Clawback

by J. A. Jance

  “Is something the matter?” Haley asked. “Carmen told me you said it was important.”

  “It is important,” Ali said. “Cami Lee never made it to Cottonwood with the memory card. She may have been kidnapped.”

  “No. How is that possible?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” Ali said. “I think someone may have been listening in on our conversation. You said Jessica Denton was at your house last night, correct?”

  “Yes. For a couple of hours at least.”

  “Has she ever been in your office?”

  “A couple of times, but not recently.”

  “Where’s your purse?”

  “Right here by my desk, why?”

  “Do me a favor. Empty it onto your desk?”

  Driving west on Camelback, Ali listened to the sound of items falling out of the purse onto the surface of a desk. Then she heard Haley say, “What the hell? What’s this?”

  “What’s happening?” Ali asked.

  “There’s something here in my purse that I’ve never seen before—a little black box that looks like a compact but it won’t open. What is it?”

  “In all probability it’s a listening device,” Ali said. “Jessica probably planted it at your house last night when she came to dinner. Pick it up right now. Before you say another word, carry it into that private office, leave it there, and close the door.”

  “But why?”

  “Just do it.”

  Ali listened to the sound of footsteps moving across a room with voices chatting in the background. Finally a door closed.

  “What’s this all about?” Haley asked.

  “I believe Jessica may have planted the device in your purse when she was at your house last night.”

  “She’s been listening in on me all day?”

  “And may still be,” Ali warned. “I believe she was trying to get a line on the memory card. What kind of car was she driving?”

  “Just a sec. Gram, did you see what kind of car Jessica Denton was driving last night?”

  “A little yellow foreign car of some kind,” Carol said. “One of those Bug things.”

  Ali’s heart constricted. “That’s all I need to know,” she said.

  “But wait,” Haley interjected. “Don’t hang up. Does this mean Jessica is mixed up in all this?”

  “It certainly does. A yellow VW Beetle was found wrecked this afternoon, between the Village and Cottonwood. Cami’s phone was found near the scene. She wasn’t there, and neither was her vehicle.”

  “You’re saying Jessica took her?”

  “I think so.”

  “And the card?”

  “That’s gone, too. I doubt we’ll ever see it again, and that means we’ll never be able to figure out what was on it.”

  “Maybe we can,” Haley said quietly.

  “How?”

  “Because before I gave it to you, I copied it onto Dan’s desktop in his office.”

  “You copied it?” Ali asked. “You mean you still have everything that was on the card?”

  “Yes, I have it, but I can’t open it. Like I said earlier, it’s password protected.”

  “Here’s what I want you to do.” Ali said. “I want you to pack up that desktop immediately and take it to High Noon’s offices in Cottonwood. Take the bug there, too, and give both of them to Stu Ramey.”

  “All right,” Haley agreed. “As soon as we can get the car loaded, Gram and I will be on our way.”

  “Do me a favor, though,” Ali said. “Put the bug in the trunk. We sure as hell don’t want anyone listening in on your conversation as you drive there.” Ali was about to hang up, when she thought of something else.

  “On second thought,” she added, “don’t take your car.”

  “Don’t take my car?”

  “If Jessica Denton bugged your purse, there’s a good chance she bugged your car, too. Instead of wasting time looking for it, take someone else’s car.”

  “Got it,” Haley Jackson said. “Will do.”

  54

  The woman directed Cami off the 101 and into a neighborhood of curving streets lined with tile-roofed houses. Once they turned on to Par Five Drive, the spaces between homes offered brief glimpses of improbably green fairways. Twice Cami had to pause briefly to allow foursomes of golfers to make use of marked golf cart crossings.

  “Slow down,” the woman directed. “It’s the one on the right.”

  Cami slowed as the door on a two-car garage rolled slowly open. A tan minivan with a handicapped license plate was parked inside.

  “Park next to the van,” the woman ordered as the garage door rolled shut behind them. “And don’t try anything. Make no mistake, I will kill you.”

  But not with that gun and not right now, Cami thought, forcing herself to remain calm as she opened her own door and stepped out of the car. Gunshots in a neighborhood like this on a weekday afternoon would attract far too much unwelcome attention.

  A door leading into the house opened and a man stepped out, smiling in welcome. As soon as he spotted Cami, the smile disappeared. “Jessie, what the hell? Who is this? What’s she doing here?”

  Jessie? Cami thought, hearing her captor’s name for the first time. Could that possibly be Jessica Denton, the woman who was supposedly Dan Frazier’s personal assistant? Was she involved in all this, including Dan and Millie’s murder? As for the silver-haired man in the doorway, his Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirt gave him the look of an ordinary sandal-wearing retiree, but the facial features beneath that perfectly combed hairdo didn’t quite work.

  Dye job, Cami concluded. This has to be Jason McKinzie, in disguise and trying to look decades older than he really is.

  “Don’t worry about her,” the woman called Jessie said to him. “Slight change of plans. Let’s get her inside.”

  Standing on one side of the car, with Jessica and the gun on the other, Cami surveyed her surroundings, looking for either a means of escape or a possible weapon. She found neither. The rolling door was closed. That meant that the only way out right now was either past or through the man. And there were no weapons here. The garage, with taped but unpainted Sheetrock walls and a shiny, perfectly clean concrete floor, was completely empty—no workbench, no tools.

  Besides, in this relatively small space, she’d no doubt have to deal with both of them at once. She might have a better chance inside the house, where she could at least hope to have access to an impromptu weapon. In a larger space, with the possibility of more separation between her and her two opponents, Cami might find an opportunity to deal with them one at a time.

  Letting her shoulders droop and bowing her head as if in resignation, Cami walked into the house. She came in via a tidy laundry room and through a narrow kitchen. On the far side of a quartz-topped island lined with barstools was a great room—half living room, half dining room. On one side of the room was a small vestibule leading to the front door. On the other were floor-to-ceiling glass sliders, looking out onto a small patio and a lap pool, framed in the distance by a stretch of green fairway. A seemingly unnecessary wheelchair was parked in front of the expanse of windows, with a laptop open on the table in front of it.

  “Sit,” Jessie ordered Cami, motioning with the barrel of her still-drawn weapon toward the barstools.

  Barstools were Cami’s nemesis. They were almost impossible for her to clamber up onto. Once there, her legs were usually too short to reach the crossbar, leaving them dangling in midair. That was the case now, too, but she did as she was told. Then she sat quietly, continuing to examine her surroundings, listening in all the while as Jason and Jessie argued back and forth.

  Looking around, Cami realized that this wasn’t a place where someone had lived for any amount of time. The interior was done in a designer-enforced, relentlessly Southwestern style that reminded Cami of her parents’ time-share in Palm Springs. A troop of Kokopellis, made of hammered copper, marched single-file along one wall. A tasteful arrangement of red cl
ay ollas spilled across the hearth at one corner of a gas log fireplace. A flat-screen TV hung over the fireplace, flanked on either side by framed prints of people who most likely represented Native Americans, although they looked more like beanbags than people.

  The only likely weapons currently in view, other than the clay pots, consisted of a set of knives in a knife block on the kitchen counter next to the sink. Unfortunately, the counter was on the far side of the island from where Cami was sitting. Too far away, she judged. A partially empty beer bottle sat next to the computer on the dining room table. Also too far away and too close to McKinzie. Other than those, Cami saw nothing useful.

  “What change of plans?” Jason asked.

  “We’re leaving tonight. Same deal as before. Meet up with the borrowed turboprop our crop duster friend has at his hangar in Casa Grande at eight. He ferries us as far as Cananea. Our friends take over from there and transport us on to Belize.”

  “But tonight? Are you kidding? It’s too soon. There’s still far too much interest out there—too many people paying attention.”

  “Too bad,” Jessica replied. “The conditions on the ground have changed. I’m not sure how it happened, but a cybersecurity company called High Noon Enterprises is now involved.”

  “So?”

  “Believe me, they’re bad news for us—very bad news. They’ve got ways to penetrate the dark web that could lead straight back to us.”

  “What about the card? Did you get it?”

  “Of course I got it,” she told him. “I wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I threw it out.”

  “Where?”

  “In the desert on the way here. Trust me, no one is ever going to find it. And as long as we have the computer, we don’t need—”

  She stopped short. “What’s that doing out?” she demanded, waggling the barrel of the gun in the general direction of the open laptop. “And why are you not in the wheelchair? What if one of the neighbors spots you?”

  “The front blinds are closed. In this weather, nobody in his right mind would be out in his backyard, and the people on the golf course couldn’t care less. Besides,” he added, “the local news is worthless. I was just trying to get an idea about what’s really going on.”

  “You’re surfing the Web? For God’s sake, Jason, how dumb are you? Shut it down. Now!”

  He said nothing. Like a sulking teenager, he sauntered over to the table, touched a couple of keys, and then slammed the lid shut on the computer.

  “What about her?” he asked, nodding in Cami’s direction. “What happens to her?”

  “I’ll handle it,” Jessica said.

  “Right,” he said. “The same way you handled Alberto Joaquín and Jeffrey Hawkins?”

  Jessica turned a frosty look in his direction. “It got the job done, didn’t it?”

  Sitting on the barstool, Cami fought to suppress any visible reaction. She had suspected as much, but hearing the confirmation was chilling. If Jessica and Jason were responsible for killing Alberto and Jeffrey, that meant they were also ultimately responsible for the murders of Dan and Millie Frazier, too.

  Jessica sighed. “Look,” she said. “I’m done for. I need a shower and some clean clothes before we leave, but it’s a long way to Casa Grande in rush hour traffic. We should probably head out fairly soon. Better to be early than late. Can you keep an eye on our little friend for a while?” As she spoke, she laid her weapon on the table, near enough to Jason to be within easy reach.

  Cami held her breath. She knew that someone wielding a knife—assuming she could lay hands on one of those—could cross a room and plunge a blade into someone before he’d have time to draw his weapon aim, and fire. In this case, before McKinzie could pick it up off the table. But that was if she could actually lay hands on a knife, and if the gun remained in the same position.

  To Cami’s immense relief, McKinzie pushed the gun aside. “I won’t need that,” he said. “I’m not exactly helpless, you know.”

  “Really?” Jessica said. “Okay, have it your way.” Picking up the weapon and returning it to a small-of-the-back holster, she turned and left the room.

  55

  Jason McKinzie slumped in his wheelchair and did a slow burn. How dare the bitch talk to him like that? How dare she come in here and start ordering him around like he was some sort of underling? Who was paying the freight here? It was one thing for her to do her damned job, but it was something else for her to decide she was running the show. She wasn’t, by God. He was! She was the hired help, and he was in charge.

  Then he glanced at the girl. That’s all she was, really a little girl—barely out of high school from the looks of her. Sitting there on the barstool with her legs dangling in midair, she looked more like a baby in a high chair than she did an adult. And Jessica thought he should be scared of her? Like hell.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” she said.

  She spoke so quietly and he was so lost in thought that he almost didn’t hear her. “Sure,” he said, waving. “Help yourself. The powder room’s right over there.”

  56

  Ali Reynolds, stuck in a massive traffic jam, used the time to phone Peoria PD. A fatality hit-and-run on the 60 had shifted most of the near west side’s north/south rush hour traffic onto I-17. Unfortunately, Dave Holman was already almost back in Prescott before Ali managed to reach him. His advice had been short and sweet.

  “Call 911.”

  She had done so, immediately, speaking to an operator who regarded this as some kind of prank call. Eventually Ali got kicked up to a supervisor, where she had to repeat the story from the beginning.

  “A possible hostage situation?” the supervisor repeated. “I’ll put you in touch with the Peoria PD watch commander.”

  “Who are you, again?” Watch Commander Harold Martinson asked after Ali again laid out the situation. “What’s your connection to all this? You’re saying a possible kidnapping, but this sounds like a straight-out missing persons case to me—a Yavapai County missing person, at that. And what makes you think this so-called kidnapping victim is being held in my jurisdiction?”

  Ali wanted to scream out of pure frustration. “My name is Ali Reynolds, with High Noon Enterprises,” she said as civilly as she could manage. “Camille Lee is our employee. Early this afternoon she and her car both vanished while she was on her way from the Village of Oak Creek back to our offices in Cottonwood. A wrecked VW Beetle was later found along that same stretch of highway, the one she would have used.”

  “Yes,” Martinson said. “I’ve got that. I have the report right here—stolen vehicle, wrecked with no injuries, and no trace of the driver. You do understand, Ms. Reynolds, that this incident may be entirely unrelated to your missing employee.”

  “Cami’s phone was found nearby,” Ali countered. “It had been tossed off into the brush near the roadway not far from the wrecked vehicle.”

  “And yet you were able to find it?”

  Ali sighed. “Yes,” she said. “I didn’t find it personally. My people did.”

  “And now you’re claiming that Ms. Lee’s missing vehicle, a red Prius, is currently located inside the garage of the residence at 15540 West Par Five Drive here in Peoria?”

  “Correct.”

  “You know this how?”

  “As I told you, Cami works for us—for my husband and me,” Ali insisted. “Because we’re concerned about our employees’ safety, we’ve installed GPS locating devices on all of their vehicles, Cami’s included.”

  “I’m not sure that kind of spying on your employees’ private lives is even legal,” Martinson said, “and it makes me glad that I’m not one of them. That said, what you’re giving me is pretty thin. You’re asking me to send in a SWAT team based on what you’ve told me so far. Ms. Lee is an adult, right?”

  “Right.”

  “She’s not related to you, there’s been no official missing persons report file
d anywhere, and she’s been off the radar for a total of what, five hours?”

  “Four.”

  “So what happens if my guys bust into a house on your say-so—a house in a very nice neighborhood, by the way—and find Ms. Lee tucked in bed with her boyfriend—or girlfriend, as the case may be? What happens then? Who comes off looking like a first-class fool? Not gonna happen, Ms. Reynolds. Not on my watch.”

  “Thanks loads,” Ali said, not bothering to stifle her sarcasm. Ending the call, she inched over to the exit at Glendale and continued north and west, traveling on backed-up surface streets. Then she dialed Stuart Ramey.

  “Peoria PD basically told me to go piss up a rope,” Ali said. “I’m stuck in traffic, and heading for Par Five Drive as fast as I can.”

  “You’re going there without backup?” Stuart said. “You can’t. Don’t do it. B. will kill me.”

  “I don’t have a choice,” Ali said. “What’s going on at your end?”

  “One of Jason McKinzie’s e-mail accounts is active again. He’s been online searching the Net for . . . wait for it . . . information about Jason McKinzie. The computer he’s using is one that—as far as I can tell—has never been on the Internet before. The activity seems to be coming from—guess where?—Par Five Drive in Peoria, at the same location where Cami’s Prius is still stationary.”

  “Where the local cop shop has just declined to participate.”

  “Maybe we need to call the FBI.”

  “Maybe so,” Ali said, “but I’m worried about that. If we alert them based on information you’ve lifted by hacking into Jason McKinzie’s life, it might invalidate his arrest. I don’t want any of our actions to end up jeopardizing a later conviction. Like it or not, Stu, I’m going to that address, but I’m not stupid. I’ll take a look around and then I’ll leave.”

  “I still don’t like it,” Stuart said. “But hold on a minute. I’ve got something else for you. Haley Jackson showed up a little while ago with a monstrosity of a computer. Not steam-driven, but close. It took three men and a boy—well, your father and me, anyway—to carry the damned thing inside. It takes up most of a desk all by itself, and your dad just finished getting it plugged in. Once we have it up and running, we’ll be able to see what was on that drive without having to run the risk of loading the information into one of our computers. No telling where those files have been, and considering the power of the worm that wiped out OFM’s files . . .”