled out a bag with a Crown Royale insignia on it, Ali thought she was about to help herself to another drink. But the bag didn’t hold a bottle of booze. Instead, Ali found herself staring at a lidded jar—a wide-mouthed canning jar filled with a not quite clear liquid. In the dusky light of the living room it took a moment or two for Ali to make sense of the pallid shape suspended inside the glass.

“My God!” she exclaimed. “Your brother’s hand!”

“Right you are,” Arabella agreed. “Give the girl a gold star. So you know all about that then?”

Ali wasn’t sure she knew “all” about anything. But she knew enough. And she remembered Deb Springer saying that Bill Junior had kept his amputated hand with him—at all times.

“How did you get it?” Ali asked.

“Maybe he gave it to me,” Arabella said. “Or maybe I took it. But does it really matter? Come on, Ali. If that worthless nephew of mine was bright enough to figure it out, surely you can, too.”

“Are you saying you were there when Bill Junior died? When he went off the cliff?”

“Was I?” Arabella laughed. “Maybe I was. Maybe I wasn’t.” Clearly she regarded this as some kind of game, and she appeared to be enjoying herself immensely.

“But you told me the other day you had nothing to do with his death; that you were out of the country at the time he died.”

“I’ve said a lot of things over the years,” Arabella admitted. “The older I get the harder it is to keep all those stories straight.”

“Like passing off your years of treatment at the Mosberg Institute by saying you were going to finishing school?”

Arabella gave Ali an appraising look and then took another hit from her flask. “So you know about the Mosberg?” she said. “Yes, I was there. As for treatment? There wasn’t a lot of that going on in those days. My father sent me there because he thought I was psychotic. He was probably right about that, by the way. I was psychotic, but just because someone’s crazy doesn’t mean she’s stupid, too. It didn’t take long for me to figure out how the system worked.”

“What system?” Ali asked.

“Sex was the coin of the realm at the Mosberg. Thanks to my big brother, sex was something I knew a whole lot about. All I had to do was spread my legs and I could have whatever I wanted. ‘You don’t want electroshock therapy today, little lady. What would you like instead?’ Or how about, ‘You want a weekend pass? What have you got to trade?’ And it turned out, I had plenty to trade. There were guys lining up to take the crazy girl into town. I was a hot date. Of course, that was long before the arrival of birth control pills. Much to the director’s chagrin, I’d had to have three abortions by the time I was eighteen. That’s when they finally fixed me.”

“Fixed you?” Ali asked.

“With a hysterectomy,” Arabella replied.

Ali was aghast. “At age eighteen?”

Arabella shrugged. “They did me a favor. After that I could do whatever I wanted. It was a lot easier not to get caught.”

The story was appalling; so was Arabella’s nonchalant delivery. The problem was, Ali couldn’t figure out if Arabella was telling the truth this time or if she was simply spinning yet another web of lies.

“Where was this place?” Ali asked. “When was it?”

Arabella shrugged. “In California,” she said. “Outside a town called Paso Robles. After the fire, Mother brought me here to Arizona—to a facility near where Carefree is now. That one was a lot nicer, but it closed. The people who owned it sold it to someone who turned the place into a resort—very posh, I understand.”

Ali had already learned a good deal about the fatal fire at the Mosberg Institute, but she wanted to hear the story in Arabella’s words. “There was a fire?” Ali asked.

“Oh, yes,” Arabella said. “At the Mosberg. A terrible fire. A nurse died in it and one of the patients. I knew the nurse. I never met the patient.”

Something about the way Arabella said the words sent a chill of recognition through Ali’s body. “Did you have anything to do with the fire?” Ali asked.

“Me?” Arabella responded. “Why would you ask such a thing?”

“Did you?” Ali pressed.

“I suppose it’s possible. I might have had something to do with it.”

“And what about Billy?” Ali asked. “Did you have anything to do with what happened to him?”

Arabella sighed. “If only he hadn’t looked so much like his father. That was a real shock to the system.”

“He looked like Bill Junior?”

“Amazingly so. When Mr. Brooks brought the man into the living room, seeing him took my breath away. For a moment I thought Bill Junior had come back to life and that his hand had grown back, too.” She unscrewed the lid on her flask, took another sip, and giggled. “That would have been something, wouldn’t it? If his hand had grown back, but of course it hadn’t—it was still safe and sound and put away right where I’ve kept it all these years.” She patted the briefcase affectionately.

For the first time Ali understood that in addition to being drunk, Arabella Ashcroft was also nuts—totally, completely, and certifiably crackers.

Ali had been standing in the middle of the living room. Now she took a tentative step toward the kitchen counter—and the telephone.

“Where are you going?” Arabella asked.

“I need to call someone,” Ali said. “You need help, Arabella. Maybe Mr. Brooks could come get you.”

“No, no calls. Mr. Brooks has helped me quite enough through the years. That’s why my mother hired him, of course—to look after me and to keep me out of trouble. I have to say, he’s done a splendid job of it most of the time, but he’s always been at a bit of a disadvantage since he never knew the full story.”

Ali glanced at her watch. It was twenty past six. If she was late to dinner, someone was bound to notice. Dinner was scheduled for six-thirty, and Edie Larson expected people to be present and accounted for when food was served. All Ali had to do was stall for time. Eventually her mother would call. Edie might even dispatch a search party.

“What is the full story?” Ali asked.

“About Bill Junior? No one would believe what he was doing to me,” Arabella said. “Even my mother didn’t believe it. The one person who did was Miss Ponder.”

The only clue that the conversation had taken a sudden six-decade detour was the mention of Arabella’s old governess. “Wait a minute,” Ali said. “You told me the other day that you hadn’t told your mother.”

Arabella looked puzzled. “Did I? Of course. Why wouldn’t I? That’s what I told myself over the years, too—that she must not have known. When you tell people and they don’t believe you, it hurts too much, so I convinced myself otherwise and didn’t think about it very much. I just ignored it. When Miss Ponder went away, Mother told me at the time that she’d been fired because Father caught her stealing something. She said Miss Ponder went back home to New Jersey. I didn’t find out until years later that she was dead. Murdered.”

“And you think your brother was somehow responsible for her death?”

“I know it,” Arabella said fiercely.

“You know it how?” Ali asked. “Did he tell you himself?”

“No.”

“Was he ever arrested or questioned in regard to that case?”

“I doubt it,” Arabella said. “Not by the police. There wasn’t time. When Mother told me Miss Ponder’s body had been found, I wrote Bill Junior a letter. He and my father were both flying high in those days. They had a number of big deals on the table. When I told Bill Junior I knew what he had done and that I was going to find a way to go public, he didn’t like it at all.”

“You were going to blackmail him?”

“After what he’d done to me, why not? He came to see me to try to talk me out of it. That’s when he went off the cliff.”

“He came to the Mosberg?”

“Not officially. I had gone AWOL and hitched my way to San Francisco. I had Bill Junior meet me there. He was taking me for a little ride when he went off that cliff.”

“You somehow sent him over the edge?” Ali asked.

“Absolutely. Who else was going to do it? I took care of him once and for all.”

“How?”

“I’m not sure. We’d both been drinking. People who are drunk do a lot of stupid things.”

“How did you get back to the hospital?”

“I don’t know. I hitchhiked, probably. Someone must have given me a ride. Dropped me off outside the gate. When questions were asked, the hospital covered for me—covered for themselves actually. They didn’t want anyone knowing I’d been off wandering about on my own when Bill Junior died. But somehow, after all these years, Billy finally figured it out.”

“And when he came to you looking for money, you took care of him, too,” Ali said.

“In more or less the same way. I was waiting for him when he came to his apartment in Scottsdale. He’d been out jogging. I held a gun on him and had him drive out to South Mountain Park. He didn’t have either a cell phone or a wallet with him and I thought that way the cops might have a harder time identifying him. He was convinced I was going to shoot him. I thought so, too, but then he somehow managed to get the gun away from me. When he tried to drag me out of the car, I slammed the door on his hand, put it in gear, and drove until he shut the hell up.”

Drunk, crazy, and dangerous as hell, Ali thought.

“So why are you telling me this, Arabella?” she asked. “Are you planning on taking care of me, too?”

As Ali asked the question, she wondered if she shouldn’t try to make a run for it. The front door was only a few feet away, and Arabella Ashcroft was no spring chicken. If Ali could make it out the door and down the hill to one of the neighbor’s, maybe she’d be able to duck inside and use a phone to summon help. On the other hand, there was always a chance that running might prove more dangerous than staying where she was.

“I guess I hoped that if I told you the whole story, maybe you’d help me,” Arabella continued. “I really do admire cutloose. At one time I thought I could do some good by sharing my story with others. I’ve been working on writing it down for months, but that’s not going to happen now. What Bill Junior did to me didn’t just destroy my childhood, Ali. It destroyed my whole life. By the time he was done with me, sex was all I was good for—sex and revenge. Once those were gone, I wasn’t good for anything.”

In Arabella’s despairing words, Ali was afraid she was catching a glimpse of what might be Crystal Holman’s grim future, as well—unless someone did something to change it.

“How do you expect me to help you?” Ali asked.

Arabella frowned. “After you talked to me this afternoon, I thought I’d come here and have you help me locate an attorney so I could turn myself in, but now I’ve changed my mind. There’s something else I need to do first.”

“What?” Ali asked.

The phone rang. Ali jumped and so did Arabella. Before Ali could move toward the phone, Arabella had reached into the still-opened briefcase and retrieved a handgun that she pointed in Ali’s direction.

“Answer it,” Arabella ordered.

“Hello,” Ali managed.

“Why are you still at home?” Chris wanted to know. “You should be here. Everybody else is. Grandma and Athena are dishing up.”

“I’m on my way,” Ali managed. “I’ll be there in a little while.” She put down the phone.

“Good girl,” Arabella said with a smile. “You are on your way. In fact, I think the two of us are on our way.”

“On our way where?” Ali asked.

“Just a little trip together,” Arabella said. “We’ll know when we get there. As you have so kindly pointed out, I’ve had a bit too much to drink. That being the case, you should probably drive.”

Holding the gun with one hand, Arabella tucked the flask into her bra. Then she used the other hand to return the jar to the briefcase, which she clicked shut.

“Shouldn’t you have wrapped that?” Ali asked.

Arabella picked up the briefcase and rattled the contents. “I don’t think so,” she said. “It’ll be fine. Let’s go. We’ll take the Rolls. Get in on the passenger side and then slide over. I’ll sit in the back.”

As they moved toward the front door, Ali once again considered making a break for it. When she opened the door, though, her ears were assailed by the pneumatic blat, blat, blat of a bouncing basketball. That meant that Gabe, the eighth-grader who lived down the street, was out in the driveway dribbling endlessly and shooting baskets. Ali couldn’t do anything that would endanger him or anyone else. And once behind the wheel, Ali realized she wouldn’t be able to risk driving erratically and provoking a traffic stop, either. No telling what Arabella would do if an officer approached the vehicle. Without a cell phone or any way to summon help, all Ali could do was play a waiting game and hope that eventually the booze would do its work.

Ali complied wth her marching orders while Arabella, puffing slightly, clambered into the back. Ali cringed as the briefcase landed heavily on the floor behind her with the jar rattling loosely around inside it.

“Here,” Arabella said. “Put this on. It’ll look better.” She dropped Leland Brooks’s short-billed cap into the front seat. “And the key is there in the ignition.”

Only someone who wasn’t used to driving would make that kind of mistake with a Rolls, Ali thought. When she turned the key, the perfectly tuned engine purred to life. It took a moment to fasten her belt, adjust the seat, and locate the headlight switch. Nothing was familiar.

“Where to?” Ali said finally, pulling out of the driveway.

She caught a hint of gin as Arabella took another hit from the flask. “When you get to the bottom, turn left.”

As soon as Ali turned onto the highway, she saw the Sugarloaf Rock and below it the café. The lights were out, but there were several cars still in the parking lot. She caught a glimpse of her father’s Bronco, somehow repaired and returned from the garage in a surprisingly timely fashion. She saw her mother’s Alero, Chris’s silver Prius, Dave’s battered Nissan, and two more vehicles Ali couldn’t quite identify. Earlier she had dreaded going there and having to tell Dave the latest piece of Crystal’s bad news.

Now, though, Ali could easily imagine the crowded living room of her parents’ cramped house, and that was exactly where Ali Reynolds wanted to be, seated along with everyone else in a humble living room masquerading as a dining room and breaking bread with people she loved. That wasn’t to be. Instead of being there and being able to meet the young woman who might become Chris’s wife, Ali was stuck in a bright yellow Rolls-Royce, being held captive by an armed old woman who was certifiably crazy.

Just like Detective Marsh said, she thought ruefully. Definitely inserted and definitely in danger.

“Where are we going?” Ali said.

“Just drive out to the freeway,” Arabella told her. “I’ll tell you what to do once we get there.”

When the two detectives arrived in Sedona, it was well after dark. There were lights on deep in the interior of Arabella Ashcroft’s house, but no one was home.

“What do we do now?” Hank asked.

Larry Marsh sighed. “I hate to mention it, but I guess we’d better look up Ali Reynolds after all.”

“Do we know where she lives?”

Larry was already pulling the cell phone out of his pocket. “We will in a minute.”

Twenty minutes later they arrived at a mobile home at the top of Sedona’s Andante Drive. There were several vehicles parked in the driveway with people milling around inside and out. Somewhere in the background the slap of a basketball pounded on pavement.

“What’s going on?” Larry asked an older woman standing outside, talking animatedly on her phone.

“It’s my daughter, Ali,” she said. “She’s missing. Are you cops? Dave was just now calling. How did you get here so fast?”

“We are cops,” Larry said, pulling out his badge. “But probably not the ones who were called. Your daughter is Alison Reynolds? What’s your name, and how long has she been gone?”

“Edie, Edie Larson. My grandson talked to his mother right at six-thirty. We were putting dinner on the table, and she was already supposed to be there by then. She told him she was on her way, but she never showed. Finally we came up the hill to check. Her car is here and so are her keys, but no purse and no cell phone. I’ve tried calling that—but she doesn’t answer.”

Larry Marsh knew exactly where the missing phone and purse were—back in Phoenix in the evidence room. No wonder she hadn’t answered.

A man showed up and looked anxiously from Edie to Larry. “Who’s this?” he asked.

“Detective Marsh,” Edie told him. “From Phoenix.”

The guy held out his hand. “I’m Dave Holman,” he said. “Detective Dave Holman, Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. What brings you here?”

“We’re investigating the death of a man named William Ashcroft. We wanted to speak to Ms. Reynolds about Mr. Ashcroft’s aunt, Arabella.”

Just then a young man came jogging back up the hill. “I talked to Gabe down the street,” he said. “He was out shooting baskets and saw Mom leave. She was driving a big old yellow car. He didn’t know what kind exactly, and he said there was someone sitting in the backseat.”

“That would be Arabella Ashcroft’s Rolls,” Larry Marsh said.

“Why would Ali be driving Arabella’s Rolls?” Dave asked. “Where’s her driver—what’s his name?”

“Brooks,” Larry supplied. “Leland Brooks.”

A pair of squad cars nosed their way up the street and stopped behind the Phoenix PD Crown Victoria. As uniformed officers converged on the scene and began trying to assess the situation, Larry pulled his partner aside.

“Once we get an APB put out on that Rolls, we’ll leave the locals to work this scene,” Larry said. “And while they’re busy with that, we’ll head back over to Arabella’s house. Maybe we missed them in transit.”

{ CHAPTER 18 }

Which way?” Ali asked when they reached the freeway. Her hands were sticky with sweat. She knew now that Arabella Ashcroft was completely nuts. She was also armed and dangerous.

“South,” Arabella said. “Get off again at Camp Verde.”

Make conversation, Ali counseled herself. Try to make things seem normal. “You still haven’t said where we’re going,” she added.

“I’m going to say good-bye,” Arabella said.

“Good-bye to what?”

“We’re going to a place I loved,” Arabella explained. “Mother called it her ‘cabin in the woods.’ It’s on a piece of private land in the middle of the wilderness. It’s very peaceful there. Once they lock me up, I’ll never see it again. And when I die, they’ll knock it down and turn it back into wilderness. It’ll be gone forever.”

Back at the house Arabella had seemed defiant—giggly and almost gleeful. Now her mood shifted. She sounded morose and brooding. Ali sensed that this subtle change, booze induced or not, made Arabella more dangerous to deal with rather than less. And if her intention was to go somewhere to say good-bye, what were the chances that she intended to take Ali with her?

“Did you do what I told you?” Ali asked. “Did you contact a defense attorney?”

In the course of their long, rambling conversation, Arabella Ashcroft had admitted to committing two homicides. She had also hinted that she might be involved in two more. It occurred to Ali that if and when the woman was taken into custody, even the most effective representation might not be enough to save her. Arabella seemed to have arrived at the same conclusion.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t see any point. Why waste the money? They’re going to send me to jail or somewhere else. Either way, I’m not coming back here. This is over.”

“What’s over?” Ali asked in an effort to keep Arabella talking.

“Everything,” Arabella said. “I’ve lived my whole life, and I’ve never done anything worthwhile.”

“What about those little girls you wanted to help? Did you mean what you said about helping them?”

“Yes, I meant it. Of course I meant it!” Arabella’s anger briefly resurfaced. “But once everything that’s happened is made public no one is going to pay any attention to anything I say.”

“I know a girl like that,” Ali said quietly.

“A girl like what?”

“One like you were, only she’s a couple of years older. She’s someone who has been abused and who has decided to use her body for whatever it’ll buy.”

“Your friend’s daughter?” Arabella asked. “The one who ran away?”

Of course, Ali thought. Arabella reads cutloose. “What would you say to her?” Ali returned, without answering Arabella’s question one way or the other.

They were approaching Camp Verde by then. “Turn here,” Arabella said. “I’m hungry. Stop at the McDonald’s—at the drive-up.”

“I don’t have any money,” Ali said. “I didn’t bring my purse.” Or my driver’s license, she thought.

“I have money,” Arabella said. “Stop with the back window at the drive-up. I’ll take care of it. And don’t try anything.”

“Don’t worry,” Ali said. “I won’t.”

Back at Arabella Ashcroft’s house for the second time, Larry and Hank found an older 4 x 4 Mazda pickup truck parked in the driveway. A man, bent under the weight of a heavy box, was hurrying from the truck toward the front door.

Hank stopped the car and Larry jumped out. “Mr. Brooks? Mr. Leland Brooks?”

With his white hair glowing in the headlights, the man turned to look at them. He was dressed in full rhinestone cowboy regalia, from the sequined cowboy shirt to the tips of his snakeskin boots. The box in his arms, full to the brim, was one of the three-side produce boxes used to pack groceries at Costco.

“Yes, I’m Leland Brooks,” he said. “Who are you? What’s going on?”

“Police,” Larry said. “We need to talk to you. Put down the box and then get on the ground.”

“Get on the ground? Are you joking?”

“Not at all. Get on the ground.”

With some difficulty Brooks tried to comply. He stooped over and let go of the box. Groceries spilled out through the opening, rolling in all directions. He dropped stiffly onto one knee, groaning with pain. “My knees aren’t what they used to be,” he said. “If you want me on the ground, you’re going to have to help me.”

He’s an old man for Chrissake, Larry thought guiltily. Give the guy a break.

By then, Hank was out of the car. Instead of pushing Brooks to the ground, Larry grabbed him by his upper arm and hauled him to his feet. “Hands behind your back, then.”

“Behind my back? You’re handcuffing me? What have I done? I had two beers in Prescott, but that was hours ago. If you want a sobriety test…”

“You’re wanted for questioning in the murder of William Cowan Ashcroft the third.” As Larry fastened the cuffs, he automatically recited the Miranda warning.

“Wait a minute,” Brooks said when Larry finished. “You think I murdered Billy? Are you kidding? Why would I? Where did you get such a crazy idea?”

“Where’s Arabella?” Larry asked.

“Where would she be? Inside and asleep, I’m sure. I gave her all her medication before I left. She should be sleeping through the night. Why? What’s wrong?”

“Because she’s taken off somewhere, and she’s taken a woman named Alison Reynolds with her.”

“Ms. Reynolds is missing?” Brooks asked. “Whatever may have happened, I can’t imagine that Miss Arabella has anything to do with it, and I’m sure you’ll find the Rolls is right here in the garage where it belongs.”

“Do you mind showing us?”

“Of course not. The clicker’s in my pocket. You’ll have to get it out.”

“Which pocket?”

“The front one.”

“Do you have anything dangerous in here—anything that will hurt me?”

“You mean like a needle or something? Certainly not!” Brooks said. “I’m not some kind of druggie, if that’s what you’re implying.”

With some difficulty Hank emptied Brooks’s pockets, extracting a wallet, a set of keys, and a small plastic clicker. When he punched the button the heavy garage door rolled up and a light came on revealing an expanse of shiny concrete polished to a high gloss.

“It is gone,” Brooks said, confirming the obvious. “But someone else must have taken it. I’m sure Miss Arabella is asleep in her room exactly where I left her.”

“Do you mind if we check?” Larry asked.

“Of course not. Go into the kitchen, through the swinging doors, and then down the hall. Her room is the first one on the left, but I can tell you for sure. Miss Arabella wouldn’t be driving the car. She doesn’t even have a license.”

“That doesn’t stop some people,” Larry observed.

Hank set off without further urging. He was back in less than a minute. “No one’s there,” he said. “The place is empty.”

“Oh, my,” Brooks said. Sounding genuinely dismayed, he staggered over to the front porch where, unassisted, he sank down on the top step. “How can this be?”

“We thought maybe you could tell us something about that, Mr. Brooks,” Larry said. “When was the last time…”

“Wait a minute,” Brooks interrupted. “You’ve read me my rights? Don’t tell me you think I had something to do with Mr. Ashcroft’s death. I can’t imagine why you’d think such a thing. It’s outrageous.”

“Have you ever heard of someone named Arthur Reed?” Larry asked. “I believe he served in Korea about the same time you did?”

“Of course, I remember Art Reed. United States Marine Corps. Why wouldn’t I?”

“And he gave you his Silver Star?”

“Yes, he did. I was really honored and touched. I saved his life once. Later when he was awarded a Silver Star, he decided to share the honor with me.”

“What became of it?”

“Of the star itself? I’m not sure. It wasn’t mine to wear, of course, since I hadn’t earned it. I treasured it, but I lost track of it years ago, shortly after it was given to me. How do you know about it, and why are you asking?”

“How do you suppose your Silver Star would have turned up in William Ashcroft’s vehicle?” Larry asked. “Our CSI team found it under the floor mat after he was murdered.”

“I have no idea where it’s been all this time or how it got there.”

“You must.”

Larry’s phone rang. “Detective Marsh? Dave Holman here. Your people down in Phoenix have brought us into the loop. I thought you’d want to know that when we put out the APB on that Rolls, we got a hit.”

“You already found her then?”

“No,” Holman answered, “but the Rolls was caught by a red-light camera making an illegal left turn in Scottsdale at Scottsdale and Camelback, just before midnight, Monday night. The citation went out in the mail today. Your records folks were able to scan through the video record and come up with the actual photo. It would appear that Arabella Ashcroft was at the wheel, and she was alone in the vehicle.”

Larry closed his phone. “So where were you on Monday night, Mr. Brooks?” he asked.

The butler shook his head. “I know that’s the night Mr. Ashcroft died,” he said. “But I was out the whole evening, from late afternoon on. It’s my day off.”

“Where did you go?”

“Prescott.”

“What did you do there?”

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather not say.”

“You might want to reconsider,” Larry suggested. “I’ve just received word that the Rolls was cited for running a red light in Scottsdale on Monday night and the insurance company has you listed as the sole driver. We also know that property directly traceable to you was found at the scene of the crime. So if you happen to have a verifiable alibi for the time in question, Mr. Brooks, now might be a good time to mention it.”

Leland Brooks sighed. “I was at Paddy’s,” he said after a pause. “Paddy O’Toole’s”

“Where’s that?” Hank asked. “One of those bars on Prescott’s famed Whiskey Row?”

Leland shook his head. “It’s a world away from Whiskey Row. It’s a private club. A gay private club out in the valley. Some of the people I saw there might not want to be connected to a homicide investigation.”

“Name one,” Larry said.

“There’s the bartender,” Brooks said reluctantly. “His name is Barry—Barry Stone.”

“Anyone else?”

“Can you be discreet?” Leland asked.

“That depends.”

“Patrick Macey,” Leland said. “Judge Patrick Macey.”

“What kind of judge?”

Leland Brooks sighed. “Superior court. We’ve been involved for a dozen years. He’s married. His wife’s an Alzheimer’s patient. His kids don’t know about him. They don’t know about us.”

“Phone numbers, please,” Larry said.

Brooks reeled them off from memory, and Hank keyed the first one into his phone.

“Please,” Brooks begged. “It’s cold out here. I’m freezing. Can’t we go inside?”

With Detective Mendoza outside on the phone, Larry took Brooks into the kitchen and seated him at a table. The kitchen was surprising cold as well. At Brooks’s direction, Larry switched on the baseboard heat. The room was starting to warm up when Hank came inside several minutes later, carrying the scattered groceries.

“His story checks out,” Hank said, setting the box down on the counter. “Both Stone and Macey say he was there, from late afternoon until closing.”

Brooks heaved a sigh of relief. “I told you,” he said. “I told you I had nothing to do with it.”

“What about Mr. Ashcroft’s visit here on Sunday?” Larry said. He came across the room and removed the cuffs. “Were you privy to their conversation? Do you know what was said?”

“Thank you,” Leland said, rubbing his wrists. “As to your question, I maintain certain professional standards. That means there are some lines that are never crossed. In other words, I don’t listen outside doors, if that’s what you’re implying. Yes, I was aware of Mr. Ashcroft’s visit. I showed him in and I showed him out. I was curious, of course, but all Miss Arabella told me was that he had asked her for money. He would have been better served asking me about that since I’m the one who handles the finances, but he didn’t.”

“She didn’t go into any further detail?”

“Not until you were here on Tuesday. That was the first I heard anything about Mr. Ashcroft’s bizarre reverse mortgage proposal. I would never have let that one fly.”

“What happened after he left?” Larry asked.

“I’d have to say Miss Arabella seemed anxious and distressed, enough so that I was afraid it might trigger another one of her episodes…”

“What kind of episode?” Marsh asked.

“She has debilitating emotional episodes from time to time—has had her whole life,” Brooks replied. “A good deal of the time she stays on an even keel, but she goes a bit haywire on occasion, can’t sleep, suffers from delusions, talks to people who aren’t there. That sort of thing. At times like those I’m especially careful that she takes all her medications, and I did that this time, too. Even when you came to tell us Mr. Ashcroft had died, it just never occurred to me that she might have done something that drastic.”

“Could she have?” Larry Marsh asked.

Brooks didn’t answer for some time.

“Well?” Larry pressed.

“Perhaps,” Brooks admitted at last.

“How?”

“There was a problem with the mileage.”

“What kind of problem?” Larry Marsh asked.

“On the Rolls. I keep track of the mileage each time I get gas. On Thursday, when I went to fill up, I noticed there was a two-hundred-plus-mile discrepancy between what I had written down last week and what was showing on the odometer. I thought I’d just forgotten to make the proper notation. It never crossed my mind that she might have taken the car out and driven somewhere herself.”

“What about weapons?” Hank Mendoza put in. “Do you have any handguns in the house?”

Brooks stiffened and seemed to get a grip. “Several,” he said at once. “Mrs. Ashcroft was a very talented markswoman. And Miss Arabella is a fair shot, as well. We’ve done target practice, but only under strict supervision. And you don’t need to worry about the weapons. They’re all locked away in the safe in the library. I can show them to you if you like.”

“Lead the way.”

They followed Brooks through the house, through a dining room and living room and into a spacious library. “The light switch is over there,” he said, nodding. “And I can tell you how to move the panel, but it would be ever so much easier if you’d allow me to do it.”

“Be our guest,” Larry Marsh said. Brooks moved forward, touched a place on the wall, and a whole section of bookcase swung open, revealing a massive safe. Brooks expertly worked the combination lock then pressed the handle. The door swung wide and a light came on inside, revealing an interior as large as a laundry room. One side was hung with wall-to-wall fur coats.

Brooks frowned. “Where’s the mink?” he asked.

Walking over to a tall cabinet, he pulled out one drawer, slammed that one shut, and opened another and another and another. “Damn!” he muttered. “They’re gone—all of them. But how’s that possible? I’m the only one with the combination to the safe.”

“Evidently not,” Larry Marsh said. “So what kinds of guns are we talking about, and how many?”

“Where is she?”

“Who?” Ali asked.

“The girl,” Arabella said. “The one you told me about.”

When Ali had tried to bring up the subject of Crystal earlier, Arabella had shut down so thoroughly, Ali wasn’t even sure she had heard her mention it. Now though, with their Big Macs gone and with the Rolls back under way and driving through the forested night, Ali was surprised when the conversation returned to that topic as though there’d been no interruption.

“She’s back home,” Ali said. “Back with her family. So how would you advise her? If you could talk to her and give her the benefit of your experience, what would you say?”

“Does her mother love her?”

“Of course.”

“Don’t say that like it’s always the case,” Arabella cautioned. “It isn’t always true, you know.”

“Are you trying to say your mother didn’t love you?” Ali asked. “I met her, you know. I saw how she was.”

“There’s a difference between love and duty,” Arabella said. “Mother had a duty to take care of me, especially since, as people like to say, ‘I wasn’t quite right in the head.’ I give her credit. She did that; she’s still doing that. That’s why Mr. Brooks is still looking after me. Mother arranged all that long before she died. But don’t kid yourself. I don’t think Mother ever really loved me.”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“Because I was the reason she had to get married.”

“But your father…”

“Bill Ashcroft Senior gave me my name, but he was definitely not my father,” Arabella said flatly. “It was like I was dropped into a family of strangers. So what about this girl? What’s her family like, and does her mother love her?”

Ali thought about Roxanne Whitman. “Yes,” she said. “I think she does.”

“And the father?”

“He loves her, too. There’s a stepfather in the picture, though,” Ali said. “I’m worried about him.”

“The girl should tell her mother, then,” Arabella declared. “She should definitely tell her mother.”

“And what if the same thing happens to her that happened to you? What if her mother doesn’t believe her?”

“Well,” Arabella said thoughtfully, after a pause. “In that case, don’t let her have any knives.”

When the three men returned to the spacious kitchen, Brooks offered to make coffee. While Hank hurried outside to notify the other jurisdictions of the changed dynamics in the situation, Larry Marsh sat at the kitchen table and watched while the butler bustled about, starting a pot of coffee and making a platter of sandwiches. By the time Hank came back inside, the coffee was ready. He picked up one of the sandwiches, which had been cut into small pieces and stacked three deep on a delicately flowered china platter.

When Hank bit into the first tiny morsel, a broad smile lit up his face. “Damn,” he muttered. “If this doesn’t beat the roach coach all hollow.”

Brooks handed each of the cops stiff white napkins that had been starched and pressed with military precision. The coffee was excellent, but it was served in tiny white cups with handles much too small for Detective Marsh’s somewhat meaty fingers.

“So tell us about the guns,” Larry Marsh said, munching another piece of sandwich. “How many are missing?”

“Three,” Brooks said. “All of them handguns. Mine was a thirty-eight—an old Chief’s Special. I bought it new in 1955 when Mrs. Ashcroft hired me. She was interested in having both a butler and a bodyguard. Since I was a former commando who had been trained as a cook, she decided I filled her bill. She actually sent me back to England to attend butler school.”

“So this thirty-eight. What was it?” Larry asked. “A Smith and Wesson Airweight?”

Brooks frowned. “Yes, it was, but how would you know that?”

“Because we found one just like that,” Larry said. “At the crime scene.”

“You didn’t mention Mr. Ashcroft was shot,” Brooks said.

“He wasn’t, but that’s still where we found the gun. What were the others?”

“Mrs. Ashcroft had a pair of pearl-handled first model Lady-smiths, both small-frame revolvers chambered for seven twenty-two-caliber long rounds. Those are missing as well, but those are mostly used for target practice. Less dangerous than the thirty-eight.”

“Not at close range,” Marsh returned. “So wherever she is, we have to assume she’s armed and dangerous. Is she a good shot?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Brooks said. “I suppose she is. I trained her myself.”

“But you said she was nuts,” Marsh objected. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“I didn’t say she was nuts, sir,” Brooks said. “Miss Arabella is prone to moods, and I did it because I was asked to. Besides, we only did target shooting. The rest of the time the guns were safely under lock and key.”

“Right,” Hank Mendoza said. “You mean like they are right now.”

Brooks nodded and said nothing.

“What do you know about the death of Mr. Ashcroft’s father?” Larry asked.

“That would be Bill Junior. That’s how Mrs. Ashcroft always referred to him. But I thought this was all about Billy. Bill Junior died in an automobile accident in 1956. He was a notorious drinker. He went off the side of a mountain and that was the end of him.”

“Was Arabella ever questioned in conjunction with that death?” Larry asked.

“No one was questioned that I know of. But there would have been no reason at all to question Miss Arabella. She was miles away at the time, hospitalized at a facility in Paso Robles.”

“Yes,” Larry Marsh said. “The Mosberg Institute. We know that’s where she was supposed to be. We also know that the charge nurse who was primarily responsible for Arabella’s care at the time died in a tragic fire at the Mosberg a few days after Mr. Ashcroft’s death.”

“I seem to remember that, too,” Leland Brooks said. “And a patient died as well. I believe he was something of a firebug—a serial arsonist. The fire was laid at his door, metaphorically speaking, but Mrs. Ashcroft was of the opinion that there was a good deal of covering up about that incident. It was one of the reasons she took Miss Arabella out of there and moved her to the Bancroft House, a place down in what’s now part of Carefree. It was after Miss Arabella came to Arizona that Mrs. Ashcroft decided to buy this place.”

“You were already working for the Ashcrofts at that time?”

“I worked for Mrs. Ashcroft from 1955 on,” Leland Brooks said stiffly. “I never worked for Mr. Ashcroft Senior, and I never had anything to do with him, either.” The butler shuddered. “He was a perfectly dreadful man. So was his son. Mrs. Ashcroft, on the other hand, was a wonderful human being and very generous. At the time of her death, she saw to it that I’d be taken care of so that her daughter, in turn, would be taken care of. I look after the house and the vehicles, manage the household accounts, make sure Miss Arabella sees her doctors and takes her medications. I also drive her wherever she wants to go.”

“It sounds pretty all-encompassing,” Larry Marsh said.

“Of course it is,” Leland Brooks returned with a smile. “I’m a butler.”

As the Rolls turned off the highway onto a small, single lane road that wound through the West Clear Creek Wilderness, Ali was beginning to wonder if they should have bought gas at the same time they stopped for those Big Macs. But at least here, in the middle of nowhere, if she decided to overpower Arabella and take her down, no one else could possibly be hurt. She was still hoping that, at some point, Arabella would simply fall asleep.

“Punishment,” Arabella announced from the backseat. “That’s what’s important. If your friend’s abuser gets punished, that helps. A little. You see, I took care of what Bill Junior did to me. And I took care of what he did to Miss Ponder. But what about the others?”

“What others?”

“The ones I don’t know about,” Arabella said. “There must have been others. Those are the ones I think about when I can’t sleep. He was never punished for any of those. But that’s also why he kept his hand, you see. I think that was his way of trying to punish my mother for what I had done to him. That’s why I have it. I did it for her.”

“Did your mother know you had Bill Junior’s hand?”

“I doubt it,” Arabella said.

“When it comes to punishment, what about you?” Ali asked, glancing at Arabella in the rearview mirror. “Should you be punished for what you did?”

“I suppose,” Arabella said. “But I don’t want to be locked up again. Mother promised me that I never would be.”

“Did she know what you had done?”

“Maybe,” Arabella said. “Probably.”

“Your mother wasn’t a judge and jury,” Ali said. “She had no right to make that promise.”

“But she did,” Arabella insisted. “And I believed her. Here we are.”

They entered a small clearing. Ali looked around, expecting to see a small, snug cabin, but she saw nothing. No outline of a building; no flashes of headlights off windowpanes. But then there was something—a gleam in the dark. She pulled closer. What she saw was her headlights reflecting back off what remained of half a wall.

“There’s nothing here,” Ali explained. “There’s no cabin.”

“I know,” Arabella said. “It burned down last summer. Vandals.”

“Then what are we doing here?”

“We’re going to sit here for a while,” Arabella said. “We’re going to sit here and let me think. Then I’m going to say goodbye.”

Good-bye! Ali thought. Good-bye? She’s going to kill me. What the hell am I supposed to do now?

{ CHAPTER 19 }

It was after ten by the time the two detectives left Arabella’s house and headed back to Phoenix.

“Damn,” Larry Marsh complained. “It annoys the hell out of me to think that Arabella snowed us completely.”

“Sounds like she snowed everybody, Mr. Brooks included. And don’t forget Alison Reynolds and Billy Ashcroft. She told Billy she was dead broke. According to Brooks, that’s not the case at all. The money may not be liquid, but it’s there. She told Ali Reynolds all about this mysterious diary of hers, one you’ve even seen, but her butler never saw it. How can that be? My guess is we could hook Arabella up to a lie detector, ask her questions all day long, and have her come up with two or more contradictory answers to every question without ever having any of them register as a lie. If she’s crazy, she probably doesn’t know the difference between fact and fiction, to say nothing of right or wrong.”

“Which will make her damned hard to convict.”

“In my book she’s a person of interest in four different homicides—Billy and Bill Junior as well as the firebug and the nurse at the Mosberg. What’s kept her from knifing poor old Brooks in his sleep all this time?”

“Enlightened self-interest,” Larry said with a mirthless chuckle. “If she did that, who would bring her her morning coffee?”

As Larry drove south on I-17, Hank called Dave Holman to check on the APB. “Still no word?”

“None,” Dave said. “As long ago as they left, they could be anywhere by now—through Phoenix or Flagstaff and halfway to California or New Mexico. If they’re still on the move, we should have found them.”

“How’s Ali’s family holding up?” Hank asked.

“About how you’d expect. I’m here at the house with her son and his girlfriend. Her parents went home to go to bed. After what went on at the hospital last night, everybody’s pretty much strung out,” Dave said. “But she saved my daughter’s life, and now we’ve got to save hers.”

Ali and Arabella sat in the Rolls with the engine running for the better part of the next half hour. Several times, when Ali tried to say something, Arabella insisted on silence. “I told you,” she said. “I need to think.”

Ali was thinking, too. With the sweat trickling down her sides and with her stomach in a knot, she was appalled by their complete isolation. They had seen no lights on the way down the narrow road, no other signs of habitation.

We’re completely alone, Ali thought. No one on earth knows we’re here. Arabella will shoot me and then herself and it’ll be weeks before anyone finds us.

Last night, in the hospital, she hadn’t had time to be scared. Jason had been there—a mortal threat to everyone he met—and Ali had simply reacted. This was different. As the minutes crept by, one by one, Ali thought she understood how condemned prisoners must feel on the night they’re due to be executed.

I don’t want to be dead, Ali told herself. I’m not ready.

“All right then,” Arabella said finally, emerging from her trancelike silence. “Here.”

Ali turned to look as Arabella held up the jar. “I told you I came to say good-bye. Now get out of the car and take this over there to where the porch used to be.”

Ali was shocked to see Arabella was handing her the jar.

“No,” Ali said. “I won’t touch it.”

“Yes, you will,” Arabella insisted. “Have you forgotten I have a gun?”

Ali hadn’t forgotten about the gun, not for a single moment.

“All right.”

Leaving the headlights on and the engine still running, Ali took the jar and got out of the car. Her legs seemed ready to collapse under her and the jar was surprisingly heavy, but she held it to her breast. She didn’t want to drop it; didn’t want to be splattered by the awfulness inside.

Picking her way across uneven ground, she made her way toward the nonexistent cabin. On either side of the clearing she could make out patches of snow. Ahead of her the denuded concrete pad of the house glowed against the surrounding blackness. Shivering with cold and revulsion both, Ali walked as far as what looked like the footprint of a porch.

“Set it down,” Arabella ordered. “Set it down right there and step away.”

Ali did as she was told. As she moved toward the Rolls, she saw Arabella assume a military stance, holding the tiny pistol in a two-handed grip. Petrified, Ali plunged to the ground. She was already facedown in the dirt when the sound of the gunfire pierced the silence of the bitterly cold night.

Behind her, the glass jar exploded into a million pieces. For a long moment, Ali huddled on the ground while the sound of that single gunshot reverberated in her ears. She lay there holding her breath, wondering if she’d been hurt by any of the flying glass and waiting for the next shot—which didn’t come. Finally she looked up to find Arabella still standing calmly beside the Rolls and holding the gun at her side as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

“There,” she said, casually waving the gun in Ali’s direction. “I’ve said my good-byes. Come on now,” she added. “I’m done here. Get in and let’s go home.”

Ali’s knees were quaking and her hands shook as she resumed her place behind the wheel. She knew something about firearms. It was clear to her that Arabella Ashcroft was one hell of a shot. Ali knew, too, that if Arabella had really intended to kill her there was no question that she would be dead.

Thank God I didn’t try to run earlier, Ali thought. She would have plugged me full of holes.

“What kind of gun is that?” Ali asked, trying to normalize the tension in the car with conversation.

“A Smith and Wesson Ladysmith,” Arabella said. “It’s a genuine antique. Belonged to my mother. Fires seven rounds.”

Which means there are probably six shots left.

“Where did you learn to shoot?” Ali asked.

“I was trained by a former Royal Marine commando,” Arabella answered.

In the darkness, Ali rolled her eyes. Sure you were, she thought. And I’m a monkey’s uncle.

“He tells me I’m a very good shot,” Arabella added.

Arabella Ashcroft may have been a liar, but that last statement was indisputably true. She was an excellent shot. She was also a cold-blooded killer.

As they headed away from the burned-out cabin, Ali tried to come to grips with how to deal with someone who was clearly a pathological liar. The same had been true for Arabella’s mother, Anna Lee. Their checks had been good when they had offered Ali her scholarship, but was anything else she knew about them true?

Arabella claimed to be broke, and the mending on that old cardigan—Brooks’s workmanship most likely—was real enough, but the coat Arabella was wearing right that minute was probably worth several thousand dollars. Arabella had implied that she’d had something to do with several murders. She had coyly refrained from coming right out and admitting to any of them, but the jar had been real enough.

“Where did you keep it?” Ali asked.

“Keep what?”

“The jar. With your brother’s hand. You said you got it from Bill Junior. If you were locked up at the time, surely you weren’t allowed to keep it in your room.”

“You’d be surprised,” Arabella said. “You’ve never been locked up anywhere, have you?”

“No.”

“I had both the jar and the briefcase,” Arabella said. “The briefcase with the jar inside it. Someone I was nice to there took it home and kept it for me, kept it until I was ready to have it again.”

“How long?”

“Eight years. From 1956 until 1964, when they shut down Bancroft House.”

“What’s Bancroft House?” Ali asked. “I thought you were at the Mosberg Institute.”

“Bancroft came later,” Arabella said. “After the Mosberg.”

“And somebody was willing to keep it for you for that long, with no questions asked?”

“That all depends,” Arabella answered coyly.

“On what?”

“On what you have to trade.”

On the drive back to Sedona, Ali kept hoping eventually Arabella would fall asleep, but she didn’t. Ali prayed that somewhere along the way they’d see a patrol car of some kind. That didn’t happen, either. By midnight, as they made their way up the hill to Arabella’s house, there was almost no traffic of any kind. But when they pulled into the yard at Arabella’s house, the garage door was wide open and a stack of suitcases stood barring the spot where Arabella expected Ali to park the Rolls.

“What is all that stuff?” Arabella demanded. “Honk the horn. Get Mr. Brooks out here to move it.”

“Arabella, it’s the middle of the night. People are asleep. I can’t be honking the horn.”

Just then the whole discussion became moot when Leland Brooks, lugging another pair of suitcases, entered the garage through the kitchen door. He set them down with the rest of the luggage then straightened slowly and started toward the Rolls.

Ali didn’t know what to do. Should she warn him away? Let him come ahead on and hope that, between the two of them, they could somehow wrestle the loaded weapon from Arabella’s hand? Before Ali could respond one way or the other, Brooks made straight for the back door and opened it. “Good evening, madam,” he said to Arabella. “I’m glad you’re home.”

He reached in and took the briefcase. Without objection, Arabella allowed herself to be helped from the car. “Get all that junk out of the way so she can pull into the garage,” Arabella ordered. “And what on earth are you doing in that god-awful outfit?”

That was the first Ali actually noticed how Brooks was dressed—in a bright blue sequined cowboy shirt, narrow-legged jeans, and cowboy boots.

“Don’t you like it?” he asked.

“Of course I don’t like it,” Arabella said irritably. “You look like you’re about to go out trick-or-treating. And what is all this mess?”

“It’s my luggage,” Brooks replied. “My ride should be here in a while.”

“Ride?” Arabella repeated. “You’re going someplace? You’re taking a trip?”

“Yes, madam,” Brooks said. “I’m afraid I’m leaving.”

“Leaving! You can’t do that. You can’t be serious.”

“I’m entirely serious,” Brooks returned. “I know I promised your mother that I’d look after you, but I’m afraid I can’t do that anymore. You’re far too dangerous—to yourself and others—including Madam Reynolds here. You are all right, aren’t you Ms. Reynolds?”

His manner was as calm and unruffled as if he were inquiring about whether she wanted one lump or two in her tea.

“Yes,” Ali managed with some difficulty. “I’m fine.”

“Good,” he said. “Very good.” Then he turned back to Arabella. “I have reason to believe you’ve somehow managed to get into the safe and remove the guns. I’m sure that must be how you convinced Madam Reynolds to accompany you on this little jaunt tonight. Is that true?”

Arabella stared at him as if he were speaking some incomprehensible foreign language.

“Well?” he prompted. She said nothing and he held out his hand. “Give it to me,” he said. “Give me the gun.”

And to Ali’s utter astonishment, Arabella complied.

“Where’s the other one?” he asked.

“In the briefcase.”

“Very well, then. Let’s go inside. It’s cold out here. I took the liberty of starting a fire in the living room in hopes you’d come to your senses and come home. We can talk there. You’re welcome, too, Ms. Reynolds, if you wish. You might want to phone your family and let them know you’re safe, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to make a call or two first.”

With Arabella leaning on his arm, Leland led her into the house. With him in his cowboy duds and her in her fur-coated finery, the two of them made an incongruous but somehow dignified pair. Seeing them together reminded Ali of pictures of the queen mum being escorted in some royal processional. They went in through the laundry room and kitchen—through parts of the house Ali had never seen before—where appliances that looked as though they should have been genuine antiques consigned to museums seemed to be still functional. They walked through the chilly dining room with its massive polished wood table and matching sideboard.

As promised, a cheerful fire was burning in the living room. Brooks deftly relieved Arabella of her coat and then deposited her in one of the chairs facing the fire.

“I notice your computer is missing,” he said. “I’m assuming it hasn’t been stolen.”

“It’s in the trunk of the Rolls,” she said. “I was going to get rid of it, but then I forgot.”

“Very well, madam,” Brooks said. “I’ll bring it back inside later. Now would you care for something to drink?”

“Oh my, yes. I’d love one of your martinis about now, Mr. Brooks. Wouldn’t you, Ali? As cold as you can make them, of course, but do change out of those ridiculous clothes before you serve us.”

Ali’s head was spinning. By force of sheer willpower Leland Brooks had somehow managed to create a sense of normalcy out of chaos. His steadfast calm in the face of Arabella’s erratic frenzy seemed to have dragged Arabella back into the real world as well. Was this how he had handled her all these years?

“Is that what you would like, Madam Reynolds?” Brooks asked. “A martini?”

“Yes, please,” Ali said. “That would be fine. And a telephone.”

“Very well. Please have a seat here by the fire. I’ll be right back.”

He took the coat and draped it over the back of a nearby chair and then exited the room, taking the briefcase with him. Arabella leaned into her chair, closed her eyes briefly, and sighed with contentment. She seemed happy to be home. Maybe she’s finally running out of steam, Ali thought.

Facedown on the table between the two chairs lay a well-thumbed paperback copy of Louis Lamour’s High Lonesome. Ali picked it up and looked at the cover. The two-dollar price tag printed on the cover probably meant that it had been around for a long time.

Arabella opened her eyes. “That’s Mr. Brooks’s book,” she said. “He likes westerns. He reads to me sometimes when I can’t sleep. Since my memory’s shot a lot of the time, it doesn’t matter if he reads the same story over and over.”

What a good man, Ali thought.

When Brooks returned to the living room, he brought with him a tray laden with shakers and glasses along with a thick stack of papers and a telephone. He put the tray on a side table, then he handed the phone to Ali, and approached Arabella with the collection of papers.

“Before I pour the drinks,” he said, “there are a few items that must be attended to.”

“Like what?” Arabella asked. “And why haven’t you changed clothes?”

“This is a listing agreement,” he replied, ignoring her question. “I finished signing it just a few minutes before you arrived. The real estate agent was more than happy to make an after-hours visit.”

“A listing agreement for what?”

“To sell the house, of course,” he answered. “Since I have your power of attorney, I’ve already signed it, but I wanted you to have an opportunity to review the documents.”

Arabella seemed totally dismayed. “We’re selling the house?” she asked. “But why? Where are we going to live?”

Ali’s first phone call was to the sheriff’s department, where she told the dispatcher what was going on and left a message asking Dave to come get her. Next she dialed her home number.

“Mom,” Chris said anxiously. “Is that you? Thank God. Where are you? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m at Arabella’s house.”

“Athena and I can pick you up.”

“No. I just talked to the sheriff’s department. Dave’s most likely already on his way here. This is going to take time. Dave will be glad to give me a ride home when things are sorted out.”

By the time Ali was off the phone, the martinis were poured, but Arabella was once again in a towering rage. “You can’t do that to me,” she screeched at Leland Brooks. “You can’t sell the house right out from under me. It’s not fair. Why are you doing this?”

“Because you’re going to need the money,” Brooks explained patiently. “We don’t have enough ready cash available to pay for the defense attorney. This is the best way to handle that.”

“Like hell it is,” Arabella returned. With that, she heaved the papers into the fire and smiled with grim satisfaction as they caught fire and turned into sheets of flying ash.

Brooks shook his head. “Those are merely copies of the original documents,” he said. “Burning them will do no good at all. Now, please, settle down and have your drink.”

“I won’t settle down. And you can’t do this to me. I won’t stand for it. You’re fired, do you hear? Fired. I want you out of the house now.”

“All in good time, madam. All in good time. As I told you earlier, I’m waiting for my ride.” Brooks turned to Ali. “I believe you’ve summoned the authorities?”

Ali nodded. “Dave Holman is on his way, too.”

“I thought as much,” Leland said.

“Why are you doing this?” Arabella asked again.

Brooks turned to look at her. “I suppose you’ve heard of the straw that broke the camel’s back? In this case, we’re talking about a star.”

“A star?” Arabella asked.

“A Silver Star,” Brooks replied.

“Oh, that,” Arabella said.

Now it was Ali who thought they were speaking a foreign language. What Silver Star? she wondered.

“How do you suppose Mr. Ashcroft ended up with my Silver Star?” Brooks asked. “I used to keep it in my wallet back when I first started driving your mother back and forth to Paso Robles, and I never noticed when it disappeared. I thought it had just fallen out somewhere along the line, but you stole it from me, didn’t you?”

Shrugging, Arabella picked up her drink and took an unconcerned sip. While Ali watched, she slipped back into the bizarre game-playing persona she had exhibited on their long drive together.

“What if I did?” she asked coyly. Somehow, trapped in that seventy-year-old voice, Ali heard the sound of a terribly disturbed nine-year-old girl determined to have her own way. No matter what.

“Did you plant it in Mr. Ashcroft Junior’s car?” Brooks asked.

“Maybe I did,” Arabella said. “Maybe I was hoping if the cops came around asking questions, they’d find the star and think you and mother were responsible for what had happened to him. I mean, you were just Mother’s driver back then, but luckily no one ever asked any questions, either. Bill Junior was a drunk, he died, no big deal.”

“Until Billy started asking questions,” Brooks said.

“Yes. He finally had to clear out Bill Senior’s storage unit where Bill Junior’s personal effects from the crash scene had been kept. I’m sure he was looking for something else, but what he found was the star. He hadn’t quite put the whole story together, though,” Arabella added. “He thought the two of us were in on it as a team. I don’t think he had any idea I was capable of doing something that drastic completely on my own. He found out, though, didn’t he?”

The doorbell rang. Brooks glanced at his watch. “Good,” he said. “Right on time.”

“It’s the middle of the night,” Arabella muttered as Brooks went to answer the summons. “Who on earth could that be?”

A few moments later, Brooks escorted a newcomer into the room. Ali expected to see Dave Holman or one of the local Sedona uniforms. Instead, she saw a tall, sallow-faced stranger, carrying a briefcase of his own. Despite the lateness of the hour, he came dressed in a full suit and tie. His costume alone was enough for Ali to realize he had to be a lawyer.

“I’m not too late, am I?” the newcomer was asking.

“No, not at all,” Brooks assured him. “No one else is here yet, although the police have been summoned. They’ll be here momentarily.”

“Good.”

“What kind of strangers are you inviting in now?” Arabella wanted to know.

“Madam Ashcroft,” Brooks said. “This is Morgan Hatfield, your criminal defense attorney. He’s just now driven up from Phoenix.”

“Send him back,” Arabella insisted. “I already told you, I don’t need a defense attorney. I don’t want one.”

“But you do need one,” Brooks said. “And now you have one.”

“And since the police are no doubt on their way,” Hatfield said, “I should probably have a moment alone with my client.”

“Very well,” Brooks said. “Would you care for some coffee?”

“I’d like that very much, Mr. Brooks,” the attorney said. “It’s likely to be a very long night.”

The butler turned to Ali. “If you don’t mind, Ms. Reynolds, perhaps you would be so kind as to join me in the kitchen. I’ll bring your drink along.”

Not surprisingly, Dave Holman was the first to arrive. When the car came up the drive, Brooks hurried outside and brought Dave into the house through the garage.

“Goddamnit, Ali!” he exclaimed when he saw her. “When are you going to stop scaring me to death?” And then, without another word, he pulled her off her chair and gathered her into a smothering bear hug. Ali was surprised by how good it felt to have his arms around her and by how comfortable it was to lean into his shoulder.

“Is Friday the thirteenth over yet?” she asked.

Dave raised his hand behind her shoulder so he could get a look at his watch. “A long time ago,” he said.

“Great.”

In the meantime, Leland Brooks, the soul of discretion, busied himself at the counter, setting out cups, plates, and napkins. “How many officers do you think will be coming?” he asked.

“Several,” Dave said. “From several different jurisdictions.”

Brooks switched on the coffeepot and then turned to beam at them. “In that case,” he said, “I’ll make some more sandwiches. It’s a good thing I bought groceries tonight.”

The interviews with Ali were conducted in the kitchen while interviews with Arabella took place in the living room. A signed search warrant was produced. Brooks opened the trunk so they could retrieve Arabella’s computer. He also handed over a battered Hartmann briefcase.

Sometime after three, Ali saw a pair of uniformed officers lead a handcuffed Arabella outside and place her in the back of a waiting patrol car. As they held her head to keep her from bumping it, Dave Holman was there watching the procedure. So was Leland Brooks.

It’s probably the first time he’s ever watched her pull out of the driveway when he hasn’t held the door for her, Ali thought.

When Brooks returned to the kitchen a few minutes later, he kept his head averted and wiped at his eyes with the back of his sleeve. When he caught Ali watching him, he shrugged. “Time for a stiff upper lip,” he said.

A few minutes after that, Dave stuck his head in the door from the garage.

“Judge Macey is here,” he said. “He wants to know if the stuff that’s here in the garage is what you want loaded.”

“Yes, it is. Tell him I need to finish straightening up in here. I’ll be out to help him in a few minutes.”

“Don’t rush,” Dave said. “I can give him a hand.”

Brooks set off into the living room with a tray, gathering plates, napkins, cups, and saucers as he went. Ali followed him. When he came to the chair where he had deposited Arabella’s coat much earlier, he stopped and set down the tray. Then he picked up the coat and stood there for a long time, silently stroking the long, soft fur.

“You did the best you could for her,” Ali said.

Brooks shook his head. “I’m afraid my best wasn’t nearly good enough,” he said. “When Mrs. Ashcroft was dying, I told her—I promised her—that I’d see to it Miss Arabella was never locked up again. But you saw what just happened. They took her away in handcuffs. They’ve arrested her and are taking her to jail. One way or the other, she won’t be back. I’ve failed completely.”

“Arabella Ashcroft killed people,” Ali said. “She told me so herself. She’s a murderess, Mr. Brooks. You’ve looked after her for years. When you saw what was happening tonight, you made sure she had legal representation. What more could you have done?”

“I could have put her in the Rolls, turned on the engine, and locked her in the garage,” he said. “At least that way she wouldn’t be under arrest.”

“But you would be,” Ali said. “What good would that do? How many years of your life have you devoted to this woman, who deliberately tried to pin one of her own murders on you?”

Brooks sighed. “Too many to count,” he said.

“You’ve done enough for her,” Ali said. “Far more than most people would.”

“What I can’t understand is how she could be so devious,” he went on.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Ali said. “It’s tough to deal with people who never tell the truth. I should know,” she added wryly. “I was married to one of them. Besides, it’s clear that Arabella is mentally ill.”

But Ali’s comment did nothing to dissuade Brooks from his barrage of self-recrimination. “I always prided myself in knowing exactly what she was up to,” he said. “But now it turns out I was wrong—completely wrong. The guns in particular, Ms. Reynolds. I have no idea how she gained access to the combination for the safe. I hold myself entirely responsible for that. And as for poor Mr. Ashcroft. I gave Miss Arabella her medication that night before I ever left for Prescott. She should have been asleep until morning.”

“I believe Arabella Ashcroft learned to fake taking her medications a very long time ago,” Ali said. “Long before you came into the picture.”

He nodded. “I suppose you’re right.”

Out of long habit, he smoothed the coat and returned it to the back of a chair while Ali picked up the tray and carried it into the kitchen. There was a dishwasher there, but it seemed to get little use. Brooks relieved her of the tray and then set about washing up the delicate bone china in a sink full of hot, soapy water.

“Where will you go?” Ali asked. “What will you do?”

“For the time being, I’ll probably live in an apartment in Prescott. I’ll need to stay around here long enough to handle the sale of the house. It’s a shame. It was state-of-the-art when Mrs. Ashcroft had it built, but it’ll probably end up being sold as a tear down. The real estate agent advised me to leave it furnished while it’s being shown, but once it’s sold I’ll need to dispose of the contents—the furniture and the artwork, and the vehicles, as well. Once that’s all handled, I’ll stay long enough to see what happens to Miss Arabella. After that, I may do some traveling. I haven’t been back home to England—to Dorset—in decades, not since Mrs. Ashcroft sent me there to school. I’m sure it’s changed quite a lot.”

“What about money?” Ali asked.

“Oh, I’m fine as far as money is concerned,” Brooks said reassuringly. “That won’t be a problem. Before Mrs. Ashcroft died, she set up an annuity for me—a generous annuity. And then there’s my social security. Living here, I’ve had almost no expenses through the years, and I’ve been able to put aside most of what I’ve had coming in. It’s built up into quite a sizable nest egg.”

“And what about this house,” Ali asked. “You’ve lived here a long time. Won’t you mind leaving it?”

Brooks pulled his hands out of the dishwater, dried them on a towel, and looked around the room with its antiquated cabinetry and appliances. “I don’t think so,” he said at last. “I’m getting on in years, and taking care of this house has been a lot of work.”

A man Ali had never seen before came in from the garage. The newcomer came over to the sink, stood beside Brooks, and put a comforting arm around the butler’s shoulder. “Hey, Lee,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Not too well,” Leland Brooks said, with an audible catch in his throat. “Not well at all.”

Something about the familiarity of the gesture and the way the men stood side by side in front of the sink told Ali more than she would have thought possible. Without another word being exchanged, she understood that they were far more than friends and that they had been together for years.

It was the same way Edie Larson knew things about people. She knew, too, that in his moment of grief, Leland Brooks deserved some privacy.

“I believe I’ll go see what Dave is doing,” Ali said. With that she abandoned the kitchen in favor of the garage, leaving the two men alone in the kitchen, but as she closed the door behind her, it seemed unlikely that either of them would notice.

{ CHAPTER 20 }

The sun was high in the sky that morning when Ali awakened to the tantalizing smell of coffee and to the guilty knowledge that when Dave had finally brought her home from Arabella’s house, she had told him nothing about the Crystal video. It wasn’t as if there hadn’t been an opportunity. That would have been when he had walked Ali up to her door, but then other considerations had taken precedence.

“Sorry about Roxie,” Dave said. “I talked to Richey earlier. He told me Roxanne had stopped by to give you the third degree.”

“Crystal has her convinced that you and I have something going.”

“Don’t we?” Dave asked with a grin.

That was when Ali could have told him; should have told him, but she was too tired. “You tell me,” Ali returned.

And that was when, to Ali’s utter astonishment, Dave had leaned down and kissed her squarely on the lips. He kissed her as though he really meant it in a way that said Crystal and Roxie and even Edie Larson were absolutely right in their assumptions.

When Dave finally turned Ali loose, she had staggered into the house. She lay in bed for a while, wondering if the kiss had really happened or if, in a delirium of weariness, she had merely imagined it. Finally she fell asleep and slept without dreaming or moving. She knew about the latter because she had slept on one hand, which was now alive with needles and pins. Lying there waiting for the tingling to subside, she once again wondered about that phantom kiss. Was it real or had she made it up? And if she hadn’t made it up, what did it mean?

Once Ali’s hand was capable of movement, she put on her robe and headed into the living room, expecting to find Chris somewhere in the house. Instead, she was surprised to see an unfamiliar young woman seated on her couch with Sam draped contentedly in her lap.

“You must be Athena,” Ali said.

Athena Carlson was a diminutive blonde with blue eyes and a ready smile. Her shoulder-length hair was pulled back and held in place by a clipped comb. She wore a vivid red-and-white tracksuit and a pair of Velcroed tennis shoes. A metal rod peeked out from under the bottom of the right leg of the tracksuit. The end of a complicated plastic-and-metal device that functioned in place of her right hand and arm rested on the couch beside her. If Sam noticed the difference, it apparently didn’t bother her.

“Yes, I am,” Athena said. “And you must be Chris’s mom.” Athena made as if to rise and started to move the sleeping cat off her lap.

“Don’t get up,” Ali told her. “Stay where you are. Sam looks like she died and went to heaven.”

Athena settled back onto the couch. Sam opened her one good eye briefly, glanced around the room, and then closed it again and resumed her nap. Ali was impressed. Sam was notoriously picky—and spooky—when it came to visitors.

“I hope we didn’t wake you, Ms. Reynolds,” Athena continued nervously. “Edie called. She told Chris that she had set aside some sweet rolls for us and that he’d better come down and get them before she threw them out.”

If Ali’s mother was already being called Edie, if she was reserving some precious Saturday morning sweet rolls for them, and if Sam, who didn’t like anybody, had already surrendered unconditionally to Athena Carlson’s charms, then Ali was way behind the times. Not only had she missed dinner, she had missed a whole lot of other stuff, too.

The last of the hot water sizzled out of the reserve tank on the Krups coffeemaker, announcing that the brewing cycle was over.

“Coffee?” Ali asked.

“Please.”

“How do you take it?”

“Black.”

Good answers, Ali thought.

She brought the coffee and set one cup down on the end table next to Athena. “Call me Ali,” she said. “Everyone else does.”

“I’m glad to finally get a chance to meet you,” Athena said. “I was afraid Chris was going to keep me hidden under a rock forever.”

Ali would have preferred for Chris to be there running interference at this initial meeting, but he wasn’t, so they would have to make do on their own. “I’m glad to meet you, too,” she said. “I suppose after all this time you were expecting some kind of dragon lady?”

“No, not at all,” Athena said with a smile. “Chris kept telling me that you were a wonderful person and that he was sure we’d get along like gangbusters. And if you’re anything like your mother—who reminds me of my grandmother back in Bemidji, Minnesota, by the way—I’m sure that’s true. I had a great time with your parents last night.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” Ali said. “I planned to be there.”

“Well,” Athena said, “there’s nothing like having somebody hold a gun on you to change your mind.”

So the word is out, Ali thought.

Chris’s Prius pulled up outside and he bounded into the living room carrying a plate of sweet rolls in one hand. He stopped short when he saw his mother and then looked anxiously back and forth between the two women. “You two have already met?”

“Yes, we have,” Athena said. “And nothing bad happened. Worlds did not collide. Everything’s fine.”

Chris put the rolls on the counter, then came back to the couch, where he sat down next to Athena. Ali thought he still looked anxious, more so than introducing his mother to his girlfriend should have warranted.

“Did you tell her?” he asked Athena.

Athena shook her head. “Not yet. I didn’t think it was my place.”

Ali’s motherly antennae were already up and operating. Now they went on high alert. Tell me what? she wondered. What’s going on here? Are they pregnant? Is that what this is all about? Am I about to be the mother of the groom at a shotgun wedding?

“It’s about your computer,” Chris said.

Ali was so relieved, she almost laughed aloud. “My computer,” she repeated. “What about it?”

“When you didn’t show up at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s for dinner last night, we came back here looking for you. Later on in the evening when you still weren’t back, I started thinking about that stalker who came after you last year. I wondered if maybe there was something on your computer that would let us know what had happened or where you had gone. So I logged on to your computer and read your files.”

“Chris,” Ali said. “That’s no big deal. I don’t know why you’re so upset. It’s not like what I do on my computer is top secret or anything.”

“We saw the video,” Athena said. “The video with Dave Holman’s daughter.”

“Oh,” Ali said. “Oh, that.” Maybe there are some secrets on my computer after all. “Did you tell Dave?”

“That’s the thing, Ms. Reynolds,” Athena said. “From what Mr. Holman had said at dinner, it was clear he had no idea about any of this. Unless you told him. Did you?”

“Please call me Ali,” she reminded Athena. “But no, I didn’t tell him either. I didn’t want to show it to him until I could figure out what to say.”

“We know who it is,” Chris said.

Ali was stunned. “You do?” she asked. “How’s that possible?”

“His name is on the video,” Athena answered. “We saw it.”

“I saw the video,” Ali said. “There wasn’t any name.”

“Show her,” Athena said.

“I’ll go get my computer,” Chris said. He brought it from the bedroom, set it up on the dining room table, and turned it on. Once it booted up, he logged on and then clicked on a link as Ali and Athena gathered around the table to watch. Moments later the disgusting video began playing on the screen. “Look behind them,” Chris said. “On the wall.”

It was difficult to ignore what was going on with Crystal and the man, but Ali did as she was told. “It looks like a piece of artwork,” Ali said. “Something in a frame.”

“Right,” Chris said. “Now look at this.” He clicked over to another file that showed a single frame from the video and then clicked on that image several times in rapid succession. With each click, what was happening in the foreground slipped further out of focus while the background became clearer and clearer. It reminded Ali of an optometrist doing a vision test.

“It’s a diploma of some kind,” Ali said at last.

“Exactly!” Athena said. “From a seminary in Weed, California, awarded to someone named Richard Masters.”

“When I first saw the video, I thought Crystal’s stepfather might be responsible for this awful stuff, but his name is Whitman, Gary Whitman. So, who is this guy, and how did you do this?”

“Sonja, my geeky best friend from college,” Athena explained. “She’s spent years working on an image-enhancement project. That program is now being used by law enforcement agencies all over the country to help decipher video-recorded images of license plates.”

“When we first turned this on, Athena noticed there was something on the wall in the background,” Chris continued. “We e-mailed this frame to Sonja. You’re seeing what she sent back.”

“Amazing,” Ali said.

“And through the magic of the Internet,” Athena added, “we can now tell you that Pastor Richard Masters is the youth minister for a small congregation of disaffected ex-Baptists called Back Door Apostles who operate out of a very modest strip mall in North Las Vegas. That’s where Crystal’s family lives, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Ali said. “In a trailer park somewhere in North Las Vegas.”

“And if Crystal was having difficulty adjusting to her new school situation,” Athena said, “what are the chances that her family sent her to this jerk for counseling? My family moved twice when I was in junior high,” she added. “It was hell. My mother sent me to a counselor, too. A good one though, not a creep like this.”

“So, what do we do?” Chris asked. “Call Dave? Have him come take a look at this?”

Ali turned away from the computer screen, walked over to the counter, and poured herself a cup of coffee while she searched for an answer to those questions.

Dave had already admitted to Ali that he didn’t necessarily have good sense when it came to dealing with Roxanne and her second husband. She seemed to remember his even making a threat of some kind toward Gary Whitman. That was one of the reasons Richey hadn’t wanted him to come to Vegas when Crystal first disappeared. Now Ali worried that if Dave saw what she had seen on the video it would send the man completely around the bend.

“I’m going to go shower,” she said. “That’s where I do some of my best thinking. When I come out, we’ll figure out what to do.”

With hot water cascading over her tired body, Ali tried to imagine the best way to proceed. She knew without question that if they showed the images to Dave, he’d be on his way to Vegas in a matter of minutes—pissed as hell and armed to the teeth. If he charged into the good pastor’s office and raised Cain about it, ordinary people would see him as a justifiably outraged father doing what fathers do. A defense attorney, on the other hand, would see him as an out-of-control police officer and would claim that any evidence resulting from Dave’s actions, damning though it might be, would nonetheless be ruled inadmissable.

Ali knew someone needed to beard Richard Masters in his den, but Dave Holman was exactly the wrong person for the job.

Ali emerged from the shower and dressed. She returned to the kitchen, where Chris was just finishing frying bacon and eggs and Athena was setting the table. “You said you wanted to do some thinking, so we’re having protein with our sweet rolls.”

“Well?” Athena asked.

“How would the two of you like to take a day trip up to Vegas?”

“Cool,” Athena said. “Sounds like fun.”

“Great,” Chris said. “Athena’s never ridden in a Porsche.”

“There’s one problem,” Ali said. “Since I don’t have my driver’s license back, one of you will have to drive.”

Chris burst out laughing. “We’ll manage,” he said.

As they prepared to leave for Vegas, Ali was waylaid for twenty minutes while she searched for the scrap of paper—the back of a gas station receipt actually—on which she had jotted Crystal’s cell phone number all those nights earlier. If she’d had her cell phone, it would have been simple to look up the information in her call history. And she could, she supposed, call Detective Marsh and have him look it up for her, but doing that would put her at risk of having to endure another “insert” lecture. Since she was obviously doing it again—not minding her own business—she didn’t want to hear it. She was thrilled when she finally found the missing note in the bottom of her bathroom trash can.

But even though she had the number, she didn’t want to call it. She didn’t want to talk to Crystal until she was good and ready—until she and Chris and Athena had all their ducks in a row.

While Ali searched for the missing phone number, Chris downloaded the video and the file of photo enhancements onto a CD. Well after noon when they finally set out, Chris was at the wheel of the Cayenne and Athena rode shotgun. Ali, sitting in the backseat, mostly wanted to close her eyes and doze, but Chris had other ideas.

“Okay, Mom,” he said. “It’s a long drive from here to there. I want you to tell us about last night. All of it.”

“It’s not just last night,” Ali said. Over the course of the next hour or so, Ali told Chris and Athena about her dealings with Arabella Ashcroft and how what had happened to her as a child led inevitably to what was going on with Crystal Holman. Athena got it with no problem.

“After Arabella’s brother molested Arabella and when nobody believed her, she ended up taking the law into her own hands, and that screwed up her entire life.”

“That’s it in a nutshell,” Ali agreed. “And that’s why we’re going to Vegas.”

“To take the law into our own hands?” Chris asked.

“No, silly,” Athena said. “To make sure Crystal doesn’t take it into hers and wreck her life, and to make sure Dave Holman doesn’t, either.”

“Oh,” Chris said.

Yes, Ali thought. This girl is growing on me by the minute.

“So what’s the plan?” Athena asked.

“I’ve been thinking about that. Once we’re there, I’ll talk to Crystal. I’m hoping I’ll be able to make her see that she needs to go to the cops and turn this dirtbag in. I’m worried about calling her in advance because I don’t want to give her a lot of time to think it over. She took off more than once already this week, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she did it again.”

“What about this?” Chris said. “Don’t give Crystal any advance warning at all. Why don’t we bring the cops to her instead of having her go to them?”

“That might work,” Ali said. “But the cops are another problem. What if they give us the runaround? The diploma on the wall is the one piece of solid evidence we have that ties Richard Masters to all this. But what if he tumbles to what’s happening and while we’re trying to convince the cops to get a search warrant and move on him, he takes off or has brains enough to ditch the diploma? I wish there was some way of verifying that the diploma is still there.”

“How about trying for a photo op?” Athena asked brightly.

“What kind of a photo op?” Ali asked.

“We have the address of the church,” Athena said. “What say we program it into the GPS. We can stop by there and see if the good pastor happens to be in. Maybe I can talk my way into his office. If the diploma’s there, I’ll take a photo of it with my cell phone. That way we can document that it was there at some other time besides just when the video was being filmed. With any luck I might even be able to get pictures of his computer equipment.”

“That’s taking a bit of a risk, isn’t it?” Ali asked.

Athena laughed outright at that. “Riding in a Humvee in Iraq is taking a risk,” she said. “Besides, I know the type. I may be a little too old to qualify for a youth ministry, but I’m betting Pastor Masters will turn out to be one of those smarmy goody-two-shoes guys who won’t be able to see anything about me except what he thinks is a hopeless cripple. He’ll fall all over himself trying to help me.”

“As long as his help doesn’t include anything more than talking,” Chris said with a laugh. “You may be short an arm and a leg, but I’m guessing you’d still be able to clean his clock.”

Ali fell asleep shortly after that and didn’t wake up again until Chris slowed to exit the freeway. “Where are we?” she asked.

“Headed up Civic Center Drive toward North Las Vegas.”

“Time to call Crystal,” Ali said. “Let me use your phone.”

Chris passed his to the backseat. “When are you going to get your own phone back?”

“Good question,” Ali said.

She put in Crystal’s number, pressed SEND, and was dismayed when a male voice answered.

“Is Crystal there?” Ali asked.

“She’s busy. Who’s asking?”

Ali wasn’t eager to reveal her name. “A friend of hers,” she said.

“Oh, yeah? Call back when you have a name.” With that the man hung up.

Ali pressed REDIAL.

“Do you have a name now?” the same voice asked. He sounded surly and argumentative.

“My name is Alison Reynolds,” Ali said. “I’m a friend of Crystal’s and of her dad’s.”

“Oh,” the man said. “Why didn’t you say so? This is Gary Whitman, Crystal’s stepdad. After what we’ve been through this week, no calls go through this phone without being screened first.”

A little late, Ali thought. But better than nothing.

“Can I talk to her? I’m in town and would like to see her.”

“We’re at soccer practice right now,” Whitman said. “It’ll be over in about an hour. Is Dave with you?”

“No,” Ali said. “Just my son and his girlfriend.”

“Do you want to stop by the house then?” Gary sounded relieved, as though having Dave in tow might have been a problem. “Roxie’s still at work,” he added. “She won’t be home until after five.”

Good, Ali thought. By then, maybe we’ll be ready.

“Do you have our address?” Whitman asked. “We live in Jackpot Dunes. It’s a trailer park just south of Nellis.”

“We’ll find it,” Ali said.

When they found the strip mall location of Back Door Apostles, Ali was a little surprised to see that, on a Saturday afternoon, it was a very busy place. There were several cars in the parking lot and a whole group of teens and preteens hanging around outside a door marked YOUTH MINISTRY.

When Athena started to get out of the car, Chris did, too. “We’ll both go in,” he said. “You can talk to the pastor, if he’s in. I’ll see what else is going on.”

After the better part of an hour, Chris was the first to emerge. “You wouldn’t believe it, Mom. This place is a regular kid magnet. They’ve got everything in there—a pool table, video games, computers, comics. My guess is that Masters uses the place to bring in all kinds of kids, then he finds the most vulnerable one and cuts her from the herd.”

That was Ali’s guess, too.

Athena returned to the Cayenne a few minutes later looking downright radiant. “Got him,” she said triumphantly. “Masters was called out of the room for a couple of minutes. The diploma was still there. I got several pictures of that. I also got photos of his Web-casting equipment and his computer, serial numbers included.”

“That’s my girl,” Chris said. “Where to now?”

“North Las Vegas PD,” Ali said. “We’re believers. Let’s see if we can make believers out of them.”

It was late Saturday afternoon. Josie Gutierrez and Frank Edwards, the two on-duty detectives in the Sexual Assault Unit, were both out in the field. It took some talking on Ali’s part to bring them back in to headquarters, and they weren’t particularly happy about it when they got there.

“What’s this all about?” Detective Gutierrez wanted to know.

“It’s about Crystal Holman,” Ali told them.

“The Amber Alert from this week?”

Ali nodded.

“But I heard she came home yesterday,” Detective Edwards said. “I thought everything was fine.”

Ali handed Edwards the CD Chris had made. “Take a look at these files,” she said, “then you tell us if everything’s fine.”

The two officers disappeared into the bowels of the building. A few minutes later, a grim-faced Detective Gutierrez returned. “You’d better come with me,” she said. “We have a few questions. Who the hell is this asshole? Where was the video shot? Who did the enhancement? And who the hell are you? In reverse order.”

Initially, Detective Gutierrez took the same position Larry Marsh had—that civilian involvement was a no-no. As far as she was concerned, Athena should never have entered Masters’s office because it was far too dangerous, and she and Detective Edwards alone should be the ones to interview Crystal and her family.

“Look,” Ali said. “You wouldn’t have a clue about any of this if it weren’t for us. I’ve been through a hell of a lot with Crystal Holman in the last few days, and I think I have some credibility with her. And with Roxie, too,” she added.

“You know the mother?” Gutierrez asked.

“She came to see me in Sedona just yesterday afternoon,” Ali said, choosing to edit out the exact nature of that visit.

The detective turned to her partner. “What do you think, Frank?”

Edwards shook his head. “With kids it can go either way,” he said.

“Chris and Athena don’t have to go,” Ali added, “but if you don’t take me, I’m prepared to show up on my own—with or without your permission.”

The detectives finally relented. They drove in a two-car caravan with the two officers leading the way. When they arrived at the Jackpot Dune’s Mobile Home Park in North Las Vegas, the place was every bit as desolate, grim, and uninviting as Ali expected. It reminded Ali of that old Roger Miller song lyric, “No phone, no pool, no pets.” She was surprised they even allowed children. No wonder Crystal hated it.

While Chris and Athena stayed in the car, Detective Gutierrez led the way up the obviously new wooden steps and knocked on the mobile home’s metal door. When Roxanne Whitman opened it, though, she ignored the police officers and looked straight at Ali.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. “Has something happened to Dave?”

“It’s about Crystal,” Ali said. “We need to talk to her.”

“She’s in the shower, but tell me. What’s wrong?”

A tall man appeared beyond Roxanne’s shoulder just as Detective Gutierrez held up her badge. “What is it, Roxie? What’s going on? Why are the cops here?”

“Do you mind if we come in?” Detective Gutierrez asked.

Shrugging, Roxie and Gary Whitman stepped aside and let the two cops and Ali enter their small but spotless living room.

“You still haven’t said what this is about,” Gary said, once they were all seated.

“Do you happen to know someone named Richard Masters?”

“Of course, I know Pastor Masters,” Gary Whitman said, answering for both of them. “He’s the youth minister at our church. He’s a great guy, and great with kids.”

“Has Crystal had any interactions with him?” Detective Gutierrez asked.

“Yes,” Gary said. “Definitely. When she started having difficulties at school, we sent her to him for counseling.”

“And did the counseling sessions seem to help?”

“Well, no,” Gary admitted. “Not really. Things have been getting worse instead of better. But she’s a teenager. You know how they can be.”

“Did she indicate whether or not she was happy with the sessions?”

“She did say she didn’t want to go anymore,” Roxanne pointed out. “She said that a couple of weeks ago.”

“And I told her she didn’t have a choice,” Gary said. “She needed to clean up her act, or else.”

Ali’s heart constricted. In her own way, Crystal had tried to tell someone. She probably hadn’t told anyone the whole story, but she had asked for help, and no one had listened. Her parents hadn’t listened, but Ali had. And now something was going to be done about it.

“I hate to have to tell you this, Mr. and Mrs. Whitman,” Detective Gutierrez said. “We have reason to believe that Mr. Masters is a sexual predator who has had inappropriate sexual contact with your daughter. We need to talk to her about it.”

“Why, that son of a bitch!” Gary Whitman exclaimed, his whole body rigid with absolute outrage. “That low-down son of a bitch! Let me at him. I’ll tear him limb from limb!”

Just then Crystal appeared in the doorway to the living room. She was wearing a robe. A damp towel was wrapped around her head. “Mom? Gary?” she asked uncertainly, looking from one face to another. “What’s going on?”

Roxanne leaped off the couch and hurried to her daughter’s side. “Oh, my poor baby,” she murmured, gathering Crystal into her arms. “Come in here. I think we need to talk.”

{ CHAPTER 21 }

On Wednesday of the following week Rudyard Kipling Hogan was laid to rest in the cemetery of his hometown of Kingman, Arizona. Ali, along with everyone else, was surprised when it turned out to be a far larger funeral than anyone—including the mortuary—had expected. A standing-room-only crowd turned out to bury him as if paying their respects to a departed hero. As the local paper had editorialized, regardless of who had actually killed Kip Hogan, he was as much a victim of that long-ago but not forgotten fire as the men who had perished in the actual inferno. It had simply taken a lot longer for him to die.

Elizabeth Barrett Hogan came home for her son’s funeral, accompanied throughout the services by both Sandy Mitchell and Jane Braeton. Ali heard several people speculating about who was who and most especially wondering about the two very protective women who never left Elizabeth’s side, but since Elizabeth wasn’t telling, neither was Ali.

She was standing nearby when, at the end of the graveside ceremony, Ali’s father went over to Elizabeth’s wheelchair and handed her an envelope. Ali knew what it was. Bob had found it in the LazyDaze when he had cleaned it out. It was a letter Kip had written to his mother only a few months before his death, one that bore the U.S. Postal Service’s inarguable determination—Return to Sender.

“Kip tried to write to you,” Bob Larson said. “But it was too late. The forwarding address had run out by then, and it came back.”

Elizabeth held the envelope up to the sunlight and peered at it from several different angles. Then she stowed it, unopened, in the purse that rested on her lap. “Thank you for this,” she said, smiling up at him. “If Kip wrote it, it’s not too late. And thank you for being his friend.”

Bob patted her shoulder wordlessly and then hurried away, but not fast enough that his wife and daughter failed to see what was going on. Edie Larson hurried to her grieving husband’s side. “Come on, Bobby,” she said. “Let’s get out of here before you make a complete fool of yourself.”

A week after Arabella Ashcroft’s arraignment, Ali received a surprise call from the woman’s attorney, Morgan Hatfield. Ali knew from news reports that Arabella had pled innocent to one charge of vehicular manslaughter in the death of Billy Ashcroft. She knew, too, from Dave that additional charges were pending in other jurisdictions, including involvement in the deaths of the nurse and patient who had perished in the fire at the Mosberg Institute and the woman who had run an institution called the Bancroft House near Carefree. In the mid-sixties the director had gone for a horseback ride, had been reported missing, and had been found dead months later. At the time, no one had connected her death to Arabella Ashcroft’s being incarcerated there. Now they had.

It occurred to Ali that this was a time when pleading insanity might actually be the right thing to do, but she didn’t mention that to Mr. Hatfield.

“Arabella would really like to see you,” Morgan said. “She’s in the new high-security jail on South Fourth in Phoenix.”

Arabella had lied to Ali on so many occasions about so many things, that Ali wasn’t eager to go another round. “Why?” Ali asked. “What does she want?”

“I’m not sure, but you know Arabella. She was quite adamant.”

Two days later, still filled with misgivings, Ali drove herself to Phoenix. Arabella came into the visitors’ room wearing shackles and a bright orange jail jumpsuit.

“The food here is dreadful,” Arabella said, as soon as she sat down opposite Ali behind a Plexiglas window. “Have you heard of nutrition loaf? It’s where they mix all the food together in a terrible conglomeration, bake it, and serve it as a meal.”

As jail fare went, nutrition loaf was fully balanced and amazingly cheap. “I’ve heard of it,” Ali said.

“Oh, what I wouldn’t give to have one of Mr. Brooks’s dinners about now,” Arabella said wistfully. “He did a particularly wonderful job with lamb chops. Have you heard from him, by the way?”

“No,” Ali said. “I haven’t.”

“I haven’t either, not directly,” Arabella said. “He must be terribly angry with me. I’m afraid I’ve been a naughty, naughty girl.”

That’s the understatement of the century, Ali thought.

“I’ve also heard rumors that there’s only one person interested in buying my house,” Arabella continued. “He’s a developer, of course. He’s planning on tearing it down. The real estate agent warned me that, if he does make an offer, it’ll probably be for only a fraction of what the place is worth—pennies on the dollar.”

“So?”

“I’d like you to buy it,” Arabella said. “For this.”

Using a pencil, she jotted a sum down on a three-by-five card and shoved it through the opening under the window that separated them.

Ali looked at the amount and put the paper down. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “That’s pennies on the dollar, too.”

“Yes, it is,” Arabella said. “But you wouldn’t tear it down. And anything that’s left after I pay off Mr. Hatfield will go to a good cause—to the scholarship trust fund—which I’m hoping you’ll administer, by the way. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Ali shook her head. The amount was something she could well afford, but she didn’t think she’d have the energy to tackle the kind of wholesale remodeling that would be necessary.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s far more house than I need.”

“Please,” Arabella said quietly. “I’d really like for you to have it. And I know Mother would, too.”

Ali stood up. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “But I’m not making any promises.”

“Wait,” Arabella said. “Don’t go yet, please. I need to ask you. How’s your friend—the little girl who ran away?”

“The guy who molested her is in jail,” Ali said. “And she wasn’t his only victim.”

“So, did I help?” Arabella asked.

“What do you mean, did you help?”

“Did you tell her about me? Did you use me as an example so she’d go to the police?”

Ali looked at Arabella—a pathetic, damaged, delusional old woman—and she could not deny her that one bit of satisfaction.

“Yes,” Ali lied. “Yes, I did.”

On the drive back to Sedona, Ali felt little satisfaction for having lied and allowed Arabella that one small triumph. Driving through town, Ali saw her mother’s Alero parked outside the Sugarloaf. The Bronco wasn’t there. Wanting some private time with Edie, Ali stopped and knocked.

“Are you all right?” her mother asked as soon as she saw her face.

“I saw Arabella Ashcroft today,” Ali said.

“Oh,” Edie said. “No wonder you look a little green around the gills.”

“She wants me to buy her house.”

“Arabella has a lot of nerve calling it her house,” Edie said. “She may have lived in it, but it was always her mother’s house. Anna Lee Ashcroft was a nice woman. And if you do decide to buy it, that’s how I’d think of it—as Anna Lee’s, not as Arabella’s.”

Ali was quiet for a moment. Finally she said, “I never really knew that Aunt Evie and Arabella were good friends. From what Arabella told me, I guess they were. She said it was because of that friendship that she and her mother started the scholarship thing—that to begin with, the whole point was to benefit me.”

“Arabella was always a conniver,” Edie said. “I think she was after your Aunt Evie and saw you as a way to get Evie into her clutches. She might have succeeded, too, but Anna Lee warned Evie away. And then she went ahead and set up the scholarship fund so other girls would benefit from it, too, not just you.”

“Wait a minute,” Ali said. “What kind of clutches? What do you mean?”

“Oh, forever more, Ali,” Edie said with a laugh. “Just because your Aunt Evie stayed in the closet all her life, don’t tell me you didn’t know about it.”

Learning that bit of Aunt Evie’s history hit Ali hard. And knowing how Richard Masters and Curtis Uttley had used the Internet to victimize and ensnare Crystal didn’t help. The whole chain of events had cast a pall over Ali’s life and over her interest in cutloose as well. She could no longer look at what happened on the Internet as being harmless and she wasn’t sure if she was helping or making things worse.

She drifted into a strange lassitude. Her interest in blogging seemed to have dissipated, but she had no idea what she was going to do instead. She did some random posting, but without having her heart in it. When she finally heard from Velma T, she read the message with a heavy heart.

…so the second opinion concurs with the first one—that there’s not that much to be done for me. There are experimental protocols—expensive procedures—that I could possibly qualify for, but most of those wouldn’t be covered by insurance. So, my son and his golfing buddy doctor were right about my prognosis and their why-bother attitude, but I will insist to the death—which may be sooner than later—that they were ABSOLUTELY WRONG!!! not to tell me. It’s my life. My decision.

So, here’s what I’m going to do. I’ve got that book about a thousand things to do before I die, and I’ve also looked into one of those luxury round-the-world tours that will hit a bunch of them at one fell swoop.There’s one that leaves Las Vegas, Nevada, on March first and lasts for twenty-five days. Private jets and first-class hotels all the way. By the time it’s over, if I’m not dead or dead broke, I should be close to it.

Maybe, Ali thought, I was wrong to be worried about Velma’s financial situation. She continued reading:

When I called to inquire about reservations, it turned out that there was only a single pair of accommodations left on the trip. Since I was a single, I thought that left me out, but then the reservations lady came up with a wonderful idea. It seems there was another person who had inquired about that same trip, another single, who’s a retired schoolteacher from Washington State. So we ended up booking our trip together. Her name is Maddy Watkins. She’s quite a bit younger than I am, but we’ve been e-mailing back and forth, and she sounds delightful.

Thank you for encouraging me not to stand around waiting for life or death to happen. If I die somewhere along the way, my son can damned well pay to have me shipped home. And if I get home and I’m still feeling well enough and have any money left over, I may book a cruise, too.

I miss your blog. I know something bad must have happened, and I know you’re not ready to say what it is. Just know that you’ve made a huge difference in my life and probably in lots of other lives, too.

Love,

VELMA T IN LAGUNA

On a sunny evening in March, Dave Holman came by for dinner. While Athena and Chris laughed and cooked in the kitchen, Ali and Dave sat outside on the front porch on the swing, sipping some of Paul Grayson’s very expensive wine. They were spending more and more time together these days. Ali wasn’t sure where the relationship was going, but for now she was comfortable with it.

“The custody hearing’s next week,” Dave said, draping one arm around her shoulder. “We’ve hammered out an arrangement that seems reasonable, and we’re pretty sure the judge will go along with it. Richey will be a senior next year, and he’ll stay in Vegas to finish high school. After that he’s planning on joining the Marines.”

“Like father like son,” Ali said.

Dave nodded. “And the girls will spend half the summer there, then they’ll come live with me and go to school here. They’re thrilled. Of course, it means I’ll have to find somewhere else to live, but with Roxie paying child support…”

Ali was astonished. “She’s agreed to pay child support?”

“That’s what I said. It’s a reasonable arrangement. And I have to give Gary Whitman credit. He’s the one who came up with the idea and convinced Roxie that it was doable. After what happened to Crystal, I think he wants the girls out of Vegas even more than I do. When Richard Masters agreed to a plea bargain and Crystal no longer faced having to testify, Gary was so relieved that I thought he was going to burst into tears.”

Ali said nothing. After a pause, Dave added, “It really chaps my butt.”

“What does?”

“Gary and I aren’t ever going to be friends,” Dave said. “But he isn’t that bad a guy. Maybe he’s not the best businessman who ever came down the pike, but he’s a better husband to Roxie than I ever was, and she’s happier with him than she was with me. I just have to make sure he’s not a better father.”

Again Ali had nothing to say. She found that happened to her often these days.

“Speaking of fathers,” Dave continued, “I saw yours today. Bob’s worried about you.”

“He is?” Ali asked.

“And so am I,” Dave said. “You’re depressed, Ali. You’re not yourself. You’re not even blogging anymore. You’ve been through a lot. Have you ever heard of post–traumatic stress disorder?”

“Of course, I’ve heard of PTSD,” Ali said dismissively, “but it’s got nothing to do with me.”

“Yes, it does,” Dave argued. “Your father and I have both been around it. We know the signs. You need to see someone. You need help.”

“No, I don’t,” Ali declared, ducking out from beneath Dave’s arm. “All I need is some sleep. You and Dad need to mind your own business. And since I’m not feeling very sociable at the moment, maybe you should just go.”

“No deal, Mom,” Chris said, materializing silently in the open doorway behind them. “Dinner’s on the table, and Athena and I say Dave isn’t leaving.”

The next day, it was all Ali could do to drag herself out of bed. By midafternoon, she was still in her robe and worrying about getting dressed before Chris came home from school when the doorbell rang. When she looked through the peephole, she was surprised to find Leland Brooks standing there in all his rhinestone cowboy glory. He looked tanned and fit and surprisingly chipper. The Rolls, shiny as ever, was parked in the driveway behind him.

At first Ali wasn’t going to open the door. He rang the bell again though, and she opened the door.

“I hope you’ll forgive me for dropping by this way,” he said. “I came over from Prescott to check on the house, and I wanted to see you.”

Grudgingly, Ali invited him inside.

“I’ve had a letter from Miss Arabella,” he said. “Several of them, in fact, all of them asking that I intercede with you on her behalf and beg you to reconsider your decision about purchasing her place.”

“I thought that was all set,” Ali said. “I thought a developer was going to take it and tear it down.”

“He thought so, too,” Brooks said, “but that was before some of the neighbors got together and had it placed on the National Historical Record. The house is considered second-generation Frank Lloyd Wright and all that. Then there was another possible buyer, but his offer fell through. The house failed the inspection—rather miserably, I’m afraid, and his bank wouldn’t approve it.”

“What does any of this have to do with me?”

“Miss Arabella wanted me to let you know that we’ll take less than she told you earlier, although I’m not sure what that amount was. She said that if you’ll make an offer somewhere in that neighborhood, as long as the offer is from you, the real estate agent and I are both directed to accept it. She also said your offer should include the house’s contents. That way, when you refurb it, you’ll be able to use as many of Mrs. Ashcroft’s original furnishings as you wish. You’ll be able to bring the house back to what it once was—what it never was with Miss Arabella living in it.”

Ali was tired—more tired than she’d ever been in her life. “Look,” she said. “I don’t really care what Miss Arabella wants.”

“It’s what I want, too,” Brooks said. “And I’d be more than willing to come help oversee the remodeling project. I know where the original blueprints are, and believe me, I know what’s wrong and what needs fixing. I suppose you could say, in a manner of speaking, that I know where the bodies are buried.”

With his eyes twinkling, Brooks seemed to be waiting for Ali to smile, but that was more than she could muster.

“I’ve spoken to Mr. Holman about this,” he said finally. “He thinks it would be a good idea for you to take on a project.”

More meddling on Dave’s part. Ali was suddenly angrier than she had been in months. “This is none of his business!” she exclaimed. “And it’s none of yours, either.”

“Oh, but it is,” Leland Brooks said. “Has anyone mentioned to you that you look quite dreadful?”

“How kind of you to point that out,” Ali said.

“Here it is, late afternoon, and you’re not even dressed.”

“Excuse me,” Ali said. “This isn’t any of your business, either.”

“Yes,” he said. “I believe it is. Do you know much about the Korean War?”

“No,” Ali said. “Not really.”

“I was in it,” he said. “I was in Forty-one Commando Royal Marines—a cook. So I saw a lot of action but I didn’t do much fighting. I fed the guys who did, but I didn’t think I was worth much. I came home from the war and I was ready to just sit around and do nothing, but then a miracle happened—two of them actually. Someone sent me his Silver Star.”

“Like a war medal?” Ali asked.

Brooks nodded. “It belonged to a guy named Arthur Reed, whose life I happened to save when his vehicle crashed through some ice and he almost drowned. He sent me the medal when the war was over. Said he never would have been alive to receive it if I hadn’t saved his sorry butt to begin with.” Brooks fell quiet for a moment and then continued.

“I was always a bit different back home. My family wasn’t keen on having people of my persuasion hanging about. After the war I tried going home where my own parents treated me like an outcast. For a while I sat around wallowing in self-pity, but after Art sent me that medal, I made up my mind to come here to the U.S. in hopes of starting over. Once I got here, the other guy, the second Marine, heard that Anna Lee was looking for a bodyguard and driver, and he put me in touch with her. So that was the second miracle. The rest is history.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” Ali asked.

“Because, according to what Mr. Holman tells me, you’ve been through your own kind of war, Ms. Reynolds. And I think you’ve earned your own kind of medal. When the police release it from evidence, I want you to have it.”

“I can’t possibly…”

“Yes, you can,” Brooks insisted. “I’m like Art Reed, you see. I had no idea how far gone Miss Arabella was. If it hadn’t been for you, chances are, I’d be dead now, too, right along with Mr. Ashcroft the third. That’s why I’m determined to pass it along. And now I’d like you to get dressed and come with me. I want to take you for a ride.”

“A ride,” Ali echoed. “Where to?”

“To the house,” Brooks said. “To Anna Lee Ashcroft’s house. To what I hope will be your house someday. I’d like to show you some of the changes I think are in order. Come on now, Ms. Reynolds. Let’s go.”

“Wait a minute,” Ali objected. “I know what you’re doing. This is exactly how you used to treat Arabella—how you’d talk your way around her and get her to do what you wanted. It’s how you got her to be…normal.”

“Exactly,” Mr. Brooks said with a smile. “It worked for Miss Arabella, and I’m quite sure it will work for you as well.”

CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM

Saturday, April 1, 2006

Happy April Fool’s Day. I woke up this morning laughing. What’s so funny? Well, let’s see. I’ve bought a house that needs everything—new plumbing, new wiring, new roof, new windows. How could any of that even remotely be construed as hilarious? For one thing, I’ve never built anything in my life.

I’m sure I’ll have plenty of help. My father is itching to get his hands on the place. So is my son, Chris. So is Leland Brooks. So is Dave Holman.

They’re all brimming over with suggestions about how to do this and that, and I’m prepared to take their ideas under advisement. But if this is going to be my house, I’m going to be the one with the final say. Next week I’ll be traveling down to Phoenix to interview several architects, and we’ll see if one of them measures up.

People who’ve lived through their own remodeling projects tell me that tackling this kind of job is no laughing matter, but this morning I beg to differ. The clouds finally seem to have lifted. Fixing Anna Lee Ashcroft’s house is going to be dreadfully hard work, but I’m looking forward to it. In fact, I can hardly wait.

After months of living in a fog of grief, I’m finally ready to step back out into the sunlight.

Demolition? Plaster dust? Building permits? All I can say is, “Bring it on!”

posted by Babe, 9:27A.M.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J.A. Jance is the Top 10 New York Times bestselling author of the Joanna Brady series, the J.P. Beaumont series, three interrelated thrillers featuring the Walker family, and the Ali Reynolds series: Web of Evil and Edge of Evil. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.

For a recipe for Sugarloaf Café sweet rolls please go to www.jajance.com and check the recipe page.

ALSO BY J.A. JANCE

ALI REYNOLDS MYSTERIES

Hand of Evil

Web of Evil

Edge of Evil

JOANNA BRADY MYSTERIES

Desert Heat

Tombstone Courage

Shoot/Don’t Shoot

Dead to Rights

Skeleton Canyon

Rattlesnake Crossing

Outlaw Mountain

Devil’s Claw

Paradise Lost

Partner in Crime

Exit Wounds

Dead Wrong

Damage Control

J. P. BEAUMONT MYSTERIES

Until Proven Guilty

Injustice for All

Trial by Fury

Taking the Fifth

Improbable Cause

A More Perfect Union

Dismissed with Prejudice

Minor in Possession

Payment in Kind

Without Due Process

Failure to Appear

Lying in Wait

Name Withheld

Breach of Duty

Birds of Prey

Partner in Crime

Long Time Gone

Justice Denied

AND

Hour of the Hunter

Kiss of the Bees

Day of the Dead

TOUCHSTONE

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2008 by J.A. Jance

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jance, Judith A.

Cruel intent / by J.A. Jance.

p. cm.

“A Touchstone Book.”

1. Reynolds, Ali (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Internet—Fiction.

3. Blogs—Fiction. 4. Housewives—Fiction 5. Serial murderers—Fiction 6.

Arizona—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3560.A44C78 2008

813'.54—dc22    2008013649

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6387-7

eISBN: 978-1-4516-7577-1

ISBN-10: 1-4165-6387-3

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonandSchuster.com

For Bill, in memory of B. Jo.

CRUEL INTENT

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

{ EPILOGUE }

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

{ PROLOGUE }

Sipping a cup of freshly brewed Colombian blend, Peter Winter sat on the couch in his spacious family room, inserted the DVD into his computer, and then waited for the slide show to appear on his fifty-two-inch flat-screen TV. He kept the “before” photos in a group by themselves, and he flicked through those first. The befores showed five slender blondes, each smiling sweetly into the camera—into his camera. Rita Winter, Candace Miller, Melanie Tyler, Debra Longworth, and Morgan Forester. The five of them looked enough alike that they could have been sisters. Their faces were remarkably similar, with wide-set blue eyes, delicate features, and flawless complexions. They all had straight white teeth and carbon-copy smiles—superior smiles, knowing smiles, cheating smiles.

In addition to their beauty-pageant good looks, that was another thing the five women had in common—they were all cheaters. Second, all of them were greedy, always wanting more—always requiring more—than they had been given. Finally, of course, there was the dead part. That showed up in the “afters”—in those, the women weren’t alike at all, except that they were dead and looked it; well, four of them did anyway. The first photo was a grainy copy of a news photo with the body already covered by a tarp. Peter had missed the opportunity to take his own portrait, but since then he had corrected that oversight.

The photos showed Peter’s handiwork in brutal detail. The women, all of them naked and bloodied, lay either where they had fallen or where he had placed them. Posed them, as the profilers liked to say. Most people would have been repulsed by the photos. He found them exciting. Invigorating. Especially when he had reached this point—the time when he was about to add one more to his collection.

He hadn’t expected it would come to this with Morgan. He had figured he’d use her and lose her. That was the way he liked to operate, and it was a philosophy that had worked fairly well over the years, with a few notable exceptions. But some dumb blondes were smarter than they looked. It had come as a rude awakening when that pretty little piece of tail had turned on him and tried tracking him down at work. That had been the end of it. Or at least it had signaled the end of it. It had taken him some time—weeks, in fact—to get all the pieces in place, but today was the day. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Whistling that familiar Sunday-school tune, he switched off the DVD player and the TV set, removed the DVD, and stashed it in the safe in the back of his closet. At the same time, he removed his precious good-luck charm—the heart-shaped Tiffany key chain Carol had given him. It was loaded now with something far more powerful than keys, and on days like this—days when he was primed for action—he wanted the key ring with him. As long as he had that talisman in his pocket, he felt safe.

After pouring a second cup of coffee, Peter set about gathering and packing his equipment. He didn’t need to carry much. He brought along a fully loaded syringe, a set of scrubs, a pair of surgical gloves, and a pair of paper surgical booties. Blood spatter on scrubs was easily explained and easily gotten rid of. Surgical booties left no traceable footprints at the crime scene, and when they went into the hospital incinerator, they left behind no traceable forensic evidence, either.

Gloves were another matter. More than one dumb killer had been taken down when damning fingerprints were found inside gloves worn while committing a crime. But working in a hospital made disposing of surgical gloves pretty much foolproof. As long as they and his used hypodermics went into the proper containers in the proper examination rooms, he could be relatively sure they’d never be seen again—and never examined for incriminating forensic evidence.

He added a pair of leather driving gloves. Those were a necessity. They were the only way to ensure that he didn’t leave behind a damning fingerprint or two in the rental car. They also kept him from running the risk of being seen driving while wearing surgical gloves; that certainly would have raised eyebrows. With driving gloves, you had to be careful not to drop one at a crime scene. Watching O.J.’s long-ago murder trial had taught Peter all about that. When he needed to unload a pair that had reached the end of the road, he dropped them off in a Goodwill donation box.

The next thing he loaded into the briefcase was that day’s weapon of choice. In this case, he planned to use an ordinary household hammer, and not one he’d picked up from his neighborhood Ace hardware. Those might very well have some distinguishing markings on them. No, he chose to use one he’d bought at a garage sale in North Phoenix. The woman, a relatively new widow, had been selling her husband’s tools in preparation for moving into an assisted-living facility. Initially, Peter hadn’t wanted the whole lot, but she’d offered the entire kit at such a bargain-basement price that he had taken all of it, rolling tool box included.

So far he’d used only one of the tools he’d purchased that Sunday afternoon—the hacksaw—on the nosy little bitch in Greeley, Colorado, who had asked way too many questions. Getting rid of her had been an especially gratifying experience, but it had also been very messy. Exceedingly messy, as the after photo clearly showed. He’d had a lot of trouble getting himself cleaned up afterward and had worried about leaving something behind that might be traced back to him.

He expected that using the hammer would be simpler. If he did it right, there’d be far less blood to deal with, and what there was would be easier to control. Having blood evidence lying around was actually quite helpful. It gave the cops something to focus on, and that was the whole secret to getting away with murder. You had to give the cops plenty of blood evidence and make sure they found it where they expected to find it. And if you could muddy the water enough by having two prime suspects rather than one, that was even better.

Last but not least, he picked up his digital camera. Before he put it into the briefcase, he replaced the batteries. These shots were important to him. He didn’t want to miss a thing.

After closing his briefcase he snapped the locks. Stopping by the kitchen sink, he rinsed his coffee cup and put it in the dishwasher. At the front door, he paused long enough to look around. There was nothing out of place, nothing at all, and that was the way he liked it.

Squaring his shoulders and whistling “A-Hunting We Will Go,” he set out to do just that.

Matthew Morrison left home that Monday morning a little past five-thirty. Knowing he’d be heading out early on Monday, he had checked a Taurus out of the motor pool late Friday afternoon. By a quarter to six, he was on the 101 and driving south, heading to Red Rock, heading to Susan.

The last thing he had done before he left the house was turn on Jenny’s coffee. He hoped she wouldn’t notice that the coffee would be a whole hour older than it usually was, but he doubted she’d pay any attention to the clock on the pot. As far as coffee was concerned, the important thing for Jenny was that she didn’t have to make it herself when she finally scrambled out of bed around seven-thirty. When she deigned to appear in the kitchen, she wanted her coffee there and at the ready.

Matt’s customary departure time of six-thirty meant that his drive to the state government campus in downtown Phoenix usually involved dealing with rush-hour traffic. This morning and this early, there was barely any traffic at all. Anxious and excited, Matt kept reminding himself to slow down. Today of all days, it wouldn’t do for him to get a speeding ticket.

During the last week, ever since Susan had suggested they should meet at last, Matt had done his best to maintain an even keel. Last night, though, he had almost given the game away when Jenny caught him whistling as he loaded the dishwasher. “What the hell are you so happy about?” she had demanded.

Eighteen years ago, when they first married, Jenny had been a reasonably good-looking woman. That was no longer true. Her constant negativity had turned the corners of her mouth into a perpetual sneer. Frown lines marred her forehead, but her lack of beauty was much more than skin-deep.

Matt, who prided himself on keeping a positive mental attitude no matter what, had done what he could to change her. Predictably, that hadn’t worked. Now, it turned out, he was changing himself and doing something for Matt for a change. He was going to get lucky. He had stopped at Walgreens on Sunday afternoon—not his neighborhood store, of course—and bought a package of Trojans. Just in case, he’d also brought along the sample of little blue pills that he’d ordered over the Internet.

Better to be prepared, he told himself. This might be his one chance, and he didn’t want to mess it up.

As the after-school bus rattled toward the end of its route on the Verde Valley School Road, only three children remained—the Forester twins, Lindsey and Lacy, and little Tommy Breznik. Tommy, far in the back, was engrossed in a handheld video game and oblivious to everything around him. As she did every day, Lacy sat silent and apart, with her face pressed to the window while her sister, Lindsey, chattered away with Mr. Rojo, the bus driver.

“Miss Farber said we’ll be taking a field trip down to Phoenix just before Christmas,” Lindsey was saying. “Do you think you’ll be our driver?”

Conrad Rojo liked kids, but he especially liked Lindsey, a bright child who talked a blue streak. Her sister, on the other hand, never said a word. It was strange to think that the two second-graders who looked so much alike could be so different.

“That depends,” Conrad Rojo told her. “Somebody else sets up the scheduling.”

“I hope it’ll be you,” Lindsey said. “Of all the bus drivers, I think you’re the best.”

Even though there was no traffic visible in either direction, Conrad turned on the flashers as he approached the turnoff to the Foresters’ place. He was surprised not to see Mrs. Forester’s white Hyundai Tucson parked at the end of the half-mile-long drive. For three years—as long as Lindsey and Lacy had attended Big Park Community School in the Village of Oak Creek—Morgan Forester had been waiting for her daughters at the end of the lane when the bus dropped them off. Conrad, who took the safety of his charges very seriously, was reluctant to leave the girls alone.

“Your mom’s not here yet,” he said.

“Maybe she’s running late,” Lindsey said brightly. “Maybe she got busy and forgot what time it was.”

“Tell you what,” Conrad said. “Why don’t you stay on the bus until I drop Tommy off at Rainbow Lane. If your mother’s running late, that’ll give her a few minutes to catch up.”

He glanced in the girls’ direction. Lindsey clapped her hands in delight. “You mean we can ride all the way to the turnaround? And then we can be on the bus all by ourselves?”

“Yes,” Conrad said. “Once Tommy gets off, it’ll be just the two of you and nobody else.”

Lindsey turned to her sister. “Won’t that be fun?”

Lacy shook her head and said nothing.

Once again Conrad was struck by how different the two girls were. Last year, on another field trip, he had overheard two of the first-grade teachers talking about them. “Well, Lacy’s certainly not retarded,” Mrs. Dryer, Lacy’s first-grade teacher, had said. “She can do all the work. She just won’t participate in class.”

Conrad had wondered at that. He didn’t think teachers should be talking about kids being retarded. Weren’t they supposed to use nicer words than that? Besides, the situation with Lindsey and Lacy reminded him of his two sons, Johnny and Miguel. Johnny was two years older, and he had been the one who had done all the talking. There wasn’t any need for Miguel to find his own voice, as long as his older brother was close at hand. Miguel hadn’t actually started speaking on his own until halfway through first grade, when he skipped the baby-talk stage completely and cut loose with fully formed sentences. And he hasn’t shut up since, Conrad thought with a chuckle. It seemed possible that some of Miguel’s teachers used to say the same thing about him. Now, though, his younger son was an honors communications major at the University of Arizona, so go figure.

Once Conrad had dropped Tommy off, made the turn, and come back to the Foresters’ long driveway, there was still no sign of the Hyundai. Conrad pulled over, stopped the bus, and reached for his cell phone. He wasn’t surprised to find that he didn’t have a signal way out here in the boonies. Putting away the useless phone, he sat and wondered what to do. It was against the rules to take the bus onto a private road, especially since there was a good chance he might run into a spot where it would be impossible to turn around. If there was any kind of problem, he’d be late getting back to school to pick up his next load of kids.

“It’s okay,” Lindsey said. “You can let us out here. We can walk home. We know the way. It’s not that far.”

“No,” Lacy said.

Conrad was surprised to hear Lacy state her opinion. In the three years the girls had been riding his bus, this was the first time she had uttered a single word in his hearing.

“Come on, Lace,” Lindsey wheedled. “Walking won’t kill us. If you want, I’ll even help carry your stuff.” Lacy Forester came to school every day with a backpack that seemed half as big as she was.

“Maybe I should take you back to school so the principal can call your mom,” Conrad offered.

“No,” Lindsey said. “I don’t want to go back there. I’m hungry. I want to go home and have a snack. Come on, Lace. We can do it.”

For a moment Lacy Forester resumed her stony silence. She seemed close to tears, but finally, faced with her sister’s force-of-nature determination, she sighed, stood, and shouldered her backpack.

“You’re sure you’ll be all right?” Conrad asked as he opened the door.

“We’ll be fine,” Lindsey declared. “You’ll see.”

The two girls clambered out of the bus. Conrad watched them trudge side by side down the dusty red dirt track with the clear November sun at their backs until they disappeared from sight over a slight rise. Then he put the bus in gear and headed back to school. If he didn’t get going right then, he would be late for the last bell.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he told the other drivers over coffee later that week. “I never should have let them go home alone.”

CHAPTER 1

For the hundredth time that day, Ali Reynolds asked herself why she’d ever let her agent, Jacky Jackson, talk her into being a part of MCMR, short for Mid-Century-Modern Renovations, a program aimed at the Home & Garden TV viewer, documenting restoration projects designed to bring back venerable old twentieth-century American houses that otherwise would have fallen victim to the wrecking ball.

Months earlier Ali had come into possession of one of those precious fixer-uppers when she had purchased Arabella Ashcroft’s crumbling hilltop mansion at the top of Sedona’s Manzanita Hills Road. She had been intrigued when Jacky contacted her about filming the entire project. According to Jacky, MCMR would be the next great thing. Mid-Century-Modern Renovations was due to air on Home & Garden TV sometime in the not too distant future, but there was always a chance it would follow the lead of some of the Food Network’s cooking shows and make the jump over to one of the major networks.

Jacky had begged and pleaded until Ali finally agreed. At first her contractor had been thrilled at the prospect, and his crew had enjoyed mugging for the two cameramen, Raymond and Robert. Now, though, with construction seriously behind schedule, the workers were becoming surly at having the cameras forever in the way, and so was Ali. It was bad enough when things were going well. But then there were days like today, when Bryan Forester, her general contractor, had gone ballistic after Yvonne Kirkpatrick, the city of Sedona’s queen-bee building inspector, had decreed that the placement of some of Bryan’s electrical outlets in both the bathrooms and the kitchen were out of compliance.

The cameras had been there filming the entire epic battle as Bryan and the fiery-haired Yvonne had gone at it nose-to-nose over the issue. Later, they had been missing in action when Yvonne, who had returned to her office to check the rules and regs, had called back with the embarrassing admission that Bryan had been right and she had been wrong. From her days as a television newscaster, Ali Reynolds knew the drill. After all, confrontations make for great TV. Reconciliations don’t. Compared to war, peace is B-O-R-I-N-G. And even though Yvonne had admitted her mistake, she had yet to come back and sign off on the permit. The drywall guys couldn’t start hanging wallboard until she did.

Ali had hoped to have the place ready for a grand Thanksgiving dinner unveiling for friends and family. Right now her house had no running water or electricity, and the interior walls were nothing but bare studs. This latest delay made a turkey-day gathering in her remodeled home even more unlikely. Disheartened, she had retreated to the wisteria-lined flagstone patio where they had erected a canvas canopy over the worn redwood picnic table that served as a lunchroom for workers and film crew alike. Before Ali could summon a really serious funk, though, Leland Brooks appeared, bearing a silver tray set for tea.

“Tea?” he asked. “You look as though you could use a cuppa.”

“Yes, please,” Ali said gratefully, shivering in the late-afternoon chill. “That would be wonderful.”

Ali had taken on restoring Arabella Ashcroft’s dilapidated home as her personal rehabilitation project, and Brooks, Arabella’s former butler, had made fixing Ali Reynolds his. Months earlier and already dealing with the end of both her newscasting career and the end of her marriage, Ali had abandoned California and returned to her roots in Sedona, Arizona, looking for respite and a little peace and quiet. That hadn’t worked very well. Instead of achieving idyllic serenity, she had been propelled into life-and-death struggles with not one but two murderous nutcases.

Afterward Ali had been drifting aimlessly into a sea of depression when Leland Brooks came to her rescue, determined to find a way to help her help herself. Refusing to take no for an answer, he had set before her the daunting challenge of buying and re-creating Arabella Ashcroft’s mother’s house. In the ensuing months, every time the resulting complications had threatened to overwhelm Ali, Leland had been at her side. He still referred to himself as her butler, but she saw him as her property manager and also as her trusted aide-de-camp. He had taken up residence in a fifth-wheel trailer set up in the driveway, where he could make sure tools and supplies stayed put when the workmen left the site.

Ali waited while Leland dosed her tea with two cubes of sugar and a wedge of lemon.

“I see that building inspector was here again,” he said.

“Yes,” Ali returned. “She rode in on her broom, out on same, and fouled up the wallboard guys for at least another day. I’m pretty sure Thanksgiving is a lost cause.”

Leland handed over a cup and saucer. “Mr. Forester is a good man,” he said thoughtfully. “Surely he’ll be able to find a way to carry us over the finish line.”

Ali took a sip of her tea. It was perfect. “Mr. Brooks,” she said, “has anyone ever told you that you’re an incurable optimist?”

Leland frowned. “I don’t suppose that’s a compliment, is it?” he returned.

Ali laughed aloud. No matter how bad things got, Leland always seemed to cheer her up. Just then a car came winding up the driveway, threading its way between lines of workers’ vehicles. As it parked behind Ali’s Porsche Cayenne SUV, she recognized Detective Dave Holman’s sheriff’s department sedan.

Dave, a fellow graduate of Cottonwood’s Mingus Union High, was a longtime friend and recently a sometime beau. Several months earlier, he had been granted primary custody of his two daughters, nine-year-old Cassie and thirteen-year-old Crystal. Since then Dave had thrown himself wholeheartedly into his unexpected second chance at fatherhood. His newly assumed parenting responsibilities combined with a realization that both Dave and Ali were in full rebound mode had led to a mutual decision to back off for a while. As a result, he and Ali had been spending far less time together of late. On this occasion, though, Ali was delighted to see him—until she caught sight of the grim set of his jaw. Clearly, this was some other kind of visit.

At another time in her life, Ali Reynolds might not have thought the worst, but after months of dealing with one disaster after another, her heart went to her throat. Had the brakes failed in her father’s doddering antique Bronco, or had her mother’s Alero been T-boned making a left-hand turn across traffic into the Sugarloaf Café’s parking lot? Or was it Christopher? Had something happened to her son? Holding her breath, she gestured Dave onto the patio.

“Hey, Dave,” she croaked. It was a lame attempt at pretending she wasn’t terrified. “Good to see you. Care for some tea?”

Dave shook his head. “No, thanks.” He glanced toward the house. “I’m looking for Bryan Forester. Is he here?”

Relieved, Ali let out her breath. “In the far bathroom,” she answered. “Would you go find him, please?” she said to Leland.

Leland nodded. “Certainly,” he said and marched away.

“Is something wrong?” Ali asked.

“I’m afraid so,” Dave answered. “Morgan Forester’s been murdered. Their two girls came home from school a little while ago and found their mother dead in the front yard. Has Bryan been here all day?”

Even though all of Bryan’s worker bees had shown up on time, Bryan himself hadn’t appeared until later in the morning. Given that he had several different jobs going, his late arrival wasn’t so unusual. Ali had noticed, however, that the generally even-tempered Bryan had seemed out of sorts. Even before his confrontation with the building inspector, Bryan had been barking at his people and growling at the guys wielding their cameras.

“He wasn’t here all day,” she said. “But he was here most of it. Why?”

Before Dave could ask anything more, Leland returned, bringing Bryan Forester with him. “What’s up?” Bryan asked, looking questioningly from Ali to Dave.

Ali knew from personal experience what it meant to be given that kind of devastating news. Not wanting to witness Bryan Forester’s heartbreak, Ali thought of taking Brooks and disappearing into the house. Before she could rise from the bench, however, Dave cut off that avenue of retreat by speaking immediately.

“It’s about your wife,” he said. “I’m afraid I have some very bad news.”

“Bad news about Morgan?” Bryan asked. “What about her? What kind of bad news. Has she been in a wreck or something?”

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this. Your wife has been murdered,” Dave said. “Your daughters found her this afternoon when they came home from school.”

Ali felt a momentary flash of anger at Dave Holman. Couldn’t he have found a gentler way of delivering such awful news? Couldn’t he have couched it in less blunt terms?

Bryan’s face contorted in grief and astonishment as the brutal blow landed. He staggered over to the picnic table and sank down onto the redwood bench across the table from Ali. “No,” he said, shaking his head from side to side in absolute denial. “That can’t be. It’s impossible. Morgan was fine when I left for work. This is wrong. You must be mistaken.”

“I’m afraid there’s no mistake,” Dave replied. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Forester, I’ll need you to come with me. Once the body has been transported, we’ll need you to identify…”

At first Ali thought he had softened slightly, but then she noticed the odd shift from “Bryan” to “Mr. Forester.” Ali was a year younger than Dave, and Bryan Forester was over ten years younger than Ali. Dave’s turn to formality struck her as ominous.

Bryan, on the other hand, seemed oblivious. He surged to his feet. “No,” he interrupted. “Where are Lindsey and Lacy? What have you done with my daughters? I’ve got to see them, be with them.”

“The girls are fine,” Dave said reassuringly. “I called in Deputy Meecham, the DARE officer from their school. She knows your kids, and they know her. I asked her to take them to the sheriff’s office. The girls are probably already there.”

“Let’s go, then,” Bryan said impatiently, changing his mind about going to the house. “Why are we standing around here jawing?” He took two long strides toward Dave’s car, then stopped and turned back to Ali. “Tell the guys for me, please,” he said. “They should probably plan on taking the rest of the week off. Until I—” He broke off, unable to continue.

“Of course,” Ali said reassuringly. “I’m so sorry about this, Bryan. You do what you need to do. We’ll be fine.”

She watched as Dave took Bryan Forester by the arm and escorted him to the waiting patrol car. Dave opened the door—the door to the backseat, Ali noted, to let Bryan inside. Ali had to concede that was probably necessary, since there would likely be weapons and equipment in the front seat, but still, was it really necessary for Bryan to be locked in the back of the vehicle like a common criminal—like he was under arrest or something? But then Ali remembered that when her almost–ex husband, Paul Grayson, had been run over by a speeding freight in southern California, the investigating officers had driven her to Riverside in the back of a patrol car as well. Perhaps this was the same protocol and it meant nothing. Maybe Ali was simply reading too much into it.

“If you’d like me to, madam,” Leland Brooks said quietly, “I’d be happy to track down the work crew and relay the bad news.”

Ali knew that in the past, Leland had dealt with Arabella Ashcroft’s periodic flights from sanity by retreating into that very proper butler made. Dave’s uncharacteristic detour into formality had disturbed her, but as Leland switched gears, Ali felt herself comforted.

“Thank you,” Ali said. “That would be greatly appreciated.”

Ali sat staring into the depths of her teacup and thought about two little girls coming home to the shock of finding their mother murdered. It appalled Ali to think about them being thrust into this awful turmoil and then being carted off to the sheriff’s office by some stranger to await the arrival of their father.

Ali’s cell phone rang. Glad to be jolted out of her grim contemplations, she hurried to answer, but it didn’t do her much good.

“Have you heard about Morgan Forester?” Edie Larson asked. “It’s positively dreadful! I still can’t believe it.”

Ali Reynolds had always marveled at her mother’s uncanny ability to know everything that was going on in Sedona, Arizona, before almost anyone else did. Since Edie’s sources were quick and nearly always accurate, Ali didn’t bother questioning them now. Obviously, whoever had delivered the news knew what was going on.

“Just did,” Ali admitted. “Dave was here a few minutes ago and told Bryan what had happened.”

“Those poor sweet little girls,” Edie went on. “Can you imagine coming home from school and finding something like that? The one is already such an odd little duck, I doubt she’ll ever recover.”

“Odd?” Ali asked.

“They’re twins, you know,” Edie said. “They’ve come to the Sugarloaf on occasion, usually with their daddy.” The Sugarloaf Café was the family-owned diner Ali’s parents had run for years.

“The two of them are the cutest little things. They look just alike, but the one—I don’t know which is which—talks nonstop. She chatters on and on like a little magpie, while the other one never says a word. The one eats everything in sight and cleans her plate without the least bit of fuss. The other one has to have everything on a separate plate—one plate for the eggs, another for the hash browns, another for the bacon, and still another for her toast or sweet roll. God forbid if one crumb of food should touch another. It’s always a problem when they come in, because there’s not enough room on our four-tops for one person to use four separate plates.” Edie paused and then added, “I guess you’ve never waited on them.”

Periodically, Ali pitched in as a substitute waitress. She knew of several adult customers with similar phobias, but she didn’t remember ever waiting on Bryan Forester’s little girls. “I guess not,” she agreed.

“I’m baking one of my tuna casseroles right now. Your dad will deliver it to their house a little later. I understand Bryan’s folks moved down to Sun City a few years ago. His dad has arthritis, and the winters up here were too cold, but I’m sure they’re on their way. I don’t know about Morgan’s folks. It seems to me they’re not from around here.”

Ali didn’t know anything about Morgan Forester’s family. Wherever her parents lived, once they learned the news, their hearts, too, would be broken, but Ali suspected that no one from either side of the family would be very interested in Edie Larson’s excellent tuna casserole.

“If the house is a crime scene, it’ll be empty,” Ali said quietly. “No one will be allowed to be there.”

“You’re right, of course,” Edie said after a pause. “Well, then, I’ll talk to one of the neighbors and find out where your father should deliver the food once I have it ready. Now, what about Thanksgiving?”

Her seamless segue from tuna casserole to turkey and dressing left Ali momentarily confounded.

“I know you had your heart set on having everyone over to your new place,” Edie continued. “But we have to be realistic. That just isn’t going to happen. We need a new plan.”

If Edie Larson had a sentimental bone in her body, her daughter had never seen it. After spending her entire lifetime either working in or running a restaurant and being in the day-to-day business of food, Edie looked at life’s ups and downs through a framework of what needed to be cooked, where, and when. Yes, Morgan Forester’s murder was a terrible thing, but after taking care of that required tuna casserole, Edie was ready to move on to the next piece of critical culinary business—Thanksgiving dinner. Meanwhile, Ali had been so shocked by what had happened that she had yet to consider how the terrible disruptions in Bryan Forester’s life might also impact her own situation.

“Don’t worry about it, Mom,” Ali said. “I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

Ali was hanging up when Leland emerged from the house and began gathering up the tea things. She passed him her cup, cold now but still half full.

“You told them?” she asked.

Leland nodded somberly. “I talked to Billy, Mr. Forester’s second in command. He said that if it’s all the same to you, they’d like to come on the job tomorrow anyway. If he can get the building inspector to come out and sign off on the permits, he said they’ll be able to go ahead with the wallboarding with or without Mr. Forester. But only if you don’t mind.”

The fact that Bryan’s crew was ready and willing to move forward without him seemed commendable. “It’s fine with me,” Ali said.

Leland nodded. “Very good, madam,” he said. “I told them I’d let them know if you had any objections.”

As if on cue, the workmen emerged from the building. Carrying tool belts, tool cases, and lunch boxes, they headed first to the Mini-Mobile, the metal storage unit where they stowed tools and supplies. Leland locked it each evening after the workmen left the job site and opened it every morning before they arrived. Minutes after the workmen left, the camera crew decamped as well, but they took their load of expensive equipment along with them. Leland picked up the tray, but before he could head back to his cozy fifth wheel, Ali stopped him.

“Detective Holman asked me if Mr. Forester had been here all day,” she said casually.

Dave had come to notify Bryan Forester of his wife’s death, but Ali had no doubt the man had been in Dave’s sights as a possible perpetrator from the moment Morgan’s homicide had been reported, and Dave had already started the process of tracing Bryan’s movements.

Leland returned the heavy tray to the table. “I seem to recall he did arrive a little later than usual,” he said thoughtfully. “Most of the time he’s here early enough to park at the top of the driveway. Today I noticed that his truck was down near the bottom of the hill.”

Ali nodded. “Did he seem upset to you?” she asked.

Leland frowned. “Now that you mention it,” he said, “I believe Mr. Forester did appear to be slightly out of sorts. He spent a good part of the day talking on his phone.”

“Did he happen to mention any kind of difficulty at home?” Ali asked.

Leland gave her a wry smile. “That’s not the kind of thing one would mention to the hired help,” he said quietly. “It’s just not done. It’s getting quite cool out here,” he added. “Would you like me to light the heater?”

They had stationed a propane-fueled outdoor heater near the picnic table so the guys could have their morning coffee without freezing their butts off.

“That’s all right,” Ali said. “I think I’ll head home.”

“By the way,” he reminded her, “it is Monday. Your evening to cook, I believe. Would you like me to come by and throw something together for you?”

Ali looked at this remarkably caring man.

“Thanks for keeping me on track,” Ali said. “You’ve done more than enough for today. I’ll handle dinner.”

“Very well,” Leland said. “Will we see you in the morning?”

“If the work crew is coming, I’m coming,” Ali told him.

But as Ali pulled out of the driveway, she wasn’t thinking about getting her job done. She was thinking about two little girls, Morgan Forester’s daughters, who would have to grow up without their mother.

Poor babies, Ali said to herself. Those poor babies.

CHAPTER 2

Peter Winter left the car parked along the road half a mile away from the house and walked the rest of the way, knowing that his surgical booties would leave behind no discernible prints. Concealed behind Bryan Forester’s workshop, he watched as Morgan loaded the girls into the car to take them to catch the bus. There was a chance that she might not come straight back, but he knew that Monday mornings were when she usually caught up on paperwork.

Walking up onto the porch, he settled into the swing to wait for Morgan to return. He didn’t have to wait long. Ten minutes later, she was back. She caught sight of him sitting there as soon as she got out of the car and greeted him with a radiant smile.

“James!” she exclaimed. “What a wonderful surprise. I didn’t expect to see you until Wednesday. Why didn’t you tell me you were stopping by today?”

It astonished Peter to think that Morgan was actually glad to see him. Naturally, he hadn’t said a word to her about what she’d done wrong—that she’d crossed some invisible line and signed her own death warrant in the process. She came toward him with a pathetically happy smile, seemingly without noticing his out-of-place scrubs. Or the fully loaded syringe he had slipped into his pocket. Smiling back, he stepped off the porch and went to meet her.

James O’Conner was the name Morgan Forester knew Peter Winter by, and that was the name she had asked for when she had called in to the “work” number she had managed to lift from his cell phone. Of course, no one in the ER knew anyone named James O’Conner. In actual fact, James O’Conner didn’t exist. Had never existed.

“Somebody wanted to trade at the last minute,” Peter told her. “So here I am.”

She fell into his arms willingly, happily, and was still kissing him when he retrieved the syringe from his pocket and plunged the needle into the flesh at the base of her neck.

“What was that?” she demanded, struggling and trying to push away from him as the painful needle point pierced her skin. “What are you doing? What’s going on?”

Once the syringe was empty, he dropped it. She was still trying to escape him, but he grabbed her with both arms and held her fast. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t okay at all. The Versed did its work well. When she sagged helpless in his arms, he half carried and half dragged her limp body up onto the porch and settled it in the swing. Then he went back and retrieved his syringe. He couldn’t afford to leave that behind. Syringes came with identifiable serial numbers that could all too easily lead back to him.

He didn’t bother undressing Morgan, as he had his other kills. He knew the cops would be examining every aspect of the crime scene. Mixing up the details would make it more difficult for investigating officers to match this incident with any of his others. From a practical standpoint, if he wanted the cops to focus on Morgan’s husband, he needed to downplay any sexual connections. Anger had to be paramount.

Physics had never been Peter’s strong suit. Using the hammer with Morgan already in the swing didn’t work all that well—not as well as he’d wanted. Each blow to her head sent both the swing and his target flying away from him, blunting the killing power. As a consequence, it took longer than he had expected. Once it was over, he did three things. He carefully set the bloodied hammer aside; he wanted to preserve as much blood evidence as possible. He dropped a little blood onto his hanky and put that in a baggy to keep it moist. That was what he hoped would seal Bryan Forester’s fate. Next he removed Morgan’s showy wedding band and the accompanying engagement ring with its three-carat rock. He slipped the wedding set onto his key ring along with all the others. Finally, he took his photo montage.

Once the scene was set, he made his way back to the rental car. Still in the underbrush, he slipped off the booties and then walked up to the rental car, which was sitting undisturbed where he’d left it. He had planned to put the bloodied hammer on some newspapers he’d left in the trunk for that purpose. Hearing a rapidly approaching vehicle, however, he was forced to ditch the hammer in a hurry, putting it down on the passenger-side floorboard before dashing around to the driver’s side. He managed to start the car and drive away before the approaching utility truck caught up with him.

After that, it took a while to track down Bryan Forester’s pickup truck. Peter had the addresses of Forester’s several construction sites, and he found the Dodge Ram pickup at the one on Manzanita Hills Road. The problem was there were several ongoing construction projects in the neighborhood, which resulted in far more street and foot traffic than Peter had anticipated. He made several futile trips past the truck. In the early afternoon, he got a clear shot at the bed of Bryan Forester’s pickup. The hammer needed to be visible but not obvious. He put it in the corner beside the rider’s door, a spot Bryan was unlikely to look at as he got in and out of his truck. And then, for good measure, he left a smear of blood from the hanky there as well.

Peter was hungry by then, but he didn’t dare stop to eat. He didn’t want to do anything that would call attention to his face in the wrong place at the wrong time. Instead, he headed back to Phoenix. To his dismay, he found that there had been a serious rollover semi accident on I-17 on one of the steep downgrades between Cordes Junction and Black Canyon City. DPS had been forced to shut down the highway completely for over an hour while they cleared the roadway of debris, which included several tons of rolled roofing and countless scattered bundles of shingles. By the time he managed to drop off the car and retrieve his own from the short-term lot, he was almost late for his shift at work. He would have been late if he hadn’t called his friend Brad Whitman who had been willing to punch in for him.

Peter had hoped to stop by the house long enough to upload the photos and clear his camera’s memory stick, but he had to stay focused. He was well aware that groggy doctors make mistakes, so he swilled coffee and tried to keep his mind on the job. Tomorrow, after he’d gotten some sleep, he would have plenty of time to treat himself to a victory lap on another job well done. Morgan Forester was dead, and her asshole of a husband would go to prison for it. What could be better than that?

The blue Ford 500 pulled into Bobby Salazar’s lane at the car return facility ten minutes before his shift was due to end. Bobby knew he needed to leave right on time—at four. Otherwise, depending on traffic, he might late for his five P.M. biology class at Phoenix Community College. There was a big exam scheduled for that night. Chasing after an A in the class, he couldn’t afford to be late.

With that in mind and hoping this rental return wouldn’t be a problem, he approached the vehicle, handheld card scanner in hand.

“How’s it going?” Bobby asked.

The driver was a middle-aged Anglo wearing mirrored sunglasses, a Diamondback baseball cap, running shoes, an ASU tracksuit, and a pair of leather driving gloves. Over time Bobby had come to have a very low opinion of people who wore driving gloves. They were usually arrogant and unpleasant, and this one fit that bill to a T. He didn’t bother acknowledging Bobby’s greeting. Wordlessly, he handed over his rental agreement and then got out and opened the back door, where he extracted a briefcase.

Used to being treated as a nonentity, Bobby leaned into the driver’s seat to verify both the odometer reading and amount of gas left in the tank. By the time Bobby popped the trunk, the driver was already moving away, walking briskly toward the shuttle buses that would return him to the terminal.

“Don’t you want a receipt?” Bobby called after him.

Shaking his head, the man didn’t reply. He just kept on walking. The scanner printed out the unwanted receipt automatically, and Bobby stuffed it into his pocket.

“Have a nice day, Mr. Morrison,” Bobby called. No matter how rude the customers might be, company training dictated that they should always be addressed by name. If Morrison heard him, there was no response.

“Screw you, too,” Bobby muttered under his breath. He turned back to the car and checked the trunk, certain that Mr. Morrison had forgotten to collect his luggage. Except for an array of day-old newspapers, the trunk was completely empty. That struck Bobby as odd. Briefcase-only guys usually wore the other kind of suits. Most of the time guys in sweats or running suits came complete with mountains of luggage and mounds of golf clubs, to say nothing of short-tempered wives and screaming kids.

Shrugging, Bobby returned to open first the driver’s door and then the passenger door, continuing the routine check to be sure nothing had been inadvertently left behind. He found sand and gravel on the driver’s-side floorboard. On the passenger-side floorboard carpet, he found a small rust-colored stain, smudged in a fashion that made it look as though some attempt had been made to clean it up.

Of all the attendants on the lot that afternoon, Bobby Salazar was uniquely qualified to recognize the ill-concealed stain for what it was—blood. He had seen bloody carpet before, and he had tried to clean it up with a similar lack of success.

One of his ex-roommates, Kiki Rodriguez, had been home alone when he had gotten bombed out of his gourd on Ever-clear. Nobody ever knew, because Kiki couldn’t remember and couldn’t tell them exactly how he had broken the glass that cut his hand so badly. What was clear was that he had wandered aimlessly around the apartment, bleeding like a stuck pig and leaving a trail of blood everywhere, before he finally passed out on the couch. Bobby had been the one who came home and found him there. He had called 911. The EMTs had taken Kiki off to the ER, leaving Bobby to deal with both the cops and the bloody carpet. He wasn’t sure which had taken longer, answering the cops’ questions or trying to get the damned blood out of the carpet. He had tried everything, including calling in a professional carpet cleaner, but when he had moved out of the apartment two months later, the stains had still been visible enough that Bobby had lost his security deposit.

Concerned, Bobby got out of the car and gave the rest of the front seat a thorough examination. There was no visible blood anywhere else—not on the seat or the steering wheel or the door handle. The stains were on the floorboard and nowhere else. The guy had obviously walked in it. What if he hit something? Bobby wondered. A deer, maybe. Or a dog. Please, God, not a person!

Bobby walked to the front of the vehicle and studied the bumper, looking for damage. He was relieved when he found nothing—no dents, no dings, no sign of a collision with anything, living or dead.

Two more renters had pulled into Bobby’s lane. Their luggage was already unloaded, and they were waiting impatiently for him to come check them in as well. He knew if he mentioned the presence of blood in the vehicle to one of his supervisors, there would be hell to pay. Questions would be asked. Forms would need to be filled out and filed. More than likely, Bobby would be late for class. Not only that, if he took that long with one vehicle, the guys who tracked productivity would no doubt give Bobby a black mark for slowing down the return process. You were supposed to check in so many customers per hour—or else.

Waving to one of the drivers, Bobby sent the Ford off to be washed, then turned and approached the next waiting customer. “How’s it going?” he said. “Hope you had a good trip.”

Late in the afternoon, Ali drove back to the Andante Drive mobile home, which had been left to her by her mother’s twin sister, Evie. Permanently set on a concrete footing that had been carved into the steep hillside, the place boasted a very un–mobile-homelike basement that included Christopher’s studio and Ali’s late second husband’s extensive wine collection.

Ali had lived there for the better part of a year and a half, most of that time with her son as her roommate. She hoped that by the time she finished the remodel and moved on to Arabella’s house, Chris would have married his steady girlfriend, Athena, and Ali would be able to pass the mobile home along to them. Both Chris and Athena were public high school teachers whose low salaries wouldn’t stretch very far in Sedona’s stratospheric real estate market. Not having to buy a home of their own would give them a big leg up in starting married life together. Ali liked the idea that Aunt Evie’s legacy to her would stay in the family.

Ali had never been a particularly capable cook, and she knew that what she brought home from Basha’s deli section wouldn’t be nearly as delectable as whatever Leland Brooks might have “thrown together.” She had suggested hosting the Thanksgiving festivities primarily because she knew she would have him there to backstop her. For this Monday-evening dinner, she had raided Basha’s deli counter for some enchilada casserole and a selection of salads and veggies.

When Ali walked in the door, Sam, her impossibly ugly sixteen-pound, one-eared, one-eyed tabby cat, trotted to the door to greet her, complaining at the top of her lungs that she was starving. Since Chris’s Prius was already parked outside, Ali knew the cat was lying. For a time, her adopted kitty’s weight had mysteriously edged up. It was only when the vet complained about the weight gain that Ali discovered that Sam had routinely cadged two evening meals by pretending she hadn’t been fed. Once Ali and Chris had realized they were being suckered, they hatched the plan that whoever came home first fed Sam, no matter what the cat said to the contrary.

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” Ali told the noisy animal. Knowing full well the kitchen counter wasn’t Sam-proof, she stowed the casserole in the microwave and deposited the evening’s salads in the fridge. Then she headed into her room to shower and change clothes.

When she came out half an hour later, she was surprised to see that Chris had set the table—for three rather than two. The table was decked out in his mother’s good china, complete with crystal wineglasses. He had also heated the casserole and opened a bottle of Paul Grayson’s high-end wine—a Corton-Charlemagne from Côte d’Beaune.

“What’s the occasion?” Ali asked.

Chris shrugged. “I invited Athena to come to dinner,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

When Ali had first heard about Athena Carlson, she had been a little dismayed. Athena was several years older than Chris and divorced. She was also a double amputee, having lost part of her right arm and most of her right leg, compliments of an exploding IED during a Minnesota National Guard deployment to Iraq.

Ali had always hoped her son would find the “perfect” girl. Initially Athena hadn’t quite squared with Ali’s idea of perfection. Over the months, though, Ali had come to see Athena really was perfect. Her midwestern small-town roots and rock-solid values provided just the right counterpoint to Chris’s artistic temperament and occasionally unrealistic enthusiasm. And Ali had nothing but respect for the way Athena focused on what she could do rather than on what she couldn’t. One of the things that fell in the “could” column was her ability to play a mean game of one-handed basketball.

“You should have called me,” Ali said. “If I had known we were having company, I would have picked up something a little nicer than enchilada casserole.”

“That’s all right,” Chris said. “Athena’s not picky.”

Ali knew that to be true, and as far as she was concerned, it was another mark in Athena’s favor.

The doorbell rang, and Chris hurried to answer it. Athena stepped into the house. Underneath a pair of slacks, her high-tech prosthetic leg was all but invisible. The complicated device on her right hand was more apparent. Smiling and laughing, she entered the room and kissed Chris hello. When the two of them turned to face Ali, Athena’s face was awash in happiness. Without a word, she held up her left hand, showing off a respectably sized diamond ring.

“He gave it to me last night,” Athena said as Ali stepped forward to admire it. “I didn’t wear it to school today. We wanted you to be the first to know.”

“Congratulations!” Ali exclaimed, giving first Athena and then her son a hug.

“You’re sort of the first to know,” Chris admitted. “It’s actually Aunt Evie’s diamond. Grandma gave it to me so I could have it reset. But Grandma and Grandpa haven’t seen it this way yet, and they don’t know I’ve given it to her. You really are the first.”

Ali couldn’t help feeling slightly provoked that her parents knew more about her son than she did. Some of the irritation must have shown on her face.

“You’re not upset about that, are you, Ali?” Athena asked warily.

Ali pulled herself together and laughed it off. “Not at all,” she managed. “My mother always seems to know exactly what’s going to happen long before anyone else does. I’m thrilled for you both.”

Chris and Athena exchanged relieved looks. Obviously, they had been concerned about how Ali might react.

Ali moved over to the table, picked up the wine bottle, and began to pour. “How about a toast to the newly engaged couple?” she said enthusiastically. “I think you both deserve it.”

Dinner was a lighthearted, fun affair. Athena, more radiant than Ali had ever seen her, was full of plans for the future. No, they hadn’t set a date yet. Most likely, they’d get married after school got out at the end of May, possibly early in June.

“A small wedding,” Athena said. “Maybe outside, with red rocks in the background and just family and a few friends in attendance. I already had the whole full-meal-deal church wedding with a white dress, half a dozen attendants, and a reception that cost my dad a bundle. Unfortunately, we all know how that one turned out.”

For the first time that evening, a shadow crossed Athena’s smiling face. Her husband had ditched her while she was in Walter Reed, recovering from her injuries. And since he and his second wife were now living in what had once been Athena’s hometown, Ali understood completely why Athena had no desire to go “back home” for a second wedding.

Ali thought about the gnarled wisteria that shaded the patio at the house on Manzanita Hills Road. In May the venerable old plant would most likely be dripping with clusters of lush lavender blossoms, something that would make a perfect backdrop for a wedding. But she had the good sense to keep her mouth shut. After all, this was Athena and Chris’s wedding. As mother of the groom, Ali needed to keep her opinions to herself.

“Your folks won’t mind coming out?” she asked.

“My grandmother had never been on an airplane until she flew to D.C. to stay with me at Walter Reed.” Athena grinned. “If she could fly for that, she can certainly fly for this.”

“What about your parents?” Ali asked.

“My grandmother’s the only one I really care about,” Athena said.

Ali decided she was better off not asking anything more.

“We’re going to have a little get-together at the gym tomorrow night before the game, and we’d like you to come,” Chris put in quickly, diverting them from what was evidently dodgy territory. “About seven-thirty. We plan to go public with our engagement then. I’ll invite Grandpa and Grandma. Athena’s roommates will be there, along with the people in our basketball league.”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” Ali assured them.

“It won’t be much of a party,” Athena said. “No champagne in the high school gym. We’ll be drinking Hawaiian Punch and eating storebought cookies.”

“I still wouldn’t miss it,” Ali said.

After dinner, when Athena left, Chris went out with her, ostensibly to walk her to the car. Ali knew that was bogus, of course. The process was likely to involve far more necking than it did walking and would last an hour or more. In the meantime, Ali cleared the table, put away the leftovers, and then hand-washed the china and crystal.

Standing with her hands and forearms plunged deep in soapy water, Ali recalled how she had chosen the Royal Limoges Beleme pattern at Paul Grayson’s behest right after the two of them had become engaged. She had loved the creamy color of the delicate bone china and the subtle, understated designs around the borders. Ali had imagined using those gorgeous dishes as she presided over a lifetime’s worth of joyous meals, complete with family and friends.

But the reality had been far different, more hell than heaven. The meals she had hosted with Paul, the ones where the dishes had been used, hadn’t turned out to be what Ali had hoped for or expected. Yes, Paul Grayson had loved entertaining and had done so lavishly, but there had been an element of one-upmanship in everything he did. Dinner guests were invited because of who they knew or what they had to offer in terms of deal making. Places at his table were generally assigned based on who could provide the best political advantage at work. For him love had counted far less than leverage.

On this occasion, an inexpensive and simple meal—reheated deli food—had been served to guests in a mobile home that had once belonged to Aunt Evie, someone Paul, in his arrogance, had summarily dismissed as mere “trailer trash.” Ali found herself smiling at the irony. Paul Grayson’s command-performance entertaining was far in the past, and tonight’s low-key celebration had fulfilled Ali’s long-ago dream of how those lovely but costly dishes would be used.

Ali was drying the last of the plates when she heard the front door open. She peeked around the intervening wall, expecting to see Chris returning. Instead, Dave Holman let himself into the room.

“Sorry,” he apologized. “Chris was outside with Athena. He said I should go on in.”

Dave and Ali’s decision to put their romance on hold while maintaining their friendship had led to a certain amount of confusion on both sides. Glad to see him under any circumstances, Ali put down her dish towel on the counter and hurried over to kiss him hello. He kissed her back with a lot more enthusiasm than mere friendship warranted.

“Sit down,” she said, ushering him over to the leather couch. “Don’t be such a stranger. How are the girls?”

“Great,” Dave said. “Cassie’s the same as she always was—never a bit of trouble. As for Crystal? She’s back to being her old self—going to school, getting good grades, playing goalie on her soccer team. It’s like she’s really turned a corner.”

Months earlier, unhappy that her mother and stepfather had moved away from Sedona, Crystal Holman had staged an adolescent insurrection by getting involved with an online predator. Her rash behavior had come close to being fatal for her and for Ali Reynolds. But Ali wasn’t the least bit surprised to know that Crystal was now happy as a clam. The child was a master manipulator. Risky though it had been, everything she had done had been calculated to bring her back home to her father. And it worked like a charm, Ali thought a little ruefully.

“Glad to hear it,” she said aloud. “So this is work?”

Dave nodded. When the girls had come back to Sedona, Dave had moved out of his bachelor-pad apartment and into a three-bedroom rental near the old downtown business district.

“So who’s looking after them while you’re off on a case?” Ali asked. That had been one of Crystal’s complaints—that cases were more important to her father than family. Ali suspected that was still true.

“Crystal promised she’d see to it that Cassie gets to bed on time,” Dave said. “Believe me, I’m keeping the computer under lock and key these days. The only time Crystal gets to use it is when I’m there to supervise.”

Crystal was an experienced thirteen, and not in a good way. Ali wouldn’t have left her in charge of a younger sibling on a bet, but Dave hadn’t asked for her advice about child care any more than Athena and Chris had asked for wedding advice. With some difficulty, Ali managed to keep her mouth shut.

“Meanwhile, you’re working the Forester homicide?” she asked.

Dave nodded. “That’s why I’m here—to ask you some questions. I really do need to track Bryan’s movements today.”

“Is he under arrest?”

Dave shook his head and pulled out a notebook and pen. “Nothing like that,” he said. “This is all very preliminary. We’re just trying to get the lay of the land. What can you tell me about today? I believe you told me Bryan was at your place most of the day.”

“That’s right,” Ali said. “We had a problem with a building inspector, and Bryan waited around until she showed up.”

“Is he usually at your place all day, every day?” Dave asked.

“No,” Ali answered. “He has multiple jobs and multiple crews—three that I know about for sure.”

“What time did he get arrive today?”

Ali had to think about that. “It must have been close to ten. I really didn’t pay much attention. He’s my general contractor, Dave. He isn’t required to punch a clock. He supervises workers, picks up supplies, and chases after permits. When it comes to work ethic, I’d have to say Bryan Forester is right up there at the top of the list. He puts in some very long days—not unlike a certain homicide detective who shall remain nameless.”

Ali’s gentle jibe produced not so much as a glimmer of a smile from Dave. “And how was he once he got there?” the detective persisted. “Did you notice anything unusual about his demeanor?”

Ali paused before she answered. She didn’t want to point the finger of suspicion in Bryan Forester’s direction, but she felt obliged to tell the truth. “I suppose he seemed out of sorts,” she admitted. “I chalked it up to what was going on with the building inspector. She’s not a very nice person.”

“But Bryan didn’t say anything to you about what might have been bothering him?”

“Not to me, and I doubt he said anything to Leland Brooks, either. If he talked to anyone at all, it would be his workers—his foreman, Billy, in particular. They’ve worked together for years.”

Dave jotted something into his notebook. “Billy?”

“William Barnes.”

“Oh, him,” Dave said. “Can you give me the names of the rest of his crew?”

“Not first and last,” Ali said. “Leland probably keeps track of all that. I know them on sight but mostly by first name only. Ryan and Gary are the ones I remember; they both said they’re planning on being on the job tomorrow. If you want to stop by and talk to them then, you’re more than welcome.”

“They’re coming to work tomorrow even after what happened today?” Dave asked. “Why would they do that?”

“Loyalty, maybe?” Ali returned. “Bryan strikes me as a nice guy. His workers seem to think the world of him. Maybe they’re just trying to help out. Or maybe they need the money.”

Dave’s grunt of acknowledgment let Ali know that even though he may have heard what she said, he remained skeptical. “I’ll come see the work crew tomorrow,” he said. “Probably fairly early in the morning, unless something else comes up.”

“How are Bryan’s girls doing?” Ali asked. She couldn’t keep from thinking about those two motherless seven-year-olds. And the fact that they were the ones who had discovered their mother’s body on the front porch.

“As well as can be expected,” Bryan replied grimly. “They’re with their father and their grandparents right now. Bryan’s folks came up from Phoenix. From Sun City. They’re all checked in to the Best Western. Bryan and Morgan’s house has been declared a crime scene. So’s their yard. No one’s going back there for the foreseeable future.”

That was what Ali had expected. So much for Edie’s tuna casserole. But remembering what her mother had said about Bryan’s twins, Ali found herself more worried about one of them. What about the quiet one who never allowed foods to mingle on her plate? How would a child like that deal with what must seem like the total annihilation of her carefully organized existence? “Are they going to be okay?” Ali asked.

“They were pretty distraught,” Dave returned. “And understandably so. Deputy Meecham, the DARE officer, is great with kids. She did what she could to help them, but they’ve been severely traumatized. I’m hoping we’ll be able to schedule CHAP interviews for both girls tomorrow.”

“CHAP?” Ali asked, not recognizing the acronym.

“Childhelp Advocacy Professionals,” Dave said. “It’s an outfit out of Flagstaff made up of psychologists and social workers. They do forensic interviews of at-risk children, including children involved as witnesses in homicide investigations.”

Ali’s heart gave a lurch. “You’re not saying the two Forester children may have actually seen what happened to their mother?”

“No,” Dave assured her. “Not as in eyewitnesses, no. The ME’s preliminary report says Morgan Forester died shortly after she put the twins on their school bus this morning. But if there was something going on in the house—if Bryan and Morgan Forester were feuding in some fashion—I’m guessing those girls know all about it. That’s one thing I learned from dealing with Crystal this past year. Kids know a lot more about what’s going on with their parents than they’re willing to let on.”

The door opened, and Chris bounded into the room in a burst of cold air. “Hey, Dave,” Chris said. “Did Mom tell you the good news—that Athena and I are engaged?”

Grinning, Dave gave Chris a high five. “That’s great,” he said. “Congrats!”

“We’re having a little get-together at the high school gym tomorrow night before the game,” Chris continued. “You’re welcome to come.”

“We’ll see,” Dave said. “I’m up to my eyeballs in a case right now.”

“The Forester murder?” Chris asked.

Dave sent a questioning look in Ali’s direction.

“It’s not my fault,” she said. “I didn’t tell him, not one word.”

“I just heard about it from Athena,” Chris explained. “Mindy, Athena’s roommate, called and told us about it while we were outside. She couldn’t believe it had happened.”

“Mindy?” Dave asked.

“Mindy Farber,” Chris answered. “She teaches second grade at the school in the village. Both the Forester girls are in her class.”

“And the teacher is Athena’s roommate?” Dave asked.

Chris nodded.

“I’ll need that phone number, then,” Dave said, “so I can talk to her as well.”

Chris recited the number, and Dave jotted it down. Watching him, Ali knew it was necessary, knew he was doing his job, but she hated the idea of someone going through those little girls’ lives. Bryan Forester’s daughters had already lost their mother. And if Dave was able to get the goods on their father, they could be destined to lose him as well.

Chris said good night and headed for his room. Dave turned back to Ali. “Can you think of anything else?” he asked.

Ali gave him an appraising look. “I like Bryan Forester,” she said. “I’ve been working with him for months now. I’ve never heard him raise his voice on the job. I’ve never heard him swear. He works hard, and he does a good job. I don’t think he’s a killer.”

Thoughtfully, Dave closed his notebook and dropped it into his pocket. “The problem is,” he said, “most killers don’t wear sandwich boards announcing the fact. And as you and I both know, just because a marriage looks solid to outside observers doesn’t necessarily make it so.”

“Do you know for sure that the Foresters’ marriage was in trouble?” Ali asked.

Dave shook his head. “The two of us have been through a lot,” he said, “but I’m sure you can understand that I can’t reveal details of an ongoing investigation—not even to you. I will tell you, though, that some details have come up that give us grounds to be suspicious of Bryan Forester.”

“Those poor little girls,” Ali murmured.

“Poor little girls indeed,” Dave agreed. “Their mother was murdered in an act of homicidal violence. This wasn’t random, Ali, it was personal. Morgan Forester’s killer was someone operating in a blind rage. And if Bryan Forester is the perpetrator here—if he’s capable of that kind of violence—I’m honor-bound to see that his daughters don’t fall victim to it as well.”

Reluctantly, Ali found herself nodding in agreement. Dave was right. If, behind his smooth facade, Bryan Forester was a cold-blooded killer, then someone had to stand up for his daughters. That someone was Detective Dave Holman.

“I’d best be going,” Dave said.

Appalled by her own bad manners, Ali realized she hadn’t offered him anything to drink. “What about a cup of coffee?” she asked belatedly. “It won’t take long.”

Dave shook his head. “No,” he said. “Sorry. First forty-eight and all that.”

Ali, like most American TV viewers, knew what he meant: If a homicide isn’t solved in the first forty-eight hours after the crime, the likelihood that it will never be solved increases dramatically.

Dave started for the door.

“When you come to talk to Bryan’s crew,” Ali suggested, “you should probably plan on talking to the film crew as well.”

“What film crew?” Dave asked.

“They’ve been taping the entire remodeling project for a possible series on Home and Garden TV.”

“Oh,” he said. “I see.” He gave her a cursory kiss on the way out. Clearly, his mind was elsewhere. Like a bloodhound hot on a trail, he refused to be distracted.

Ali watched him as far as his car, then turned off the porch light and locked the door. She leaned her forehead against the door, and a sense of disappointment passed over her. Women always expected to juggle more than one thing at a time—family, work, relationships. Obviously, men did the same thing, but their priorities were entirely different. For Dave, duty came first. Being a good father had detracted from his ability to be a good lover. And now, with Morgan Forester’s homicide case taking precedence, Ali worried that the fatherhood part might be losing ground as well.

Ali wondered if maybe the same thing was true for Bryan Forester. She could speak to the fact that the man was a conscientious worker, someone whose word was his bond. But what if being good at his job made him a bad husband or father? What then?

As for Bryan’s two little girls? Ali was dismayed to realize that she didn’t even know their names. Saddened by the reminder that real evil was alive and well in the world, Ali went into the bedroom.

After changing into her nightgown, she gently shifted Sam off her pillow and crawled into bed. Long after she turned out the light, though, Ali was still wide awake. At last, she turned on the light. While Sam stalked out of the bedroom in a huff, Ali took her computer out of the nightstand drawer and booted it up.

CHAPTER 3

In the aftermath of losing both her job and her marriage and encouraged by her son, Chris, Ali had started Cutlooseblog. com. Much to her surprise, what she had written about her own travails had resonated with plenty of other women. They had written in, sharing their own difficulties, their triumphs and tragedies. Some of those women, like the dauntless Velma T of Laguna Niguel, California, an eightysomething tough-as-nails cancer patient, Ali counted as friends.

But as her own life changed, Ali had found that Cutloose hadn’t. Every few months a brand-new crop of women seemed to cycle through the website, dealing with the same kinds of issues Ali had already dealt with, drowning in their own pain, trying to put their lives back together. When Ali’s direction changed, when she went from agonizing about her life and times to something else—like remodeling the house or choosing plumbing fixtures, for instance—many of the people who continued to visit Cutloose weren’t interested. Her previous readers didn’t want to learn about architectural drawings or getting permits or battling dry rot or sistering joists or any of the other countless new things the Manzanita Hills house was bringing to Ali’s attention on a daily basis. It didn’t take long for Ali to realize there was a looming disconnect between her own life and those of her readers. Once she did, she had done the only honorable thing—she cut Cutloose loose.

Months earlier a woman named Adele Richardson, aka Leda, had written in. Her history with a philandering husband paralleled Ali’s in many ways. At a time when Ali’s criminal defense attorneys were advising her to take a break from blogging, Adele had offered to step in and pinch-hit. Ali hadn’t accepted the offer, but later on, when she realized she really did need to step away from the blog, she had contacted Adele once more. The transition had been seamless and relatively painless. Ali had written a farewell blog in which she announced she was handing the reins over to someone else, and Cutloose seemed to have gone on quite nicely without her, thank you very much. That was one thing the past few years had taught Ali Reynolds in spades. She was nothing if not expendable.

It had been true for her job and for her marriage and, apparently, for Dave Holman as well. Things happened. Circumstances changed. Life moved on. And as Ali logged on to Cutloose that night, it wasn’t because she felt a need to revisit or wallow in her own misery. In fact, it was exactly the opposite. She had journeyed a long way from the awful pain she’d been in when she first started the blog. She went there now knowing that the stories she was likely to find would allow her to count her blessings.

For old time’s sake, she scrolled through that day’s postings. The stories were achingly familiar.

My husband ran off with my sister. I’ve got three kids, no job, no car, and no money. What am I going to do?

Go to work, Ali thought. Get a job. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

As she scanned through the string of reader comments, she saw that was what the other writers were saying as well: Don’t sit around blaming your husband; be responsible for yourself; get a life. Some of the correspondents couched their suggestions in less confrontational ways, but they were all pretty much of a piece—a course in tough love; self-love seasoned with ample amounts of good common sense. Obviously, Adele was keeping Cutlooseblog.com on track, staying true to Ali’s original mission.

Ali was interested to see that Cutloose seemed to have attracted a fair number of male readers.

Thank you for showing me that I’m not the only man in the world who’s a victim of domestic violence. It helps to know that there are others out there like me who are finding the courage to speak out. Maybe there’s hope for me and my kids.

The posts that followed that were a mixed bag. Two amazingly angry women declared in no uncertain terms that men were ALWAYS the perpetrators and NEVER the victims in domestic-violence situations. But one correspondent included a toll-free number where men could call to locate family-style shelters in their geographical area that would take male victims and their children right along with women.

While I was off on a business trip with my boss, I had too much to drink and ended up in his room. When we got back home, he fired me. What do I do now?

Get another job, Ali thought. Again the accompanying posts echoed that sentiment, some of them with the added proviso of: Quit drinking!!!

Ali found it all interesting, but more as a trip down memory lane than anything else. She really had moved on, and she wondered how long her successor would be able to keep it up before she, too, would need to hand Cutloose off to someone else—to new blood, as it were.

Leaving Cutloose behind, Ali logged on to the virtual edition of Phoenix’s daily newspaper, the Arizona Reporter. There, in the statewide news section, she found an article on Morgan Forester’s homicide.

Morgan Forester, age twenty-seven, wife of prominent Sedona area contractor Bryan Forester, was found bludgeoned to death on the front porch of their rural home outside the Village of Oak Creek. Mrs. Forester had been dead for some time when the body was discovered by her two young children as they returned home from school.

The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office is investigating.

“This is an extremely tragic situation,” said Demetri Hartfield, Yavapai County media relations officer. “We know she died of homicidal violence. At this point, however, we have no suspects and no persons of interest.”

That’s not entirely true, Ali thought. Dave Holman definitely has a person of interest in this case.

Neighbors up and down the lonely length of Verde Valley School Road reported seeing nothing at all out of the ordinary. The house itself is in a scheduled area half a mile from its nearest neighbor and screened from the road by a rise that would have concealed events at the house from passersby.

“Morgan was a wonderful woman and the best friend anyone could ever want,” said neighbor Sally Upchurch. “She was a full-time mom who loved being at home and who absolutely doted on her two little daughters. She adored her husband as well. They’re just the nicest family, all of them. I can’t imagine how such a terrible thing could happen.”

Bryan Forester and his two daughters are reportedly in seclusion somewhere in the Sedona area. Through a family spokesman, he asked that they be left to grieve in peace during this difficult time. Services for Mrs. Forester are pending and will be announced at a later date.

The problem is, Dave Holman can imagine such evil very easily, Ali thought, and now so can I.

Bad things really did happen to good people. Ali Reynolds herself was a case in point. Her husband had abandoned her to father out-of-wedlock children with not one but two other women. As a result, when he had been trussed in the trunk of a car and left on a railroad track to be run down by a speeding freight train, she had immediately been viewed as a prime suspect.

But all that worked itself out eventually, Ali told herself. Dave Holman may be a less than perfect father and lover, but he’s a good detective. If Bryan Forester is innocent of murdering his wife, then Dave is the one who’ll sort it out. It’s none of my affair.

Ali looked at the clock and was astonished to see that while she had been staring at her computer screen, several hours had zipped by unnoticed. She logged off, shut down her computer, closed it, and put it away.

As soon as she turned out the light, Sam relented. The cat returned to the bedroom and to her spot on the side of Ali’s bed, landing on it with a soft thud. As Sam curled up and settled down, Ali reached out and put one hand on the purring cat.

“Not our business,” Ali said aloud as she drifted off to sleep. But Sam wasn’t listening. Unfortunately, neither was anyone else.

Sleepless, Matt Morrison lay in bed and tried to figure out what had happened. For the thousandth time that day, he asked himself the same question. Why had Susan stood him up? After all, she was the one who had come up with the idea of meeting in the first place. Susan Callison—Suzie Q in her profile—was thirty-seven years old, married, had no children, and sold real estate. She had told him in their many online encounters that her fantasy was to meet up with a guy and “do it” somewhere they weren’t supposed to be—preferably in somebody’s model home. By seven A.M. that morning, an eager Matt had been at the appointed place sixty miles south of Phoenix, parked in the driveway of one of the model homes in a new planned-living development called Red Rock Ridge.

For someone like Matt, who had always followed the rules and kept his nose to the grindstone, Susan’s explicit online chats had made the whole idea sound amazingly daring and out there. Making love with a stranger in a strange bed or elsewhere was something totally out of character for him, which was why he had jumped at the chance. It was why he had gone. He had driven down I-10 anticipating the idea that for once in his incredibly boring life, he was about to have the kind of sex he’d read about in books and seen in movies—something that would literally knock his socks off.

He had shown up early, a good twenty minutes before he was expected, but beautiful blond Suzie Q hadn’t showed. Anxious minutes had ticked off one by one while he waited and waited. Worried that she might have been in an accident somewhere along the way, he would have loved to call her, but she had never given him her number. “Better not,” she had counseled in an instant message. “Too dangerous.” So he hadn’t been able to call, and without his computer, he couldn’t e-mail or instant-message her. Instead, he had waited for the better part of two hours. When construction workers at some of the other houses on the street had started giving him funny looks, he had driven away.

At first he’d had a hard time deciding where to go. Having left word at the office that he was on his way to Tucson, he couldn’t very well show back up without some kind of explanation. He couldn’t go home, either. Eventually, he’d made his way back to a truck stop in Eloy. There he’d sat at the counter and swilled several cups of coffee and thought about the call of the open road. What would life be like if he had become a trucker instead of an auditor? He tried to see himself at the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler with nothing ahead of him but mile after mile of blacktop. What if he didn’t have to come home each night to a woman who barely tolerated his presence?

Unable to stand the suspense any longer, Matt had driven back to the office and told his supervisor that his appointment had been canceled at the last minute. In the privacy of his cubicle, he logged on to his personal e-mail account. His department maintained a zero-tolerance policy on personal e-mail, so he didn’t send or open any, but he did scroll through his new mail, looking for a message from Susan. Nothing.

After work, he had hurried home, gone into his study, and fired up his home computer, where he had been disappointed to find there was still no e-mail from Susan, and she wasn’t listed on his buddy list.

He had immediately dashed off a quick note:

Where are you? What happened? Did I go to the wrong place? Are you all right?

That one seemed too brusque. Unable to unsend it, he had written another:

I can understand it if you changed your mind. There’s no harm in that. I just want to know that you’re okay. I was afraid something bad had happened to you—that you’d been in a car accident and that you were hurt or in a hospital. Please let me know.

And then a third:

Please, please, please get back to me. The silence is killing me.

Matt had sat at his desk for a long time, staring at his computer screen and hoping in vain to hear the sound of an arriving message. Finally, startled by how much time had passed, he had hurried out to the kitchen to start dinner. He had just put the chicken pot pies in the oven and was starting to fix the salad when Jenny arrived.

“Dinner’s still not ready?” she asked. “Did you forget that I have book club tonight?”

Matt had forgotten all about her meeting, but he had been thrilled to hear about it. If she was going out, that would give him a little peace and quiet for the evening, and maybe, with any kind of luck, a chance to hear back from Susan Callison. Just a single kind word from her, that was all he wanted.

Now, though, it was one o’clock in the morning. Jenny was back home, asleep in the bedroom, and snoring like a steam engine. Matthew Morrison was wide awake. Susan still hadn’t replied.

Monday-night shifts were usually fairly quiet in the ER. Sometimes Peter could even duck into the lounge and grab a nap. But not that night. The place was a zoo all night long, from the beginning of his shift to the end. It took some doing for him to manage to dispose of the damning needle as well as the bloodstained scrubs, booties, and hanky. Once that was done without anyone in the ER being the wiser, he felt a rush of euphoria. Soon, however, it seemed as though the nervous energy that had sustained him through the day abandoned him completely. Fatigued beyond bearing, he could barely stay focused on what needed to be done. When his shift ended two hours late, Peter scared himself by almost nodding off a couple of times on his way home from the hospital. When he got there, he did the only thing he could do: He stripped off his clothes, fell into bed, and fell sound asleep.

By that time, a bedraggled Matt Morrison was already in his cubicle. He had never been much of a drinker, but this morning, lack of sleep had left him feeling like he’d overdosed on Captain Morgan rum and Coke. Matt felt sick to his stomach. His head ached. His ears rang. All because Susan hadn’t gotten back to him.

By now he had sent her a dozen different messages. As each interminable moment of Matt’s workday ticked by, he knew with heartbreaking certainty what he had already known in the driveway of that model home in Red Rock—he would never again hear from Suzie Q. Susan Callison was the one good thing that had ever happened to Matt Morrison, and now she was over—completely over. For Matt, the saddest part about his erstwhile affair was that it had ended before it even started.

Making love would have been nice. Matt would have liked the sex part, but that wasn’t the point. What he had really wanted was a connection—a honest, loving, human connection—to someone who, unlike Jenny, might somehow learn to care for him the same way he cared for her.

For a brief time, Suzie Q had held out that tantalizing possibility. It hurt him to think that what had almost been within his grasp had disappeared from his life. Without ever actually touching him, Susan Callison had wounded him deeply and had left a permanent hole in Matt’s heart.

Staring blankly at the wall of his cubicle, Matt wondered if he’d ever get over it. Maybe, he thought. Then again, maybe not.

On Tuesday morning, Ali didn’t bother making coffee at home. Instead, she drove straight to the Sugarloaf Café and took a seat at the counter, where her mother, coffeepot in hand, was holding forth on the previous week’s local school board election, where her slate of candidates had won walking away.

Edie Larson glanced in her daughter’s direction. “Ali’s here,” she called to her husband, who waved from his workstation in the kitchen. Edie hurried down the counter and filled Ali’s mug. “From the look on your face, I take it I’m in trouble again,” Edie said.

Ali suspected that it wasn’t just the expression on her face that had alerted her mother. It was more likely Chris had stopped by the restaurant on his way to school to give his grandmother a heads-up on the engagement-ring situation. Ali tackled her mother straight on. She was glad Chris was close to her parents, but she worried that sometimes being close went too far.

“Why would that be?” Ali demanded. “Could it have anything to do with the fact that you and Dad knew all about the engagement situation, including the ring, and never said a word to me?”

“Chris asked us not to,” Edie said. “He and Athena wanted to surprise you.”

“I was surprised, all right,” Ali said.

“Chris came to your father asking for advice about a ring,” Edie explained. “Naturally, your father mentioned it to me. Evie’s diamond wasn’t doing anybody any good just lying around in my jewelry box, so I suggested he use that. End of story.”

Ali realized that her parents had always regarded Christopher as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Things could be a lot worse. At least her parents cared, which was a lot more than could be said for Chris’s other grandparents.

“What would you like?” Edie asked, changing the subject and writing on her order pad as she spoke. “Eggs over easy, bacon, no hash browns, biscuits?”

Because Ali was still a little provoked with her mother, she was tempted to order French toast out of spite—just to prove her mother wrong for a change—but for today eggs, bacon, and biscuits were what she actually wanted. She loved her parents dearly, but there were times when she could have used more distance.

Edie tore Ali’s order off her pad and slapped it on the wheel in the kitchen pass-through. After delivering someone else’s breakfast, she returned to Ali. “Have you talked to Bryan yet?” she asked.

Ali shook her head. “No,” she said. “Under the circumstances, I don’t really expect to. I’m sure he has plenty of other things to deal with.”

“Dave’s on the case?”

Ali nodded. In the old days, when Dave Holman had been an almost daily visitor at the Sugarloaf, Edie wouldn’t have needed to ask that question. She would have had the answer straight from the horse’s mouth. Now that Dave had his girls with him, he was evidently eating most of his breakfasts at home.

“People are really up in arms about what happened,” Edie said. “The idea that someone could be murdered like that in broad daylight in her own front yard is appalling. And having those poor little girls be the ones who discovered their mother’s body…” Edie clicked her tongue and shook her head. “Sedona is supposed to be a nice place. Things like that don’t happen here.”

Yes, they do, Ali thought. Things like that happen in all sorts of places.

“They’re all saying Bryan did it,” Edie Larson continued. “Although how a man could do something like that to the mother of his children is beyond me!”

“Mom,” Ali objected. “Wait a minute. What makes you think Bryan is responsible for what happened?”

“I didn’t say I thought it, but it’s what people are saying. The husband is usually the responsible party.”

Ali was taken aback. The article she had read online a few hours earlier had stated that investigators had yet to establish a person of interest in Morgan Forester’s death. In the meantime, the good citizens of Sedona were already declaring Bryan Forester guilty before even being charged.

“What people?” Ali asked.

“Cindy Martin, for one,” Edie said. “She works at the Village of Oak Creek salon. She’s the one who always did Morgan’s nails.”

Ali sometimes forgot that her mother’s unfailing ability to see all and know all was based in large measure on the fact that Edie Larson was tuned in to an intricate network of small-town gossip.

“According to Cindy, Morgan was tired of doing all the behind-the-scenes paperwork for her husband’s construction company and was ready to do something else. I can certainly understand that,” Edie added. “Not everyone can handle working in a family-owned business. When you spend every minute of every day with someone, it can turn into way too much togetherness. It’s not easy, you know. There are times when I think I need to have my head examined for spending my whole life putting up with your father’s foolishness on a day-to-day basis.”

The Sugarloaf had been started by Ali’s grandmother, who had eventually handed it over to her two daughters, Edie and her twin sister, Evelyn. Up until Aunt Evie’s death, the two sisters had waited tables and managed the front of the house while Ali’s father had done most of the cooking. Edie’s current complaints notwithstanding, Ali knew that neither one of her parents would have wanted it any other way.

“And then there’s the boob job,” Edie went on, lowering her voice.

“What boob job?” Ali asked.

“Morgan had one a couple of months ago,” Edie said. “When a woman signs up for a surgical enhancement, you can usually bet that she isn’t doing it for the poor dope who happens to be her current husband.”

In southern California, where Ali had lived previously, that hadn’t been her experience. From Ali’s point of view, lots of women had breast augmentation, many of them with their husband’s encouragement and approval. That Morgan had joined ranks with other consumers of enhancement surgical procedures didn’t necessarily mean the Foresters’ marriage was in trouble. And it certainly didn’t seem like an adequate reason for anyone to declare Bryan a person of interest in his wife’s homicide.

Bob Larson pounded twice on a bell in the pass-through, announcing that one of Edie’s orders was ready to be picked up. Edie shot off to deliver plates of food, leaving Ali to mull over what had been said. Yes, Ali knew Morgan Forester handled the bookkeeping part of her husband’s company, Build It Construction; she sent out the invoices, paid the bills. The neighbor had said she was a stay-at-home mom, although Ali thought she had been more of a work-at-home mom.

Edie returned and refilled Ali’s cup. “Cindy also said that Morgan was always complaining that her husband was a workaholic—that he lived and breathed for his business. That’s not good for a marriage, either.”

The idea that Edie Larson was disparaging someone else for being a workaholic would have been downright laughable if Ali could have found anything in this dreadful situation even remotely funny. Bryan Forester had lived in the community all his life. Ali didn’t like the idea that people were already turning against him based on nothing more than flimsy hearsay from his wife’s manicurist. Ali felt obliged to defend him.

“One person saying it doesn’t make it so,” Ali declared. “Yes, Bryan Forester is a very hard worker, but that doesn’t mean he’s a workaholic. And it doesn’t make him a killer. Besides, most workaholics don’t have time for affairs.”

Edie seemed taken aback by Ali’s remark. “I see,” she said, although Ali wasn’t at all sure that her mother did see. It seemed instead that this was a subject on which they would simply agree to disagree.

Bob sounded the bell once again. This time Edie brought Ali’s breakfast. While Ali ate, a seemingly abashed Edie hustled up and down the counter, busying herself with other customers. When she returned, she had evidently decided it was time to change the subject.

“About Thanksgiving,” she began. “If the new house isn’t going to be ready—”

“Bryan’s crew is coming to work today,” Ali interrupted. “Let’s see how much they get done in the next few days. For right now I don’t want to cancel.”

“All right,” Edie said. “Suit yourself. I hope it all comes together.”

So did Ali. After breakfast, she drove from the restaurant to the house on Manzanita Hills Road. When she had left the night before, Bryan Forester’s Dodge Ram pickup had still been parked at the bottom of the hill. Now the pickup was gone, but vehicles belonging to other workers lined both sides of her driveway. True to their word, Bryan’s crew had turned up for work even if their boss hadn’t. The same thing went for the videographers. Their van was there, too.

When Ali pulled into the yard, she was surprised that she had to move aside in order to make way for the departing building inspector. Yvonne Kirkpatrick had obviously stopped by first thing to sign off on that permit.

Thank you, Billy, Ali thought. You’re getting things done after all.

The front door of the house stood open, with workmen coming and going. Ali followed one of them inside, where she was thrilled to see that after months of seemingly no progress but the framed skeleton of a building, studs were now disappearing behind sheets of expertly installed wallboard. She found Billy Barnes in the bathroom of what would be a master suite. He was deep in conversation with one of his crew of wallboarders, walking the worker through some thorny issue.

“Looks like you’re making good progress,” she said when he looked up and noticed her. “And I saw that the permit got signed off on after all.”

Billy Barnes nodded. “That one took some doing,” he said.

“What about Bryan?” Ali asked. “Have you heard anything from him—how he’s doing?”

“About how you’d expect,” Billy answered. “I didn’t talk to him directly, but I talked to his parents.”

“So at least he wasn’t alone,” Ali said.

Billy nodded. “His dad said Bryan was in pretty bad shape—still in shock, couldn’t believe what had happened, and all that. I don’t blame him. I can’t believe it myself.”

“It was great that you and your guys came to work this morning. I really appreciate it.”

“We’re not the only ones,” Billy said, waving aside her praise. “Bryan’s other crews are doing the same thing. We’re moving forward as well as we can without him. He can’t afford for us to shut the jobs down. If he does, he’ll go broke, and so will we. If any of us could afford to work for free, we wouldn’t be here every day busting our butts, Bryan included.”

That answered one of Dave Holman’s questions: The employees being on the job had very little to do with loyalty to their boss or with sympathy for him, either. Their showing up had far more to do with enlightened self-interest. They were working because they needed the money. Bryan’s regular paychecks fed their families and covered their bills.

“If you have a chance to talk to him directly,” Ali said, “let him know I’m thinking of him, and if there’s anything I can do to help—”

“Knock, knock,” someone called behind her.

Ali turned to find that Dave Holman had followed her down the hallway. One hand held his notebook. In the other, he clutched a half-eaten doughnut. Dave glanced at Ali and then back at the doughnut. “At least I’m eating breakfast,” he said, then he turned to Billy. “Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

Obviously, no introductions were required. From the guarded way the two men looked at each other, Ali was reasonably sure they were already acquainted—and that there was no particular love lost between them.

Billy had been cordial enough with Ali. Now he glanced pointedly at his watch, as if to say that he did mind—a lot. “I suppose,” he allowed gruffly. “As long as it doesn’t take too much time.”

Dave polished off the last of his doughnut. “So tell me about yesterday,” he said. “We’re trying to get a time line on Mr. Forester’s activities. He claims he was here on the job all day long. Do you happen to recall what time he showed up?”

Ali knew better than to hang around listening to the interview. Leaving the two men alone, she went back outside and made her way over to the canopy-covered patio. Leland had started the propane heater, and the outdoor space was warmer than it was inside the house. The butler had covered the redwood table with a clean white cloth and had stocked it with several thermal carafes of freshly brewed coffee and stacks of Styrofoam cups. The spread included a selection of baked goods—a platter of blueberry muffins and a box of mixed doughnuts with one (Dave’s, presumably)—conspicuous in its absence.

Ali was pouring herself a cup of coffee as Leland emerged from the fifth wheel with sugar, cream, and a fistful of spoons. “A good morning to you, madam,” he observed. “A bit nippy, but lovely.”

Ali looked out at the bright, cloudless sky arching overhead. “Yes,” she agreed. “It is lovely.”

“I see that Detective Holman is hot on the trail, as it were,” Leland continued. “He’s asking some of the same things he asked yesterday and checking our recollections for any inconsistencies.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The truth. I told him that Mr. Forester is usually soft-spoken and remarkably even-tempered, but that he seemed a bit out of sorts yesterday—impatient and irritable.”

That was how Bryan had seemed to Ali as well. They fell silent as Brooks laid out the spoons, lining them up with military precision.

“From the way Detective Holman asked his questions, I’m quite sure he believes Mr. Forester is responsible for what happened to his wife,” Leland continued thoughtfully.

Ali nodded. “He’s not the only one. According to my mother, everyone in town has already decided he’s the guilty party.”

Leland shook his head. “I’d hate to think he would be capable of that kind of thing. Then again, I know for a fact that you can’t always tell what someone is capable of, even if you think you know them.”

Ali knew he was thinking about Arabella Ashcroft. Her seemingly normal appearance had belied the fact that she was a remorseless serial killer.

Before Ali could reply, tires sounded on the driveway. She looked up to see Bryan Forester’s pickup truck come to a stop near the garage. As Bryan strode toward her, Ali hurried to meet him. Not surprisingly, the look on the man’s face was grim.

“That’s Dave Holman’s car, isn’t it?” he asked. “What’s he doing here?”

“Asking questions about whether or not you were here yesterday, which you were,” Ali said.

“Great,” Bryan said. “Just what I needed, having him going around to all my jobs asking questions.”

“But what are you doing here?” Ali asked. “Your guys are doing a great job on their own. After what happened yesterday, I would have thought—”

“We need to talk,” Bryan interrupted. “In private.”

CHAPTER 4

With a discreet but understanding nod in their direction, Leland disappeared into his fifth wheel. Ali led Bryan over to the canopy-covered table. “What about?” she asked.

Bryan sighed and ran one hand over his eyes as though he couldn’t imagine where to begin. “It’s about your cabinets,” he said.

“The kitchen cabinets?” Ali asked. “What about them?”

“Since it seems likely that I’m going to have to be off track for a while, I was trying to line up materials so the guys could keep on working and we can finish up the jobs that are already in process,” Bryan said. “I’m self-employed. If the jobs don’t get finished, I don’t get paid, which means I’ll probably end up firing my crews and declaring bankruptcy. With the drywall going up, I knew it was only a matter of days before we’d be ready to install your cabinets. I noticed yesterday that they hadn’t been delivered yet, so I called to check. The person I talked to said she’d look into it. Today she called me back to say that they were never ordered.”

“Not ordered?” Ali asked. “How can that be? I distinctly remember giving you a check. You said I needed to pay half at the time we ordered and the remainder when they were delivered and installed.”

“That’s right,” Bryan said. “I remember that, too. You did give me a check. So did the people on the other two jobs. All three checks were deposited in the company account, but as far as I can tell, Morgan never faxed the order to the cabinet company. They have no record of it. The good news is that I have a copy of the three files on the laptop in my truck, so at least we don’t have to start over from scratch. I’ve already e-mailed the specs for each of the three jobs to High Design Cabinets. The problem is, they don’t have any record of the payments, even though the money for those three deposits is no longer in my business account.”

“It’s not there?” Ali asked.

Bryan shook his head morosely. “None of it.”

“But that was a lot of money,” Ali objected. “I seem to remember the check I wrote for the cabinet deposit was well over thirty thousand dollars.”

“Thirty-three nine, to be exact,” Bryan answered. “And the other two orders came to nearly the same amount. One was a little more and the other a little less. Altogether, it comes to right around a hundred thousand.”

“So where did the money go?” Ali asked. “Maybe your wife simply made a mistake.”

“I believe I’ve found the money, and it’s no mistake,” Bryan said grimly. “A couple of years ago, when Morgan’s grandmother passed away, she left her daughter a tidy little sum of money. Morgan had always been self-conscious about her figure. We agreed that she’d set that money aside in a separate account so she could use it if she ever decided to go ahead with breast enhancement surgery. Which she did. Once the surgery was over, I thought the account would be empty, but it’s not. It has well over a hundred thousand dollars in it—almost the exact amount that’s missing from the three cabinet deposits.”

“You think Morgan was embezzling funds?” Ali asked.

Bryan nodded. “That’s how it’s starting to look. I think she was hiding money away and getting ready to take off. It’s also what I need to talk to you about today. The money is in an account that’s in Morgan’s name only. With everything that’s happened, the bank says I won’t be able to touch a dime of it until after probate and this is all straightened out. High Design says they’re willing to start building the cabinets on a rush-order basis, but to do that, I need to send them money—money I don’t happen to have at the moment. I mean, I do have some money, but if I use that to pay the cabinet bill, I won’t be able to meet payroll. One way or the other, I’ll be out of business.”

“So what do you need?” Ali asked.

“I was hoping you’d go ahead and pay the second half of the cabinet bill. That would be enough to get them started building them. Hopefully, by the time the cabinets are ready to ship, I’ll be able to get the amount you’ve already paid freed up from Morgan’s account.”

“You’re asking me to give you another check?”

Bryan shook his head. “The way things stand, that’s probably a bad idea. I’d rather you have your bank wire the funds directly to High Design. That way, if something else happens…”

“What something else?” Ali asked. “What more could go wrong?”

Bryan let out a long breath. “Do you remember a couple of years ago, when we were afraid that fire was going to come down this side of the mountain and wipe out all of Sedona?”

Ali hadn’t been living in Sedona at the time, but her parents had kept her posted with almost hourly reports. She nodded. “I remember the fire,” she said. “What about it?”

“Our place was like a sitting duck out there in the middle of nowhere. Morgan did everything on the computer. I worried that if the house burned and took our computers with it, we’d be out of business. So I signed up with a Web-based off-site backup system. Every night at midnight, our computers log on to the Internet and backup all the files on our hard drives. I hadn’t ever had any reason to look at Morgan’s backup file. To begin with, I was just trying to figure out what happened to the missing money, so I didn’t look at all of them by any means, but I learned enough to know that she’s been playing me for a fool.”

“More than just the money?”

Bryan nodded grimly. “Way more,” he said.

“She’s been cheating on you?”

“In spades,” Bryan said. “I won’t know the whole story until I have a chance to look into the files. And I have a feeling that once I dig deeper, I’m going to find out there was a whole lot more going on that I still don’t know about.”

Ali heard the hurt in Bryan’s voice. Betrayals that are uncovered while someone is still alive are bad enough, but at least you can deal with them. You can talk them over, or not, and then move on. When something like that surfaced after someone was dead, the survivor was left to deal with the whole thing alone. Unfortunately, Ali knew all about that kind of pain—from the inside out—and she worried about Bryan and whether or not he’d be able to handle whatever else might be hidden in his dead wife’s computer files.

“I’m so sorry,” Ali said. “I’m not sure if you ever heard about it, but something very similar happened to me. There were things my former husband did behind my back that I never knew about until after he was dead.”

“When it was too late and there wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it,” Bryan Forester added bitterly. There were tears in his eyes.

Ali pretended not to notice. “That’s pretty much it,” she agreed. Her heart went out to the man. How could it not? And even though she expected the rest of the world would deem her a fool, she decided right then that she would trust him on the cabinet deal. Besides, he wasn’t asking for her money to go to him. He wanted Ali to pay the cabinet manufacturer directly.

“Where do you want me to wire the payment?” she asked.

Bryan let his breath out in a sigh of gratitude. “Thank you,” he said. “You have no idea how much this means to me.”

Before Ali could reply, her attention was drawn to the sound of raised voices coming from the open door of the house. The words, indistinct at first, became clearer as the speaker moved closer.

“You’ve got a job to do, and so do I,” Billy insisted, his voice raised to a near shout. “I’ve wasted enough time answering questions. Now get the hell out of here.”

Dave Holman emerged from the house a few minutes later, trailed by the two cameramen, one of whom had his camera shoulder-high and running. Obviously, it had occurred to at least one of them that, with a homicide investigation under way, their mundane Mid-Century Revival filming project may have morphed into something that might be more profitable.

The videographers may have been filming for some time, but this was the first Dave seemed to notice. “Hey, you two,” he said. “What the hell are you doing? This is a homicide investigation. Turn that thing off.”

The two cameramen, Raymond and Robert, were virtually interchangeable. At that moment, Ali still couldn’t tell them apart, but on this score, she was in full agreement with Dave Holman.

“That’s right,” she told them. “This falls outside our filming guidelines. Do what he said. Turn it off.”

Dave glanced toward Ali. When he caught sight of Bryan Forester, he stiffened. “What’s he doing here?” the detective asked.

“Talking to my client,” Bryan answered in Ali’s place. “In case you haven’t noticed, we have a job to finish here.”

Without another word, Bryan rose from the table. He stalked off across the driveway and strode past both the detective and the cameramen. Billy Barnes and Bryan walked into the house together. Dave, meanwhile, came over to the table where Ali was sitting. “What’s he doing here?” he asked again. “What did he want?”

“He already told you what he was doing here,” Ali corrected. “We were conferring about the best way to get my project finished.”

Dave made no attempt to conceal his disbelief. “The day after his wife was murdered? Sure he was. It’s a lot more likely he’s making the rounds, trying to make sure his people have their stories straight about where he was and what he did yesterday.”

“Dave—” Ali began.

“Have you ever seen someone who’s been beaten to death?” Dave demanded, cutting her off. “Morgan Forester died a horrible death on the front porch of her own home. She was beaten to death—so savagely that her face is barely recognizable. I can’t believe those poor little girls came home and found their mother like that. Do I think this was a crime of opportunity—that some stranger just happened to stop by their place, found her home alone, and slaughtered her because he could? No way, Ali. Like I told you last night, when homicide cops see this kind of mindless fury, this kind of rage, we usually don’t have to go looking for some kind of stranger/danger perpetrator. Killers like this are mostly found a whole lot closer to home.”

“Bryan didn’t kill his wife,” Ali asserted quietly.

“Oh, really?” Dave returned. “How can you be so sure of that? Because he told you so?”

“Because I know the man,” Ali insisted. “He’s a nice guy who’s worked for me for months. He just wouldn’t, that’s all.”

“Right,” Dave said. “Billy Barnes has known Bryan since high school, and he says the same thing—he just wouldn’t. Don’t be naive, Ali. When a man’s world gets turned upside down, not even his mother knows what he might be capable of.”

When Ali didn’t reply to that, Dave pulled his car keys out of his pocket and walked away. Since he had arrived first, his car was parked on the far side of Bryan Forester’s truck. Instead of going straight to his sedan, Dave made a slow circuit of Bryan’s Dodge Ram, peering into the bed of the pickup. Halfway around the truck, even with the far back tire, he stopped cold, leaned over, and stared. Then, pulling a pair of latex gloves out of his back pocket, he reached into the pickup, removed something, and took it with him when he drove away.

For a moment Ali stood there in shocked silence. What was that? she wondered. But she knew what it had looked like—a hammer. And why did Dave take it? But she knew the answer to that, too. Dave had taken whatever it was because he thought it was evidence in his case—evidence that hadn’t required a search warrant because it had been lying in plain sight.

“Are you all right?” Leland Brooks had appeared soundlessly behind Ali and was examining her face with some concern.

“Yes,” she said, a little too quickly. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine,” he returned. With a firm hold on her upper arm, he led her back to the table. “Come sit down, then,” he said. “Let me get you something—coffee, tea, or even something a bit stronger? Perhaps a hot toddy is in order.”

Shaking her head, Ali managed to laugh off his suggestion. She reached for her now-cold coffee. “No, thanks,” she said. “That’s not necessary. I’ll just sit here for a few minutes.”

“Well, at least let me call and cancel your afternoon appointment,” Leland suggested. “There’s no point in going through with it if you’re not feeling up to snuff.”

At first Ali didn’t remember what appointment he meant, but then she did. As a high school senior, Ali had been the surprised recipient of the very first Amelia Dougherty Askins Scholarship, an award that had made it possible for her to go on to college. Now, over twenty years later and through a series of fluke circumstances, Ali found herself in charge of administering the scholarship program that had once benefitted her.

Rather than being part of the regular financial aid programs, the Askins Scholarship had a somewhat unorthodox selection process. There was no formal application. Early in September, Leland Brooks, after months of investigation, had presented Ali with a list of ten possible candidates. The deserving students were drawn from the Verde Valley’s various secondary schools. Once Ali and Leland had winnowed that list down to three finalists, Leland had gone about collecting as much information as possible on all three. Ali had decided that before making her final decision, she wanted to interview each of the candidates. The first of those interviews was scheduled for later that day.

“So you don’t want me to cancel your meeting with Miss Marsh?” Leland confirmed. Haley Marsh, a seventeen-year-old single mother, was a senior at Cottonwood’s Mingus Mountain Union High School.

“No,” Ali said. “Considering what’s going on around here today, a drive over to Cottonwood would probably be good for what ails me. It’s not until afternoon, though. In the meantime it might be a good idea if I spent an hour or so going over the files on all the finalists.”

Leland nodded. “Very well,” he said.

Just then Bryan emerged from the house. Ali was relieved when he merely nodded in her direction and walked to his pickup without bothering to engage her in conversation. He clambered into the vehicle, wheeled it around, and drove out of the driveway.

What if Dave is right about Bryan Forester? Ali wondered. And what should I do about the cabinet order? She had told Bryan she’d wire the money to get the rush job started, but should she? Wouldn’t that be sending good money after bad?

Ali sat there for some time thinking about it, but then the whining sound of someone installing wallboard screws came to her attention. It was a wake-up call. Regardless of what was going on with Bryan, the job was moving forward. If her remodeling project was ever going to be completed, and no matter who was doing the actual work, Ali would need those cabinets on hand sooner rather than later. She spent the next little while making sure her rush order of cabinets was under way.

She was still at the table and finishing up on the cabinet call when the two cameramen came over to the table and helped themselves to coffee and doughnuts. They seemed surprised to see her.

“I want this morning’s tape,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

Which one is he? Ali wondered. Robert or Raymond?

“The tape,” she said. “The one you were doing this morning when Detective Holman was here. You were hired to film a home remodel. You weren’t hired to film a homicide investigation.”

“But it’s all part of the same—”

“Detective Holman’s visit doesn’t fall under the heading of home remodel,” Ali insisted. “I want whatever film you may have taken of that. I clearly remember stipulating in the contract that I had the right to say what film would be released to the public and what wouldn’t. That means I want a copy of the whole tape. That way, if all or part of it is released to any venue without my express approval, I’ll know where the material came from.”

“But what about the wallboard installation?” Robert/Raymond objected. “That’s on the same set of footage.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, the crew is still hanging wallboard,” she said. “You’ll have plenty of usable footage on that, but the cop stuff is off limits—all of it.”

“Well,” Robert/Raymond said, “I can’t just give it to you. It’s not that simple. This equipment doesn’t create an actual tape, as such. I can send you the file by e-mail, if you like.”

“E-mail is fine,” Ali said. “But I want it today, no later than five. And if I were you, I’d make damned sure that I didn’t accidentally e-mail it to anyone else, either. I’m the one who determines who gets the material and who doesn’t. If you try passing my film along to someone who isn’t authorized to have it, be advised: I have plenty of trial attorneys at the ready who’ll be only too glad to take you to court and hold you accountable.”

The two cameramen walked away, grumbling to themselves, as Leland Brooks appeared with three file folders in hand. “Good,” he said. “The two of them are forever throwing their weight around. It’s about time someone put them in their places.” With a ceremonial flourish, he set the folders on the table in front of Ali. “Here you are,” he added. “The official dossiers, as it were. When I put these together, I always feel a bit like M from the old James Bond movies.”

“Don’t you mean Q?” Ali asked. “He’s the one with the gadgets. Isn’t M a woman?”

“I know,” Leland replied with an impish grin. “I definitely mean M.”

Ali remembered the night Arabella Ashcroft had realized that her long-term butler was gay. She had hit the roof about it. Ali liked the fact that Leland felt free to tease with her about the situation.

Ali spread the folders out in front of her and glanced at the three names. Two of the candidates were female—Haley Marsh, from Cottonwood, and Marissa Dvorak, from Sedona. The male was Ricky Farraday, also from Sedona High School.

Leland reached down and tapped Ricky’s file. “As far as I’m concerned, he’s out.”

In the spring of his junior year, Ricky Farraday had gained some national exposure as the victim of Sedona High School’s first ever documented hate crime when he’d been publicly outed by having his locker filled with swarms of fruit flies. The ACLU had come to his rescue and had obtained an undisclosed monetary settlement. He had also been thrown out of the house by his hard-nosed, homophobic father. Ali knew from things Chris had mentioned that Ricky was now living in an apartment on his own—at his parents’ expense—as a supposedly emancipated adult.

Even though Askins Scholarship winners were traditionally female, Ali hadn’t objected when Leland Brooks had put Ricky’s name on the list. Ricky’s grades up through his junior year had certainly merited that. Then there was the similarity between Ricky Farraday’s background and Leland Brooks’s own family history. After serving with the Royal Marines during the Korean War, Leland had been cast aside by his nearest and dearest because they hadn’t wanted “his sort hanging about.” Being rejected by his blood relations was the real reason Leland had emigrated from the UK to the States. Bearing all that in mind, Ali was somewhat startled to hear that Leland was prepared to kick Ricky Farraday off Scholarship Island.

“How come?” she asked. She more than half expected to hear that since he was living on his own, his senior-year GPA wasn’t good enough. That was what often happened when kids went off to live without parental supervision for the first time.

“Because he’s a fraud,” Leland declared forcefully. “A lying, cheating fraud.”

Ali was stunned. “You mean he’s not gay?”

“He may be gay,” Leland allowed. “Although I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced of that, either. My main problem with Ricky is that I’ve gotten to the bottom of the fruit-fly escapade. He’s a victim of a self-inflicted hate crime.”

“You mean he put those fruit flies in his own locker?” Ali asked.

“A friend of Ricky’s put them there at his insistence. He was at war with his father and was looking for a way to get thrown out of the house, and he certainly succeeded in that. Yes, he’s living on his own, but with that undeserved windfall from his court case, he doesn’t really need any scholarship help. That’s just my opinion, however. Go ahead and read all three dossiers. The final decision is yours, but I think either one of the two girls would make a better choice.”

Ali didn’t ask how Leland had uncovered all these details, but she was prepared to accept his considered opinion on the subject. Setting aside Ricky Farraday’s file, she spent the rest of the morning in the canopy-covered break room, working her way through the two remaining dossiers. Although both Marissa Dvorak and Haley Marsh were capable students, neither was performing at the valedictorian or salutatorian level, where scholarship help would have been much more plentiful. The two girls were solidly second-tier students.

Marissa Dvorak had been adopted as a ten-year-old from an orphanage in the Ukraine. Juvenile arthritis had left her confined to a wheelchair prior to her freshman year in high school. Lengthy hospital stays and prolonged absences had limited her academic achievement and had also contributed to a lower GPA than she would have had otherwise. Nonetheless, she was a serious student who gravitated toward classes in science and math. Her single extracurricular activity was the chess club, where she had easily walked away with the state championship.

According to what Leland had been able to learn from interviewing friends and teachers, Marissa hoped to attend the University of Arizona as a premed student with the eventual goal of doing medical research. For right now, her hopes and dreams were stymied by the fact that her parents, who ran a chain of dry-cleaning establishments, made too much money for her to qualify for most forms of financial aid other than student loans. Both she and her parents were reluctant to sign up for those—a situation Ali Reynolds understood very well.

Haley Marsh, along with her maternal grandmother, Nelda Harris, had moved to Cottonwood a little over two years earlier from Tuttle, Oklahoma. Haley had enrolled in Mingus Mountain as a very pregnant fifteen-year-old sophomore. Despite being an unmarried teenage mother, Haley had managed to maintain a solid 3.2 GPA for as long as she’d attended Mingus Mountain. Nelda, who worked as a school janitor in the afternoons and evenings, looked after the baby during the day while Haley was at school, and on weekends while Haley held a part-time job as a cashier at the local Target.

Faye Gerrard, Haley’s homeroom teacher and her junior-year English teacher, was the one who had brought Haley to Leland Brooks’s attention. “The girl is smarter than she knows,” Faye had told Leland. “What she’s lacking is self-confidence. I don’t think anyone else in her family has ever gone on to college. She’s somehow decided that since they didn’t, she won’t, either.”

Haley’s file left more questions than it offered answers. Where were Haley’s parents? Why weren’t they in the picture or even mentioned? And what about the baby’s father? Where was he? Who was he?

Ali Reynolds found it easy to relate to both girls. Like them, she had been a second-tier student. For her, receiving the Askins Scholarship was the one thing that had made going on to school possible. She suspected the same would be true for either Marissa or Haley. One would have to overcome tough physical realities. As for Haley? Ali knew that being a single parent and going to school wasn’t easy, but she also knew it could be done. Ali Reynolds herself was proof positive of that.

Marissa had a definite career goal in mind. The information on Haley gave no hint as to what her possible career choices might be, but Ali didn’t find that particularly alarming. After all, how many high school seniors already knew exactly what they wanted to be when they grew up?

Ali abandoned her spot at the picnic table when the workers came wandering outside for lunch. Relieved to leave the construction behind, she grabbed some lunch on the way and then stopped by a Hallmark store and searched until she found just the right card for Chris and Athena. After ordering a bouquet of flowers to be delivered to the high school gym in time for their engagement celebration, she headed for Cottonwood.

It wasn’t until she was alone in the car that she started thinking about Morgan Forester again—about Morgan and Bryan, about how the love two people once shared for each other could go horribly wrong. After all, when she had first met Paul Grayson, he had showered her with flowers, one arrangement after another, so many that her friends at work had teased her about being able to open her own flower shop. The onslaught of bouquets had started to dwindle shortly after their wedding, and the deliveries had ended completely long before Paul had ended up dead under that speeding freight train.

Ali was relieved when she arrived at Haley Marsh’s place, a modest duplex on the far-east side of Cottonwood. When Ali knocked, she heard a toddler, crowing and babbling, come racing to answer it.

“Get out of the way,” Ali heard a woman’s voice order from inside the house. “Let me open it.” Ali recognized the gentle drawl that betrayed the mother’s Oklahoma origins.

The child must have stepped aside because eventually the door opened. Haley Marsh was a petite blue-eyed blonde. One arm was filled with an overflowing laundry basket, while a wide-eyed child with chocolate-brown skin and a cap of curly black hair peeked shyly out from behind his mother’s leg. Looking at him, Ali estimated that he had to be right around two years old.

“Haley Marsh?” Ali asked. “My name is Ali Reynolds.”

Haley nodded, but she didn’t open the door to welcome Ali inside. “Mrs. Gerrard said you’d be dropping by today,” Haley said guardedly. “She mentioned something about your wanting to talk to me about a scholarship, but I haven’t applied for any scholarships.”

“May I come in?” Ali asked.

Haley sighed and set down her laundry basket. “I guess,” she said. “But the place is sort of a mess.” She hefted the child onto her hip and motioned Ali into the room. The crammed living room wasn’t really a mess so much as it was lived in. A playpen empty except for a collection of outgrown toys was jammed into one corner of the room along with a changing table. Baby gear and more toys were scattered everywhere. Half the dining room table was covered with stacks of folded laundry. An open schoolbook and a notebook of some kind lay on the other end of the table as though an afternoon study session had been interrupted by Ali’s arrival. A high chair, littered with the remains of the toddler’s afternoon snack, sat nearby.

Still holding the squirming child, Haley ushered Ali over to a sagging couch, then she took a seat on a nearby straight-backed chair. As soon as she was seated, the barefoot baby scrambled out of her lap and scooped up a tiny plastic truck from the floor. With a face-wide grin, he brought the toy to Ali and offered it to her. Ali accepted the proffered gift with a thank-you. The child clapped his hands in glee, said something that sounded very much like “truck,” and then dashed off in search of another one.

“Good sharing,” Haley told her son. To Ali, she added, “He likes having company.”

“He’s adorable,” Ali said. “What’s his name.”

“Liam,” Haley answered. “After my grandfather.”

Not after his father, Ali thought. She couldn’t help wondering how this clearly African-American child would go about explaining his very Irish first name as he grew up. And was the fact that Haley had been expecting a mixed-race child part of why she and her grandmother had pulled up stakes and moved to Arizona?

“I’m here on behalf of the Amelia Dougherty Askins Scholarship fund,” Ali explained. “The first Askins Scholarship was given to me years ago, when I was a senior in high school, and it made all the difference. My parents own the Sugarloaf Café in Sedona. At that point they had a viable business but not much money. Without the scholarship, I wouldn’t have been able to go on to college; with it, I could and did. They say what goes around comes around. Now I’ve been put in charge of distributing the scholarship that was so helpful to me.

“You’ve been brought to our attention as an especially deserving student. I wanted to have an opportunity to talk to you about it. I wanted to see if your receiving a scholarship from us would help you go on to college.”

“With him here and getting into everything, it’s hard enough just going to high school,” Haley said. “How could I possibly go on to college?”

“But you’d like to?” Ali pressed.

“I suppose so,” Haley admitted a little wistfully. “But I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“What were you planning to do instead?” Ali asked.

“Work,” Haley answered. “My manager at Target promised me a full-time position once I graduate. All I want to do is earn enough so Liam and I can rent a place of our own. Give Grandma a little peace and quiet for a change. She already raised me. It’s not fair that she’s having to raise him, too.”

“If you could do anything you wanted, what kind of work would you choose?” Ali asked.

“I suppose I’d be a nurse,” Haley said without hesitation. “I’d also like to be Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. The chances of that happening aren’t very good, either. For now all I want is to graduate from high school and for Liam and me to be on our own.”

“But if someone would help you,” Ali began. “If someone offered to help pay your way—”

Liam came back over to his mother, scrambled up into her lap, and cuddled up against her breast. Ali knew that, as a general rule, it was a bad idea for babies to have babies, but clearly, Haley Marsh was a good mother—an exceptionally good mother.

“If you had a better education, there’d be more opportunities for Liam,” Ali said. “And more opportunities for you, too.”

Suddenly, Haley’s bright blue eyes sparked in anger. “You don’t know that,” she declared hotly. “You don’t know anything about us. You don’t get to come in here with your fancy checkbook and think that gives you the right to judge us or tell us what we should do or shouldn’t do.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Yes, you did,” Haley interrupted. “But this is my baby. I had him on my own, and I’m raising him on my own. Grandma’s been wonderful to us. I don’t know how we would have made it without her. But I’ll be eighteen in May. It’s not fair to ask her to do any more. It’s time for us to move out and be on our own. I can’t do that and go to school, too. So thanks for the scholarship offer, but no thanks.”

It wasn’t quite the response Ali had expected. She had thought Haley would be as thrilled as Ali herself had been to learn she was even under consideration for a possible scholarship. She never expected that her offer would be turned down cold.

“This is important. Before you decide, shouldn’t you at least discuss it with your grandmother?” Ali asked. “Yes, if you go on to school, it may take a few years longer for you and Liam to be out on your own, but obviously, your grandmother loves you very much. Surely she wouldn’t mind—”

“No,” Haley insisted. “I don’t want it. We’ll be fine. Give it to someone else.”

“But—”

“I’m not going to ask her,” Haley said. “My grandmother looks after Liam while I’m at school, and then she works from four o’clock in the afternoon until midnight. She can’t go on working that hard forever. It’s bad enough that she’s doing it while I’m in high school. I couldn’t ask her to do the same thing so I can go to college. I can’t and I won’t. She’s done enough for us already. Now go, please. I’ve got homework to do.”

“Won’t you please reconsider?” Ali asked.

Haley was having none of it. “Thank you but no thanks,” she said. “I appreciate the offer.”

Rebuffed, Ali stood up and held out the toy truck. Liam scrambled out of his mother’s lap and dashed over to collect it. As Ali made her way to the door, she opened her purse and pulled out a business card, which she handed over to Haley. “Given the cost of tuition, books, and room and board, the scholarship could turn out to be a substantial amount of money over the next several years,” she said. “If you happen to change your mind…”

Haley took the card and then dropped it on a nearby end table. “Right,” she said. “I’ll let you know.”

Moments later, feeling as though she’d been given the bum’s rush, Ali found herself in the yard outside.

What kind of a salesman does that make me? she wondered. I can’t even give money away.

CHAPTER 5

With both Ricky Farraday and Haley Marsh officially out of the running, Marissa Dvorak was the only remaining candidate for that year’s scholarship. Ali’s appointment with Marissa was scheduled for tomorrow. In the meantime, awash in a sense of failure, she headed back to Sedona. She couldn’t help but contrast the ecstatic, grateful way she had felt when Anna Lee Ashcroft had told Ali about her scholarship with the way Haley Marsh had received similar news.

Ali picked up the phone and dialed Leland’s number. “How’d it go?” he asked.

“Not well,” Ali told him. “Haley Marsh told me to take my scholarship and shove it, then she threw me out of the house.”

“She wasn’t interested?”

“You could say so. She was vehemently not interested. Not interested in going on to school and not interested in receiving a scholarship.”

“That wasn’t the impression I got from speaking with her grandmother,” Leland replied. “It sounded as though she was interested in Haley continuing on to university.”

“You talked to Nelda Harris about the scholarship?” Ali asked.

“Only in the most general terms,” Leland replied. “I led her to believe Haley was being considered for some kind of academic award, but I didn’t mention the scholarship per se.”

“Then grandmother and granddaughter need to get on the same page,” Ali told him. “At this rate, we’ll be lucky if we award an Askins Scholarship this year.”

“Don’t be discouraged,” Leland counseled. “There’s always Marissa Dvorak.”

“She’ll probably throw me out, too,” Ali said despairingly. “What’s happening on your end?”

“Bryan Forester came by and dropped off another load of wallboard,” Leland said. “Dropped it off and unloaded it, too. The crew had run out of materials and gone home.”

“He unloaded it by himself?” Ali asked. “That stuff is heavy.”

“By himself,” Leland confirmed. “And I can understand where he’s coming from. Mr. Forester strikes me as a man of action. Doing some hard physical labor probably did him a world of good. Maybe he’ll be tired enough to sleep. I doubt he did last night.”

Ali doubted that, too.

“Oh,” Leland added, “he wanted me to let you know that he heard from the cabinet company, verifying that the funds had been received and that your order was in process. They told him they have enough material in stock to do your entire order, and they’re getting started on it right away. They’re hoping to ship in two weeks, but that may be pushing it.”

“So much for Thanksgiving,” Ali said.

“What do you mean?” Leland asked.

Now that she had opened her mouth, Ali regretted it. Considering the fact that Bryan’s whole family was coming apart, it seemed incredibly selfish for her to have brought it up. Now that she had started, however, she charged on.

“I was hoping I’d be able to invite people over to the new place for Thanksgiving dinner,” she said. “Even if everything wasn’t quite finished, I figured we’d be able to make do.”

“Does Mr. Forester know about your dinner plans?” Leland asked.

“Not really,” Ali admitted. “I never mentioned it to him. I didn’t want to add any more deadline pressure than there already was. Besides, it’s not that big a deal. I can always invite everyone over to my old house in Skyview. It’s the principle of the thing—and a matter of changing my mind. That’s all.”

“Finished or not, if you’d rather have your guests come here, we’ll have them here,” Leland Brooks declared. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a very capable cook. If I could cook food for the officers’ mess in Korea in the cold and the mud, I’m sure I can manage this. How many people are we talking about?”

“Not that many. My parents, Christopher and Athena, Dave and his three kids, one of my friends from California. Mom probably wouldn’t mind doing the turkey. She usually does, but she and Dad cook every single day of their lives. I wanted to give them a break.”

“Not to worry,” Leland said. “We’ll work it out. You come up with the guest list, and I’ll manage the rest. We’ll make it a memorable occasion. And speaking of occasions, the florist called. They said they tried to deliver your flowers to the gym, but the place was locked up tight. I’m having them deliver them to me here instead. I’ll drop them off a little later myself. That will give me an opportunity to give the lucky couple my own good wishes as well.”

Ali tried to remember if she had mentioned the engagement news to Leland. With everything else that had been happening throughout the day, it didn’t seem likely.

“So you know about that?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” Leland Brooks replied. “Mr. Reynolds came to me a couple of weeks ago with some concerns about where to take the ring to have it redesigned and resized. I sent him to see the man who used to handle all of Miss Arabella’s work. I hope he was pleased with the results.”

“I’m sure he was,” Ali said. “And I’m sure Chris appreciated having the benefit of your advice.”

Ali couldn’t help feeling slightly left out. Yes, she knew that Chris and Athena had wanted to surprise her, but her folks had both known about Chris’s engagement well in advance of last night’s ring unveiling. Obviously, the same was true for Leland Brooks.

I always tried to raise him to be independent, Ali thought ruefully. I may have succeeded too well.

When Peter woke up, he needed to pee like a racehorse and was astonished to see that he had slept for the better part of ten hours. When he was younger, he had been able to manage on far less sleep than that. It was, he supposed, part of getting older rather than better. He fixed coffee and some toast. Then he uploaded the memory stick from his camera and, after deleting some of the less-well-thought-out shots, added the remainder to his DVD.

Scrolling through them, he congratulated himself on the fact that the crimes were all different. Morgan, still dressed, lay half in and out of the swing with her face battered and bloodied beyond recognition. He had arranged Candace so she lay on the ground with her various pieces put back together in all the wrong places—like a macabre human picture puzzle gone horribly wrong. He had heard that a novice FBI profiler had claimed this indicated a highly disorganized killer. Peter had laughed outright when he heard that; he was anything but disorganized. Melanie Tyler had been shot to death with her husband’s .38, while Debra Longworth had been stabbed to death before being the victim of a vicious postmortem sexual assault. And that was another part of being smart. Never do it the same way twice.

The pictures were fine, but Peter was feeling vaguely displeased with himself as he stowed the DVD in his safe. He spent some time examining the diamond he had removed from Morgan’s finger. It was large and showy, though Peter understood enough about diamonds to know that it wasn’t as flawless as it should have been. But then Morgan hadn’t been flawless, either. With a sigh, he returned the precious diamond-loaded key ring to its customary hiding place.

After one of his exploits, Peter usually spent the next day patting himself on the back. After all, who else was going to tell him “good job”? This time he couldn’t quite manage it. Yes, by trying to track him down, Morgan Forester had posed a threat to him. As a result, she had gotten exactly what she deserved. But had it been worth it? Usually, he came back from a kill with a euphoric sense of accomplishment. Today he was left with a lingering sense of forboding.

When Rita had fallen off the mountain, he had been right there with her. Naturally, he had been a person of interest in that case, but the cops had never charged him. With the others, he had managed to make sure his name had never surfaced in the resulting investigations, and all those cases had gone cold without ever being solved. This time he worried that he might have made a mistake. He couldn’t get that asshole from Hertz out of his mind.

One of the things Peter counted on in life was that worker bees would function that way—as miserable drones who collected their paltry paychecks without caring that much about doing their job. Peter’s big problem with the guy running the Hertz check-in line was that he hadn’t just been doing his job. He had actually been paying attention. How carefully had he been watching, and if questions were raised, how much would he remember?

For the first time, Peter realized that he might have made a slight miscalculation. He had used Matthew Morrison’s name for car-rental purposes because he could. Because Matthew Morrison was convenient. Because he was as good a fall guy as any.

People said that being a doctor let you play God. That was especially true in the ER. Patients came in. Peter sewed them up and patched them up. Some lived; others died; and after Peter was done with the ones who survived, he turned them over to other doctors who helped them go on with the messy business of living. But what he did and didn’t do with his patients in the ER was nothing compared to the havoc he could wreak in people’s lives when, as Internet puppet master, he could run them up and down a flagpole at will—as he had with Matthew Morrison.

Much as Peter despised cheating women, that was nothing compared to his overriding contempt for weak-willed, pussy-whipped men like Morrison. Peter had created Suzie Q—her name, her profile, her e-mails, her everything. He had penned every word of Susan’s half of the e-mail correspondence, and it had amused him to see how smitten Matt had been, how he had fallen under the faux Susan’s spell. In return, Matt had poured out the details of his miserable, boring life—his deadly dull job and his loveless marriage to the appalling Mrs. Morrison, the loathsome Jenny.

As far as Peter was concerned, Matthew was less than nothing. Peter had used the man’s hijacked identity for the car rental without the smallest concern that anyone would notice. And even if someone did notice, Peter couldn’t help wondering how Matthew would manage to talk his way out of that. The man was utterly petrified of losing his job. It didn’t seem likely that he would have the balls to tell someone that he couldn’t possibly have murdered Morgan in Sedona, since at the time she died, he was down in Red Rock waiting to get it on with some hot-to-trot sexy babe named Susan—who didn’t, in actual fact, exist.

Peter had looked forward to watching Matt squirm, but because of the guy at Hertz, he’d have to deny himself that pleasure. He scanned through a couple of the thirteen plaintive, groveling, apologetic e-mails Matt had sent to Susan in the course of the last twenty-four hours. Too bad there was no time to reply. With a few clicks on his keyboard, Peter closed the e-mail account. Then he went to Singleatheart.com, found Suzie Q, and deleted her so thoroughly that no one but the most determined of hackers could have found the smallest cyber trace of her.

That done, Peter turned his attentions to Matt Morrison’s hapless computer. Peter had kept his file-eating Trojan lurking undetected in the background of Morrison’s HP for a very long time. Again, all it took was a few keystrokes to bring the worm to life. When Matt came home from work that afternoon and tried to log on as he usually did, the worm would destroy his hard drive. He wouldn’t be able to boot up. The only thing left on his desktop would be the blue screen of death.

Taking out Matthew’s computer meant that Peter would no longer have an unauthorized window into the man’s pathetic life. Though Peter had enjoyed the game as long as it lasted, now it was over.

So long, Matt, Peter thought as he typed in the command. It’s been good to know ya.

And then, having set the worm in motion on Matt’s computer, Peter turned his attentions to those that belonged to the Foresters. Through spying on Morgan’s files, Peter had managed to gain unlimited access to Bryan’s computer. Peter hoped that by waiting this long he had given cops ample opportunity to find the bloodied hammer in Bryan’s truck and that they would now be focusing their investigation in that direction. He was certain that the homicide detectives involved would take a very dim view of having their prime suspect’s files suddenly disappear from the family’s computers. Forester could shout to all the world that someone else had destroyed the data, but under the circumstances, who would believe such a story? The missing files would make him seem that much more guilty.

With a few masterful key strokes, Peter launched that destructive process as well, then he turned off his computer and headed for the gym. What he needed before work was a good workout and a nice lunch or dinner.

With Morgan gone, he was once again ready to go on the hunt for a new woman. He knew he was blessed with relatively good looks. When it came to attracting women, that always helped. So did good muscle tone and properly defined abs and biceps. This time, though, he hoped he’d find someone who didn’t ask so many questions.

Peter remembered his mother telling him once that curiosity killed the cat. He had been a little boy at the time, only seven or eight. He had wondered about the statement, trying to figure out exactly how it worked. He no longer wondered about it because he knew it was true.

So did Morgan Forester.

Ali was back home by four-thirty. After showering, still wearing her robe, she turned on her computer and logged on to the Internet. She had been reassured by Leland Brooks. Now, regardless of whether or not her stalled home remodel would be finished in time for Thanksgiving, Ali was determined to start issuing holiday invitations. To that end, she was relieved to see Velma Trimble’s screen name, VelmaT, on her buddy list.

Velma T, an eighty-six-year-old widow from Laguna Niguel, had started out as a fan of Ali’s blog. Over months of regular correspondence, a friendship had grown up between them. When Velma was diagnosed with cancer, both her son and her doctor had been more than willing to write her off. Ali had been the one who had stepped up and encouraged Velma to seek a second opinion. With that dire second opinion, Velma, too, had been willing to give up. She had gone off on what was to have been a final splurge, an all-first-class, round-the-world tour. Much to Ali’s surprise, Velma had returned from the trip determined to undergo treatment.

“That’s what Maddy Watkins told me,” Velma had said, referring to the retired schoolteacher from Washington State who had been her traveling companion on the trip. “Anyone who’s tough enough to go see Mount Kilimanjaro is tough enough to fight cancer.”

Now that Velma was finishing her second round of chemo, Ali wanted her to come to Sedona for Thanksgiving dinner. She immediately sent an instant message to that effect and received an almost instantaneous reply:

Velma T: I couldn’t possibly. I’m bald as a billiard. I look a fright. Ghastly.

Babe: I’m inviting you to come have dinner. It’s not a beauty pageant.

Velma T: Who all would be there?

Babe: My parents. My son and future daughter-in-law. A few friends.

Velma T: But how would I get there? You know I don’t have a car. Don’t drive.

Babe: Just say you’ll come. Let me worry about getting you here.

Velma T: It’s so close. You probably wouldn’t get a very good fare.

Babe: See reply above. I’ll worry about that.

Velma T: I already told my daughter-in-law that I was booked. That was a lie. Now it could be true.

Babe: Is that a yes?

Velma T: Even if I’m bald?

Babe: Especially if you’re bald.

Velma T: Fair enough, then. It’s a yes.

Babe: Okay. Details to follow.

Ali’s phone rang as she was signing off. Her parent’s number showed on the caller ID screen, but since her father avoided using the telephone as much as possible, there wasn’t much chance Bob Larson would be calling.

“Hello, Mom,” Ali said. “What’s up?”

“Nothing much,” Edie said. “I was just worried about you, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Because of all this business with Bryan Forester. What’s going to happen to your house? What if he gets thrown into jail and your job doesn’t get finished?”

This was probably not the right time to mention the cabinet order for which, if things fell apart, Ali would be paying 50 percent more for than the original agreed-upon price.

“It’ll be finished,” Ali declared with more confidence than she felt. “I’ve definitely decided to go ahead with Thanksgiving dinner. Please mark it on your calendar.”

“And where do you plan to have it?” Edie wanted to know. “In the driveway? I heard they were just installing wallboard today. You’ve got a long way to go before the place is going to be ready for occupancy.”

“Turkey dinner is at my house,” Ali said. “If not that one, then this one, and that’s final.”

“What do you want us to bring?”

“Nothing,” Ali said. “I’ll handle it.”

The long silence that followed meant that Edie wasn’t entirely convinced. “All right, then,” she said. “But have you ever cooked a turkey before?”

“Don’t worry,” Ali said. “I’ll figure it out. I can read a recipe.” And so can Leland Brooks, she thought.

“Is Dave coming to Chris and Athena’s get-together at the gym tonight?” Edie asked, changing the subject. “He loves my pumpkin pies. I’ve made one especially for him.”

When it came to Dave Holman, Edie and Bob Larson were absolutely transparent. Ali’s parents really liked the guy and were lobbying to the best of their ability for Dave and Ali to land in some kind of permanent arrangement. Ali had attempted to explain the changed dynamics in the relationship, but it made no difference. Bob and Edie’s minds were made up. They weren’t listening.

“He may be coming,” Ali said. “He was here at the house for a while last night. I know Chris invited him tonight, but I don’t know if he’ll be there.”

“Well, then,” Edie said determinedly. “I’ll bring his pumpkin pie to the gym along with everything else, just in case.”

“Everything else?” Ali echoed. “I thought Athena said Hawaiian Punch and storebought cookies.”

“Christopher is my grandson!” Edie said indignantly. “You don’t suppose I’d let him celebrate his engagement with a batch of storebought cookies, do you?”

“No,” Ali agreed with a laugh. “I don’t suppose you would.”

Just then her e-mail announced the arrival of a new message. And there, moments before the five P.M. deadline she had given them, was a video-bearing e-mail from Raymond Armado. Once Ali got off the phone with her mother, it took her a while to download the attached file. When she finally opened it, she fast-forwarded through the parts that consisted of Billy Barnes and the other guys dutifully hanging wallboard. Boring. Steady. Absolutely unexciting. Toward the end of the film segment, however, Dave Holman, notebook in hand, appeared on the scene. That sequence began with Billy Barnes glancing at his watch and with Ali exiting the frame.

“What can you tell me about Bryan Forester’s situation yesterday?” Dave asked on the video without preamble.

“He was here from around ten A.M. on,” Bryan answered. “We had a problem with a building inspector. Once he got here, he was here for the rest of the day.”

“He didn’t come and go?”

“Nope,” Billy said impatiently. “I already told you. He was here all day long.”

“Did he seem upset to you?”

Billy made a face and shrugged, but Ali knew the answer to that was yes. When she’d had dealings with Bryan herself on Monday, he had appeared to be distracted and off his game. She had assumed it had something to do with the building inspector or with the slow progress of construction or even the missing cabinets. Now it seemed possible that something else had been bothering him.

“Were you aware of any difficulties he and his wife might have been having?” Dave asked.

“What husband and wife doesn’t have difficulties?” Billy returned. “Of course they were having difficulties.”

“Do you know what kind?”

“I’d rather not say,” Billy said.

“Look,” Dave said. “This is a homicide investigation. I need you to answer.”

“Bryan Forester is a nice guy—a regular straight arrow. You’d think a woman would appreciate having a guy like that around, someone who goes to work every day in all kinds of weather, brings home the bacon, and turns the money over to her so she can spend it however she likes, and spend it Morgan did. I never heard the woman say a kind thing about him. All she ever did was gripe, gripe, gripe. Nothing was ever good enough for her, but still, finding out that she’d signed up for an Internet dating site. That just about corked it.”

Dave consulted his notebook. “This Internet dating site. I believe Bryan mentioned something about that. That would be Singleatheart.com, right?”

“I guess,” Billy conceded with a shrug. “Something like that.”

“And Bryan told you about it?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Yesterday morning,” Billy said. “We were out at the picnic table having a smoke. He was fit to be tied. It was his first cigarette in three years, at least.”

“You’re sure it was yesterday that he mentioned it to you? He talked about it on Tuesday, not Monday.”

“I’m sure,” Billy said.

“Did Bryan mention to you how he found out about it or when?”

“The kind of woman she was, I wouldn’t be surprised if she came right out and told him about it herself. Probably wanted to rub his nose in it. Morgan was like that. He did say that they’d fought like cats and dogs all weekend.”

“About?”

“He didn’t say.”

“So they fought like crazy all weekend, and Morgan ended up dead on Monday morning,” Dave muttered, more to himself than to anyone else. “How very convenient.”

“He didn’t kill her,” Billy insisted. “Even if she deserved it, he wouldn’t.”

“Did he say that—that she deserved to die?”

“Bryan never said any such thing,” Billy replied. “I’m the one who said it. As far as I’m concerned, Morgan Forester was bad news. Her family used to be dirt poor, and all she ever wanted was a meal ticket. I don’t think she even liked the guy.”

“You seem to know quite a bit about it,” Dave said.

“You think so?” Billy answered. “Bryan and me go way back. We’ve been friends since high school. Once Morgan turned up on the scene, you could see she thought she was really hot stuff—like she was something special—but she wasn’t. You don’t have to take my word for it. There are plenty of guys around who can tell you Morgan Forester was a good-for-nothing tramp and that Bryan was way too good for her.”

“Sounds like you didn’t care for her much.”

Billy simply shrugged.

“So where were you yesterday morning?” Dave asked.

Billy bristled. “So now you’re accusing me of having something to do with what happened? For your information, I was right here on the job. Had to go out for supplies for a while early in the morning. We were running short on wallboard screws. Other than that, I got here at seven-forty-five and left at four. You can ask anybody. Try Leland Brooks, for starters. He’s usually right outside.”

Someone spoke to Billy from off screen. He nodded, then turned back to Dave. “Look, they need me. I’ve got to get back to work. You’ve got a job to do, and so do I. I’ve wasted enough time answering your damned questions. Now get the hell out of here.”

Dave studied his notebook for a moment before pocketing it and walking away. The camera continued to roll, following him through the house and out the front door. Moments later, he seemed to notice the trailing film crew for the first time and ordered them to stop filming. Seconds later, Ali’s voice said the same thing. Only then did the film fade to black.

When the clip ended, Ali sat staring at the screen. Morgan’s neighbors had thought of her as the perfect stay-at-home wife and mother. But her husband suspected her of embezzling funds, and now it turned out that she’d been prowling the Internet looking for greener pastures while her husband was hard at work.

What kind of perfect wife does that? Ali wondered. And what kind of place is Singleatheart? The name implied that it was a hookup tool for people who were married but who wanted to carry on as though they weren’t. The way Bryan had told the story to Ali, he hadn’t looked at Morgan’s computer files and learned about Singleatheart until after his wife was already dead. But what if that wasn’t true?

What if he learned about it earlier? Ali wondered. What if that was what Bryan and Morgan fought about over the weekend? If that were the case, it made sense that Dave Holman would have settled on Bryan as the prime suspect in his wife’s murder. And maybe the item Ali had witnessed Dave removing from Bryan’s pickup would further implicate Morgan’s widower. From the way Dave had rushed away after finding it, Ali suspected that to be the case.

Still, there was something about the interview she’d just witnessed that gave Ali pause, something that bothered her. Why was it Billy Barnes happened to know so much about everything that was going on with Bryan and Morgan? Were Bryan and Billy really close enough friends that Bryan would have confided in Billy about Morgan’s infidelity and her involvement in Singleatheart? That struck Ali as odd. Most betrayed husbands wouldn’t have admitted such things to anyone, not even their best pals.

And what about Morgan? Ali recognized that she must have been dreadfully unhappy to have risked everything—including life itself—to go shopping for romance on a dating website.

Without really thinking about it, Ali typed “Singleatheart” into her computer’s search engine. Just then Chris came trotting upstairs from his basement studio. “It’s my night to cook. I thought I’d fix some grilled-cheese sandwiches before we go.”

Guiltily, Ali closed her computer before Singleatheart’s home page appeared on the screen. On the night they were due to celebrate her son’s engagement, she didn’t want to spoil his happiness with tales of other marriages that had foundered and come to grief.

“Don’t bother,” she replied. “I’m sure there’s going to be plenty of food at the gym.”

“What kind of food?” Chris asked. “I thought we were just doing cookies and punch.”

Ali laughed. “Guess again,” she told him. “You invited your grandmother, remember? Just plain cookies and punch won’t cut it. They aren’t in Edie Larson’s vocabulary.”

In terms of the abundance of food, Ali’s prediction proved absolutely on the money. Out of deference for the hardwood floor, the engagement party wasn’t in the gym proper but in the tiled lobby right outside. A cloth-covered table inside the door sagged under a load of goodies. The centerpiece was a decorated white sheet cake. Bright red frosting roses were stationed on each corner, while in the middle, resting on a red frosting heart, were a pair of entwined frosting wedding rings.

That eye-stopping cake was only part of Edie Larson’s caloric overkill. There was a tall German chocolate layer cake and a seven-layer straight chocolate cake along with six homemade pies—two each of lemon meringue, pumpkin, and pecan—without a single “storebought” cookie in sight. Those showed up a few minutes later, when Athena arrived followed by a young woman Ali didn’t know. The newcomers came into the room carrying several brimming grocery bags. Ali caught the look of momentary shock on Athena’s face as she took stock of the overloaded table. After some quietly exchanged words, Athena and her friend removed plates, napkins, and plastic forks from the bags and then tactfully stowed everything else under the table.

Once the storebought foodstuffs had disappeared, Athena went over to Edie Larson and gave her a hug. “You shouldn’t have,” she said.

“I couldn’t help it.” Edie was beaming. “I wanted it to be a real party.”

Athena turned questioningly to Ali. “Don’t look at me,” Ali said. “It’s not my fault. I’m responsible for the flowers, and that’s it.”

As the festivities got under way, they soon turned into a real party, starting with a series of Hawaiian Punch toasts. After that, by mutual consent, community-league basketball was canceled for the evening while the erstwhile players swilled punch or coffee and filled up on Edie’s scrumptious collection of sweets. Someone found folding chairs in a closet and set those around the room so people had somewhere to sit while they juggled plates and paper cups. Toward the end of the evening, Ali wandered into a conversation where the young woman who had helped Athena bring in the groceries was speaking with her and two other high school teachers, Lois Mead and Gail Nelson.

“The whole thing just breaks my heart,” the young woman was saying. “Lindsey will be fine, but what about Lacy? She’s already so…breakable. I can’t imagine that she won’t shatter into a million pieces.”

“Lindsey and Lacy?” Ali asked. “You mean the Forester twins?”

The young woman nodded. She seemed close to tears.

“I’m sorry,” Athena said. “Have you two met?”

Ali shook her head. “I don’t believe so.”

“This is my roommate, Mindy. Mindy Farber,” Athena said. “She teaches second grade over in the village. The mother of two of her students was found murdered yesterday. And this is Ali Reynolds, my future mother-in-law.”

Mindy mumbled a polite acknowledgment and then went on talking. Ali already knew more about the situation than she cared to admit, but she stayed on, listening to what Mindy Farber had to say.

“Lacy has issues,” Mindy said. “She’s afraid someone might touch her books, so she carries all of them back and forth with her every day. She never leaves anything in her desk. She doesn’t talk, either, not at all. Maybe she talks at home, but not in school. Last year the principal separated the two girls for first grade. He thought that would force the issue, but it turned into a complete disaster. This year they put them both in my room. Most of the time it’s not a problem. Lacy may not say anything, but Lindsey more than makes up for it. That girl never shuts up. But they’re both smart. And as long as Lacy can write out the answers instead of responding orally, she’s a straight-A student.”

“I heard they’re the ones who found their mother’s body,” Lois Mead commented.

Mindy nodded. “It’s true. They found the body on the front porch after the bus driver dropped them off at the end of their drive. Lindsey was smart enough to call nine-one-one and report it.”

“Do the cops know who’s responsible?” Gail Nelson asked.

“If they do, I haven’t heard,” Mindy said.

“I’ll bet it’s the father,” Gail said. “Isn’t that usually how it turns out? The mother gets murdered, and the father or boyfriend ends up going to jail.”

“If the father did do it, what will happen to the two little girls?”

Mindy shook her head. “I have no idea,” she said. “They’re so young to lose both their parents. Maybe there are other relatives who can step in and help out, but the whole thing makes me sick to my stomach.”

Me, too, Ali thought. Excusing herself, she wandered back over to the table where her mother was sorting leftover cakes and pies into a collection of Styrofoam take-home containers she had brought along from the restaurant.

“Aren’t they a lovely couple!” Edie exclaimed, beaming at Chris and Athena, who were across the room bidding departing partygoers good night.

Ali nodded.

“And I hope they’ll be very happy.”

“So do I.”

“Have they said anything to you about setting a date?”

“Not to me,” Ali replied.

“June is very nice,” Edie observed. “I think we could have a very nice June wedding. If we wait until July or August, it’ll be way too hot.”

Ali knew that her mother had a weak spot for weddings, and it was sounding as though, after turning Chris and Athena’s “intimate” engagement party into a major function, she was determined to do the same thing for their wedding.

“Shouldn’t we leave that up to them?” Ali asked circumspectly.

“Absolutely not,” Edie declared. “We have way more experience with these things than they do. By the way,” she added, “here’s Dave’s pie. Make sure he gets the whole thing. I wouldn’t put it past that son of yours to try stealing a piece.”

CHAPTER 6

A few minutes later, pie in hand, Ali left the gym. Shaken by her mother’s over-the-top interference, Ali was glad to have her assigned pie-delivery errand as an excuse to bug out early. When she pulled up in front of Dave’s rented house, she saw that his battered Nissan Sentra was parked on one side of the driveway, but the county-owned sedan that was usually parked next to it was nowhere in sight. That meant Dave wasn’t home, but since lights were on inside, Ali figured his daughters were.

She parked in the street and carried the pie to the front porch, where she rang the bell. Seconds later, Crystal, Dave’s older daughter, pulled the door open but only as far as the length of the security chain.

“Ali,” Crystal said, peering through the crack. “Dad’s not here. He got called out on a case.”

Ali didn’t bother asking what case. She already knew. Well into the first forty-eight hours after Morgan Forester’s homicide, there could be little doubt that the officers charged with solving her murder—Detective Dave Holman especially—would be working pretty much round-the-clock.

“I’m not here to see your father,” Ali announced. “I come bearing gifts. My mother baked a pie for your dad and you. I’m here to drop it off.”

“A pie?” Crystal asked, undoing the chain and opening the door the rest of the way. “From the Sugarloaf?”

“Absolutely.”

“Can we eat it?” Crystal asked eagerly. “Or do we have to wait until Dad gets home?”

“I don’t see your father’s name on it,” Ali said. “Just don’t eat it all.” She waved at Cassie, Dave’s younger daughter, who had appeared beyond her older sister’s shoulder and was hovering in the background.

“Do you want to come in for a while?” Crystal asked.

“No, thanks,” Ali said. “I appreciate the invitation, but I need to get home, and you and Cassie should probably go to bed.”

“I know, I know,” Crystal grumbled. “It’s a school night.”

A few months earlier, Crystal had been in full-bloom adolescent rebellion. The idea that she was concerned about getting to bed at a decent hour on a school night struck Ali as remarkable progress.

“Right,” Ali said. “A school night.”

She was happy to leave it at that.

Back home on Andante Drive, Ali was sitting with Sam purring in her lap, and still thinking about her mother’s performance, when Christopher arrived home. He looked unhappy.

“Nice party,” Ali said.

Chris gave his mother a disparaging look. “Thanks,” he said. “But Athena’s all bent out of shape about it.”

“She is? How come?”

“Because Grandma managed to turn it into a circus,” Chris said.

She did, Ali thought. And I was right to be worried.

“It was supposed to be this casual, fun time with our friends,” Chris continued. “By the time Grandma finished her baking spree, it turned into something else entirely. Athena didn’t make a fuss about it at the time, but she’s worried that Grandma will try to hijack our wedding into some kind of huge event. That’s not us, Mom. It’s not what Athena and I want.”

“What do you want?” Ali asked.

“Something small,” he said. “Something private and nice.”

Ali had suspected as much. “Here’s the deal,” she explained. “Back when Mom and Dad got married, times were tough, and they couldn’t afford much of a wedding. There were the two of them, Aunt Evie and her then-boyfriend, and a justice of the peace. That was it—the five of them. I’m afraid Mom has been trying to make up for that deficit ever since. It’s a total blind spot for her. I doubt she even realizes she’s doing it. When your father and I got married, she tried to pull the same stunt with us. If I’d let her have her way, our wedding would have been an out-of-control extravaganza.”

“But you stopped it?”

Ali nodded.

“How?”

“By putting my foot down and taking control,” Ali told him. “You and Athena will have to do the same thing. Tell your grandmother no and mean it.”

“But how can you stop something when you don’t even see it coming?” Chris asked. “By the time we got to the gym tonight, the food was already there. Mountains of it.”

Ali understood far better than Chris that food was the coin of her mother’s realm. That was how Edie dealt with the vicissitudes of life, with both the good and the bad, the triumphs and the tragedies. Arriving babies or returning soldiers were greeted with cakes and cookies and immense bread puddings. Hospital stays called for soups or casseroles. Rounds of chemo meant plenty of mashed potatoes and bowls filled with red Jell-O. Deaths and funerals brought back the soup/casserole theme.

“Try turning it into a chess game,” Ali advised her son. “You win at chess by anticipating what your opponent is going to do several moves in advance. You’ll need to learn to anticipate what your grandmother is going to do as well, then you’ll have to come up with suitable countermeasures.”

“Easier said than done,” Chris grumbled.

“Don’t be so grumpy about it,” Ali said. “After all, that’s what you get for being the apple of your grandmother’s eye. You and Athena will have to sit Mom and Dad down and have a serious talk with them, but in order to make it stick, you’ll have to present a united front, diplomatic but absolutely firm. By the way, Athena was exceedingly diplomatic tonight,” she added. “She came in with her bags of groceries, but as soon as she saw what Mom had brought, she deep-sixed the grocery bags. I never heard her say a cross word.”

“There were plenty of cross words for me,” Chris complained. “As far as Athena was concerned, the whole engagement-party extravaganza was my fault.”

“Dealing with difficult relatives is one of the hazards of getting married,” Ali said. “And your grandmother isn’t the only one who’ll pull that kind of stunt. It turns out I’m putting together a little extravaganza of my own.”

Chris rolled his eyes. “What kind?”

“Thanksgiving.”

“Don’t tell me you’re cooking.”

“Be nice,” she told him. “But don’t worry. Leland will be supervising the cooking, if not doing most of it himself. So this is my official notice that you and Athena are invited, as long as you don’t have any other plans.”

“Okay,” Chris said. “Sounds good. We’ll be there.”

“Wrong,” Ali said with a laugh. “We’re talking Rules of Engagement 101 here, Chris. Don’t fall into the old trap of making unilateral holiday decisions. If you want to be happily engaged and end up happily married, you won’t accept any invitations without first consulting your significant other.”

“You mean I should ask Athena and then let you know?”

“Exactly,” Ali said. “If you know what’s good for you.”

“If she’s even speaking to me,” Chris added gloomily. He went off to bed then, leaving Ali absently petting Sam and reflecting on the conversation.

Where do I get off dishing out marital advice to anyone? she wondered. When it comes to being married, my own track record isn’t much to write home about. For instance, when she had told Chris he needed to put his foot down about his grandmother hijacking the wedding plans, it had been a case of “do as I say” rather than “do as I do.” Or did. Back when she and Chris’s father had been in a similar situation, Ali hadn’t exactly confronted the problem head-on. Instead, once the wedding arrangements had threatened to careen out of control, she and Dean had taken the path of least resistance and eloped to Vegas. No fuss; no muss. Edie had been furious, but despite the instant wedding, Ali and Dean had been a match made in heaven—right up until his death from cancer a few short years later.

Ali’s much later wedding to Paul Grayson had been far more to Edie’s liking. It had been a splashy Beverly Hills social event even in a milieu where outsize weddings were the order of the day. Edie and Bob Larson, a little out of their depth, had sat proudly in front-row seats when Paul, dressed in an impeccable tux, had stood in front of several hundred other invited guests and had solemnly vowed to love, honor, and obey.

In spite of all the lavish arrangements, Ali had learned, to her regret, that it had all been for show. Paul hadn’t meant a word of what he’d said, and he’d made a mockery of his wedding vows. In the dark of the night, sitting there alone with her aging, scruffy cat, Ali couldn’t help feeling a small chill tingle her spine as she realized Morgan Forester had done the same thing. She, too, had made marital promises that she had been unwilling or unable to keep. And now the young wife and mother was every bit as dead as Paul Grayson.

Ali went to bed a short time after that, but it took hours before she fell asleep. Awakening the next morning to the sound of Chris’s car pulling out of the driveway, she wandered out to the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee.

While she had been lying awake, she’d kept going back to Morgan Forester’s involvement with the Internet dating site Singleatheart.com. What had compelled a supposedly happily married woman to sign up for something like that? And what kind of people had she hoped to meet there?

Other cheaters, no doubt, Ali thought. Other people whose word couldn’t be trusted. So why had Morgan thought one of them would have more to offer than her hardworking husband, Bryan?

Without necessarily making a conscious decision, Ali retrieved her computer and dragged it over to the dining room table. Within a matter of minutes, she had surfed over to the Singleatheart website. At least she had arrived at the welcome page. In order to see more than that, she would have to register. To simply surf through the site or post a profile would cost a hundred dollars. To make a connection with one of the profiled parties was an additional four hundred.

Ali hesitated. She had no interest in posting a profile, but she wanted to know more about the people who had. She waffled briefly, but before long, her natural curiosity won out. In order to register, she had to provide both her name and a screen name. Fortunately, Babe, her Cutloose handle, worked very nicely. Her names, along with a working credit-card number and billing address, allowed her to log on.

Her browser was set to limit pop-up ads, but once Ali was inside Singleatheart, her computer screen was immediately besieged by a cascade of competing images. Unremittingly explicit sexual scenes sprang to life on either side of her screen. As a news broadcaster, Ali had done two separate news stories related to commercial porn sites. She had expected a dating site to be somewhat less graphic, but it wasn’t. There were ads for sex toys that came in more varieties, shapes, colors, and sizes than she ever could have imagined. The lingerie for sale was outrageous, and the ads promoting it were even more so. This was a long, long way from eHarmony!

The middle of the screen contained an old-fashioned Mercator projection of the world with an arrow and a guide that advised visitors to click on a particular location in order to narrow their search. By the time she landed on the map for Arizona, she was told that the section contained 2,364 profiles. That many? she thought. Just in Arizona?

Ali whistled aloud. At a hundred or five hundred bucks a pop? You didn’t have to be a math whiz to realize that Singleatheart meant big business. Even if you disregarded the lower-priced subscribers who were website visitors only, the people who ran Singleatheart were raking in piles of Internet dough.

Ali poured herself another cup of coffee and prepared for what she thought would be a long search, but she found what she was looking for almost immediately among the list of Arizona-based female profiles: the screen name Morgan le Fay.

From Camelot, Ali thought, drawing on her knowledge of Aunt Evie’s extensive collection of musical comedies. Like the fairy princess who caused all the trouble by packing off Merlin.

It took some time for her air card to download the profile, which consisted of several paragraphs of printed bio-style material along with a video clip. When that one finally opened, Ali saw a young woman sitting in a wooden swing, probably on the very porch where Morgan Forester had been murdered. She was a blond beauty with fine features, a winning smile, and an air of absolute innocence. Had Ali not heard what Billy Barnes had told Dave Holman about Morgan, Ali might have believed that look. Instead, she hit the play button, and the taped image of Morgan Forester began to speak:

“My grandmother loved records. Not CDs, but the old-fashioned black vinyl ones that played on phonographs. One of her favorites—one she listened to when she was washing dishes or doing the ironing—was done by a woman named Peggy Lee. I came into the house one time and found my grandmother sitting on the sofa crying with a record playing in the background. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me, ‘Oh, honey, it’s just so sad.’ ‘What’s so sad?’ I asked her. ‘This lady and her song,’ she said. ‘She’s singing about her life.’

“I loved my grandmother to pieces. It worried me that something could make her that upset, so I made it my business to find out which song it was that bothered her so much. ‘Is That All There Is?’ Eventually, my grandmother divorced my grandfather and came to live with us. She brought her records with her. I still have that one by Peggy Lee, and now I understand it. Too well. I’m living that same kind of life.

“If you asked any of my friends, they’d be surprised. They all think I have the perfect life, and maybe I do. I have a nice house, a nice car, good kids, and a nice husband, but it seems like nice is not enough. I keep asking myself the same question: Is this all there is?

“My husband and I started dating while we were still in high school. From the time I first knew him, he dreamed of having his own business. At first he worked construction for other people. When he was able to go off on his own, we both thought his dream—our dream—had come true. Now that he’s successful, it’s more like a nightmare. That’s all he thinks about all day long—his business. He lives, eats, and breathes his job. Yes, I’ll admit he brings in good money, but what good is money if we never do anything together or if we never have any fun?

“As far as I can see, I’m nothing more to him than a live-in cook and babysitter. Don’t get me wrong. I love my two girls. And I guess I even still love him a little. But I’m looking for something more. I want someone who will look at me and value me for the person I am. Someone who will see that I’m more than an attractive doormat in a very nice house. I don’t want to go to my grave still asking Peggy Lee’s old question, because I believe with all my heart that there is something more out there for me. Something better.”

For a long time after the clip ended, Ali sat staring at Morgan Forester’s features, slightly distorted but frozen in place on the computer screen. The whole thing left Ali feeling incredibly sad. The vital and attractive young woman who had filmed that clip was no more. The life she’d had—with her boring but hardworking husband and challenging seven-year-old daughters—really was all there was or ever would be, just like in the song. It sounded like Morgan had fallen out of love with her husband and was looking for more than a quick roll in the hay. But then she could be lying about that, too, Ali thought.

Whatever Morgan had wanted, or however much she had cheated on her husband, it seemed clear that she had cheated herself even more. Her craving for temporary excitement had robbed her of a lifetime of joy—of watching her children grow up and become adults themselves; of watching them marry and have children of their own. The real tragedy of Morgan Forester’s life was that she had missed it.

How could a few tawdry sexual encounters have been worth all that? Ali wondered, although Morgan couldn’t have known that she was putting her entire existence at risk.

When Ali had watched the tape of Dave’s interview with Billy Barnes, it had struck her as odd that Billy would have such intimate knowledge about Bryan and Morgan Forester’s private lives. Some men might go around pounding each other on the back and bragging about their various sexual exploits, but Ali couldn’t see Bryan admitting to anyone—especially one of his employees—that his marriage was going south and that his wife was screwing around on him. If Bryan hadn’t admitted any of that to Billy, how did Billy know so much? And why was the man so outspoken in his antipathy toward his boss’s dead wife? And why had he taken it all so personally?

Ali had been about to exit the website. Now, though, working on a hunch, she clicked back to the navigation page and pulled up the list of Arizona would-be bachelors, the men who were stalking the Internet in hopes of hooking up with like-minded women, sexual partners who were willing to play around with no strings attached.

This time the search took slightly longer, but as soon as she saw the screen name Billy Boy, she knew she was on the right track. After a few more clicks, there he was—Billy Barnes himself. His run-of-the-mill profile contained no film clip, just a still photo and a laudatory bio that made Billy sound like a well-to-do contractor in his own right rather than a guy working for someone else. Ali also remembered noticing that Billy wore a wedding ring, but that was hardly a surprise. After all, this site was a place for people who were single at heart as opposed to being single really.

Was it possible that Morgan and Billy had hooked up and had a fling? If so, it would have been a stunning double betrayal—an unfaithful wife deliberately carrying on an affair with a man who was both her husband’s friend and his employee. If it had happened, and if Bryan had somehow caught wind of it, would that—along with the missing cabinet deposits—have been enough to push him over the edge and set off a murderous rage?

But did it really happen? Ali wondered. Am I leaping to conclusions here?

The fact that both Billy and Morgan were members of Singleatheart didn’t necessarily mean that they’d been involved. But still, it was possible, and it meant that if nothing else, Billy knew about Morgan’s posting.

I know, Ali told herself. When I get to the other house, maybe I’ll ask Billy Barnes about this outright and see what he has to say.

Just then, though, her phone rang.

“Good morning, madam,” Leland Brooks said. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but it seems you have an unexpected guest. Mr. Jackson is here.”

“Mr. Jackson,” Ali repeated. “As in Jacky Jackson, my agent?”

“I believe that is correct,” Leland said. “He evidently came into Phoenix on an early flight from L.A. and drove straight here to see you.”

“Without calling in advance?”

“So it would seem,” Leland replied with a sigh.

Ali knew that Leland Brooks held an exceptionally low opinion of people who failed to observe the niceties of polite behavior. In his book, showing up uninvited and unannounced at someone’s home was a serious faux pax. Social anathema was more like it.

“I’m not sure how he knew to come here,” Leland went on, sounding aggrieved.

That was easy. Jacky was the one who had set up the Home & Garden TV gig. That meant he knew all about the house on Manzanita Hills Road. He probably also knew that Ali spent time there on a daily basis.

“What does he want?” Ali asked.

“Other than hinting it’s a matter of some urgency, he didn’t say,” Leland answered. “I gave him a cup of coffee and stowed him at the table outside. I used the excuse of making him an omelette to come inside and call you. If you’d like me to tell him you’re unavailable and send him on his way…”

“No,” Ali said with a laugh. “I’ll handle it. I’ll be there in a few.”

“Very well,” Leland said. “I’ll do my best to keep him occupied in the meantime.”

Putting down the phone, Ali closed her computer and threw on some clothes. After pulling her hair into a ponytail and without bothering to apply any makeup, she headed for Manzanita Hills Road. All the time she was getting dressed, she was trying to figure out what Jacky was doing here. After all, Sedona was a long way out of his natural habitat in southern California.

Although Jacky had been Ali’s agent for years, she was more than ready to be done with him. In the aftermath of her divorce from the network bigwig Paul Grayson, Jacky had distanced himself from her completely. Yes, he had come up with the home-remodel filming project, but Ali suspected he had done that more because it would be good for him than because it would be good for her. Ali really was interested in the process of bringing back and preserving architectural treasures that were in danger of being bulldozed. Jacky, on the other hand, was interested in Jacky.

Ali had considered leaving him on more than one occasion, especially now, when she had no intention of going back to work. But with only a few months left on her contract, she had decided to run out the clock rather than making a break. Letting their agreement simply disappear would be a lot less messy than going to the trouble of ending it prematurely. Had he somehow gotten wind of her possible defection? Had someone mentioned to him that Ali Reynolds was about to flee the Jacky Jackson coop?

That brought her back to her original question: What was Jacky doing here? Maybe he had ridden into town at the behest of Raymond and Robert, the camera guys. Was it possible the enterprising videographers had found someone willing to pay top dollar for the off-limits homicide-investigation portion of their film? Ali suspected it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to find someone willing and able to outbid Home & Garden TV’s lowball offer. If Raymond and Robert were hoping to transform their remodeling gig into something else, maybe Jacky had come to see her in hopes of convincing Ali to change her mind and let them run with it.

As usual, the lower part of Ali’s driveway was lined with pickup trucks, which meant that even without Bryan Forester, his work crew was on the scene. After threading her way up the hill to the top of the drive, Ali found a rented Lincoln Town Car in her accustomed parking spot. Count on Jacky to grab the prime spot, she thought as she made her way over to the covered picnic table where Jacky was seated. Wearing a down vest and huddled next to the roaring propane heater, her uninvited guest was polishing off the last few bites of what appeared to be one of Leland Brooks’s fluffy three-egg omelettes.

“My, my, my,” Jacky cooed as Ali approached. “Wherever did you find such a marvelous cook way out here in the sticks? I don’t think I’ve ever had a better omelette.” He handed his empty plate over to Leland, who took it with a stiffly polite nod and walked away. Jacky’s referring to Leland Brooks as a cook was a joke. He might as well have called a Kentucky Derby–winning thoroughbred a nag. Yes, Leland cooked on occasion, but he was far more than that. At a time when he might reasonably have put himself out to pasture, he had stayed on to help Ali with the complicated remodel and had morphed into a friend. She sometimes suspected that in helping her, Leland was also helping himself as he, too, tried to move beyond his own set of betrayals.

“If you ever want to unload him,” Jacky continued tactlessly, “I’m sure I could come up with a list of ten people who would be happy to snap him up.”

“Mr. Brooks is fully employed,” Ali said. “He’s not available.”

“Too bad,” Jacky said. Belatedly, he rose to greet her. After a peremptory kiss on each cheek, he held her at arm’s length and examined her. There was no disguising the dismay that registered on his face.

“My goodness, Ali!” he exclaimed. “Just because you’re stuck here in lovely, charming, perfect Sedona is no excuse for letting yourself go. What are you thinking? No makeup, bag-lady clothes, hair in a ponytail? Bad for your image, darling, very bad. What would people think?”

“They might think I was having to deal with company that hadn’t bothered calling in advance,” she said. “And if you’ll pardon my saying so, you don’t look all that great yourself.”

“Oh, that,” Jacky said with a dismissive wave. “That comes from flying at such an ungodly hour. Had to be at the Burbank airport at oh-dark-thirty this morning. I’m missing several critical hours of beauty sleep. And can you believe it? Even at that ungodly hour, the plane was totally packed. Not a single empty seat to be had. Squalling babies everywhere.”

“Yes,” Ali agreed. “I see what you mean. It’s always a shock to see how the other half lives.” It annoyed her to realize that Jacky somehow brought out the worst in her. It was as though his perpetual bitchiness were a communicable disease.

Leland returned from his trailer, poured Ali a cup of coffee, and handed it over. “Will you require anything else, madam?” he asked formally, nodding imperceptibly in Jacky’s direction.

Ali smiled at him. “We’re fine for now, Mr. Brooks,” she said.

As Leland headed back to his fifth wheel, Jacky watched him go with mouthwatering intensity. “Such a lovely man,” he said admiringly.

“Knock it off, Jacky,” Ali ordered. “I already told you Mr. Brooks is not available. He’s fully employed. He’s also taken.”

“Spoilsport,” Jacky said.

Ali was tired of small talk. “I’m pretty busy at the moment,” she told him. “What is it you want?”

“Don’t be so cross,” Jacky purred. “I’ve got this wonderful, wonderful opportunity for you, something you’d be utterly perfect for. And you know me. I never discuss important negotiations over the phone. I’m a face-to-face, belly-to-belly kind of guy. So that’s why I’m here: to offer you a golden opportunity to go back to work doing what you love—to get you back where you belong, in front of a television camera. Fortunately, the project is being put together by some very talented people who happen to have enough money at their disposal to do things right.”

“Sounds intriguing,” Ali said. “What project do you have in mind?”

“All right, so maybe it’s a bit of a knockoff—a second-generation America’s Most Wanted, if you will, but do you know how long that program has been on the air? Besides, as they say, imitation is the highest form of flattery. You’ve built up a bit of a crimefighting reputation since you’ve been off the air. It seems to me this would be a great fit.”

“What are you asking me to do?” Ali asked. “Host it?”

“Oh, no,” Jacky said too quickly. “Nothing like that. They’ve already lined up a man-type to do the actual hosting job. They want you to be one of their personalities—one of the team of on-air folks and producers who go around the country and pull together various independent segments. You’d have a lot of autonomy, Ali. You’d be able to call your own shots.”

Unfortunately, Ali was able to read between the lines. She understood what Jacky wasn’t saying as much as what he was. No doubt one of his other clients—a male big-name client—was being tapped for the host job. What Jacky was doing was pulling in people to fill out the rest of the package.

“I’m calling my own shots now,” she said. “I’m not interested.”

“But you’re not working,” Jacky insisted. “Come on. Let me at least show you the proposal and bring you into the picture as far as the dollars are concerned. This is a good deal, Ali, darling. A very good deal, and despite the fact that you’ve been out of the loop and really need to make a comeback, they’re still willing to pay some real money.”

“Who says I need to make a comeback?” Ali returned abruptly. “And I don’t care that much about the money. I don’t need more money.”

In Jacky’s world, everyone wanted more money. The idea that Ali didn’t left him stunned. The lingering silence between them was broken by the ringing of Ali’s cell phone. A glance at caller ID told Ali her mother was on the phone. Oddly enough for that time of day, Edie Larson was calling from home rather than the restaurant.

Ali felt a moment of panic. Is Mom sick? she wondered. Or has something happened to Dad?

“This is a good deal, Ali,” Jacky went on as though he hadn’t heard her. “Surely you wouldn’t just turn your back on it.”

But Ali’s attention was focused on her phone. “You’ll have to excuse me,” she said. “I’ve got to take this.” She got up and walked far enough away to be out of earshot before she answered. “Hello, Mom,” she said. “What’s up? Are you all right?”

“I just had a call from Chris,” Edie said. “And it’s all so upsetting. He lit into me something terrible. He’s never spoken to me like that before, Ali. Not ever. He made it sound like the baking I did yesterday was some kind of criminal offense. I was trying to help out. I wanted to make their engagement party a special occasion. How could it go so wrong?”

There was an odd sound. It took Ali a moment to realize that her mother was actually snuffling into the phone. From what she was saying, Chris had taken Ali at her word and tackled his grandmother on the subject of wedding planning. Ali remembered mentioning to Chris that he should try to be diplomatic. Evidently, that part of the message hadn’t gotten through.

“Mom,” Ali said, “are you crying?”

“Well, maybe a little,” Edie admitted. “I’m so upset, though, that I can’t help it. Your father sent me home. He said he didn’t want me making a fool of myself in front of all the customers. He’s right about that, of course. Fortunately, the restaurant isn’t busy, and Jan is holding down the fort.”

Jan Howard was the Sugarloaf Café’s long-term waitress. She and Edie handled the front of the house while Bob Larson handled most of the kitchen chores.

“Hold on,” Ali said to her mother. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

For someone wanting to dodge Jacky Jackson, Edie’s call was heaven-sent. “Sorry,” Ali said, turning back to Jacky. “Family emergency. I’ve got to go.”

“But—” Jacky began.

Ali didn’t give him a chance to finish. “It’s my mother. I’ll catch you later.”

Before he could build up to full-whine mode, Ali walked briskly away. She got into the Cayenne and drove down the hill. She went straight to the Sugarloaf and parked next door to the little house at the rear of the building where her parents had lived for most of their married life. Ali found her mother in the living room, plopped in the recliner usually reserved for her husband. A trash basket full of sodden tissues sat on the floor next to her.

“Just tell me,” Edie demanded tearfully as Ali entered the room. “What did I do that was so wrong?”

Honesty’s the best policy, Ali told herself. “You did too much,” she said.

“Too much,” Edie echoed. “All I did was bake a few things…”

“You baked more than a few things,” Ali corrected. “I’ve seen whole bakeries with fewer pies and cakes. Chris and Athena wanted a small party. You turned it into a big party. They wanted to keep it simple and do it themselves. From their point of view, you took over. You made their party your party.”

“But Chris is my grandson,” Edie objected. “Why wouldn’t I want to make it special?”

“You have to remember that Chris is only half of this equation,” Ali told her. “The other is Athena. She’s been married once before, and it didn’t turn out very well for her. I can understand why she might be feeling a little glitchy about doing this the second time around.”

“And then there’s her physical situation,” Edie suggested. “That might be a factor.”

“No,” Ali corrected firmly. “I think you’re wrong there, Mom. I don’t believe Athena’s missing arm and leg have anything to do with it. But if they do, so what? She’s a grown-up. She went to war and served our country. She’s paid a hell of a price for wanting to do things her way—not your way or Dad’s way or my way, but her way. Athena’s way. She and Chris get to conduct themselves the way they want to.”

“But still—”

“No,” Ali said. “No buts. I could have raised a fuss when I found out that Chris went to you and Dad about the engagement ring instead of coming to me. But I didn’t. It was Chris’s decision. This is the same thing, Mom. He and Athena are a couple. We’ve got to let them live their own lives.”

“So I suppose you’re going to light in to me, too?” Edie asked. “Is that why you’re here?”

“No,” Ali said. “I’m here because you were crying on the phone. As far as I can remember, that’s never happened before. I’m here because you’re upset, but I happen to know Chris and Athena are upset, too. They’re at a delicate point in their relationship. They’re trying to figure out how to pull away from us and be a family of their own. That means that even though we have the very best of intentions, you and I need to back off. Not only that, I’ll make you a deal. If you’ll tell me when you think I’m meddling, I’ll do the same for you. Maybe we can spare ourselves and everyone else a lot of grief.”

“It’s just like when you and Dean eloped, isn’t it?” Edie said as a new spurt of tears coursed down her cheeks.

“Pretty much,” Ali admitted.

“I never meant for that to happen, you know,” Edie said, blowing her nose one last time. “I just wanted to be a part of it.”

Ali leaned over and gave her mother a hug. “I know, Mom,” she said. “And I’m sorry, too, so let’s see if we can both do better this time around.”

When Edie had recovered enough to go powder her nose, Ali left her alone. Realizing she had skipped breakfast, she walked across the parking lot and into the restaurant.

“How’s she doing?” Jan asked after taking Ali’s order for French toast. “That poor woman baked like crazy all afternoon yesterday, and for what?” she added. “So she could be bitched out about it today? I swear, there’s no pleasing kids these days.”

So that’s it, Ali concluded. A generational divide.

As far as Jan and Edie and probably even Ali’s father were concerned, Edie had been trying to “help.” From the point of view of Chris and Athena, however, that help had come across as unwanted interference. Ali realized it would fall on her shoulders to negotiate a peace treaty, and it wouldn’t be easy.

I’m stuck in the middle, Ali told herself. I’ll be ducking shots from both sides.

CHAPTER 7

Working four ten-hour days gave Peter Winter a lot of time off—three whole days he could devote to other things and to his other life. He tried to get in at least two rounds of golf a week, not because he liked the game all that much but because it was expected. Besides, playing golf was good cover. The rest of his free time went to Singleatheart. Sometimes he went prowling on the site for the hell of it, checking to see if any of the newly arrived profiles suited his particular fancies. Now that he was in the market for a new playmate, his search had taken on greater urgency.

Peter’s private system automatically captured all incoming profiles and credit-card info and sent him those bits of information. Each week he made it his business to go over all of it in detail. You never could tell when something might prove useful for creating yet another virtual man or woman, as he had with the lovely and now departed Susan Callison. As far as Peter Winter was concerned, having a never-ending supply of virtual identities at the ready was essential.

Most of the time he used a stolen identity only once or twice before shedding it the same way a molting snake discards its skin. As long as he was careful to keep any resulting bills under five hundred dollars, no one paid much attention—not the cops and not the banks, either. The banks quietly wrote off any and all disputed bills, mostly because they didn’t want to let on that their supposedly secure systems were being breached.

At Hertz, Peter had used a phony credit card belonging to Matt Morrison to rent the vehicle he had driven to Sedona. He had done so in hopes of adding another possible suspect to the investigative mix into Morgan’s death. Now that the damage was done, he wouldn’t use it again; he ran the card itself through his shredder.

So far the only major exception to Peter’s use-it-and-lose-it identity philosophy was Manny Wilkins, Peter’s first fully cyber offspring, a fictional creation who was proving to be exceptionally successful in the real world. Manny Wilkins had come into being through a complex trail of fake and official documents it had taken Peter two years to pull together. Known as a canny businesman with a Las Vegas address, Manny was listed as the founder and CEO of Wilkins LLC and also as the bottom-line owner of Singleatheart.com. It was Manny who received all the checks and paid all resulting expenses and taxes before moving any remaining monies to numbered accounts in a series of offshore banks. Other identities came and went. Manny remained because, to Peter’s astonishment, Singleatheart had turned into an inadvertent gold mine, and as long as all resulting taxes were paid on time, no one looked too closely.

The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Peter. He owed much of his good fortune to Rita—poor, dear departed Rita, who had stupidly refused to give him a divorce—or at least the divorce he had wanted. She had told him once that the only way he would get rid of her was over her dead body, which was exactly how he had done it—by making sure Rita was dead.

Their hike up Camelback Mountain had been part of a carefully orchestrated reconciliation after a period of marital turbulence. There had been no witnesses when Rita fell several hundred feet to her death. She had been so surprised when Peter had turned on her with a drawn weapon in his hand that she’d leaped backward and fallen all on her own. He’d made sure there was no one around to say Rita hadn’t tripped and fallen exactly the way her grieving husband claimed she had.

Had Peter carried a big insurance policy on Rita, things might have been different. That would have given him a motive. As it was, after a fairly cursory investigation, Rita’s death was declared an accident. That was done over the objections of Rita’s mother, who insisted Peter had killed her daughter. The mother-in-law couldn’t prove it, however, and neither could anyone else.

Rita had been gone for ten years now. Peter’s friends at work kept telling him that he needed to get over her and move on. They kept trying to fix him up with someone else, but Peter wasn’t interested in another wife. In fact, he was hung up on something else entirely.

Peter had liked how he felt as he watched Rita go tumbling helplessly down the steep hillside, flopping like a limp rag doll as she flew from one boulder to the next. He had exulted in hearing her fading screams as they melted into the far distance, and he had known right then that he would kill again when the first opportunity presented itself—even if he didn’t know exactly how or when.

In contemplating this new compulsion, and before taking any action, Peter had become a student of murders. He searched out as many cases as he could find and sorted out who got away with it, who didn’t, and all the hows and whys in between. As he researched his newly chosen field, Peter was struck by one recurring theme: how many stupid killers, mostly men lacking in imagination, killed first one wife or girlfriend and then another in exactly the same way. Later, once the hapless killers were caught, they were always astonished that some detective or other happened to pick up on the obvious similarities between cases.

Peter Winter was a doctor. That meant he was smarter than the average bear to begin with. Determined not to make the same kinds of fatal errors, he realized there was no need to kill his own cheating wife when he could always murder someone else’s.

Peter had earned his way through school by being a geek. Putting his well-honed technical skills to work, he set about creating Singleatheart. In doing so, he discovered that the world was full of women just like Rita, all of them admitted cheaters and all available for the taking. Their numbers alone had been an amazing wake-up call. It turned out they were everywhere. As Peter scanned through the various profiles each week, that was what he went looking for—geographically diverse women who looked like carbon copies of Rita and deserved what was about to happen to them. By murdering women who bore an amazing resemblance to Rita Winter, Peter was able to do away with his wife over and over without ever getting caught.

Peter had covered his tracks by working through websites based in Russia. When it became apparent that he’d need a U.S.-based server farm, he had chosen one in Deadwood, South Dakota, for three reasons. For starters, the name appealed to him. Deadwood had a certain ring to it, and that was how he liked to think of cheating women in general—as so much deadwood. He also liked the fact that Deadwood was a hell of a long way from his home and respectable lifestyle in Phoenix, or from Manny Wilkins’s phony condo office just off the Strip in Vegas. As long as Peter was careful to avoid attracting the attention of the feds, crossing multiple jurisdictional lines made things far tougher on the cops and easier for him.

Third, the server’s South Dakota location was attractive for economic, moneygrubbing reasons. With gold mining not exactly booming at the moment, local city and state officials had enacted a series of changes designed to attract and keep new businesses. The resulting tax savings meant that the IP server Manny had chosen was able to do the same job for a lot less money than vendors in other locations.

Securing Singleatheart’s business had been carried out by one of Manny Wilkins’s minions—Peter Winter in yet another cyber guise. Once the site was up and running, all Peter had to do was sit back and rake in the dough and the occasional victim.

On that particular Wednesday morning, Peter turned to his computer with no inkling that something was amiss, not until he went scrolling through the credit-card information from that week’s server-farm data dump. What jumped out at him from the very first listing of the day wasn’t the person’s name, Alison Reynolds, but part of her address—Sedona. The place where Peter had driven on Monday morning. Where he’d used a hammer to beat Morgan Forester’s pretty little face to a bloodied pulp. Where he’d managed to leave the murder weapon in the back of the victim’s husband’s pickup truck.

Was it merely a coincidence that someone else from Sedona was venturing through the Singleatheart website barely two days later?

No, Peter Winter told himself. There are no coincidences.

But there was something about the name Alison Reynolds that was spookily familiar. Just for argument’s sake, Peter went ahead and Googled the name to see what might come up. There was far more material than he’d expected, and none of it was good news for Peter Winter. A former TV anchor, Alison Reynolds now claimed to be a different kind of journalist—a blogger with an extensive following of fans. Over the course of the past two years, she had been involved in several high-profile homicide cases in Arizona and California. She had a concealed-weapon permit, and she was evidently well acquainted with a Yavapai County homicide detective named Dave Holman. And she was remodeling a house with Build It construction—the company owned by Bryan Forester.

The light came on in Peter’s head. That was why Ali Reynolds’s name was familiar: He had seen it mentioned somewhere in Morgan Forester’s computer files.

That’s not good, either, Peter told himself. Not good at all.

Was she nosing around because Morgan had confided in her, or was she doing her snooping on behalf of Morgan’s husband? Either way, Alison Reynolds was a woman who would bear careful watching.

From past experience, Peter knew that often the best way to watch someone like that was through her computer. A less adept man might have unleashed the dogs of war. Peter Winter didn’t need to. Ali Reynolds had unwittingly wandered into the world of Singleatheart, so she had also opened her computer files to the Trojan horse he kept hidden there. The next time Ali Reynolds opened her computer, he’d be there, too, able to follow her every keystroke.

Peter didn’t have a doubt in the world that observing what she said and did there would tell him everything he needed to know. And though he was tracking her activities online, he knew that if he needed to, he’d be able to take her out the old-fashioned way—just like he had Morgan Forester.

After dealing with her mother’s meltdown, Ali had no intention of going back to see Jacky Jackson. When she left the Sugarloaf, she headed for Andante Drive. She had just parked and walked inside when her phone rang. Glancing at caller ID, Ali saw a Cottonwood number in the window. “Hello?”

“Is this Alison Reynolds?” a strange woman’s voice asked.

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Nelda Harris, Haley Marsh’s grandmother. I found your business card on a table in the living room last night. I believe you must have stopped by to see her sometime yesterday afternoon.”

Great, Ali thought. Now I’ll probably be caught in the cross fire on this as well. “Yes,” she admitted. “I did stop by.”

“May I ask why?” Nelda asked.

“Haley didn’t tell you?”

“No, she didn’t, and that’s why I’m calling—to find out. As her guardian, I need to know what’s going on with her.”

“I came to offer her the chance of a scholarship, Mrs. Harris. A scholarship she could have used to attend any college of her choice. She turned it down. She says she wants to go to work for Target.”

“An Askins scholarship?” Nelda Harris asked.

“That’s right. It would have paid her way to virtually any school in the country. I suggested she might want to talk this over with you. She seems to be under the impression that she’s a burden to you somehow. She wants to make her own way in the world, and she’s afraid that going to school will mean you’ll be stuck with her and her little boy for that much longer.”

“Whatever would give her that idea?” Nelda demanded. “I never said she was a burden to me, or little Liam, either. I wouldn’t.”

“And I’m sure you didn’t,” Ali agreed.

“Liam,” Nelda said, “stop that. Come away from there.” Speaking into the phone once more, she added, “Do you believe in good and evil?”

For a moment Ali thought the woman might be referring to her granddaughter’s cute little toddler. “I’m not sure—” Ali began.

“Not just good and bad,” Nelda interrupted. “I mean real good and evil.”

Earlier in her life, Ali might have been able to answer that question clearly in the negative—at least so far as evil was concerned. But now that she had met and unmasked Arabella Ashcroft, now that she had seen beyond the skin-deep physical beauty of April Gaddis, the young woman who had come within hours of marrying Ali’s former husband, real evil did have a presence in her life, and often a very human face.

“Yes,” Ali replied at last. “I suppose I do. Why?”

“Liam, please. Grandma’s on the phone. Come here and be still for a moment.” Nelda sounded exasperated, as though the toddler was taking advantage of her being on the phone to get into all kinds of mischief.

“Let me ask you another question, Ms. Reynolds…”

“Please call me Ali.”

“All right, Ali. I know you said Haley turned down your offer, but if I could convince her to change her mind—if we could convince her—would the scholarship still be available?”

“She doesn’t actually have the scholarship at the moment,” Ali corrected. “When she said she wasn’t interested, I took her at her word. It’ll most likely be awarded to someone else.”

“Please,” Nelda said as though she hadn’t heard. “I’d really like to discuss this with you, but not right now, when Liam’s driving me crazy. I need to put him down for a nap, but once he wakes up, we could drive up to Sedona to see you.”

Ali looked around her house. Aunt Evie’s very breakable knickknacks were still scattered here and there, well within reach of a toddler. And then there was Sam. A temperamental cat who didn’t do well with most adult strangers would probably have a complete meltdown if faced with a busy-bee little boy. And if this house wasn’t kid-proof, the construction site at Manzanita Hills Road was even less so.

“I’ll tell you what,” Ali said. “Do you know where the Sugarloaf Café is?”

“Of course,” Nelda said.

“Great,” Ali said. “Call me at this number when you head out. I’ll meet you there. We can have lunch. My treat.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Nelda said. “Liam and I can eat before we leave home.”

“Don’t be silly,” Ali told her. “You said we need to talk. Eating lunch will give Liam something to do in the meantime.”

“You must know something about little boys.”

Ali smiled into the phone. “I had one of those once myself,” she said, laughing. “It’s like riding a bicycle. Some things you never forget.”

Ali had fixed her hair and makeup and was in the process of changing into something more suitable for lunch when her cell phone rang.

“Mr. Forester just called,” Leland Brooks reported. “He’s on his way here and says he needs to speak with you. He says it’s urgent.”

“All right,” Ali said. “I’m on my way. Is Jacky still there?”

“Mr. Jackson evidently had another engagement,” Leland said.

“Good news,” Ali said. Relieved, she headed back to Manzanita Hills Road. She stepped out of her Cayenne and was delighted when she heard the familiar whine of drills working inside the house. That meant that no matter what else was going on, wallboard installation was still moving forward.

Bryan Forester arrived bare seconds later. When he stepped out of his pickup, she was startled by his gray pallor. “Come on,” he said grimly, gesturing toward the picnic table. “We need to talk.”

He settled down at the table, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it. Sitting opposite him, Ali was surprised. She remembered that Billy had mentioned something about Bryan taking up smoking again, but in all the months they’d worked together, she had never seen him with a cigarette.

“They fired me,” he said at last, blowing a cloud of smoke into the air.

“Who fired you?”

“The people at the other two remodel jobs I was doing,” Bryan said. “They’re using the missing cabinet order as cover. They’re claiming I was trying to defraud them by charging for materials that were never ordered.”

“What does that mean?” Ali asked.

“It means both those jobs are shut down. My workers have been ordered off the two properties. Immediately. That’s just an excuse, though. The real reason is what happened to Morgan. As far as the people in this town are concerned, she’s dead, and I’m the abusive murdering husband who did it.”

He sounded so beaten and discouraged, Ali had no idea what to say. “I’m sorry,” she began, but he plowed on.

“You know, I put up with Morgan’s crap for years because I didn’t have a choice,” Bryan continued. “The world may have changed in a lot of ways, but not when it comes to divorce. If there are kids involved, fathers don’t get custody. Period, not unless the mother happens to be a drug-dealing crackhead, and sometimes not even then. So I put up with Morgan’s stunts, with all her whoring around and game playing, because I wasn’t willing to lose Lindsay and Lacy. I kept my mouth shut and lived with it. But now that she’s dead, all of a sudden people have decided I’m the one who’s at fault—I’m the one who must have killed her. That I, someone who’s never killed anything—who’s never even shot a bird with a BB gun—would murder the mother of my children.”

“I’m sure they’re shocked by what happened to Morgan,” Ali interjected. “We all are. They’re looking for someone to blame.”

“They’re blaming me!” Bryan insisted, his voice trembling with outrage. “People I’ve known all my life are saying awful things about me. They don’t say them to my face, of course. No one has guts enough to do that, but I’m not stupid. I’m getting the message loud and clear.”

“What do you mean?” Ali asked.

“I went to the bank just now, and the teller there treated me like crap. The same thing happened to me at the hardware store with a clerk I’ve done business with for years. It seemed to me that with my wife dead, people would be nice to me and might even offer a little sympathy. What a laugh. Instead, they treat me like a leper. Why? What happened to that bit about innocent until proven guilty? And what about the deputy who’s been following me around all morning? I’d be willing to bet he’s parked at the bottom of your driveway right this minute. What do they think I’m going to do, try to take off somewhere? Take my girls and go live in another country?”

Spent, Bryan subsided into a bleak silence. At that point, the man seemed so far beyond any consolation mere words could offer that Ali wondered if she should even try. But she did anyway. “As I told you, the same thing happened to me when my second husband died.”

Bryan looked at her blankly and shook his head. Bogged down in his own troubles, he clearly didn’t remember their earlier conversation. So she told him again.

“My ex-husband was murdered just before our divorce was due to become final,” she said. “People found it easy to blame me, too. So did the cops.”

“Even though you hadn’t done it?”

Ali nodded. “Even though.”

“And what did you say to those people—to the people who thought you were guilty?”

“They were entitled to their own opinions,” Ali said. “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some of them still think I was somehow involved in Paul Grayson’s murder. The point is, what they think of me is none of my business. It doesn’t matter.”

“Do you believe me?” Bryan asked suddenly. “Do you think I did it?”

“I saw Morgan’s profile on the Singleatheart website,” Ali said quietly. “I know she was cheating on you. Or at least I know she was trying to cheat on you.”

“More than trying,” Bryan corrected. “Did.” He didn’t bother asking how Ali knew about Singleatheart. Obviously, he had known about it, too.

“You told me yourself that you thought she had misappropriated the cabinet deposits,” Ali said. “I can see how you’d have reason to be angry.”

“Not angry enough to kill her,” Bryan said.

“No,” Ali agreed, “but in the eyes of the world, the fact that you were angry, even justifiably angry, also makes you a suspect.”

Bryan looked at Ali closely. “What about you? Do you think I did it?” he repeated.

It was an honest question that deserved an honest answer. Ali met Bryan’s questioning gaze without wavering. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t. If I had thought you were guilty of murder, do you think I would have gone ahead and reordered the cabinets?”

“But you’re the only one,” Bryan said. “My other so-called clients sure as hell didn’t reorder.”

“Maybe I have more faith in the justice system than they do,” Ali said. “Maybe I believe in what you called ‘the innocent until proven guilty’ bit.”

“Does that mean you’ll help me?” Bryan asked.

“Wait a minute,” Ali countered. “As I said, I’ve already reordered the cabinets. Your guys are still working here. I haven’t ordered them off the premises. Isn’t that enough?”

“I need more than that,” Bryan said, lowering his voice. “I’m convinced someone is trying to frame me—someone who wants me to go to prison for murdering my wife. Gary, one of the wallboard guys, told me he saw Dave Holman take something out of the back of my truck yesterday afternoon. Gary didn’t know what it was, and neither do I. But whatever it was, I sure as hell didn’t put it there.

“Then, last night, when I was loading a stack of wallboard, I saw something in the bed of my truck—a rust-colored stain that looks like blood. If that’s what it is, I have no idea where it came from, but I’m guessing whatever Dave took away with him had blood on it, too. They’re probably running forensics tests on it right this minute. That may be why I’m not already under arrest—they haven’t finished running whatever tests they need to run. But once they do that, it’s game over. That’s why I’m here talking to you now. There’s been a cop on my tail all morning long, following me everywhere I go. I doubt I have much more time.”

With that, Bryan reached into the pocket of his plaid flannel shirt and withdrew several items—an envelope with Billy Barnes’s name scrawled carelessly across it and what appeared to be two computer thumb drives. He carefully returned the envelope to his pocket, but after placing the two drives on the table, he pushed them in Ali’s direction.

“I downloaded these from our Web-based backup site,” he explained. “One contains all the files that were on Morgan’s desktop computer as of midnight last night. The other contains all the files on my laptop. I’m sure Dave Holman is trying like crazy to get himself a search warrant for all my property. Once he does that, I have to assume both of those computers are going away. He’ll probably be able to freeze the backup files as well. In the meantime, I want you to keep these for me.”

“Why?” Ali said. “Surely you must know that Dave Holman is a friend of mine. I’m not going to go against him on something like this.”

“I still want you to have them,” Bryan insisted. “I’m not asking you to do anything with them. Just hold them for me, for safekeeping, until I decide what’s to be done with them.”

“Bryan,” Ali said, “if you think what’s on either one of those drives will help your case, you’re far better off giving them to your attorney.”

“What attorney?” Bryan asked. “You’re forgetting I just had to terminate two full crews of workers. It took every last penny in my checking account to pay them off. And I’ve maxed out my credit cards making a deposit with the funeral director who’s handling Morgan’s services. I don’t have an attorney for the very good reason that I can’t afford one. Period. I’m not going to have any representation at all until the court gets around to appointing someone, and that won’t be until after I’ve been arrested. From the way things are going, help like that could be too late. I need to know that someone is looking at this mess from my side, Ali. Right now it feels like everyone in the world is working against me—everyone but you.”

As Ali struggled to find a way to reply, she realized that the whining drills inside the house had fallen silent. She saw Bryan’s expression darken. His crew emerged from the house. With lunch boxes in hand, the three men sauntered in the direction of the canopy-covered table. They were followed by the camera crew. This time the cameras weren’t running.

“Speak of the devil,” Bryan muttered. Rising to his feet, he went to meet them. A few steps from the table, he barred their way.

“Hey, Bryan,” Billy Barnes said easily. “Good to see you. What’s up?”

In answer, Bryan removed the envelope from his pocket and handed it over.

Billy looked puzzled. “What’s this?” he asked.

“You’re terminated,” Bryan said. “Ryan, you and Gary are still on the job until the wallboarding is done. Understand?”

“Terminated,” Billy repeated. “Wait a minute. What’s the deal? You’re keeping these yahoos and letting me go? What are you smoking?”

“Unfiltered Camels,” Bryan returned. “That’s what I’m smoking, but I’ve also been reading the e-mails on Morgan’s computer. Turns out she kept them all—the ones she wrote to somebody named Billy Boy and the ones he wrote back to her several months ago. She didn’t even bother erasing them. Can you imagine that? And here I thought the two of us were friends.” Bryan’s voice dripped with contempt.

Billy Barnes’s customary bluster faded. “Look, Morgan and me were friends,” he said. “And I can explain. What happened was an accident. I didn’t mean for us to get involved like that, and neither did she. Things just got out of hand.”

“Things got very out of hand,” Bryan agreed. “Now get the hell out of here, Billy. Everyone in town seems to think I’m capable of murder. Looking at your slimeball face, I’m beginning to think maybe they’re right. I could do the world a huge favor by wiping your ass off it.” Bryan took a single threatening step in Billy’s direction. Fearing blows were about to be exchanged, Ali held her breath, but before the confrontation had a chance to turn physical, Leland Brooks appeared silently out of nowhere and stepped between the two men.

“Enough,” he said. “You should probably leave now, Mr. Barnes, while you still can.”

Brandishing his lunch pail, Billy glared back at him. “Nobody tells me what to do, you worthless little fag,” he shot back. “Get out of the way.”

“Don’t start with me,” Leland advised quietly, holding up a warning hand of his own. “Looks can be quite deceiving. I just might surprise you. Now, I suggest you do as you were told and go.”

After a moment of bristling silence, Billy backed down. He turned to the other workers, who had melted into the background, putting some welcome distance between themselves and the growing altercation. “Are you two coming with me or not?” Billy asked.

Gary and Ryan exchanged wary glances, but neither of them made a move.

“Suit yourselves,” Bryan told them. “It’s up to you. Go or not. Billy’s the one who got terminated, not you. As far as I’m concerned, you guys are still on this job.”

“Hey, you two, don’t be stupid,” Billy urged. “You heard what the man said. He’s broke. Busted. Tapped out. Once he goes to jail, who’s going to write your checks?”

“I will,” Ali asserted quietly, moving into the breach. “No matter what happens to Mr. Forester, if you’re still working on my job, I’ll see to it that you get paid. Understand?”

“You think she’ll pay you directly?” Billy asked. “What BS!”

“It’s not BS,” Leland said. “If madam says she’ll pay, she will. The woman’s word is her bond. As for you? It’s time for you to leave. Now.”

Heeding the warning, Billy stalked off without a backward glance. Bryan returned to the table and sank down on one of the benches, while Leland turned back to the two remaining workmen.

“It might be best if you went somewhere else for your lunch break today,” he said. “I believe Mr. Forester and Mrs. Reynolds require some privacy.”

CHAPTER 8

Gary, Ryan, and the two ever present cameramen disappeared into the house without any further discussion.

“Thank you for backing me up, Leland,” Bryan murmured. “If it hadn’t been for you, I might have decked the guy. Then the cops could have me up on an assault charge along with everything else.”

“You’re most welcome,” Leland replied. “Think nothing of it. That’s one of my responsibilities around here—dealing with thorny construction issues.” With that, he turned to Ali. “And now, if you don’t mind, madam,” he added, “I’d like to take the key to your other home and go have a look around.”

“Why?”

“In case we have to change the venue for Thanksgiving dinner in a matter of days, I should probably reconnoiter the situation—see what you have available. That way I’ll know what equipment, if any, I should get out of storage.”

Ali knew at once that she had been outmaneuvered. Had Leland pressed her for the key to her house under any other circumstances, she might have been able to tell him no. Not wanting to add to Bryan’s difficulties by making more of a fuss about the Thanksgiving issue, she simply handed over her key.

“And the alarm system is still out of order?” Leland asked.

The previous week, the alarm had gone nuts. A technician had stopped by long enough to say that a new motherboard was required. He had yet to return. Ali nodded in confirmation.

“Very well, then,” the butler said. He started away, then turned back. “You’re not forgetting your three o’clock, are you?”

“Which three o’clock?” Ali asked.

“With Marissa Dvorak.”

The other possible scholarship winner. Leland was right: With everything else that was going on, she had forgotten.

“Of course not,” Ali replied. “What makes you think I’d forget that?”

For a long time after Leland Brooks left them there, Ali and Bryan sat at the table in silence while Bryan lit another cigarette. “Thanks for agreeing to pay my guys,” he said at last. “I don’t know when or how, but I will pay you back.”

“I’m sure you will,” Ali said.

“I really appreciate it,” Bryan added. “I understand that you probably don’t want to believe me, either. Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt.”

Ali glanced down at the two thumb drives, still lying on the table. Then she looked back at Bryan. “So Billy was involved with Morgan?”

Bryan nodded dejectedly. “Some friend, right?”

“Is it possible he had something to do with what happened to her?” she asked.

Bryan shook his head. “I doubt it. The e-mails I found that went back and forth between them were from several months ago. Whatever they had going, I think it was pretty much over, but I may have turned up another clue.”

“What’s that?”

He reached into the pocket of his jeans and removed his wallet. From that he took a small piece of paper that he handed over to Ali. On it was a list of numbers—872-GYG, along with a freestanding H that evidently wasn’t part of the number.

“What’s this?” Ali asked.

“You don’t know my daughters,” Bryan said softly. “Lindsey is bright as a new penny—fun and engaging. Lacy is different, smart but different. She likes order. She doesn’t like it if things are out of place or if they’re not what she’s used to. She notices things and can remember details that other kids don’t. Numbers especially.”

Ali studied the paper. “Is that where these numbers came from?” she asked. “From Lacy?”

Bryan nodded. “She saw a car parked along the road that morning when the bus went past on its way to school. It had never been there, so as far as Lacy was concerned, it shouldn’t have been there at all. That’s why she remembered the license number.”

“Is the H part of it, too?”

Bryan shook his head. “That was on the bumper, not the license. So it could have been a rental car—from Hertz, maybe.”

Ali handed the piece of paper back to Bryan. She remembered Dave mentioning that he intended to have the two girls interviewed by one of the children’s forensics specialists from up in Flagstaff.

“Did this information come from an interview with one of the child advocates?” Ali asked.

Bryan shook his head again. “Lacy doesn’t speak to strangers,” he said. “She doesn’t speak to anyone, really, not even me. The only person she actually communicates with is her sister. She told Lindsey about this last night, and Lindsey told me this morning. She said the license was green and white and that it had mountains on it.”

“So the vehicle is registered in Colorado, then,” Ali concluded. “Have you told Dave Holman? If there was an unidentified vehicle in the vicinity of a homicide, the investigating officers need to know about it.”

“There’s no way to know for sure if whoever was driving this vehicle had anything to do with what happened to Morgan,” Bryan said. “It could be totally unrelated—something as harmless as a hiker leaving his car parked along the road while he went for a walk.”

“It could also be a lot more than that,” Ali pointed out. “Dave needs to know about it.”

Several long seconds passed before Bryan replied. “Here’s the problem,” he said. “If Dave learns about it, he’ll want to question Lacy, and I don’t want him hounding her about anything. My girls have already been traumatized enough—Lacy in particular. Their mother’s dead. Their whole world is in an uproar. How much worse could it be?”

“Unfortunately, it could be a lot worse,” Ali told him. “What happens if you go to prison for Morgan’s murder? How traumatized will your daughters be then? If there’s even the smallest chance that this license number might lead to the killer, or even to someone who might have seen the killer and could help identify him, then you have an obligation to your daughters and to yourself to let the authorities in on it.”

Without another word, she picked up her cell phone and scrolled through the phone book until she located Dave’s number. Then she handed the phone over to Bryan.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“That’s Dave’s number. Press send and then talk to him. You can’t sit on this information, Bryan. It’s too important. It could be vital.”

Bryan stared at the phone in his hand but made no move to use it.

“Look,” Ali insisted, “you asked me to help you. I’m willing to do that, but not if you’re not willing to help yourself.”

“All Dave Holman is looking for is an excuse to slap me in jail.”

“Dave Holman doesn’t screw around,” Ali returned. “He’s a straight shooter. And he’s got kids who aren’t perfect himself. If you ask him to leave Lacy alone, he probably will. But you decide. Either call him and give him the information, or you’re on your own.”

For a moment her ultimatum hovered between them, then reluctantly, Bryan pressed send.

“Detective Holman?” he said when Dave answered. “It’s Bryan Forester. I have some information for you. Yes, I know I’m calling on Ali Reynolds’s phone. She insisted that I call.”

There was a long pause before Bryan spoke again. “It has to do with a vehicle that was spotted in the vicinity of our place the morning my wife died.” After another long pause, Bryan swallowed hard before he replied to Dave’s obvious question. “That would be my daughter Lacy. And no, I don’t have a description, beyond the fact that the car was blue but I have what I believe to be the license number—from Colorado. Yes. I’ll wait.” He turned to Ali and mouthed, “He’s getting a pencil.”

Several minutes later, Bryan had relayed the information. He closed the phone and handed it back to Ali. “There,” he said. “I hope you’re happy.”

Ali nodded. “It’s a start,” she said.

Bryan stood up.

“Where are you going?” Ali asked.

“I’ll go into the house and check on progress, then I’ll head back to the hotel. My mother doesn’t do well with Lacy, especially when it comes to mealtimes. Mother thinks Lacy is spoiled. She’s not. She’s just Lacy.”

He walked away, leaving Ali to wonder if Lacy’s different way of viewing the world might provide the one telling detail that could end up proving her father’s innocence.

Bryan was still in the house when Ali’s phone rang. She wasn’t surprised to see Dave Holman’s phone number.

“You had Bryan Forester call me on your phone?” Dave demanded. “Why are you having anything to do with him, Ali? He’s a possible murder suspect, a dangerous man.”

“Yes,” Ali agreed. “That’s the word on the street. I’m hearing the same thing from all the local hairdressers.”

“Ali, he’s playing on your sympathies. And this license thing. Where did that come from? It certainly didn’t show up in the CHAP interview.”

“I’m not surprised,” Ali said. “According to Bryan, Lacy doesn’t talk to anyone but her sister, but are you going to check the lead or not?”

“Of course I’m going to check it out,” Dave said, sounding exasperated. “But I’m also telling you that it’s in Bryan’s best interest to have us running around in circles and following up on useless leads. It’s what guys like him do. That’s how they think and how they work.”

“Bryan Forester didn’t kill his wife,” Ali asserted.

“How do you know?” Dave asked.

“Because he told me.”

“Right,” Dave said with a mirthless chuckle. “He told you, and you believed him. How does that old George Strait song go? ‘If you’ll buy that, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Arizona.’”

“But I do believe him,” Ali said.

Dave backed off. “Look, things were going badly for him. I’m hearing that Morgan wasn’t exactly walking the straight and narrow and that she was fooling around—a lot. I think it’s possible he and Morgan got into some kind of argument, and he lost it. I’m not saying that he didn’t have some real provocation, and I’m not saying it was premeditated. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous and unpredictable. Do yourself a favor, Ali. Do us all a favor. Stay away from him. Don’t get involved.”

“Sorry, Dave,” she said. “Remember, I was a murder suspect, too—and not all that long ago.” Ali ended the call knowing it was too late for Dave’s warning. She was already involved—very involved.

Bryan emerged from the house. “Ryan and Gary are close to finishing up with what little wallboard they have left. I told them that when they quit for the day, they should call me. I’ll pay them for whatever hours they’ve worked so far. After today, though, they should plan on taking the rest of the week off. I told them either I’ll give them a call or Mr. Brooks will when it’s time for them to come back.”

Ali nodded. “That’s fine,” she said.

“Thanks for all your help,” he said. “The best I can possibly hope for now is that Dave Holman won’t throw me in jail until after the funeral and until after I can make some kind of arrangement for the girls. That’s not asking too much, is it?”

“I hope not,” Ali said. “When is the funeral?”

“Day after tomorrow,” Bryan answered. “Friday at ten A.M.”

What if Dave does have evidence that links Bryan to Morgan’s mrder? Ali wondered. Here was Bryan, hoping he’d be able to be with the twins for their mother’s funeral. But what would happen to them after that, especially if he ended up being tried for murder and going to prison? The idea of those two little girls—the one, especially—having to live with a grandmother who didn’t particularly like them made Ali’s heart ache.

Bryan had barely driven away when Ali’s phone rang. “Liam didn’t take much of a nap,” Nelda Harris told her. “We’re on our way.”

Switching gears, Ali left the house and went straight back to the Sugarloaf. It was long enough after the lunch rush that the place wasn’t crowded. She corralled the corner booth—the one that offered the most privacy—and asked her mother for a high chair.

“Whose baby?” Edie Larson asked.

Ali wasn’t eager to go into detail. “A friend’s” was all she said.

Nelda arrived a few minutes later. She walked through the restaurant with Liam following behind. He carried a miniature truck in each hand and grinned happily when he saw Ali.

Nelda nixed the high chair in favor of a booster seat and then hefted Liam into that. “He gets in less trouble if he has a truck in each hand,” she observed.

Ali’s mother followed them to the table, bringing along the one-page children’s menu and a pack of four Crayolas. When she returned a few minutes later, she beamed at Liam, who was busily coloring, and handed Nelda a package of oyster crackers. “What’s Mr. Handsome here having today?” she asked. He looked back at her with his wide-eyed killer smile.

For lunch, Nelda asked to share a grilled cheese with the baby. Ali, still full from breakfast, ordered nothing but coffee. As Edie pocketed her order pad, she gave Liam an affectionate pat on the head. “This kid is cute as a button,” she said. “I’ll bet he takes after his daddy.” As Edie walked away, she didn’t glimpse the dismay that flashed across Nelda’s face at the well-meaning remark. Ali did and knew that her mother had stepped in it. So that’s it, she thought. Something to do with the father. Some kid knocked Haley up and then declined to do the right thing.

Since Edie had already broached the subject, Ali went ahead and followed up. “I suppose this is the same old story,” she said. “The boy gets off scot-free, and the girl is left holding the bag and the B-A-B-Y.” Ali didn’t know exactly how old Liam was or how much he’d be able to understand. Spelling some of the critical words seemed like a good thing.

For a moment, rather than replying, Nelda busied herself with doling out a few of the oyster crackers to Liam. “It wasn’t quite like that,” she said at last. “It was actually a lot worse. Do you remember what I asked you about this morning?”

“You mean about good and evil?”

Nelda nodded. “I think most people believe that good comes from good and evil comes from evil, but that’s not necessarily true. My husband, Liam, was one of the nicest people who ever lived. And I consider myself a good person, too, but our daughter, Patsy, was pure evil. Still is pure evil. And yet Haley is her daughter. And Liam here is her grandson.”

Liam took that as a cue to toss a handful of crackers over his head. And when his grandmother—his great-grandmother, Ali realized—chided him about it, he gave her a grin punctuated by tiny white teeth. Shaking her head, Nelda gathered up the crackers and gave him the menu and the Crayolas.

Ali sensed that this was the reason Nelda Harris had driven here—to tell Haley’s story, whatever it might be. Now, though, with Nelda seeming to have second thoughts, Ali realized that it must be worse than a teenage affair gone bad. It must be a case of rape, Ali theorized. She knew from her years in the news business how difficult it could be for rape victims and their families to discuss such things.

“What happened?” Ali asked gently.

Nelda bit her lip. “She was a problem from the day she was born,” she said at last. “We tried to love her, but it wasn’t easy. She was a colicky, cranky baby who never slept. And once she got to school, she was a biter and a fighter. By the time Patsy was a teenager, she was completely out of control.”

When Nelda first started speaking, Ali had thought she was referring to Haley. It wasn’t until that last sentence that Ali understood Nelda was talking about her own daughter rather than Haley, her granddaughter.

“Patsy dropped out of high school her sophomore year,” Nelda continued. “Nothing we said made any difference. As far as she was concerned, she had learned everything there was to learn. Besides, she had taken up with an older guy—a married older guy, a long-haul truck driver named Wally Marsh. Patsy had two abortions before she was twenty. By then Wally had divorced his wife. He and Patsy got married, and the next thing we knew, Haley arrived on the scene.”

There was a short pause in the narrative while Edie delivered Nelda’s grilled cheese and poured more coffee. Nelda cut half the sandwich into pieces and then passed those to Liam, who stopped coloring long enough to mow through them.

“I knew before Patsy ever delivered that she’d be a terrible mother, and she was. She had this strange idea that as soon as she had the baby, Wally was going to straighten up and fly right. He didn’t.”

“Yes,” Ali said. “As my father likes to say, once a cheat, always a cheat.”

“And now Patsy was stuck at home with a baby while Wally was right back to doing his cheating with someone else. So Patsy came up with this harebrained idea of going to school and becoming a truck driver, too. I’m sure she figured that once she was out on the road with Wally, it would be that much easier to keep an eye on him. She came to me and asked me if I’d look after Haley so she could get her license.

“Liam and I talked it over. We knew what kind of a person she was—mean and vindictive. Liam said that if she ever got mad at us, she’d take Haley away and we’d never see her again. We told Patsy that the only way we’d look after Haley was if she made it official—if she and Wally signed over their parental rights to us. We told her they could have visitation privileges, but they needed to make us Haley’s official guardians. And that’s what happened. They both signed the paperwork, and then off they went while we set about raising Haley.”

“From what I see, you did a good job of it,” Ali said.

Nelda nodded. “We still had the farm then. Patsy always hated living there, but Haley loved it. She worshipped her grandpa—followed him everywhere, rode on the tractor with him. And when he got sick, she sat with him for hours on end. Just sat with him, telling him stories that she made up on the spot.” A tear appeared in the corner of Nelda’s eye. She brushed it away with the back of her hand.

Liam peered at her with a look of concern. “Owee?” he asked.

“No, honey,” she said. “Grandma’s fine. Just eat your sandwich.” As he returned his attention to the food, Nelda returned to her story. “At first Patsy and Wally came to visit every month or so, but then their visits started getting farther and farther apart. By the fourth year, they came for Haley’s birthday and for Christmas, and that was it. But it didn’t matter, not really. By the time she was five, she barely knew them. Liam and I were her parents, the only ones who mattered.

“But we started hearing rumors about Patsy and Wally—that things were going haywire with them. Tuttle’s a small town. Wally’s first wife still lived there with his two sons. First we heard that Patsy and Wally were having marital difficulties of some kind. The next thing we knew, Wally was shot dead at a truck stop near Dallas. It turned out that they had been doing land-office business, hauling drugs along with their other cargo. Wally had been ready to settle down and buy a farm somewhere. He bought the farm all right. Patsy and her new boyfriend, Roger Sims, saw to it. All the ugly drug dealing came to light during the trial, and Patsy and Roger both got sent up twenty-years to life for second-degree murder.

“The whole thing nearly killed poor Grandpa,” Nelda continued after a pause. “He wanted to pull up stakes, sell out, and move somewhere else, somewhere far away. We came here looking for a place to move. We went to Prescott for the Fourth of July rodeo and even up to Jerome because he wanted to see a ghost town. But he loved Cottonwood. We both did, and we were thinking about coming here to live when he got sick. Lung cancer. I knew as soon as we got the diagnosis that moving away wasn’t an option. Besides, as I told him at the time, what Patsy did or didn’t do was no reflection on us, and the people who thought it was weren’t worth bothering with anyway.”

Ali was struggling to keep track of this long, convoluted story while wondering how any of it could have contributed to Haley’s turning down the scholarship.

“So for a long time, we just tried to keep going. Liam was getting sicker and sicker. It was all I could do to take care of him and Haley and look after the farm, too. Unlike her mother, Haley was good as gold—sweet and loving—and a huge help. When we lost Liam, she was only twelve, but she took care of me more than I took care of her. I don’t know how I would have made it if she hadn’t been there.” Nelda sighed. “I don’t know how other people deal with having a child in prison. The way I did it was I pretty much put Patsy out of my mind. I guess I sort of thought they put people in prison to be punished and learn their lessons so they won’t make the same kinds of mistakes again. When they come out, they’re supposed to be rehabilitated, right? And then two years after Liam died, the year Haley turned fourteen, who should turn up on my doorstep but Patsy. They had let her out on good behavior. And because she was so needy and because she was my child and because I’m a good person, I let her come home.”

“Except she wasn’t rehabilitated,” Ali suggested quietly.

“No,” Nelda agreed sadly. “She wasn’t.”

“Drugs?” Ali asked.

Nelda nodded. “Lots of drugs. She was using them and selling them right there in my house. In my own house. How could I have been so stupid? How could I not have known? Of course, Patsy was never that smart. And when she ran short of money, she paid off her dealer with the only other thing of value she had—Haley.”

Ali was dumbfounded. “No.”

“Yes,” Nelda said. “It was late November. I was trying to get ready for the holidays. A friend of mine and I drove up to Oklahoma City to go shopping. Haley was supposed to go with us, but for some reason she wasn’t feeling that well. She was in bed, asleep, when this big guy came waltzing into her room and told her she was his for the day because her mother owed him money. That’s how it happened.”

“Haley was raped?”

Nelda nodded and whispered as if hoping Liam wouldn’t hear. “I came home and found her in bed, bleeding and terrified.”

“Where was her mother?”

“Patsy took off. It’s a good thing, too. If I could have found her, I would have plugged her on the spot. I took Liam’s old forty-five out of his desk drawer and put it in my apron in case she came home. Then I called the cops. And then we had to go through that whole awful rigmarole—the hospital, the testing, the interviews, the photographs. Haley was only fourteen, fourteen and a half.”

Ali did the math. Haley would have been fifteen when her baby was born, and she was seventeen now. That meant little Liam was slightly past two.

Nelda dissolved into tears. While Liam patted his grandmother’s arm consolingly, Ali looked around the room. Other than their table, the Sugarloaf was empty. Jan Howard was gone. Edie and Bob Larson were evidently hiding out in the kitchen.

Nelda smiled at Liam through her tears while Ali wondered how much of the brutal story was soaking into Liam’s agile little brain.

“What happened then?” Ali asked.

“They arrested Patsy and charged her with rape. She tried to get off by turning state’s evidence, but that didn’t work. They arrested the guy, too. He was a repeat offender, and they’re both in prison now. He’s not supposed to get out for the next forty years. Patsy’s sentence is added on to what’s left of her other one. She won’t ever get out.”

“Then Haley turned up pregnant.”

Nelda nodded. “At the time, nobody told us about the morning-after pill. They probably should have, but they didn’t, and we didn’t know to ask. When we realized she was pregnant, I tried to talk her into having an abortion, but she wouldn’t. She told me it was against her religion, and that’s reason enough not to have one. But that’s also when I decided to sell out and move away. Yes, I know, I had told Liam that what those people thought or said didn’t matter, but when it came to Haley and the baby, I didn’t want them to have to put up with all that crap. We sold the farm, auctioned everything, and came here. There wasn’t much money. We had mortgaged everything to the hilt while Liam was sick. Fortunately, I was able to get work once we got here. It’s the perfect job, actually, since I work when Haley’s in school, and she works at Target when I’m home on the weekends.” Nelda glanced at her watch. “Speaking of which, I’m going to have to go soon or I’ll be late for work.”

“What about the scholarship?” Ali asked.

“I know how smart Haley is, and I want her to go on to school, but she won’t hear of it,” Nelda said. “She thinks that after all the years of looking after first her, then her grandfather, and now little Liam, it’s time for me to have some time off.”

Ali nodded. “That’s pretty much what she told me. That she wanted to move out and live on her own. She’s already got a job lined up.”

“I know about the job,” Nelda said. “At Target, but I want her to do better than that. Look what happened to me. I don’t have any education, either. That’s why I’m stuck working as a janitor. It was the best job I could get, and I’m glad to have it—at least I have some benefits. But I don’t want her to hit my age and be stuck in the same kind of rut. I know you said she’s only one of the candidates—one of the finalists—for that scholarship. I hope you’ll think about giving it to her and helping me talk her into taking it. I don’t want her to end up like me.”

Ali reached across the table and took the older woman’s hand. “Scholarship or not,” she said, “Haley Marsh could do a lot worse than being just like you.”

“What in the world was that all about?” Edie wanted to know after Nelda and Liam had driven away and Edie was sweeping up leftover oyster crackers.

“She’s the grandmother of one of my scholarship candidates,” Ali said.

“My goodness,” Edie said. “A senior in high school who already has a baby that old? Are you sure that’s the kind of person you’d want to be one of your recipients?”

“Yes,” Ali said after a moment’s reflection. “I’m pretty sure she is.”

Still overwhelmed by the sheer weight of Nelda Harris’s story, Ali left the restaurant with only a few minutes to spare. At the stroke of three, she pulled up in front of Marissa Dvorak’s modest home in one of Sedona’s least fashionable neighborhoods. A homemade wooden wheelchair ramp wound back and forth from the front gate to the side of the large front porch, where a dark-haired girl in a wheelchair sat waiting. She waved shyly as Ali exited the Cayenne.

“Ms. Reynolds?” she asked.

“Yes,” Ali answered. “Alison Reynolds.”

When Marissa held out her hand in greeting, Ali saw that the fingers were bent at a severe angle. The skin on her wide face was pulled taut across features distended by steroids, but her smile was utterly sincere, and her excitement was only barely under control.

“When Mr. Brooks called to set up this appointment, I went online and did some checking on you,” Marissa said. “I think I know what this is about.”

“And what would that be?” Ali asked.

“An Askins Scholarship, maybe?” Marissa asked hopefully.

Since Haley had already turned down the scholarship, Marissa should have been the last finalist. Had it not been for Nelda Harris’s emotional plea, Marissa would have been the hands-down winner. Now Ali wasn’t so sure. “How about if we go inside and talk this over?” she suggested.

The subsequent interview couldn’t have been more different from the one with Haley Marsh. Marissa was thrilled beyond measure. She was eager to go on to college. She already had a letter of acceptance from the University of Arizona and had banked several advanced-placement classes, but with two younger children at home—also adopted—Marissa and her family had been worried that her going to college could only come with a huge burden of student loans.

Partway through the interview, Ali made up her mind. Haley Marsh was conflicted. Yes, she was certainly deserving and had been victimized by dreadful circumstances, but was it reasonable to attempt to push her into accepting a scholarship she didn’t really want? And even if coercion worked, was it fair to herd her into going to college against her own wishes? On the other hand, Marissa Dvorak was an equally deserving young woman, one who was thrilled at the prospect of receiving a scholarship. She already knew where she wanted to go and would be happy to accept some help in getting there.

“You mean you can just say so?” Marissa asked when Ali told her the scholarship was hers. “You can decide just like that?”

“Actually, I can,” Ali said. “Of the three finalists, you’re the most viable. If it’s all right with you, we’ll make the official announcement in a press release sometime in the next week or so. In the meantime, you’re welcome to let people know, especially your parents.”

“They’re not going to believe it.”

“You’re a remarkable young woman,” Ali said. “I think they will.”

Ali went on to tell Marissa about the terms of the scholarship—how much she would get and the GPA she’d need to maintain to receive it in subsequent years. When Ali left the house at four-thirty, she felt a real sense of relief and accomplishment. Months earlier, when Arabella Ashcroft had first broached the subject of Ali taking over the administration chores on the Askins Scholarship, Ali had been reluctant. Now, having seen firsthand the tremendous difference the award would make in smoothing the road for Marissa, Ali felt thankful to be involved.

As late as it was, Ali went straight home to Andante Drive, where she was astonished to find Leland Brooks’s Mazda pickup still parked there. Several scatter rugs, freshly laundered and hung out to dry, decorated the rail on the front porch. From inside, she heard the wail of a vacuum cleaner. She opened the door and found the furniture pushed to one side of the room while Leland vacuumed where it had once stood. When she shut the front door, he turned off the noisy machine and faced her.

“Why are you still here?” Ali asked.

“Because I’m cleaning,” he said simply. “As I told you, I came to get an idea about the kitchen situation—about cooking and serving equipment as well as dishes. Those all appear to be quite adequate. As for the rest of it, your quarters wouldn’t pass even the most rudimentary inspection. If you expect to have your home ready to receive guests by Thanksgiving, I’m going to need to spend some time here, whipping it into shape. Vacuuming will do for today, but what this carpet really needs is a thorough shampooing. I’ve reserved a shampooer for first thing tomorrow morning.”

Ali felt a pang of guilt. She and Chris were reasonably neat and conscientious about putting things away, but neither one of them excelled at the kind of deep cleaning required to measure up to Leland Brooks’s fastidious standards. That was one of the drawbacks about living with a professionally trained butler. He called the shots in the nicest way imaginable, but he still called the shots.

“How are things at the construction site?” he asked, carefully wrapping up the power cord and attaching it to the vacuum’s stem. Ali tended to shove the vacuum cleaner into the broom closet and toss the cord in after.

“When I left,” Ali said, “my understanding was that once the wallboarders finished work today, our job would be shut down until Mr. Forester gives the word.”

“That’s probably just as well,” Leland said. “It also means that it won’t be a problem if I’m working over here for the next little while, giving the place some spit and polish.”

“About that,” Ali began. “It seems to me that Chris and I should be responsible for cleaning up our own mess.”

“Madam,” Leland said, “for the past several months, while I’ve been stuck at the construction site, you’ve barely tapped my potential. I’ve been quite frustrated. Bored, really, almost to the point of giving notice. I’m sure you wouldn’t want that, so let me tackle the work here and get it done. It will give me a chance to show you what I can do—what I’m capable of.”

“What about the part where you offered to clean Billy Barnes’s clock?” Ali asked with a smile. “Was that part of showing me what you can do?”

“Boasting for its own sake is in very bad taste,” Leland said. “But I was trained by the Royal Marines, and I still know the moves. Over the years, I’ve had to use them more than once.”

“The next time Jacky shows up, I might let you use some of those moves on him.”

“You think he’ll be back?” Leland asked.

“Of course he’ll be back,” Ali answered. She handed him Marissa Dvorak’s file folder. “By the way, I talked to Marissa Dvorak and made up my mind. She’s this year’s recipient.”

“That stands to reason, since Miss Marsh turned it down,” Leland replied. “Would you like me to prepare a press release to that effect?”

“Yes, please,” Ali said. “I told her you would.”

Leland nodded. “Very well.” He looked around the room. “I got a start on things today, but since I’m going to be shampooing the carpet tomorrow, I hope you won’t mind if I leave the furniture where it is.”

Ali knew Leland Brooks was more than capable of pushing the leather couch around, but there was no need for him to do so twice. “Of course not,” she said. “This is fine.”

“You can expect me here bright and early,” he said. “You may want to be out and about. As for your Cayenne, if you’ll pardon my saying, that could also use a good detailing.”

“Trying to keep me in line must be a real trial for you,” Ali said.

“On the contrary, madam,” Leland said with a fond smile. “Occasionally, I find it quite stimulating.”

CHAPTER 9

As soon as Chris knew Leland Brooks had left, he ventured upstairs. “Is the cleaning Nazi gone?” he asked. “He was here working up a storm when I got home from school. What was that all about?”

“Thanksgiving,” Ali told him. “With everything that’s going on with the contractor, we came to the conclusion that there’s no chance of having dinner at the new house. Leland came over here to see about whipping this one into shape.”

“You’re not going to let him clean my studio, are you?”

“He will unless you stop him,” Ali said with a laugh. “Since he seems to be a force of nature, I’m not sure that’s possible.”

Chris took a soda from the fridge and hustled back downstairs. Ali was in the bedroom changing into her comfy sweats when her phone rang. Caller ID told her the number was restricted.

“Ms. Reynolds?”

“Yes.”

“It’s B.”

The B. in question happened to belong to Bartholomew Quentin Simpson. Named after his maternal grandfather, Bart Simpson had been ten years old when the other Bart Simpson first appeared on local TV screens, thereby consigning Sedona’s Bart Simpson to a peculiar form of childhood hell. Subjected to unending teasing, he stopped answering to any name but his first initial, since using both of them, B.Q., didn’t work for him, either. The one initialed B. had retreated into the solitary solace that computers had to offer. By seventh grade, he had taken apart his father’s old Commodore 64 computer and put it back together.

By eighth grade, B. Simpson had taught himself to write computer code. To his parents’ dismay, he had dropped out of high school his junior year after selling his first video game to Nintendo. He had gone to work for them long enough and well enough that he’d been able to “retire” at age twenty-eight. He had returned to the Sedona area, where, although he had never played golf, he bought himself a golf-course-view home. Rather than hitting the links, he had started his own computer security firm called High Noon Enterprises. His company motto was “It takes a hacker to catch a hacker.”

Now that B. Simpson was back in town, he easily could have been one of Sedona’s most eligible bachelors, except no one really knew he was there. He lived alone and worked odd hours, usually coming into the Sugarloaf for breakfast just as Edie and Bob Larson were closing down for the day. It was Bob who had brought B. Simpson’s painful childhood history and the existence of High Noon Enterprises to Ali’s attention.

“The way I understand it, he’s sort of like an Internet version of an old-fashioned gunslinger,” Bob Larson had told his daughter. “As much time as you spend online, you should probably have someone like him in your corner. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone shipped you one of those awful viruses. Or worms.”

In the end, Ali had signed up with B.’s High Noon Enterprises more to shut her father up than because she was worried about being hacked. In the three months since she’d been a paying customer, it had seemed like a needless expense. As far as she could see, preventing cyber crime seemed about as exciting as watching grass grow.

“Good to hear from you,” Ali said now to B. “What’s up?”

“You won’t think it’s good to hear from me when you find out what I have to say,” B. warned her. “You’ve got yourself a Trojan.”

“Excuse me?” Ali asked.

“A Trojan horse,” B. replied. “In your computer. Twice each day I run a monitoring check on all the computers I have under contract. Today your noontime analysis came up positive.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that as long as your computer is connected to the Internet, someone else can see everything you do there. He can take over control of your computer. He can gain access to your files and change them. He can also send mail that’s ostensibly from you, even though it isn’t. You don’t use a multiple-computer network, do you?”

“No,” Ali said. “I’m usually on my air card.”

“That’s good,” B. said. “If there are other computers operating on the same network, the bad guy can gain access to those as well. If he’s inside your computer, he’s also inside your network.”

Suddenly, cyber crime sounded a lot more ominous. Ali was surprised to find herself feeling spooked and vulnerable. Knowing that a crook could operate inside her computer made her feel like someone had broken into her house and penetrated her personal safety zone.

“What should I do, then?” she asked. “Turn off the computer? Unplug the damn thing and shut it down?”

“No,” B. said. “If you do that, it might tip him off that we’re on to him. I want you to leave the computer on. Try to use it more or less the way you usually do.”

“Why?”

“Computers that are connected to the Internet are two-way streets,” B. explained. “Whoever sent you the Trojan did it over the Internet. I’m going to try to return the favor and send one right back to him. While he’s monitoring your every keystroke, I’ll be monitoring his keystrokes. If he makes a move, I should be able to begin tracking him down.”

“Wait a minute,” Ali said. “If he has that kind of total access to my computer, shouldn’t I cancel my credit cards and shut down my online banking? Should I report this to the police?”

“It’s my experience that banks are a whole lot more interested in identity theft than cops are. If there’s a murder or even an armed robbery, the cops are all over it. With identity theft, they’re not until and unless we can prove that a crime has actually been committed. They’ll get on the bandwagon once we’ve accumulated enough evidence that it’s easy for them to make a case without having to expend much effort. Right now the best thing that could happen is that the guy will try to rip you off. In order to catch him at it, you’ll need to monitor your credit-card and bank transactions very carefully. Be on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary, but don’t use your computer to do it.”

“If I’m not supposed to use my computer,” Ali objected, “how am I supposed to go about monitoring anything?”

“I have a couple of spare laptops lying around,” B. said. “I’ll be glad to lend you one of mine to use for the time being. If you don’t mind, I can drop off a loaner for you a little later this evening. You can insert your air card and use that for anything you don’t want exposed to prying eyes.”

“You’ll drop it off,” Ali murmured. “Does that mean you know where I live?”

“Yup,” B. replied, “I’m afraid I do. It was right there in your computer files, plain as day. And I’m not the only one who would know that, either. If I found it out, our sneaky little friend can find it out, too.”

“Great,” Ali said. “See you when you get here. The sooner the better.”

Ali had been planning on taking a look at Bryan Forester’s two thumb drives. Heeding her computer security expert’s warning, however, she left them in her purse. Under normal circumstances, she might have picked up her computer and checked her e-mail account. But now, self-conscious in the knowledge that her every keystroke might be under observation, she left the computer where it was and went into the bedroom to change into sweats.

Late in the afternoon, Matt managed to get his brain focused on work. When his phone rang, he answered it before the second ring. Yes, he was a bureaucrat—and a lowly one—but that was also why Matt always answered his phone so promptly. He regarded himself as a public servant, and he didn’t like to keep the public waiting.

So when he answered, Matt thought it would be someone calling about one of his many accounts. The last thing he expected was a phone call from a detective—a homicide detective!

“My name’s Dave Holman,” the man on the phone announced. “Detective Dave Holman, with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. Is this Matthew Morrison?”

Matt’s first thought was that it had to be some kind of joke. Bill Baxter was one of Matt’s former coworkers at the state auditor’s office. Before transferring over to the Department of Weights and Measures, Bill had established himself as a practical joker of the first water. This sounded like the kind of off-the-wall stunt Bill would pull.

“Bill?” Matt asked uncertainly. “Bill Baxter, is this you?”

“No,” the caller replied. “It’s not Bill Baxter. As I said a moment ago, my name is Dave Holman.”

“Sorry,” Matt said. “My mistake. You sound a lot like another guy I know, a friend of mine.” He glanced guiltily around his cubicle to see if anyone was listening. Bobbie Bacon, his nearest neighbor, was talking on her phone. No one else seemed to be paying the slightest bit of attention. “What can I do for you—Did you say Holman?”

“Yes. Dave Holman. I’m a homicide detective.”

“What’s this all about?” Matt asked. Why on earth is a homicide detective calling me? he wondered.

“I’m working on a case that happened up here in our jurisdiction,” Holman explained. “On Monday morning of this week, a woman named Morgan Forester was bludgeoned to death shortly after her children left for school.”

“Where was this again?” Matt asked.

“Up by Sedona,” Holman answered. “Outside the Village of Oak Creek.”

As soon as the detective said “Monday morning,” Matt felt his heartbeat quicken, and he went into a state of near-panic. He knew he had a problem. Matt hadn’t been anywhere near where he was supposed to be that morning, not even close. In the solitude of his cubicle, he felt his ears turn red. Beads of sweat popped out on what his wife liked to call his “very tall forehead.”

“What does any of this have to do with me?” Matt asked. He did his best to keep his tone conversational and even. It would not do to sound upset or panicked. That was critical.

“The car you were driving was reportedly seen in the area shortly before the crime occurred,” Detective Holman continued. “I was wondering if I could stop by your office and visit with you about that. We’re hoping that perhaps you may have unwittingly witnessed something that could help us in solving our case.”

Matt was utterly mystified. “Wait a minute,” he said. “What car? You say this happened somewhere around Sedona? I wasn’t anywhere near there on Monday morning. What makes you think I was?”

Now it was Detective Holman’s turn to be mystified. “You weren’t?” he asked. “Where were you, then?”

The easy thing for Matt to say was that he had been at work, but that wasn’t true. There was a whole floor of people in his office who would be more than happy to blow a hole in that whopper. Who was this dead woman? And why was the homicide cop calling him? Was he under suspicion somehow? Did he need to have an alibi? The waitress at the truck stop might remember him—he’d left her a nice tip—but if he admitted to having been there, he’d also have to admit why.

Matt’s ears burned anew. The cop was saying something, but Matt hadn’t been paying attention to anything except the damning sound of his own breath coming in short, anxious gasps. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Bad connection. I didn’t get that last part.”

“According to the people at Hertz, you rented a vehicle from their Sky Harbor facility early that morning and brought it back later in the afternoon.”

“Why would I need to rent a car?” Matt asked. His insides lurched. The car! That was another problem. Using his fictional early appointment in Tucson as an excuse, he had checked out a motor-pool vehicle on Friday night. He had driven home in it and kept it over the weekend. It was also the vehicle he had driven to his appointment with Susan at the model home in Red Rock. How many traffic cameras along the way might have picked up on that?

He took a deep breath. Obviously, this wasn’t a joke. The cop was real. Someone was dead, murdered, and the cops believed that Matt was involved. Then his heart skipped a beat. He hadn’t heard from Susan since then—not since the day she had stood him up—though he had written to her time and again, told her he understood completely if she’d had second thoughts. What if Susan Callison was the person who had been murdered? What if that was why she had stood him up and why she hadn’t been back online?

“It was rented under your Hertz gold-card number,” Holman told him.

“I’m sorry,” Matt declared. “There must be some mistake. I don’t have a Hertz gold card.”

How would he? Why would he? He never went anywhere that he didn’t drive himself. Jenny didn’t like flying, which meant they didn’t fly.

“I see,” the detective said.

And Matt was afraid that he did—that Holman saw everything. So Matt didn’t demand to know who was dead. That would have counted as making a fuss. And he didn’t say again that he hadn’t been in Sedona, couldn’t possibly have been in Sedona, because he was a third of the state away from there, hoping to get lucky. He just kept quiet.

“So could I come talk to you about this in the morning?” Dave Holman asked. “I could probably be at your office by ten or so, if that would be all right.”

“Of course,” Matt said. “Ten is fine. You know where we are? We’re here in Phoenix, on the capital campus downtown.”

“I’m a detective,” Dave said with a laugh. “I’m sure I can find it.”

Matt wondered if that comment had been intended as a joke, but his first thought was that it sounded more like a threat, and maybe it was.

For a long time after Matt put down the phone, he sat there and considered his options. He could go home and spill the beans to Jenny. He could tell her the whole story, throw himself on her mercy, and hope she would forgive him. Or not.

Around him, other people in the department started leaving the office. A glance at the clock told him that Jenny was still at work. Even if she heard her phone ringing, she wouldn’t be able to answer it on the floor. Glad to avoid having to speak to her directly, Matt dialed her number and left a message.

“Something’s come up at work,” he said. “It’s a project that has to be finished in time for a meeting first thing tomorrow morning. So you’re on your own for dinner. Sorry about that. And don’t bother waiting up for me,” he added. “I’ll probably be very late.”

When Ali returned to the living room, Chris reappeared long enough to say he was leaving. Like his grandfather, Chris had warned her of the dangers of computer worms and viruses. Right that moment didn’t seem like the time to tell him that her computer might have been compromised by an identity thief.

“Where to?” she asked.

“Just out for a burger with the guys.” His response seemed a trifle too casual.

“Not with Athena?” Ali asked.

Chris shook his head. “She has papers to grade.”

The answer was so quick that Ali wondered if it was true. Was the fact that Chris was on his own for the evening some kind of carryover from the previous night’s engagement-party fiasco?

“Want me to bring you something?” Chris added. “I think Mr. Brooks pretty much emptied all the leftovers out of the fridge.”

“And probably saved us both from dying of food poisoning,” Ali said with a laugh. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

And she was. She turned on her music and fixed herself a container of microwave soup. As she cleared the kitchen, she was careful to dispose of the plastic container in a fashion that would be invisible to her mother, if not to Leland Brooks. As far as Edie Larson was concerned, soup that came in plastic containers wasn’t fit to eat.

Ali had just started the dishwasher when the doorbell rang. She went to answer it, expecting to find B. Simpson outside, bringing her a substitute computer. Instead, Athena stood waiting on her doorstep.

“Chris isn’t here,” Ali said, letting her visitor inside.

“I know,” Athena said. “I came to talk to you.”

“About last night, I assume,” Ali said without enthusiasm.

“Yes,” Athena agreed. “It is about last night.”

By the time Athena made her way to the couch, Sam was there waiting. As soon as Athena settled down, Sam snuggled up beside her. There was something touching in the way the normally unsociable cat had taken to Athena—as though there was some special connection between these two disfigured beings.

“Look,” Ali said. “I’m really sorry about what happened at the party. My mother adores Chris, and she thinks you’re terrific. I’m sure she let her natural enthusiasm get a little out of hand, but—”

“I know Chris already bitched Edie out about that,” Athena interrupted. “The last thing I want to do is to cause hard feelings between Chris and his grandparents. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t that big a deal—well, maybe it was a little bit of a big deal, but I didn’t want him to go to Bob and Edie and make it that much worse.”

Time to fess up, Ali thought. “He spoke to my mother at my suggestion,” she said. “He told me you were upset, and I thought he needed to get my parents to back off. He may have been less diplomatic than he could have been, but I had said that the two of you should get to do things your way, with nobody else interfering. That goes double for me.”

Suddenly, with no warning, Athena burst into tears. “You don’t understand,” she managed. “Nobody does, not even Chris.”

In order to sit next down next to Athena, Ali had to pry Sam loose and shoo her out of the way. “What is it?” Ali asked, wrapping a comforting arm around the young woman’s heaving shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“How can I explain it to you when I don’t really understand it myself?”

“Try me,” Ali said.

“You know about Kenny?”

Ali knew a little about Kenneth Carlson, the man who had been Athena’s husband. He was also the jerk who had dumped her, filing for a divorce while she had been recuperating from her injuries.

“Some,” Ali said, keeping her voice noncommital.

“We started dating in high school,” Athena said. “From our sophomore year on. Our senior year, we were voted most likely to become Ken and Barbie. My folks loved him and still do. As far as they were concerned, Ken was the son they’d never had. His folks loved me the same way, like a daughter. But as we got older, things changed. Or maybe I changed. Ken’s a farmer, like his dad. I wanted more than that. I was interested in other stuff, but by then things were already in motion. Both our families—both sides—got all caught up in planning this huge wedding. It was like a moving freight train—the dress, the invitations, the flowers, the whole bit. I knew I was getting cold feet. I wanted to get off the train, to stop it somehow, but I didn’t have the nerve. So I went through with the wedding, even though I knew it was wrong. Even though I knew, walking down the aisle, that I didn’t really love him the same way he loved me.”

Athena paused. Ali, sitting beside her, said nothing. This story was one she recognized all too well. She had allowed herself to be talked into marrying Paul Grayson in much the same way—allowed herself to be persuaded, even though she’d known at the time she was settling for something less than what she’d had with her first husband. Paul had money, position, looks, everything she should have wanted, except for one critical deficit—Paul Grayson wasn’t Dean Reynolds. Ali worried that Athena was feeling the same kind of reluctance about her engagement to Chris.

“So I can’t really blame Kenny for dumping me,” Athena continued finally. “The timing sucked. But he found someone who worships him, someone who’s thrilled to be living the farm life the way her mother and grandmother did. I heard a couple of weeks ago that they’re expecting a baby. The real problem is, my parents still blame me for everything that happened, including the divorce. They were both dead set against my joining the National Guard, even though that’s what paid most of my way through school. My father’s old-fashioned. He doesn’t think girls should go to war. As far as he’s concerned, what happened to me in Iraq is all my own fault. Mom and Dad are both convinced that if I hadn’t lost my arm and my leg, Kenny never would have left me for a ‘whole woman.’”

“None of us has a problem seeing you as a whole woman,” Ali said quietly.

Athena nodded. “I know. Thank you.”

“So the only member of your family who’s still in your corner is your grandmother?” Ali asked. “The one who flew to D.C. to visit you when you were in the hospital?”

Athena nodded again and wiped her eyes. “Grandma Betsy is my dad’s mother, and she’s a hoot. You’d really like her.”

“What about last night?” Ali prodded gently.

Athena sighed. “That’s the thing. I felt like I was back on that same train, the speeding wedding train. Like they say in that old joke, ‘Déjà vu all over again.’ Chris is great. Your folks are great. So are you, for that matter, but when I saw the food, all I could think about was that huge wedding. My parents were so excited to do it, and they spent money they couldn’t afford, because they wanted to do it right. And that’s why I wanted the party to be small—why I needed it to be small.”

“In case you needed to pull the emergency brake and stop the train, you could,” Ali said.

Athena sniffed, blew her nose, and nodded again. “But I didn’t mean to make it Chris’s problem, and I certainly didn’t mean for him to have a big falling-out with his grandparents over it. I mean, the party was more than I wanted, but I know Bob and Edie were only trying to help.”

“Don’t worry about them,” Ali said, patting the back of Athena’s hand. “They’ve had some dealings with temperamental brides in their time. When Chris’s father and I were getting married, I was a lot like you. The last thing I wanted was a big wedding. At the time, my mother was determined to ‘do the whole thing up brown,’ as my father would say. Dean and I responded to all the parental pressure by eloping to Vegas. It wasn’t one of those drive-through ceremonies, but close.

“So all these years later, my mother’s still walking around singing those ‘I missed the big wedding’ blues. As soon as Chris admitted popping the question to you, she went off the deep end. She figured this was her last chance at a big production-number wedding. But that’s her problem, Athena, not yours. If Edie Larson wants a big wedding, maybe she and Dad should plan a whole formal renewal-of-vows hoopla for their fiftieth—which isn’t all that far off, by the way. But for right now, as I told Mom this afternoon, we all need to back off. We’re doing things your way. Period.”

“You told her that?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Is she upset?”

“She was upset,” Ali replied. “Maybe still is, but she’ll get over it.”

“What about your dad?”

“What about him? If Mom is over it, Dad is over it,” Ali answered. “That’s how they work.”

For a moment Athena said nothing. “What about Chris’s other grandparents?” she asked. “He never mentions them. What happened to them?”

That was the other problem with our wedding, Ali thought. My parents wanted a huge wedding. Dean’s didn’t want any wedding at all—at least not to me.

“Dean’s parents disowned him,” she said. “They wanted him to come into the family business. He wasn’t interested. My family didn’t have any money. His did, and they thought that’s what I was after—his money—so they opted out of their son’s life completely. That’s the other reason we eloped.”

“And they never came back?” Athena asked.

Ali shook her head. “Even though Dean asked me not to, I tried getting in touch with them once after he got sick. They never returned my call. I’ve never forgiven them for it.”

“They don’t know Chris?”

“No,” Ali said. “Not at all.”

Athena gave her a wry and still slightly tearful smile. “So at least I’m not the only one with a screwy family.”

The doorbell rang again. Athena leaped off the couch. “Sorry,” she said. “How rude. You were expecting company, and here I am, messing things up. I need to go.”

“Believe me, you’re not messing anything up,” Ali began, but Athena wasn’t listening. She hurried to the front door and flung it open. With a mumbled apology, she hustled past the visitor waiting outside on Ali’s front porch.

“That was Athena, my son’s fiancée,” Ali explained to B. Simpson, who stood there with a roll-aboard computer case stationed behind him. “They had a bit of a disagreement.”

“Nothing too serious, I hope,” he said.

“No,” Ali said. “I think Athena and Chris both have a case of new-engagement jitters.”

“If this is a bad time and I’m interrupting, I could always come back later.”

This whole encounter was one Ali dreaded, but it had to be done. “No,” she said. “Come on in. Let’s get this over with.”

One by one, the last few stragglers left the building. Finally, there was no one left but Matt, who sat there agonizing about Detective Holman’s phone call and struggling to understand how this unforeseen disaster had come to pass.

In the movies, earth-shattering events happened with the hero stranded on steep, rocky cliffs overlooking roiling seas. Matt had always loved those black-and-white romances from the thirties in which star-crossed lovers would dine together in high-class restaurants where they could say their bittersweet goodbyes, all the while sipping high-toned cocktails or champagne. But Matthew Morrison was no movie-worthy hero. He was just a regular Joe whose downfall had started months earlier in the checkout line at his neighborhood Lowe’s.

He had gone there after work with Jenny to pick up some gardening supplies and flats of annuals, mostly petunias and snapdragons, for the pots she liked to keep blooming out on the back patio. As they left the store, Matt did what he usually did: He scanned through the receipt. When he spotted the error—an eighty-seven-cent overcharge on the bottle of slug bait—he had turned on his heel and marched back into the store and back to the cash wrap to have the clerk set it right. It was an error; it needed to be fixed.

As per usual, Jenny was in a hurry. She had been for as long as Matt had known her and for all of the eighteen years they’d been married. She had followed him back into the store, berating him all the way. Despite the long line of strangers at the checkout, she had kept after him the whole time, bitching him out, screeching at him that “only an anal-retentive auditor would waste his precious time and mine for eighty-seven goddamn cents!”

Matt had prided himself on being a good husband. For the whole time they’d been married, he had been unfailingly faithful to Jenny, even though she’d made it clear from the beginning that no matter what Matt did, he would never measure up to her sainted and mercifully deceased father. Matt liked going to work. Compared to what went on at home, work was peaceful and quiet. He had hired on with the state auditor three years after they married. For fifteen years Matt had kept his nose to the grindstone, doing his important but unheralded work in a quietly efficient manner. It bothered him that when it came time for promotions, he was always pushed aside for someone younger—often someone Matt himself had trained—but he never made a fuss about it. That was something Matthew Morrison didn’t do: make a fuss.

In all those years and in all situations, he’d kept a mild-mannered smile plastered on his face and done his best to get along. With everyone. Without realizing it, though, he must have been moving ever closer to the edge. And that fateful night, as the clerk counted out Matt’s eighty-seven cents’ worth of change and with the people in line snickering at him behind his back, something had snapped. After emptying the trunk and carrying Jenny’s flats of annuals out to the back patio, he had locked himself in his home office and gone shopping at Singleatheart, a site for “married singles,” which, Matt decided, was what he was.

A month or so later, he had found Suzie Q, also a married single, separated from her husband, not interested in a divorce, but wanting to put some fun and joy back into her life. That was what Matt wanted, too—some fun in his life, although for him, it wasn’t so much putting it back in as it was having fun for the first time. Ever.

It hadn’t worked. He had never actually seen Susan Callison, had never, as they say, laid a glove on her. But as of this afternoon, his whole nonaffair with her had blown up in his face. He was convinced that Suzie Q was dead, and he seemed to be the prime suspect. Tomorrow morning the detective would be here at his office. Would that be for questioning, or would it be worse than that? Was Holman planning to place him under arrest? Right there? In the office? With everyone around them looking on? Matt’s insides squirmed at the very idea.

The janitorial crew swept through the floor. Ignoring Matt completely, they emptied trash cans, vacuumed a little, and then went away. Matt knew what he needed to do, but only when he was left alone once more, only when there was no one left to see, did Matt Morrison reach for his keyboard.

CHAPTER 10

In talking to B. Simpson on the phone, Ali had forgotten how tall he was—six feet five, at least. He wasn’t particularly good-looking. His most outstanding feature was a pair of gray-green eyes that seemed to change color depending on the lighting. There was a hint of natural curl in his short brown hair, and the smile he offered was engagingly shy.

“Can I get you something?” Ali asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “I find it’s best not to eat or drink around computers.” Rather than stopping off in the living room, he headed straight for the dining room table, where he deposited the computer bag. “Mind if we set up shop here?” he asked.

“Sure,” Ali said. “Go ahead.”

He opened the case and began hauling out two separate laptops as well as a whole series of cables and power cords, which he began connecting.

“Why so many computers?” Ali asked.

“Since we have to assume our friend is monitoring your computer at all times, we’ll have to do our own file sharing via cables rather than over the Internet. Oh, and I’ll need your computer.”

With a nod, Ali went to fetch it. When she came back, she couldn’t help noticing that a subtle hint of aftershave had permeated the room. Good stuff, she thought. I wonder what it is?

B. took the laptop from her. After removing her air card, he placed it on the table, where he began connecting the computer into what was by then an impressive tangle of computer cables.

“So here’s the thing,” he continued, talking as he worked. “High Noon has been looking after your system for over three months now. Until today, other than some relatively harmless adware programs and cookies, there hasn’t been anything out of the ordinary. The Trojan horse wasn’t there last night during our midnight scan, but it was there today at noon. So I have to ask you the usual clichéd computer troubleshooting question: What were you doing just before that happened? Had you visited any unusual websites, for example, or did you open any attachments this morning, even an attachment from a regular correspondent, from someone you know?”

“I logged on to something called Singleatheart,” Ali said.

“What’s that?” B. asked.

“An Internet dating site,” she replied.

B. stopped what he was doing long enough to give her an appraising look. “If you don’t mind my saying so, it doesn’t seem to me that you’d have any reason to go looking at one of those.”

To her consternation, Ali found herself blushing at his unexpected compliment. “Thank you,” she said. “But it wasn’t for me. I was doing it for a friend of mine.”

That sounded lame, she thought. Totally and completely lame.

“Right,” he said, then returned to his cables.

Bob and Edie had left Ali with the impression that B. Simpson was something of a recluse. She wondered if that was true or if it was simply what he wanted people to believe.

“How much do you know about what goes on in town?” Ali asked.

“Not very much,” he admitted with a shrug. “I’m more in tune with what’s out there on the Web than I am with what’s going on down the street. Why?”

“I have a contractor who’s working on my house,” Ali said. “My new house. His wife, Morgan, was murdered earlier this week, and now Bryan’s fallen under suspicion. I learned that his wife had been involved with this Singleatheart website. That made me curious. I logged on because I was trying to find out why a happily married woman would have signed up on a dating service to begin with. The problem is, you can’t go there and look around for free. You have to sign up and log on.”

To judge from the puzzled look on B.’s face, Ali wasn’t sure he was listening to her. “Did you say Bryan and Morgan?” he asked as though the words had just penetrated his consciousness. “Are you by any chance talking about Bryan Forester and Morgan Deming?”

Ali didn’t remember hearing Morgan’s maiden name, but clearly, B. Simpson had. “Yes,” Ali said. “Do you know them?”

“I knew them both,” B. replied after a slight pause. “It was a long time ago, when we were all still in school. I didn’t know they’d gotten married, but that’s just as well. As far as I’m concerned, they deserved each other.”

So you weren’t exactly friends, Ali thought. “What do you mean?” she asked.

Again B. didn’t answer right away. “Morgan Deming and Bryan Forester were part of the in crowd,” he said finally. “For all I know, you were, too, so maybe you don’t have any idea how it feels to be ‘out.’ The people who are ‘in’ go through school in a kind of Teflon-coated world. Nothing touches them. They get away with all kinds of outrageous stunts while teachers, parents, and coaches turn a blind eye. Bryan and his best pal, Billy, were the ringleaders of a particularly vicious little gang of thugs. I was still called Bart Simpson when I met them. Once The Simpsons showed up on TV, I turned into one of their favorite targets. Bryan and the other creeps made my life so miserable that as soon as I could, I took the only option available to me at the time. I quit school, went to Seattle, and never looked back. The day I left Sedona was the happiest day of my life. I couldn’t wait to get out of town.”

“You said Billy,” Ali pointed out. “Which one? Would that happen to be Billy Barnes?”

B. nodded grimly. “One and the same.”

“But you’re back here now,” Ali observed. “Are your folks still here?”

B. shook his head. “My dad died of a heart attack about ten years ago, and my mother went back to Michigan, where she came from originally. She still has family there. So what brought me back to Sedona? For one thing, it’s a beautiful place. I came back because I loved the red rocks, and I missed them. I loved the blue skies, and I missed those, too. I decided that I wasn’t going to let a bunch of school bullies keep me from living wherever I wanted. When I did come back, I did it with a whole pile of cash in my pocket and with the ability to be here on my own terms. By choice, I don’t have much to do with local yokels. I probably have more day-to-day dealings with your parents than with anyone else in town, and that’s pretty much how I like it.”

“What about Bryan Forester?” Ali asked.

“What about him?” B. said with a shrug. “I’m sorry to hear his wife is dead. That’s too bad, especially if they had kids. But just because I wouldn’t walk across the street to say hello to Bryan Forester doesn’t mean I wish him ill.”

Ali hadn’t anticipated that Bryan Forester and B. Simpson would have such a complicated history, but that was what happened in small towns. Inevitably, everyone knew everyone else, for good or ill. Ali would have liked to tell B. about Bryan Forester’s difficulties so she could enlist his help and advice on the two thumb drives. Realizing she had inadvertently poked a stick at a hornet’s nest, though, she quickly backed away from that idea. She’d have to deal with the thumb drives on her own.

“Unlike you,” she said, “I didn’t know Bryan Forester in high school. From what you said, it sounds like he was a complete jerk back then. But he’s not a jerk now—at least he doesn’t seem like one to me. And he doesn’t seem like a possible killer, either. As for Morgan? Maybe she never grew up. Apparently, she liked living on the wild side, otherwise she wouldn’t have been messing around in places like Singleatheart. But that’s why I went there, to try to find out more about it and see if her being involved in the website might have had something to do with her death.”

That comment seemed to get B. back to the problem at hand. “So you went to the site and logged on,” he said.

Ali nodded. “And paid money—a hundred bucks—to do it.”

“You paid with a credit card?”

Ali nodded again.

“That makes sense.” B nodded thoughtfully. “My guess is that someone who works at Singleatheart is capturing the information that comes in to the website and planting the Trojan horse on the computers of people who sign up. That gives him an unending source of information that he can subsequently use in identity theft scams. He may lift money out of an account here or there, or he may use pieces of real names to create what’s called a synthetic identity.”

“Synthetic identity?” Ali repeated. “How does that work?”

“The bad guy applies for a credit card under a fictitious name, or else he uses the real name and social security number along with a fake address. That generates a file name and address, as far as the various credit-reporting companies are concerned. Once enough action happens on that name, the guy ends up having a real credit report, which makes him real as far as financial transactions are concerned. It makes him good to go, even though he doesn’t exist. The synthetic identity can then be used to empty people’s bank accounts or run up thousands of dollars in fraudulent credit-card charges.”

Ali was stunned. “That’s all it takes?”

“That’s all,” B. said. “People like that are generally cowards. They don’t have guts enough to pick up a gun and go out robbing people face-to-face or holding up banks in person. They’d rather do their stealing second-and thirdhand, hiding behind various virtual camouflages. This is your basic white-collar crime. No blood or guts. That’s why the cops generally aren’t interested.”

Finished with his cable connections, B. punched a series of commands into one of the keyboards. The computer screens came to life with pictures of files floating first in one direction and then another.

“Okay,” he explained. “What I’m doing here is making a mirror image of your hard drive on this computer so you’ll have access to all your files. If you don’t want our bad guy seeing everything you’re doing, that one will need to stay off the Internet at all times. We’ll leave his Trojan intact on your old computer. I’m loading what I call my stalking horse into your online banking folder and into your e-mail folder as well. Use that one selectively, enough that it looks like business as usual. That way, if he tries to access any of your recent e-mail activity or your banking or credit-card information with his computer, we’ll be able to infect him. What goes around comes around.”

“In other words, we’re turning my computer into a mousetrap, and I’m the bait.”

“Exactly,” B. said.

“But won’t these extra programs slow down my computer—and his, too?” Ali asked. “Won’t he notice?”

“Have you noticed any difference?” B. asked.

“Not so far.”

“Right. With any luck, he may not notice right away, either. I’m hoping we’ll be able to hack in to his system long enough to get a fix on some of his other connections. Even if he wises up and deletes our program, I’ll have enough details that I’ll be able to track back to him through some of the other people he’s targeted. He’s most likely hiding behind multiple servers and layers of identities that are strung out all over the globe. This isn’t going to happen all at once. It’s going to take time to find him. Unfortunately, finding him will be just the beginning.”

Ali nodded. “Until we find compelling evidence of some illegal activity, there’s no sense in turning him over to the cops. Which means we have to wait until he rips me off before we can do anything about it.”

“Not entirely,” B. returned after a moment.

“What do you mean?”

“There are really two ways of doing this. The one you’ve just mentioned—using your computer as bait and waiting for him to do something illegal—is the long way around. First we have to catch him; then we have to bring the cops in on it in hopes that eventually, the justice system will dish out some kind of punishment.”

“But we both know that with all the jurisdictional considerations, that’s not likely to happen,” Ali said. “And even if he is convicted, punishment will be minimal. So what’s the other way, a shortcut of some kind?”

“You could call it that,” B. said. “It comes under the heading of an eye for an eye, and it bypasses the justice system completely.”

“You’re talking about some kind of vigilante action?”

B. nodded. “These bad-boy geeks think they’re so smart that no one will ever wise up to them, so instead of hitting him with my Trojan, I’ll nail him with my other secret weapon. Did you ever watch Voyager or Enterprise or any of those Trekkie series on TV?”

“I suppose so,” Ali answered. “Why?”

“Do you remember tractor beams, the things the bad guys used to grab something and drag it back to their mother ship?”

“I guess.”

“My pet worm works the same way. I deploy it by putting it on your computer, the one he’s targeted. It sits there until he tries logging on to your system. That carries it into his system, where it’s programmed to do two things—retrieve all his files and shoot them back to us while it’s trashing them on his end.”

“We end up with his files?” Ali asked. “Is that legal?”

“Would whatever we retrieved from there be admissible in a court of law?” B. asked. “Probably not. That’s what I meant when I said we’d be bypassing the justice system. But I guarantee you, this is some jerk who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, and when we outwit him, he’s going to be annoyed as hell. It’ll drive him up a wall.”

“Driving him up a wall sounds about right,” Ali said. “What’s the turnaround time?”

“Once I install the worm program on your computer, all it takes is for him to try opening one of your infected files. As soon as he does, it’s kerblammo, and his computer system is toast. So it’s up to you. I’m happy to do it either way—fast or slow, through legal channels or not. And until we know we’ve nailed him—I’ll know as soon as the worm is deployed—then you should probably operate on an outside computer.”

Remembering her father’s gunslinger comment, Ali was glad to have B. and High Noon Enterprises on her side. It didn’t take long for her to make up her mind. “I’m all for instant gratification,” she told him.

B. grinned at her. “So am I,” he said.

Once the file transfers were completed, B. began disconnecting his cables and stowing his gear.

“You’ll let me know as soon as anything happens?” Ali asked.

“You bet,” he said. “Night or day.”

B. left a few minutes later. As he drove his Saab out of the driveway, Chris was waiting to enter.

“Who was driving that 9-7X?” Chris asked. “He’s got great taste in cars. Which reminds me, you and Dave don’t seem to be spending that much time together lately. Is this a new boyfriend, by any chance?”

“Hardly,” she answered. “His name’s Simpson—B. Simpson.”

“Oh, him,” Chris said. “I remember now. He’s that friend of Grandpa’s who’s the computer security guru. I didn’t know guys like him made house calls”

“He stopped by because he found a Trojan horse on my laptop.”

“Whoa!” Chris said. “If you’ll pardon the expression,” he added with a laugh. “But a Trojan horse? I’ve heard of them, but where did you pick one up?”

It wasn’t lost on Ali that there were certain similarities between having her computer infected with a virus and picking up an STD after an anonymous one-night stand. Not eager to admit to her son about having logged on to an Internet dating site, Ali shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

“Still, he stopped by to help you get rid of it?” Chris asked.

“Not exactly,” Ali said. “There may be some kind of identity theft scheme at work. He’s planting a couple of countermeasures on my computer, and he dropped off one of his spares for me to use as needed in the meantime.”

Before Chris could respond, Ali’s phone rang. It wasn’t late, but it was after nine. Thinking it might be bad news, Ali hurried to answer.

“Is this Ali Reynolds?” an unfamiliar woman asked.

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“It’s Beverly Forester,” the woman answered. “Bryan’s mother.” Her trembling voice faltered.

“Is something wrong?” Ali asked. “Are you all right?”

“No. We’re not all right,” Beverly managed, pulling herself together. “We’re still at the Best Western. The cops were here a little while ago. They put my son in handcuffs, loaded him into the back of a patrol car, and drove away.”

Ali’s heart fell. If Dave had gone so far as to place Bryan under arrest, then the evidence he had collected from the back of the truck must have been damning.

“The girls didn’t see that,” Bev Forester continued. “But they’re dreadfully upset that their father isn’t here with them right now, and I don’t know what to do. Lindsey’s crying like her poor little heart’s broken. Lacy’s locked herself in the bathroom and won’t come out. They’ve been through so much the last few days, but I can’t do a thing with them, and right now I’m at my wits’ end!”

“I’m sure if you just talked to them—” Ali began.

“I already tried that,” Beverly returned. “So did Harold, Bryan’s father. He didn’t get anywhere, either. We were wondering if we could convince you to come see them.”

“I can’t see how that would help,” Ali objected. “I don’t even know them.”

“Oh,” Beverly said with a disappointed sigh. “Bryan speaks so highly of you, I thought maybe you knew his girls as well.”

“I don’t, but it’s possible I know someone who does,” Ali said. “I met their teacher at a function last night. Her name is Mindy Farber. Her roommate is my son’s fiancée. Mindy seemed to be concerned about the girls. Maybe she could help.”

“Do you have her number?”

“Let me call her and explain the situation,” Ali said.

Once off the phone with Beverly, Ali called Athena’s number. While Chris listened with considerable interest, Ali enlisted Mindy’s help and made arrangements to come get her.

“Thank you for picking me up,” Mindy said twenty minutes later as she buckled herself into the Cayenne’s passenger seat. “You didn’t have to. I know where the Best Western is. I could have driven there myself.”

The truth was, Ali wanted to go, too. Bryan Forester was part of her life; so were his girls. If there was anything she personally could do to help them, she would. As a consequence, on the drive there, Ali filled Mindy in with as much background information as she’d been able to piece together.

At the hotel, Ali drove around the building until she spotted Bryan’s Dodge Ram. A man smoking a pipe stood leaning against the front bumper. “Mr. Forester?” Ali asked as she stepped out of her car and into the parking lot.

He straightened. “Ms. Reynolds?” he asked. “Thank you for coming. Bev’s not very good at this kind of thing. Completely out of her league. I don’t know how much more she can take.”

“Where is she?”

“Bryan and the girls were staying in the next room over,” he said, pointing toward the adjoining door. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about that tonight. We can’t very well leave them there by themselves.”

As Ali walked through the low-lying cloud of pipe smoke, Mindy Farber was already knocking on the door. “Come in,” Bev Forester called.

As soon as Mindy opened the door, Ali saw a gray-haired woman sitting on the edge of a bed. A little girl lay on the far side of the bed, crying inconsolably. When the woman reached out to touch her, the girl shrank away. The woman stood up, then, wringing her hands, she hurried to meet Mindy.

“She’s been like this ever since her father left,” Bev Forester said. “What should I do?”

In answer, Mindy walked past her and took Bev’s place on the bed. “Lindsey,” she said softly. “It’s Miss Farber. Are you all right?”

Without warning, Lindsey sat up and flung herself at Mindy and buried her tearstained face in her young teacher’s breast. “Did you hear?” she hiccuped through her sobs. “Our mother is dead. Somebody murdered her. I heard some people talking. They were saying that they think Daddy is the one who did it. I wasn’t supposed to, but I was peeking out the window when he left. They put handcuffs on him, put him in the back of a car, and drove away. Oh, Miss Farber, if Daddy’s in jail, what’s going to happen to us? Where will we live? Who will take care of us?”

“Maybe your grandparents—”

“They don’t like us,” Lindsey sobbed. “They don’t like Lacy.”

“That’s not true,” Bev interjected. “Of course we like Lacy, we just don’t understand—”

Just then the bathroom door swung silently open. Without so much as a glance in Bev Forester’s direction, Lacy emerged from the bathroom. She went straight to the bed and sat down next to her sister. With a dignity that belied her age, Lacy silently took one of Lindsey’s hands and held it tightly with both of hers while two fat tears tumbled down her own cheeks.

Ali knew Lacy to be a troubled child. Her willingness to emerge from the bathroom in hopes of comforting her grieving sister seemed like a display of raw courage.

Mindy Farber was already holding Lindsey. Ali worried that if Mindy tried to draw Lacy into the same hug, she’d once again withdraw. Mindy must have sensed the same thing. She continued to cradle Lindsey but made no effort to reach for Lacy.

“I don’t know the answers to any of those questions,” Mindy said softly to both girls. “But I do know this much: Wherever you are, I’m sure you’ll be together.”

Ali held her breath. The words were simple enough to say, but if, for some reason, Bryan’s folks were unable to care for the girls and Child Protective Services stepped into the picture, Ali knew that promise might not be easily kept. Where the girls would end up then was anybody’s guess.

While Mindy Farber dealt with the two girls, Ali took Bev by the arm and led her outside, where she sank into her husband’s arms and burst into tears herself. “What are we going to do?” she asked him. “The girls don’t know us, really. Lacy especially refuses to have anything to do with us. How are we going to manage, Harold? And what will become of Bryan?”

“I’ve got a call in to Mitch,” he said. To Ali, he added, “Mitch Gunn used to be our attorney when we lived here. I left him a message. So far he hasn’t called back.”

“Is Mitch Gunn a criminal defense attorney?” Ali asked.

“I’m not sure what his specialty is. Mitch has handled business agreements as well as our wills—that kind of thing,” Harold Forester said. “Up till now, that’s the only legal help we’ve ever needed.”

“If your son has been arrested for murder,” Ali told the Foresters, “he’s going to need a lot more than that.”

“If you know someone who would be better, tell us,” Harold said. “Whatever it costs, we’ll find the money. We have to. He’s our son.”

In the past several years, a series of tough circumstances had forced Ali to retain a whole series of defense attorneys, all of whom had proved reasonably effective. The first one, however, a local named Rick Santos, had been by far the most affordable. Once Harold Forester was on the line with Rick, Ali went back into the girls’ room, where Mindy Farber had somehow convinced Lindsey and Lacy to don pajamas and climb into bed.

“Are you going to stay with us?” Lindsey asked her teacher.

Mindy shook her head. “Not overnight. Your grandparents will be here with you. I have to go home so I can get ready for school in the morning.”

“Can we go back to school, too?” Lindsey asked. “I hate being here. So does Lacy. It’s boring. There’s nothing to do.”

Bev Forester had followed Ali into the room. “Of course you can’t go back to school,” she announced. “Not right now. Not until after the funeral on Friday. What would people think?”

Mindy turned to Bev. “These girls are seven,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t matter what people think. Let them come back to school, Mrs. Forester. Their whole lives have been disrupted. Going to school will give their days some structure. It will also give them something familiar to think about besides what’s happened to them.”

“But—” Bev began.

“Please, Grandma,” Lindsey interrupted. “Please let us.”

“She’s right,” Harold told his wife from the doorway. “They’ll be better off at school than stuck here with us all day long, worrying or else watching CNN.”

“What’s a funeral?”

At first Ali thought Lindsey was the one who had asked the question, but then she saw Lindsey turn toward her sister in drop-jawed amazement.

“What?” Lindsey said.

“What’s a funeral?” Lacy repeated.

Lacy’s unprecedented excursion into the verbal world may not have surprised her sister, but it had left all the adults in the room dumbstruck. Mindy Farber was the first to recover.

“A funeral is like a church service,” she explained. “Funerals are held when people die. They give the people who are left behind a chance to say goodbye. This one will be for your mother.”

“But I don’t want to say goodbye,” Lacy said. With that, she rolled away from them and covered her head with her pillow, signaling with some finality that her brief conversation was over.

Lindsey was determined. She turned back to her grandmother. “So can we go to school or not?” she asked.

“We’ll see,” Bev said, but Ali could tell the woman was wavering. So could Mindy.

“Tomorrow, then,” Mindy said, patting Lindsey’s shoulder as she stood to leave. “See you there.”

When Mindy and Ali exited the room a few minutes later, Bev Forester followed. “You had no right to say that,” she sputtered. “You had no right to tell the girls that you’d see them tomorrow.”

“Did you happen to notice a miracle just happened?” Mindy demanded in return, rounding on the older woman. “Your granddaughter, who has never spoken a single word in my hearing, suddenly said something—something important. She’s not ready to say goodbye, and not just to her mother, either. She’s not ready to say goodbye to life as she knew it. Please let the girls come to school tomorrow.”

“But what if some of the other kids say something to them?” Bev objected. “What if they tease the girls or make fun of them?”

“No doubt the kids will say something,” Mindy agreed. “Ours is a small school, and what happened on Monday was and is very big news. By tomorrow people will probably know that the girls’ father is in custody. But Lacy and Lindsey will be better off if they start dealing with comments—kind or unkind—earlier rather than later. That’s also part of saying goodbye.”

“I’ll take them,” Harold said, cutting short the discussion. “What time does school start?”

“Eight-thirty.”

“All right, then,” he said. “The girls will be there. I’ll drive them there myself.” He turned to his wife. “Now, you go on to bed, Bev. The manager’s going to bring down a roll-away bed. I’ll be here with the girls in case they wake up.”

Shaking her head, Bev disappeared into the other room while Ali and Mindy headed for Ali’s Cayenne.

“You were really good with the girls,” Ali said. “With both of them.”

“Thank you,” Mindy said. “But what’s going to happen after tonight? If their father ends up going to prison, what will happen to the girls? The grandfather’s probably okay, but the grandmother? Yikes!”

“From what Bryan Forester said to me, I doubt his mother is very good with little kids under the best of circumstances, which these definitely are not,” Ali said. “Bev’s daughter-in-law has been murdered, and her son has been placed under arrest. We should both try to cut the woman some slack.”

“And I’ll do what I can for the girls when they come to school tomorrow,” Mindy added.

“Exactly,” Ali said.

When she pulled up in front of Mindy and Athena’s apartment, there were no lights on inside, but Chris’s Prius was parked on the street out front. “It looks like the lovers got over their little spat,” Mindy said with a laugh as she opened the door to step out of the vehicle. “Thanks for the ride.”

“And thanks for all the help,” Ali said. “I don’t know how Bev and Harold Forester would have managed if you hadn’t been there.”

Once Mindy had gotten out, as Ali drove on, she found herself thinking about her mother. Ali had always admired and envied Edie’s ability to do the right thing in the face of almost any crisis. Well, almost any crisis. The uproar over the engagement party counted as a major exception to her mother’s otherwise unblemished record.

Ali had been operating on pure instinct when she’d invited Mindy Farber into the fray to help deal with Lindsey and Lacy Forester. It had turned out to be the right thing to do. Maybe I’m my mother’s daughter after all, she thought.

It wasn’t until she was back at the house that she remembered the thumb drives. But having just had a serious lesson in computer security, she was no longer willing to insert either one of them into the backup computer B. had lent her. If the virus on her computer had come from Singleatheart, wasn’t there a good chance that Morgan Forester’s files had also been infected? Before doing something potentially damaging to B.’s computer, she would have to bring him into the picture.

She was in bed and ready to turn off the lights when Chris came home a little after one. He tapped on her door and then entered the bedroom, where he perched on the edge of Ali’s bed. “I went to see Athena,” Chris said.

Ali nodded without saying that she knew as much.

“We talked,” Chris added. “And I think we got some things straightened out; we came to an understanding.”

“That’s good,” Ali said.

“I’m glad you told Athena about you and my father running away to Vegas to get married. She liked that.”

“Your grandmother didn’t like it,” Ali replied. “She still doesn’t.”

“That’s all right,” Chris said. “Just knowing about it made Athena feel better, and that made me feel better. So thanks for the good advice, Mom.”

“You’re welcome.”

He glanced at his watch and made a face. “Now I’d better get to bed,” he said. “First period is going to come very early.”

Ali lay awake for a long time after Chris closed her bedroom door. Athena had told him that she and Ali had discussed the situation with Bob and Edie, but Ali was well aware that in telling the story to Athena, she had neglected to finish mentioning what had gone on with Chris’s other grandparents—with Angus and Jeanette Reynolds of Boston, Massachusetts.

For years Ali had managed to keep any remembrance of them locked away. She had never forgiven them for turning their backs on their only son. Even now she couldn’t imagine how they could have done such a thing. Angus was an attorney with some big law firm, and he had been offended when Dean had spurned the idea of his going to law school in favor of getting a Ph.D. in oceanography, of all things! That, combined with Dean’s decision to marry Ali, had been enough for them to walk away. For good.

Once Dean had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, Ali had tried to get him to contact them, but he’d proved to be his father’s son. He had adamantly refused to take the first step on trying to effect a reconciliation. And after that one abortive phone call, Ali hadn’t tried again either.

There were several times while Chris was growing up when he had asked about his “other” grandparents. Ali had told him he didn’t have any, and that was the truth. He didn’t. But tonight, pondering Athena’s complicated family situation, Ali couldn’t help thinking about her own. Whatever had become of Dean’s parents? Are they dead or alive? Ali wondered.

What would Angus and Jeanette Reynolds think if they saw their grandson now, a grown, good-looking man who was almost a mirror image of their long-dead son?

Do they ever regret what happened back then? Ali wondered as she drifted off to sleep at last. And do I?

CHAPTER 11

As usual, Peter had played a round of golf at the Biltmore on Wednesday afternoon with a couple of other docs who also had Wednesday afternoons off. They’d had drinks and dinner afterward. When he’d come home, he had tumbled into bed fairly early—into bed but not into sleep.

The whole time he’d been out golfing and buddying around, thoughts of Ali Reynolds had lingered in the background. Now he found himself tossing and turning and thinking about her again. He was convinced she was a problem. The question was, how serious a problem—major or minor?

It would have helped if Peter had known what had brought Ali Reynolds to Singleatheart in the first place. Had she logged on for the same reasons most other people did—because she was lonely and looking for a date? Sedona was a small town. Peter assumed it was possible that Morgan and Ali were good enough friends that Morgan, as a satisfied Singleatheart customer, had referred this Reynolds woman to the website so she could join in the fun and games. Or was that wishful thinking on Peter’s part?

Several things gave him cause for concern: Ali’s alleged tendency to be a crimefighter; her license to carry; and most of all, her long-term relationship with Morgan Forester’s widower. Since she was one of Bryan Forester’s customers, the far more likely scenario was that she had learned about Morgan’s involvement with Singleatheart through him. If Bryan was under suspicion for his wife’s murder—as Peter most certainly hoped he was—it made sense that Ali had visited Singleatheart while snooping around on his behalf.

It was well after midnight before Peter drifted off to sleep. He did so only after deciding that he would take another serious look at Ali Reynolds first thing in the morning. By logging on to her computer and seeing what she was up to, he’d be able to ascertain whether or not she posed a threat to him. If she didn’t, fine. If she did? That was another matter. In that case, Peter would find a way to take care of the problem—forever.

Once Belinda Helwig became Arizona’s auditor general, she was determined that she and everyone on her staff would lead by example. Worried that too many state-funded employee hours were being squandered on personal Internet activity, Ms. Helwig had instituted and enforced a comprehensive workplace ban on personal e-mails.

Matt Morrison was someone who always strove to be an exemplary employee. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have dreamed of violating that particular rule, but these were desperate times for him. As such, they called for desperate measures.

In their phone conversation earlier, Detective Holman had mentioned the dead woman’s name. Unfortunately, Matt had been in such a state of shock that he hadn’t been paying close enough attention. It seemed to him now that the name started with an M, but he couldn’t remember exactly. Whatever the name was, he hadn’t recognized it.

Once he was off the phone, Matt had sat numbly in his cubicle, staring at the shoulder-high walls and mulling his plight. The detective may have called the dead woman by another name, but she had to be Susan Callison.

As the hours passed, Matt called into question everything he knew or thought he knew about Suzie Q. She had claimed to be separated from her husband and had said she lived in Glendale. Now Matt wondered if any of that had been true. According to Detective Holman, the dead woman had been married and living near Sedona. Where did that leave Matt? Out on the end of a limb, while Detective Holman, armed with a chain saw, was ready to lop it off.

From the time Matt’s mother had first put a red Crayola in his hand, he had done his best to color inside the lines. Fearing disgrace, he had always played it safe and had never taken chances. Not until Monday. But now disgrace was coming anyway. Matt knew he wasn’t guilty of murdering anybody. Surely, with the help of someone, somewhere, he’d be able to prove that, no matter what phony evidence the cop had manufactured about him. But in order to prove his innocence, Matt knew he would end up losing everything else. Jenny would know he had been unfaithful—at least he had tried to be. Their friends at church would know all about it, and so would everyone at work.

That was particularly galling. Work had always been Matt Morrison’s safe haven. No matter how tough things were at home, he’d always been able to escape by going to work. Once word about this got out, though, he knew what would happen. Everyone in the office would recognize Matthew Morrison for the loser he was. They’d laugh about him behind his back and whisper about him before and after he left the break room. It would be like the checkout line at Lowe’s—only worse.

So Matt set out on a course of action that he hoped would spare him some of that humiliation. It might spare Jenny some ugliness as well. He did it the way Matt Morrison did everything—in a thorough and organized fashion.

First he brought up his folder of Suzie Q correspondence. One at a time, he went through all the e-mails that had come and gone between them, reading each message as he went. The ones that hurt the most weren’t the ones at the beginning, when they’d been testing the waters, or the plaintive ones he’d written to her this week after she hadn’t written back. No, the ones that made his heart ache were the ones in the middle of their not-quite-affair, the sweet-nothing silly notes from when they had both believed—well, both had claimed to believe—in a future that had included the tantalizing promise that somehow, someday, the two of them would be together, living a happily-ever-after existence.

Matt read through the messages and remembered how he had felt when he read those miraculous words the first time—remembered how they had buoyed him and given him hope. Now, once the words had been committed to memory, he deleted each and every one of them. When the messages were gone, Matt went to his buddy list and deleted Suzie Q’s name. He didn’t doubt that cops, armed with a search warrant, would be able to obtain the deleted messages from the server, but he was hoping they wouldn’t bother.

With a sigh, Matt turned off his computer. He put away the files he’d been working on earlier. He straightened his desk. He returned the stapler he’d borrowed from Bobbie Bacon. Once his cubicle was in order, Matt was ready to head home. He knew it was time, but he also knew there was no hurry.

On his way out of the building, he stopped off in the men’s room. There, standing behind the closed door of a stall, he removed the condoms and the packet of little blue pills from their hiding place in the back of his wallet. He was dismayed that it took a series of several flushes before the plastic-wrapped containers disappeared down the toilet.

He spoke pleasantly to the security guard at the desk in the downstairs lobby. Out in the parking lot, Matt retrieved his ’96 Corolla from the employee lot and then meandered east toward home. Traveling on surface streets rather than hitting the freeways, he stopped at a 7-Eleven on Indian School long enough to fill the gas tank and buy two pint bottles of Baileys.

He opened one of the bottles while he was still parked at the gas pumps. Swallowed straight, the stuff was so cloyingly sweet that he almost gagged, but he managed to keep it down. He hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch, so the booze hit him hard. Not wanting to be picked up on a DUI, he waited until he was at Scottsdale Road and North Chaparral before he took his next big swig. It was important that there be enough booze in his system to blur the lines between deliberate and accidental. The trick was being able to show an intent to get drunk without an intent to do anything else.

When Matt pulled up in front of his house, he was relieved to see that all the interior lights had been turned off. Jenny wasn’t the kind of person who would leave a porch light burning on those rare occasions when he came home later than she did. The darkness inside meant she was fast asleep. Considering her snoring problem, he doubted that his opening and closing the garage door would disturb her in the slightest.

He drove into the painstakingly neat two-car garage and parked the faded blue Corolla next to Jenny’s much shinier ’05 Acura. Once the garage door had closed behind him, he put the car in park and engaged the emergency brake. Leaving the engine running, he reached for the bottle again and took several more quick swallows, one after the other. As the stuff slid down his throat, he started to feel the buzz. That was good. So was having a full tank of gas.

Leaning against the headrest, Matt wondered how long it would take. It would be better for all concerned if it was over long before Jenny woke up. She usually staggered out of bed around seven or so and came scrounging out to the kitchen in search of her first cup of coffee. Matt knew there would be far less fuss and bother if there was no chance of reviving him when she opened the door and found him. Things were going to be bad enough for her that Thursday morning. He didn’t want to make the situation any worse.

The first bottle of Baileys was entirely empty, and the second was mostly so by the time he started feeling more drowsy than drunk. It took several tries before he was able to twist the cap back on the bottle, but he managed it.

Good, he thought dreamily. No sense in spilling what’s left and making a mess.

Ali’s phone rang at five to six, dragging both her and the cat out of a sound sleep. Samantha left the foot of the bed in a huff while Ali groped for her phone.

“We have a bingo,” B. announced triumphantly. He sounded wide awake and amazingly chipper.

Ali was not. “A what?” she grumbled.

“A bingo,” he repeated. “Our bad guy tried logging on to your e-mail account a little while ago. I’m pretty sure we nailed him.”

“And you collected all his files in the process?”

“I think so,” B. said. “And if he had to sit there and watch his computer die, he’s probably not a happy camper at the moment.”

Ali made the effort to sound a little less grumpy. “That’s great,” she said. “So does that mean I can use my own computer again?”

“Probably,” B. said. “If I were him, I’d have learned from my mistake. I doubt very much that he’ll be trying to invade your computer files again anytime soon. He won’t want to risk damaging a second computer.”

“So we’re done, then?” Ali asked.

“Not by a long shot,” B. said. He sounded focused and energized. “I’m a little surprised it was that easy. I would have thought he’d do more about securing his own equipment. He does have a fairly sophisticated encryption code. I’m working on breaking that in hopes of getting a look at his files.”

“What are you hoping to find?” Ali asked.

“We managed to stop him before he could do any real damage to you, but there may be others who weren’t as lucky—people who maybe don’t yet know they’ve been victimized. If we can find them and let them know what’s going on, we may be able to bring law enforcement in on this after all.”

Now that the crisis with her own computer had been averted, Ali found that idea appealing. “In other words, now that we’ve had our immediate gratification, we’ll let someone else take a crack at him.”

“Exactly,” B. agreed. “In the meantime, I’m hoping that having access to his files will give us some clues about who this guy is and where he lives.”

“Any ideas on that?” Ali asked.

“My first guess would be that he’s one of the employees on the Singleatheart server farm in South Dakota—some low-level minimum-wage guy who figured out how to circumvent the system. I’ll start by doing some unofficial background checks on a few of those folks and see if anything jumps out at me.”

“How?” Ali asked. “Will you ask the cops for help?”

B. chuckled. “Are you kidding? There are background checks, and then there are underground background checks. For what I do, the second one is far more useful, and those will have to wait until later. Right now I have all my computer power working on breaking that encryption code. And since my computers can churn out logarithms without any help from me, I’m on my way to bed.”

Having just abandoned her own, Ali was a little surprised. “You’re going to bed at six o’clock in the morning?”

“What I do crosses international datelines, so local time zones tend to fade into the background,” he replied. “I sleep when I’m tired, eat when I’m hungry, and don’t punch a time clock.”

“Luckily for me,” Ali said. “And thank you for this good news, but are you sure it’s safe to use my computer?”

“Relatively safe,” B. told her with a laugh. “From that one source, at least. It doesn’t mean someone else won’t try to pull the same stunt, but you can rest assured that if there’s another problem, it’ll show up on my system as well.”

“Good night, then,” Ali said. “Or should I say good morning? Sleep well.”

Fully awake, she scrambled out of bed and reached for her robe. Out in the kitchen, the coffee grinder howled into action as Chris started brewing fresh coffee. She followed the heady aroma into the kitchen, where she found her son looking questioningly at the two computers and the two thumb drives that still littered the dining room table.

“What happened with all the computer drama?” Chris asked.

“Thanks to B. Simpson, good has prevailed,” Ali replied. “When whoever it was tried to access my e-mail account early this morning, our worm knocked him out and collected all his files in the process.”

“Way to go,” Chris said admiringly.

While Ali waited for the coffeepot to finish, she sat down at the table. Her old computer, left on as bait, clicked with a new mail announcement. Reassured that whoever had been spying on her had been taken offline, Ali was relieved to see a familiar name in the address line—Velma T, her longtime correspondent from Laguna Niguel.

Dear Babe,

I’ve had the most wonderful surprise, but now I’m in a bind and don’t know what to do about it. You maybe remember that earlier this year, when I went on that long trip, I met up with a wonderful lady from Oak Harbor, Washington, Maddy Watkins. She just sent me an e-mail that she wants to come down to see me over Thanksgiving. I think she’s really trying to get away from her kids, but that’s another story.

The problem is, I had just told you that I’d come to your place for Thanksgiving, and now I don’t know what to do. I’ve never been to Sedona, and after you brought it up, I had my heart set on coming to see you. Should I e-mail Maddy and tell her not to come or what?

Velma T in Laguna.

Ali sent off an immediate reply.

The more the merrier. Invite her to come here. Will she be coming from Seattle, or will she be coming with you? Please let me know so I can make suitable travel and room arrangements for you.

After punching send, Ali reached over, absently picked up one of Bryan Forester’s thumb drives, and held it in her hand. She had fallen asleep the night before while still wondering what to do about them. Now that B. had cleared the way, Ali felt she could risk looking at them on her own computer. If there happened to be another computer virus lurking in the background of Morgan’s files, Ali could be reasonably sure that she wouldn’t be putting B.’s equipment at risk. And since there was no love lost between Bryan Forester and B. Simpson, it was a relief to Ali that she wouldn’t have to ask for B.’s help in dealing with the Foresters’ situation.

She was about to insert the drive when the doorbell rang. Company? she thought. At six-thirty in the morning?

Except what she found waiting on her front porch wasn’t company at all. It was Leland Brooks, lugging a humongous carpet-cleaning machine. “What are you doing here so early?” she wanted to know.

“Sorry,” he said apologetically, wrestling the machine through the front door. “I thought I mentioned it to you last night. It turns out everyone else is trying to get ready for Thanksgiving company, too. They told me I could use this today on the condition that I have it back by nine A.M., when it’s booked to go out again.”

Sam took one look at the load of equipment and bolted for the relative safety of the laundry room, where she would no doubt squeeze herself behind the dryer and then need to be coaxed out with offers of food. For right now, however, it was a good place for her.

Chris emerged from his room dressed for school. He paused in the kitchen long enough to fill his coffee cup. “Good morning, Leland,” he said. “I hope you’re not planning on doing any cleaning down in my studio.”

“Let’s see,” the butler said. “Would your studio happen to be the source of all the metal filings and BBs I vacuumed out of the carpet yesterday afternoon?”

Chris’s metal sculptures did leave behind a certain amount of debris. He looked slightly crestfallen. “Yes,” he admitted. “I suppose so.”

“In that case,” Leland replied, “since I expect to do a thorough job of cleaning the carpet, you can also expect that I will clean your studio. There’s not much sense in doing one without the other. You can also rest assured that I’ll put everything back where I found it, which won’t necessarily be where it belongs.”

It was a statement that brooked no disagreement. “Right,” Chris said, backing down. “I’ll get out of your way, then.”

Ali concealed a grin behind her coffee mug. She had already learned that when it came to cleaning, Leland Brooks was not to be denied. Chris was coming to that same conclusion.

“Why don’t I get out of your way, too?” Ali offered. “I’ll get dressed and go have breakfast with my parents.”

As someone accustomed to taking full advantage of other people’s lax computer security measures, Peter Winter was surprisingly blasé about his own. His dealings with Singleatheart were concealed through multiple layers of identity that protected him. For his personal computer, he employed a sophisticated encryption routine, but for the most part, he didn’t worry about it. People like Matt Morrison and his ilk were nothing but chumps, and Peter was willing to bet this Ali Reynolds woman was the same—stupid beyond bearing.

By five A.M. on Thursday morning, after a restless night, Peter took his cup of coffee over to the desk and sat down at his computer. The little notes people sent back and forth to their friends and relations often gave away much more than they knew. And that was where he went—straight to Ali Reynolds’s computer and her e-mail records.

The moment he tried to log on to Ali’s e-mail account, however, something strange happened. The egg timer showed up and stayed there. After a moment or two, he tried control/alternate/delete, but nothing happened. The egg timer wouldn’t go away. And that was when he knew he’d been hacked. His computer froze up. He knew that even unplugging the damn thing would accomplish nothing. As soon as the power was restored, the inevitable destruction would continue. For the next three minutes, unable to stop the slow but inexorable process, he sat and watched helplessly to the end, until the words FATAL ERROR flashed across his screen.

Full of impotent fury, Peter watched his computer’s death throes and worried that his whole house of cards was about to tumble down around him. It wasn’t just his computer. He could replace that. Though it would take time, eventually, he’d be able to reconstruct the passwords and most of the files. But he couldn’t do it right then. What left him feeling half sick was that someone—a woman, no less—had been smart enough and had gotten close enough to him to do this kind of damage. And she’d had balls enough to hit him where he lived. Yes, Peter hacked in to other people’s systems all the time, most recently, that hopeless asshole Matt Morrison’s. But to Peter’s knowledge, this was the first time anyone had ever hacked him. Turnabout definitely wasn’t fair play.

Who the hell is this bitch? he wondered. How dare she do this, and what makes her think she can get away with it?

Slamming away from his desk, Peter headed for the shower. Trying to harness his outrage, he stood under the stream of hot water and considered the problem. Nothing Peter had read about Ali Reynolds had indicated that she was any kind of computer genius. In order to take on the unassailable Peter Winter, he knew she must have had help of some kind—talented and very capable help. That detective friend of hers, maybe? What Peter found most disturbing was that the woman had made no effort to conceal her identity, although clearly, the attack had come from her. What did that mean? Was she letting him know she knew everything? And what if she and her helper had somehow managed to gain access to his files or break his encryption code? That would spell utter disaster.

By the time Peter stepped out of the shower, he had settled on a course of action—he’d have to go to Sedona and find her and her helper, too. Fortunately, even without access to his computer, Peter had a good idea where to start looking. He had scanned through a surprising amount of Internet-based Ali Reynolds material the day before and had read about her restoration project on Manzanita Hills Road, which also happened to be where he had located Bryan Forester’s truck. If the house was under construction, she probably wasn’t living there at the moment, but with any kind of luck, Peter thought he’d be able to decoy her into coming there—alone.

And once he found her? It was pretty clear to him that he’d have to put her out of her misery. After that, it would be time for Peter Winter to exit stage left. He’d had that game plan set up and waiting for a long time, along with several suitable alternate identities. The problem was, he hadn’t intended to make use of any of them yet.

Moving deliberately, he dragged two suitcases out of the hallway closet. He packed one with nothing but computer gear—the still-working laptops as well as the dead one. In the other bag he packed clothing, and not much of that, either. Depending on where he ended up, he’d buy whatever he needed. Right now it was important to travel light. He opened his briefcase and made sure he was fully equipped with gloves, scrubs, and duct tape. The last items he placed in the briefcase were the several vials of Versed that he kept at home and at the ready. Experience had taught him that unconscious victims were far less troublesome than those who were able to fight back.

Just before leaving the house, he emptied the safe. The DVD and his collection of false documents went into the briefcase. The key ring went into his pocket. With Alison Reynolds rocking the boat, carrying a cache of phony IDs and precious mementos could prove dangerous, but leaving them behind was even more so. He might find himself in a position where he’d need access to one or more of them. As for the DVD and his collection of rings? He’d carry those with him until he once again had a secure hiding place.

By eight o’clock, Peter was driving north on I-17, heading toward Sedona. When he called the hospital to let them know he wouldn’t be coming in to work that evening, he was already north of Black Canyon City. Careful to keep the right measure of hesitation and concern in his voice, he explained to Louise Granger, the administrator on duty, that he’d just received a distressing phone call from his mother’s physician in upstate New York. “My mom’s in the ICU in Buffalo,” he said. “She may not make it through the day. I’m on my way to the airport right now.”

Louise was nothing if not sympathetic. “I’m so sorry to hear that, Dr. Winter,” she said. “Is there anything we can do?”

“Cover my shifts in the meantime,” Peter said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, but there’s no way to tell how long I’ll be gone.”

“Of course, Dr. Winter,” Louise said. “Don’t give it another thought.”

Thanks, Mom, Peter said to himself as he put down the phone. He hadn’t spoken to his mother in over fifteen years, not since she had caught on to the fact that he’d been using forged checks to take money from her account. That tardy discovery had come years after he’d forged her name to countless excuses and permission slips all through junior high and high school. When the subject of families came up, he usually told people that his mother bounced back and forth between her condo in Florida and her home in upstate New York. That wasn’t true, of course. She’d been dead for a long time.

He’d seen to it.

By the time Ali emerged from the bedroom, Leland had the noisy carpet cleaner up and running. Ali grabbed her computer, the power cord, and the two thumb drives and headed for the Sugarloaf Café. It was cold and spitting snow as she started down Andante Drive. When she reached the Sugarloaf parking lot, her nose was assailed by the unmistakable aroma of freshly baked sweet rolls.

Edie met her at the door. “You’re up bright and early,” she said.

In answer, Ali held up her computer. “I’m looking for office space,” she said. “Leland Brooks is cleaning carpets.”

Edie generally disapproved of people who used her tables for anything other than eating, but the restaurant wasn’t crowded, and she cheerfully led Ali to a booth in the back.

“I know the drill,” Ali said. “I’ll close down and move along if it gets too crowded. In the meantime, I’ll settle for coffee.”

Once the computer booted up, Ali extracted the two thumb drives from her jacket pocket. The two drives looked exactly alike, and neither of them was labeled. The first one she inserted into her computer turned out to be Bryan’s. Ali had no difficulty searching through his various files and folders. The internal passwords that had been installed in his programs worked as though the files were being opened by Bryan on his own computer.

As far as Ali could see, everything was work-related and as dry as dust. There were immense files that held nothing but computerized architectural drawings. The saved e-mail file consisted mostly of back-and-forth correspondence between Bryan and his various suppliers or customers. Some of the e-mails concerned projects that were still at the planning or construction stage, along with others that had been completed.

Ali remembered Morgan’s video complaint about her husband—that the man worked too hard and wasn’t any fun. From what Ali could see, he appeared to be guilty as charged. If he had any interests or pursuits outside work, they weren’t apparent in his computer files.

“Okay if I sit down?” Dave Holman asked. “Your mother thought you might not mind sharing.”

Having lost track of time, Ali looked around and was surprised to find that the restaurant had filled up while she was perusing Bryan’s files. Dave Holman, coffee cup in hand, was standing next to her booth.

“Of course,” she said, closing the computer and setting the Mac down on the banquette next to her. “Have a seat.”

Dave slid into the booth opposite her. “I stopped by your place earlier, looking for you,” he said. “Mr. Brooks told me I could probably find you here.”

“You stopped by before seven A.M.?” Ali demanded.

“Before eight,” Dave corrected. “But I need to talk to you, Ali.” His serious expression worried her.

“What about?” Ali asked.

“I know that when it comes to the Forester situation, the two of us are on opposite sides of the fence,” he said. “I hope you’ll consider this more of a courtesy call than anything else.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look,” he said with a sigh. “Morgan Forester is dead, and it’s my job to find out what happened to her, even if I end up having to step on your toes.”

“My toes?” Ali asked. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s been brought to my attention that Bryan Forester maintains a storage facility of some kind at your place up on Manzanita Hills Road.”

Ali nodded. “He has one of those Mini-Mobile things. He keeps supplies and equipment in it. Why? What does that have to do with me?”

“Now that we know about it, we’ll have to search it,” Dave said. “And probably the rest of the construction site, too.”

“Wait a minute. You’re planning on searching my house? Why? What are you looking for?”

“I’m not at liberty to say,” Dave said. “To anyone. This is an active investigation.”

Before Ali had a chance to say anything more, Edie Larson bustled up to their booth with her order pad in hand. “Ali appears to be drinking coffee and using her computer. Are you here to order, or are you just talking?” Edie asked.

“A little of both,” Dave told her. “We’ll have breakfast, and when it’s time for a bill, give it to me. I’m buying.”

CHAPTER 12

After Edie Larson had finished taking their order and left, Dave picked up the conversation. “I wanted to see you before I left town,” he said. “I’m on my way to Phoenix in a couple of minutes. With your help, we’ve located a possible witness down there.”

“My help?” Ali asked.

Dave nodded. “The driver of that vehicle whose license you had Bryan call in to me the other day.”

“The car Lacy saw?” Ali asked.

“That’s the one,” Dave said. “A rental from Hertz. The guy who rented it was from Phoenix. I have an appointment to interview him later on this morning. It could turn out he saw nothing at all, but he played so coy with me on the phone, and that got my attention.”

“If he was evasive on the phone, are you thinking he might be involved?” Ali asked.

Dave shook his head. “Forget it,” he said. “I probably shouldn’t have mentioned him. Right now he’s nothing but a potential witness. But after my meeting with him, I’ll be stopping by Prescott on the way home. That’s when I’ll pick up a warrant to search your place on Manzanita Hills Road. We’ll be executing it later this afternoon.”

“Why are you telling me about this in advance?” Ali asked. “Isn’t that a little unusual?”

“It’s a lot worse than unusual,” Dave admitted. “The sheriff would have my badge if he ever found out about it, but the two of us go back a long way, Ali. I’m letting you know in advance so you can be on-site when we do it. There’ll be a lot less chance of damage if someone—you or Mr. Brooks, perhaps—is there to unlock doors with actual keys.”

“As in unlock the doors to my house,” Ali said.

“It may be your house, but it’s also a construction site,” Dave explained. “A construction site where our homicide suspect may have concealed evidence of his crime.”

“But it’s still my house,” Ali insisted.

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Dave’s regret sounded genuine, but Ali didn’t much notice. “Aren’t you afraid I might go there before you do and try to get rid of anything incriminating?”

Her sarcasm wasn’t lost on him. Dave looked at Ali sadly and shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’m not. To begin with, you wouldn’t know what to look for. Besides, that’s not who you are. You’d never conceal evidence.”

Stealing a look at the computer beside her, Ali wasn’t so sure about that. She was about to tell him about the two thumb drives when Edie arrived at the booth with their breakfasts—ham and eggs for Dave and French toast for Ali for the second day in a row.

“So will we be seeing you and your girls at Ali’s for Thanksgiving?” Edie asked.

Dave looked at Ali. “As far as I know, we haven’t been invited. Besides, the girls will be in Vegas with their mom for Thanksgiving. I get all three kids for Christmas.”

Knowing she had stepped in it, Edie beat a hasty retreat, leaving Ali to sort out her mother’s unintentional gaffe. “Sorry, Dave,” she said. “We’ve both been so busy, and I was waiting to figure out where the dinner would be. But now that we know the new house won’t be ready, it’ll be at the old one. And you’re definitely invited. Are you coming?”

Dave looked at her and grinned. “Depends on who’s doing the cooking,” he said.

Ali’s lack of cooking credentials was well known, but having people continually pointing it out was also a bit tiresome. “That’s not fair,” she said. “Accurate but not fair. And Leland will most likely be overseeing the food, so no one should die of food poisoning. Will you come, then?”

“I doubt I’ll get a better offer,” he said. “Count me in.”

Lighthearted banter had fixed the momentary awkwardness left behind by the warrant discussion. They started into their food. Dave had managed only a bite of his ham and eggs, and Ali was about to tell him about the thumb drives, when his phone rang.

He put down his fork and answered. “Holman here.” Then he listened for a long time while someone else spoke. “What do you mean both hard drives are ruined?” he demanded at last. “How is that possible? You’re telling me somebody deliberately crashed the computers before we could execute our warrant?” There was another short pause before Dave went on. “But crashed or not, surely we can find someone smart enough to retrieve the data.”

As Dave listened again, Ali tried to make sense of what she had overheard. She was sure that the damaged computers in question, picked up as a result of a search warrant, were the ones that belonged to Bryan and Morgan Forester.

“You’re right,” Dave was saying. “I can see how writing over the files is worse than just erasing them. Cute. Well, we’ll see how funny Mr. Forester thinks this is once I finish up with him. Do you remember that computer-science professor up at Northern Arizona University, the guy we asked for help on that other case a couple of months ago? Yes, that’s it. Professor Rayburn. Check with him and see if he has any ideas on how we can go about recapturing the data. With any luck, Bryan Forester isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks he is. There’s always a chance he missed something.”

Shaking his head in disgust, Dave slammed his phone closed and jammed it into his pocket. “What do you know about that!” he muttered. “It seems someone has written over all the files on the Foresters’ computers. And whoever did it thought he was being incredibly cute—he wrote the same letters over and over: H-A, as in ha, ha, ha. That’s funny, all right. Funny as hell. You probably think your friend Bryan is downright hilarious.”

“Bryan wouldn’t do that,” Ali said quietly. She realized as soon as she’d said it that it was absolutely true. Why would Bryan go to so much trouble when he knew there were perfectly usable and readable backup copies available, copies that were, even now, within arm’s reach of Dave Holman? Someone else might have done that, but not Bryan.

“You might believe it, but I don’t,” Dave returned abruptly. “Trust me, there was something incriminating in those files, and I intend to find out what it was.”

“I have them,” Ali said. “I can show them to you.”

Dave stared at her, thunderstruck. “You what?”

“I have Bryan’s files, and I’ve looked at them,” she added. “The ones from his computer, anyway. Believe me, Dave, they’re all business-related.”

“And how is it that you happen to have them?” Dave asked.

“Because Bryan gave them to me. For safekeeping.”

“Sure he did,” Dave said. “Once he took out whatever it was he didn’t want you or anybody else to see. What the hell do you see in the guy, Ali? Don’t you see what he’s up to? He’s playing you for a fool.”

For the first time, Ali wondered if Dave Holman was jealous. “I can give you copies,” she offered.

“Right,” Dave said. “Sure you can. Copies of copies with everything he wanted deleted already deleted. Don’t bother! It’ll be a waste of your time and mine.” Shaking his head, he once more yanked his phone out of his pocket and punched in a series of numbers. While he waited for his call to be answered, Ali concentrated on her French toast. She had offered the drives to Dave, and he had turned her down. Now, though, she was thinking about her computer, where Bryan’s contaminated thumb drive was parked in her USB port. If a delayed-reaction worm of some kind had corrupted the files on Bryan’s and Morgan’s computers, would hers be next?

“Yes,” Dave was saying into the phone. “This is Dave Holman of the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office. I’m calling for Mr. Morrison. Mr. Matthew Morrison.” That statement was followed by a long pause and a deep frown. “What do you mean, he won’t be in today? Is he sick or what? I have an appointment with him scheduled for this morning, and I was calling to see if I could move it to a little later.”

There was another pause. “Look,” Dave said curtly. “I already said who this is. I’m Detective Dave Holman with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. And it’s urgent that I speak to Mr. Morrison today. No, I don’t need to speak to his supervisor, I need to speak to him. All right, then. I’ll wait.”

While he sat on hold, Dave managed another few bites of breakfast. Then, covering the phone mouthpiece with his hand, he spoke to Ali. “Guess what? It seems that Mr. Morrison, our reluctant witness, has unexpectedly taken the day off work. I wonder if the prospect of having to see me has anything to do with his going AWOL.”

Dave turned his attention back to the phone as someone came on the line. “Yes, Mrs. Helwig. I’m not sure why they brought you into this, but yes, that’s correct. I’m a homicide detective with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. Mr. Morrison is a potential witness in a case I’m investigating…”

The person on the other end of the line did some talking, and Dave’s face took on a distinctly reddish hue.

“Mrs. Helwig, please slow down. Are you telling me Mr. Morrison is dead?” Even across the table, Ali could hear snippets of a woman’s voice—an almost hysterical woman—talking at warp speed.

“When?” Dave asked at last. “And how did it happen?” Finally, he added, “Can you tell me who’s doing the investigating?”

Holding his phone between his chin and his shoulder, Dave dragged a tattered notebook out of his shirt pocket and began scribbling in it. “Yes, I have it,” he said. “Detective O’Brien with the Scottsdale Police Department. And what’s that address again?”

Seconds later, when Dave closed both his phone and his notebook, he looked at Ali and shook his head. “So much for my potential witness,” he said. “Matthew Morrison is dead. Sometime overnight he drove his vehicle into his garage, closed the door, and left the motor running. His wife found his body this morning. Just before I called the office looking for him, she had phoned to let them know that he wouldn’t be coming in ever again.”

As he spoke, Dave was already dialing the next number. “Someone else will have to go to Prescott to pick up that search warrant,” he said into his phone. “I’m on my way to Phoenix. Scottsdale, actually. It seems our possible witness or suspect in the Morgan Forester homicide offed himself overnight. Well, so far it seems like suicide, anyway. Right. It’s probably a good thing for Bryan Forester that we’ve still got him under lock and key. Otherwise he might be declared a suspect in a second homicide.”

There was another long pause. “No!” he exclaimed. “You can’t be serious. They’re actually thinking about cutting him loose? Who came up with that lamebrained idea? All right, then, if they do let Forester out, I want someone on his tail every step of the way. I want to know where he goes and who he talks to. I also want you to amend that warrant request to include his telephone records. If there’s any kind of connection between him and the guy who’s dead down in Phoenix, I want to know about it. He may have been able to do a clean sweep of his computer, but his phone records won’t be as easy to destroy.”

Dave hung up and took one last slug of coffee. Between phone calls, he had eaten very little. Leaving most of his food, he slapped a twenty-dollar bill down on the table. “Tell your mom to keep the change,” he said. “I’ve gotta go.” With that, he dashed out the door.

Edie came back over to the table after he left. “Sorry about the Thanksgiving thing. I really stepped in it. Is that why Dave went racing out of here like that, or was there something wrong with the food?”

“The food was fine,” Ali said. “And there’s no problem about Thanksgiving. Dave’s on his way to Phoenix. Something happened to one of his potential witnesses.”

“I wonder if they’ve had any luck in finding Morgan’s ring,” Edie said.

“What ring?” Ali asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Morgan’s wedding ring,” Edie answered. “And the three-carat diamond engagement ring that was with it. I heard they’re both missing.”

“They weren’t found on the body?”

Edie shook her head. “Nope. One of the cops was asking Cindy Martin about them last night. Cindy always did Morgan’s nails, and the cops wanted to know if Morgan was wearing her rings the last time she came into the salon—which she was, by the way. Cindy said she never went anywhere without them.”

“So people are thinking that the killer stole her rings?”

Edie shrugged. “Cindy says she’s heard that Bryan is really hard up for cash right now.”

“So now she’s suggesting that Bryan made off with his wife’s rings in hopes of what—pawning them and realizing some quick cash?”

“It’s just a theory,” Edie said. “People are entitled to their opinions.”

“And I’m entitled to mine!” Ali returned. “What else are people saying?”

“There’s evidently some talk about possible drug use. I guess there was a puncture wound of some kind found on the body. The cops asked Cindy if Morgan Forester ever used drugs of any kind. Cindy said that if that had been the case, she for sure would have known about it.”

Did she know about Singleatheart? Ali wondered. If she had, she would have spilled her guts about that, too. Remind me never to set foot in Cindy Martin’s salon.

“Look, Mom,” she said. “I don’t think we should be discussing any of this.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, these sound like confidential details of a homicide investigation.”

“But Cindy—”

“Cindy talks too much,” Ali declared.

As Edie went to deliver coffee to another table, Ali was left thinking about the series of ha-has that had been written over every one of Bryan Forester’s computer files. If Bryan wasn’t responsible for destroying his own computer files, who was? Someone who had no idea Bryan had backups. Ali was equally sure Dave was right about one thing—the culprit, whoever it was, had something to hide. And that was when it came to her for the very first time that there might be some connection between the guy who had infiltrated Ali’s computer and Morgan Forester’s killer.

Maybe what Ali and B. had been dealing with was something far more deadly than a simple identity thief. Lost in thought, Ali removed Bryan’s thumb drive from her computer. She needed to warn B. about that, and much as she had wanted to avoid doing so, she also knew that she would have to ask him for help with the possibly contaminated thumb drives.

Ali glanced at the clock on the far wall. She had spoken to B. on the phone under three hours earlier, and he’d been on his way to bed, but the urgency of the situation meant she needed to talk to him sooner than later. When she called, though, his line went straight to voice mail, so she left a message. When her cell phone rang a few minutes later, she more than half expected to hear B.’s voice on the line. She didn’t.

“This is Haley Marsh’s grandmother,” Nelda Harris said. “Is this Ms. Reynolds?”

“Yes, it’s Ali. What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry to bother you so early in the morning, but I need your help.”

“Why?” Ali asked. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Haley. I told her about our conversation when I got home from work last night. I wanted her to reconsider turning down your scholarship offer. She was very upset with me. She claimed I had no right to go behind her back and talk to you. We had a terrible fight about it. This morning she’s shut herself up in her room with the baby and is refusing to come out, refusing to go to school. What if she drops out completely, Ms. Reynolds? What will happen to her then? In all the years we’ve been together, we’ve never had this kind of difficulty. I can’t imagine what’s gotten into her. I’m at my wits’ end.”

“Do you think my talking to her directly would do any good?” Ali asked.

“I don’t know,” Nelda said. “Maybe. Right now she won’t listen to a word I have to say. Like I said, she won’t even come out of her room.”

Ali finished putting away her computer. “All right, then, Mrs. Harris. If you think I can be of assistance, I’ll come right over. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Thank you so much.”

Halfway between Sedona and Cottonwood, Ali’s phone rang again. This time, when she answered, the caller was Leland Brooks.

“Do you remember hearing anything about a tile delivery scheduled for today?” he asked.

Ali didn’t. What she did remember was spending what had seemed like weeks of her life narrowing her choices down to the particular kind of Italian limestone tile that was to be laid in all three baths.

“What about it?” Ali asked.

“A driver from Contract Transportation just called here looking for Mr. Forester. He’s bringing a load of tile up from Phoenix and is on his way to Manzanita Hills. He says he can’t unload it without having someone on hand to sign for the delivery. He’s currently unable to locate Mr. Forester.”

“Because Mr. Forester happens to be in jail at the moment,” Ali supplied.

“Yes,” Leland agreed. “I thought it best not to mention that. The driver told me that since your name is on the invoice, along with Mr. Forester’s, you can okay the delivery in his stead.”

“I can,” Ali agreed. “Unfortunately, I’m halfway to Cottonwood right now. What about you? Could you sign for it for me?”

“If that’s what you’d like, I’ll be happy to do so,” Leland said. “But I’ll have to drop off the carpet shampooer first. It’s due back before nine. The carpet is quite damp at the moment, so it’s just as well that I’ll be out of the house for a while. That’ll give it a chance to dry a bit. Is there anything else you need me to do?”

“Not right this minute, but I’ll need your help this afternoon. We should probably both plan on being back at Manzanita Hills later on today. Detective Holman told me that someone from the sheriff’s department will be executing a search warrant there, looking for incriminating evidence they believe Bryan Forester may have hidden somewhere on the property. We’ll need to be there to let them in.”

“Very well,” Leland said. “I have all the keys. I’m more than happy to handle that for you as well.”

“Thank you,” Ali said. She was incredibly grateful to have the unflappable Mr. Brooks backstopping her every move. “Depending on what happens in Cottonwood, I should be back in plenty of time for the search warrant.”

A few minutes later, when Ali stopped in front of Nelda Harris’s duplex, the woman herself hurtled through the front door and came rushing to meet her.

“We’re not having a good morning,” she said, gripping Ali’s hand. “Not at all. Thank you so much for coming.”

“Where is she?”

As Nelda led the way into the house, Ali’s ears were assaulted by the sound of wailing. Liam was clearly unhappy. “They’re both still in her room,” Nelda said, pointing toward a closed door. “She won’t come out.”

Ali went over to the door and tapped on it. When nothing happened, she tapped louder. “Haley?” she said. “It’s Ali Reynolds. I’m here with your grandmother. We need to talk.”

“Go away,” Haley said, raising her voice to be heard over Liam’s screeching. “I don’t want to see you, and I don’t want to talk.”

“What’s wrong with Liam?” Ali asked. “He sounds upset. Is he all right?”

“He’s tired. He needs a nap. He didn’t sleep last night, and neither did I. Now go away and leave us alone.”

Ali felt her heart constrict. She remembered those early years when Chris had been little and when everything to do with him had fallen on her shoulders. She’d had some help from babysitters during the day, but she also recalled those long sleepless nights when Chris had cried for hours on end and hadn’t cared at all that his weary mother needed to stagger off the next day to school where she’d had to fight to stay awake during class.

“Please come out, Haley,” Ali pleaded. “Let’s all talk about this. Your grandmother is here to help you, and so am I.”

There was a pause filled only by Liam’s plaintive wailing. At last the bedroom door inched open to reveal Haley standing there in a pair of sweats with her sobbing child perched on one hip. Without a word to Ali or her grandmother, Haley marched into the kitchen, filled a sippy cup with milk, and then went over to the couch. When she sat down, Liam reached for the cup.

“Help me with what?” Haley demanded as Liam settled back against her. “With him? Have a ball. Welcome to my stupid life. And you think we should talk? What’s there to discuss? I thought the two of you had it all figured out, that you’d decided everything about my future without bothering to consult me.”

As Liam drank from the cup, a sudden silence filled the room. He hiccupped a little and then handed the cup back to his mother. Exhausted, he leaned against her and stared up at her chin. Within a matter of moments, he fell fast asleep.

“Great!” Haley exclaimed. “Maybe I can sleep now, too.” She slammed the still-full cup down on the end table beside her, whacking the cup hard enough that a few drops of milk spurted out, but the noise wasn’t loud enough to disturb the sleeping baby. Without a word, Nelda picked up the cup and put it in the fridge, then went back over to the table and sponged up the spilled milk.

“So talk,” Haley muttered defiantly, staring at Ali. “Isn’t that what you came here to do—to tell me what a terrible mother I am and order me around?”

“I didn’t come here to tell you anything,” Ali said. “I came here to help. And believe me, I know how hard it is to think about going to school when you’ve been up all night with a fussy little one.”

“Sure you do,” Haley retorted. “Other kids get to go to football games and basketball games and dances. I get to come home, do homework, and take care of Liam. That’s it.”

“Once you go to work, it’ll be the same thing,” Ali pointed out. “You’ll go to work. You’ll come home. You’ll take care of your baby. How will that be different from what you’re doing now? And how would it be different if you were going to school instead of going to work?”

“I wouldn’t have to do homework, for one thing,” Haley said. “And I wouldn’t have to put up with all the other kids at school. You don’t have any idea what it’s like. Neither does Grandma. School is hell. The kids treat me like I’m some kind of freak because I have a baby. They’re all busy talking about what it’ll be like when they go off to school—what school it’ll be, what dorm they’ll live in, what clothes they’ll take along, who their roommates will be, stuff like that. As far as I know, none of the schools have dorms for girls with babies.”

That one exchange was enough for Ali to get it. Haley Marsh’s disinclination to go on to school or accept the scholarship had far less to do with ability or ambition than it did with her having been treated as a social outcast in high school. She had claimed she wanted to stop going to school and to get a job in order to give her grandmother a break. Maybe that was partially true, but it wasn’t the whole story. Haley wanted to give herself a break as well.

Meanwhile, Haley turned away and ducked her head, letting a screen of long blond hair obscure her face. Ali wondered what else the girl was hiding.

“High school is hell,” Ali agreed quietly. “There’s nothing as mean as high school girls when they turn on someone who doesn’t fit in.”

Ali paused, waiting for Haley to respond. She didn’t. Instead, she ducked her head even lower, but Ali caught sight of the single tear that rolled down Haley’s cheek and dripped onto her shirt. Ali saw it; Nelda didn’t. And in that moment, Ali understood something else about Haley Marsh. During the last two years, she had somehow managed to conceal her desperate social status from her caring and loving grandmother.

“The kids at school treat you like crap?” Ali asked.

Haley looked up and met Ali’s gaze. “Pretty much,” she admitted.

“College is different,” Ali said. “For one thing, not everyone is the same age. It’s a bigger pond with a lot more fish, so it doesn’t matter so much if you don’t fit in with one group, because there are plenty of others. And some of the people you meet there will already have kids. I did.”

“But you were married, weren’t you?” Haley asked. “That’s a lot different.”

“Not as different as you might think,” Ali told her. “By the time my son was born, my husband had been dead for two months. He died of a brain tumor. Admittedly, I wasn’t a freshman at the time. I already had my B.A. and was working on my master’s, but still, going to school and looking after a baby was desperately hard. Going to high school with a baby must have been awful, and going to college would be tough. I won’t try to pretend otherwise.”

Haley nodded. “But at least you had a husband,” she said wistfully. “You weren’t doing it all alone.”

“You’re not alone, either,” Ali pointed out. “You have a grandmother who would do anything for you and has been doing it all along. You also have your son. Regardless of how Liam came into being, you chose to have him, didn’t you?”

There was a pause before Haley nodded.

“You could have had an abortion,” Ali added. “Under similar circumstances, I think many people would have, but you didn’t. Why not?”

“Because I don’t believe in abortion,” Haley said quietly. “It’s against my religion.”

“You also could have given him up for adoption,” Ali suggested. “But you didn’t do that, either, and why not? Because no matter what, he’s your baby, and you love him, all of which means that you really are a good mother.”

Haley ducked her head again, and another tear dribbled onto her shirt.

“But part of being a good mother is being good to yourself, Haley,” Ali continued. “I didn’t come here today to tell you what to do about going on to school or to beg you to accept a scholarship you don’t want, but I did come to tell you something important. Your grandmother came to me to see me yesterday for one reason and one reason only. She loves you. She wants you to have a chance to live up to your potential. And why does she want you to do that? Because she wants you to give your son a better life than her daughter—your mother—gave you. By being good to you, your grandmother is being good to herself.”

“You know about all that, then?” Haley asked. “About my mother? Grandma told you about what happened?”

“Yes,” Ali said with a nod. “She did. She also told me that you have Liam because you chose to have Liam. Having him and keeping him were the only possible decisions open to you, but you need to remember that was a choice, Haley, a conscious choice made by you and nobody else. I’d like you to feel empowered by that decision instead of feeling trapped by it. I don’t give a rat’s ass what the girls at Mingus Mountain think about you. What’s important is what you think about yourself.”

“But you still want me to go to college.”

“No one is telling you to do anything, but I am asking that you think about it—that you think about the kind of life you want to live with that little boy of yours. And when you make up your mind, let me know.”

Ali stood up and collected her purse. Haley didn’t move to accompany her; neither did Nelda. At the door, Ali turned back. “Regardless of what you decide, Haley, I want you to know that I think you’re a pretty remarkable human being. And so is your grandmother. Your bitchy classmates may not be impressed, but I am.”

Outside in the bright winter sunshine, Ali started her vehicle with the clear knowledge that if Haley changed her mind and accepted the scholarship offer, Ali had just committed to doing two scholarships as opposed to one.

And if that’s what happens, so be it, Ali thought. If I decide to do two, it’s entirely up to me.

Turning on her Bluetooth, Ali punched Leland Brooks’s number into her phone. When the call went directly to voice mail, she left him a message. “You must be busy. I’m on my way back from Cottonwood,” she said. “Just checking on that load of tile. Hope you got it signed for and unloaded. If you need anything, call me.”

She was still driving when her phone rang. This time, when she expected to hear Leland Brooks’s voice, the caller turned out to be B. Simpson. With the flip of a switch, Ali moved from Haley’s difficulties to her own.

“What are you doing up already?” she asked.

“Fortunately, I don’t need much sleep. What was keeping me awake was you.”

“Me?” Ali echoed. “How come?”

“I Googled you,” B. said. “And now I’ve got a question.”

Ali cringed. There were any number of things a Google search of Ali Reynolds might bring to light. “What’s that?” she asked.

“Who’s the big baseball nut in your family?”

Ali knew at once where that was going. Being teased about the “other” Allie Reynolds, a famed New York Yankees pitcher from the late forties and early fifties, was something that had plagued Ali for a very long time, from the moment she’d first married Dean. From even before she had married Dean.

“I’m a one-L one-I Ali,” she pointed out. “The other one happens to be a two-L and an IE Allie. Besides, Reynolds is a married name, not a maiden one, so even though my father does happen to be a baseball nut, his preferences had nothing to do with it.”

“I thought maybe it was your first husband—that he married you because he was a fan.”

“What else did you find out?” Ali asked.

“That you carry a gun,” B. said. “One of the articles I read, or maybe even a couple of them, mentioned something about that. Is that true?”

“Yes, it is,” Ali said. “I carry a Glock. I have a license to carry it, and I know how to use it, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. What if the guy who killed Morgan Forester is also our identity thief?”

That question was followed by a quiet intake of breath on B.’s part. “What makes you think that?” he asked.

Over the next few minutes, she brought him up to date with everything that had gone on over the course of the morning. In telling B. about the possible connection between Morgan’s killer and the Foresters’ destroyed computer files, Ali succeeded in convincing herself as well.

“If you’re right about this, the killer already knows way too much about you,” B. said when she’d finished. “And it probably is a good thing you’re armed and dangerous, but we have to bring Detective Holman in on all this.”

“We don’t have any real proof that the two bad guys are one and the same.”

“We don’t have any proof that they’re not,” B. insisted. “And if we even suspect that there’s a connection, we need to let him know.”

“All right,” Ali agreed. “I’ll call him as soon as I get off the phone with you. But what about those two thumb drives? I offered them to Dave, and he dissed them, assuming that Bryan had already gone through them and deleted whatever he didn’t want seen. But what are the chances that they’re also infected and something will overwrite all the files on the next computer someone uses to try accessing them? I was looking at Bryan’s files earlier, and there didn’t seem to be any problem, but…”

“Were you off-line at the time?”

“Yes.”

“I should probably take a look at both of those drives,” B. said. “If there’s a Trojan lurking in them, maybe I can disable it before it does any damage. Right now, though, I’m still working on that encryption problem. I think we’re getting close, and I don’t want to walk away from it. Could you maybe drop the thumb drives off here at the house?”

“Where is that?” Ali asked.

“The Village of Oak Creek,” he said. “Overlooking a golf course.”

“Which one?”

“The one by the Hilton.”

“Okay,” Ali said. “I’m on my way.”

“Right now?”

“Yes, right now.”

“So where are you?”

“Just coming into Sedona from Cottonwood. Why?”

“Do me a favor,” he said. “I’m famished. I haven’t taken the time to go have breakfast, and there’s no food here—plenty of coffee but no food.”

“What do you want?” Ali asked.

“One of your dad’s meatloaf sandwiches.”

“Done,” Ali said. “Meatloaf it is.”

CHAPTER 13

On his way down from Sedona, Dave Holman had notified the Scottsdale police of his impending arrival and of the possible connection between their case and his. Driving to the address he’d been given in the far northern reaches of Scottsdale, Dave was surprised to find himself in a neighborhood of relatively modest tract homes that had been built years before far more affluent housing had grown up around them. The garage door of the house stood open, but the opening was strung with yellow crime-scene tape, and a pair of uniformed officers were stationed outside.

Led inside by one of the uniforms, Dave introduced himself to Scottsdale homicide detective Sean O’Brien and to Matthew Morrison’s widow.

“I still don’t understand why you won’t let me use my car,” a surprisingly poised and dry-eyed Jenny Morrison was saying. “After all, since Matthew died in his Toyota, I don’t see what any of it has to do with my Acura. How can I go about planning a funeral if I can’t even drive my car?”

An aggrieved widow rather than a grieving one, Dave thought. Someone who’s far more concerned about being able to drive her car than she is about finding out what happened to her husband.

“As I explained earlier,” Detective O’Brien said, “for right now, the entire garage is considered part of the crime scene until we have a chance to have our CSI team process it—”

“But there wasn’t any crime,” Jenny insisted. “I’m telling you, what happened to Matt has to be an accident. He would never commit suicide or do anything at all that would attract this kind of attention. Not on purpose. It’s totally out of character.”

“So what do you think happened?” Dave asked.

“Who the hell are you?” Jenny asked.

“Detective Holman,” Dave said, handing over his ID. “Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. We’re working on a related case. Now, getting back to your husband—”

Jenny shrugged impatiently. “He called me yesterday afternoon at work and left me a message. He said there’d been some kind of problem at work and that he would be late getting home. Once he got it straightened out, he must have had a drink or two with a colleague on his way home. He passed out in the car without ever turning off the engine.”

“Was that something he did often?” Detective O’Brien asked. “Have ‘one too many’ on his way home from work?”

“No,” Jenny said. “But there’s always a first time, isn’t there?”

And a last time, Dave thought. “Had your husband been upset about anything recently?” he asked.

Jenny turned back to Detective O’Brien. “I already went over all this with you. Do I have to repeat it to him?”

“Please answer the question, Mrs. Morrison,” O’Brien said. “Believe me, the more information we all have, the easier it’ll be to get to the bottom of this.”

Jenny Morrison gave an exaggerated sigh. “All right, then,” she said. “In answer to your question, no, Matthew didn’t seem particularly upset. If anything, he seemed pretty cheerful.”

“Not what you’d call depressed,” Detective O’Brien offered.

“No more than usual,” Jenny replied.

“What do you mean?”

“My husband was never what you’d call a wild and carefree guy. He was an auditor. The only thing he would have liked more than working for the state would have been working for the IRS. In other words, he wasn’t ever a bundle of laughs. In fact, he may have known a joke or two, but I never heard him tell one. He was just a regular guy who wore a suit and tie when he went to work every day. After work, he came home, ate dinner, watched TV or messed around on his computer, and then went to bed. Mr. Regular-as-Clockwork.”

“Did he have dealings with anyone in or around Sedona?” Dave asked.

“Probably. Matthew had dealings with people from all over the state,” Jenny said. “Like I said, he worked for the auditor general. I’m sure she can tell you which accounts he was working on.”

“Did he mention anything to you about maybe going to Sedona this past Monday morning?”

“I’m sure you’re mistaken about that,” Jenny said. “He told me he had a Monday-morning meeting in Tucson. He brought home a motor-pool vehicle on Friday so he’d be able to leave for Tucson bright and early on Monday.”

On his way to Scottsdale, Dave had already checked on Matthew Morrison’s supposed Monday-morning appointment in Tucson and had found it totally bogus. No record of any scheduled Tucson appointment existed. Period. The car-rental agreement, however, did exist.

“You’re saying your husband was driving a state-owned vehicle on Monday morning when he left here, and not a Hertz rental?” Dave asked.

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

“My understanding is that he used his Hertz gold card to rent a vehicle that was seen near Sedona—”

“You think Matthew rented a car? Never. He didn’t have a Hertz gold card,” Jenny declared flatly. “He never rented a car in his life, not once. For one thing, we never went anywhere. Besides that, he was too cheap.”

“You mentioned your husband’s computer. Was it here at home?”

Jenny nodded.

“And did he use it for work?”

“I don’t know. The last few months he was on it almost every evening. But it doesn’t really matter what he did with it. It’s broken.”

“Broken?” Dave asked.

“Yes. To begin with, I thought the same thing you did—that he had done himself in and he might have left me a note. But when I tried to turn on the computer, it wouldn’t even boot up. It was several years old, though. It probably died a natural death and he didn’t want to tell me about it.”

Dave’s phone vibrated in its holder on his belt, but the news about another broken computer made the call easy to ignore. Both Bryan and Morgan Forester’s computers had been tampered with. He tried to keep any sense of urgency out of his voice when he spoke. “Would you mind if we took a look at it?” he asked. “If someone at the crime lab could reinstate some of the data, it might give us a better idea of what was going on with your husband.”

“By all means,” Jenny Morrison said. “Knock yourselves out. You can take it right now if you want to. The sooner you get to the bottom of all this, the sooner I’ll be able to drive my car.”

“What about a photo?” Dave asked. He caught the raised eyebrow that Detective O’Brien gave him. Dave knew that eventually, they’d be able to retrieve Matthew Morrison’s photo from the DMV, but that would take time and going through channels. Right this minute, Detective Holman was looking for speed.

“That one,” Jenny said. With a careless shrug, she pointed to a gold-framed eight-by-ten photo sitting on an end table next to the couch—a photo of both of them together, Jenny with her hard-edged, fashion-plate good looks and beefy Matthew with a bad comb-over and a bulky sport jacket.

“It’s not brand-new,” Jenny said. “It’s from last year’s church directory.”

“Would it be possible to borrow it?” Dave asked.

“Sure,” Jenny told him. “You can keep it if you like. If I need a copy, I can always order another.”

Somehow, listening to Jenny Morrison talk, Dave doubted she’d be ordering another copy.

Half an hour later, he helped Detective O’Brien load Matthew Morrison’s dead PC and old-fashioned CRT into the back of his sedan.

“I’m not sure why we’re even bothering to drag this old computer out of there,” Sean said as he slammed the car door shut behind it. “Sounds as though it’s as dead as he is, poor guy. Maybe Morrison’s death really will turn out to be an accident, although, if I had to be married to a coldhearted witch like her, I’d have blown my brains out long ago.”

“Yes,” Dave agreed. “Jenny Morrison is definitely bad news, but I don’t think her husband’s death was an accident, and maybe not suicide, either.”

“What makes you say that?” Detective O’Brien asked.

“What if I told you I’ve learned about three dead computers connected to this case so far this morning?”

Once Dave explained, O’Brien nodded. “I see what you mean,” he said. “Sounds like at least two too many. I’ll drag this one back to the crime lab and see if anyone there can extract any data from it. What are you going to do with that photo?”

“Go see Hertz,” Dave said. “Matthew Morrison rented a car there on Monday. I want to see if anyone remembers him.”

Ali arrived back at the Sugarloaf during the late-morning lull. The parking lot was empty, and when she stepped inside, the place was deserted except for Jan Howard, who was grabbing a quick cup of coffee. Edie’s laptop sat open on the counter, but what should have been a pre-lunch quiet was punctuated by the sound of raised voices from the kitchen.

“I don’t care what I said about not minding,” Bob Larson was telling his wife. “The reason I didn’t mind is I never thought you’d do it. I thought you’d have better sense. No matter, you’re not bringing that damn thing into our house. I won’t have it. The last thing this world needs is a bunch of hysterical little old ladies going around zapping everything in sight.”

“I’m not hysterical,” Edie returned. “And I haven’t zapped anyone, not yet. And I certainly haven’t zapped you, now, have I?”

“What’s going on?” Ali asked Jan.

Bob and Edie’s longtime waitress rolled her eyes and shook her head. “You know how your parents are, Ali. They’re always squabbling like cats and dogs about one thing or another.”

That was true. For Bob and Edie, a day without a verbal skirmish was like a day without sun.

“What about this time?” Ali asked.

“Your mother’s Taser,” Jan returned.

Ali was aghast. “My mother’s what?”

“Her Taser,” Jan repeated. “FedEx delivered it a little while ago. She went out into the kitchen to load and authorize it, and your father started pitching a fit. Are you here for lunch?” she added, pulling out her order pad. “It’s early, but what can I get you?”

“You’re telling me my mother has a Taser, like on COPS?”

“Not exactly like on COPS,” Jan said. “Theirs are black. Edie’s is that pretty metallic pink. She got one that matches her cell phone.”

Pink? Ali marveled.

“And what happens when you hit some poor little old guy with a pacemaker and he flops over dead?” Bob’s tirade continued. “What happens then?”

“You need to watch the video,” Edie said patiently. “It goes into all those details. The amount of charge in the Taser doesn’t do anything at all to pacemakers. Besides, how many crooks that are robbing banks or doing carjackings already have pacemakers?”

“And how many carjackings have you been involved in?” Bob demanded.

“None so far,” Edie replied. “But if I ever am, the guy doing it will be in for a big surprise.”

Walking around the end of the counter, Ali stepped into the kitchen. Her father stood leaning against the kitchen sink with his arms folded belligerently across his chest. Edie, frowning in concentration, was holding and manipulating a metal object of some kind in one hand while consulting a piece of paper in her other hand. The pink metallic object was about the same size and shape as an ordinary office stapler, and the color did indeed match Edie’s hot-pink cell phone.

Intent on their argument, neither Bob nor Edie registered Ali’s arrival on the scene. Since bickering was a way of life for her parents, Ali didn’t hesitate before stepping into the melee. “What’s going on here?” she demanded.

“Your mother’s gone off the deep end this time,” Bob replied. “Bought herself one of those Taser outfits from that Frieda Rains woman. With her packing that thing around, God help me if she ever goes on the warpath.”

None of this made much sense, but Ali plucked a familiar name out of her father’s diatribe: Frieda Rains was a local woman somewhere in her mid-to late seventies who had been left virtually penniless by her husband’s long bout with numerous health issues, including his eventual death from complications related to Alzheimer’s. In order to keep a roof over her head, Frieda had taken over as manager of a trailer park somewhere farther up Oak Creek Canyon. In addition to that, she eked out a meager living by doing other various odd jobs, including working as a food demonstrator and selling Tupperware.

“What’s Frieda doing with Tasers?” Ali asked.

“Selling them,” Edie Larson answered. “She can make a lot more money selling Tasers at a party than she can make selling plastic dishware.”

“My point exactly,” Bob said. “Once she sells them to everyone she knows, we’ll all be at risk. No one in town will be safe.”

“You should be grateful,” Edie said. “With the women in town prepared to defend themselves, you’ll be a whole lot safer than you were before.”

“You’re saying Frieda Rains is an authorized dealer, then?” Ali asked.

“Yes,” Edie answered. “She’s a fully authorized dealer. I went to one of her first parties here in town last week. Your father knew at the time that I was going. I told him well in advance.”

“Yes,” Bob grumbled. “But when you came home, you neglected to mention that you actually bought one. You seem to have left out that important detail.”

“Because I knew you’d pitch a fit five ways to Sunday when you found out,” Edie shot back. “Which is what you’re doing right this minute, in case you haven’t noticed. Since I knew having this argument was inevitable, I decided to postpone it until my C2 actually got here and it came time to activate it. Which I’ve done, by the way, by putting in the authorization code.”

“You’re saying that now it’s loaded?” Bob asked warily. “Are you telling me all you have to do is shoot the damn thing? Shouldn’t there be some kind of training program before you’re allowed to go around with it in your hand?”

“It isn’t a lethal weapon,” Edie returned. “And I’ve already done the training. Frieda gave me a copy of the video. I’ve watched it several times. Running this thing is as easy as pie.”

“What about a license? Shouldn’t you have one of those?”

“A license isn’t required,” Edie said. “I brought the computer over from the house so I could answer the questions on the felony check. Obviously, there weren’t any of those. Now that it’s activated, I’m good to go.”

“How about if you go out of my kitchen, then,” Bob suggested. “And take that blasted thing with you. What if it goes off accidentally and messes up my microwave?”

“It doesn’t go off unless you move back the cover and push the red button,” Edie said. “And it’s not going to hurt your microwave.”

“I don’t care,” Bob said. “I want it out of here!”

With a glare in her husband’s direction, Edie stuffed the Taser in the pocket of her apron and headed for the dining room. Bob turned on his daughter. “As for you,” he said, “if you’re looking for lunch, we don’t start serving for another five minutes. No exceptions, not even for you.”

Ali followed Edie back into the dining room. “Can I see it?” she asked. “Please?”

Edie sighed. “As long as you don’t give me any grief about it. See? This is how it works.” She held out the sleek little instrument and pulled back the plastic cover that served as a trigger guard. As soon as she did that, a bright red laser light appeared on the opposite wall.

“A lot of the time, just having that light aimed at his chest is enough to get a crook to back off. If he doesn’t, you press this button, the one with the lightning on it. You’ve got to keep the Taser vertical. The darts shoot out about fifteen feet, and they say you should always aim for the chest. The second dart hits about a foot lower than the first one. If he still doesn’t go down, you can use this as a stun gun in close physical combat, but that’s a lot harder.”

“You seem to know a lot about this,” Ali said.

“You bet,” Edie replied with a grin. “Like I said, I’ve watched the video.”

The bell rang over the door, signaling arriving customers. Without another word, Edie stowed her Taser in the locked compartment under the cash wrap next to her purse. While Jan went to seat the new arrivals, Edie busied herself with brewing a new pot of coffee. “I swear,” she said, “I think your father would be happier living in the twentieth century—the early twentieth century. The moment something new comes along, he digs in his heels. That’s why he’s still driving that old wreck of his.”

Bob Larson’s 1972 Bronco was his pride and joy. It was also his sole means of transportation. Refurbished after being stolen and stripped sometime earlier, it now sported a brand-new coat of paint and newly acquired copper-plated antique-vehicle license plates.

Ali wasn’t about to be deflected from the subject at hand. “But why a Taser?” she asked.

“Why not?” Edie returned. “Not everybody has what it takes to be a martial-arts expert, and we can’t all be like you and carry a loaded Glock around.”

Both of Ali’s parents had objected to her having a gun and a concealed-weapon permit, although the criticism had pretty much gone away after an almost fatal shoot-out in a Phoenix-area hospital waiting room. On that occasion, the presence of Ali’s weapon had played an important part in saving countless lives.

“I used to think Sedona was the safest place in the world, but not anymore,” Edie continued. “I’m the one who takes the receipts to the bank every day. When I’m walking around with that bag of cash in my purse, I can tell you, I feel mighty leery about it. I’m the one at risk, you know. Who’s to say some would-be thief might not take a look at me and decide I’m an easy mark?”

“But Mother,” Ali began.

“No buts,” Edie said. “It’s not a lethal weapon. If someone was coming at me and I had a gun in my hand, I’d probably think about it for a minute. Do I want to kill this guy or not? And by the time I made up my mind, it would be too late. With this, I pull the trigger. And what happens if there’s a struggle and he takes my weapon away and shoots me instead? Same thing. I may be tased, but I won’t be dead. I may fall down on the ground and wet my pants in public, which would be embarrassing as all get out, but again, I won’t be dead. Big difference.”

“Let’s suppose you end up tasing a bad guy,” Ali said. “What if he gets up and comes at you anyway? What do you do then?”

“That’s the beauty of it,” Edie said. “You’ve got the thirty seconds while he’s helpless on the ground to call for help and get out of Dodge. You take off and leave your Taser right there with the darts still in him. Afterward, you submit a police report about the incident to Taser International, and they replace your Taser, no questions asked. So it comes with a lifetime guarantee.”

“Interesting,” Ali said.

“Look what happened to Morgan Forester,” Edie continued. “Whoever killed her did it right there in her own front yard, and she was completely defenseless. If she’d had a Taser, maybe she could have gotten away. Frieda told me that she booked three parties for next week based on that incident alone.”

Ali had to concede that Edie had a point. Sedona wasn’t nearly as crime-free as it had once been. That lethal weapon/ shoot/don’t shoot pause in the action, the critical seconds of wrestling with the decision of pulling the trigger and possibly killing an attacker, had proved fatal for countless police officers and civilians alike over the years. And how many people died when, in the course of a struggle, their own weapons were used against them? Maybe Edie and Frieda were right—that having access to a nonlethal alternative wasn’t such a bad idea.

Edie glanced at the clock. “It drives me nuts when your father starts acting like a prima donna, but it’s after eleven now. If you want lunch, I can take your order, but didn’t you just have breakfast?”

“I need a meatloaf sandwich,” Ali said. “To go.”

“With everything?”

Ali nodded. She didn’t mention that she would be delivering it to B. Simpson at his home. That would spin off another whole set of questions, to say nothing of rumors.

Once Ali’s order was up on the wheel, Edie turned back to her daughter. “Frieda asked me if I thought you’d be interested. Next week’s parties are booked, but she said she’d be able to squeeze you in to one of them if you’d like to attend.”

“No, thanks,” Ali said. “For right now I believe I’ll stick with my Glock.”

Gradually, the Sugarloaf’s lunch crowd began to filter into the restaurant. From the sounds of banging pots and pans in the kitchen, Ali knew her father wasn’t yet over his snit, but he would be. He and her mother had their various differences of opinions, but they always got over them one way or the other.

While Ali waited for the sandwich, she tried calling Leland Brooks, hoping to see how he had fared with the tile delivery. She was a little surprised when he still didn’t answer his phone; he usually picked up after only one ring.

“Back in town now,” she said, leaving another message. “Give me a call when you get this.”

As the booths filled up, so did the stools at the counter. Blanche Sims, a teller from Wells Fargo, slipped onto a stool one down from Ali. “I heard they let Bryan Forester out of jail this morning,” Blanche said as Edie filled her coffee cup. “Someone told me they saw his truck parked in front of the funeral home. Probably there making arrangements for tomorrow’s funeral. Under the circumstances, I don’t think the man has any business arranging a funeral, much less attending it.”

The comment was addressed to Edie. Ali had no business involving herself in the discussion, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t sit idly by while people who had no idea of what had happened sat around proclaiming Bryan’s guilt.

“Why wouldn’t Bryan show up for the funeral?” Ali demanded sharply. “Morgan was his wife and the mother of his children. He has every right in the world to be there.”

Everyone within hearing distance, including Blanche, seemed taken aback by Ali’s outspoken response.

“Your order’s up,” Bob said from the kitchen.

Hurriedly grabbing Ali’s to-go bag from the pass-through, Edie handed it to her daughter. “Go ahead,” she said. “We can straighten this out later.”

“Yes,” Ali declared, standing up and favoring Blanche with a cold-eyed stare. “We certainly can.” With that, she stomped out of the Sugarloaf and headed for the Village of Oak Creek.

Unconvinced that Matthew Morrison’s damaged computer would provide any answers, Dave Holman left the crime scene in Scottsdale and headed for Sky Harbor airport. Shortly after noon, armed with the formerly framed photo of Jenny and Matthew Morrison, Dave arrived at the Hertz car-rental facility at Sky Harbor. Not that it did him much good.

Once Dave showed his ID, Jim Henderson, the young branch manager, was polite and eager but less than helpful. A check of their records showed that the vehicle in question—a blue Ford 500 with Colorado plates—was out on another rental and wasn’t scheduled to be returned again until Sunday evening. As for Morrison’s rental agreement? It had been done through their online facility. Since Matthew Morrison had a valid gold card, he didn’t have to stop at a rental counter. All he had to do was step off the shuttle, climb into his waiting vehicle, and then drive through the guarded gate, showing his paperwork as he went.

“That’s all there is to it?” Dave asked.

Henderson nodded. “It’s a service for our repeat customers. We maintain profiles on each of them. We know what vehicles they like and their insurance preferences. We also have their license information on file, along with their preferred credit card. That’s all we need. It streamlines the process for everyone.”

“What happens when the vehicle is returned?”

“Customers drive up to one of our drop-off lanes. An attendant checks the car for damage, verifies the mileage and fuel readings, and makes sure nothing’s left in the vehicle.”

“Can you tell which attendant that would have been?”

“Sure. Just a second. Attendant 06783. That would be Bobby Salazar. He’s out on the line now.”

“Do you mind if I talk to him?”

“You can try, but I wouldn’t hold my breath, if I were you,” Henderson said. “These guys check in hundreds of vehicles in a week’s time. Bobby’s one of our best, but this is Thursday. He’s not going to remember a vehicle that was turned in on Monday.”

Dave arrived at Bobby Salazar’s station and waited on the sidelines while the attendant finished checking in two very sunburned guys in shorts and Hawaiian shirts who came equipped with a mountain of luggage and two sets of golf clubs. As they piled their stuff onto a rolling cart, Bobby turned an appraising gaze on Dave. “What can I do for you, Officer?”

Wordlessly, Dave handed over first his ID and then the photo of Jenny and Matthew Morrison. “Have you ever seen this guy?”

Bobby studied the picture carefully, then shook his head. “Nope,” he said confidently. “I’ve never seen him before.”

“That’s funny,” Dave said. “According to the check-in records, he came through your line on Monday—late in the afternoon.”

“Driving what?” Bobby asked.

“A blue Ford 500 with Colorado plates.”

Dave caught the subtle tightening of Bobby Salazar’s jaw. He looked down at the photo and then handed it back. “I remember the vehicle, but this guy wasn’t the one who was driving it. Why? What’s this about?”

“I’m investigating a homicide that occurred outside Sedona on Monday morning,” Dave answered. “This vehicle was seen in the area and—”

“There was blood in it,” Bobby said. “On the floorboard of the passenger seat. At least it looked like blood.”

“And you didn’t report it?”

“My shift was almost over,” Bobby said. “I didn’t want to be late for class. There wasn’t any other damage to the vehicle. Besides, it wasn’t that big a stain. Carpets get dirty over time. The detail guys clean them up as best they can.”

“I’m sure they do,” Dave said. “But this is the man whose name was on the rental agreement.” He held up the photo. “You’re sure this isn’t the man who was driving?”

“I remember the guy very well,” Bobby said. “He was rude to me—a first-class asshole, but not this asshole. This isn’t him.”

When Ali arrived at the address she’d been given, she found herself in front of a sprawling piece of stucco-covered architecture stacked on top of a three-car garage. Looking at it, she knew the modern-looking affair would total up to be well over a million-dollar property, especially since it was built on a steep hillside lot that backed up to a large swath of undeveloped and probably undevelopable open space. In the Sedona area, that kind of privacy meant big bucks.

She parked in the driveway and stepped out of her Cayenne to admire the view. The house overlooked the ninth fairway of a well-kept eighteen-hole golf course, with Sedona’s fringe of deep red rocks dominating the horizon.

B. hurried out to meet Ali as she gathered her purse and the take-out bag containing his sandwich. Ali handed the bag to him and then reached back into the Cayenne to retrieve her laptop. B. led her up the steep driveway and under a covered portico on the south side of the house, where two double doors—either antique or suitably distressed—created an impressive entry.

“For real?” Ali asked, fingering the rough-hewn wood.

B. grinned and shook his head. “Nope,” he replied. “Well done but absolutely fake. There’s a door factory down in Mexico that’s made a real name for itself manufacturing reproduction doors. The doors were going to be part of a whole Mexican-hacienda motif. I had planned on hiring a decorator and really doing the place up in spectacular fashion, but it turns out I’ve had a few other things on my plate. In other words, I haven’t quite gotten around to redecorating. You’ll have to take the house as is.”

The tall wooden doors opened onto a soaring two-story foyer with an exquisitely tiled floor. After that impressive entry, things pretty much went downhill. The living room was huge, with a massive black granite fireplace at the far end. What should have been a spectacular focal point for the home suffered from the furnishings—an oddball collection of mismatched tables, desks, and benches, all of which held one or more computers. The only concession to comfort came in the guise of two rolling desk chairs that evidently migrated as needed from one computer station to the next.

“Why do I feel like I just ended up at a computer garage sale?” Ali asked.

“It’s not,” B. said with a chuckle. “For one thing, not one of these computers is dead. They’re all hard at work doing their own little part of solving our encryption problem. I’ll admit, I probably shouldn’t have set them up in the living room, but there was more room here than anywhere else. The kitchen’s on through there,” he added, pointing and leading the way. “I put on a new pot of coffee, and if you’re hungry, I’ll be happy to share some of my sandwich.”

Taking the hint, Ali followed B. into the kitchen. “Yes on the coffee,” she said. “I already had breakfast, so I’m not hungry. Don’t let that stop you. You go ahead.”

She watched while he dished the sandwich out onto a paper plate and set the table with an assortment of plastic utensils. A confirmed bachelor, Ali concluded.

B. seemed to read her mind. “I was married once,” he said as he poured freshly brewed coffee from a state-of-the-art Krups brew station into a pair of mugs that were covered with fading Nintendo logos. “Briefly and badly,” he added. “She wanted to fix me and turn our house into something out of House and Garden. I’m more into retro Star Wars. She also wanted me to work regular office hours with nights and weekends off. I took the position that as much money as I was making, I didn’t need to be fixed. We decided to go our separate ways. She lives the way she lives, and I live like this.” He paused and looked at Ali expectantly, as if waiting for her to fill in the blanks of her own life.

“If you’ve Googled me,” she said, “then you already know I got turned in for a newer model. Or two.”

“Yes,” B. agreed. “I believe there was some mention of that. I also read that before all was said and done, you ended up being accused of knocking him off. Is that what got you so bound up in trying to help Bryan Forester?”

It was a fair question, especially in view of the fact that Ali’s involvement had drawn B. into the equation as well. “I suppose,” Ali admitted. “And considering your past history, I really appreciate that you’re willing to help out.”

B. grinned at her before taking a bite of the oversize sandwich. “You’re a paying customer,” he said, when he finished chewing. “And the customer is always right. You brought the thumb drives?”

“Yes.” Ali reached into her purse, pulled out the drives in question, and put them on the table. “I already tried using one of them in my computer,” she said, patting her computer case. “Nothing happened, but as you said, I wasn’t online at the time.”

B. nodded. “Thanks for dropping them off. As soon as I’m done with my sandwich, I’ll check them out. The drives and the computer.”

“Thank you,” Ali said.

“And what about Dave Holman?” B. asked. “Did you tell him about the possible connection between his case and our identity thief?”

“Not yet,” Ali said. “I’ve tried calling him several times. He must be busy. The calls go straight to voice mail.”

“Keep trying,” B. urged. “The more I think about it, the less I like it.”

Ali stayed long enough for B. to polish off the sandwich. Once he reached for her computer, she stood to leave. She still hadn’t heard back from Leland Brooks, and she wanted to make sure someone was at the Manzanita Hills house in advance of the deputies with their search warrant.

“You’re welcome to stay if you want to,” he said.

Ali shook her head. “I’ve already seen you working on computers,” she said. “It’s about as much fun as watching grass grow.”

“That’s funny,” B. said. “It’s almost the same thing my ex-wife used to say.”

CHAPTER 14

Leaving the village, Ali tried calling both Dave and Leland again. To no avail: Neither of them answered. On the way, she drove up to the Manzanita Hills house, expecting to see a pallet or two of tiles sitting in the driveway. There wasn’t one, and Leland wasn’t there, either.

Exasperated, Ali called B. Simpson back. “Have you taken a look at either one of the thumb drives?” she asked.

“Both of them,” he said. “And you’re right. They were both infected, but now that I know how this guy works, it wasn’t hard to disable the worm. I just finished working on Morgan’s. Why?”

“Someone was supposed to deliver a tile order today,” Ali said. “But there’s no sign of it here, and no sign of Mr. Brooks either. I’m wondering what happened.”

“Would you like me to check Morgan’s address book and see if I can find a phone number for you? Do you happen to remember the name?”

“Tile Design,” Ali answered impatiently. “Something like that.”

“Import Granite and Tile Design?” B. returned a moment later. “On Buckeye Road?”

“That’s the one,” Ali said. “Can you give me the number?”

“And down here on the notes, there’s a whole series of invoice numbers,” B. said. “Would you like those as well?”

Ali noted them. Once she dialed the number, she spent the next several minutes on hold before someone from customer service came on the line.

“My name is Alison Reynolds,” Ali told the woman. “My contractor is Build It Construction here in Sedona. I was told my order of limestone tile would be delivered today, but it hasn’t shown up.”

“You were expecting an order today?” the woman asked. “Where again?”

“In Sedona. At my construction site on Manzanita Hills Road. The contractor is currently unavailable, and I was told I needed to have someone on site to sign the invoice and accept delivery.”

“I’m so sorry, Ms. Reynolds,” the woman said. “I see the order right here, but there must be some kind of mistake. We don’t make deliveries in Sedona on Fridays. And your tile is in transit, but it isn’t due at our warehouse here in Phoenix until late next week at the earliest.”

“But I was told it would be here today.”

“Perhaps it’s an order from another company,” the woman said cheerfully. “It’s possible that the contractor ordered from more than one supplier. You should probably check with him.”

I would, if I could find him. Ali thought grimly. If he really is out of jail.

She was still fuming when she pulled into the driveway at Skyview, where she was relieved to see Leland Brooks’s pickup parked right outside the house. That meant he was back here. Maybe he was vacuuming or doing some other noisy chore that made hearing the ringing of his telephone impossible. If nothing else, he might be able to unravel the puzzle of that missing load of limestone tile.

“Hi,” she called, coming inside. “Leland? Anybody home?”

There was no answer as she closed the front door and turned to deposit her keys and purse on the burled-wood entryway table. When she looked up from doing that, she was astonished to find herself faced with a complete stranger. A dark-haired man with a grim expression was seated directly across from her on the leather couch. In one hand, he held a gun—an enormous handgun—that was trained on her. Both that hand and the other one, the one resting casually on his knee, were covered by latex surgical gloves. That was definitely a bad sign—a very bad sign. The man was dressed all in green, like one of the doctors on Scrubs, and he wore a pair of surgical booties on his feet.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “What the hell are you doing in my house? Who let you in? And where’s Leland Brooks?”

The man’s face twisted into a sardonic grin. “So many questions,” he said, “and from someone who no doubt thought she already had all the answers. First let me see that Glock of yours. I understand you never leave home without it. Take it out from wherever it is you carry it. Take it out very carefully and put it right there on the floor in front of you. Then move back to the door and sit there. No heroics, Ms. Reynolds. One false move, and I promise you, I will pull the trigger.”

He spoke so calmly, so deliberately, that Ali had no doubt he meant every word. With her heart slamming wildly inside her chest, she did as she’d been told: She carefully removed the Glock from its small-of-back holster and put it on the floor. Then, as directed, she moved back to the door and slid down to the floor in front of it.

How can this be happening to me? she wondered. Why didn’t I see it coming?

There had been no warning. None. One moment things had seemed completely normal. She had been performing the perfectly ordinary tasks of stepping into her house and closing the door behind her. The next moment her life was on the line: There was a stranger in her house, and she was staring down the barrel of a deadly weapon.

“You still haven’t told me who you are,” she said. With her whole body quaking, she struggled to steady her voice. She needed to put up a good front and to sound less threatened than she felt.

“Why don’t you tell me who I am?” the man returned.

Just then Ali heard a car pulling up in the driveway. A car door slammed shut. Hearing it, she was terrified that school had let out early for some unknown reason and her son, Chris, was about to walk into a trap. But then a second door slammed as well. She heard the sound of approaching voices, of two men talking. Her captor heard them, too.

“Whoever it is, get rid of them,” he whispered urgently. “Now! And no tricks, either.”

When the doorbell clanged right above Ali’s head, the sound was so loud it took her breath away. She knew that she needed to call for help. Someone was right there, on the far side of the door, but if she did call out and sound an alarm, what would happen? She would be dead, and so might the unsuspecting people outside. For a long time, she didn’t move and didn’t speak.

“I said get rid of them,” the man hissed.

The bell rang again. “Ali,” Jacky Jackson said. “Your car’s parked right outside. We know you’re in there. Why aren’t you answering the door?”

“What do you want?” Ali croaked, her voice cracking with a combination of fear and raw emotion. She tried to pull herself together. I can’t let him know how scared I am, she told herself. I can’t.

“It’s Jacky,” the agent said, as if she couldn’t recognize his voice. “I’ve brought someone along who wants to meet you. You need to meet him, Ali. It’s important. He wants to talk to you about that offer we discussed yesterday. We’ve been looking for you all morning long, traipsing all over hell and gone.”

The only thing that was important right then was survival. Ali knew that in a fair fight, Jacky Jackson would be no help at all—in fact, he’d be less than no help. But his unexpected and unwelcome presence right outside her door at this exact moment did serve one useful purpose. It made Ali mad as hell, and that helped clear her head and made her focus.

“Go away,” she ordered. “Leave me out of it. I already told you, I’m not interested.”

“But you don’t understand,” Jacky wheedled. “This is one of the major players in this deal. He flew in last night for the express purpose of seeing you. He wants to be sure you understand what’s at stake here—what kind of an offer you may be turning down.”

And what I’m keeping you from walking into, Ali thought.

“You could be here with the pope himself, for all I care,” Ali returned. “I’m not interested. My answer was no yesterday, and it’s still no today. What part of N-O don’t you understand, Jacky? Go away and leave me alone.”

“If you let us walk away from here, you’re going to live to regret it,” he said.

Yes, that may be true, Ali thought, but only if I’m alive long enough to care.

She waited until the car doors slammed again and the engine turned over. Tires crunched in the gravel of the driveway. By sending Jacky and his friend away, Ali knew that she had saved his weaselly little life and that of his friend as well. Now she needed to save her own.

“Who are you?” she said to the man. “What do you want?”

“You tell me,” he replied. Obviously, he was enjoying this dangerous game of twenty questions.

On the trail of a possible identity thief, Ali and B.’s amateur sleuthing had led them to Singleatheart. This man had evidently doubled back on the same trail and had come looking for them in return—looking for Ali. Devoid of her Glock, all she could do was bluff.

“You’re from Singleatheart,” she said.

He smiled again—a chilling grimace that filled Ali’s soul with dread. “I’m just not from Singleatheart,” he told her deliberately. “I am Singleatheart. Who helped you find me? Who helped you destroy my files?”

“Does it matter?” she said. “And what makes you think I had help?”

“I know you had help,” he returned. “You may be a lot of things, Ms. Reynolds, but you’re no computer genius. I saw what equipment you have lying around here. There’s a Mac down in the basement—one your son evidently uses—but that’s it. Less than basic.”

“And I suppose you consider yourself some kind of self-styled computer genius?” Ali replied. “Maybe you are, but once we break your encryption code, we’ll have all your secrets.”

She knew it was dangerous to taunt him, just as it was dangerous to taunt a coiled rattlesnake, but she couldn’t help herself. She needed to do something to unsettle him. Words were the only weapons at hand.

“So you didn’t only destroy my files,” he snarled at her. “You stole them.”

Without warning, he sprang from the couch and crossed the room, brandishing the gun like a club. Before she could raise her hands to defend herself, the blow fell. The weapon slammed into the flesh of her cheek with a tooth-jarring intensity that sent her sprawling, bouncing off the door and sliding across the tiled entryway. As stars exploded in her vision, she came to rest against the legs of the burled-wood table. The room spun and swam around her. Blood spilled from the cut on her cheek and slopped into her eye, blurring her vision that much more. She tasted blood in her mouth as well, and the pain was more than she could imagine. But by then he had grabbed the crewneck of her sweatshirt and was hauling her to her feet.

“Who helped you?” he snarled.

He was mere inches away. She could feel his hot breath on her face.

“No one,” she managed. “I didn’t need any help.”

“That’s a lie,” he said, shaking her as though she were a rag doll. “You just said ‘we.’ Who’s we?”

With that, he let loose of her shirt and gave her another powerful shove, one that sent her careening across the room. She landed backward onto the couch, hitting the back of it hard enough that her head snapped whiplash fashion. The room spun around her again. When it stopped spinning, he was looming over her once more.

“Who helped you?” he repeated. “It sure as hell wasn’t that useless little Brit.”

For the first time since the confrontation had begun, Ali put it together. This guy was here, in her house. He had driven here in Leland’s truck and let himself in with Leland’s keys. For all she knew, Leland Brooks was lying dead in the basement.

“What did you do to him?” she managed. “Where is he?”

“Indisposed at the moment, I’m afraid,” the man replied. “He refused to tell me what I wanted to know. Maybe he didn’t say because he didn’t know. But you do know, and you’re going to tell me!”

“Where is he?” Ali demanded. “Is Leland hurt?”

It was all she could do to force the words out past her already badly swollen lips. She wondered in passing if her jaw was broken, but the pain was so intense that it was almost as though she were observing someone else’s battered and bloody body and hearing someone else’s labored voice.

Staring down at her, he said nothing. The fact that he wouldn’t answer her questions was answer enough. In a moment of appalling clarity, Ali knew that whatever horrors had already been visited on poor Leland Brooks would also be coming to B. Simpson as soon as this monster knew who B. was. And when that happened, Ali knew it would be her fault for dragging Leland Brooks and B. Simpson into this nightmare along with her.

“Tell me what I want to know!” her tormenter ordered. “Tell me now or else.”

“Or else what?” she spat back at him. “Go to hell!”

He reached for her then. She thought for a moment he was going to hit her again, but just then a bell sounded, and it was enough to make him hesitate. The ringing seemed to be coming from the far distance, like the bell signaling the end of a round in a boxing match. It took a moment for her to realize that the sound was coming from her cell phone. It was ringing from the spot inside her bra where she sometimes stowed it. The same place Edie Larson carried hers.

“Don’t answer that,” her attacker ordered in a hoarse whisper. “Don’t even think about touching it.”

It wasn’t until he was headed back up I-17 that Dave Holman realized he’d never bothered to turn his phone back on when he’d left the Morrisons’ house after the interview with Jenny. As soon as he turned it on, he saw he had six messages. Four were from the office, telling him with increasing urgency that his warrant was ready, and did he want to be on hand when they went to search Ali Reynolds’s house? Two of the voice mails were from Ali herself. After calling in to the office and letting them know he was on his way, he tried calling Ali back. When she didn’t answer, Dave felt a small surge of relief. He knew that she’d been pissed at him this morning when he’d told her about the search warrant, and she probably still was. He’d talk to her later and try to smooth her ruffled feathers. She had offered to show him files purported to be from Bryan Forester’s computer. And even though he had turned her down, he should probably attempt to revisit that decision. In the meantime, he had another problem.

Dave now suspected that Bryan Forester had at least one accomplice in the plot to murder his wife. Dave was also thinking that one of those accomplices could have been Matthew Morrison. Sure, Bobby Salazar had sworn that Morrison hadn’t been behind the wheel of the car turned back in on Monday, but if Matthew wasn’t involved in the Forester homicide, why had he killed himself? Jenny Morrison had taken the position that her husband’s death was accidental. Dave’s homicide-detective gut told him it was definitely deliberate.

This wasn’t just idle speculation. Dave sensed there was some kind of connection between Matthew Morrison’s dead computer and Bryan Forester’s overwritten files. Someone had made a concerted effort to obliterate the information on three different computers. That meant the data from one of those held an important clue, a key to everything that had happened. All Dave Holman had to do was find it.

Neither Ali nor the intruder said a word while the phone continued to ring. It was maddening for Ali to know there was someone on the other end of the line. If she answered, there might be enough time for a desperate scream for help. But she knew better. By the time she flipped the phone open, she would be dead. If help came at all, it would come too late.

After ringing five times, the phone subsided into silence. The man was still standing over her, holding the gun.

“Who helped you?” he demanded again. “And where the hell are your real computers?”

Ali didn’t answer. A trickle of coppery-tasting blood ran across her tonsils. As she fought off her gag reflex, her phone jangled again. This time she knew it was announcing a voice mail—a message she didn’t know if she’d ever have a chance to hear, much less return.

“Get up,” he ordered.

Ali didn’t move. She couldn’t. After a moment he grabbed her sweatshirt again. Holding it so tightly against her throat that she could barely breathe, he jerked her to her feet and propelled her across the room and into her bedroom. As she stumbled into the room, she caught a glimpse of poor Sam dodging for cover under the bed. That was also when Ali caught sight of Leland Brooks. Duct tape pinned his arms to his body and bound his legs together. From the knees up, he appeared to be soaking wet, and so was the carpeted floor all around him. Trussed, helpless, and absolutely unmoving, he lay on the floor between the bed and the dresser. As far as Ali could tell, he wasn’t breathing. Was Leland unconscious, or was he already dead?

She struggled and twisted, trying to escape her attacker’s ironfisted grasp. “What have you done to him?” she demanded. “Is he dead?”

“Not yet, but he will be soon if you don’t give me what I want.”

She knew from the way the man said it that he wasn’t making idle threats. She knew instinctively that he was a killer who would kill again. He would murder Ali and Leland Brooks in cold blood without a moment’s hesitation.

“What do you want?” Her lips were almost swollen shut. She could barely speak.

“I already told you,” he said. “You didn’t just destroy my files, you stole them. How else would you know they were encrypted? I want them back, all of them.”

Ali said nothing.

“Even more than my files,” he added, “I want the bastard who did this.”

And there it was: the automatic and arrogant assumption that whoever had managed to do this to him—to outwit him—had to be a man. In his distorted view of the universe, only another male would be smart enough to catch him.

By then he had muscled Ali through her bedroom and into the bathroom beyond it. Still holding her sweatshirt bunched at the front of her neck, he reached down long enough to put the gun down on the side of the tub. The bathroom floor was slick with water. The room reeked of vomit, and the bathtub was full almost to overflowing with vomit-spattered water.

Ali knew then what was coming. “That’s what you did to Leland Brooks?” she gasped. “You forced him underwater?”

The man nodded grimly. Letting go of her shirt, he twisted her around so her back was to him. “Believe me, if he’d known anything, by the time it was over, he would have told me. The same way you will.”

“No,” she said, trying to desperately to pull away from him. “You can’t do this. Please.”

“Of course I can do this,” he returned calmly. “I can do anything I want. Surely you’ve heard of waterboarding. Everyone has these days. If it’s good enough for Islamic terrorists, it’s good enough for you, and it’s pretty much foolproof. When we’re done, it’ll work the same way for me that it does for the CIA. In order to keep from drowning, you’ll tell me everything I want to know.”

“You’ll never get away with it,” Ali said. “They’ll find you. They’ll put you away.”

“No, they won’t, my dear. I’ll be long gone before anyone ever finds you or your friend out there. Long gone.”

Staring down at the bathtub full of water, Ali Reynolds knew one thing that her captor couldn’t possibly know: She was petrified of water; terrified of drowning. As a teenager, she had nearly drowned on an outing to Oak Creek’s Slide Rock. She had knocked herself out on a rock and gone under. She had been unconscious when one of her friends pulled her from the water and pumped the water out of her chest. She had awakened coughing and choking.

All her adult life, she had avoided swimming pools and hot tubs, and wading in the ocean was totally off limits. She simply couldn’t bear the idea of being at the mercy of those unpredictable waves. She had enrolled Chris in swimming classes early because she had wanted him to be water-safe. She had wanted him to be able to save himself rather than looking to her for help. Only in the last few years, in the safety of this very room, had she forced herself to overcome that fear by facing it—by trying the occasional bubble bath.

But now the tub had turned into Ali’s worst horror. Staring down at it, she knew what would happen. Once he forced her head underwater long enough for the water to gush into her lungs, she would tell him whatever he wanted to know when she came back up. She would do anything to keep it from happening again—to keep him from doing to her what he had already done to Leland Brooks.

Who could already be dead, she reminded herself. Who told this monster nothing because he had nothing to tell.

She knew that Leland Brooks’s fate should have been enough to make her capitulate right then. Maybe that was what her captor had in mind—that simple dread would make her weaker. To her astonishment, it had exactly the opposite effect. A pulse of absolute abhorrence shot through her, filling her body with a physical strength she didn’t know she had.

Ali fought him then, fought him tooth and nail, biting and scratching in a desperate attempt to maim him, to knee him in the groin or gouge out his eyes. He outweighed her, though. He was taller and far stronger. She knew going in that no matter how hard she fought, eventually, she would lose. That was inevitable.

Yes, Ali thought as he forced her down on her knees beside the tub and pressed her face toward the water. Dreading what was coming, she took one last desperate gasp of air, filling her lungs as he grabbed the back of her neck and plunged her head underwater.

Dave Holman’s phone rang again as he approached the exit at Cordes Junction. “Is this Detective Holman?”

“Yes. Who is this, and how did you get my number?”

“My name is Simpson—B. Simpson. I run an Internet security firm called High Noon. Ali Reynolds is one of my clients, and I have access to her files. I found your numbers listed in her contact list. Have you heard from her?”

“From Ali? Not in the last little while,” Dave replied. “I missed a couple of calls from her earlier this morning, but when I tried calling back, she didn’t answer. Why? What’s up? Is something wrong?”

B. paused before he answered. “I know the two of you have a lot of history,” he said tentatively. “And this would probably be better coming from her, but…”

“What would be better coming from her?” Dave asked impatiently. “What are you talking about?”

“I have a name for you,” B. said. “A name for the case you’re working on. The man’s name is Winter—Dr. Peter Winter. I just Googled him. He’s an ER physician at Phoenix General.”

“Which case would that be?” Dave asked.

“Morgan Forester’s murder,” B. answered.

“And how exactly is this Dr. Winter supposed to be related?”

“Earlier this week I discovered that a worm had taken up residence in Ali’s computer. I was able to neutralize it before it could do any irreparable damage, and we assumed it was just a case of attempted identity theft. A little while ago, Ali brought me a pair of thumb drives Bryan Forester had given her for safekeeping. They contained copies of files from his computer and from Morgan’s as well. The same worm had been planted in the thumb-drive files. If they had been opened on a computer with access to the Internet, those files would have been destroyed, the same way the files were destroyed on the two computers you picked up on your search warrant. Once again, I’ve neutralized the worm before it was able to do any damage.”

“Wait,” Dave said. “You’re saying the same worm that was on the Foresters’ computers was also on Ali’s? How can you be sure?”

“How does an epidemiologist know one strain of flu from another?” B. returned. “By analyzing the makeup of the virus that causes each individual case. This is the same thing. All three worms come from the same basic source—in other words, from the same programmer. Had the worm actually been unleashed, the end result would have been slightly different. For instance, the Trojan in Ali’s system was set to simply crash the computer. The worm on the Foresters’ computers was set to overwrite files. But it’s still the same guy.”

Dave’s heartbeat quickened. The guy was a doctor? That might explain the single unexplained needle mark the ME had found at the back of Morgan Forester’s neck, in a spot where it couldn’t possibly have been self-administered. And now there was another crashed computer? Anxious not to give anything away, the next time he spoke, Dave was careful to keep his voice and his questions firmly neutral. “What does this Winter character have to do with any of this?”

“That’s the thing,” B. said. “I gave Ali a choice. I told her we could pursue legal recourse, or we could go after the guy on our own.”

“Don’t tell me,” Dave said. “I already know where Ali Reynolds came down on that one.”

“Yes,” B. agreed, “you do. So we sent the guy a worm of our own and picked up all the files from his PC in the process.”

“In other words, you used an illegal wiretap. Evidence from that wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law.”

“Maybe not,” B. agreed. “But it’s good enough for an anonymous tip. Most of Winter’s files are encrypted. I’m working on breaking the code. So far I haven’t had much luck, but I did come across one unencrypted file—one he somehow missed: his initial licensing agreement with Microsoft from back when he first purchased the computer. That’s where I got his name. He’s apparently connected to an Internet dating site called Singleatheart. Ali’s computer was infected after she registered at that site. I believe Singleatheart may also have some connection to the Forester murder.”

Listening intently to every word, Dave fought to avoid betraying his eagerness. Maybe the files Ali had offered him were the Foresters’ real files after all. If someone besides Bryan had tried to destroy them, maybe Dave had missed something. It was possible that this Winter guy was in on everything with Bryan Forester. It was also possible Dave was wrong.

As the Cordes Junction exit came up, Dave switched on his turn signal. “All right,” he said. “I’ll see about looking into this all this, Mr.—” He paused. “What did you say your name was again?”

“Simpson. B. Simpson.”

Once he was off the exit ramp, Dave pulled over. “And how do I get back to you?”

B. gave him a phone number. After ending the call, Dave wasted no time putting in another one—to Phoenix General Hospital. His first call, to the ER, came up empty. Dr. Winter was not due in today, and the person who took the call said he was expected to be away for an indefinite period. Dave’s next call was to the hospital’s administration office. It took a while before he managed to work his way up the chain of command and found someone who seemed to know what was going on.

“Yes, Dr. Winter is on staff here,” a woman named Louise Granger told him. “But he’s currently on leave. His mother was taken ill overnight and was transported to an ICU. Dr. Winter flew out to be with her first thing this morning.”

“Did he say where?” Dave asked.

“I don’t remember the exact location. He may not have even mentioned it to me, but I believe it was somewhere in upstate New York. Buffalo, maybe.”

Dave ended the call and then looked at his watch. He wanted to go back to Phoenix and start following up on this lead, but he had told the people at the office to wait for him—that he wanted to be on the scene when it came time to execute the search warrant. Since it wasn’t possible to be in two places at once, he picked up the phone and punched in the number for Detective Sean O’Brien of the Scottsdale PD.

“Hey,” O’Brien said once Dave had identified himself. “Have I got some hot news for you. Mr. Morrison’s got nothing to do with that homicide case of yours.”

“What makes you say that?” Dave asked.

“After you left, I went back to Jenny Morrison. I convinced her that with Mr. Morrison’s computer broken, and in order to ascertain that her husband hadn’t committed suicide, we needed access to his e-mail accounts, which she was happy to give me. It turns out that the day before he died, Mr. Morrison went through his mail account and deleted a large number of messages. Unfortunately for him, the deleted messages were still stored on his ISP. He wasn’t in Sedona on Monday morning. He was actually down in a new development called Red Rock, where he was hoping to meet up with a sweet little real estate babe he met over the Internet. He was all hot to trot and hoping to get lucky, but she stood him up.”

“What real estate agent?” Dave asked.

“A woman named Susan,” O’Brien answered. “From an Internet dating site.”

“Was it a place called Singleatheart, by any chance?” Dave asked.

“As a matter of fact, it was,” O’Brien replied. “How did you figure that out?”

“Luck,” Dave said. “Combined with an anonymous tip. But now I’ve got someone else I need you to track down. An ER doc from Phoenix General. His name’s Peter Winter, and he supposedly flew out of Sky Harbor this morning on his way to visit his ailing mother in upstate New York.”

“That’s all you know about him?”

“So far. Except that I’ve been told he’s also involved in Singleatheart, and I need you to find him.”

“What do you want me to do with him once I find him?”

“Just let me know where he is. I’ll take it from there.”

“Anything else?” said Sean O’Brien.

“If you can locate a photo of Dr. Winter, I need you to take a copy of it over to the Hertz facility at Sky Harbor. Show it to a guy who works the vehicle check-in line—a guy by the name of Bobby Salazar—and ask him if it looks familiar. Let me know what he says.”

“Will do,” Sean said. “Glad to help out.”

Ending the call, Dave steered his vehicle back onto the freeway, heading north. He knew he had just learned something important. One way or the other, Peter Winter was involved, and without Ali and B.’s efforts, that connection wouldn’t have come to light—at least not this soon.

Wanting to say thank you, he tried calling Ali one more time. Once again, she didn’t answer.

Why leave word for me to call if you’re not going to pick up? Dave wondered.

He hung up without leaving a message.

CHAPTER 15

Ali was falling—falling through space and time. The ground was coming up at her fast. It was reddish, rocky dirt punctuated by a few scrubby bushes, a lot like the ground around Sedona. As she fell to earth, she realized she was supposed to pull the cord on her parachute, but she couldn’t find the cord, and she didn’t have a parachute. Someone had told her that she should pack it, that she should keep it with her at all times, but she didn’t have it now, and when she hit the ground, she was going to die.

Suddenly, she came out of the water. He grabbed her by her hair and pulled her out of the tub. He flung her gasping and wheezing and choking onto the bathroom floor. The water and other things as well gushed out of her—out of her nose and her mouth—as she choked and heaved. Her whole body shook with terrible spasms as she tried desperately to clear her lungs and find a way to breathe again. To find a way to live.

How many times had he shoved her under? She didn’t know and couldn’t remember. The only thing that mattered now was would he do it again? And when? And where was he? He seemed to have left her alone on the bathroom floor. Why? Not that being left alone offered any particular advantage. Ali was helpless. She couldn’t move. The racking spasms of choking and coughing left her weak and dizzy and almost paralyzed. She knew she couldn’t stand up. She couldn’t even crawl. All she could do was pray—for wisdom, for strength, for grace.

Then her tormentor was back. She saw his bootie-clad feet next to her face and heard his voice speaking to her from very far away. “Had enough?” he asked.

Ali tried to answer, but another set of body-racking coughs rocked her. She tried to say “Enough,” but she couldn’t speak. All she could do was nod.

He dragged her up off the floor and pulled her sopping-wet body into the bedroom. Grasping her under her shoulders and knees, he lifted her and then dropped her on the bed. The movement dislodged more water from her lungs and set off another spasm of choking. Turning her head to cough, she noticed Leland’s body wasn’t exactly where it had been. He was still and unmoving again. Either Leland had moved himself or he had been moved.

Maybe Leland’s alive, Ali thought. Why else would he be duct-taped? Maybe I’m not alone in this after all.

“So tell me,” her tormentor urged. “I’m waiting.”

She looked up at him. He was no longer training his gun on her. Instead, he was using a towel to dry it. Evidently, in the course of their epic struggle, she had managed to knock the weapon—a .357, from the looks of it—into the tub. Ali knew that didn’t count in her favor. Just because the gun had gotten wet didn’t mean it wouldn’t work. If he aimed it in her direction and pulled the trigger, it would fire, and she would be dead.

“Well?” he pressed. “Who was it?”

And that was when the answer came to her. It was an answer to her prayer, and it came to her out of the blue. He’s waiting for me to tell him something. But I don’t have to tell him the truth.

The truth would mean divulging B. Simpson’s name and address, but Ali already knew that B., by his own admission, wasn’t armed. He was tall and imposing and could probably defend himself under most circumstances, but not against a determined killer armed with a .357.

If she told the man that the cops had helped her, it would be over. He’d kill her and be done with it. What Ali really needed was a bargaining chip, something she could use to divert him long enough to get help. And where would she find that? She needed an ally who was armed to the teeth and who would be utterly fearless when it came to fighting back.

With a start, Ali realized she knew just such a person.

“My mother,” she whispered aloud.

“Your what?”

“My mother,” she repeated.

“You’re saying your mother did this? No way!” he blurted. “I read all about your parents in some of those articles on you. Don’t they run some stupid restaurant or something?”

That he could so easily dismiss her parents and their life’s work made Ali that much more determined. She had paid a huge price to be able to lie to this man. Now her very life depended on making sure that lie was believable.

“It’s true,” she insisted between coughs. “All of it. Mom helped me grab your files. It’s her hobby. She does it for fun.”

The disbelief on his face was clear. He simply couldn’t get his mind around the fact that he might have been bested by a woman or, rather, by two women—Ali and her mother. That was absolutely unacceptable.

“For fun? No!” he exclaimed. “You can’t tell me that an old woman who makes her living cooking in some dinky restaurant is some kind of computer genius. That’s not possible. It makes no sense.”

“It’s true,” Ali said again.

“Where did she go to school, then?”

Ali knew that in order to convince him, she would need to come up with a whole series of telling details.

“Mother’s family was poor. When it was time for her to go off to college, there wasn’t any money, especially since she wanted to become an engineer. Back then engineering schools weren’t interested in enrolling women, so she taught herself.”

That bit was taken from B. Simpson’s nonstandard education. He didn’t have an engineering degree, either.

“But she was always curious about how things work,” Ali went on. “She was forever taking stuff apart and putting it back together and improving whatever it was in the process.”

That, of course, was more like Ali’s father. It was how Bob Larson had kept his beloved Bronco in working order all these years.

“She taught herself programming, too,” Ali said, warming to her story. “A couple of years ago, when a friend’s computer got taken down by a virus, Mother made it her business to become a self-taught expert in worms and viruses.”

That last whopper may have been a step too far.

“I suppose next you’re going to tell me she’s also an expert at encryption?” the man asked sarcastically. “Is that another of your remarkable mother’s spare-time specialties?”

“You’re right,” Ali said. “Mom doesn’t know anything about encryption, but she has a friend who does, an elderly friend who specialized in code-breaking during the Cold War. He and his new wife have a winter home in Yuma. Mother asked him to come help out. They’ll be driving up later on this afternoon.”

The man’s momentary expression of dismay was immediately replaced by something cold and calculating. Once again the gun was aimed squarely in Ali’s direction.

“Where are my files, then?” he asked. “Who has them right now, and who has access to them?”

“They’re on my mother’s computer,” she said. “At her house.”

“Where’s that?”

“Here in Sedona. Down by the highway.”

“And where’s your mother?”

Ali glanced at her watch. It wasn’t waterproof, so the glass was covered with a layer of steam from being dunked in the tub, but the watch was still running. It was two o’clock. Soon the restaurant would be closing for the afternoon. Her father and Jan would be cleaning up and putting things away. Her mother, having arrived early to do the Sugarloaf’s morning baking, would have gone home to rest, to put her feet up and have an hour or so of peace and quiet before her husband came in for the evening.

“She’s home now, too,” Ali said.

“Call her, then,” the man ordered. “Have her come here and bring her damn computer with her.”

Ali knew that wasn’t going to work. Asking Edie to bring over her computer with its nonexistent files would provoke an immediate storm of difficult and impossible-to-answer questions. Fortunately, when Ali reached for her phone, it wasn’t there. It had disappeared from under her bra strap during the struggle in the bathroom. It was probably sitting on the bottom of the tub.

“I can’t,” she said. “I lost my phone.”

The man checked his own watch and abruptly changed his mind. Turning away from Ali, he rummaged in her closet, found a jogging suit, and tossed it in her direction.

“Get out of those wet clothes and put these on,” he ordered. “We won’t have your mother come here. We’ll go see her instead.”

Dave had put himself out on a real limb by letting Ali know in advance that the search was coming. Having run that risk, Dave was annoyed when he arrived at the Manzanita Hills house and found that his officers were on the scene and armed with their search warrant but Ali hadn’t bothered to show up. She hadn’t sent Leland Brooks, either. With no keys available, Dave had no choice.

“Cut the padlock on the Mini-Mobile,” he ordered. “If you can jimmy the lock on the front door, do it. Otherwise, knock it down.”

The uniformed officer had just swung open the door on the metal storage unit when Bryan Forester’s Dodge Ram pulled into the driveway. He jumped out of the cab and came running over to the officers, who were about to step inside.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

So Ali did tell him, Dave thought grimly. Too bad for him, he got the news too late. “Back off, Bryan,” he ordered. “My officers have a warrant to search this site.”

“There are valuable tools and equipment in there,” Bryan objected. “I don’t want people messing with them.”

“I said back off,” Dave repeated. “We’re doing a search. We’re not going to bother your equipment. I don’t see any of your guys working today. What brings you here?”

“The tile company in Phoenix called me about some kind of delivery mix-up. Supposedly, someone was on his way here to drop off a load of tile that isn’t mine. I came by to check it out.”

Dave glanced around the driveway and saw nothing. Likely story, he thought. “What tile?” he asked. “I don’t see any tile.”

“I don’t see any, either,” Bryan said. “Like I said, it was a mix-up of some kind—probably someone else’s order. I just didn’t want it to be delivered here by mistake and then have to make arrangements to ship it back.”

“This is going to take some time,” Dave said. “If you want to hang around, how about if you and I go have a seat over at the picnic table and give these officers a chance to do their jobs.”

Nodding, Bryan headed for the table, shaking a cigarette out of a pack as he went. “You let me out this morning,” he said once he was seated and had lit up. “So how come you’re searching my stuff this afternoon? What changed?”

Nothing, except the prosecutor lost his balls, Dave thought. He said, “Letting you out was someone else’s call, not mine.”

“So you still think I did it?” Bryan asked. For a moment the two men glared at each other in charged silence. “Go to hell, then,” Bryan added when Dave didn’t respond. “I shouldn’t be talking to you, not without my lawyer.” He stood up as if to go.

“Sit,” Dave said.

Bryan sat.

“Who’s Peter Winter?”

“Peter who?”

“Winter. Dr. Peter Winter.”

Bryan shrugged. “I have no idea. Never heard of the man.”

“We believe he had some connection with Singleatheart,” Dave said.

“So?” Bryan asked, blowing a cloud of smoke skyward. “What does that have to do with me? Morgan was involved in all that garbage, not me.”

“Maybe you both were,” Dave suggested.

“Like I said before, go to hell,” Bryan told him. “Everyone in town knows your ex screwed around on you while you were off in Iraq. You didn’t kill her.”

“How kind of you to mention that,” Dave returned. “But it turns out my ex isn’t dead. Yours is.”

“Yes, Morgan was screwing around on me, but that doesn’t mean I killed her.”

“If you knew what was going on, why didn’t you divorce her?” Dave asked.

“Why do you think? The first time it happened, it broke my heart. But I got over it. After a while I just didn’t care anymore. I hung in because of the kids, because I didn’t want to lose my girls.”

This was far more than Bryan had said during all the hours Dave had spent with him in the interrogation room. “You knew about Singleatheart, then?” Dave asked.

“Not until Monday night, when I went through Morgan’s computer files.”

“How could you do that?” Dave asked. “Her computer was at the house. It was under lock and key as part of the crime scene.”

“There’s a backup system,” Bryan said. “It was all there—her own little black book. Morgan kept a detailed account of all her conquests: where they went, what they did, when she dumped the poor guy, and how. And if you want to find someone who was pissed about being dumped, maybe you should talk to my old pal Billy Barnes. That two-faced SOB, my good buddy, a guy whose ass I saved by giving him a job, was more than happy to screw around with my wife behind my back. And when she dropped him for that new guy, somebody named Jimmy, Billy went all to pieces. Sent her whiny, pleading messages, begging her to take him back. But by now you’ve been through her files, and you already know all this stuff. You’ve seen it.”

“No, I haven’t,” Dave said. “The files on Morgan’s computer had all been destroyed. So were yours.”

The undiluted surprise on Bryan Forester’s face would have been tough to fake. “Destroyed?” he demanded. “What do you mean, destroyed? How’s that possible?”

“Someone overwrote the files. There’s nothing left.”

“Nothing?” Bryan repeated, shaking his head. “That can’t be. No way. My whole business is on those two computers—all my contracts and sales records; my tax and insurance information.” He paused. “You don’t think I did this—that I deliberately set out to destroy the information. Besides, I made copies on two thumb drives. I gave them to Ali, but maybe they’re wrecked, too. Crap. If they are, then I’m done for. Out of business. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Somebody’s out to destroy me.”

From Monday afternoon on, from the moment Dave had seen Morgan Forester’s lifeless body in the porch swing, he had been convinced that her husband had done the deed. And when he’d first learned of the damaged computers, he’d been even more certain that Bryan was responsible for those as well. B. Simpson had tried to tell him otherwise, but Dave hadn’t really believed it. Now maybe he did, and for the first time it occurred to him that there might be two victims here—both Morgan Forester and her husband.

Ali felt self-conscious peeling out of her sodden clothing and putting on the jogging suit under the watchful eye of her captor. As she did it, she seesawed back and forth, second-guessing her strategy. She kept hoping that somehow she’d find another way out of this awful mess—a way that wouldn’t require involving her mother in a desperate life-or-death gambit.

Ali knew she should leave Edie out of it, even though her mother and her newly activated Taser held the key to evening the odds. What if it all went bad—if one or both of them died? Ali knew in advance that no matter what happened, her mother would forgive her, and so would her father. There was no question about that. The problem was, if something awful happened to Edie and her daughter somehow survived, would Ali ever be able to forgive herself?

Even so, Ali knew several important things about Edie Larson that the bad guy didn’t. For one thing, Ali understood that her mother would fight to the death to help protect her child, in the same way Ali would fight for Chris if the situation called for it. Ali knew, too, that her mother was stubborn. Having gone to war with her husband over whether she should have a Taser, Edie would be damned rather than leave the restaurant without it. Just to show her husband, she would have taken it home with her. It would be someplace close at hand—in her pocket or her purse.

Ali’s captor wouldn’t consider the possibility that Edie Larson would be armed for bear. This arrogant jerk would automatically assume that Edie—a harmless-looking gray-haired, hearing-aid-wearing old lady—would pose no threat to him at all. Ali understood instinctively that he would totally “misunderestimate” her mother.

Edie Larson’s stubborn streak was much like Ali’s own, and Edie would fight like crazy once she knew what was going on—if she knew what was going on. That was the problem. How could Ali manage that feat of mother/daughter communication? How would she let Edie know what was at stake without alerting the gunman?

At last Ali was dressed. When she stood up, she was woozy. Clutching at the dresser for support, she looked around for her shoes, which were nowhere to be seen. The cut next to her eye was still bleeding. She looked down at her bare feet just as a drop of blood trickled off her chin and dripped onto the top of her foot. Her cheek ached, her mouth was close to being swollen shut, but seeing the blood—her own blood—shocked her.

I could die today, she thought. It could all be over.

Meantime, her captor pointed the gun at Leland Brooks, who lay motionless on the floor. “Drag him into the other room,” he ordered Ali. “We’ll load him into the back of his truck and take him with us when we leave.”

To go where? Ali wondered. Where are you taking us?

She didn’t ask that question aloud, though. She knew better. Wherever he planned to take them, it wasn’t going to be good.

When she bent down to lift Leland, she was relieved to find him soaking wet but warm to the touch. He was breathing and probably heavily sedated, but at least he wasn’t dead. He was deadweight, however. Grunting with effort, she managed to drag him out of the bedroom, through the living room, and over to the front door. He moaned softly as she wrestled him out the door and onto the front steps.

She hoped briefly that one of her neighbors might see what was going on and summon help. Ali’s Andante Drive house sat at the top of the hill with an unobstructed view of the surrounding countryside, but that also meant the house next door shielded her place from all the others farther down the street. As for her next-door neighbor? She was a single mother who was most likely at work, and her kids were at school. Looking at that deserted street, Ali had never felt more isolated or more alone.

At the edge of the porch, she stopped, panting with effort. “He’s too heavy,” she gasped. “I can’t do this alone.”

With a sigh of disgust, the man shoved the .357 into the top of his pants. Bending over, he effortlessly lifted Leland off the porch and flung him over his shoulder. Ali thought briefly about making a grab for the gun while both of the man’s hands were occupied. She thought about it, but she didn’t even try. She was too spent to make it work.

“Open it,” he ordered.

Months earlier, Leland Brooks had installed an aluminum camper shell on the back of his truck. The tailgate on the camper shell flipped up while the tailgate on the truck flipped down. Ali wrenched both of them open and then stood back while her captor tossed Leland’s helpless body onto the floor of the pickup as casually as if he were a bag of potatoes.

“So much for him,” the man said, closing the tailgates. “We can finish this later. Time to go. You drive.”

But Ali didn’t move right away. The water was finally clearing from her lungs, and the crippling fog was lifting from her brain as well. She stared up at him. He was still wearing his latex gloves. Why? Because he didn’t want to leave any prints behind. He claimed this was all about his stolen files—that he wanted his files back. But there had to be more to it, had to be more at stake. In a moment of insight, Ali understood what it was—the only thing that made sense.

“You murdered Morgan Forester, didn’t you?”

He gave a mirthless chuckle and shrugged. “Brainy as you are, you’re just now figuring that out? Morgan thought she was smarter than I am, but she wasn’t. Neither are you, and neither is your mother.”

“And now you’re going to kill us, too?”

He nodded. “More than likely,” he said. “Get in.”

“But why?” Ali objected. “Why are you going to kill us?”

“Because I have to,” he said reasonably. “Because you have no idea who you’re messing with or what you’ve done. Now let’s go. I don’t have all day.”

When Ali climbed into the pickup, she found Leland’s car key already in the ignition. She turned it, and the engine roared to life. A lightweight windbreaker had been lying on the seat. As they started down Andante Drive through Skyview, her captor put on the jacket and then slipped the .357 into his pocket.

“You still haven’t told me why you killed Morgan,” Ali insisted. “What did she do wrong?”

“I killed her because she asked too many questions, and so do you. Now shut up and drive.”

When they reached the highway, there were still a few cars in the parking lot at the Sugarloaf Café. Ali knew her father and Jan would be fully occupied with shutting down for the day. While they were driving down the hill, Ali had half hoped her mother’s Oldsmobile Alero wouldn’t be parked there. Maybe Edie would have gone off to run an errand, to pick up some groceries for dinner or to have her hair done. Then whatever happened—whatever this maniac had in mind—would happen to Ali alone. Her mother wouldn’t be involved.

But Edie’s Alero was there, parked right next to her husband’s venerable Bronco. Ali expected that her mother was safely ensconced in her cozy living room, where she could indulge in her one guilty pleasure—watching TiVoed episodes of the previous day’s Dr. Phil and Judge Judy. That was what she often did in the afternoons before her husband walked in from the restaurant and switched over to nonstop cable news.

The man was right behind Ali with his hand in his pocket as she walked up to her parents’ front door. She could hear the television set blaring from inside. As soon as Ali tapped on the door frame, her mother muted the volume.

“Just a minute,” she said. “I’m coming. I’m coming. I can’t do everything at once.” A moment later, Edie, with a phone in one hand, opened the front door and caught sight of Ali. “Why aren’t you answering your phone?” she demanded. “I’ve been trying to reach you, and so has B. I was waiting for your father to finish cleaning up so we could both come check—” She stopped abruptly. “Ali, you’re bleeding!” she exclaimed. “And your hair’s all wet. What happened? Are you all right?”

Only then did Edie catch sight of the man standing behind Ali. “Who’s this?” she asked.

“It’s the man whose files we stole this morning.” Ali spoke quickly, hoping to stave off any comments that would give the game away. “He’s dangerous, and he’s got a gun. He wants his files back, Mom. I told him they’re on your computer.”

Edie peered up at the man. “Oh, yes,” she said, dropping the phone into the sagging pocket of the worn cotton sweater that was her preferred around-the-house attire. “The files. That means you would be Peter Winter, then, correct? Dr. Peter Winter, I believe.”

Edie’s question may have astonished her daughter, but it floored the man behind her. He took an involuntary step backward.

His name is Winter? Ali wondered. How on earth did Mom know that?

By then he had recovered enough to press the barrel of the gun into the small of Ali’s back. “Move,” he ordered. “Get inside. Both of you. Now.”

Still mystified by her mother’s reaction, Ali stumbled over the threshold and into the comfortable, crowded clutter that was Bob and Edie Larson’s tiny living room. There was the recliner her mother occupied only when Bob wasn’t home, as well as a sagging cloth-covered couch with a colorful crocheted afghan covering the spot on the back where aging material had given way.

Both couch and chair were situated within easy viewing distance of an old-fashioned console TV, one that was far too big for the room. The television inside the shiny cherry cabinetry had been dead for years, but the piece of furniture served as a handy base for a newer, slimmer model as well as a collection of cable boxes, receivers, and recorders, everything from an old-fashioned VHS model up through the spanking-new DVR Chris had given his grandfather for his birthday.

Glancing at the TV screen in passing, Ali expected to see a frozen image of Judge Judy preparing to pass judgment on some hapless pair of feuding dimbulbs. Instead, she saw a Taser, one that was improbably decked out in a leopard pattern. Ali knew then that, rather than watching a television program, Edie had been reviewing her training DVD. As for Edie’s metallic pink Taser? That one lay on the hassock that served as her parents’ joint footstool, hidden in plain sight among a scattered collection of remote controls. It was tantalizingly close but out of Edie’s reach and certainly out of Ali’s.

Edie had backed away from the door in order to let them in, but Ali noticed that her eyes remained locked on the man—a man whose name she somehow seemed to know. How was that possible?

“The computer’s in the office,” Edie said to him. “Do you want to go get it, or should I?”

Calling the room that had once been Ali’s bedroom an “office” was vastly overstating the case. Every bit as cluttered as the living room, the second bedroom was actually a catchall storage room. It contained the entire collection of holiday decorations for every conceivable occasion that went up inside the Sugarloaf Café with absolute predictability. It was also a resting place for Bob and Edie Larson’s various short-lived hobbies.

A rickety table in one corner held Edie’s Singer sewing machine, while the flower-patterned spread on the twin bed had long since disappeared under stacks of material and patterns, as well as Edie’s many half-completed sewing projects. One wall of the room was stacked with boxes of books Bob had gathered up in preparation for retirement reading in case retirement ever became a viable option. Another jumble of boxes held the latest assortment of cast-off clothing and household goods that Bob Larson routinely collected and then passed along to anyone who happened to be in need. If a computer—even Edie’s laptop—had somehow been shoehorned into all that mess, Ali had no idea where it would have gone.

Winter, if that really was his name, pulled the .357 out of his pocket and waved it in Edie’s direction. “You go,” he said. “And remember, since your daughter’s here with me, you’d better not try anything.”

Shaking her head in apparent disgust, Edie disappeared into the bedroom/office. Ali was torn. She wanted to edge closer to the hassock, but she didn’t want to risk drawing the man’s attention to either the Taser image on the television screen or the real Taser resting just beyond her reach.

What if she somehow managed to retrieve it? Her mother had shown her how to push the switch cover out of the way, and which button to depress, but would it work? And if Ali did get off a shot, would the darts penetrate the man’s jacket?

A moment later, and much to Ali’s amazement, her mother emerged from the bedroom carrying what looked like part of a very old desktop computer. She lugged it over to the table and set it down. “There you are,” she said.

“What’s that?” Winter asked.

“My computer,” Edie said brusquely. “You said you wanted my computer. I’m bringing it to you.”

“But that thing is ancient,” Winter objected. “You’re telling me that’s what you used to steal my files? Does it even still run?”

“Of course it still runs,” Edie assured him archly. “A computer’s a computer, isn’t it? It takes a while to boot up, but once it does, it’s good to go. If you’ll wait just a minute, I’ll go get the rest of it—the keyboard, the CRT, and the power cords.”

While she returned to the bedroom, Winter moved closer to the table. Clearly expecting the latest and greatest, he seemed both fascinated and appalled by the appearance of this old machine. Taking advantage of his momentary lapse in focus, Ali moved closer to the hassock.

He reached down and touched the computer. “It’s dead cold,” he said when Edie returned with the oversize monitor. “This thing probably hasn’t run in years.”

“Of course it’s cold,” Edie told him. “I’m not the kind to leave something plugged in and wasting electricity when I’m not using it.”

And that was when Ali understood what was going on. Somehow—through B., in all likelihood—Edie had learned that the man’s name was Winter, but the rest of it was all bluff. Edie was making a huge production of dragging this computer equipment from the other room. But Ali knew for sure this wasn’t her mother’s computer and never had been. It was probably an ancient model someone had donated to Bob, one that was so out of date even he couldn’t give it away. And Winter was probably right when he said that if Edie ever did plug it in, it wouldn’t boot up.

A telephone rang. Edie pulled it out of her pocket, answered, and then listened. “I’m really very busy right now,” she said finally. “And I’m certainly not in the market for aluminum siding.”

Sticking the phone back in her pocket, she handed her daughter a tangled power cord. “Here,” she said. “Plug this in. If it’ll reach that far, we’ll have to use the outlet over by the TV set. The one next to the table burned out. And you’ll probably need to unplug the lamp or the TV to make it work.”

Without a word of objection, Ali took the cord and turned toward the television set. Dropping to her knees next to the hassock, she crawled close enough to the wall to reach the outlet. First she unplugged the TV; she was relieved to know that the Taser with the leopard pattern would now have disappeared. She plugged in the cord, then turned back to the table, where Edie was in the process of reassembling the computer equipment.

Winter, engrossed in watching Edie’s every move, was no longer concentrating on Ali. It took only a moment for Ali to pluck the brightly colored C2 out of the cluster of remote controls. As soon as she pulled back on the switch-plate cover, the infared dot appeared silently in the middle of the man’s back. Ali didn’t shout out a warning to him. Instead, she simply pressed down on the switch. Winter immediately crumpled to the floor, screaming as he fell. The gun fell, too. It landed on the hardwood floor and went spinning away from him. Edie pounced on the .357 before it ever came to rest. “Got it!” she crowed. “Now open the door. I called nine-one-one. They should be here any minute.”

Dropping the Taser, Ali raced to the door and flung it open. As soon as she did, she could hear an approaching siren somewhere in the background.

“I’ll go get them,” Edie said. “You take the gun. If he tries to get up, I’m sure you’ll know how to use it.”

Yes, Ali thought savagely. I sure as hell will!

CHAPTER 16

Arriving officers burst into the house while Peter Winter still lay twitching and helpless on the floor. Seeing Ali with the weapon in her hand, they immediately misread the situation.

“Drop the gun,” one of them shouted at her. “Get on the floor.”

After having her head held underwater, dropping to the floor was no problem. Ali was only too happy to comply.

“That’s my daughter,” Edie screeched from behind them. “Get him! The guy on the floor. He came in here with a gun. He was going to kill us.”

Just then Bob Larson appeared in the doorway behind his wife. Taking in the room, he paused when he saw the man on the floor. “Oh my God, Edie!” he exclaimed. “What have you done? Did you shoot him? Is he dead?”

But by then the thirty-second burst from the Taser had run its course, and Peter Winter lay whimpering on the floor in a puddle of his own making. Moments later, a pair of uniformed Sedona officers fitted him with a pair of Flex-Cuffs and then hauled him to his feet. The jolt of electricity seemed to have turned his legs to rubber.

While the one officer held him upright, the other turned to Edie. “What happened here?” he asked.

“He came to the door holding my daughter at gunpoint,” she said. “He thought we’d stolen some of his computer files.”

Dave Holman was the next man who darted through the front door and into the crowded room. “What’s going on?” he wanted to know. “What’s happened? Is anyone hurt?”

By then Bob was helping his daughter to her feet. “Leland Brooks may be,” Ali said. “He’s outside, unconscious, in the back of his truck.”

Nodding, Dave turned. “I’ll call the EMTs,” he said on his way out.

Meanwhile, two more Sedona officers edged their way into the room. “Whose Taser?” one of them asked.

“Mine,” Edie said. “My daughter fired it, but it belongs to me.”

Leaving the crowd inside to sort things out, Ali followed Dave. She found him on his hands and knees in the back of the camper shell. By the time she got there, he had pulled Leland to the end of the pickup and was loosening his restraints.

“Is he all right?” Ali asked.

Dave shook his head. “I can’t tell,” he said. “Looks like he’s out cold, but he’s got a pulse, and he’s breathing on his own.” He glanced up at Ali. “And what about you?” he asked. “That looks like a pretty bad cut.”

“It’s nothing,” Ali said. Compared to what it might have been, the injury to her face really was nothing.

A fire truck with a blaring siren arrived in a cloud of dust, followed by an ambulance. As a pair of EMTs raced forward, Ali motioned them toward the pickup. “He’s in there,” she said. She meant to be there with them, but suddenly, her legs were no longer cooperating.

Dave turned to Ali with a look of concern. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said, but not too convincingly. Taking her arm, Dave led her over to the back of the Sugarloaf and eased her down on the set of cement steps that led up to the back door.

“I should be there with Leland,” she objected.

“Sit,” Dave said.

When Ali looked down at her feet, she was surprised to see that she was barefoot. It was November and cold, but until she saw her feet, she hadn’t been aware of being without shoes.

“How did the cops get here?” Ali asked. “Who called them?”

“Your mother,” Dave replied. “She evidently placed a nine-one-one call and then hung up. When they tried calling back, she yelled at whoever was on the line and accused him of being an aluminum-siding salesman. Luckily, the operator was smart enough to realize something was amiss. He went ahead and dispatched units.”

“What about you?” Ali asked.

“B. Simpson had already told me that he’d plucked Peter Winter’s name out of the computer files he had lifted. When I tried to check on Winter myself, I was told he was off duty for the foreseeable future. That worried me. It worried me even more when Simpson told me he had been trying to reach you and couldn’t get through. I left my guys to execute the warrant at Manzanita Hills and was on my way to your other place when I heard the radio transmissions. I came here instead.”

“B. may not have been able to reach me, but he talked to my mother,” Ali said. “You should have seen her, Dave. She was amazing. I show up with my face dripping blood and with a guy who’s holding me at gunpoint, but she’s cool as a cucumber. ‘You must be Peter Winter,’ she says, as calm as can be. The next thing I know, she’s dragging some old discarded heap of a computer out of Dad’s trash pile and convincing the guy that was what she had used to hack in to his files. And he believed her. While he was busy watching her hook it up, I managed to grab the Taser and nail the guy.”

“Taser?” Dave asked. “What Taser? Where did you get one of those?”

“It’s Mom’s,” Ali answered. “She bought it at one of Frieda Rains’s parties.”

Dave shook his head and rubbed his forehead. “Remind me not to make your mother mad,” he said.

By then the EMTs had loaded Leland Brooks onto a gurney and were headed for the ambulance. “Where are you taking him?” Dave called after them.

“Yavapai Medical Center,” the driver returned. “Do you want us to come back for the guy with the darts once we get this one transported?”

“Don’t bother,” Dave told them. “We’ll be able to handle him.”

In the meantime, someone—Jan Howard, maybe—had brought a chair from the restaurant and set it down near the steps where Ali was already sitting. While Ali watched, Bob led a pale and shaken Edie out of their house. Holding his wife’s arm as though afraid she might break, he led her over to the chair and helped her sit down.

“I’m fine, Bobby,” Edie was saying. “Really, I am.”

But she didn’t look any finer than her daughter did. Like Dave, Bob Larson didn’t believe a word of it.

Just then Chris’s Prius raced into the parking lot. Jumping out and slamming the door behind him, he ran over to where Ali was sitting. Athena was hot on his heels.

“Mom, are you all right?” he gasped. “What’s going on?”

“I’m okay,” Ali assured him. “So’s Grandma.” But Ali was surprised to notice that at the same time she was uttering those supposedly reassuring words, she was also shivering uncontrollably. She didn’t know if the shakes were coming from being outside barefoot in the November cold or from realizing that the worst of the crisis was past.

Chris responded by whipping off his sport jacket and throwing it over his mother’s quivering shoulders. “Someone called the principal at school and said there was a problem at the Sugarloaf. He took charge of my class so I could get over here. What the hell happened?”

“It would appear that your mother and grandmother have succeeded in apprehending a possible homicide suspect,” Dave said, getting to his feet. “Now, if you and Athena will look after your mother, I’ll check out what’s going on inside the house and make sure the guy they tased is okay.”

“They tased somebody?” a baffled Chris asked. “As in a Taser? Who did that?”

“Your mother was the one shooting it,” Dave observed with a tight smile. “But it isn’t hers. I believe she used your grandmother’s Taser.”

Chris looked questioningly at his grandmother. She nodded in return. “That’s right,” she said. “It’s mine.”

“But you’re all right?” Chris asked.

Edie was getting a grip. “Couldn’t be better,” she replied stoutly, as if daring her husband to say otherwise.

Chris turned back to his mother and paused when he saw her bloodied face. “Then who was in the ambulance?” he asked. “They almost took us out back at the stoplight.”

“Leland Brooks,” Ali replied, struggling to her feet. “He’s hurt. They’re taking him to the hospital, and I’d like to go, too. If you and Athena would be kind enough to give me a ride…”

But before she could finish the sentence, a strange procession emerged from Bob and Edie Larson’s house, and everyone who had gathered in the Sugarloaf’s parking lot stopped to watch. Two cops, each of them holding a handcuffed Peter Winter by an arm, led the way. The three of them were followed by a third cop who trailed behind, carrying Edie’s Taser. With the darts still stuck in the middle of Winter’s back and the strings attached to the Taser trailing along behind him, the whole thing resembled a bizarre bridal procession.

Ali was relieved to see that Peter Winter appeared to be much the worse for wear. Even though electricity was no longer flowing through his body, he still seemed to need help remaining upright. The shaming telltale marks of urination stained his clothing. In order to reach the waiting patrol car, the cops had to lead their prisoner past both Ali and Edie. When he saw them, he ducked his head and turned away.

“See there?” Edie said to her husband. “I told you he’s fine.”

Bob Larson shook his head. “The poor guy doesn’t look fine to me,” he said. “And like I said earlier, don’t you go shooting that thing off at me. If it made him piss his pants, it would probably kill me.”

“Would you stop harping about it?” Edie returned. “Please. If we hadn’t had that Taser, Ali and I would probably both be dead by now. Would you like that any better?”

Chris left Ali’s side long enough to give his grandmother a brief hug. “I wouldn’t,” he said. “Tase away, Grandma. Way to go! But will you be all right if I take Mom to the hospital? She wants to check on Mr. Brooks.”

“I just wish everyone would quit worrying about me,” Edie said. “You take care of your mother. If Grandpa ever finishes complaining, he can look after me.”

Athena piled into the front passenger seat of the Prius while Ali sat crammed in the back. With Chris at the wheel, they headed for the hospital.

Yavapai Medical Center operated more as a stand-alone emergency room than it did a full-service hospital. Although it had rooms that could accommodate the occasional overnight stay, the medical center’s physicians specialized primarily in stitching together minor cuts, setting broken bones, and delivering the occasional fast-arriving baby. Patients requiring more comprehensive care or longer stays were routinely transported to hospitals in Cottonwood, Flagstaff, or Phoenix. The fact that the EMTs had opted for local treatment gave Ali cause to hope they didn’t regard Leland’s situation as life-threatening.

“Do you know anything about Leland’s family?” Athena asked. “Is there someone we should call?”

If he had relatives living anywhere in the States, Ali was unaware of them. Even so, there was someone Ali was quite sure would want to be notified about Leland’s condition. Without thinking, she reached for her phone, only it wasn’t there—or rather, it still wasn’t there because it was still at her house, still sunk at the bottom of that tubful of water.

“Can I please borrow a cell phone?” Ali asked.

Without a word, Athena passed one back. With the help of directory assistance, Ali was connected to the Yavapai County courthouse in Prescott, where she asked to speak to Judge Patrick Macey.

“I’m sorry,” his secretary told Ali. “It’s impossible to reach Judge Macey just now. He’s conducting a trial.”

“This is urgent,” Ali insisted. “Perhaps his bailiff could let him know I’m on the phone.”

“What’s your name again?”

“Ali,” she said. “Ali Reynolds from Sedona.”

The woman sighed. “One moment, then,” she said.

Ali waited. She knew that Leland and Judge Macey had been involved for quite some time. She remembered hearing that the judge’s wife, after years of being confined to a nursing home, had succumbed to the ravages of Alzheimer’s. Prior to the wife’s death, there had been some need to keep the relationship under wraps due to objections from the judge’s grown children, but with their mother gone, Ali had assumed that—

A man’s voice came on the phone. “Why are you calling me?” Judge Macey asked.

The brusque response caught Ali off guard. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said. “It’s about Leland Brooks. I thought you’d want to know that there’s been a problem, and he’s been taken to the hospital in—”

“You had no business interrupting a trial,” Macey interrupted. “Do not call me about this matter again!” With that, he hung up.

Staring at the words CALL ENDED on the phone, Ali couldn’t help feeling sorry for Leland Brooks. From the way it sounded, far more than a phone call had been disconnected.

By then Chris had pulled up at the entrance to the medical center, where an empty Sedona patrol car was parked right outside the front entrance. With a start, Ali realized that Leland Brooks was being treated here, and so was the man who had attacked them. No doubt Peter Winter had been brought here to have the darts removed from his back.

“Go on in, Mom,” Chris suggested. “Athena and I will park and be there in a few minutes.”

When Ali stepped into the lobby, she was relieved to see that Dr. Peter Winter was nowhere in sight. She approached the reception desk, fully expecting to be rebuffed. After all, Ali was no relation to Leland Brooks; she was sure HIPAA rules would prevent hospital personnel from giving her any information concerning his condition. They might not even acknowledge that he had been admitted as a patient.

When Ali gave her name to the receptionist, however, the woman nodded knowingly. “Of course, Ms. Reynolds. Dr. Langston, one of our in-house doctors, is with Mr. Brooks right now and assessing his situation. If you’ll have a seat, I’m sure he’ll be with you shortly.”

Stifling her surprise, Ali did as she was told—she took a seat and waited. Because she still had Athena’s phone in her hand, she used those few moments to attempt to contact B. Simpson. There was a problem, however: This wasn’t her phone. She was used to dialing B. by simply using her directory. Without access to her cheat sheet of numbers, she was unable to recall B.’s. She had already dialed two wrong numbers by the time Athena and Chris came into the waiting room.

“Any word?” Chris asked.

“Not yet.” Ali started to hand the phone back.

“You keep it until we find yours,” Athena said.

“Thanks.” Ali stuffed the phone in her pocket.

“I just talked to Dave again,” Chris said to his mother. “He told me that both our house and Grandma’s are currently considered crime scenes. That means until they can get them processed, we’ll need to stay somewhere else. I can stay with Athena, but do you want her to find rooms for you and Grandpa and Grandma?”

Nodding, Ali leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. “We’ll need a place for Sam, too,” she said. “Assuming anyone can catch her, that is. She’s probably petrified.”

Athena collected Chris’s phone and went to the desk to find a phone book while Chris turned to his mother. “Why?” he asked. “What happened there?”

Just thinking about it was enough to make Ali feel sick again. “He filled the tub with water, shoved my head under, and held it there. Repeatedly,” Ali said. “He did the same thing to Mr. Brooks.”

Chris knew all about Ali’s fear of water, and he was obviously appalled. He reached over and took his mother’s hand. “But who is this guy?” he asked. “And why would he do such a thing? Is he really a killer, like Dave said, and how did you and Grandma and Leland Brooks get mixed up with him?”

“Do you remember that identity thief B. and I were tracking?”

Chris nodded. “What about him?”

“B.’s a very smart man,” Ali said. “The man’s name is Peter Winter. We were actually able to lift his files right off his computer. It turns out they’re encrypted, so we still don’t know what’s on them, but whatever it is must be really incriminating. He was worried enough that he came here looking for me in hopes of getting them back.”

As if speaking of the devil, a pair of swinging doors opened, and there was Peter Winter himself. He was sitting in a wheelchair being pushed by a nurse, while the same two uniformed officers flanked the wheelchair. Winter wore the cuffs, but his clothing was gone. Instead, he was clad only in a skimpy hospital gown, with a single sheet thrown over his bare legs. The moment he saw Ali, his eyes sparked a look of pure fury.

“Bitch!” he muttered under his breath as the chair rolled past her. “You incredible bitch!”

To her surprise, Ali burst out laughing. She couldn’t help herself, and she was still laughing when the automatic outside door whirred shut behind him. Before she managed to get back under control, the swinging doors opened once more. A man dressed in scrubs strode into the lobby.

“Ms. Reynolds?” he asked, glancing around.

Stifling her laughter, Ali got to her feet and hurried forward. “Yes,” she said, “that’s me. Is Mr. Brooks going to be all right?”

“I’m Dr. Langston,” he said, “Mr. Brooks’s attending physician. We believe he’ll be fine. He’s very heavily sedated at the moment. That means that his blood pressure and heart rate aren’t entirely normal. We found two separate puncture marks on Mr. Brooks’s arm, marks that might possibly indicate he had been dosed with some kind of medication. Do you have any idea what drugs might have been administered?”

Ali closed her eyes. She thought about lying helpless on the bathroom floor while her captor temporarily disappeared from view. She remembered that when she’d come back into the bedroom, Leland’s body had apparently been moved.

“The man who was just here,” Ali said. “The one they just took away in the cop car—”

“The one who was hit by a Taser?” the doctor asked. “What about him?”

“He was dressed when they brought him here. What happened to his clothes?”

“I believe the police officers who were with him took charge of all his personal property, clothing included. Why?”

“Have them check his pockets,” Ali suggested.

Dr. Langston looked at Ali for a moment, then nodded. “All right,” he said. “I’ll do that. And I should probably take a look at your face, Ms. Reynolds. Apparently you got hit pretty hard. In the meantime, if you’d like to go wait in Mr. Brooks’s room…”

The whole time they had been in the hospital lobby, Athena had been on the phone. “The Majestic Mountain Inn has two rooms,” she reported now. “And they take pets. Do you want me to book them?”

Ali nodded. Automatically, she reached for her purse and her credit card, but she didn’t have those, either.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Chris said. “I’ll put the rooms on my card.”

Leaving Chris and Athena to make the room reservation, Ali followed Dr. Langston through the swinging doors and into the interior of the building. “He’s in there,” Dr. Langston said, motioning Ali toward a room two doors down the hall.

Entering Leland’s room, she was more than a little gratified to have been given such unlimited access. He lay on his back with his hands folded peacefully across his chest. He was sleeping soundly and snoring with window-rattling volume. The thought that such a small man could make so much noise would have been humorous under any other circumstances. Today it wasn’t funny.

Ali studied his sleeping face. His lips were cut and swollen. One eye was black, and the rest of his face was mottled with bruises and abrasions. One arm was in a sling, and both hands showed signs of having been in a serious physical altercation. Neither he nor Ali had won, but they had gone down swinging.

There was a single chair near the head of the bed. Ali slipped gratefully onto that and settled in to wait. The doctor reappeared within a matter of minutes. “You’re right,” he said. “They found two empty syringes of Versed in his pockets. Where the hell did he get those?”

“I think Winter is a doctor,” Ali said. “That’s what I was told.”

“A doctor!” Dr. Langston repeated, shaking his head. “In that case, it’ll take time for the medication to wear off. Fortunately for someone Mr. Brooks’s age, he doesn’t appear to be in any kind of distress at the moment. Other than bruising and battering, he has a dislocated shoulder and possibly a torn rotator cuff. We’re capable of monitoring his progress here, but if you’d prefer to have him moved to another facility…”

It was one thing to be allowed into Leland Brooks’s room, but Ali was surprised to be given so much information about his condition, and she certainly hadn’t expected to be consulted about the kind of care provided.

“Look,” Ali said. “I need to tell you, that I’m not a blood relation and probably shouldn’t have any say.”

“Mr. Brooks has an unusual blood type—O-negative—and wears a MedicAlert tag that gives emergency personnel access to his information. You’re listed as the person to be notified in case of an emergency. You’ve also been designated the decision maker regarding his treatment options.”

“He’s given me his medical power of attorney?” Ali asked.

“Do you mean to say that you didn’t know?” Dr. Langston asked.

“I do now,” Ali said. “And we’ll wait here until he wakes up,” she added, making the decision as she spoke.

“Let’s go take a look at you in the meantime,” the doctor said.

An X-ray revealed that her aching jaw wasn’t broken, but the cut next to her eye required two stitches. In another time and place, she would have been concerned about scarring. Now she was just glad to be alive.

After leaving the examination room, Ali returned to the chair next to Leland Brooks’s hospital bed, where she remained for the next several hours. She couldn’t help being sorry about keeping that solitary vigil. He was a wonderful human being, she had worked with him for months, but she didn’t know him that well. She had known nothing about his snoring, for instance, or the breakup of his romance, but she was the only person he had trusted to make life-and-death decisions about his medical care. How could that be?

Somewhere along the way, she fell asleep. When she awakened, it was dark outside, and someone had turned on a night-light on the far side of Leland’s bed. When she opened her eyes, she was surprised to see he was awake, too, and staring at her intently.

“I’m sorry,” Leland murmured. “So very sorry.”

“Sorry?” Ali repeated, straightening up and rubbing her eyes. “What do you have to be sorry about?”

“I let you down,” he said. “He was there in the driveway waiting for me, and I simply didn’t see it coming. He had brute force and surprise working in his favor. I never had a chance. I’m so sorry if he hurt you.”

It was entirely predictable that Leland’s first thought would be for someone else rather than for himself.

“He didn’t hurt me,” she said reassuringly. “Not really.”

“There’s a cut on your face—with stitches,” Leland objected.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“Who was he?” Leland asked. “Do you know his name?”

“Winter—Dr. Peter Winter.”

“And did he get away?”

“No,” Ali said. “We got lucky. He’s in custody.”

“He was a big man,” Leland said. “Who caught him and how?”

“My mother has a Taser,” Ali said simply. “We used that.”

“I see,” Leland said with a nod, as though the idea of Edie Larson having a Taser were the most natural thing in the world. “What about Mr. Simpson?” he added. “Winter didn’t find him, did he? I hope he’s all right.”

That stopped Ali for a moment. Winter had claimed Leland had said nothing because he’d had nothing to tell. Evidently, that wasn’t the case. “Are you saying you knew about my involvement with Mr. Simpson?”

“Of course I knew about it,” Leland answered. “I’m your butler. I didn’t know the details, but I knew it had something to do with computers. So when this man, this Winter person, kept raving about someone who had wrecked his computer files, I assumed it had to be Mr. Simpson.”

“But you didn’t give him Mr. Simpson’s name,” Ali said.

“No,” Leland replied. “Of course not. That’s not something I would do.”

“Thank you,” Ali said quietly. She meant it.

She wanted to say more, but just then a nurse stuck her head into the room. “We don’t have a kitchen here,” she said. “If you’d like something to eat, I can order in.”

They settled on Subway sandwiches. Once the nurse was gone, Ali turned to what had been bothering her while she’d been sitting awake and watching Leland sleep.

“I called your friend,” she said. “Your friend from Prescott. I’m sorry if that was the wrong thing to do, but I thought he’d want to know what had happened.”

“I assume he didn’t,” Leland said sadly.

“That’s correct,” Ali agreed. “He didn’t.”

“We broke up,” Leland said. “His children don’t approve of me, you see. I guess that means they don’t approve of him, either, but he’s their father. He doesn’t want to lose them. They gave him a choice of them or me. He chose them, and who can blame him?”

It struck Ali that this was almost the same thing Bryan Forester had said about not wanting to lose his girls. Although the situations were very different, they were also surprisingly similar—a father choosing to live a lie rather than risk losing his kids.

“I’m sorry,” Ali said.

“I am, too,” Leland admitted. “I thought that once Patrick’s wife was gone he’d find the courage to live his own life and be who he really is, but it turns out he can’t. I suppose I should have mentioned it to you.”

“No,” Ali said. “There was no need to tell me. Your personal affairs are none of my business.”

“Not telling you was rather cowardly on my part,” Leland Brooks said thoughtfully. “I just didn’t want to get into it.”

Ali reached over and took one of his hands in hers. “No, Mr. Brooks,” she said quietly. “That’s not it at all. I don’t think you could ever be a coward. That’s not who you are.”

A while later, once Leland had drifted back to sleep, Ali ventured out of the room long enough to use the restroom. Studying her face in the mirror, she was shocked by what she saw. The stitches were the least of it. An ugly bruise stretched from the corner of her left eye and down across her jawline. It ended halfway down her neck.

Not a pretty face, Ali thought ruefully. If Jacky Jackson sees me now, it’ll all be over between us.

A nurse came through the doors at the end of the hallway. Before the doors swung shut again, Ali heard the sound of familiar voices and caught a glimpse of her mother’s steel-gray page-boy. Hurrying into the lobby, she found it packed with people she knew—both her parents and Athena and Chris were there, along with several concerned neighbors from Andante Drive. All of them were worried about her.

“Oh my,” Edie Larson said tearfully, rushing over to her daughter. “Look at you. If you aren’t a sight for sore eyes, or should I say, a sight of sore eyes! They said you were in with Mr. Brooks and that he couldn’t have any more visitors, but I was so afraid that animal had hurt you.”

Bob Larson stepped between Edie and Ali and engulfed his daughter in a crushing bear hug. “You and your mom are quite the tag team,” he said. “But what about Mr. Brooks? Is he going to be all right?”

“He’s a little worse for wear,” Ali said. “But he’s sleeping now. The doctor says he’ll be fine.”

“Too bad he didn’t have a Taser,” Edie said. “Maybe you should give him one for Christmas.”

That broke the tension in the room, and everyone laughed. For the next few minutes, Ali told her collection of well-wishers as much of the story as she and Leland had managed to put together. Peter Winter had expected Ali to show up in response to his tile-delivery ruse rather than Leland Brooks. Once again, as she had with Chris and Athena, Ali recounted for everyone what Peter Winter had done to her and to Leland Brooks, shoving them under the water in hopes of their telling him who had taken his files.

“Those files were the tip of the iceberg,” Edie said. “Dave thinks Winter is the one who killed Morgan Forester.”

“He did,” Ali confirmed. “He told me so himself.”

“That means Bryan is off the hook, then?” Bob Larson asked.

“I hope so,” Ali said.

An hour or so later, a nurse shooed everyone out of the lobby, and Ali returned to her spot next to Leland’s bed. She had dozed off briefly when someone touched her shoulder. She awakened to find Dave Holman standing next to her chair and beckoning for her to follow him.

“I know you’re tired,” he said once they reached the lobby. “And this probably isn’t the best time to do this, but we need to take your statement as soon as possible.”

“We?” Ali asked.

“This is Detective Marjorie Hill from the city of Sedona,” Dave said, as a woman who had been seated near the windows rose to greet them. “She’s here because the attacks on you and Mr. Brooks occurred inside the city limits. I’m here because of Morgan Forester.”

“So you believe me, then?” Ali asked, glad of the confirmation.

Dave nodded grimly. “We found Morgan’s missing wedding and engagement rings on a key ring in Peter Winter’s pocket. But there’s a problem with that.”

“What kind of problem?” Ali asked.

“There are four other sets of rings there, which leads me to think there are at least four other victims. We just don’t know who they are. One them may have been his wife, Rita.”

“You’re saying Peter Winter is a serial killer?”

“Most likely,” Dave said. “It also means you and your mother had a very close call.”

CHAPTER 17

It was after midnight when Dave drove Ali to the Majestic Mountain Inn. “You’ll be all right?” he asked. “Yes,” she told him.

When she got out of Dave’s Nissan, Ali was gratified to see that someone had driven her Cayenne to the hotel and parked it there. She limped toward the door of her room, still wearing the jacket Chris had placed on her shoulders much earlier in the afternoon. On her feet were ill-fitting bedroom slippers that the nurse at the hospital had produced for Ali’s use.

Ali opened the door, expecting to find the room empty. To her surprise, both Chris and Athena were there waiting for her. Chris was asleep on the bed, while Athena dozed in an armchair with Sam curled comfortably in her lap.

“She was hiding behind the dryer in your laundry room,” Athena explained. “Chris dragged her out of there, and we brought her here, but we couldn’t leave her in this strange place all by herself.”

In actual fact, Sam didn’t seem all that upset. She opened her one good eye, gave Ali an appraising glance, and then closed it again.

“Thank you,” Ali said.

“We packed a suitcase for you,” Athena added. “It’s there in the closet. We brought your robe and nightgown and some clothes for you to wear tomorrow. No toiletries, though—the cops said your bathroom was off limits—so we stopped by the drugstore and picked up a hairbrush, a toothbrush, and some toothpaste. For makeup, you’re on your own.”

The idea that Chris and Athena had managed to talk their way into bringing anything at all from the crime scene was impressive. “They let you into the house?” Ali asked. “That must have taken some convincing.”

“A little,” Athena agreed. “One of the CSI guys helped.”

Grabbing her nightgown and robe, Ali went to the bathroom to change. In addition to the bruises on her face and neck, there were bruises on her legs and arms. She had been in a fight for her life, and it showed.

When she came back out of the bathroom, Chris was sitting up on the side of the bed, and Sam was stretched out on one of the pillows.

Chris stood up. “Mom,” he said, giving Ali a hug. “You’ve got to stop doing stuff like this. You scare me to death.”

“It scared me, too,” she admitted.

“It’s late,” he said. “I’m going to Athena’s. If you need anything, Grandpa and Grandma are right next door. And here’s Athena’s cell phone. You can use it until we can get you a new one. According to the cops, there’s one sitting at the bottom of your bathtub at home. I think that one’s a goner.”

Ali let Chris and Athena out and then locked both the deadbolt and the security chain behind them. Crawling into bed a few minutes later, she was grateful to feel Sam’s stolid presence snuggled up next to her. She fell asleep almost immediately, but three times she was awakened by the same recurring nightmare: Someone was holding her head underwater, and Ali was drowning.

She was awakened shortly after sunrise by someone knocking sharply on her door. It took a moment to gather her wits and figure out where she was. Meanwhile, Sam skittered away and disappeared under the bed.

“Who is it?” Ali asked, pulling on her robe and slippers.

“It’s B.,” B. Simpson said. “I’m sorry to wake you, but I need to talk to you. I need to see with my own eyes that you’re all right.”

“Maybe not one hundred percent,” she said as she unlatched the security chain and the deadbolt to let him in. Catching sight of her stitched and battered face, he took a step back.

“Come on in,” Ali said. “How did you know I was here? Is something the matter?”

“I just dropped off copies of the files with Dave Holman. He told me where to find you,” B. answered. He looked haggard and careworn, as though he hadn’t slept in days. “As for what’s the matter?” he continued. “Hell yes, there’s something the matter! Look what happened to your face. I almost got you killed.”

“Wait a minute,” Ali said. “You just said you dropped off the files. If you gave them to Dave, does that mean you broke Winter’s encryption code?”

“If Winter turns out to be his real name, I’ll be surprised,” B. said. “But it does mean I broke his damn code. Just a little while ago, as a matter of fact. And now I know why the bastard was so desperate to get those files back. He had his whole world tucked away in them. He’s so friggin’ arrogant that it never occurred to him someone else might be smart enough to take him down. When it happened—when we hacked in to his system—it pushed him over the edge.

“But he’s not the only one with an arrogance problem, Ali. What about me? I thought he was just your run-of-the-mill identity thief. I had no idea how dangerous this creep might be or what he might do. If something had happened to you and your mother, if one or both of you had died because of my actions, I don’t know what I’d do or how I’d live with myself. I’m so sorry about all this, I just—”

“Stop,” Ali said, interrupting B.’s bout of self-recrimination. “None of this is your fault. You gave me a choice about what to do, remember? You said we could either turn the guy over to the cops and let them deal with him, or we could smack him down by taking his files. Since it seemed likely the cops wouldn’t do anything, I was the one who said turnabout is fair play, let’s rattle his chain and take his files.”

“The cops have them now,” B. said somberly. “I turned everything I had over to Dave Holman. Those files and the Foresters’ thumb drives as well. Bryan told me it was okay to turn them in.”

“You’ve done everything you can, then,” Ali said. “It’s up to the cops now. Go home and get some rest.”

Apparently, B. Simpson was too tired to object. He left, and Ali set about getting dressed. Chris and Athena had brought along underwear, jeans, a sweatshirt, and a pair of running shoes so she had something to put on that wasn’t the jogging suit, which had already been deposited in the trash can in the bathroom.

Ali used fresh food to coax Sam out from under the bed. Once she emerged, Ali scooped her up and stuck her in her crate. She didn’t want Sam exiting the room when an unsuspected maid came by to clean.

By seven A.M. Ali was at the counter in the Sugarloaf, drinking a cup of coffee and waiting for Bob to finish cooking a to-go order of cheese-baked eggs for Ali to take to the hospital for Leland Brooks.

“You’ll take a sweet roll for him, too, won’t you?” Edie asked. “Surely he’ll want one of those. What about the memorial service?” she added. “It’s due to start at ten. Are you going?”

Ali looked down at her jeans and sweatshirt. “I can’t very well go in this,” she said.

“Given what you did for Bryan Forester yesterday,” Edie Larson said, “you could probably turn up stark naked, and I doubt he’d voice a word of complaint. He wouldn’t let anyone else gripe about it, either.”

“So Dave has let it be known that Bryan’s no longer under suspicion?”

“Pretty much,” Edie said.

By the time Ali got back to Yavapai Medical Center, an unmarked Sedona cop car was parked out front. When she arrived at the door to Leland’s room, she found Detective Hill conducting an interview about everything that had happened the day before.

“So you didn’t notice the silver Mercedes parked at the bottom of Ms. Reynolds’s driveway?” Marjorie Hill asked.

“No,” Leland said. “I was looking for a truck bringing a load of tile. I wasn’t looking for a Mercedes. I got out of the car, and there he was. He had the element of surprise in his favor. I tried to fend him off, but I couldn’t. I seem to remember being stuck by something—something sharp. Then it was all over. The fight went out of me. I couldn’t do a thing.”

“He drugged you?”

“I believe so.”

“What’s the next thing you remember?”

“Waking up in Ms. Reynolds’s bathroom. There was duct tape around my legs and around my arms and chest. He was holding my head underwater. He kept asking me about some files, and I kept telling him I didn’t know anything about them. When I woke up again, I was here. That’s pretty much it. I don’t know anything else.”

Ali heard the note of weariness in his voice and came into the room. “Breakfast is here,” she announced. “The rest of the questions will have to wait until after that, Detective Hill.”

“But—” began the detective.

“But nothing,” Ali told her. “What Mr. Brooks needs right now is to eat and rest.”

She set the food out on the rolling table next to Leland’s bed and hustled the detective out the door. Once she had escorted Marjorie Hill to the lobby, Ali went in search of a nurse. “He’s to have no more visitors,” Ali ordered. “Got that?”

“Got it,” the nurse said.

When Ali went back to Leland’s room, he was sound asleep again, with his food sitting untouched on the rolling cart. She sat with him for the next hour or so while he continued to sleep. Finally, at about nine, she drove to the drugstore and put together an emergency set of makeup. At ten, having done what she could to fix her bedraggled face, she presented herself at Thomas and Sons Mortuary. She could tell from the way cars spilled down the street that the chapel was jammed to capacity. Searching for a place to park, she was surprised to see Bryan Forester standing out behind the building, smoking a cigarette.

Leaving her Cayenne idling, Ali got out and walked over to him. “Where are the girls?” she asked.

“Inside,” he said, “with my folks and with all those damn hypocrites. What did they all come here hoping for? Are they thinking I’ll be beside myself with grief and throw myself on her coffin, or are they hoping I’ll stand up and tell them Morgan was a tramp and deserved what she got? What the hell do they expect of me?”

“They’re here to pay their respects,” Ali said. “And they’re here to say they’re sorry for your loss, even though they have no way of comprehending the real loss you’ve suffered.”

Bryan sought Ali’s eyes. “But you know, don’t you,” he said.

She nodded. The fact that Paul Grayson had betrayed her so thoroughly was still part of who she was, how she functioned in the world, and how she saw herself.

“But I also know that it doesn’t matter,” she said aloud. “What went wrong between you and Morgan doesn’t matter as much as what went right—which is to say your two girls. You have to be here for them, Bryan. You have to be strong for them.”

“But I don’t want to be around these people,” Bryan fumed. “The way they turned on me…When I finish your job, I’ll go somewhere else. Maybe I can find work down in Phoenix. Or maybe over in Albuquerque, somewhere people won’t know me and know all about what happened.”

“Don’t,” Ali said. “Geographic cures don’t work.”

“You tried one,” Bryan said. “You came home.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that my husband screwed around on me,” Ali said. “Coming home didn’t fix it for me, and leaving home won’t fix it for you, either. And uprooting your girls from everything that’s familiar is the last thing they need right now. It’ll make things that much worse for them. Stay here, Bryan. Look your demons in the eye.”

“Including Billy Barnes?” he asked.

“Especially Billy Barnes,” Ali told him. “Especially him.”

“I’ll think about it,” Bryan said. With that, he ground out his cigarette and strode inside.

Ali parked in a no-parking zone in front of a Dumpster. She went inside the mortuary and found a spot to sit on one of the extra folding chairs that had been set up around the perimeter of the chapel to accommodate the standing-room-only crowd. Ali could see why Bryan might have a problem with some of those folks. Cindy Martin, the manicurist who had been only to happy to blame him, was sitting there as big as life on the end of the fourth row. Ali suspected that many of the other people in attendance were ones who had been quick to think Bryan was responsible for his wife’s death and to dish out rumors and innuendo.

Others, however, were clearly there in a show of support. Ali wasn’t surprised to see that Mindy Farber, Lacy and Lindsey’s teacher, had taken time off to be there for them.

The service, conducted by the Reverend C. W. Stowell, was a low-key affair, dignified but distant, as though the minister had been asked to officiate without knowing too many details about either the deceased or her family. From Ali’s point of view, that was a good thing. It gave the two little girls sitting quietly in the front row something to remember about the loss of their mother. As Mindy Farber had told them, it was a way of saying goodbye.

Ali ducked out during the final benediction and went back to the hospital, where she found Leland, fully dressed except for shoes, waiting for her in the lobby.

“The doctor came around and told me I could go, but he said that with this arm, I’m in no condition to drive. He said I needed to have someone come pick me up. I’ve been trying to call you, but your cell phone isn’t working.”

And won’t ever work again, Ali thought.

The nurse came forward to wheel Leland’s chair out to the Cayenne. “Just drop me off at the house,” he said once he was loaded into the passenger seat. “I’ll be fine.”

“No,” Ali said. “We can go by your place and pick up some clothing, but for right now Sam and I are staying at the Majestic Mountain Inn, and so are you.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Leland said. “I’m perfectly capable of staying on my own.”

“You may be capable of it,” Ali said, “but you’re not doing it. End of discussion.”

After checking Leland in to a room three doors down from hers, Ali went up to the house and collected clothing for him from his fifth wheel. At her house there was clear evidence that a search had been conducted the day before. The locked front door had been battered open and was closed now with a piece of plywood that had been screwed into the casing with wallboard screws. The padlock on Bryan’s storage unit dangled unlocked on the hasp. A quick look inside told Ali all was in order, but she picked up her phone—Athena’s phone—and called Dave Holman.

“It’s bad enough that your guys had to break my door down,” she said, “but they also left Bryan’s toolshed unlocked. What if someone had come by during the funeral to steal his stuff?”

“I’ll go by the hardware store and pick up a new padlock,” Dave said. “Then I’ll be right there.”

True to his word, Dave arrived under ten minutes later.

“What were you hoping to find here?” Ali asked as Dave struggled to liberate the padlock from its childproof plastic container.

“Syringes,” he said. “But as you know, the ones we were looking for turned up somewhere else.”

“And in someone else’s possession,” Ali added.

Dave nodded. “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “Most of the time the culprit turns out to be the husband.”

“Or the boyfriend,” Ali said.

“You’re not going to give me a break on this one, are you?”

“No,” she said. “Since I was right and you were wrong, I see no reason not to rub it in.”

He laughed at that. They both did.

Dave freed the padlock, threaded it through the hasp, locked it, and handed Ali the key. “We found photos,” he said, turning serious and changing the subject.

“What kind of photos?”

“Souvenirs,” he said. “Pictures of five dead women, one of whom happens to be Morgan Forester. We’re pretty sure one of them is Rita Winter. We don’t know who the others are yet, but as of now it’s pretty clear that Bryan Forester wasn’t involved in any of it.”

“What about Singleatheart?” Ali asked.

Dave shrugged. “I asked Winter about that,” he said. “He sneered at me and said, ‘Figure it out.’ So that’s what we’re doing—figuring it out. I think you and B. Simpson were on the right track. Identity theft probably played a big part in it. It made money for Winter, but I think he used Singleatheart as a way to mess around with people’s lives. People signed up with them looking for romance, but he ran it with cruel—rather than romantic—intent. I’ve already got one suicide I can lay at Winter’s door, and there may be more. I most likely can’t bring him up on criminal charges for that, but the widow might be able to file a civil suit against him—assuming Winter has any actual assets.”

“Won’t having his files help you with all that?” Ali asked.

“That depends,” Dave said.

“On what?”

“On whether or not a judge rules our having them constitutes an illegal wiretap.”

CHAPTER 18

It took until Monday for things to get back to seminormal. Complaining about the cost, Edie and Bob Larson bailed out of the hotel first and were back home by Saturday evening. Ali convinced Leland that he needed to take it easy for a few days, but by Monday morning he insisted that he was well enough to go home to his fifth wheel. By Monday afternoon Ali and Sam were back home, too, in the house on Andante Drive in Skyview.

As soon as Ali let Sam out of her crate, the cat made a beeline for her safe-haven hidey-hole in the laundry room while Ali wandered through the house. She’d had a locksmith come through and change all the locks, for safety’s sake, but knowing that the house had been invaded—that she and Leland had both been attacked there—left her feeling nervous and uncomfortable.

Chris, Athena, and some of their friends had spent the weekend cleaning up the mess left behind by the water and the investigation; they’d also reshampooed the carpets. Even though none of the damage was visible, Ali still felt Peter Winter’s ominous presence in her home and in her life.

Athena’s phone rang. Ali had been too busy in the intervening days to go to the store to replace the one that had died in her bathtub.

“Hello?” Ali said.

“Hello,” a woman’s voice returned. “Is Athena Carlson there?”

“I’m sorry,” Ali said. “I’m Athena’s fiancé’s mother. My phone was damaged last week, and she’s letting me use hers temporarily. I can give you Chris’s number, if you like. You can call her on that line.”

There was a momentary hesitation on the other end of the phone. “Alison?” the woman asked warily. “Is this Alison Larson, then?”

No one had called Ali Reynolds by that name in years—decades, even. “Yes,” Ali said. “Who is this?”

“It’s Jeanette. Jeanette Reynolds, Dean’s mother. I can’t believe I’m actually hearing your voice. Athena tracked Angus down over the Internet. She sent him an e-mail at work, introducing herself and asking if we’d like to be in touch. We were overjoyed to hear from her. This is the phone number she left in the e-mail in case we wanted to call. I know it’s a bit awkward for us to come horning back into your lives like this after so many years, but yes, we’d be so honored to have a chance to finally meet our grandson, and we’ll be thrilled to come to the wedding. He’s the only grandson we have, you know. We wouldn’t want to miss it.”

As soon as Jeanette Reynolds hung up, Ali called Chris’s number. “What wedding?” she demanded.

“Oops,” Chris said. “I think you need to talk to Athena.”

“What wedding?” Ali asked when her future daughter-in-law came on the phone. “Are we having a wedding?”

“Well, yes,” Athena said. “We are.”

“When?”

“Over Thanksgiving weekend, if that’s all right with you,” Athena said. “On Saturday afternoon. You said that we should do it our way, and I told Chris that if we can pull off a wedding with two weeks’ notice, it’ll be just about right. Not too big and not too small. The people who want to be here will be, and the people who don’t won’t.”

“Who all knows about this?” Ali asked.

“You and Chris and me,” Athena said.

“To say nothing of Angus and Jeanette Reynolds.”

“Chris’s grandparents?” Athena asked. “You mean they called?”

“They called,” Ali returned dryly. “So tell me, where are we having this little event?”

“I’m not sure about that yet,” Athena said. “Do you have any ideas?”

“Only one,” Ali said. “Call Leland Brooks first, but after that, your next call had better be to my mother.”

{ EPILOGUE }

On Tuesday Ali managed to purchase a replacement cell phone. As soon as she turned it on, it let her know there were messages. Several of those were from Jacky Jackson, but before she could call him back, he rang through again.

“It’s over,” he said dolefully.

“What’s over?”

“Mid-Century-Modern Renovations,” he said. “They’ve dropped it completely.”

As far as Ali was concerned, that seemed like good news.

“That’s not all,” Jacky continued. “The other deal is off, too. You never should have left us standing out there on the porch like that. He’s a very important man. It made me look like a complete fool, Ali. Really, it did.”

Obviously, Jacky and the very important man hadn’t stuck around town long enough to hear what had happened or to learn how narrowly they had escaped because Ali hadn’t opened the door. She could have told him about it right then, but she didn’t. Jacky was on a tear, and she let him continue.

“Having two deals blow up like that isn’t a good thing,” he added. “Not if you expect to be considered bankable.”

“What are you saying?” Ali asked. “Are you telling me it’s over?”

Jacky paused as if he’d been taken by surprise, as if he hadn’t expected Ali to beat him to the punch. “I suppose so,” he said. “I mean, it sounds as though you’re not that interested in working, as though you’re not that hungry…”

“Fax me the paperwork,” Ali said. “We’ll go our separate ways.”

“No hard feelings?”

“None,” Ali said.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving dawned clear and crisp. Early in the afternoon, Ali found herself standing in bright sunlight in the doorway of a flower-bedecked party tent that had been pitched in the driveway of her unfinished house on Manzanita Hills Road. Watching the arriving guests, she reflected that pulling all this off in a mere two weeks had been just about right.

And what a two weeks it had been. Edie had gone nuts over flowers and dresses and food, but she hadn’t had enough advance warning to do any real damage. Athena absolutely put her foot down when Edie tried to convince her that having a storebought wedding cake or hiring caterers wouldn’t do.

“You’re coming to this wedding as an honored guest,” Athena insisted. “You’re not doing the cooking, and that’s final.”

Edie had been aghast at the idea that Angus and Jeanette Reynolds, the very people who had disowned their own son, Chris’s father, would be coming to the event as honored guests, too. Since there wasn’t a thing either Edie and Ali could do about that situation, Ali advised her mother to accept it with good grace. By the day of the wedding, however, she realized the advice was far easier to give than it was to take.

Leland Brooks’s arm was still in a sling, but that hadn’t kept him from organizing the wedding in jig time. He had also supervised Ali’s great adventure in cooking her first ever Thanksgiving dinner, an experience enjoyed by a whole selection of guests. To everyone’s amazement—a universal reaction she found quite annoying—she managed to pull off the full-meal deal: turkey and dressing, bourbon-drizzled yams, mashed potatoes, green-bean casserole, yeast rolls, and orange-cranberry relish.

Ali’s folks were there, of course, as were Chris and Athena and Athena’s grandmother, Betsy Peterson, who had flown in from Minnesota. Predictably, Athena’s parents had decided not to come for either Thanksgiving or the wedding.

Their loss, Ali thought.

Maddy Watkins and her two golden retrievers had driven from Seattle to L.A., where they picked up Velma T in Laguna Niguel. Then the four of them had driven over to Sedona, where they had taken up residence in the pet friendly Majestic Mountain Inn. Over everyone’s objections, and most especially over Edie Larson’s, Maddy Watkins had insisted on baking pumpkin pies as the finishing touch for Ali’s otherwise solo performance. By the time Thanksgiving dinner was over, the visitors had been invited to stay on for the wedding, which they were thrilled to do, thus adding two more geriatric attendees to the guest list.

Dave Holman and B. Simpson both showed up for the Thanksgiving Day extravaganza. They appeared upstairs only long enough to eat, however. They and most of the other menfolk, spooked by nonstop wedding planning, chose to spend their time both before and after dinner hiding out down in Chris’s studio and watching college football games.

With the men downstairs, Edie had recovered from being miffed about the pie situation by wowing everyone with her newly arrived replacement Taser. Ali suspected she would be carrying it at the wedding, too, “just in case.” Thankfully, Chris and Athena were getting married because they wanted to be married. Edie might show up armed, but it wouldn’t be either a shotgun or a Taser wedding.

Several late-breaking additions to the Thanksgiving guest list turned out to be Haley and Liam Marsh; Haley’s grandmother, Nelda Harris; and Marissa Dvorak, who would be having a second Thanksgiving dinner with her own family later in the evening. When Haley had called on Monday of that week, Ali had been up to her eyeballs in wedding planning.

“Can we talk?” Haley said.

“Sure,” Ali said. “What about?”

“You really don’t think I’d be all that weird in college?” Haley asked. “I mean if I went. People wouldn’t make fun of me or think I was odd?”

“You wouldn’t be odd,” Ali said. “A lot of single mothers go on to school these days.”

“What if I went to the University of Arizona down in Tucson?” Haley asked. “Would I be able to find a place to live? How would I make arrangements for someone to look after Liam?”

Leland Brooks had already been on the phone looking for wheelchair-accessible accommodations for Marissa Dvorak. There were some dorm rooms available, but he had also found a terrific three-bedroom house not far from the university. He and Ali had dismissed it as being more than Marissa needed. Now, though, Ali had an inspiration.

“What are you and your grandmother doing for Thanksgiving dinner?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

So while Nelda Harris joined Edie’s Taser admiration program, Haley Marsh and Marissa Dvorak had sat in one corner of the living room, playing with Liam and the collection of toys Haley had brought along to keep him occupied. The two girls seemed to be having fun together, but Ali spent a lot of the evening worried about whether the meeting—not exactly a blind date but close—would do its magic. When it was time for Marissa to leave, Ali was pleased as Liam clambered up into the wheelchair and gave Marissa a droolly smack of a kiss.

Nelda Harris saw the kiss, too. She caught Ali’s eye and gave a slight nod.

She’s thinking the same thing I am, Ali thought. Only time will tell, but I’m betting that kiss seals the deal.

As for Dean’s parents—the other grandparents, as everyone called them—Ali was relieved when they decided not to come for Thanksgiving. Instead, they flew into Phoenix on Friday night and drove up to Sedona on Saturday morning.

You’re a grown-up, Ali told herself that morning as she put the finishing touches on a face that still showed traces of bruising. You can be civil. You don’t have to be their friend.

And that became her watchwords for the day: Be civil.

The simple outdoor ceremony went off without any complications. It was ably conducted by Judge Ruben Dreyfuss, justice of the peace, who also happened to play in the same community-league basketball team as Chris and Athena. Chris wore a tux, and Athena wore a simple winter-white silk brocade pantsuit. Athena, looking absolutely radiant, walked down the aisle on her own. She didn’t need anyone to give her away.

Now, with the reception getting under way and the DJ tuning up the sound system, Ali wandered outside only to run smack into Angus Reynolds. He was standing beside the construction-crew break-room picnic table, taking in the view and smoking an enormous cigar.

“Nice place you have here,” he observed. “Hope you don’t mind. Jeannie won’t allow me to smoke these in the house.”

For good reason, Ali thought.

“Chris is a fine young man,” Angus went on. “You must be very proud of him.”

It was odd to be having a conversation with this stranger, a man who had once been her father-in-law but whom she hadn’t actually met until only a few hours earlier. In a way, he seemed to be talking to her, but he also seemed to be talking to himself.

“Yes, I am proud,” she said.

“If he had lived to see it, Dean would have been proud, too,” Angus said quietly.

Ali felt her eyes filling with tears. She willed them to stop. When they didn’t, she turned away and looked off in the other direction.

“Is the smoke bothering you?” Angus asked.

“No,” she said. “It’s fine.”

“I was wrong, you know,” Angus continued. “I wanted Dean to be a lawyer. I told him that if he insisted on getting a doctorate in oceanography, he’d never amount to anything and he’d never be able to do anything but teach. I didn’t mean it as a compliment, either.”

Ali remembered that conversation, not because she’d heard it but because Dean had told her about it in excruciating detail.

“And do you know what he told me?” Angus asked. “That no matter how little money he made, he’d rather be a dirt-poor teacher any day instead of being a rich lawyer and selling his soul to the devil.”

Dean never mentioned that part, Ali thought. He seemed to have left that out.

Angus blew another puff of foul-smelling smoke into the air before he continued. “So I told him that if he was going to be that pigheaded, he was no son of mine, and I was writing him out of my life. If he wanted to go off and screw up his life and be poor until his dying day, he was on his own. And that’s what I did, too. I wrote him out of our lives, and I wrote you and your wonderful son out of our lives, too. Pretty stupid, wouldn’t you say?”

Again Ali said nothing.

“And now Chris is a teacher,” Angus said thoughtfully. “Where do you suppose that shows up on the DNA, the propensity for being a teacher instead of being a lawyer?”

“It may have more to do with being stubborn than it does with DNA,” Ali said. “Chris’s stepfather was adamantly opposed to his being a teacher, too.”

“I see,” Angus said. “But thank you for letting us come, Alison. Considering how we treated you and Chris, it’s far more than we deserve, and it means more to my Jeannie than you can possibly know.”

“You’re welcome,” Ali said. “I’m glad you’re here.” And when she said that, she really meant it; she wasn’t just being civil.

Edie Larson stuck her head out the door to the tent. “There you are,” she said. “Everybody’s looking for you, Ali. They’re getting ready to cut the cake.”

Without a word, Angus Reynolds crushed the end of his cigar out in the ashtray on the table. Then he offered Ali his arm.

“Shall we?” he asked.

“Yes,” Ali said quietly. “Let’s.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J.A. Jance is the Top 10 New York Times best-selling author of the Joanna Brady series, the J. P. Beaumont series, three interrelated thrillers featuring the Walker family, and the Ali Reynolds series: Hand of Evil, and Edge of Evil. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.

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