Hand of Evil

by J. A. Jance

  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 them in 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 ri
ght. 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.”