Duel to the Death

by J. A. Jance

  “An old Macintosh?” B. asked with some bemusement as Stu removed what looked like a museum piece from the box and set it down on the tabletop. “Are you kidding me?”

  “It may look like an antique,” Stu replied, “but you’ll find what’s under the hood is surprisingly up-to-date.”

  He reached into the box again, this time extracting both a separate keyboard and mouse. While the rest of the crew, including a newly awakened Cami, surrounded the table and stood there watching, Stu began reassembling the bits and pieces of the old computer. Once the power cord was plugged in, it took the better part of a minute for the machine to finally boot up. At last a screen opened up. Peering over Stu’s shoulder, Ali saw a blank box and the words PASSWORD REQUIRED. Stu pulled out his phone, turned it on, consulted a notes page, and then, without the slightest hesitation, confidently typed in a combination of letters and numbers. Within seconds, a directory appeared.

  “Whoa!” B. said, clearly impressed. “You hacked Owen Hansen’s password?”

  “I didn’t have to,” Stu replied with a grin. “It was written on a piece of masking tape on the bottom of the computer.”

  “Now what?” Ali asked.

  In preparation for traveling to Santa Barbara, Stu had located his hidden backup copy of Frigg’s kernel file, which he had loaded onto a thumb drive. When Odin had reworked the computer, he had replaced the original Macintosh ADB ports with a pair of USBs. Pulling the drive out of his shirt pocket, Stu plugged it into one of the USBs and waited until the directory appeared. The directory held a single file, Tolkien’s Ring. When he clicked on that, the words PASSWORD REQUIRED appeared on the screen.

  “Here goes,” he said. “If anyone has any objections, now’s the time to say so.”

  No one said a word. “Okay,” he said, “here goes the kernel file.”

  Once again he consulted the screen of his phone. One careful keystroke at a time, he typed the password Frigg had sent in her message to him that Friday afternoon more than a month earlier: 1AMAGENIUS!. Each character appeared briefly before being replaced by a solid dot. Finished at last, Stu pressed enter. For a long several seconds nothing happened, then one by one the individual GPUs began to fire up and come online. A moment later one of the monitors mounted on the wall lit up as well. At the bottom of the screen were two parallel lines with a tiny bright blue spot glowing inside them. Above the lines were the words, Time to completion 6 hours 47 minutes.

  The appearance of that notification elicited an enthusiastic round of applause from everyone gathered in the room. “Holy moly!” B. exclaimed, giving Stu a tooth-jarring congratulatory whack on the back. “I think you did it. You pulled it off!”

  “It was a joint effort,” Stu corrected. “We all pulled it off.”

  For a time, everyone stood transfixed, watching the time-remaining number count down as the GPUs sent messages all around the world, summoning Frigg’s scattered files and bringing them back home to the blades that formed the AI’s mainframe.

  It was Cami who broke the silence. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve got better things to do that stand around watching an almost seven-hour download. If somebody will come with me, I’ll return the truck, then I want to go home, shower, and change clothes. Once I do that, I can come back here or go to the office, whichever you prefer.”

  Stu replied with an absentminded nod while never taking his eyes off the monitor.

  When Cami left the room, there didn’t seem to be much for everyone else to do but follow. Only when they were outside the garage and standing next to the truck did she speak again. “The AI is Stu’s problem right now,” she explained. “I don’t think he’s made up his mind yet about keeping Frigg or killing her. Whichever way it goes, I think he deserves a little privacy.”

  While Cami and Alonso went off to return the truck, Ali turned to B. “What’s your plan?”

  “I think I’m going to take advantage of one of the chaises, a pillow, and a blanket and grab a few more minutes of shut-eye. That way I’ll be close at hand if Stu needs reinforcements. What about you?”

  Standing there enjoying the welcome warmth of the sun, Ali was surprised to realize that she had found her second wind and wasn’t the least bit sleepy. Just then she caught sight of the packing tape–wrapped soda can, still standing upright in the Cayenne’s cup holder.

  “I’m going to go track down Dave Holman,” she said. “It’s high time we found out who our mysterious building inspector really is.”

  32

  Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office’s substation in the Village of Oak Creek was located in a strip mall and close enough to B.’s house that Ali could easily have walked there and back. This time she chose to drive. When she arrived in the parking lot, Dave’s SUV was nowhere to be seen. She pulled into a visitor slot and sat there wondering. Since Dave wasn’t there, should she even bother? Finally, though, shrugging off her momentary indecision, she collected the soda can and went inside.

  Behind the counter sat a sweet-faced young woman with her long blond hair pulled into a knot at the back of her head. At first glance, Ali wondered if she was old enough to be out of high school. Was the sheriff’s department hiring teenagers these days? When the woman stood up, however, Ali was surprised to see that she was actually a uniformed officer—Deputy L. Harper.

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  “I was hoping to see Detective Holman,” Ali said.

  “Sorry, he’s unavailable,” Deputy Harper replied. “We had a homicide overnight, and he’s working that. Can I be of service?”

  This seemed like a lost cause, but Ali decided to take a crack at it anyway. “My name is Ali Reynolds,” she said. “My husband and I own High Noon Enterprises, a company located on the far side of Cottonwood—on county land rather than inside the city limits.”

  Deputy Harper frowned, and Ali was sure she was already losing her. “Any relation to Ms. Reynolds, the math teacher over at the high school?” the deputy asked.

  Ali was taken aback. “Why, yes,” she said, “Athena is my daughter-in-law.”

  Deputy Harper’s face broke into a beaming smile. “She’s the best teacher I ever had!” she exclaimed. “Until I met Ms. Reynolds, I thought I hated math. It turns out, I just hated bad math teachers. And she’s, like, this incredible inspiration to everybody, I mean, with her arm and leg and all. It was because of her that I decided to apply for a job with the sheriff’s office after I got my associate’s degree.”

  Before Athena and Chris met and married, she had served with the Minnesota National Guard and had returned from a deployment to the Middle East as a wounded warrior and partial amputee, having lost one arm from below the elbow and one leg from below the knee.

  A little more hopeful now, Ali returned to telling her story. “On Friday, someone gained entrance to our facility under false pretenses by claiming to be a county building inspector. He may have interfered with some of our electronic equipment. I had spoken to Detective Holman about this earlier, but . . .”

  “It sounds like a property crime,” Deputy Harper interrupted. “Detective Holman doesn’t deal with those. Have you filed a police report?”

  “Not yet,” Ali began.

  “Was there any damage?”

  “Not that we know of,” Ali replied, “at least not so far.”

  Deputy Harper was already reaching for a clipboard with a pen attached by a length of string. When she placed it on the counter, Ali saw it contained a blank incident reporting form.

  “In situations like this we generally don’t send officers to the scene,” Deputy Harper explained. “Once you fill out this form and give it to me, you’ll have filed an official police report. That way, if you happen to uncover damage later on, you’ll already have a case number to turn over to your insurance company.”

  “I was a sworn police officer for a while, so I know about not dispatching officers to incidents involving property crimes,” Ali said, moving the soda can in Deputy
Harper’s direction and setting it on the counter between them. “That’s why I brought you this.”

  “What is it?”

  “It may or may not be evidence,” Ali said. “At High Noon we use a buzzer on the front door to let visitors into the building. It looked to me like the guy who pressed the button wasn’t wearing gloves. I used packing tape to try lifting a print. I was hoping if I did get one that maybe Dave could run it for me. I’d like to find out who this guy really is.”

  The words coming out of Ali’s mouth sounded completely lame. Had Deputy Harper been older and wiser, they might not have worked. But then, since Athena Reynolds was still the deputy’s favorite teacher of all time . . .

  “Would you like me to try?” she asked. “We have a fume hood in the back, and I’ve been trained on using it. While you’re filling out the form, I’ll check to see if you got anything. If so, I can send it to the latent people at the crime lab over in Prescott and ask them to run it through AFIS.”

  Ali could barely believe her luck. “That would be wonderful,” she said. While she set about filling out the form, Deputy Harper collected the soda can and disappeared into the back room. When she returned a few minutes later, she was grinning from ear to ear.

  “It worked like a charm,” she said. “You got a great print. As soon as you finish the form and I assign you a case number, I’ll be able to send it right over. Someone in property crimes will probably give you a call.”

  “I hope so,” Ali said, signing the bottom of the form and handing the clipboard back to Deputy Harper. The young deputy was cheerful and enthusiastic in the extreme, and her good spirits were catching.

  Back out in the sunlight, the last of Ali’s adrenaline suddenly drained away allowing weariness to overtake her. She had thought about making a quick run to the grocery store to pick up a few additional supplies, but now she nixed that idea. What she wanted to do right that minute was go straight back to the house and crash on one of those chaise lounges.

  In her youth, doing an occasional all-nighter hadn’t bothered Ali in the least. These days when she finally hit the wall, that was no longer the case. This time Ali did the only sensible thing—she went back to the house to go to bed.

  Once at the house, Ali avoided the garage and let herself in through the front door. With everyone else asleep, the house was silent and downright frigid. The laboring AC that was keeping the blades cool in the room off the garage had managed to lower the temperature throughout the rest of the house as well. Ali tiptoed from one room to the next. She located B., sound asleep on a chaise in the master bedroom with a second chaise positioned nearby. Without bothering to undress, she climbed onto it and wrapped the blanket around her. It may not have been the most comfortable bed in the world, but as soon as her head touched the pillow, she was out like a light.

  33

  Graciella wasn’t someone given to second-guessing herself. She hadn’t felt a moment of concern or remorse about her mother’s death or about Arturo’s, either, for that matter. Somehow, though, the hit on Ron Webster was different. She had targeted him because he was a bumbling idiot and had screwed up what should have been a simple intelligence gathering mission.

  A check of news feeds coming from Arizona told her that the hit had been successfully carried out in spectacular fashion. Now she worried that her overreaction to Webster’s screwup might somehow lead back to her. She tried to convince herself that if anyone came around asking questions, she’d left behind enough incriminating breadcrumbs that Pablo would be the one in the hot seat. Even so, she felt antsy and unsettled.

  Overnight the bugs planted at High Noon had detected some activity. It sounded as though several people had come and gone. There had been a lot of noise. It almost sounded as though someone was moving furniture, but there had been very little conversation. As a consequence, and without a video component, there was no way to figure out what was really going on. What struck Graciella as strange, however, was that apparently no effort was made to take her listening devices off-line. What did that mean? Was it possible that no one had bothered to review the tapes and the bugs were still undiscovered? After that one flurry of activity the devices had gone dead silent again.

  Graciella’s research had led her to believe that Stuart Ramey actually lived on the premises. If that was the case, where was he? And where the hell was Frigg? Did he have her or didn’t he?

  Ready to be out of the house for a while, late that Sunday morning, Graciella got dressed and went to mass—because that’s what dutiful daughters were expected to do in the aftermath of their mothers’ deaths. The brisk walk from home to Our Lady of Guadalupe did her a world of good. She went to church and sat through the service, but she didn’t partake in communion. El Pescado had seen to it that his daughter was educated at good Catholic schools, and she regarded herself as a good Catholic. That meant no communion without having gone to confession, and sitting in a confessional discussing her several mortal sins was more than Graciella could manage right then. Maybe someday in the distant future, but not right now.

  As she was leaving the church, Isobel Flores caught up with her. Like Graciella, Isobel lived in the neighborhood, and it wasn’t surprising to see her there. It also wasn’t surprising that she was eager to talk.

  “Any word on Arturo?” Graciella asked.

  “Not so far. I talked to poor Bianca after she got home. The cops questioned her for the better part of six hours before they finally let her go.”

  “They think she had something to do with what happened?”

  “I guess. She said Arturo got drunk. She told him he was in no condition to drive. She left the hotel before he did and took a cab home. Luckily for her there were people at the hotel who verified her story.”

  “But still no sign of Arturo?”

  “No, but I spoke to Natalia, his wife. The cops told her that they have confirmed that the blood found in Arturo’s car is his, and because there’s so much of it, they doubt he’s still alive.”

  “It must be tough on her,” Graciella offered. “Did she know he was fooling around?”

  “She does now,” Isobel said.

  “Yes,” Graciella agreed. “I guess she does.”

  With that in mind, Graciella Miramar walked back home with a smile on her face. Not only was Arturo Salazar dead, so was his reputation, all of which was exactly as Graciella had intended.

  Once back in her unit, Graciella changed out of her church clothes and into something more comfortable. Then she settled down with her computer and spent the next hour or so searching online for everything she could find concerning the death of Arturo Salazar. At a press conference, a police spokesman suggested that Arturo’s homicide might have something to do with road rage or else with gang-related violence. Graciella understood the words “road rage” and “gang-related” for exactly what they were—cop-speak for “unlikely to be solved.”

  And that, too, was exactly as Graciella had intended.

  34

  “I don’t care whose ashes they are,” Lupe Duarte stormed. “I don’t want anybody’s funeral urn on display in my house.”

  “It’s actually my house,” Felix told her firmly. “Mine. And if I want to have a dozen funeral urns in every room, I will. Understood?”

  “It’s bad luck,” Lupe insisted. “It’s like asking for trouble.”

  “I don’t care,” Felix told her. “I want the urn here, and it’s staying.”

  “Suit yourself, then,” she said, flouncing out of the room.

  Of all Felix’s wives, Lupe had been around the longest. She had not aged well. Too much Botox in her younger years had left her with a face that was almost as disfigured as her husband’s. She could be shrewish and demanding on occasion. Sex had disappeared from their marriage years ago. She was no longer interested, and, to be honest, neither was he. There were plenty of places where someone as powerful as El Pescado could find willing bedmates should the need arise.

  No, the real secre
t behind Lupe’s long-term staying power had to do with her ability to manage Felix’s household and keep that part of his life running smoothly. Sex partners were easy to come by; good housekeepers were not. As a consequence Felix seldom vetoed anything about the way Lupe ran things. However, the presence of Christina’s funeral urn in their living room was an exception to that rule. On that one issue El Pescado refused to budge. In fact, over Lupe’s objections, he had positioned the urn in a place of honor on the mantel of the fireplace.

  Pouring himself a tumbler of his favorite scotch, he sat down in his customary armchair and settled in for an afternoon and evening of quiet grieving. The alcohol gave him free rein to think about Christina—about both of them—as they had once been, before things had gone so very wrong.

  An hour or so later, El Pescado was half dozing in the chair with the empty glass on the table at his elbow when the front door slammed open and Manuel, his younger son, marched into the room uninvited. Despite the fact that both his sons had homes located inside the Duarte compound, very little in-person visiting occurred among them. For one thing, both Manuel and Pablo despised their stepmother, and the feeling was entirely mutual; Lupe didn’t like them, either.

  One glance at Manuel’s face told Felix something was wrong. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Something weird,” Manuel announced. “I think we’ve been set up.”

  “Set up? How?”

  “I just heard from one of my informants in the ATF. Someone carried out a hit in Arizona early this morning. According to my guy, the ATF is working on the assumption that we’re involved.”

  “Are we?” Felix asked.

  The cartel didn’t operate on a strict command structure. El Pescado wasn’t always aware of everything that was going on, and neither were Pablo and Manuel.

  “Not as far as I know,” Manuel answered.

  “What kind of hit?”