Edge Of Evil

by J. A. Jance

  “I just read this morning’s post,” Chris countered. “That didn’t sound like you’d be taking it easy.”

  “Don’t go all grown-up on me,” Ali said with a laugh. “I just want some answers. That’s all.”

  “And how do you plan on getting them?”

  “By asking questions, I suppose,” she returned.

  “What kinds of questions?”

  “My plan for today is to drive down to Phoenix and talk to the banker Reenie talked with the day she died. I just want to get a line on what she did after she left the doctor’s office.”

  “That’s all?”

  “What do you mean, that’s all?”

  “I mean you won’t be doing things you shouldn’t.”

  “You mean as in not minding my own business? You really are starting to sound like your grandmother.”

  “And for good reason,” Chris responded. “You just got out of the hospital, remember?”

  “So you’re worried about me!”

  “You could say that,” he agreed. “And from the sound of your post this morning, I should be, which is why, at the very least, I should come over and help.”

  “No,” she said. “You definitely shouldn’t do that. Finish your exams. Finish school.”

  “But you’ll be careful?”

  “Chris, I’m going to go talk to a banker,” she said, not trying to conceal her exasperation. “How dangerous can that be?”

  “In your case, who knows?” he returned.

  Chris hung up abruptly after that. Ali and her son quarreled so seldom that their telephone tiff left her feeling uneasy. Had Chris started it or had she? And what did he expect her to do, just turn her back on Reenie and forget about it?

  Sipping coffee, she reread the printed e-mail from First United Financial. This time her eyes stopped short on the words “the trustee and/or with the grantor.” Who in Reenie’s family would be best qualified to fill either one of those jobs?

  Ed Holzer! Ali realized. Of course. That made perfect sense.

  After all, the man had been a banker for years before selling out and establishing a property management firm in its stead. In fact, there was a good chance that Ed himself had established the trust accounts. Maybe these were things he and Diane had set up to benefit their grandchildren.

  Ali had started making a to-do list to take with her. The phone rang just as she added Ed’s name.

  “Good morning,” Bob Larson said. “How’s my girl this morning?”

  “Fine,” she told her dad. “Still bruised and battered but fine.”

  “Your mother wants to know if you’re coming down for breakfast. So do I, for that matter.”

  “I won’t have time,” she said. “I’m leaving for Phoenix in just a few minutes, and I thought I’d stop by and see Ed and Diane Holzer on the way.”

  “Our loss,” he said. “Dave’s, too.”

  “Dave?”

  “Holman. He was hoping to talk to you, too.”

  Detective Dave Holman was the last person Ali wanted to see. She remembered Dave running to her side at the end of the Ben Witherspoon confrontation. And she had a hazy recollection of his worried face hovering in the background as the EMTs rolled her from the ambulance into the ER. She hadn’t seen him again after that, and it was just as well. For one thing, Rick Santos, her criminal defense attorney, had told her to have nothing at all to do with law enforcement officers for the time being, at least not until the Witherspoon matter had been resolved, one way or the other. Before that, her attorney needed to be present at all times: As in anything you say can be held against you.

  But Ali had a second reason for avoiding Dave Holman which, in her opinion, carried as much weight as her attorney’s objections. If Chris somewhat disapproved of Ali looking into the Reenie situation, Dave was likely to be absolutely opposed.

  “Tell him I’ll be in touch,” Ali said. She was about to hang up, but Bob caught her in time.

  “Kip said something about your having extra food you want to donate?”

  “Tons of it,” she said.

  “How about if I have him bring me up to your place later on this morning,” Bob suggested. “I have a key. We can pick up your extra food and take it up the mountain. Kip’s old neighbors will be glad to have it, and I imagine your mother will be thrilled to have me out from under hand and foot.”

  “Be advised,” Ali said. “I have an alarm system now.” She gave him the code. “And don’t let the cat out.”

  “What cat?” Bob demanded. “Since when do you have a cat? You always hated cats.”

  In the crowded days between her father’s snowboarding accident and Ali’s own trip to the hospital, there hadn’t been much occasion for visiting.

  “Sam belongs to Matt and Julie Bernard,” Ali explained. “It’s only temporary. Samantha’s the first cat I’ve ever really made friends with, and she’s not half bad. Ugly, but not bad.”

  Bob laughed. “That sounds a lot like what your mother says about me on occasion.”

  When it came time to leave the house, Ali spent the better part of ten minutes fruitlessly searching for her purse. Baffled, she finally thought to look in the shopping bag her mother had used to bring her wrecked clothing home from the hospital.

  Sure enough, there, zipped into a Ziploc bag, she found the remaining contents of her purse—wallet, MP3 player, three tubes of lipstick, a compact, nail file, a few paperclips, out of date credit card receipts, a plastic tampon container, and other assorted junk. The collection included an official-looking Yavapai Sheriff’s Department document that notified her that her Coach bag had been kept as evidence and could be claimed at a later date.

  Right, Ali thought. A Coach bag with a bullet hole in the bottom.

  Ali paused long enough to write “buy purse” on her to-do list. She stuck that along with the printout from Reenie’s e-mail into her makeshift, see-through plastic purse and then set off for Phoenix by way of Cottonwood.

  It was only a little past ten when Ali drove into the yard at Ed and Diane Holzer’s place. She saw at once that their car was missing from the carport and no one answered her knock. Thinking Ed might have gone to his office, Ali drove on into town.

  Holzer Property Management was located at the corner of Aspen and South Main in a block Ed had purchased and redeveloped. It was tucked into a small commercial complex that contained two dentists, an accountant, a chiropractor, a Mailboxes, Etc., and a Subway sandwich shop. Ali was disappointed when she saw no trace of Ed’s Buick in the parking lot there, either, but she went inside to check all the same.

  The receptionist just inside the door was clearly troubled by Ali’s appearance. “Ed isn’t in today,” she said, trying hard not to stare at Ali’s cuts and bruises. “I believe he had a doctor’s appointment this morning, but Bree is in. Would you like to talk to her?”

  “Sure,” Ali said. “Why not?”

  Ali was shown into a conference room where she found Bree seated in front of an unfurled stack of architectural drawings. “My God!” Bree exclaimed, leaping to her feet and coming around to give Ali an effusive hug. “You look awful! I heard about what happened, but I didn’t expect…”

  “…me to look like the wrath of God?” Ali finished with a pained grin. “Believe me, I’m a lot better now than I was two days ago.”

  “Grab a chair,” Bree said, resuming her own. “What can we do for you?”

  “I was looking for your dad.”

  Bree shook her head. “Sorry,” she said. “You just missed him. Mom and Dad left about twenty minutes ago. They’re on their way to Phoenix so Dad can see his cardiologist.”

  “Phoenix,” Ali said. “That’s where I’m going, too. Do they have a cell phone? Maybe I can catch up with them there.”

  Bree shook her head. “Sorry. Dad hates cell phones. Loathes them, in fact. Wouldn’t have one on a bet. But this sounds urgent. Is there something I can do?”

  Ali considered for a moment before deciding ther
e was no reason not to ask Bree about the accounts. She was, after all, a managing partner. Presumably, whatever Ed knew Bree knew and vice versa.

  “I’m doing some tracking on Reenie’s movements the afternoon she died,” Ali began.

  There was a subtle shift in Bree’s demeanor. “How come?” she asked, frowning. “As far as I know, it’s all settled. At least that’s what they told me—that according to Detective Farris the case was closed.”

  “It may be closed as far as he’s concerned,” Ali said. “Closing cases is what he gets paid for, but can you just accept that, Bree? Can you see your sister just giving up without a fight? I can’t. She wouldn’t turn her back on her kids that way. I still believe she’d stay and duke it out.”

  Bree took a deep breath. “The point is,” she said, “this has all been terribly hard on my parents. They’re starting to come to terms with what happened. It’s only going to make things worse if you keep going over the same ground. Don’t bother them with this, Ali, please. Let it go. Give them a chance to get past it.”

  Here was someone else telling Ali to drop it, to mind her own business. And in the old days the old Ali—the old please-everyone-but-yourself Ali—might have backed down.

  “Hurting your parents is the last thing I want to do,” she said. “But Reenie was my friend, Bree, and as a friend, I want answers about why she’s dead—answers I can accept. Detective Farris may be right—suicide may well turn out to be the answer—but I still want to know why she did it, why she just gave up.”

  “So what are you doing about it?” Bree asked.

  “Trying to find out what Reenie did after she left Dr. Mason’s office in Scottsdale that Thursday afternoon. I have reason to believe she visited a bank, United First Financial in Phoenix. I believe she was trying to track down some trust accounts that had been established in her children’s names, but the bank manager wasn’t able to locate them.”

  “Oh, those,” Bree said at once. “I’d forgotten all about them, but now that you mention them, I do remember. Dad and Mom set one up for Matt right after he was born, and they started one for Julie as soon as she showed up as well. I’m sure misplacing them is just a bookkeeping error of some kind. I can’t imagine why on earth Reenie went to the bank directly instead of calling here.”

  “You have the records?”

  “Of course we have the records. All it would have taken is a single call from Reenie to me to straighten this whole thing out, but then again, with everything that was going on in Reenie’s life right then, she probably wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “Probably not,” Ali agreed.

  “Anything else I can do, then?” Bree asked.

  “No,” Ali said. “Thanks for your help. I should probably be going. Give your folks my best, and when I talk to Andrew Cargill I’ll let him know he should call you for information on those missing accounts.”

  “You’re still going to talk to him?” Bree asked sharply. “I thought…”

  “Andrew Cargill is the last person who saw your sister alive, Bree. Reenie may have mentioned something to him about where she was going and what she planned to do next.”

  “But—”

  “It’s what I have to do, Bree. For Reenie and for my own peace of mind.”

  Ali left then, without looking back, sensing rather than seeing Bree watching her exit from behind. Once back in the Cayenne, she programmed the address for First United Financial into her GPS and headed for Phoenix.

  The sky overhead was a bright, cloudless blue. The winter rains had done their magic. Even with springtime weather only a few days old, there was already a hint of green everywhere as hardy high desert grasses poked their way up out of the ground. On I-17 traffic was heavy but moving and not at all slow. Spilling downhill from the Mogollon Rim and Arizona’s high country, the freeway’s long sweeping curves made the steep descent deceptively smooth. It was a stretch of highway where unwary truckers and motorists, oblivious to the force of gravity, could find themselves sailing along at speeds well above the 75-m.p.h.-posted limits.

  It was also a part of the highway whose long vistas of distant mountains never failed to raise Ali’s spirits. She passed the broad, grassy expanse of Sunset Viewpoint. As she started down the first steep grade that led to Black Canyon City and to the Valley of the Sun far below, her cell phone rang. Ali pressed the button, glad she had set her phone on hands-free mode.

  “Ali?” the distinctively deep voice asked. “It’s Helga.”

  “How are things?”

  Helga Myerhoff laughed. “Couldn’t be better,” she said. “Never better.”

  “You’ve talked to Paul’s attorney, then?”

  “No,” Helga said with a laugh. “I talked to Paul himself. I have no idea why he seems to think he’s qualified to do this on his own.”

  Ali was astonished. “He’s trying to do this without an attorney?”

  “Men who are used to running the show end up thinking they’re smart enough to run all shows,” Helga said. “And more the fool him,” she added. “I believe your soon-to-be-former husband is what people in the real estate business refer to as a ‘motivated seller.’ He wants out of this marriage in the very worst way.”

  “And he’s willing to pay for the privilege?” Ali asked.

  “Apparently,” Helga said. “I believe it’ll be to our benefit if we can make the deal before some hotshot pal of his talks him into changing his mind.”

  “What’s he offering?”

  “Fortunately, he wants to keep the house. He’s willing to buy out your half of the equity on both that and on the condo in Aspen, which was also purchased after the two of you married. The selling prices are to be based on the average of three separate and independent appraisals.”

  “Sounds fair,” Ali said.

  “That’s what I thought,” Helga agreed.

  “What else?”

  “He also wants to make a lump-sum payment for you to sign off on his pension. I’ll need to look into that because I think there’s a good chance he’s screwing us on the pension’s current valuation. Don’t worry, though. I’ve got my favorite accountant bloodhound working that line of inquiry.

  “Mr. Grayson is also willing to pay lifetime alimony, but only in the event you don’t remarry,” Helga continued. “That’s standard, of course, but I told him the amount he was offering was a joke. I let him know that if he really wants us to sign off on this so he can make it to the altar before his kid gets here, he’d better get real in a hurry.”

  “I’m surprised he didn’t hang up on you.”

  Helga laughed. “Frankly,” she said, “so am I.”

  As she drove, Ali had been keeping a close eye on traffic, which had mostly slowed to the posted 60 m.p.h. limit. Glancing in her rearview mirror, Al pulled out to pass two slow-moving trucks, one driving on the paved shoulder and the other in the right-hand lane. She was easing around them when a vehicle—a bright iridescent red SUV of some kind—suddenly emerged from around the obscuring curve behind her and charged forward.

  “Ali,” Helga said. “Are you still there?”

  Ali knew the red car was coming way too fast. “Just a minute,” she said. “Let me get out of the way of this nutcase.”

  Ali pressed down on the accelerator, and the turbo-charged Cayenne shot forward. Even so, by the time she had overtaken the trucks and was ready to move back into the right-hand lane, the red car was right on her bumper. Once Ali returned to the right lane, however, the red car didn’t pass after all. Instead, it slowed and stuck—right in Ali’s blind spot.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Ali muttered under her breath. “Why the hell don’t you just pass?”

  “Ali?” Helga asked. “Are you talking to me?”

  “This jerk behind me won’t…”

  Just then something slammed into her back left-hand fender. For what seemed like an eternity, as metal screeched against metal, the front end of the Cayenne swung sickeningly toward the left. As the me
dian rushed toward her, Ali gripped the wheel and desperately twisted it to the right. Too late she realized that by then the other driver had veered away. Without the pressure against the rear of the Cayenne, the front of the vehicle suddenly snapped straight again. Ali knew instantly that she had overcorrected.

  With terrible clarity, Ali saw the Cayenne swerve back to the right, aiming dead-on at the steel guardrail that lined the right-hand edge of the pavement. Invisible beyond the pavement was a sheer two-hundred-foot drop-off.

  Wrestling the wheel, Ali tried to compensate for the overcorrection, but there wasn’t room enough. Or time. Instead there was a sudden grinding explosion of steel on steel. Lost in a blinding curtain of air bags, Ali felt the disorienting sensation of spinning. Then, with the Cayenne still astonishingly upright, it came to a sudden stop.

  The driver’s side air bag had blown Ali’s hands free of the steering wheel. Side-curtain bags had protected her head. But now, as the passenger space filled with smoke and dust, Ali sat stunned and gasping for air, trying to piece together what had happened.

  Off in the distance, hidden somewhere in the wreckage, she heard Helga’s voice. “Ali! Ali! What in God’s name happened? Are you all right?” Then, there was a sudden sharp pounding on the car window next to her ear.

  Fighting her way through the empty air bags, Ali saw the face of a bearded man peering in the window. Behind him, parked on the freeway, sat a gigantic idling semi.

  “Lady, lady,” he shouted through glass. “Are you all right? What the hell was the matter with that woman? She tried to kill you.”

  “I think I’m all right,” Ali managed, but since she could only summon a whisper, he probably didn’t hear her.

  “Can you unlock the door?”

  Eventually Ali complied, and the man wrenched it open. “Come on,” he said. “My buddy’s stopping traffic. He’s calling the cops, too. If you think you can walk, let’s get you out of there in case something catches on fire.”

  Once Ali was upright, the good Samaritan took one look at her battered face and backed away in horror. “My God, woman, you really are hurt! I’d better call an ambulance.”