by J. A. Jance
“As I said before,” she insisted. “There is nothing wrong with your insurance coverages. Ocotillo Fund Management is an entirely separate entity.”
There was a jostling in the crowd. A moment later, Julia King, a client who also happened to be Dan Frazier’s across-the-street neighbor, appeared at Haley’s elbow. “Something’s wrong,” Julia whispered urgently in Haley’s ear. “You need to come with me.”
“Excuse me,” Haley said back to the crowd. “I need to attend to something.”
That wasn’t an end to the matter. Frank Merrick was still shouting insults in Haley’s direction as she followed Julia through the crowd.
“What is it?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“Something bad is happening at Dan and Millie’s house.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. There are cop cars everywhere and ambulances, too. They’ve blocked off the street.”
“I’ll go get my car,” Haley said at once.
“No, that won’t work,” Julia insisted. “You need to get in mine. They’re allowing residents through at this point, but no one else. The only way you’re going to get there now is to ride with me.”
Haley did as she was told. Approaching Elberta Drive, Haley noticed that the media vans she had seen earlier in the parking lot outside the office had been redeployed and were now on either side of the entrance to the cul-de-sac. Stopped at a roadblock, Julia had to pull over to allow a white van with flashing orange lights to drive by. When Haley saw the lettering and logo on the side of the van—YAVAPAI COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER—her heart constricted. “If the ME’s here,” she breathed aloud, “someone must be dead.”
The cop manning the roadblock tried to turn them back, but when Julia showed him her driver’s license with an Elberta Drive address, the officer waved them through. Haley’s whole focus was on the driveway leading up to Dan’s house. It was crowded with cop cars surrounding an aging, faded red Bronco with old-design plates—white letters on a red background. She recognized that vehicle at once because it belonged to one of her clients—Bob Larson.
As Julia turned down her own driveway, Haley looked back toward Dan’s house in time to see a cop car come barreling down the hill. Hopping out of the car, she hurried back to the top of Julia’s driveway, just as the patrol car swung on to Elberta and raced away. Haley arrived in time to see Bob Larson’s unmistakable profile in the backseat.
“Hey, lady,” another cop farther up the driveway called out to her. “We’re dealing with a double homicide here. You need to go back down the hill and mind your own business.”
A double homicide? Haley was aghast. That could only mean one thing: Dan and Millie Frazier were both dead. And she had seen Bob Larson being driven away from the scene in the back of a patrol car. Could that nice old man be the one who had done it?
Blinded by tears, Haley stumbled back down the steep driveway, where she fell, weeping, into Julia’s comforting arms.
“They’re dead,” she sobbed brokenly. “Dan and Millie Frazier are both dead.”
6
Governor Dunham was good to her word. By the time Ali returned to her office there was a message saying she should give Adele Harris a call. Ali did so immediately.
“Evidently I was mistaken,” Adele said in an aggrieved tone Ali’s mother would have referred to as “snippy.”
“It seems the superintendent of schools has received a call from the governor’s office saying that in the case of the Johnson children, records from the family Bible will be considered sufficient,” Adele continued. “That does not mean, however, that we will be waiving the requirement for each child’s vaccination record to be up to date.”
“That’s easy, then,” Ali said. “I just happen to have those records at my disposal. If you’ll give me a fax number, I’ll send them right over.”
“Usually parents are the ones who supply shot records,” Adele objected.
“Not in this case,” Ali answered.
Ali downloaded the necessary documents and fed them into the fax machine.
“Yay,” she said aloud as the last one was sent.
“Yay what?” Sister Anselm Becker asked, slipping quietly in through the open door to Ali’s makeshift office.
Sister Anselm was a tall, spare woman with iron-gray hair and steel-rimmed glasses. She was dressed in her customary fashion—a navy blue pantsuit paired with a crisp white blouse complete with a button-down collar. Only the crucifix she wore on the outside of her blouse hinted that she might belong to a religious order. A Sister of Providence, Sister Anselm was based at St. Bernadette’s Convent in Jerome, Arizona, where she acted as an in-house counselor to nuns dealing with personal and/or mental health issues. She also devoted much of her time to traveling the state and functioning as a patient advocate for seriously ill or badly injured indigent folks who needed help navigating complex medical issues.
Ali and Sister Anselm had met years earlier at the bedside of a badly burned woman who subsequently died. Since then, they had become good friends. They had also both been caught up in the drama surrounding the Dunham Massacre. In the aftermath of that, Sister Anselm had devoted almost as much time and effort to helping The Family’s dispossessed victims as Ali herself had.
“Governor Dunham just brought another foot-dragging school district official to heel,” Ali answered with a smile. “Christine Johnson’s kids’ lack of birth certificates is suddenly no longer a barrier to their being enrolled in Albuquerque public schools. I just finished sending over their vaccination records, which was the last ‘t’ that needed to be crossed. You’d be surprised how fast things move when one governor picks up the phone and calls another one.”
“No I wouldn’t,” Sister Anselm answered, smiling too. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all.”
“What brings you to town?” Ali asked.
“I had a meeting at the hospital earlier this morning,” Sister Anselm answered. “Before heading back to Jerome, I stopped by to see how our girls are settling into their new digs.”
Ali’s main focus had been two-pronged—finding employment for the women and getting the children enrolled in schools. Initially, emergency housing issues had been handled with help from a local domestic violence shelter, Irene’s Place. Now, though, when it was time to find permanent housing, Sister Anselm had applied her considerable organizational skills to the problem.
Weeks earlier, with the help of her benefactor down in Phoenix, Bishop Francis Gillespie, Sister Anselm had scored an amazing deal on a run-down rental property near the NAU campus. The place had been in such bad shape that she’d been able to negotiate a favorable long-term lease in exchange for doing an extensive cleanup and rehabbing whatever needed fixing. An army of volunteers had tackled the project, and the last city inspector had signed off on the rehab work the week before. Now Sister Anselm had a relatively low-cost four-bedroom home that The Family’s refugees could cycle through as needed.
Because the first tenants would be coming directly from emergency housing with little more than whatever clothing they could carry, much of Sister Anselm’s weekend had been devoted to furnishing the place with donated and secondhand goods. The kitchen was stocked with dishes, pots and pans, silverware, and utensils as well as a new microwave while Ali and B. had personally seen to it that both the fridge and pantry were generously supplied with groceries.
A day earlier—move-in day—Sister Anselm and Ali had accompanied the new tenants on their goggle-eyed initial walk-through. For them the mismatched secondhand furnishings seemed like heaven itself, and the colorful Bed Bath & Beyond artwork decorating the walls constituted incredible luxury.
One of the four, Enid Tower, was a sixteen-year-old with a three-month-old baby whose father had died in the massacre. The ground-floor master bedroom, large enough to accommodate a crib, had been designated as Enid’s and Baby Ann’s. When Ali ushered them into the room, Enid was nothing short of astonished. She ran her fingers along the smooth
surface of the crib rail and then touched the arm of the well-used but highly varnished wooden rocking chair with something close to reverence.
“All of this is just for us?” she asked in wonder. “You mean we don’t have to share it with anybody else?”
“It’s just for you,” Sister Anselm had assured her.
When it came time to tour the kitchen and the women discovered that both the fridge and the pantry were brimming with food, another of the women, Agnes Gray, simply burst into tears. After a failed attempt to run away from The Family, Agnes had been designated as a Brought Back girl, The Family’s version of an untouchable pariah. As such, she and another would-be runaway, Patricia Glenn, had been forced to live in squalid conditions in an unheated Quonset hut where they were required to look after a herd of pigs and survive on near-starvation rations that consisted of a single meal of table scraps grudgingly passed to them at the kitchen door after everyone else had eaten their evening meal.
“I never knew there could be this much food,” Agnes had sobbed. “Food we can eat whenever we want.”
Ali and Sister Anselm had shared a knowing nod at that comment. The other two roommates, Donna Marie and Christina Gray, were Agnes’s half sisters. Sold into a human trafficking ring and shipped to Africa, they had somehow managed to stick together. Stranded in Nigeria, they had survived for years without passports or papers by working for free in the orphanage that had initially taken them in. Inseparable, they preferred to share a single room rather than having rooms of their own.
With the exception of Enid, who was still nursing the baby, all the other roommates had jobs that made paying the rent feasible. Agnes had been hired as a hotel maid. Patricia worked for a local animal shelter, while Donna and Christina had found employment at nearby daycare centers. The rent was divided four ways, while Enid, the youngest, would earn her share by serving as housemother and handling the cooking and cleaning. It was a communal style of living with which they were all accustomed.
“How are our five ladies doing today?” Ali asked.
“A little of the initial giddiness has worn off,” Sister Anselm observed wryly, “but after lives of utter deprivation, they’re still on top of the world. I suggested that they might want to throw a housewarming party as a way of thanking the volunteers. I could just as well have been speaking in a foreign tongue. Not one of the five has ever attended a party, much less given one, so they’ll need a bit of direction on that score.”
“No parties?” Ali echoed. “Not ever?”
“Not a one,” Sister Anselm said.
Ali’s cell phone rang just then with her mother’s name showing in caller ID and with the clock registering 2:05. “Hi, Mom,” she said into her Bluetooth. “How’s it going?”
“Where are you, Ali?” her mother demanded.
“I’m still in Flag, why?”
“I need you to come home.”
Ali had seldom if ever heard outright panic in Edie Larson’s voice, but there was panic now. She also sounded close to tears.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s your dad,” Edie answered.
Ali’s heart went to her throat. Her father was in his midseventies. As far as she could tell, he was in good health, but still . . .
“What’s happened?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know what’s happened,” Edie replied. “Like I told you earlier, he took off right after breakfast, and I haven’t seen or heard from him since.”
“He’s still not back?” Ali did a quick calculation. Her mother’s earlier call about Bob going AWOL had come in just shy of noon. It was now two hours later. A dozen scary scenarios began playing out in Ali’s head. No doubt her mother was imagining the same things.
“No,” Edie answered. “He’s still nowhere to be found.”
Ali tried to compose herself before she answered, willing her voice to sound calm and reassuring. “He probably just had car trouble and is having to hike out from wherever he happened to get stranded. B. keeps trying to tell him that he needs a newer SUV, one that’s more dependable.”
“You know your father,” Edie grumbled. “He’ll never give up that stupid Bronco no matter how old and decrepit it is. He says he has to have a car he can fix himself, not one that operates on some kind of computer chip.”
Ali was relieved to hear a little of the customary impatience come back into her mother’s voice. Under the circumstances, impatience was preferable to panic.
“You’ve tried calling his phone?”
“Do you think I’m stupid? Of course I’ve tried his phone—every fifteen minutes on the dot. My calls go straight to voice mail.”
“Did you call B.?”
Years earlier, when Ali had been the victim of a kidnapping, B. had managed to ride to the rescue by tracking her cell phone. Since then, Ali’s technophile husband had seen to it that the cell phones and devices of all family members were equipped with a tracking app that allowed for following and locating the device—regardless of whether it was turned on or not. In addition, it contained a mapping service that showed where the device had been.
“I thought about it,” Edie admitted, “but I didn’t want to bother him with this. If your dad is stuck out in the boonies someplace with a busted transmission or just out of gas, he’ll be embarrassed to death if we call in the cavalry.”
“B. isn’t the cavalry,” Ali said. “He’s my husband and Dad’s son-in-law. That means he’s family. He’ll be glad to help.”
“What should I do in the meantime?”
“Where are you?”
“At home. Betsy’s here with me.”
Betsy, a woman in her eighties, was Ali’s daughter-in-law’s grandmother. She was also eminently sensible.
“I’m glad you’re not on your own,” Ali said. “The two of you stick together and stay right there, I’m on my way. I’ll also call B. and let him know what’s happened. I’ll stop by as soon as I get to town.”
“Thank you, Ali,” Edie said in a surprisingly small voice. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
7
Julia King escorted a shaken Haley into the house and settled her on a sofa in the living room. Haley was humiliated to be bawling like a baby in front of someone who was not only a client but also a near stranger. Still, she couldn’t help herself.
When Julia returned with a box of tissues, Haley took one and used it to mop her face, removing most of her carefully applied makeup in the process. “Sorry to make such a fool of myself,” Haley murmured.
“Don’t apologize,” Julia said. “You’ve had a terrible shock. We all have. The idea that something this awful could happen right here on our street is unbelievable. I saw the piece on the news this morning about the whole bankruptcy thing. Is it possible one of Dan’s clients went off the deep end?”
Haley nodded but said nothing. With Bob Larson locked in the back of a patrol car, that wasn’t just possible—it was likely.
Across the room from the sofa, a floor-to-ceiling window offered an unobscured view of what was happening up the hill and across the street. Haley and Julia watched in stricken silence as not one but two gurneys bearing what looked like body bags were rolled out of the house. One was placed in the van bearing the medical examiner’s logo while the other was loaded into a waiting aid car that had evidently been temporarily commandeered by the ME’s office.
“So both of them, then,” Julia said softly as first the van and then the aid car came down the driveway and turned on to the street. There was no need for flashing lights or sirens. It was already far too late for those.
“Yes,” Haley agreed softly. “Both of them.”
Officially Haley had worked directly for Dan, but in actual fact, for years she had worked for both of them, functioning as Dan’s and Millie’s personal assistant and doing whatever needed to be done, including running errands like picking up dry cleaning and prescriptions.
Haley regarded Dan and Millie as an unstoppable t
eam, both personally and professionally. Dan was easygoing and gregarious—a glad-hander—who was the perfect front man for the business. Millie was more reserved and seemed content to operate in the background, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t involved. If one of the girls in the office was having a birthday, you could count on Millie to show up with a gaily decorated cake. Or if someone was getting married or ended up pregnant, Millie hadn’t organized the showers, but she had always shown up with thoughtful and beautifully wrapped gifts in hand.
“They were such nice people,” Julia said moments later, wiping away tears. “I wasn’t that close to Dan, but Millie was someone who brightened every room she entered. I can’t believe someone could possibly hate them enough to murder them.”
Haley and Julia sat in stunned silence for a time, grieving together for two people who had suddenly been wiped off the face of the earth. They were startled out of their reverie by a sharp knock on the door. Leaving Haley where she was, Julia hurried to answer.
The man standing outside was a uniformed cop, and Haley was relieved Julia didn’t invite him to enter. She didn’t want to have to explain to anyone what she was doing there right then, but because she knew someone would be around to question her sooner or later, Haley listened in on the conversation. After introducing himself and noting Julia’s name, the officer started by explaining Dan and Millie were dead before he launched off on a series of questions.
“Did you see any unusual activity in the neighborhood this morning?”
“None at all,” Julia said. “I was out in the backyard having breakfast and working on my pots. I didn’t notice anything unusual. The first I realized something was wrong was when I heard the sirens as cop cars and ambulances poured into the neighborhood.”
“No strangers hanging around, then?” the cop asked. “No one who looked or acted out of place?”
“No.”
“What about unusual vehicles? Did you see any of those?”