Cold Betrayal

by J. A. Jance

  Ali thought about that. “I suppose I could drive over to Kingman and have a chat with him.”

  “In my opinion, eye-to-eye contact is always better than over the phone,” Fergus agreed. “Our primary concern is this. Regardless of what action is undertaken, no innocent women and children are to be harmed.”

  “Exactly,” Ali said. “That’s my position, too.”

  There was a rap on the conference room door, and Sister Anselm poked her head inside. “Enid’s been restless and wakeful most of the night, but now she’s come around enough to be able to identify her pursuer.”

  “From the other night?”

  Sister Anselm nodded. “She says Deputy Amos Sellers, or, as she calls him, Brother Amos, was about to lay hands on her. That’s what sent her darting into traffic.”

  “Amos Sellers?”

  “What’s that?” Sean said. “I heard someone else speaking, but I couldn’t quite make out what was said.”

  “This is Sister Anselm,” Ali said, beckoning the nun closer to the phone. “Enid Tower’s patient advocate. She says Enid just identified the man who was after her the other night. Deputy Sellers, the man I was just telling you about. Not only did he force Enid into oncoming traffic, he didn’t stop to render assistance, either.”

  “Did the incident occur inside his jurisdiction or outside?”

  “Outside.”

  “He most likely didn’t come forward because he didn’t want anyone to know he was there.”

  “That would be my assessment,” Ali answered.

  “Was the young woman able to provide any further details?” Sean asked.

  Since the question seemed to be directed at Sister Anselm, Ali passed the phone to her.

  “She’s been talking off and on all night about someone named Agnes and Patricia. She calls them the ‘Brought Back’ girls. Presumably they’re previous runaways who were caught and returned to the cult. One of them was evidently instrumental in helping Enid make her escape, and she’s worried that they’ll be brought to account for it.”

  “What about younger girls?” Sean asked. “Did she make any mention of those?”

  “Yes,” Sister Anselm said. “Unfortunately, yes. She calls them ‘Not Chosens.’ ”

  “What does that mean?” Sean asked.

  “Girls who end up unbetrothed are designated as Not Chosen,” Sister Anselm answered. “Several times a year, those girls simply disappear overnight and are never seen again. When I got a look in one of the family Bibles, I noticed that several names with the letters N.C. beside them were marked through in red ink. I was puzzled about them at the time. Now, with Ms. Benchley’s help, I’m afraid we all have a better understanding of the grim reality of what those letters mean.”

  “How many of those marked-through names did you see?” Sean asked when Sister Anselm finished relating that part of the story.

  “At least seven or eight, just in the first two pages of Richard Lowell’s family Bible,” Sister Anselm said. “Since there are probably twenty-five to thirty families, that most likely means there are that many more family Bibles.”

  “And that many more missing girls,” Sean muttered under his breath. “It just gets worse and worse, doesn’t it? Okay then. Where are we?”

  “Ali and I will drive over to Kingman together to try to assess whether or not we should bring Sheriff Alvarado into the picture,” B. offered. “Unless, of course, someone else has already spilled the beans.”

  “If so, the leak didn’t come from our end,” Sean insisted. “In the meantime, I’ll be checking in with Bernie and contacting my U.S. counterparts. I don’t have any idea how long all this is going to take, but since you seem to be the one with the most intimate knowledge about the current situation, Ms. Reynolds, is it okay if I have them contact you directly as necessary?”

  “Yes, please,” Ali agreed. “Feel free to give them my contact information.”

  When the phone call ended, Sister Anselm consulted her watch. “We’ve made arrangements for the patient transfer,” she explained. “The air ambulance is due here any moment. I’d best go make sure all the details are handled.”

  When Ali and B. left the conference room, Ali noticed that, except for two new daddies, the waiting room on the maternity floor was empty. “Where’s Leland?” she asked.

  “He looked beat,” B. said. “I told him to go home and get some rest. You’re not in such great shape yourself,” he added.

  A mirror hung on the wall outside the nurses’ station. A glance in that told Ali that B.’s assessment of her appearance was on the money. Her hair and makeup were a mess. Her pantsuit had been slept in, and it showed.

  She shook her head. “You’re right,” she said. “I look like hell, and I’m starving besides. Any chance of getting some breakfast before we head for Kingman?”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” B. said. “Knowing you’d been stuck here overnight, I brought along a change of clothing and your traveling makeup kit. They’re out in the car. How about we rent a motel room so you can get showered and changed? Then before we head for Kingman, we’ll stop long enough to have breakfast.”

  “You’re a good man,” she said, giving him a peck on the cheek. “In fact, you’re a gem. If we weren’t already married, I’d marry you on the spot!”

  28

  Betsy woke up early and pulled on her robe as soon as she got out of bed. The idea that people she didn’t know might be watching her every move was still very disturbing. After walking Princess, she made a careful circuit of the house, checking the windows and doors, making sure nothing was out of the ordinary.

  Once Princess was fed and the coffee finished perking, Betsy went over to the kitchen cabinet and opened what she liked to call her “dynamite drawer.” The whole time she and Alton were married, he had carefully balanced the checkbook every single month—without fail. Alton had been a pretty sensible guy. Betsy had generally gone along with his programs without raising much of a fuss, whether the question at the time was about installing a new roof, purchasing a car, or selling off part of the farm. It wasn’t because Betsy didn’t want to voice a countervailing opinion so much as the fact that she had usually agreed with Alton’s assessment of the situation at hand.

  Once he was gone, Betsy still did most things his way, with one small exception—balancing the checkbook and savings accounts, and it happened that now there were several of those. Each account had been established to fund and handle some particular purpose. She checked the credit card bills each month when they came in just to be sure there were no oddball charges in addition to the ones that were on automatic or the occasional small purchases she herself made. Once she had surveyed those, she tossed the statements, along with the collection of bank statements that came in month after month, in the bottom drawer—the deepest one—in the kitchen ­cabinets. Finally, once a year and usually at the beginning of March, she hauled out the ledger—she still used Alton’s old-fashioned ­ledger—and his calculator and did a year’s worth of bookkeeping all at once before handing the whole shebang over to the accountant to sort out the taxes.

  She and Alton had lived carefully if not exactly frugally. Having seen too much of what happened during the Depression, Alton had stayed away from the stock market. He had derided it as “gambling with other people’s money.” And he hadn’t gone looking for investment schemes with high returns, either. But he did believe in banks. The tiny returns that came back on savings accounts were fine with him. He had created several and assigned a label to each—Household, New Car, Travel, Emergency, Home Improvement. Once one of them was full to the extent that it didn’t exceed FDIC limits, he went on to create the next one, and the next, and the next—five in all. When it came time to pay bills, he—and, later, Betsy—would transfer the necessary amounts from the proper account into the checking account where Social Security checks were automati
cally deposited.

  With the farm long since paid for, most of Betsy’s day-to-day bills could be handled by that without having to resort to taking funds from one of the named accounts. When she did have added expenses, like the credit card bills for her trips to and from DC to look after Athena and also her trip to Arizona for the wedding, those were transferred over on an as-needed basis only. Since those occasional expenditures were few and far between, Betsy had zero concerns about running out of money in her lifetime, just the way she and Alton had intended.

  It was only February, a month earlier than usual, but since Betsy had to visit the various banks later on in the day anyway, she decided she could just as well get the onerous bookkeeping chore over and done with. Steeling herself for the task with a first cup of coffee on the table next to her and with Princess curled up in a cozy ball at her feet, Betsy settled down to work.

  She dumped the whole drawer upside down on the table, so that the earliest statements would be the ones on top. In the very first statement—in the account Alton had labeled “New Car,” Betsy saw something worrisome. There were four different $250 ATM withdrawal transactions posted to that account in a one-month period—one a week—a thousand dollars gone. The only problem was, Betsy Peterson had never made an ATM withdrawal in her life. She supposed you’d need some kind of card to make that happen, but she didn’t have one. The only plastic she carried of any kind consisted of her trusty Visa and Amex cards, where she always maintained a zero balance.

  With trembling hands, she tore into the next envelope—her Home Improvement account—only to discover the same thing, one withdrawal a week, $250 a shot, four times in the course of the month. And so it went, in every account. Betsy worked in a state of rising fury until she had the whole year’s worth of statements opened and accounted for. And there were the cold hard numbers. In one year, someone had relieved her of $60,000 without her knowledge or consent.

  Too late she realized that Alton had been right to do the accounting every month. Had she done that, she could possibly have limited her loss. But now? Her first instinct was to pick up the phone, dial the first bank, and go to war with the manager. She had the phone in her hand when she thought better of it and put the receiver back on the hook. The bank statements for January had not yet arrived. If she called the bank and alerted them, that might also serve to alert whoever was doing it. She wanted the guilty parties caught and punished every bit as much as she wanted them stopped.

  Instead, she tracked down the phone number for Joe Friday, the guy who had installed what he had explained was something like a distant band of guardian angels there to watch over her.

  “Good morning, Betsy,” he said when he answered. Obviously his caller ID was in good working order. “What’s up?”

  “I’ve been going over my bank statements,” she said. “Someone has been making unauthorized withdrawals all year long in every one of my accounts. They’ve been using ATMs, which I’ve never once used. I’m mad as a wet hen about it, and I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’ll call Stuart,” Joe said. “Believe me, this kind of thing is right up his alley. He’ll be back in touch as soon as possible.”

  When the phone call ended, Betsy reached down, lifted Princess into her lap, and held her close. “See there?” she told the squirming dog. “I wasn’t just being paranoid. Someone really is after me.”

  29

  As Ali drove out of the parking lot, she caught sight of a departing air ambulance. She was relieved to know that both Enid and her baby were flying off to Tucson, well beyond The Family’s reach.

  The Crown Inn Motel just up the street from the hospital was convenient if not particularly inviting. What she needed that morning was a shower and some breakfast. The Crown Inn offered both because it came complete with an attached restaurant, the Pancake Castle.

  The room itself was marginal at best, with a shower that offered little more than a dribble of water and clean but aged towels that were see-through thin. Rinsing the shampoo out of her hair under a chin-high shower head presented a challenge, but she managed to make it work. The mirror over the sink was so short that she had to lean over the basin to see enough of her face to put makeup on. Even so, when Ali stepped out of the bathroom, she felt like a new woman.

  She emerged just in time to hear the end of a phone call. “Okay,” B. was saying. “We’ll stop long enough for breakfast, then I’ll head out. I should be in Cottonwood about the same time the warrants arrive.”

  “Cottonwood,” Ali echoed. “I thought you were driving over to Kingman with me.”

  “Sorry, babe,” he said. “You’re on your own. Warrants issued in Phoenix should be in Cottonwood sometime within the next two hours. I need to be on hand to sign off on them.”

  “That was fast,” Ali observed.

  “It’s Interpol,” B. answered. “The last part of that word may be P-O-L, but in my experience it really should be P-U-L-L. The fact that any number of kids may be in jeopardy means that everybody concerned is jumping through hoops. The warrants give us authorization to dispatch Stu’s drone guy. The FBI has its own drone capability, but our guy is on-site, and theirs isn’t.”

  “I was looking forward to having you along to back me up when I go talk to Alvarado.”

  “Hey.” B. grinned. “Don’t forget our agreed-upon division of labor. Stu, Cami, and I handle High Noon’s geek stuff; you’re in charge of PR. You make nice with Sheriff Alvarado, and we’ll handle the drone issues.”

  • • •

  Once inside the tackily turreted Pancake Castle, B. opted for the King—a full stack—while Ali took the Queen—a short one. Both breakfasts came with crisp bacon and coffee included. The pancakes turned out to be a bit thick for Ali’s taste and not nearly up to the delectably thin ones her father, Bob Larson, used to serve at the Sugarloaf. Still, Ali downed hers with relish.

  “Oh,” B. said after they ordered. “I almost forgot. Stu just received a message from Joe Friday. Betsy called Joe in a blind panic this morning because she discovered that someone has spent the last year lightening her bank accounts to the tune of some sixty thousand bucks.”

  Ali whistled. “How did they do that?”

  “By making unauthorized withdrawals using debit cards that Betsy somehow didn’t know she had. It started in January of last year. Stu’s in the process of tracking down the dates, times, and ATM locations that were used for the transactions. He’s hoping to locate security tapes.”

  “If the withdrawals started in January,” Ali asked, “how come it went undiscovered for so long?”

  “For one thing, the amounts were small enough that they didn’t raise any red flags. Betsy is one of those people who does all her accounting work once a year, just in time to meet the April 15 IRS deadline. Today was the day she tackled that job, and today is also when she noticed the problem.”

  “Did she go to the cops?”

  “Not yet,” B. said. “Surprisingly enough, she reached out first to Joe, who immediately put Stu on the case. Betsy evidently has issues with some of the local law enforcement folks and came to us instead.”

  “I don’t blame her,” Ali said. “When she was worried that someone had tried to kill her, the local sheriff came right out and told her she was nuts. What about Athena? Has Betsy mentioned any of this to her?”

  “That’s not clear at the moment,” B. answered. “If she had, I’d think Athena would have called to discuss it.”

  “Betsy probably doesn’t want to worry Athena any more than she already has.”

  “In that case,” B. said. “I won’t mention it, either, at least not until I get a clear reading from Stu and/or Betsy.”

  “Good thinking,” Ali agreed.

  Twenty minutes later, Ali hit the road, heading west on I-40. She had spent most of the previous day and all of the night inside the hospital. During that time, the we
ather had taken a turn for the better. For the first twenty miles or so, a tall berm of plowed snow lined the roadway although the pavement was clear and dry. As the road gradually descended in elevation, so did the snow lining the highway until eventually it disappeared altogether. Ali was thinking about her upcoming meeting with Sheriff Alvarado when her cell phone rang.

  “Good morning,” Andrea Rogers said when Ali answered. “I’m slow getting started this morning. I stayed up way too late looking through boxes, and I ended up oversleeping. I turned the alarm off instead of punching snooze and went right back to sleep.”

  “Did you find anything?” Ali asked.

  “Yes and no. Seeing some of the names made me realize we need to computerize those old files. It turns out in some cases, we’re dealing with second- or even third-generation abusers, as in violence begets violence. There’s one family where both the grandmother and her grandson’s spouse have come through the shelter. Unfortunately some files we dismissed as being ancient history are all too current.”

  “Did you find anything leading back to Colorado City?”

  “No, but I did run into Reenie’s ancient computer. It’s a tiny little thing—a Toshiba laptop, one that used those little floppy disks—the hard plastic ones. Why they called them floppies, I have no idea.”

  Ali recalled the long-ago era of floppy floppy disks, but now was no time to go off into a discussion of the history of computer science.

  “So?” she asked.

  “When Irene was starting the shelter, it was a one-woman outfit that operated out of a cubbyhole office down in the basement. She had no clerical help until the YWCA was able to give her a part-time assistant for a few hours a week. Up to then, that computer was all she had. It’s dead as a doornail now, of course, but I found a small file box—a gray plastic container—that’s loaded with floppy disks. There might be something on one of those, but I have no idea how you’d go about accessing the information.”