by Jance, J. A.
“Right at the end of my shift. Around four thirty or so.”
“Is there another driver who might have dropped something off earlier?”
“Not with UPS. This is my territory. As for what time I delivered it? I have a computerized log. I have to enter where and when I drop off anything. I’m definitely sure of when I made Richard’s delivery.”
“Why did you leave the package on the porch? Was there anyone home?”
“There was somebody inside the house. I heard a vacuum cleaner running. It was noisy. She probably didn’t hear the bell.”
“She?” Gil asked eagerly. “A woman? Did you see her?”
“The blinds were closed. All I could see was the entryway. I just assumed that Richard had finally gotten around to hiring himself a cleaning lady. I guess it didn’t have to be a woman, though, huh? Anyway, I figured he’d got some kind of help. He sure needed it. He wasn’t the best housekeeper in the world.”
That, Gil thought, is an outrageous understatement!
“Thanks, Mr. Frost,” he said aloud. “You’ve been most helpful.”
Gil closed his phone, marched back into the house. He stopped by the entryway closet and opened the door. Inside was the old Kirby vacuum cleaner. He left the door open and walked into the living room. By then the body had been zipped into a body bag. Once the body was gone, Gil stopped to chat with the CSI techs who were busily collecting and cataloging computer equipment.
“Found several fingerprints for you,” Cindra said. “Including a real clear one on the tape on the victim’s mouth. Could be the victim’s, could be the killer’s. We’ll run them through AFIS as soon as we can.”
“Good,” Gil said. “The sooner the better. While you’re at it, be sure to pick up the vacuum cleaner in the entryway closet. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find something useful inside the bag, like a missing finger, for instance. Oh, and dust it for fingerprints as well.”
28
Salton City, California
Lola Cunningham had been a good cook, an excellent cook, actually, and she had been thrilled to pass those skills along to her adopted daughter. And in an effort to make Mina feel at home, Lola had tracked down a traditional Croatian recipe for punjene paprike, stuffed green peppers, and made it her own.
There was a lot about her adopted family and being in the Cunningham house that was repugnant for Mina, but she had loved being in the kitchen with Mama Lola, as her mother liked to be called. They would stand in the kitchen together, side by side, talking and laughing as they diced and sliced, chopped and cooked. Had Lola not died of an undiagnosed heart attack the year Mina turned sixteen, everything might have been different. Mina might have been different, but Lola’s unexpected death had changed everything.
Today though, once Mark finished burying the ashes from the Weber grill, he’d probably return to the couch. Morosely silent, he’d sit there, drinking and watching some inconsequential golf tournament while Mina bustled around the kitchen. She prepared the stuffed peppers the same way Mama Lola had done—well, almost the same way—making two separate batches, one for Mark and one for Mina.
Working in the kitchen always made Mina happy. She hummed a little tune as she ground up the necessary ingredients—the beef and the pork and the onions—that would go into the green peppers she had brought home with her from San Diego for this very purpose. Finding decent green peppers or decent anything else in the godforsaken little grocery store in Salton City was pretty much impossible. She estimated that the extra doses of seasonings she added to the mix should be enough to conceal a few other things.
As she hacked the tops off peppers, Mina found herself thinking fondly of Richard. He had surprised her and proved to be far more of a man than she ever would have expected. She was sorry not to have the money back, but even so, Richard had won a measure of respect from his killer that he probably would have appreciated if he had lived long enough to know about it.
As for Mark? He was useless, spineless, and boring. His money had been a major part of his appeal. Now that the money was gone, so was the attraction. She enjoyed the prospect of torturing him with the idea that she expected him to take care of Brenda single-handedly and that she wanted him to do it tonight. It would be immensely entertaining to see him sitting there stone-faced while he struggled to come to terms with the very idea. She didn’t doubt that he’d need to fill himself with some kind of liquid courage—gin most likely, gin on the rocks with a twist of lime.
Just to keep him off balance, she would pretend that everything was fine and that she believed that he’d do what she wanted. Wasn’t that why she was hustling around in this grim little kitchen fixing him a sumptuous dinner?
Whenever Mina noticed that Mark’s drink needed refilling, she would pick up his glass without being asked. And later, along with the brimming glasses, she would hand him one of his little blue pills. After all, Mark was an older man with a drinking problem and a much younger wife. In the shorthand of their marriage, the proffered drink was a peace offering. The little blue pill would be a bribe.
San Diego, California
Brenda awakened in the dark. She was stiff, hungry, and agonizingly thirsty. While she had been asleep, she had evidently shifted positions. The weight of her body had been resting on her imprisoned hands. As circulation returned to her hands and fingers, so did a storm of needles and pins.
“I’m going to die,” she said aloud. Her voice was an unnatural croak. “I’m going to die here and alone and in the dark.”
She would have wept then, but she didn’t want to risk losing whatever moisture might be in her tears.
Her aching shoulder reminded her of her uncle Joe. She hadn’t thought about her father’s brother in years. Uncle Joe had come home after five years of being a POW of the Vietcong. His teeth were gone—broken out—and his broken limbs never healed properly. He had ended up in a wheelchair, but he had never complained. Brenda had asked him about his experiences once when she’d been putting together a Veteran’s Day piece for the news.
“Yes, it was hard,” he said, “but all I had to do each day was choose to live.”
Returning to the States, he had refused to accept the idea that his life was over. He had gone back to school and married his high school sweetheart. He had gone on to become a teacher and a winning football coach who had taken his team to championship games year after year. He had also been the kindest and most amazingly positive man Brenda had ever met. Could she be like him?
Lying there alone, Brenda couldn’t help thinking about how far she had fallen short in that regard, and she had no one to blame but herself. Losing her job and her marriage and being betrayed by Richard Lowensdale were nothing when compared to what Uncle Joe and his fellow wartime captives had endured. Unlike Uncle Joe, Brenda had capitulated. And now, when she was finally sober and getting back on her feet, this happened.
But what is this? she wondered.
Did it have something to do with Richard or with the book she was writing about him? The days before waking up in this place seemed shrouded in fog. Maybe one of the women she had interviewed had gone back to Richard and told him about Too Good to Be True, the book Brenda was writing. But this wasn’t Richard’s house. It couldn’t be. This cold, hard floor was too clean.
Thinking about the unfinished book brought Brenda back to her mother. Even if she didn’t let on to her sister, Brenda knew that she should have told her mother about the sale. It had been easier to keep quiet. She had kept everything about the book—her research materials, the signed contract for Too Good to Be True, and her laptop under lock and key in what had once been her mother’s hope chest. She had carried the key with her, in her purse, because she had worried that someone—one of her mother’s caregivers or even her sister—might go prying. But now her purse was gone and the key was gone. The only way anyone would be able to gain access to the chest would be to break the lock.
Brenda understood the huge debt she owed to her mother—finan
cially and emotionally—and she fully intended to pay it all back. But not just yet. Brenda had known instinctively that with her still very fragile hold on sobriety, living on her own might well have been too much.
And so for whatever reason—whatever excuse—Brenda had kept a lid on news about the sale. Now, though, since she was probably going to sit in this chair until she died, that didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
After all, Brenda had disappointed her mother more times than she could count. If Camilla didn’t know about the book, she wouldn’t have any unreasonable expectations. It was a blessing for Brenda to know that her mother wouldn’t be disappointed.
Again.
In the darkness, Brenda drifted into something that wasn’t exactly sleeping or waking. She was a girl again, maybe ten or eleven. It was a Sunday afternoon. She and her older sister were out in the driveway of her parents’ house on P Street, shooting hoops at the basket that hung over the garage door.
Aunt Amy and Uncle Joe had come for dinner. As they were getting ready to go home, Uncle Joe had challenged Brenda’s father to a two-on-two scrimmage, Uncle Joe in his wheelchair and Brenda against Dad and Valerie.
As Brenda fell back asleep—or into something that resembled sleep—she and Uncle Joe were winning.
29
Laguna Beach, California
By the time Ali fought her way through Sunday afternoon traffic from LAX to Laguna Beach, she’d had almost two hours to give further consideration to her conversation with B. She wasn’t over it enough to call him back, but she’d come to realize that he might have had a point. Being found to be in possession of illegally hacked material probably wouldn’t have been a good idea for someone who was a newly appointed officer in Sheriff Gordon Maxwell’s Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. And it probably would have been a black mark against High Noon’s reputation as a high-profile Internet security entity.
But still . . .
Ali appreciated having a working GPS in her rental car. As she followed the turn-by-turn directions through very upscale neighborhoods, then onto Cliff Drive, and finally onto Lower Cliff Drive, Ali had to laugh at herself. When Velma Trimble had first appeared in the lobby of Ali’s hotel years earlier, she had come in a cab and had sported a patriotic walker. The tennis balls on the legs of her walker were red, white, and blue, and a tiny American flag had been affixed to the handlebar.
Since she had arrived by cab, Ali had assumed she didn’t have a car and was probably too old to drive. Looking up at Velma’s multistoried, controlled-access condo with designated guest parking and spectacular ocean views, Ali could tell right off that Velma T. was anything but impoverished. Even in a down market, a condo that was within walking distance of the beach meant money—plenty of money.
Ali arrived at the gate a few minutes before three, the appointed hour. Once she punched the apartment number and the open code into a keypad, the gate swung open. Off to her left was a path that led to what looked like a covered picnic shelter on the curve of a steep bluff above the cliffs that gave the street its name. In front of her was a lobby complete with a uniformed doorman who called upstairs to announce that “Ms. Reynolds has arrived.”
No, Velma T. might be dying, but she sure as hell wasn’t poor.
Once on the penthouse level on the sixth floor, Ali found there were only two doors—600 and 602. Those two apartments, each with a panoramic ocean view, evidently accounted for the total number of penthouse units. Ali rang the bell on the one marked 602. The ringing bell set off an answering bark from what sounded like at least three canine residents—two large ones and at least one small noisy one.
“Quiet, everyone,” Maddy Watkins ordered sternly. “Get on your rug.”
Silence descended at once. Through the closed door Ali could hear the scrabbling of several sets of doggy paws on parquet floors as the dogs hurried to obey. Moments later, Maddy opened the door.
“Why, hello there,” she said. “If you aren’t a sight for sore eyes.” Then, turning back toward the room, she said, “Velma, you’re not going to believe it. Ali Reynolds has arrived in the flesh.”
Maddy took Ali’s arm and led her into what had once been a gracious living room but was now a hospice ward. There was a hospital bed with a rolling hydraulic lifter to aid in getting in and out of bed. There was a hospital-style IV tree and an assortment of other equipment including an oxygen concentrator and a PCA for pain relief. Next to the bed was Velma’s walker with its signature patriotic decor.
The whole west-facing wall was nothing but windows that overlooked a panorama of limitless blue water, and the hospital bed had been placed in a position so that when Velma was in the bed, she could gaze out at that million-dollar view. One of the sliders had been left slightly open, allowing an ocean-scented breeze to blow into the room. Velma sat in a wheelchair that had been parked directly in front of the window. A red, white, and blue afghan covered her legs and helped fend off the draft. She looked gaunt—little more than skin on bones—and the skin that was visible was an alarming shade of yellow that Ali knew indicated the beginnings of kidney and liver failure.
“Oh, good,” Velma said. Her face brightened as she turned from the window to greet Ali. “I’m so glad you’re here. We were about to have our midafternoon round of Maddiccinos.”
“Of what?” Ali asked.
“Frappuccinos made with lots of Bailey’s,” Velma said with a tired smile. “Maddy downloaded the recipe from the Internet, but we can only have those when the nurses are between shifts. They disapprove of my having liquor or coffee, although I can’t see what difference it makes.”
“Coming right up,” Maddy said. She headed for what Ali assumed to be the kitchen. “Come,” she added, speaking to the three dogs who were still on their rug command. They rose as one, Maddy’s now somewhat white-faced, leggy goldens and some tiny ball of fuzz whose canine origins Ali could only guess.
“They do really well together,” Velma said. “Candy is mine. She was a little upset when Maddy’s interlopers first showed up, but now they’re the best of friends.”
Looking around the room, Ali had an instant understanding of why hospice home care was preferable to hospice care anywhere else. Velma was at home in her familiar surroundings. Her dog was here. Her stuff was here. Her view was here, and so was her good friend Maddy and her two dogs. What could be better?
From the kitchen, Ali heard the squawk of a blender as Maddy Watkins mixed the unauthorized treat. Ali moved aside a scatter of Sunday newspapers that littered half a nearby couch and took a seat.
“I’m so sorry . . . ,” she began lamely, but Velma waved the comment aside.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” she said. “I’ve had a good run. They’re doing a good job of pain management. That was what scared me most—that I’d be in a lot of pain, but I’m not, and I’m reasonably lucid most of the time.”
Maddy emerged from the kitchen carrying a tray filled with three rocks glasses filled with generous helpings of mocha-colored drinks. The dogs, having recovered from the arrival of a newcomer, followed docilely at her heels and arranged themselves around the room. Candy scrambled up into Velma’s lap, Aggie settled comfortably near the wheel of Velma’s chair, while Daphne shadowed Maddy as she bustled around the room delivering drinks.
“Make that lucid some of the time,” Maddy corrected with a smile as she settled on the far end of the couch. “But when she sets her mind to it, she can still beat the socks off me at Scrabble.” She held up her glass. “Cheers.”
Ali raised her glass along with the others and tried not to notice the visible tremor in Velma’s hand as she lifted her drink to her lips and took a tiny sip. Then she set the glass down on a nearby tray and smiled. Ali tried her drink. It tasted of coffee and chocolate and maybe a hint of whiskey, but not much more than that. Ali suspected that there was probably a thimbleful of booze in the whole blender pitcher.
“The nurses really do disapprove,” Velma said. “They think Maddy
is a bad influence.”
Maddy raised her glass in another toast. “I am a bad influence,” she agreed. “And the nurses are unanimous in their belief that a sickroom is no place for dogs, but isn’t that what friends are for—to cause trouble whenever possible?”
Both women laughed at that, comfortably, the way only old friends can laugh, although Velma’s laughter ended in a fit of coughing. When the spasm passed, she picked up an envelope from the same table where she had placed her glass.
“Here,” Velma said, holding it in Ali’s direction. “This is for you.”
As Ali stood up to take the proffered envelope, her silenced iPhone vibrated in her pocket, but she ignored it. The envelope was made from thick linen-based paper and had Velma’s name elegantly embossed on the flap. Ali’s name was on the front, written in spidery, old-fashioned handwriting—Spencerian script.
“What’s this?” Ali asked.
“Go ahead. Open it,” Velma urged.
Inside Ali found a single piece of paper—a printed cashier’s check in the amount of $250,000 made out to the Amelia Dougherty Askins Scholarship Fund. The scholarship program, established in honor of the mother of one of Sedona’s movers and shakers, was designed to help young women from Arizona’s Verde Valley go on to college. As a high school senior, Ali had gone to school on an Askins scholarship. Now, in adulthood, she administered the scholarship that had once benefited her.
Ali looked at Velma in surprise. “Thank you,” she said, “but this is a lot of money. Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Absolutely,” Velma confirmed with a nod. She took another sip of her drink, and it seemed as though she was somehow reenergized, more vital.
“I can say with a good deal of confidence that my son won’t like it. As far as he’s concerned, everything I have should come to him. Everything else will go to him, but I’ve noticed over the years that Carson is far more interested in accumulating than he is in doing—like a kid who collects marbles but never plays with them. Carson had the misfortune of being born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and I’m afraid he’s never gotten over it. You, my dear Ali, come from humble stock. I know the kind of impact receiving that scholarship had on your life and on the lives of countless other deserving young people. I don’t want that well to run dry.”