by Debra Erfert
“Sometimes they do. Sometimes they take the money and put it down on a bigger house in a nicer neighborhood,” Baxter said. “I mean, who can blame them? They probably wouldn’t get the price out of their old house if they’d sold it.”
“But would they get anything if the insurance company thought it was done deliberately?”
“In this case, a couple of dumb neighborhood kids were playing with matches,” Baxter said, leaning his burly shoulder against a framed pillar. “But the property owner didn’t want to put the money back into this location, so he sold it to Graham Construction Company when he asked about it.”
“Oh, that makes sense.” Candice gazed around at the men watching them—watching her—and she took a chance at finding the kid. “Would Zane be working here today?”
Baxter shook his head and smiled. “No, Mr. Graham didn’t come down today. He’s a busy man.”
Candice caught her breath. No way could she get so lucky. A contractor’s kid? “I think I might be looking for Mr. Graham’s son. Does he work for his dad sometimes?” She didn’t like the way the foreman squinted at her.
“Uh, his kid’s only five years old.” Baxter stepped closer to her. “What did you say your name was again?”
Candice moved back a little as her heart sped up from excitement. “My name?” There was no way she wanted him to know that she knew who Zane was. She remembered another woman’s name, and she also grew up without a mother. “Mary, Mary Shelley. I’ll go say hi to Zane on my way home.”
~*~
“Alex,” Candice said into her cell phone, “where are you?”
“Digging through the remains of your apartment. I got here a few minutes ago,” he said.
He sounded like he was trying to hold his breath and talk to her at the same time. “Is it all gone?”
“Not completely, sweetheart, but I don’t see how you can rebuild this without starting from scratch.”
“That seems to happen a lot in this town lately,” Candice mumbled. “Alex, I found Zane.”
“What? Where? Are you okay?” he asked in a rush of short questions.
“Well, I haven’t actually found him, but I believe I know who he is,” Candice told him, and then she spent a few minutes telling him in detail what she’d learned about the “drop-in” houses and Graham Construction Company.
“Zane Graham,” Alex repeated. “If this pans out, it sounds like he’s got a great racket going, and that he’s got a lot to lose if you find him.”
“No kidding. And then if he gets kids to strategically burn out the houses so Zane can buy the lots up, he gets a great deal and the kids don’t really get in trouble if they’re caught. He just destroys the boys’ lives with what they’ve done.”
“Yeah,” Alex said to someone in the background, and then he said to her, “I think I can get to part of the second floor now. Inspector Barbarize is here and I told him about the fire safe. He said he’d help look for it. Oh, he also said that he couldn’t find any fingerprints.”
“Did he check the power supply box?” Candice asked. When Alex hesitated, she nearly asked again.
“I don’t think he checked that, and I didn’t think about it, either,” he said softly. “Wait a minute.”
Candice heard the crunch of broken wood and her burned things breaking under his cowboy boots, and then a moment later he said just as quietly, “Candice, I’m standing on the lawn, looking up to where your power supply box is next to your back door. And from what I can see, the front panel is closed and completely blackened in soot, like at the Leavitts’ garage. Either he couldn’t get to it because your steps are gone . . .”
“Or he knew there were prints on it and, for some reason, he didn’t want to try to get them,” Candice finished for him when he paused for too long. “Alex, if Zane is the one who shot me and the one who torched my home, then maybe his prints are on that box. I could try to get his prints—” She didn’t get to finish her sentence before he raised his voice.
“No way, Candice Shane, are you to go anywhere near Zane Graham by yourself, not without an army, and even then I still wouldn’t want you near him if he’s the man you think he is.”
“Alexander Delaney, you know very well that I could take care of myself if he tried to grab me,” Candice said. “And I didn’t say that I was going to confront him or anything without you, did I?”
“Well . . . no,” Alex said almost calmly.
“Okay, I just wanted to let you know what I found out. Now I’m on my way home. I’ll see you there. Are you going to the station to check on the bullets before you come over?”
“I’ll do that,” Alex said quietly. “I’ll see you back at the guest house after I’m through with my chores you gave me. Oh, and Mom said to tell you she made an appointment for you with Dr. Johns for four this afternoon, and she wants to be with you when you see him. Is that okay with you?”
“Yes, that’s fine,” she said, hugging her bandaged fingers to her chest. “You have a good mother.”
“I know,” Alex said. “I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Sounds good.” Candice sat in the parking lot of a Circle K, trying to figure out what her next move should be. Her curiosity about Graham Construction Company had her doing an internet search on her phone. She’d found out Zane’s last name, but now she was determined to catch a glimpse of him and take a picture of the creep who tried to kill her twice already. She knew how to stay in the proverbial shadows, so she wasn’t worried about her safety. If he tried to solicit a young fire-setter on the way home from, well, anyplace, she would photograph him doing it. Okay, Candice felt excited. And hungry. She went inside the convenient store to fix a hotdog.
Now she had to convince Alex to let her go on a stakeout tonight. But why should she have to convince him of letting her do anything? He knew moments after he’d handcuffed her days ago that she was a private investigator, and surveillance was part of the job. It wasn’t like she was stumbling through the investigation ignorantly, alone maybe, with no one but herself to talk to. Liz wouldn’t get off until this evening—if she didn’t have a date with Daryl. It was Friday night, after all. Besides, Candice didn’t think Alex would want to miss the stakeout, anyway.
After Candice ate her hotdog, she opened a small bag of Skittles, her favorite candy, and set it in the cup holder for easy access. She popped open a cold soda, sipped it so it wouldn’t spill as she drove, and then backed out of the parking space. She was on her way to do a little surveillance. She had everything she needed. Binoculars, camera, an unassuming car, for the most part, and she had sustenance to maintain her body for a short duration. Her cell phone was fully charged for communications, emergency or otherwise.
On her drive over to the address belonging to Zane’s business, she kept looking around for his white dually truck just in case he was coming or going to his office and they bumped into each other. As it turned out, Zane’s office wasn’t very far from the convenience store where she bought her snacks, and with the heavy lunch hour traffic, the drive was fairly slow.
She slumped low in her seat and drove past a property with an open security gate that had a metal sign engraved with GCC Graham Construction Company. Inside sat a mobile home with the same sign next to the front door. The parking lot was paved with fine gravel. It looked recently installed, and the mobile home couldn’t be any older than a couple of years. It seemed GCC had recently prospered, and it grated on Candice’s nerves that his good fortune was earned on the innocent backs of little kids.
A country bar across the street from Zane’s business was a good site for her surveillance. Its parking lot had a statue of a horse near the sidewalk large enough to hide Candice’s car. She pulled around the base of the statue and cut the engine. The concrete base was low enough for her to peer over, but it gave her enough cover from the front gate and the mobile home’s windows.
Candice got out her digital camera from the padded compartment of her backpack and set it on the passeng
er seat, waiting for any activity across the street. She had to run on the assumption that Zane hadn’t seen her earlier today at the shed fire. The man had to be busy with his construction business, especially if the kids kept him in “drop-in” lots to build on. She had to wonder what would happen after Zane was arrested. Would fires in the city of Phoenix drop dramatically afterward? And for that matter, did he keep his young fire setters confined to Phoenix, or did he expand his business into Scottsdale and Tempe, and beyond? Candice didn’t think to check outside the city limits. It was an oversight she would remedy tomorrow. Her heart beat a little harder, a little faster, knowing how hot her lead was.
It didn’t take twenty minutes before a truck drove into GCC’s driveway.
“Here we go,” she said out loud, picking up her camera and zooming in on the silver truck. She began to take pictures as it pulled up to the porch in front of the office. It didn’t have anything on the side of the door like she thought most business vehicles would have. And it didn’t have dual wheels on the back. That didn’t matter. She still took the man’s picture as he got out and slowly walked up the steps to the front door. The older man looked like he’d been in construction most of his life and had been doing the physical labor for the majority of it. His balding head was dark tan from exposure to the Arizona sun.
Two minutes later, a white dually truck pulled into the yard and parked on the far side of the silver truck. She didn’t get a clear shot of the man until he’d climbed the steps and entered the office. Interestingly enough, he looked around before going inside, like he felt he was being watched. A guilty conscience, perhaps? His age could’ve been thirty years old, and he looked as muscular as Alex, but not nearly as handsome, or as tall, either. In fact, comparing where his head came up to the top of the door frame, he might not be any taller than Candice. Her camera captured his every feature before he disappeared behind the door.
His face was familiar. Candice brought up the recent pictures of the people watching the shed fire and scrolled through them until she found his face peering from behind another man.
“I love my camera,” she said to herself. Alex had been right; Zane had been at the fire watching the shed burn—the creep. She needed a shot of the license plate, but the angle wasn’t right. Maybe she could get it when he left for Alex to run through dispatch and prove the man driving it was indeed Zane Graham. Or maybe Patrick would do it as a favor, and then they’d have a home address, too.
Candice opened a small bag of Skittles and enjoyed them while she waited. Even the chewy, fruity flavors couldn’t suppress the shock she felt when a familiar red car drove into their parking area and stopped on the other side of the silver truck. The dark-haired Antonio Barbarize walked up to the door and quickly disappeared inside.
“Barbarize knows Zane,” Candice whispered. “He could be the one who gave Zane the name of boys in the reports. He’s the link!” In the next instant, she groaned. She’d forgotten to take his picture. She snapped a shot of the back of his car, and then another, and another as she worked her way up to the door. It took ten minutes before the arson investigator came out of the trailer and headed for his car. He didn’t look very happy as she took several pictures of him getting in his car, of him backing out, and as he drove out of the yard and down the street. Now the only things she needed were the license plates of those two trucks. Either she could wait until they left, or she could drive along the street until she had the angle to take the pictures.
“I’m not waiting,” Candice said aloud and turned over the engine. She merged into traffic with her camera in her hand. When she was in front of the yard, she pulled parallel with the entrance and lowered her window to get a better view. She clicked once and then twice. When she lowered the camera, she saw two angry men staring at her from just outside the door. Candice snapped one more picture before she laid the camera on the passenger seat and hit the accelerator.
With the window down, she heard a powerful engine start up. She touched the button, rolling up the window and muffling the sound of the gravel impacting the truck’s undercarriage. Glancing in the rearview mirror, she saw the white dually fishtail out onto the street several cars behind her. She’d need to lose him before she could put her case together and have him arrested, and have Barbarize explain his complicity in the juvenile fire setters connection.
Candice worked up a mental list of things she’d need to buy at Staples while she passed the slower cars in front of her. Of course, slower was relative in this case. Nobody in Phoenix actually went the posted speed limit. Usually it was a good five to ten miles faster over the surface streets, like where they were now, and a good ten to twenty miles faster on the freeways.
Ignoring the pain in her fingers, Candice turned a fast right at a corner onto a different street and then another hard right into a parking lot of a landscaping business. A group of Arbor Vida trees next to the building blocked her car from passing traffic. She sat next to the thick trees and watched out her back window to see if the dually made the first turn. He did. But then he sped off down the busy street, unaware of her hiding place. She hadn’t seen the silver truck leave the parking lot, so it was fairly safe to backtrack a little, and hightail it away from their neighborhood.
Chapter 21
“I’ll take the HP four-in-one,” Candice said to the Staples clerk. He was standing on a tall ladder, waiting for her to make up her mind. “And I’ll need the power cord for that and also a replacement cord for my MacBook Pro. Oh, and also two extra ink cartridges for the color ink and two for the black. Make that four extra.” She didn’t want to run out.
“Yes, ma’am.” He reached for the big box and wriggled it off the shelf before he passed it down to another man standing at the bottom of the ladder. It was placed in her grocery cart already stuffed with items she found in the pen and pencil supply aisle, and the office supply aisle. Staples, file holders, paperclips, and everything else her new office needed. The reams of paper were on the tray underneath the basket next to the photo paper.
The newspaper articles she had in her backpack still needed to be mapped out, but she was sure they would only build on her theory. She may not have any physical evidence, other than the fingerprints of the two boys at the Leavitts’ fire, but the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming on conspiracy to commit arson and insurance fraud, and at least one case of manslaughter of the poor transient caught sleeping in that abandoned house. And, of course, attempted murder of the Leavitt family.
There was a new face manning the barricade. She looked as young as Liz but more serious than Daryl, who must have the night off.
“Hi,” Candice said after her window disappeared into her door.
“Hello, Ms. Shane,” the young woman said with a smile. That impressed Candice. She was probably given a description.
“And your name is?”
“Monica Hernandez, ma’am. I’m here until midnight. My partner is George Cunningham. He’s walking the grounds right now.”
“Good. It’s nice to meet you, Monica,” Candice said. “Is Alex here?”
“He hasn’t arrived since I got here at noon, ma’am.”
“Thank you,” Candice said, and after the young woman moved the barricade, she drove down to the guesthouse. She noticed the Leavitts’ rented van was gone from the carport. Too bad. Candice was hoping to get Joshua’s help with the rest of the reports and to carry her stuff inside. Instead, she backed her car up near the front door and turned off the engine. Unloading everything was a painful chore but, she was sure, not as bad as what she stuck Alex with. Candice’s was just laborious, especially when she could only use one hand.
Before she opened her first box, she called Alex to find out how things were going on his end. It took a while before he answered.
“Hello, sweetheart,” Alex said. His voice had a quiet tone to it, like he didn’t want to be overheard.
“Hi,” Candice said a little too breathlessly.
“You sound win
ded. Are you all right?”
“I just got home and I had to lug in all the stuff I bought at Staples all by myself,” she said as she sat at the breakfast bar.
“Oh, sorry about that, but you’ll be glad to know that I was finally able to find your fire safe. Besides the outside of the casing being melted, it’s intact.”
“Good, I’m glad. Alex, did Inspector Barbarize leave you shortly after I called you before?” Candice asked. His pause was noticeable.
“Yes, he did. How did you know that?”
“Because I know where he went.”
“Okay, Candice, where did he go?” Alex asked slowly, almost painfully.
“Over to Zane Graham’s office on Southern Avenue. He went inside the office where there were two men, one who drove a white dually. He stayed for about ten minutes before he left.”
“How do you know this?” Alex asked, his question even calmer than the last.
“Because I was on surveillance across the street from Zane’s office taking pictures,” Candice told him as calmly as he’d asked his question, waiting for him to explode in her ear. He didn’t disappoint.
“Candice, what were you doing over there? You told me you were going home.”
“I am home. I just made a detour so I could get a picture of the dually’s license plate, and to see what Zane looked like,” Candice said as sweetly as she could manage. “I didn’t go near him.”
“But you didn’t . . . never mind. Candice, I knew Barbarize was going to talk with Zane Graham. He heard us talking about him and he said he wanted to interview him.”
Candice shook her head. “Alex, don’t you see it? Barbarize knew all the names of the kids who started the fires, or at least who were questioned about the fires, and some of them were the fire setters but weren’t charged. I think he is the link between the kids and Zane.”
“I . . . I got a call from the department about the gun,” Alex said quietly, almost in a whisper.