by Jance, J. A.
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Contents
Trial by Fire
Fatal Error
Left for Dead
ALSO BY J.A. JANCE
ALI REYNOLDS MYSTERIES
Edge of Evil
Web of Evil
Hand of Evil
Cruel Intent
JOANNA BRADY MYSTERIES
Desert Heat
Tombstone Courage
Shoot / Don’t Shoot
Dead to Rights
Skeleton Canyon
Rattlesnake Crossing
Outlaw Mountain
Devil’s Claw
Paradise Lost
Partner in Crime
Exit Wounds
Dead Wrong
Damage Control
Fire and Ice
J. P. BEAUMONT MYSTERIES
Until Proven Guilty
Injustice for All
Trial by Fury
Taking the Fifth
Improbable Cause
A More Perfect Union
Dismissed with Prejudice
Minor in Possession
Payment in Kind
Without Due Process
Failure to Appear
Lying in Wait
Name Withheld
Breach of Duty
Birds of Prey
Partner in Crime
Long Time Gone
Justice Denied
Fire and Ice
AND
Hour of the Hunter
Kiss of the Bees
Day of the Dead
Touchstone
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by J.A. Jance
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Touchstone hardcover edition December 2009
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jance, Judith A.
Trial by fire/J.A. Jance.
p. cm.
“A Touchstone book.”
1. Reynolds, Ali (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2.
Arizona—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3560.A44T75 2009
813'.54—dc22
2009015875
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6380-8
ISBN-10: 1-4165-6380-6
ISBN 978-1-4516-7578-8 (eBook)
In memory of Anthony Nadolski and to Ernie Gabrielson, two outstanding Bisbee educators.
TRIAL BY FIRE
PROLOGUE
She awakened to the sound of roaring flames and to searing heat and lung-choking smoke. Maybe she was already dead and this was hell, but why would she go to hell? What had she done to deserve that? Just then a scorched beam fell across her leg, and she felt the horrifying pain of burning flesh—her burning flesh. That’s when she knew wasn’t dead. She was still alive. And on fire.
She tried to shake the burning two-by-four off her leg but it was too heavy. It wouldn’t budge. She tried shoving it away and managed to move it a little, but in the process her hand caught fire as well. She tried to sit up, desperate to find some avenue of escape, but the floor around her was a sea of flame. She was barefoot. She couldn’t bring herself to step into the fire. There was nowhere for her to go, no way to escape. It was hopeless. She was going to die.
Falling back onto the bed, she began screaming and praying and coughing, all at the same time. “Please, God. Let it be quick. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Another wooden beam fell. This one didn’t land on her directly, but as the hungry flames licked away at it, she knew they were really searching for her. The pain was all around her now. Her whole body was on fire. Somewhere, far beyond the flames, she heard something else—the sound of breaking glass. Was there glass in heaven?
“Hello,” a voice called. “Where are you?”
Why is He asking that? she wondered. God knows everything. He must know where I am.
Then, unexpectedly, a mysterious figure clothed all in yellow or maybe even orange rose up silently out of the flame and smoke. He was holding his arms stretched out toward her, reaching for her.
Not God after all, she thought despairingly. Satan. I really am in hell.
Darkness fell and there was nothing at all.
CHAPTER 1
On a gorgeous mid-May morning with temperatures still in the seventies, all was right with Ali Reynolds’s world. The cobalt blue sky overhead was unblemished by even a single cloud, and Sedona’s towering red rocks gleamed in brilliant sunlight.
The seemingly endless remodeling project on Ali’s recently purchased Manzanita Hills Road house had finally come to an end. The workers were gone, along with their trucks and their constant noise. Now, seated on her newly refurbished flagstone patio and surrounded by an ancient wisteria in full and glorious bloom, she was enjoying the peace and quiet, as well as a third cup of freshly brewed coffee, while she worked on a speech, a commencement speech actually, that she was due to deliver at not one but two high school graduation ceremonies at the end of the week.
How she had gotten roped into doing two commencement speeches one day apart was a wonder to her still.
A year or so earlier Ali had agreed to take the helm of the Amelia Dougherty Askins Scholarship Fund, a charitable entity that helped provide financial assistance for college expenses to deserving students from schools all over Arizona’s Verde Valley. Though she was once an Askins Scholarship winner herself, this was Ali’s first year of administering the program. The time-consuming process of searching out and evaluating likely recipients had put her in touch with students, teachers, and administrators from a number of local schools.
Ali’s ties to Sedona Red Rock High School had to do with the fact that both her son, Christopher, and her new daughter-in-law, Chris’s bride, Athena, taught there. When it came time to cajole Ali into agreeing to speak at commencement, her son and daughter-in-law had known just which strings to pull.
Although Sedona was Ali’s hometown, Sedona Red Rock wasn’t her actual alma mater, since there had been no high school in Sedona at the time Ali was an eligible student. Instead, Ali and her classmates had been bused to nearby Cottonwood, where they had attended Mingus Union High School and where Ali’s favorite teacher had been the head of the English department, a gruff but caring character named Ernie Gabrielson. Once word leaked out that Ali had been scheduled to speak at Sedona’s graduation
ceremonies, a delegation had been sent requesting that Ali do the same for Mingus. Hence the two separate invitations. The two events, however, required only one speech, and Ali had been working on it for several days.
She wanted her talk to be fun and meaningful. Ali had graduated from high school and gone away to college. After obtaining her degree in journalism, she had gone off to work in the world of television news, first reporting and then anchoring newscasts in Milwaukee, New York City, and finally L.A. She had returned to her hometown in the aftermath of losing both her anchor position and her philandering husband, Paul Grayson. Her initial intention had been to stay in Sedona just long enough to regroup, but now she had settled back into small-town life and was reveling in it. She was glad to be out of the constant hustle and bustle and traffic of L.A., and she was enjoying living close to her parents and her son.
That was part of what she wanted to say to the graduates later this week, on Thursday evening in Sedona and on Friday in Cottonwood—that it was fine for students to leave home in order to further their educations and make their marks in the big, wide world—but she also wanted to tell them that it was fine for them to stay at home or to come back home eventually, bringing with them the benefit of both their education and their hard-won experience, which they could then apply to problems and opportunities that existed in their own backyards.
Lost in thought and concentrating on the work at hand, Ali was surprised when her majordomo, Leland Brooks, cleared his throat and announced, “Excuse me, madam, but you have a visitor.”
For the better part of fifty years, Leland had managed the house on Manzanita Hills Road, first for the previous owner, Arabella Ashcroft, and for her mother. Now he did the same thing for the new owner. During Ali’s massive remodeling project he had served as the on-site supervisor. Now he mostly supervised Ali. She didn’t require much supervision, but she’d grown too fond of Leland Brooks to consider putting him out to pasture.
Ali looked up in time to realize that the guest in question, Gordon Maxwell, had followed Leland onto the patio. Maxwell was sheriff of Yavapai County, and he certainly looked the part. He was dressed in a crisply starched khaki uniform and held a white Stetson gripped in one hand. A loaded pistol, a 9-millimeter Smith and Wesson M&P in its molded scabbard, was strapped to his right hip. Weaponry aside, he looked like a man who could handle himself.
For one thing, he was large. The heels on his highly polished snakeskin cowboy boots added an extra inch or so to his barefoot height of six foot six. Ali estimated him to be somewhere in his early sixties, but he had the physique and carriage of a much younger man. If he had worn the Stetson instead of carrying it around, it would have completed the impression of youthfulness by covering his bald head. On his chest was a silver star and a name tag that said Sheriff Maxwell. The presence of that white hat, worn or not, served notice to one and all that Gordon Maxwell was one of the good guys.
“Morning, ma’am,” he drawled in greeting. “Hope you don’t mind my dropping by unannounced like this.”
Ali could tell from the disapproving frown on Leland’s forehead that her butler most certainly minded. In Leland Brooks’s world, well-mannered guests never dropped by uninvited; it simply wasn’t done. Sheriff Maxwell, however, had apparently failed to get that particular memo. Ali knew that since the sheriff lived miles away in Prescott, the county seat, he couldn’t exactly claim that he was simply in the neighborhood and decided to drop in. No, he had come to see Ali on purpose, and he hadn’t called in advance because he was worried she might try to dodge him.
“No,” Ali said at once, clearing her laptop out of the way. “Of course not. Please have a seat. Would you care for coffee?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Maxwell said. “A cup of coffee would be greatly appreciated.” With that he eased his lanky frame into one of the empty patio chairs and then set his hat carefully, with the crown down, on the seat of another.
Ali nodded in Leland’s direction. With only the smallest disapproving shake of his head, the butler picked up Ali’s empty mug and bustled off to fetch coffee while Ali turned to her visitor.
“To what do I owe this honor?” she asked.
Sheriff Maxwell looked both thoughtful and uncomfortable at the same time. “It’s to whom,” he said finally, with the kind of carefully chosen grammar that would have done Mr. Gabrielson proud. “Not to what. And the real answer to your question would be your friend Detective Holman. I suppose he’s told you that my department has been through a bit of a rough patch recently.”
It was true that Dave Holman had mentioned the sheriff’s department’s difficulties, but so had everyone else. The story had been the talk of the town, from the Sedona post office to the lunch counter at the Sugarloaf Cafe, a neighborhood diner run by Ali’s parents, Bob and Edie Larson.
According to local gossip, a longtime evidence clerk named Sally Harrison had come under suspicion of hijacking some of the drugs that had been left in her charge. When the alleged thefts finally became known, her boyfriend, Devon Ryan, a deputy who not only happened to be the department’s media information officer but was also still married to someone else at the time, had decked an overly inquisitive reporter from the Flagstaff daily newspaper, the Coconino Courier. Oscar Reyes, the reporter in question, had turned up at a press conference with plenty of questions about the alleged thefts, but also with pointed questions about the couple’s illicit affair. The press conference altercation had gone from verbal to physical. Now both the evidence clerk and the media relations officer were off work on administrative leave while the reporter, more outraged than physically hurt, was supposedly in the process of filing suit against Devon Ryan as well as the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department.
“So I’ve heard,” was all Ali said.
Maxwell nodded. “I’m afraid that reporter from Flagstaff isn’t the only one with a black eye over this. The county attorney is hinting around about making a settlement with him. If that happens, the voters will have my balls.” Suddenly aware of his slip, he said, “Oops, please excuse my blunt language. The truth is, both Harrison and Ryan were working for the department long before I was elected to office, but that’s not going to count in my favor. As far as people in the county are concerned, riding herd on my employees is my responsibility. They’ll say I wasn’t supervising them properly.”
Ali knew that was true as well. It was exactly what people around town were already saying, including Ali’s mother, Edie Larson; but that bit of gossip didn’t explain why Sheriff Maxwell was here on Ali’s patio, staring off across the valley at some of Sedona’s most spectacular red rocks.
Before anything more could be said, Leland Brooks marched onto the flagstone patio carrying a fully laden tray. Ali noticed at once that Leland was taking a butler’s revenge on their impromptu guest: rather than the casual everyday dishes, he had loaded the tray with a pair of tiny, carefully ironed napkins and Ali’s good Limoges Bélème-pattern china. Ali knew at once that the oversized fingers on Sheriff Maxwell’s meaty paws would barely fit inside the handles of those delicately shaped cups.
Without a word, Leland unloaded the tray, depositing napkins, bread plates, and silverware along with a platter of freshly baked cookies onto the patio table’s glass top. Then, after serving the coffee, he returned to the house.
Maxwell watched him go with a bemused expression on his face. “Didn’t he used to work for Arabella Ashcroft, and for her mother?” Maxwell asked as he stirred a pair of sugar cubes into his coffee.
“He works for me now,” Ali replied civilly, but she wasn’t about to reveal any more than that about her domestic arrangements. Besides, Leland Brooks wasn’t the only one who was more than a little put out by Sheriff Maxwell’s taking the liberty of dropping by her place uninvited, especially when she was impatient to get back to work on her speech. If the man’s visit had a point, he had yet to set about making it, and Ali thought it was high time he did.
“Why exactly are you here?” she
asked.
Maxwell shifted in his chair. He reached for his Stetson as if considering holding it in front of him as a shield. Then, sighing heavily, he left the hat where it was.
“My two miscreants—Sally Harrison and Devon Ryan—are off on administrative leave right now. They’ll stay that way as long as the charges against them are being investigated. That leaves my department shorthanded, but I can’t hire permanent replacements until the situation has been resolved. If it goes the way I think it will, they’ll both get their walking papers.”
Listening to him, Ali still wondered what any of this had to do with her.
“I’ve got someone on my staff who can take up the slack in the evidence room,” Maxwell continued, “but the media relations problem is a white horse of a different color. Ryan made quite a mess of it, and our recent history with the press is such that no one inside the department is willing to step up to the plate.”
Ali was beginning to get the picture, and she was astonished. “Are you asking me to take on the media relations job?”
Maxwell nodded and then took a sip of his coffee. Hanging on to the tiny cup with one pinky finger poking out in the air made him look as silly as Leland Brooks had intended. Finally he gave up and engulfed the tiny cup in one massive hand.
“On a temporary basis,” Maxwell added, after carefully returning the cup to its matching saucer. “Of course, we can’t pay you nearly what you earned when you were a television news anchor out in California, but you used to be a reporter, Ali. You know how those people think. You know what they want, and you’ll know how to handle them.”
“I’m not a cop,” Ali said. “Never have been.”
Maxwell gave her the smallest grin. “There have been several times the last couple of years when you could have fooled me.”
It was true. Since returning to her hometown, Ali Reynolds had found herself in one scrape after another, sometimes dealing with some very bad people. The previous winter she and her mother had helped bring down a serial killer, but that had all come about through her being in the wrong place at the wrong time.