J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds Mysteries 3-Book Boxed Set, Volume 2: Trial by Fire, Fatal Error, Left for Dead

by Jance, J. A.

  “You mean after you made a complete fool of yourself?”

  Brenda made a face and nodded. “Yes,” she said meekly. “I guess I just got carried away.”

  To Ali’s relief it sounded as though Brenda was genuinely sorry.

  “So yes, I’ll still do it because I told you I would,” Ali said. “I’ll need an address so I can send you the report.”

  “But . . .” Brenda began, then she stopped. “I don’t have an address right now,” she admitted. “I don’t have a computer either. I guess you can send it to my mom’s house.”

  Ali located the piece of paper Brenda had used the night before to jot down her missing fiancé’s e-mail address. “Use this,” Ali said. “That way I’ll have all the information in one place.”

  Brenda scribbled an address on the paper. The waitress came, took their order, and disappeared again.

  “I don’t have much money,” Brenda said, as she handed the paper back to Ali. “How can I possibly pay for a background check?”

  As a customer of High Noon Enterprises, Ali knew she could ask for a routine background check with no charge, but Brenda didn’t need to know that.

  “I’ll tell you how you can pay for it,” Ali said.

  On the way to the restaurant, Ali had decided that she wasn’t going to pull any punches. “You’re a mess right now, Brenda—a wholesale mess. Yes, your fiancé dumped you, but considering the way you look and act right now, I’m not surprised. If you don’t believe me, you might take a gander at yourself in a mirror.”

  Two bright angry splotches appeared on the surface of Brenda’s once-narrow cheekbones. “How can you talk to me like that?” Brenda demanded, as tears of self-pity welled in her eyes. “I thought you were my friend!”

  Ali didn’t relent. “I am your friend,” she declared. “And that’s the very reason I’m telling you this. Your broken-down wreck of a BMW is parked outside. It looks like you’re living in it.”

  At least Brenda had the good grace to look embarrassed. “I lost my apartment,” she said. “Living in my car beats living on the street. What was I supposed to do?”

  “You’re supposed to pull yourself together,” Ali told her. “Find a job, any kind of job. You say you don’t have money, but you had enough money to buy tequila last night.”

  “My mother gives me an allowance,” Brenda said.

  “That allowance isn’t helping you, Brenda. It’s enabling you,” Ali said. “Stop using your mother and stop using whatever else you’re on. I don’t know if it’s just booze or if it’s something more than that. You told me Richard dropped you. I don’t blame him. He probably didn’t want to be involved with an addict. He’s not the one who’s sick or dying. You are. The amount of tequila you put away just last night should have been enough to kill you.”

  Brenda stared into her coffee cup and said nothing.

  “If booze is all you’re on, go to AA,” Ali continued. “If you’re on drugs, go to Narcotics Anonymous. Put yourself in a treatment center if you have to. Get your life back on track. Once you’re clean and sober, if Richard Lattimer is the kind of empathetic guy you seem to think he is, maybe he’ll take you back.”

  Their order came. Instead of touching it, Brenda shoved the plate across the table. Then she stood up and stormed out of the restaurant without touching a bite.

  The waitress came back over. “Something the matter with the food?” she asked, picking up Brenda’s abandoned plate.

  “No,” Ali said. “Something’s the matter with her.”

  The waitress shook her head. “Some people don’t have a lick of sense.”

  A few minutes later, when the waitress brought Ali the bill, the charge for Brenda’s food had been removed. Ali left enough cash on the counter to cover Brenda’s breakfast along with a generous tip. Outside in the parking lot, Brenda’s BMW was long gone.

  At least I tried, Ali told herself. It was the best I could do.

  5

  Peoria, Arizona

  Ali headed back to the academy. She was there in plenty of time to get into her uniform for the early morning session. Some of the swelling had gone down, but the bruise on her cheek was still purple. Ali thought about trying to cover it with makeup but decided against it. She had earned it the hard way; she might as well show it off.

  Cell phones were forbidden during class. The last thing before she went out the door, she turned on her cell phone and called B.’s number. “You’re still in the air,” she said. “I won’t have access to my phone again until after four. You had said something about going out for dinner. I’m ready to stay home. I’m going to call Leland and ask him to pull together a light dinner for tonight. Hope you don’t mind.”

  Then she called Leland and asked him to do just that. “Very good, madam,” he said. “I think a nice chilled fusilli pesto salad would fill the bill. Sam will be glad to have you home. I think she much prefers your company to mine.”

  Sam was Ali’s aging cat, a one-eyed, one-eared, sixteen-pound tabby who had come to Ali on a supposedly temporary basis, which was now comfortably permanent for all concerned.

  “I miss her too,” Ali said with a laugh.

  Off the phone, Ali hurried to the parade ground, where she was dismayed to find Jose Reyes waiting for her.

  “Morning, Oma,” he said with a cheerful grin. “How’s it going today?”

  Jose’s friendly overture, made in public, sent a clear message to those around them that whatever problem he’d had with Ali before was over—at least on his part. She understood that he was enough of a ringleader that if he buried the hatchet, the others would follow suit.

  But that didn’t mean it was completely over. That day, when they went to the shooting range, Ali made sure she had the slot next to Jose’s. When target practice was over, she had beaten him six ways to Sunday. She knew it. He knew it. Neither said a word. They signed off on their respective targets and handed them over to the range instructor.

  On her way to the next class, Ali wondered if the antagonism between them had really been put to rest.

  All things considered, Ali thought, it doesn’t seem likely.

  Barstow, California

  In an unreasoning rage, Brenda Riley slammed out of the Denny’s parking lot with her tires squealing. Her speeding BMW left behind a rooster tail of gravel as she roared into traffic. She missed the entrance to the 101 and decided to stick it out on surface roads rather than taking a freeway. Somewhere along Grand Avenue she finally caught sight of a drive-in liquor store. She stopped at the drive-up window and filled her purse with a collection of three-ounce bottles of tequila—a little hair of the dog.

  Ali Reynolds wanted Brenda to stop drinking? Big deal. Who had appointed Ali Reynolds as the ruler of the universe? What business was it of hers? What right did she have to go around pointing fingers? Brenda Riley would stop drinking when she got around to it—and only when she was good and ready.

  Then since her mother’s credit card was still working, Brenda decided to take the scenic road back home. She stopped for lunch in Wickenburg and ended up having to spend the night when an alert bartender in the Hassayampa River Inn took away her car keys. For Brenda, having her car keys confiscated twice in as many days was something of a record.

  On Saturday morning, Brenda was up bright and early—well, ten o’clock, which was bright and early for her. She ate half a bagel and some cream cheese from the breakfast buffet at the hotel and was on the road as soon as she got her car keys back. She was doing just fine until she made pit stops in Kingman and again in Needles. By the time she was outside Barstow, she was feeling no pain. That was when she drifted off the highway. Without even noticing the rumble strips, she slammed into a bridge abutment and rolled over several times into a dry riverbed.

  Brenda was knocked unconscious. Her seat belt kept her from being ejected from the vehicle, but the sudden force exerted by the belt broke her collarbone in two places. By the time rescuers reached her, she had regained c
onsciousness and was screaming at the top of her lungs. Her nose was broken, as was a bone in her right wrist. There were several cuts on her body as well, some from flying debris from the windshield but others from glass from numerous broken booze bottles, most of them empty, that had gone flying around the passenger compartment of the battered BMW as it finally rolled to a stop.

  One of the early first responders was a San Bernardino deputy sheriff who noticed the all-pervading odor of tequila and took charge. He summoned an ambulance. Once Brenda was loaded into it, he followed the ambulance to Barstow Community Hospital, where he saw to it that the doctors caring for the patient also administered a blood alcohol test, which came back at more than three times the legal limit. That was enough to maintain the deputy’s interest and make his paperwork easier. It was also enough for the alert ER doc to admit her to the hospital for treatment of her injuries as well as medically supervised detox.

  Afterward, Brenda Riley would recall little about her three-day bout with DTs. The acronym DT stands for “delirium tremens,” and Brenda was delirious most of the time. Even with IV drips of medication and fluids, the nightmares were horrendous. When the lights in the room were on, they hurt her eyes, but when she turned them off, invisible bugs scrambled all over her body. And she shook constantly. She trembled, as though in the grip of a terrible chill.

  During her stay at Barstow Community Hospital, Brenda Riley wasn’t under arrest; she was under sedation. She wasn’t held incommunicado, but there was no phone in her room. Besides, when she finally started coming back to her senses, she had no idea who she should call. She sure as hell wasn’t going to call her mother or Ali Reynolds.

  Finally, on day four, the doctor came around and pronounced her fit enough to sign release forms. Once he did so, however, there was a deputy waiting outside her room with an arrest warrant in hand along with a pair of handcuffs. Brenda left the hospital in the back of a squad car, once again dressed in what was left of the still-bloodied clothing she’d been wearing when she was taken from her wrecked BMW—her totaled BMW, her former BMW.

  It didn’t matter how the press found out about any of it, but they did. There were reporters stationed outside the sally port to the jail, snapping photos of her as the patrol car with her inside it drove into the jail complex.

  Sometime during that hot, uncomfortable ride from the hospital to the county jail with her hands cuffed firmly behind her back Brenda Riley finally figured out that maybe Ali Reynolds was right after all. Maybe she really did need to do something about her drinking.

  First the cops booked her. They took her mug shot. They took her fingerprints. They dressed her in orange jail coveralls and hauled her before a judge, where her bail was set at five thousand dollars. That was when they took her into a room and told her she could make one phone call. It was the worst phone call of Brenda’s life. She had to call her mother, collect, and ask to be bailed out of jail.

  Yes, it was high time she, Brenda Riley, did something about her drinking.

  Peoria, Arizona

  Back in Peoria that Friday, Ali Reynolds knew nothing of Brenda’s misadventures in going home. At noon Ali went back to her dorm room to check her cell for messages. Ali understood that the major purpose of academy training was to give recruits the tools they would need to use once they were sworn officers operating out on the street. Weapons training and physical training were necessary, life-and-death components of that process. The rules of evidence and suspect handling procedures would mean the difference between a conviction or a miscarriage of justice.

  Drills on the parade ground were designed to instill discipline and a sense of professional pride. That sense of professionalism was, in a very real sense, the foundation of the thin blue line. Still, some of the rules rankled. There was a blanket prohibition against carrying cell phones during academy classes, to say nothing of using them. In the first three weeks, instructors had confiscated two telephones and kept them for several days as punishment and also as an object lesson for other members of the class.

  Ali had definitely gotten the message. She had taken to returning to her room for a few minutes at lunchtime to make and take calls. That Friday, there was only one text message awaiting her. B. said that he had landed in Phoenix, picked up his vehicle, was on his way to Sedona, and would see her at dinner. That was all Ali really wanted to know.

  On her way back to class, Ali encountered one of her fellow recruits, Donnatelle Craig, out in the hallway. Donnatelle was an African-American woman, a single mother, who hailed from Yuma. She was standing in front of the door to her room, weeping, and struggling through her tears to insert her room key into the lock.

  Ali stopped behind her. “Donnatelle, is something wrong?”

  “I flunked the evidence handling test,” she said. “Sergeant Pettit just told me if I screw up again, I’m out. I can’t lose this chance,” she sobbed. “I can’t.”

  When she finally managed to push open the door to her room, Ali followed her inside uninvited. Donnatelle heaved herself down on the bed, still weeping. Looking around, Ali noticed that, unlike the comfortable messiness of her own room, this one was eerily neat. Nothing was out of place. The only personalization consisted of a framed photo on the small study desk—a picture of Donnatelle flanked by three smiling youngsters, two boys and a girl. The girl, clearly the youngest, was missing her two front teeth.

  “Are these your kids?” Ali asked.

  Donnatelle nodded but didn’t answer.

  “Who takes care of them while you’re here?”

  “My mom,” Donnatelle said.

  Ali didn’t ask about the children’s father. He wasn’t in the photo, and he probably wasn’t in the picture anywhere else either.

  “What did you do before you came to the academy?” Ali asked.

  Sniffling, Donnatelle sat up. “I was a maid, in a hotel,” she said. “But I wanted to do more. I wanted to do something that would make my kids proud of me—something besides making other people’s beds. So I went back to school and got my GED. The sheriff said he’d give me a chance, but I’m not good at taking tests, I’m scared of guns, and Sergeant Pettit has it in for me.”

  School had always been easy for Ali. She aced written exams at the academy in the same way she had aced exams in high school and college. And she had come here with a more than nodding acquaintance with her own handgun and how to use it. Her notable failure with Jose Reyes was the first real black mark on her academy record.

  Donnatelle, on the other hand, had come to the academy with a school record that was less than exemplary, but Ali found her determination to improve herself for the sake of her children nothing short of inspiring.

  “That may be true,” Ali said ruefully, “but I seem to remember you were fine in the hip toss. You threw your guy down and you don’t have a black eye either. Besides I think Sergeant Pettit has a problem with women—any women.”

  Donnatelle sat up and gave Ali a halfhearted smile. “But my guy wasn’t as big or as tough as yours was.”

  “Are you going home this weekend?” Ali asked.

  Donnatelle shook her head. “It’s too far. I’m going to stay here and work on the evidence handling material. They’re going to let me retake the exam next week. As for the gun thing?” She shrugged hopelessly. “I don’t know what to do about that.”

  “Had you ever handled a gun before you got here?”

  Donnatelle shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not ever.”

  “You need to practice,” Ali said. “Spend as much time on the range this weekend as you can.”

  “I was going to, but now I can’t,” Donnatelle said. “They told me the range here is going to be closed because it’s a holiday.”

  “Use a private one then,” Ali said. “Go practice somewhere else.”

  “But where?”

  “Just a minute,” Ali said. She returned to her room and woke up her iPhone. She returned to Donnatelle’s room a few minutes later with a list of
five shooting ranges in the nearby area.

  “Try one of these,” she said. “And next week, when I get back, maybe I can help you with some of the written material.”

  “You’d do that?” Donnatelle asked.

  “Absolutely,” Ali told her with a smile. “After all, the girls on the thin blue line have to stick together, don’t we?”

  Rising from the bed, Donnatelle went into the bathroom and washed her face. Then rushing to keep from being late, they hurried to their next class. When the recruits were finally dismissed at four o’clock on that scorching Friday afternoon, Ali joined what seemed like most of Peoria in migrating north on I-17 in hopes of escaping the valley’s crushing heat. On the way Ali speed-dialed High Noon Enterprises and spoke to Stuart Ramey, B.’s second in command about doing a background check on Richard Lattimer, originally from Grass Valley, California. Ali could have gone directly to B. with her request for information, but she had grown accustomed to dealing with Stuart during B.’s many absences. Besides, Ali assumed B. was probably dealing with a killer case of jet lag and there was a very good chance he was napping. She gave Stuart all the information she could remember from what Brenda had told her. She even dragged out the scrap of paper with the addresses on it and gave that information to Stuart as well.

  “You want me to mail this to that address in Sacramento?” Stuart confirmed. “Do you want a copy too?”

  “Why not?” Ali said. “I’m a little curious about this guy. The idea that he could get a fairly intelligent, accomplished woman to fall for him sight unseen is a little over the top.” Of course, Ali realized that Brenda had severe “issues,” but she was nonetheless baffled. Brenda had, after all, worked as a journalist, albeit the eye candy variety.

  Stuart laughed aloud. “You’d be surprised,” he said. “And you’d also be surprised at the number of requests we get these days that are just like this—somebody checking out the real deal of the new person who’s supposed to be the love of his or her life.”