Cruel Intent

by J. A. Jance

  “What do you want?” Ali croaked, her voice cracking with a combination of fear and raw emotion. She tried to pull herself together. I can’t let him know how scared I am, she told herself. I can’t.

  “It’s Jacky,” the agent said, as if she couldn’t recognize his voice. “I’ve brought someone along who wants to meet you. You need to meet him, Ali. It’s important. He wants to talk to you about that offer we discussed yesterday. We’ve been looking for you all morning long, traipsing all over hell and gone.”

  The only thing that was important right then was survival. Ali knew that in a fair fight, Jacky Jackson would be no help at all—in fact, he’d be less than no help. But his unexpected and unwelcome presence right outside her door at this exact moment did serve one useful purpose. It made Ali mad as hell, and that helped clear her head and made her focus.

  “Go away,” she ordered. “Leave me out of it. I already told you, I’m not interested.”

  “But you don’t understand,” Jacky wheedled. “This is one of the major players in this deal. He flew in last night for the express purpose of seeing you. He wants to be sure you understand what’s at stake here—what kind of an offer you may be turning down.”

  And what I’m keeping you from walking into, Ali thought.

  “You could be here with the pope himself, for all I care,” Ali returned. “I’m not interested. My answer was no yesterday, and it’s still no today. What part of N-O don’t you understand, Jacky? Go away and leave me alone.”

  “If you let us walk away from here, you’re going to live to regret it,” he said.

  Yes, that may be true, Ali thought, but only if I’m alive long enough to care.

  She waited until the car doors slammed again and the engine turned over. Tires crunched in the gravel of the driveway. By sending Jacky and his friend away, Ali knew that she had saved his weaselly little life and that of his friend as well. Now she needed to save her own.

  “Who are you?” she said to the man. “What do you want?”

  “You tell me,” he replied. Obviously, he was enjoying this dangerous game of twenty questions.

  On the trail of a possible identity thief, Ali and B.’s amateur sleuthing had led them to Singleatheart. This man had evidently doubled back on the same trail and had come looking for them in return—looking for Ali. Devoid of her Glock, all she could do was bluff.

  “You’re from Singleatheart,” she said.

  He smiled again—a chilling grimace that filled Ali’s soul with dread. “I’m just not from Singleatheart,” he told her deliberately. “I am Singleatheart. Who helped you find me? Who helped you destroy my files?”

  “Does it matter?” she said. “And what makes you think I had help?”

  “I know you had help,” he returned. “You may be a lot of things, Ms. Reynolds, but you’re no computer genius. I saw what equipment you have lying around here. There’s a Mac down in the basement—one your son evidently uses—but that’s it. Less than basic.”

  “And I suppose you consider yourself some kind of self-styled computer genius?” Ali replied. “Maybe you are, but once we break your encryption code, we’ll have all your secrets.”

  She knew it was dangerous to taunt him, just as it was dangerous to taunt a coiled rattlesnake, but she couldn’t help herself. She needed to do something to unsettle him. Words were the only weapons at hand.

  “So you didn’t only destroy my files,” he snarled at her. “You stole them.”

  Without warning, he sprang from the couch and crossed the room, brandishing the gun like a club. Before she could raise her hands to defend herself, the blow fell. The weapon slammed into the flesh of her cheek with a tooth-jarring intensity that sent her sprawling, bouncing off the door and sliding across the tiled entryway. As stars exploded in her vision, she came to rest against the legs of the burled-wood table. The room spun and swam around her. Blood spilled from the cut on her cheek and slopped into her eye, blurring her vision that much more. She tasted blood in her mouth as well, and the pain was more than she could imagine. But by then he had grabbed the crewneck of her sweatshirt and was hauling her to her feet.

  “Who helped you?” he snarled.

  He was mere inches away. She could feel his hot breath on her face.

  “No one,” she managed. “I didn’t need any help.”

  “That’s a lie,” he said, shaking her as though she were a rag doll. “You just said ‘we.’ Who’s we?”

  With that, he let loose of her shirt and gave her another powerful shove, one that sent her careening across the room. She landed backward onto the couch, hitting the back of it hard enough that her head snapped whiplash fashion. The room spun around her again. When it stopped spinning, he was looming over her once more.

  “Who helped you?” he repeated. “It sure as hell wasn’t that useless little Brit.”

  For the first time since the confrontation had begun, Ali put it together. This guy was here, in her house. He had driven here in Leland’s truck and let himself in with Leland’s keys. For all she knew, Leland Brooks was lying dead in the basement.

  “What did you do to him?” she managed. “Where is he?”

  “Indisposed at the moment, I’m afraid,” the man replied. “He refused to tell me what I wanted to know. Maybe he didn’t say because he didn’t know. But you do know, and you’re going to tell me!”

  “Where is he?” Ali demanded. “Is Leland hurt?”

  It was all she could do to force the words out past her already badly swollen lips. She wondered in passing if her jaw was broken, but the pain was so intense that it was almost as though she were observing someone else’s battered and bloody body and hearing someone else’s labored voice.

  Staring down at her, he said nothing. The fact that he wouldn’t answer her questions was answer enough. In a moment of appalling clarity, Ali knew that whatever horrors had already been visited on poor Leland Brooks would also be coming to B. Simpson as soon as this monster knew who B. was. And when that happened, Ali knew it would be her fault for dragging Leland Brooks and B. Simpson into this nightmare along with her.

  “Tell me what I want to know!” her tormenter ordered. “Tell me now or else.”

  “Or else what?” she spat back at him. “Go to hell!”

  He reached for her then. She thought for a moment he was going to hit her again, but just then a bell sounded, and it was enough to make him hesitate. The ringing seemed to be coming from the far distance, like the bell signaling the end of a round in a boxing match. It took a moment for her to realize that the sound was coming from her cell phone. It was ringing from the spot inside her bra where she sometimes stowed it. The same place Edie Larson carried hers.

  “Don’t answer that,” her attacker ordered in a hoarse whisper. “Don’t even think about touching it.”

  It wasn’t until he was headed back up I-17 that Dave Holman realized he’d never bothered to turn his phone back on when he’d left the Morrisons’ house after the interview with Jenny. As soon as he turned it on, he saw he had six messages. Four were from the office, telling him with increasing urgency that his warrant was ready, and did he want to be on hand when they went to search Ali Reynolds’s house? Two of the voice mails were from Ali herself. After calling in to the office and letting them know he was on his way, he tried calling Ali back. When she didn’t answer, Dave felt a small surge of relief. He knew that she’d been pissed at him this morning when he’d told her about the search warrant, and she probably still was. He’d talk to her later and try to smooth her ruffled feathers. She had offered to show him files purported to be from Bryan Forester’s computer. And even though he had turned her down, he should probably attempt to revisit that decision. In the meantime, he had another problem.

  Dave now suspected that Bryan Forester had at least one accomplice in the plot to murder his wife. Dave was also thinking that one of those accomplices could have been Matthew Morrison. Sure, Bobby Salazar had sworn that Morrison hadn’t been
behind the wheel of the car turned back in on Monday, but if Matthew wasn’t involved in the Forester homicide, why had he killed himself? Jenny Morrison had taken the position that her husband’s death was accidental. Dave’s homicide-detective gut told him it was definitely deliberate.

  This wasn’t just idle speculation. Dave sensed there was some kind of connection between Matthew Morrison’s dead computer and Bryan Forester’s overwritten files. Someone had made a concerted effort to obliterate the information on three different computers. That meant the data from one of those held an important clue, a key to everything that had happened. All Dave Holman had to do was find it.

  Neither Ali nor the intruder said a word while the phone continued to ring. It was maddening for Ali to know there was someone on the other end of the line. If she answered, there might be enough time for a desperate scream for help. But she knew better. By the time she flipped the phone open, she would be dead. If help came at all, it would come too late.

  After ringing five times, the phone subsided into silence. The man was still standing over her, holding the gun.

  “Who helped you?” he demanded again. “And where the hell are your real computers?”

  Ali didn’t answer. A trickle of coppery-tasting blood ran across her tonsils. As she fought off her gag reflex, her phone jangled again. This time she knew it was announcing a voice mail—a message she didn’t know if she’d ever have a chance to hear, much less return.

  “Get up,” he ordered.

  Ali didn’t move. She couldn’t. After a moment he grabbed her sweatshirt again. Holding it so tightly against her throat that she could barely breathe, he jerked her to her feet and propelled her across the room and into her bedroom. As she stumbled into the room, she caught a glimpse of poor Sam dodging for cover under the bed. That was also when Ali caught sight of Leland Brooks. Duct tape pinned his arms to his body and bound his legs together. From the knees up, he appeared to be soaking wet, and so was the carpeted floor all around him. Trussed, helpless, and absolutely unmoving, he lay on the floor between the bed and the dresser. As far as Ali could tell, he wasn’t breathing. Was Leland unconscious, or was he already dead?

  She struggled and twisted, trying to escape her attacker’s ironfisted grasp. “What have you done to him?” she demanded. “Is he dead?”

  “Not yet, but he will be soon if you don’t give me what I want.”

  She knew from the way the man said it that he wasn’t making idle threats. She knew instinctively that he was a killer who would kill again. He would murder Ali and Leland Brooks in cold blood without a moment’s hesitation.

  “What do you want?” Her lips were almost swollen shut. She could barely speak.

  “I already told you,” he said. “You didn’t just destroy my files, you stole them. How else would you know they were encrypted? I want them back, all of them.”

  Ali said nothing.

  “Even more than my files,” he added, “I want the bastard who did this.”

  And there it was: the automatic and arrogant assumption that whoever had managed to do this to him—to outwit him—had to be a man. In his distorted view of the universe, only another male would be smart enough to catch him.

  By then he had muscled Ali through her bedroom and into the bathroom beyond it. Still holding her sweatshirt bunched at the front of her neck, he reached down long enough to put the gun down on the side of the tub. The bathroom floor was slick with water. The room reeked of vomit, and the bathtub was full almost to overflowing with vomit-spattered water.

  Ali knew then what was coming. “That’s what you did to Leland Brooks?” she gasped. “You forced him underwater?”

  The man nodded grimly. Letting go of her shirt, he twisted her around so her back was to him. “Believe me, if he’d known anything, by the time it was over, he would have told me. The same way you will.”

  “No,” she said, trying to desperately to pull away from him. “You can’t do this. Please.”

  “Of course I can do this,” he returned calmly. “I can do anything I want. Surely you’ve heard of waterboarding. Everyone has these days. If it’s good enough for Islamic terrorists, it’s good enough for you, and it’s pretty much foolproof. When we’re done, it’ll work the same way for me that it does for the CIA. In order to keep from drowning, you’ll tell me everything I want to know.”

  “You’ll never get away with it,” Ali said. “They’ll find you. They’ll put you away.”

  “No, they won’t, my dear. I’ll be long gone before anyone ever finds you or your friend out there. Long gone.”

  Staring down at the bathtub full of water, Ali Reynolds knew one thing that her captor couldn’t possibly know: She was petrified of water; terrified of drowning. As a teenager, she had nearly drowned on an outing to Oak Creek’s Slide Rock. She had knocked herself out on a rock and gone under. She had been unconscious when one of her friends pulled her from the water and pumped the water out of her chest. She had awakened coughing and choking.

  All her adult life, she had avoided swimming pools and hot tubs, and wading in the ocean was totally off limits. She simply couldn’t bear the idea of being at the mercy of those unpredictable waves. She had enrolled Chris in swimming classes early because she had wanted him to be water-safe. She had wanted him to be able to save himself rather than looking to her for help. Only in the last few years, in the safety of this very room, had she forced herself to overcome that fear by facing it—by trying the occasional bubble bath.

  But now the tub had turned into Ali’s worst horror. Staring down at it, she knew what would happen. Once he forced her head underwater long enough for the water to gush into her lungs, she would tell him whatever he wanted to know when she came back up. She would do anything to keep it from happening again—to keep him from doing to her what he had already done to Leland Brooks.

  Who could already be dead, she reminded herself. Who told this monster nothing because he had nothing to tell.

  She knew that Leland Brooks’s fate should have been enough to make her capitulate right then. Maybe that was what her captor had in mind—that simple dread would make her weaker. To her astonishment, it had exactly the opposite effect. A pulse of absolute abhorrence shot through her, filling her body with a physical strength she didn’t know she had.

  Ali fought him then, fought him tooth and nail, biting and scratching in a desperate attempt to maim him, to knee him in the groin or gouge out his eyes. He outweighed her, though. He was taller and far stronger. She knew going in that no matter how hard she fought, eventually, she would lose. That was inevitable.

  Yes, Ali thought as he forced her down on her knees beside the tub and pressed her face toward the water. Dreading what was coming, she took one last desperate gasp of air, filling her lungs as he grabbed the back of her neck and plunged her head underwater.

  Dave Holman’s phone rang again as he approached the exit at Cordes Junction. “Is this Detective Holman?”

  “Yes. Who is this, and how did you get my number?”

  “My name is Simpson—B. Simpson. I run an Internet security firm called High Noon. Ali Reynolds is one of my clients, and I have access to her files. I found your numbers listed in her contact list. Have you heard from her?”

  “From Ali? Not in the last little while,” Dave replied. “I missed a couple of calls from her earlier this morning, but when I tried calling back, she didn’t answer. Why? What’s up? Is something wrong?”

  B. paused before he answered. “I know the two of you have a lot of history,” he said tentatively. “And this would probably be better coming from her, but…”

  “What would be better coming from her?” Dave asked impatiently. “What are you talking about?”

  “I have a name for you,” B. said. “A name for the case you’re working on. The man’s name is Winter—Dr. Peter Winter. I just Googled him. He’s an ER physician at Phoenix General.”

  “Which case would that be?” Dave asked.

  “M
organ Forester’s murder,” B. answered.

  “And how exactly is this Dr. Winter supposed to be related?”

  “Earlier this week I discovered that a worm had taken up residence in Ali’s computer. I was able to neutralize it before it could do any irreparable damage, and we assumed it was just a case of attempted identity theft. A little while ago, Ali brought me a pair of thumb drives Bryan Forester had given her for safekeeping. They contained copies of files from his computer and from Morgan’s as well. The same worm had been planted in the thumb-drive files. If they had been opened on a computer with access to the Internet, those files would have been destroyed, the same way the files were destroyed on the two computers you picked up on your search warrant. Once again, I’ve neutralized the worm before it was able to do any damage.”

  “Wait,” Dave said. “You’re saying the same worm that was on the Foresters’ computers was also on Ali’s? How can you be sure?”

  “How does an epidemiologist know one strain of flu from another?” B. returned. “By analyzing the makeup of the virus that causes each individual case. This is the same thing. All three worms come from the same basic source—in other words, from the same programmer. Had the worm actually been unleashed, the end result would have been slightly different. For instance, the Trojan in Ali’s system was set to simply crash the computer. The worm on the Foresters’ computers was set to overwrite files. But it’s still the same guy.”

  Dave’s heartbeat quickened. The guy was a doctor? That might explain the single unexplained needle mark the ME had found at the back of Morgan Forester’s neck, in a spot where it couldn’t possibly have been self-administered. And now there was another crashed computer? Anxious not to give anything away, the next time he spoke, Dave was careful to keep his voice and his questions firmly neutral. “What does this Winter character have to do with any of this?”

  “That’s the thing,” B. said. “I gave Ali a choice. I told her we could pursue legal recourse, or we could go after the guy on our own.”