J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds Mysteries 3-Book Boxed Set, Volume 1: Web of Evil, Hand of Evil, Cruel Intent

by Jance, J. A.

  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.<
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  “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 h
er 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.”