by J. A. Jance
“Since I work for what some regard as the opposing team, I don’t pay much attention to JFA,” Brandon said, edging toward the door. “I’m a lot more concerned with closing prison doors than I am with opening them. But speaking of opposing teams, weren’t you Lassiter’s defense attorney that first time around?”
Ollie nodded. “I was. Public defender the first time around and private for the second one when he appealed that first conviction. The case against him was all circumstantial. I never thought they’d lock him up for ‘life without’ either time. I’m sure it was all my fault. I was relatively inexperienced the first time and probably didn’t do quite as good a job as I should have. Five years later, I was back at the defense table again hoping we’d get him out on a technicality. Unfortunately, that didn’t work, either.”
“I take it these JFA folks have now parachuted in and done what you couldn’t?”
“More or less,” Glassman agreed glumly. “They seem to have negotiated a deal with the county attorney. Lassiter could either go for a third trial or he could cop to second degree and get out with time served. I sent my son, Ollie—that’s Oliver Junior, who’s in the process of taking over my practice—to look in on the situation. Pro bono, of course, just as a courtesy.
“The thing is, Lassiter is saying no-go. He told them he doesn’t want a third trial, and he’s turned down the plea deal, too. Flat. Said he’d already served more than thirty years for a crime he didn’t commit, and he’d be damned if he’d plead guilty to something he didn’t do just to have a get-out-of-jail-free card. The JFA folks had made a big deal about working his case, and they’re still hoping to save face. At this point, they’ve avoided making any public announcement that he won’t go along with any of it. As for Lassiter? According to Junior, what he really wants right now is a chance to talk to you.”
“To me?” Brandon said in surprise. “How come?”
“He evidently remembers you from back then.”
“Since I was the cop who put the cuffs on him originally, I suppose he does remember me. But why on earth would he want to talk to me?”
“He said he’d heard you were retired and were busy solving cold cases these days. He wants to talk to you about finding Amos Warren’s real killer.”
“Sort of like O.J., you mean?”
“More or less. Lassiter told Junior that just because the cops are calling the case closed doesn’t mean it’s solved!”
Across the room, Diana turned and beckoned to Brandon. “Oops,” he said. “Duty calls. We’d best get a move on.”
Ollie delayed him for a moment by reaching into the pocket of his suit coat and pulling out a business card. “It’s Junior’s,” he explained. “If you do decide to look into this, I’d appreciate your keeping him in the loop.”
Reluctantly, Brandon took the card, slipped it into his own pocket, and then made his way toward the bookstore entrance and up the stairway to the ballroom. Using the table number on his name badge, he found where he was supposed to be. Matilda Glassman was already on hand directing traffic and motioning people into preselected seats. The arrangement left Brandon on the far side of the table from his wife, who was seated next to Ollie, while Brandon was sandwiched between a philosophy professor and the wife of a banker who happened to be a major donor.
The philosophy professor offered Brandon a tepid handshake and turned her attention to the person seated on her left. The banker’s wife, clearly out of her element, attacked her salad with a total focus that told Brandon she was beyond shy. He suspected that she, too, would have been far more comfortable seated next to her spouse rather than across the table from him. After a few abortive attempts to engage the woman in conversation, Brandon gave up. Instead, he settled into his own food, all the while keeping track of what was going on across the table.
By then, Ollie, clearly into his cups and despite the daggers being sent his way by his wife, was talking a blue streak. At one point, Diana looked away from him and sent a questioning raised-eyebrow look in her husband’s direction. No doubt Glassman had just spilled the beans about Brandon Walker’s faux writing career. A moment later, when Diana smiled at him and gave him a slight nod, Brandon knew that she got the joke.
There was something about that shared smile—a moment of silent connection in that crowded, noisy room—that made Brandon’s heart sing. The look didn’t just cross the table; it bridged the years as well. He remembered the moment in 1975 when he’d first been smitten. He had met Diana years earlier in the course of a homicide case in which her first husband, Garrison Ladd, and Garrison’s mentor and former creative writing professor, Andrew Carlisle, had both been suspects. Ladd had supposedly committed suicide, while his co-conspirator had gone to prison.
Years later, Carlisle’s early release from prison had put Diana in jeopardy as Carlisle came after her, intent on wreaking vengeance on the woman who had helped send him away. At about the same time, Brandon and Diana had once more been thrown together when Diana’s six-year-old son, Davy, was injured in a car accident on the reservation. Brandon had been sent to notify Diana of the incident. Since the boy was an Anglo and couldn’t be treated by the Indian Health Service, Brandon had offered to drive Diana to Sells so she’d be able to look after the boy.
In the ER, when it came time for the doctor to put twelve stitches in her son’s head, Diana had been forced to bail. Brandon was the one who had stayed at the boy’s side. And that night, Brandon had stayed on at Diana’s house to help keep the boy awake overnight. That was how he had spent that first night in the house that he and Diana had now shared for years—sleeping on her living room couch.
Yes, Andrew Carlisle had been beyond evil, but without him and his murderous ways, Brandon knew that he and Diana would never have met. In the years since, the two of them had married and raised two amazing kids together—Diana’s son, Davy, and an adopted Indian child named Lani. The less said about Brandon’s own kids the better, but Davy was now a successful Tucson-based attorney, and Lani was the first ever Tohono O’odham M.D. to practice on the reservation.
As for Diana? In his eyes, although her blond hair had long since turned silver—she preferred the word “platinum”—she was still as beautiful as ever. And even if he had to spend a thousand nights like this, making small talk and enduring the rigors of being “Mr. Diana Ladd,” Brandon still counted himself as incredibly lucky to be there with her.
When the after-dinner speeches ended and they headed home toward Gates Pass, Diana nailed Brandon for suckering Ollie Glassman.
“You told the poor man you’re writing a book?” Diana asked. “Really?”
“I couldn’t help myself,” Brandon said, grinning at the very thought of it. “The guy’s a jerk.”
“That’s true,” Diana agreed. “I saw him tracking you down during the reception. What did he want?”
That surprised Brandon. He knew he had been keeping an eye on Diana from across the room, but he hadn’t realized that she’d also been keeping an eye on him.
“He wanted to talk to me about John Lassiter.”
“Big Bad John? Whoa, that’s a name out of the dim, dark past.”
“Indeed,” Brandon agreed.
“So why talk to you about it? I heard they were trying to work out a plea deal of some kind. Evidently two trials weren’t enough.”
“Wait,” Brandon said. “You knew about that—about the plea offer?”
“I read about it in the paper,” Diana said with a shrug. “I seem to remember Lassiter’s daughter was responsible for bringing in the people from Justice for All.”
“John Lassiter has a daughter?” Brandon asked. “What daughter? I didn’t know Lassiter had a child.”
“He does.”
Brandon thought about that. He and Diana read the same papers each day over their morning cups of coffee. Even so, the
y often came away with totally different sets of information.
“Since you and Michael Farraday were the officers who arrested Lassiter back in the day,” Diana continued, “I figured it was just as well to let sleeping dogs lie.”
“This particular dog is no longer sleeping,” Brandon said.
“What did Ollie Glassman want?”
“He says Lassiter asked to see me. He wants TLC to find Amos Warren’s real killer.”
“Sounds like O. J. Simpson,” Diana said.
Brandon laughed aloud at that. “We’ve been married so long it’s no wonder that you and I are on the same wavelength. That’s exactly what I told Glassman—just like O.J.”
CHAPTER 3
FOR A LONG TIME AFTER Tash returned, things went well. Because of the clouds, it wasn’t too hot. Rain, Juk, returned. The Tohono O’odham planted their fields and the crops grew, and every morning and evening, Sun’s niece and nephew kicked the dust balls. In a village near the Coyote Mountains lived a woman who braided the grass mats upon which the Desert People sleep. This Braiding Woman, Hihgtpag O’oks, was a fast worker. She could weave as many as four large mats in a single day.
One day while Braiding Woman was working, Nephew-of-the-Sun kicked his red ball so hard that it rolled onto the mat the woman was weaving. The woman quickly picked up the ball and hid it in her dress. When Nephew-of-the-Sun came looking for it, the woman claimed she hadn’t seen it. He said that was very strange since he had seen it land on her mat, and some of the dust was still there.
Hihgtpag O’oks—Braiding Woman—still claimed that she hadn’t seen it. After a while Nephew-of-the-Sun grew very angry. “If you keep it, something very bad will happen to you, because the red dust ball belongs to Tash.” After that the nephew went away.
Braiding Woman was very frightened. She called Nephew-of-the-Sun to come back for the ball, but when he did, she couldn’t find it.
On the eighth day after this, around noon when it is very hot and all the animals are sleeping, Braiding Woman became very sleepy. That was strange because she always worked through the day without needing to rest. She asked Cricket—Chukugshuad—to sing to her to keep her awake. Cricket tried, but it was no use. Braiding Woman had to sleep.
AVA RICHLAND, WITH THE REMAINS of her blended scotch in hand, sat in solitary splendor in her lushly appointed living room and gazed serenely out through floor-to-ceiling windows at the sunset over the Tucson panorama. From their home, situated on the last buildable lot, high in the Catalinas, she could see almost the whole of the city, stretching for the better part of twenty miles in any direction. Their property line bordered Forest Service land, with the sheer cliffs of the mountain rising skyward less than fifty yards beyond that.
“I built there because of the view,” Harold, the man who would be her husband, had bragged back when he and Ava had first met. “Best view in town. No one can ever top it. I made sure of that.”
Of course, the view would have been better if it hadn’t been for those pesky Dark Sky people. Ava had no patience for what she regarded as a bunch of wild-eyed activists who thought it was so much more important to keep the skies dark for the astronomers at Kitt Peak than it was to have adequate lighting on the city’s streets. Especially now, with the arrival of cataracts—particularly the one in her right eye—she was of the opinion that seeing to drive down the street was far more important that seeing what was happening on Mars.
Ava glanced at her diamond-encrusted Datejust Rolex, one that had once belonged to Alvira, Harold’s first wife, and saw that it was just now seven. In recent years, she would have been at the University of Arizona campus, rubbing shoulders with all the other Tucson VIPs at the Authors’ Dinner for the Tucson Festival of Books. Her good friend Matilda Glassman had always made sure that Ava and Harold were seated at a table with one of the big-name visiting authors.
Ava tended to enjoy those dinners, even if Harold despised them. She had made her way up from some very straitened circumstances, and Ava still got a charge out of being seen in public, where she and Harold were regarded as one of the city’s luminary couples. She liked being photographed at charity events, even if her place in the limelight was due to the size of Harold’s donations. As far as Ava was concerned, people like Matty Glassman were welcome to hustle around and do the actual work.
This year’s Authors’ Dinner was going on without either one of them. They’d had tickets, and Harold had suggested that she go without him, but because she knew that Harold’s son and daughter-in-law, Jack and Susan, would be there too, Ava had declined. She made it sound to Harold as though she couldn’t bear to go without him. The truth was, she didn’t want to be in the same room—even a ballroom—with Jack and Susan. Ava disliked the couple, and she knew the feeling was mutual. If she showed up without Harold, Susan was bound to stop by Ava’s table long enough to make some catty remark about it being such a shame that poor Harold was once again left to his own devices.
Of course, neither Jack nor Susan ever offered to drop by and stay with “poor Harold.” And the man wasn’t exactly on his own, either, since his live-in attendant—what was her name again?—was just a few steps away, at the call of a pager.
Ava could see that Harold was growing frailer by the day, and that was a problem. If Harold died—make that when Harold died—Ava needed to have her exit strategy completely in place. That was one thing she’d always prided herself on having—an exit strategy. No matter what the circumstances, she was always prepared for the moment when she’d be forced to abandon ship.
Ten years earlier, when she’d nailed Harold, Ava had thought she’d finally found a ship she wouldn’t have to abandon. True, Alvira hadn’t been entirely cold in her grave before Ava made her move. But Harold was considered a great catch. If she hadn’t gone after him when she did, someone else certainly would have.
Harold was at the top of the heap in Tucson at the time, and not just in terms of housing. He was tall, handsome, and rich, and he hadn’t yet had either of his two debilitating strokes. Through a series of strategic marriages and at least one tactically brilliant divorce, Ava had been lucky enough to position herself on the fringes of Harold’s circle of friends. Younger than most of the other women in the group, she’d had beauty on her side, to say nothing of a sexual appetite Harold was determined to satisfy. He hadn’t been quite up to that task, but Ava was discreet about it. What the poor man didn’t know about his inadequacies couldn’t hurt him.
Ava had taken up with a somewhat older man, thirty years and counting, fully expecting that after putting in some time reveling in his lavish lifestyle, she’d be left to live out her days as a well-heeled widow. Harold had redone his will shortly after he and Ava married. His kids weren’t left out in the cold by any means, but neither was Ava. A short time later, however, his busybody son, Jack—a lawyer himself—had seen to it that the will was rewritten. This time the house and most of Harold’s assets were locked up in a complicated marital trust that didn’t exactly turn Ava into a pauper, but it meant putting a trustee—who just happened to be one of Jack’s best buds—in charge of her purse strings. The trust meant Ava wouldn’t be able to make a move on any of those assets—including unloading that huge house in which she had a life tenancy, or even their getaway condo in San Carlos, Mexico—without the trustee’s explicit, written permission. As far as Ava was concerned, that was the last straw. She had stopped playing Mother-May-I a long damned time ago!
That was when she began working on this most recent exit strategy. As she had fought her way up from the bottom of the heap, she had been careful not to burn any bridges. She didn’t send out Christmas cards to folks from her old life, but she still knew where useful people were and how to get in touch with them. She remained friends with the people she had enlisted to help dispose of the treasure trove she had lift
ed from Amos Warren’s storage locker. Even then, she had been smart enough to realize that she was dealing with top-drawer goods. With access to Amos Warren’s little black book, she’d been able to make sure she sold to only the best possible folks.
Ava had started out in the drug trade, back when trafficking had been a wildly profitable freelance operation—back before the cartels got involved and smuggling became a far more dangerous and murderous occupation. She and a girlfriend, or a boyfriend as the case may be, would drive down to Nogales or Naco or Agua Prieta, smile and wave at the customs guy, and be back home with the goods, free and clear, in a jiffy. And she’d always been smart enough at it that she’d never been caught.
Big Bad John Lassiter had been dazzled by her looks. Amos Warren hadn’t. Worried that he might turn her in, she’d taken him off the board. The poor sap had probably thought she was bluffing when he saw the gun pointed at him. Too bad. You snooze, you lose.
The fact that Ava been able to make off with a fortune in artifacts after Amos’s death was nothing more than a happy coincidence, one that she had used to good advantage. The resulting money had made possible a complete makeover, one that had given Ava entrée into one of the top-tier escort services in town. From there it had been only a small step to her first upwardly mobile set of marriage vows.
Over the years, however, she hadn’t crossed any of the useful people from the bad old days off her list. Guys she knew from her earlier drug-dealing exploits—the ones who were still alive, anyway—were easy to find because many of them were still in prison and could lead her to a whole new generation of useful contacts. Someone she had met in her escort-service days had turned into a very capable forger who could, with a few strokes of a pen, turn a blood diamond into a conflict-free one that was good to go for two to three times what she paid for it initially. And that was Ava’s focus these days—smuggling diamonds. Blood diamonds could be bought on the cheap. Certified diamonds went for a bundle, and that was the whole idea—buy cheap and sell high.