by Jance, J. A.
“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
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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.
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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
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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 Sa
m 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.