Duel to the Death

by J. A. Jance

  “Okay,” Stu said, “but there’s something you need to know about me. I was raised by my grandfather, and he always insisted that you don’t do business with someone unless you can see them face-to-face and eyeball-to-eyeball. Dealing with the bank accounts was one thing. But this? A job offer? I wouldn’t even consider it without meeting you and the principal in person.”

  “If you want to come in for an interview, I’m pretty sure my client would be willing to fly you down to Panama City first-class and put you up in the best hotel possible.”

  “Who is your client?”

  “Obviously, unless we have a deal on the table, that information must remain confidential.”

  “It’s not going to happen, then,” Stu said, pulling back abruptly after hopefully giving her the impression that he had been about to say yes. When Graciella spoke again, even he was able to detect the audible concern in her voice.

  “Why not?”

  “Because of something else you don’t know about me,” he said. “I’m afraid of flying. Petrified, even. If you want me to consider any of this at all seriously, then you’ll have to come to me.”

  “Very well,” Graciella said. “Let me speak to my client. I’ll be in touch.”

  Stu ended the call. Then, spent with effort, he slammed the phone down on the table and turned on the Bluetooth. “Frigg.”

  “Yes, Stuart. How can I help?”

  “I’m going to go take a shower and change clothes. I just recorded a telephone call between me and Graciella Miramar. While I’m gone, I want you to listen to the recording and then give me your analysis when I get back.”

  “Sure thing, Stuart,” Frigg said. “I’ll get right on it.”

  52

  Filled with revulsion, Graciella put down the phone and shoved the offending computer as far away from her as possible. What she really wanted to do was throw the damned thing out the nearest window. She felt so violated and betrayed that she didn’t want to touch it. The simple task of keying in the access codes and activating Stuart’s accounts had left her feeling sick to her stomach.

  How could Odin have done this to her? But he had, and now she needed to fix it. She couldn’t afford a moment of delay. She’d have to go to the States and reel Stuart in—something that had to be done in person and in a hurry. She had to get to Stuart, gain his trust, and lay claim to Frigg in time to destroy the AI before Stuart acquired any real understanding of the incredible gold mine that had fallen into his lap; before he realized that Frigg’s key-logger Trojan had been deployed against her with potentially devastating results.

  Making flight reservations—both commercial and private—was second nature to Graciella Miramar. It was something she did on a daily basis for one client or another. Out of habit, she reached for her phone. She touched it and then yanked her hand away as though she’d been burned. It wasn’t that she couldn’t use her phone to call the airlines. The key logger was on her computer rather than on her phone—at least she hoped that was the case—but how the hell would she pay the plane fare? If Frigg had been tracking her keystrokes, then she knew all of Graciella’s secrets—her account numbers, passcodes, and balances. Frigg would have access to all of it—both the legitimate accounts and ones on the dark Web. The moment Graciella paid for a reservation, Frigg would know all about it.

  Frigg was frighteningly smart. That much was obvious. After all, she had outwitted Odin completely, managing to guarantee her own survival by trapping poor, unsuspecting Stuart Ramey, a complete stranger, into assuming ownership of the AI and rebooting her. So it wasn’t just that Frigg knew all of Graciella’s secrets; she knew Felix’s, too, along with all of his account numbers, passcodes, and balances. If the AI had been clever enough to bribe Stuart by appropriating Odin’s money, what were the chances she’d go straight to El Pescado himself to spill the beans?

  For the first time in twenty-six years, Graciella was stuck, as helpless as that little girl whose mother had gone to work and left her alone to make her way in the world. It wasn’t quite that bad. She still had her emergency stash—two packets of Felix’s hundred-dollar bills—stowed away in her closet safe, but she couldn’t risk paying cash for plane reservations. The moment she tried that, security would be all over her.

  Looking at her watch, Graciella was astonished to see how much time had elapsed. It was already nearly two o’clock in the afternoon. Isobel was coming for her at five to take her to the vigil—Arturo’s vigil.

  And that’s where Graciella found her answer—in Arturo Salazar, the slimy little bastard himself. All the girls in the office had joked about knowing his passcode, his wife’s name plus four—N-A-T-A-L-I-A-1-2-3-4. Since it was easy to remember, he never bothered to change it. Every once in a while, when he was out on one of his assignations, someone would duck into his office, turn on his computer, and check out his browsing history. It was always the same thing—porn, every kind of porn imaginable.

  Graciella threw on her clothing and a pair of comfortable walking shoes. Then, grabbing her purse, she set out for the office on Vía Israel. A tasteful sign posted on the front door and penned in Isobel’s distinctive calligraphy announced “HOY CERRADO”—“CLOSED TODAY.” No reason was given. The door itself was locked, but that was no problem. Graciella often came in during off-hours and had her own key. The alarm was on, but that wasn’t a problem, either, because Graciella knew the code.

  She stepped inside. Without turning on any lights, she made her way back to Arturo’s office and sat down at his desk. His computer was old and clunky. It took a long time to boot up, but once it did, the passcode worked like a charm. She found his bill-paying program, and there were the names and numbers of all his credit cards, including his corporate Platinum Amex. Flying private would have been faster and easier, but the price tag for that would most likely blow Arturo’s balance through the roof.

  Graciella knew that Sky Harbor in Phoenix was the closest major airport to Cottonwood. She also knew that the most direct flight, late in the afternoon, was on American with a two-hour layover in Miami. When she logged on to American’s Web site with Arturo’s customary password, she was pleased to discover that he already had an established account with all of his credit card information preloaded into the system. She made a first-class round-trip reservation, departing on Tuesday and returning on Friday. She was coming for Stuart and Frigg. That would give her two full days to do what needed to be done, and two days would have to be enough.

  The reservations were made under her own name. She had a cache of phony IDs and passports available, but she might need to use those later on. For right now, traveling under the name of Graciella Miramar worked. The flight would leave Panama City at five p.m. the following afternoon and have her in Phoenix at midnight. When it came time to pay, she held her breath and clicked on the proper credit card number. When the system called for the card’s expiration date, that wasn’t difficult at all. The company Amex cards had all been reissued a few months earlier. The expiration date on Graciella’s card was the same as the one on Arturo’s.

  Graciella didn’t bother making a room reservation or renting a car. Both of those would have required on-site credit cards. Instead, she placed a call on a burner phone to one of her known contacts. For five hundred bucks cash, a car and driver would be waiting for her when she stepped off the plane in Phoenix. For an additional thousand, the driver would bring along another burner phone and a pair of lethal fentanyl patches.

  At this point, the idea of gaining custody of the AI with the intention of utilizing her was off the table. Frigg had targeted Graciella and needed to be destroyed. She hoped that Stuart Ramey would agree to hand Frigg over, but if he didn’t? Then Graciella would do what needed to be done, and that’s why she needed the patches. Thanks to the two bundles of cartel cash stashed away in her safe, she’d have just under the legal limit of ten thousand dollars along on the trip, enough to handle any number of incidental expenses.

  By the time Graciella fin
ished making her flight reservations, she was still outside the twenty-four-hour check-in deadline, but she didn’t dare hang around the office long enough to make that happen. Having to check in at the airport wouldn’t be that big a deal. After erasing her browsing history, she shut down Arturo’s computer, turned off his office lights, and locked the office door behind her. She was back home—showered, dressed, made up, and waiting down in the lobby—when Isobel arrived at five o’clock sharp.

  As they wended their way through the city on their way to the vigil, Graciella leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes, and said a heartfelt thank-you to poor, dead Arturo Salazar. In all these years, making that plane trip possible for her was by far the nicest thing he had ever done for her.

  53

  Halfway through the afternoon, Cami stopped by Ali’s office to voice her complaint.

  “I don’t like doing busywork,” Cami grumbled.

  “What busywork?” Ali asked.

  Taking a seat, and rather than answering aloud, Cami slid a stack of computer printouts across Ali’s desk. Shuffling through them, Ali quickly ascertained that these were copies of articles containing press coverage of the attack on Christina Miramar. Included were articles about the subsequent court proceedings along with a complete set of obituaries outlining the untimely deaths of each of the men involved in the crime.

  “Why are you doing this?” Ali asked.

  “Because Stu asked me to. He’s having me research all these guys independently without any assistance from the previous sort Frigg already did, which is incredibly time-consuming. Not only that, I’m getting nowhere fast. I’ve tried talking to the various cop shops involved, but since I’ve got no legal basis for requesting autopsy reports or police records, they won’t help me. Lawrence Tompkins, the guy from Medford, Oregon, used a gun to blow his brains out. That one’s pretty self-explanatory. The two overdose deaths barely caused a ripple. As for the hit-and-run in Fresno? Alfred Miller was last seen hitchhiking after leaving a bar on the outskirts of Fresno just after closing time. He never made it home. His body was found floating in an irrigation ditch two days later. He had been struck by a car and killed instantly before being dragged off the shoulder of the road and dumped into a canal. The offending vehicle and driver were never found. Then there are the two shooting victims, one in Detroit and the other in Chicago. Both of those cases remain unsolved.”

  Cami came around to Ali’s side of the desk and searched through the printouts before selecting one. “Here we have the obituary for Cameron Randall Purdy, age twenty-six,” she said, “shot to death by an unknown assailant in Chicago, Illinois, on September 24, 1992. He was the first of the six to die, but don’t expect anybody to hop to and go sorting through cold case files looking for the shooter. Purdy died twenty-five years ago. So far this year Chicago has had more than six hundred shootings, and most of those are unsolved as well.”

  “So as far as the cops are concerned, Purdy’s death is ancient history,” Ali put in.

  “Right, and nobody’s interested in talking about it. They won’t give me the time of day.”

  “Have you tried contacting the families?” Ali asked. “These are obituaries with mention of surviving family members.”

  “You want me to talk to these people?” Cami asked in disbelief. “You want me to talk to the families and bring up all this bad old stuff that’s probably best forgotten?”

  “You might be surprised,” Ali told her. “The families of most murder victims count their days by what their lives were like prior to that person’s death and what their lives have been like afterward. Yes, these six guys committed a horrible crime and mostly got away with it. And yes, they’re all dead now, but before any of that happened, they were somebody’s son or brother or friend. And after all these years, their surviving loved ones might be grateful to know that someone is still interested in what happened. That’s especially true of the three cases that are still listed as open.”

  “What am I supposed to do,” Cami asked, “pretend to be some kind of cold case cop?”

  “Don’t try to pass yourself off as law enforcement,” Ali advised. “Tell them whatever you like. Maybe you’re a blogger. Maybe tell them you’re writing a book on unsolved homicides. In any case, I can see where Stu is going with this. While you’re out turning over stones, if you do happen to dig up some new evidence, it won’t be tainted by having been conjured up by Frigg.”

  “Illegally conjured up, you mean?”

  “That, too.”

  “All right,” Cami said, “I’ll see what I can do, but don’t hold your breath.”

  “By the way,” Ali said, “where are you working?”

  “The break room,” Cami said. “With that transmitter still up and running in the computer lab, I can’t talk about any of this in there.”

  A still-unhappy Cami returned to her temporary workstation. With a fully operational AI to do this kind of grunt work, it seemed ridiculous to be reinventing the wheel, but maybe that was one of the reasons work was a four-letter word.

  An hour and a half later Cami found herself speaking by phone to a woman named Darlene Miller at her apartment in an assisted-living facility in Fresno, California. Darlene’s only son, Alfred Miller, aka Skip, was the hit-and-run victim who had died August 14, 1993.

  Only a few words into the conversation, Cami learned that Ali was right. Darlene Miller wasn’t offended that someone was bringing up her son’s name. Instead, she was supremely grateful.

  “Skip wasn’t the best of kids,” she admitted. “Troubled, I guess you’d call him, but I loved him anyway. I thought joining the Air Force would help straighten him out, and for a while that seemed to work. Then he got caught up in that awful mess down in Panama. Too much booze; too few brains, if you ask me. He came home in way worse shape than when he left. Couldn’t get his act together. Couldn’t find a job. I let him stay with me and had lined up some construction work for him, framing houses for a friend of mine. He was supposed to start work the following Monday, so he went out with some friends to celebrate on Saturday night and never came home. Instead of starting a new job on Monday morning, a farmworker spotted him floating facedown in an irrigation canal.”

  “And they never found out who did it?” Cami asked.

  “I don’t think they looked very hard,” Darlene replied. “I believe the cops examined Skip’s history and figured he was expendable. They did locate the place where it happened—just up the road from where he’d been drinking with his buddies. I always wondered if it really was an accident or if someone had it in for him, waited around until Skip left the bar alone that night, and then ran him down.”

  “So you never believed it was an accident?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “Women’s intuition, maybe?” Darlene asked. “Frank, one of Skip’s buddies who was at the bar with him, told me at the funeral that there were some strangers hanging around the bar that night, people they’d never seen before or since. Frank seemed to think one of them might have been keeping a little too close of an eye on Skip. I said he needed to mention that to the cops. He told me he already had, but that it didn’t do any good. It’s been a long time, but it still hurts, you know. He was my son, and I miss him.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Cami said. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you for saying that,” Darlene said, struggling to stifle a sob. “Even after all these years it means so much to hear those words. Parents shouldn’t have to bury their children.”

  Heartened by Darlene’s cordial response, Cami went searching for the family of Richard David Thorne, the drive-by shooting victim from Detroit. To no avail. The obituary mentioned his being survived by his parents, Susan and Robert Thorne. After an hour of diligent searching, Cami learned that both were deceased. End of that story.

  Dutifully Cami turned her attention back to Cameron Randall Purdy, who had died in Chicago, Illinois, on Septe
mber 24, 1992. At the time of his death, Cameron’s father was listed as deceased. He was survived by his mother, Mary, and his younger brother, James, both of Morton Grove. Rather than attempting to track down another aging or deceased parent, Cami went after the brother directly and found him still living in Morton Grove with a listed phone number.

  “Mr. Purdy?” she asked.

  “This better not be one of them solicitation calls,” he growled at her. “I’m on the national do not call list.”

  “It’s not,” she said. “My name is Camille Lee. I’m calling about your brother.”

  “My brother is dead.”

  “I’m aware of that. I’m also aware that even though he died in 1992, his death remains unsolved. I was wondering if the Chicago Police Department has ever made any effort to reopen that case.”

  “When hell freezes over,” James said. “They couldn’t care less. Cameron got himself in some hot water while he was in the service. When he came home, my folks wouldn’t even let him inside the house. He was my big brother, though, and I loved him. He used to take me to White Sox games. Once I got my license I snuck out to meet him a couple of times. There was a hot dog joint just down the street, and we’d meet up there. The last time I saw him was two nights before he died. He was over the moon. He had gotten a job as a mechanic and had a new girlfriend—Traci was her name—Traci with an i. Can’t remember her last name. Anyway, it felt to me like he was getting his life back on track and then, just like that, he was gone.”

  “What happened?”

  “Him and Traci—wait a second—Rhodes was her last name, Traci Rhodes. They were parked in the street in front of her apartment just off Skokie, making out, when this guy walks up to the car and taps on the driver’s window. Cameron rolls it down to see what’s up, and the guy hauls off and shoots him at point-blank range—no provocation, no cross words, nothing, just kerblamo! Left Traci covered with blood and brains. I don’t think the poor girl ever got over it. And that wasn’t the worst part. The cops acted like they thought she had something to do with it. She had this ex-boyfriend, you see—one of those street toughs—and the cops thought this was one of those romantic triangle types of deals. Traci swore the shooter wasn’t her ex—that he’d had nothing to do with it. She even did one of those composite drawing things, but the cops claimed she just made the guy up—invented an imaginary face—to keep from fingering the ex.”