Duel to the Death

by J. A. Jance

  “Please.” A moment later, Stuart was reading an article he’d never seen before. His grandmother Grace had told him about the accident, but it was only after that trip on I-10 on Saturday night that he’d thought about searching out the details for himself. The article, from the Arizona Capitol Times, was dated Monday, April 9, 1979.

  Interstate 10 was closed in both directions for more than five hours overnight while the Arizona Department of Safety investigated a two-car head-on collision that claimed three lives.

  DPS spokesman Donald Norfolk said that at approximately 11:15 p.m., an eastbound vehicle with two people onboard veered across the median where it collided with a car driving westbound. Two of the three victims were pronounced dead at the scene. The third, the driver of the westbound vehicle, died while being transported to a local hospital.

  Normal traffic resumed in both directions prior to morning rush hour, but officers continue to investigate the incident. Names of the victims are being withheld pending notification of next of kin.

  When Stu finished scrolling through that article, he continued on to the next:

  New details are emerging in Sunday’s overnight crash on Interstate 10 that closed the freeway in both directions for several hours and took the lives of three people. At 11:15 p.m. on April 8, a Dodge Dart, driven by Robert S. Ramey, Jr., age 29, veered out of the eastbound lanes, crossed the median, and slammed into a westbound vehicle driven by Alfred A. Coffer, age 43. Both drivers perished as did a passenger in the first vehicle, Penelope Suzanne Ramey, age 27.

  According to Donald Norfolk, DPS public information officer, there were initial indications that alcohol consumption on the part of the westbound driver might have been a contributing factor. Further examination, however, seems to suggest that the driver of the eastbound vehicle may have fallen asleep at the wheel.

  Mr. and Mrs. Ramey perished on impact. The couple resided in Tucson where Mr. Ramey worked as a cook in a restaurant and his wife was a teacher’s aide. They were on their way home after attending a weekend funeral in the Los Angeles area. They are survived by their three-year-old son.

  Mr. Coffer survived the initial impact but was pronounced dead while being transported by ambulance to Phoenix General Hospital. Divorced, he was the father of three teenaged children who reside in Tempe with their mother. Mr. Coffer, a journeyman ironworker, was recently laid off from a construction job on the Central Arizona Project.

  The accident occurred just west of New Vicksburg Road at milepost 45. Funeral services for all three victims are pending.

  As Stu read that last paragraph, the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He remembered the Vicksburg exit. It had been just there that he had first thought of his parents. He was sure no one had ever mentioned that milepost detail to him, and yet somehow he had known it that night. He didn’t believe in heaven or hell or even life after death, but the message had come to him from somewhere. His grandmother maybe?

  And then there was the part of the story Grace Ramey had always left out when she told the story. She had always said that Stuart’s parents had been killed in a crash with a drunk driver. Never once had she mentioned that her son had been driving in the wrong direction when his car had slammed head-on into someone else. The first version of the story made Stu’s father sound entirely blameless. The other one did not. In this case, driving when he had been too tired to be behind the wheel had doubtless been a more serious impairment than the other guy’s drinking. Robert Ramey was the one who had caused the accident. It was his fault. Had Stu’s father stayed in his own lanes, Albert Coffer might have been drunk, but he wouldn’t have died.

  Long after he finished reading the second article, a thoughtful Stu continued to sit and stare at the monitor—long enough for the text to disappear and be replaced by the screen saver. Frigg’s voice jolted him out of his reverie.

  “Mr. Ramey?”

  “Yes, Frigg.”

  “I have completed the off-line index. The online access one is more extensive. Would you like me to send the first one to you all at once, or break it into sections?”

  Stu suspected that the online index was where he would find the really problematic material—the sites Frigg was able to access that she wasn’t supposed to, but this was a good place to start.

  “Send it to me a letter at a time,” he said. “I want to go over it on a line by line basis.”

  He started the process just before four a.m. When Ali called him at seven thirty, Stu was on his fourth cup of coffee, his third piece of last night’s pizza, and the letter D. “I’m on my way to come pick you up,” Ali told him.

  “I was hoping to work from here today.”

  “No dice,” she said. “I just had a call from Detective Wasser down in Pima County. She’s on her way up from Tucson to interview all of us concerning the Ron Webster homicide. She’s bringing along an ATF agent named Diaz who’s working the case with her.”

  “I don’t know anything about who killed Ron Webster or why. This sounds like a big waste of time,” Stu said. “Couldn’t I just skip it?”

  “No,” Ali responded, “we need everyone to be present and accounted for—cooperative but not too smart, remember?”

  “Okay,” he agreed with a sigh. “I’ll be ready whenever you get here.”

  57

  Graciella managed to make it through the endless candlelight vigil ordeal, but it wasn’t easy. Natalia Salazar turned out to be a lovely woman who seemed genuinely grief-stricken over the loss of her husband. Graciella was mystified as to how someone as bright and attractive as Natalia could have been so completely bamboozled by someone as creepy as Arturo. She was clearly a far better woman than the man had deserved.

  During the vigil, with Graciella present but discreetly on the sidelines, Isobel made herself useful—bustling around, greeting arriving guests, helping serve refreshments, offering her services in making funeral arrangements. When Bianca Navarro approached the widow to hug her and offer her tearful condolences, Graciella had wanted to fling her glass of Chardonnay across the room at her. Bianca had slept with Arturo on the day he died, and now she was here comforting his widow? How dare she? But then Graciella realized she had no right to talk, not since she herself was the reason Arturo was dead.

  As the evening wore on, Graciella considered whether she should give Isobel advance warning that she wouldn’t be in for a couple of days. In the end she decided against it. Sometime tomorrow morning would be time enough for her to announce the need of an emergency trip to the States.

  “See you tomorrow,” Isobel said as Graciella stepped out of the car in front of her building.

  “Right,” Graciella returned, “tomorrow.”

  Up in the fifth-floor unit, Graciella packed a bag. For a two-day trip, a single carry-on would be sufficient. When she went to get cash out of the safe, she wondered if she should leave El Pescado’s encrypted phone behind or bring it along. By rights she should have called him the moment she learned of the existence of that key-logger hack. She hadn’t done so for one very good reason—she was afraid of his reaction. Felix Duarte was a dangerous man who didn’t suffer fools gladly, or failures, either, and at this point Graciella felt she was both. Once she’d completed her damage control operation—after she had gained control of Frigg and fixed the problem—that was when she would inform her father and not before.

  So she thought about taking the phone along, but in the end she left it where it was—plugged into the charger in her safe. She told herself there was no point in carrying it around since it probably wouldn’t work in the States, but that wasn’t the whole story. She was also afraid that if it was on her person, El Pescado might be able to follow her movements.

  It wasn’t late when she finished packing, but Graciella was too antsy to sleep. Instead, she paced the floor, hour after hour, cursing Owen Hansen and cursing Frigg! This was war. Graciella Miramar would either take control of that damned AI or she would destroy her. There would be no middle ground
.

  She finally fell asleep about four in the morning. At seven, the alarm rousted her out of bed. She had coffee, put on her makeup, dressed, and went to work, arriving at her customary hour. Just before noon, she faked a phone call. When it was over, she went straight to Isobel.

  “I just got off the phone with an attorney from the States. There’s a problem with my mother’s estate, and I need to go there to straighten things out.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” the always helpful Isobel asked.

  “No, I just checked with American. There’s one seat available on the evening flight to Miami, and I can fly out today, if that won’t be a problem. I should be back by Friday.”

  “We’ll manage,” Isobel said. “You do what you need to do. And feel free to take the whole weekend instead of rushing back on Friday. I just spoke to Natalia. That’s the day of the funeral, unless you want to be here for that.”

  “No,” Graciella said. “Funerals aren’t my thing.”

  She left the office at noon, walking. Back at El Sueño she called for a cab, collected her carry-on, and went downstairs. It was early to head for the airport, but she didn’t care. What she wanted to do was make it through security and then tuck in to the first-class lounge for a glass of champagne and maybe a nap. It had been a long night, and this would be a very long day.

  58

  Manuel Javier Duarte had lived his entire life in his older brother’s shadow. There had never been any doubt that Pablo was his father’s favorite; his go-to guy; his anointed one. Pablo had also been bigger, tougher, and smarter—at least to hear him tell it. He was also lazy and full of himself. He was a womanizer who liked to hang out with the “big shots.” He spent most of his time drinking too much and bragging about his many sexual conquests.

  If Pablo was a loudmouthed know-it-all, Manny quietly remained on the fringes. Pablo saw himself as a big honcho, free to socialize with others of that ilk while leaving the actual work to be done by lowly peons, people he regarded with utter contempt. It was one of those, a peon whose sister Pablo had been screwing on the side and then dropped when she got pregnant, who had turned on the Duarte Cartel.

  If Pablo had been able to keep his pants zipped, there never would have been an informant living in Las Cruces in the first place. It had been Pablo’s ill-fated attempt to fix the problem that had resulted in the inadvertent unmasking of the nascent alliance between the cartel and MS-13. With the Las Cruces fiasco so recent, it was inconceivable to Manny that Pablo would call for another MS-13 hit, especially one that was completely off the books.

  While Pablo was known for throwing his weight around, insulting his underlings, and treating them as little better than servants, Manny was a bit more subtle. He had made a practice of seeking out promising young lieutenants inside the Duarte organization and then cultivating relationships with them. In the process, he had created an underlying shadow group of operatives and informants who, although still loyal to the family brand, owed their primary fealty to him. It was one of Manny’s carefully groomed guys—an ATF insider named Diaz—who had alerted Manny to the investigation into the hit on Ron Webster in Marana, Arizona. It was another of Manny’s henchmen, one inside MS-13, who had fingered Pablo as the one responsible.

  And Pablo wasn’t the only one, either. Yes, Pablo had hired the guy, but the money had come through “the usual channels,” which meant the payment had to have been routed through Graciella Miramar, the woman who functioned as the cartel’s CFO. Princess Graciella, as Pablo and Manny had always referred to her in private, was a financial wiz and also the daughter of one of Felix’s many whores.

  Manny had been shocked when he came to the realization that, regardless of the cause, the hit on Ron Webster had been carried out by Pablo and Graciella working in tandem. Rather than tackling them both at the same time, Manny had decided to go after the low-hanging fruit first. Pablo had been messing up big-time lately. His wife had just moved out. He was drinking too much and working hardly at all.

  When Manny had gone to Felix with the information, he had expected Felix to lash out at him. Instead, within hours, Pablo’s house had burned to the ground with Pablo passed out cold on his bed inside it. Anyone familiar with El Pescado’s face or with the family history would have known the truth about what happened. Felix was Felix. Although shocked to think that the “fair-haired son” had finally gone too far, Manny was confident no one would say a word. Now, though, it was time to set his sights on Graciella and find out exactly what she and Pablo had been up to.

  To that end, Manny hired a team of watchers and set them up outside Graciella’s condo on Calle 61 Este with orders to report her every move. On Tuesday, the surveillance team followed her to work in the morning and back home at noon. When she emerged from the building a few minutes later, pulling a rolling carry-on bag and hailing a taxi, they continued trailing her. Once it became apparent that she was heading for the airport, Manny’s man on the ground called in for additional instructions.

  “Keep on her,” Manny ordered. “See if you can find out what flight she’s on and where she’s going.”

  When Graciella Miramar got in the check-in line at American Airlines, she paid no attention to the man standing directly behind her. She should have. When she told the ticket agent that she was bound for Phoenix with a two-hour layover in Miami, the guy behind her listened intently. There was only one American flight departing for Miami that afternoon. Moments later, the man apologized to the other people in line and then melted seamlessly into the crowd.

  As soon as Manny knew about the flight, he went straight to Felix’s house. “You can’t see him,” said an adamant Lupe, barring Manny’s way. “Your father is an old man who’s had a terrible night. I’ll call you when he’s awake.”

  Knowing it was pointless to argue with his stepmother, Manny gave up and went home. He was not a man enamored of electronic devices. Carrying a cell phone was a business necessity, but he didn’t own an iPad and wouldn’t have used one if he did. There was a large desktop computer in his office at home, but he seldom touched that, either. He wasn’t in the habit of surfing the Net looking for news reports or interesting tidbits of information. He relied instead on human intelligence. In this instance he called Ernesto Díaz, his ATF informant. Ernesto provided a few new details, including the fact that prior to his death, the firebombing victim was suspected of having planted surveillance devices inside the offices of a company called High Noon Enterprises located in Cottonwood, Arizona, some two hundred miles away from Marana, the town where Webster perished.

  “These High Noon people,” Manny asked, “what do they do, exactly?”

  “Cyber security,” Ernesto told him.

  Which, from Manny’s point of view, told him less than nothing. After that, Manny placed a call to a friend of his who ran a travel agency. From her he learned that Graciella’s flight was scheduled to arrive at Sky Harbor in Phoenix at midnight.

  An hour later Lupe called to say Felix was awake and ready to receive visitors, and Manny headed straight there with the information he’d managed to gather.

  “What now?” El Pescado growled at him, as if to say, Haven’t you already done enough damage? But Manny didn’t back down.

  “Whatever Pablo was up to,” he said, “I think Graciella was in on it.”

  “Me, too,” Felix said resignedly. “How else would MS-13 have gotten paid?”

  Manny was gratified beyond words to hear that Felix had arrived at the same conclusion—that the father and his second son were on the same page for a change. He went on to explain everything he had learned about the victim, Ron Webster, and his supposed target, High Noon Enterprises.

  “Do we have any idea why Graciella and Pablo would have been interested in these High Noon people?”

  “No idea,” Manny said.

  “But obviously they were,” Felix concluded, “so what do we do about it?”

  “I had Graciella followed,” Manny said. “Right this mi
nute she’s about to board a flight headed to Miami with a connecting flight to Phoenix, Arizona. She gets in around midnight.”

  El Pescado glanced at his watch. “If that’s where she’s headed, so are we,” he said. “Call for the jet.”

  “Are you sure flying into the States is a good idea?” Manny asked.

  “I’ve been flying in and out of the States all my life,” El Pescado said grimly. “My people will be able to get me in and out with no difficulty. Besides, weakness isn’t an option here. Graciella may be my daughter, but if she’s turned on me, I have to be the one to put her down—personally. If I allow her to skate, I’ll be out of business, and so will you.”

  “Right,” Manny said, nodding in agreement. “I’ll call for the jet. When do you want to leave?”

  “As soon as they can get the plane fueled up and ready to go.”

  As Manuel Duarte turned to leave, Felix surprised him. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention,” he said, gathering his younger son into an embrace. “We’ll get through this together.”

  For the first time in years, Manny felt his heart swell with pride. “Yes, we will,” he said, “together.”

  59

  “Any news from Panama?” Ali asked when Stu settled into the passenger seat of the Cayenne with his Bluetooth connection to Frigg ready and waiting, just in case.

  “Nope,” he said, “not a word. Graciella’s devices are all dark.”

  “Do you think she’s still monitoring the audio feed?”

  “From another device, you mean? I suppose she could be, why?”

  “Because if she is, I don’t want her knowing about the interviews.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “You want me to tell Cami to shut down that last transmitter?”

  “I think so, and in the spirit of cooperation, we need to hand all Webster’s surveillance equipment over to Detective Wasser.”

  “They’ll have my fingerprints on them, mine and Cami’s.”