Trial by Fire

by J. A. Jance

  “Company car?” Ali asked.

  Maxwell grinned at her again. He knew she wouldn’t be asking that question if she hadn’t already made up her mind to take him up on his offer. What they were doing now was negotiating terms.

  “I saw that nifty blue Porsche Cayenne of yours as I came up the driveway,” he said. “Your helper was in the process of detailing it. Believe me, none of the vehicles in the department’s fleet would measure up to that. I’m afraid you’d need to use your own wheels and settle for a car allowance. You’ll need to keep track of your mileage.”

  “Of course,” Ali said. “What about a radio?”

  “It’ll take some time, but we’ll set you up with the same kind of communications equipment our plainclothes people use, although you may not want a radio permanently installed in your vehicle. We’ll also equip you with a Kevlar vest, which will need to be worn at all times when you’re working for us—except when you’re in the office, that is. Oh, and you’ll need a complete contact list.”

  Will need, Ali noted. Not would need.

  In other words, Maxwell knew that he had hooked her. Now he was going for the assumed close.

  “When would I start?” Ali asked.

  Sheriff Maxwell looked enormously relieved, as though a huge weight had been lifted from his broad shoulders. “Anytime,” he said, getting to his feet and donning his Stetson. “The sooner the better.”

  He left then, sauntering away across the patio. Watching him go, Ali had no idea how much her life had just changed—in ways she could never have envisioned.

  CHAPTER 2

  In the end, Ali’s cheering section sorted itself out in exactly the way she had expected. She went to the Sugarloaf that very afternoon to give her parents the news. Edie Larson was thrilled.

  “Will you have your own badge?” she wanted to know.

  “I suppose,” Ali said. “An employee ID badge to wear in the office and a wallet with a badge and another ID to carry in my purse.”

  “It’s a good thing you already have your Glock and your Taser,” Edie continued. “I’m really proud of you. This is great.”

  Ali’s dad, Bob Larson, wasn’t nearly as happy to hear it. Looking aggrieved, he folded both hands across his chest—including the one that still held a spatula.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “You were such a sensible kid growing up. What I can’t understand is why, as an adult, you’re always dead set on getting yourself into all kinds of hot water. Why can’t you be as levelheaded as your mother?”

  Ali almost laughed aloud at that one. Her father was the levelheaded one. Her mother was not.

  After calling first to make sure it was okay for her to stop by, Ali went next to Chris and Athena’s house—her old house on Andante Drive—to tell the kids her news.

  Chris reacted stoically. “Are you sure this is what you want to do, Mom?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Ali answered with a nod. “I’m sure.”

  “Then go for it,” Chris said.

  Athena’s enthusiasm mirrored Edie Larson’s. “You’ll be great,” she said. “And from what I’ve heard, that Devon guy is a real piece of work. Sally Harrison isn’t the only ladylove he has on the side. With any kind of luck he’ll be going down the road on a permanent basis.”

  As for Dave Holman? Ali called and invited him to stop by for dinner that very night. He arrived holding a somewhat forlorn bouquet he had snagged from what was left in the flower section of Safeway. He had gone there to raid the deli section so he could make a single-dad dinner for his two school-aged daughters.

  “You’re not mad at me, are you?” Dave asked warily as he handed Ali the flowers. “For interfering in your life, I mean?”

  Ali handed the flowers over to Leland, who gave them a disparaging look and then set off for the kitchen with the bedraggled bouquet in hand. No doubt he’d get rid of the faded flowers and sort the rest into something a bit more appealing.

  “I take it you’ve already heard the news?” Ali returned.

  Dave nodded. “Gordy was delighted—and relieved.”

  “Gordy?” Ali repeated. “That’s what you call Sheriff Maxwell?”

  “Not to his face,” Dave admitted. “But he’s not getting a fair shake on this one. The previous administration left him encumbered with a pile of deadwood—Devon Ryan being the worst case in point. Due to civil service rules he can’t just dump the guy, but Sheriff Maxwell needs some help cleaning up the mess—someone from the outside, and someone with a little class.”

  “Namely me?” Ali asked.

  Dave grinned. “Absolutely.”

  He poured two glasses from the opened bottle of Coppola claret Leland had liberated from the vin ordinaire section of her ex-husband, Paul Grayson’s, extensive wine collection. Taking their wineglasses with them, Dave and Ali retreated to the patio while Leland finished cooking.

  “So when do you start?” Dave asked.

  “Next week,” she said. “In the meantime I have those two commencement speeches to give. I’m still working on them.”

  “What are you going to say?”

  “To the graduates?” Ali asked.

  Dave nodded.

  “That regardless of what their high school experience may have been, unqualified success or miserable failure, the world beyond high school is entirely different. They should go out into that world and explore it—see what there is to be seen and get their education. But eventually I hope some of them will feel compelled to come back home with whatever they’ve learned.”

  Dave took a thoughtful sip of his wine. “After all,” Ali added, “that’s what you did.”

  “I suppose,” he said.

  “That’s also the real reason I had to say yes when Sheriff Maxwell asked me to help out,” she said. “Either that or face the fact that I’m a complete hypocrite.”

  “You wouldn’t be a hypocrite even if you’d turned Sheriff Maxwell down cold,” Dave said. “That’s not who you are.”

  “Thanks,” Ali said, smiling and accepting the compliment. “But what’s it going to be like? He says he wants me to shadow him next week and get an idea of what’s going on—sort of like one of those new waiters who follow the old ones around, smiling a lot but never touching a plate. I’m not looking forward to that. I have a feeling the people who are there already won’t exactly welcome me with open arms.”

  “They don’t have a leg to stand on,” Dave pointed out. “None of them was willing to step up and take on the job, even when it was offered. Besides, you’re a consultant, remember? That word alone conceals a multitude of sins. You’ll be fine.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Ali said, but Leland appeared in the doorway just then to announce that dinner was served. Since there was no point in agonizing over what might or might not happen in the future, Ali stood up and led the way into the house.

  “Let’s go eat,” she said. “No sense letting it get cold.”

  That night, long after Dave left, Ali lay awake and thought about the twists and turns of her life. She had been devastated when her television broadcast career had been ended without warning. She had walked away from her marriage to an adulterous spouse expecting to leave with her dignity and a reasonable property settlement. Her financial situation had changed remarkably when Paul Grayson was murdered prior to finalizing their divorce. As Paul’s surviving spouse, Ali had been left with far more financial security than she had ever expected. It wasn’t really necessary for her to go looking for work, but it seemed that, in this case, work had come looking for her.

  On Thursday of that week, she delivered the commencement address at Sedona Red Rock High School. After giving what Ali hoped was a motivational speech, she watched with pride as one of her scholarship winners, Marissa Dvorak, rolled her wheelchair across the stage to accept her diploma. The Askins Scholarship award would enable Marissa to attend the University of Arizona, where she hoped to earn a degree that would allow her to work in the field of medical research. />
  As the Sedona High graduating class filed across the stage in alphabetical order, Ali noticed that the school’s second runner-up for the Askins Scholarship, a boy named Ricky Farraday, wasn’t listed in the program. Ali had scratched him from the list when she had learned, through Leland’s efforts, that Ricky had scammed his way into a large financial settlement by staging a phony hate crime. The school district had paid up, but Ali wondered if Ricky had transferred to another school or simply dropped out. He was bright enough, but if other people in the community had caught on to his shenanigans, the kids at school, along with the teachers, might have made life miserable for him—and in Ali’s opinion, deservedly so.

  After the ceremony, Ali posed for photos with Marissa and her adoptive and very proud parents. Then she went home and read through another hundred pages in a book called Street Legal, a textbook on criminal investigative procedures written by a guy named Ken Wallentine. In her previous existence as a television news anchor, she had always believed in being prepared before she did an interview.

  Now, faced with the prospect of being on the other side of the news process—the one being interviewed as opposed to the one doing the interviewing—Ali thought it reasonable to prepare in the same way. That’s where the textbook came in, giving her a crash course in pretrial criminal procedure. Then, on Friday, after reading for most of the day, she gave the commencement address for Mingus Union High.

  When Ali’s speech was over, she watched with undisguised pride as the other of her two scholarship winners received her high school diploma. Haley Marsh, looking confident and determined, strode across the stage in her cap and gown with her almost three-year-old son, Liam, perched on one hip.

  When Ali first met her, months earlier, Haley had seemed defeated and close to giving up. She had enrolled at Mingus Union High as a sophomore—a very pregnant and unmarried sophomore. She and her grandmother had moved to Cottonwood from Oklahoma in the aftermath of the vicious rape that had resulted in Haley’s unintended pregnancy.

  Predictably, Haley’s well-established schoolmates at Mingus Union had treated the new arrival as a social pariah. For the next three years, Haley had soldiered on, persisting in being a good student if not an outstanding one. With her grandmother’s help, she had managed to eke out a decent GPA while also caring for her baby. By Haley’s senior year, however, the strain had taken its toll, and Haley had all but given up on her ambition of becoming a nurse. Her family’s straitened financial situation and her less than top-drawer grades made going on to college seem impossible. Instead, she had expected to use her high school diploma to help her land full-time work at a local discount store.

  Ali’s appearance on the scene and her offer of an Askins Scholarship had changed all that. Suddenly, the possibility of Haley’s attending college was back on the table. By graduation night, Haley’s transformation was a wonder to behold. When Haley reached the principal, who was holding her diploma, she set Liam down beside her long enough to accept it. Taking the leather-bound document in hand, she passed it along to her bow tie–wearing son for him to hold during the principal’s congratulating handshake. While her son opened the diploma and seemed to try to read it, Haley blew a kiss to her beaming grandmother. Haley exited the stage as Liam’s self-possessed performance elicited some good-natured laughter from the crowd, as well as sporadic applause.

  Ali was again drafted into a postgraduation photo session. The process was barely under way, however, when Marissa Dvorak rolled into the middle of it. With a squeal of joy, Liam abandoned his mother and raced over to Marissa, then clambered up into her lap.

  The previous November, shortly after the two scholarship winners had been announced, Ali had arranged for Haley and Marissa to meet. That meeting of the two girls, both of them considered social misfits in their own schools, had proved to be an unqualified success. In the ensuing months the two girls had formed an unlikely but close friendship. They had both been accepted for the fall term at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, where Leland Brooks had succeeded in locating a wheelchair-accessible apartment that would suit them both. And Liam, too, apparently.

  “You have no idea what a blessing Marissa is in our lives,” Haley’s grandmother, Nelda, said, appearing suddenly at Ali’s elbow. “Haley’s never had a friend like that, not a really close friend, not even back home in Oklahoma.”

  “They look like they’re having fun,” Ali said.

  Nelda nodded. “You should hear them. Those two girls are on the phone every night, making plans, talking about what they’re going to do once they get to Tucson. And as you can see, Liam’s crazy about Marissa, too.”

  “That’s clear enough,” Ali agreed with a laugh.

  Shortly thereafter, she and Nelda were summoned both to take pictures and to pose in them as well. When the celebration was over, Ali went back home to Sedona to hit the books—or rather, to hit the book. Now that she and Sheriff Maxwell had come to terms about her salary arrangements, she was due to show up for her first staff meeting on Monday, where her temporary position with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department would be announced.

  It was true that she would be receiving far less than she was accustomed to being paid in the California media world. But this is Arizona, she reminded herself. I’m doing this for my hometown.

  On Monday morning she was up and out. She left the house at six, a good half hour earlier than she needed to depart in order to make the 8 a.m. briefing at the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department on East Gurley Street in Prescott. She was tempted to stop by the Sugarloaf so her mother could wish her luck but, concerned about the long, slow construction zone between Sedona and the Village of Oak Creek, she headed immediately in that direction.

  Ali was on edge during the drive, but that was hardly surprising. She had always been nervous when it came time to start a new job. The trick was to overprepare and then not let anyone else know that she was anything other than ten feet tall and bulletproof.

  Before getting on the freeway, she stopped long enough to shuffle through her music selections—including her Aunt Evie’s extensive collection of musicals. Then, singing along with “I Whistle a Happy Tune” from The King and I, Ali turned south toward Highway 169.

  Part of Ali’s overpreparation plan, beyond studying the police procedure textbook, meant that she had also spent hours learning what she could about the Yavapai sheriff’s office. She knew, for example, that the eight-thousand-plus-square-mile county was divided into three command centers. The main office and jail complex were located in Prescott, but there were also substations scattered throughout the far-reaching jurisdiction that stretched from the outskirts of Peoria, near Phoenix, on the south; to Seligman, to the north; and to Wickenburg, on the west.

  According to what she read, the Media Relations area came under the heading of Technical Services, where it was lumped in with Dispatch. That, too, was headquartered in Prescott. From what Ali read online, she wasn’t able to fathom why Sheriff Maxwell had wanted to bring in an outsider, someone with no law enforcement experience, even on a temporary basis. Ali somehow suspected that there was more behind the move than the purported reason she had been given—that she was being asked to pinch-hit while a long-term and possibly disgraced officer was off on paid administrative leave.

  What’s really at work here? Ali wondered. Sheriff Maxwell was glad she was signing on, and so, evidently, was Dave Holman, but what about everyone else?

  Once she reached Prescott, she parked outside the two-story, modern-looking sheriff’s office on East Gurley Street, then walked into the public lobby of the sheriff’s office.

  “I’m Ali Reynolds,” she said to a clerk stationed behind a glass partition. “I believe Sheriff Maxwell is expecting me.”

  “Just a minute, please. I’ll see if he can see you.”

  The clerk’s words were polite enough, but they were accompanied by such a cold-eyed, dragon-lady stare that Ali found herself wondering if she had spilled coffee down the
front of her blazer.

  The one-minute wait turned into several. A full ten minutes later—and five minutes after Ali had been told to arrive—a young woman finally emerged through a door at the far end of the lobby.

  “Hi,” she said, holding out her hand in greeting. “I’m Carol Hillyard, Sheriff Maxwell’s secretary. You must be Alison Reynolds. He asked me to come find you and bring you back to the staff meeting.”

  That was what she called it—a staff meeting—but when Ali walked into the crowded conference room a few minutes later, the chilly reception made her think she had wandered into a refrigerator.

  She walked into the room to find Sheriff Maxwell standing at a lectern in front of an assembled group of officers and other personnel. “Ah, yes,” he said, nodding in her direction. “Here she is. I’d like to introduce Ali Reynolds, the media consultant I was telling you about. I know some of you are less than thrilled by my decision to temporarily outsource our public information functions, but I think giving ourselves a complete break with the past is the best strategy to allow the department to move forward.”

  “Yes,” an unidentified voice grumbled from the back of the room. “Let’s start by reinventing the wheel.”

  If Sheriff Maxwell heard the sarcastic muttering, he chose to ignore it and continued. “Ms. Reynolds lives in Sedona. As I mentioned earlier, since this is a temporary assignment, I see no need for her to work out of this office on a daily basis, especially considering the ease of communications we have these days—teleconferencing, e-mail, cell phones, and the like. I’ve assigned her office space in the substation at the Village of Oak Creek.

  “She’ll be spending the next few days traveling with me, seeing how we do things, and meeting all of you. Please be so kind as to introduce yourselves to her and let her know what part you play in the big picture. I’m going to expect your complete cooperation in all this. It’s one thing to do the job we do, but our constituents need to hear about it.