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.

  Finally curiosity got the better of him. He called the number. It was two o’clock in California. Four o’clock in Jefferson City, Missouri. A woman answered with an accent so southern that it sounded like verbal honey.

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “He’ll be right here.”

  “Jim here,” a male voice said a minute or so later. “Who’s this?”

  “My name is Gilbert Morris,” Gil said, feeling stupid. “I’m a homicide detective with the Grass Valley Police Department in Grass Valley, California. Someone suggested that I should give you a call and ask you about someone named Ermina Vlasic Cunningham. I’m not sure why.”

  “That’s odd,” Laughlin said. “That’s the second request I’ve had for information about her in as many days. Someone else was asking about her six months or so ago. Long story short, Ermina lived here for a few years with her adoptive parents, Lola and Sam Cunningham. Lola died. Sam supposedly committed suicide. I didn’t buy it then, and I’m not buying it now. I know, as sure as you’re born, that Ermina killed her dad but I’ve got no way to prove it. The inquest ruled Sam’s death a suicide. The daughter was never charged.”

  Gil knew what was coming before he ever asked the question. “How did he die?”

  “He was drunk,” Tom said. “Somebody put a plastic bag over his head and taped it shut.”

  “Holy crap!” Gil said. “And now she may have done it again!”

  He ended the call, opened the earlier message—the one he had ignored—and jotted down Ali’s name and phone number before calling her back.

  “Okay,” he said, “I talked to Laughlin. Where are you? What have you got? How did you make the connection, and are you a cop?”

  Disregarding all Gil’s questions, Ali asked, “Do you have a fax machine?”

  Gil glanced around his clean but bare-bones living room. “Are you kidding? I’m at home. I barely have a microwave. Why?”

  “An iPhone maybe?”

  “Lady, look, if you’re looking for high tech, I’m not your guy. There’s a fax machine at the office. What do you want to send me?”

  “As I told you in my earlier message, Brenda was my friend. On Friday, just before she disappeared, she sent me an e-mail, requesting that I order a background check on Ermina Blaylock. That’s what led me to Detective Laughlin.”

  “You’re not a cop?”

  “No. Not for lack of trying. I made it through the academy but my department furloughed me due to budgetary considerations.”

  Great, Gil thought. An unemployed almost cop.

  “So what are you, then, a glorified PI?”

  “I’m not a PI, and I’m currently in Salton City, east of Palm Springs. I’ve just come from the home of one of Mark and Mina Blaylock’s neighbors. The woman, Florence Haywood, witnessed Ermina burning something in a barbecue grill bonfire in the early hours of Sunday morning. Later on, that same woman—sort of a neighborhood busybody—saw Mark Blaylock dump the ashes into a wheelbarrow and bury them. We used a metal detector to locate the site. It’s marked so we can find it again. Florence was all set to dig it up. I cautioned her that since this might be critical evidence, she needed to leave it as is.”

  Gil thought about that for a minute. “Salton City. What county is that, Riverside?”

  “Imperial,” Ali replied.

  “I’m a city cop. A Grass Valley cop investigating a crime that happened inside my city limits. There’s no way a judge is going to grant me a request for a search warrant in a county that’s half a state away from here so I can try to figure out who killed Richard Lowensdale.”

  “I don’t give a damn about Richard Lowensdale,” Ali told him. “I want to know what happened to Brenda Riley. As far as I’m concerned, those two cases are bound together, but whatever Mark Blaylock was seen burying, it isn’t on private property,” Ali replied.

  “It’s public property?”

  “Yes. It’s out on the beach. No one is going to require a search warrant to dig it up, but in order to maintain the chain of evidence, I need a sworn officer in attendance. You’re my first choice.”

  “Look,” Gil said. “I appreciate the tip, I really do. And I’d like to be there, but it’s not going to happen. I already got hauled into my chief’s office earlier today and bitched out for all the OT I put in this weekend. I was given a direct order to stand down. Based on that, I can’t very well go back to him now and say, ‘By the way, I need to take a four-hundred-mile side trip in hopes of picking up some evidence.’ Besides, even if he said yes, that’s at least a ten-hour trip, most likely longer today. There’ll be lots of people heading home after the three-day weekend.

  “I’m friends with a Nevada County detective named Frank Escobar. Since Brenda Riley’s effects were found in the county, he’s the one assigned to her possible suicide. Maybe he has some connections down where you are.”

  “The more people we involve, the more cumbersome it’s going to be,” Ali told him. “Did I understand you to say you’re off work today? That your chief sent you home?”

  “Yes.”

  “So do me a favor,” she said. “Give me the fax number for your department. There’s a general store here. I already checked. They happen to have a working fax machine. I’ll send you a copy of this report so you’ll have it in hand. I’ll also send you what I have on Richard Lowensdale. Once you read the fax, give me another call. By then maybe I’ll be able to figure out what our next move should be.”

  Our move, he thought. Right.

  But still, Gil had to admit he was intrigued. He had to look at one of his own business cards to come up with the fax number.

  “I need to shower,” he said, after giving it to her. “It’ll take me half an hour or so.”

  “All right,” she said. “Bye.”

  47

  Salton City, California

  The Salton City Pay and Tote was jammed with customers buying drinks, sandwiches, chips, snacks, and gas for their journeys home. Ali waited in line. When she turned over her stack of documents to be faxed, the harassed clerk shook her head.

  “All of these? Can’t you see I’m busy? This is going to take time.”

  Ali took a twenty from her purse and laid it on the counter. “That’s for you,” she said. “I’ll pay for the faxes separately.”

  “Okay,” the clerk said. “Just a minute.”

  It took more than a minute—lots more. The machine was balky. The first three attempts, it cut off after sending only three pages, and each time the clerk started it, she came back to the cash register to help the next person in line.

  While Ali waited, she used her iPhone to scroll through her e-mail account.

  During Ali’s years in California, as the wife of network executive Paul Grayson in a spare-no-expense era, she had made use of his company’s corporate jet connections on numerous occasions. Once the network started cutting costs and shedding “nonessential” personnel, the corporate jets as well as their pilots had been jettisoned at about the same time Ali had been kicked off the air.

  The pilots, most of them former military, were a good bunch of guys. Somehow a few of them had banded together with some other pilots, pooled their resources, and purchased a couple of the network’s stable of secondhand jets. They had used those aircraft to start their own charter service. In turbulent financial times and against all odds, they had started You-Go Aviation and were somehow succeeding at being the low-priced spread in California’s once-thriving private jet business.

  Ali wasn’t sure how her e-mail address had been added to You-Go’s customer mailing list, but she received frequent updates advertising their various specials, one of which was $1,995 an hour all in for charters flying anywhere in California, Arizona, and Nevada. Ali remembered from reading their corporate literature that from You-Go’s home base in Fresno, most flights could be done with a mere six hours’ notice where most other companies required a full twenty-four. When Ali dialed their operations center, she was hoping to take a big ch
unk out of the six.

  The young woman who took Ali’s call sounded dubious when she asked to be put through to Allen Knox, one of You-Go’s cofounders and a pilot Ali had known well back in the old days.

  “I’m sorry,” the call center clerk named Amelia told Ali. “Mr. Knox is our CEO. He doesn’t involve himself in day-to-day flight arrangements.”

  “This is urgent,” Ali said. “My name is Ali Reynolds. Please give him this number.”

  “Today’s a holiday. I may not be able to reach him, and even if I do, I can’t guarantee he’ll call you back.”

  “Just give him the number,” Ali said. “He’ll call.”

  And he did, less than five minutes later—just as Ali was paying off the faxing bill and reassembling her stack of paper.

  “Hey, Ali,” Allen said. “Good to hear from you after all this time. What’s going on?”

  “I’m involved in a possible kidnapping situation,” she said, fudging a little. “In order to maintain the chain of evidence, I need to get a homicide cop from Grass Valley to Palm Springs ASAP. How fast can you get someone from there to Jackie Cochran?”

  “Today?”

  “Yes, today.”

  “How many passengers?”

  “One.”

  “Luggage?”

  “He’ll most likely be traveling light.”

  “All right, Nevada County Air Park is a pretty short runway. Hold on. Let me see if we have a CJ1 available.”

  He put her on hold and was gone for some time. While she waited, Ali finished sorting and clipping her papers and bought herself a bag of chips. She needed something to soak up those many cups of Flossie Haywood’s Folgers.

  “You’re in luck,” Allen said brightly. “Our new CJ1+ just put down here in Fresno. The pilot’s still here, so we don’t even have to call him out. He can refuel, file a flight plan, and be in Grass Valley in about an hour and a half. With ten minutes or so on the ground in Grass Valley, we should be able to have your guy on the ground in Palm Springs, about an hour and a half after that. So we’re talking three hours give or take. Will that work for you?”

  “That works.”

  “Let me put you back on the line with Amelia, then. She can take the passenger information and your credit card, give you the tail number and the address of Airpark Aviation, the FBO we use in Grass Valley. You haven’t flown with us since we became You-Go, have you?”

  “Nope,” Ali said. “This is a first.”

  “Well, I certainly hope it’s not the last,” Allen said. “Welcome aboard.”

  Amelia worked her way through the details in a no-nonsense fashion. Once they were ironed out, Ali called Gil back, on his cell phone.

  “Are you at your office yet?” she asked.

  “No, I’m still at the house. I just got out of the shower. I’ll be heading out in a few minutes.”

  “You might want to pack a bag,” Ali said. “You need to be at Airpark Aviation at the Grass Valley airport in about an hour. I’m sending a plane to pick you up.”

  “A plane?” Gil asked. “You mean like a Cherokee or a Piper or something—one of those little outfits?”

  “It’ll be a CJ1,” she told him. “A jet—definitely not a Piper.”

  “Do you mind telling me where I’m going?”

  “Jackie Cochran Airport outside of Palm Springs. I’ll pick you up there. Once you read the background material, you’ll understand.”

  “Great.”

  “One more thing,” Ali added.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m assuming you’re armed. Don’t worry. Flying private, you’ll be able to wear your weapon on board with no problem. Just be sure you show up with government-issued photo ID. And if you happen to have a couple of Kevlar vests lying around, you might want to bring them along. One for you and one for me. I wear a size large.”

  “You want me to bring vests?” Gil asked. “I thought the purpose of this trip was to dig up evidence with shovels. You think someone is going to be taking potshots at us?”

  “You never can tell,” Ali said. “Better to have vests and not need them than the other way around.”

  She hung up on Gil before he could say anything more, then she redialed High Noon. “What now?” Stuart Ramey asked when he picked up.

  “Don’t you ever take any time off?”

  “Not so you’d notice.”

  “I need more phone info,” she said.

  Stuart laughed. “I guess it pays to be the boss’s girlfriend. I was just talking to B. He said I should give you whatever you want.”

  “Cell phone numbers,” she said. “For people named Mark and Ermina Blaylock.”

  “The people who used to live in La Jolla but who now live in Salton City.”

  “The very ones,” Ali said.

  “Okay. I’ll call you back when I get something.”

  Ali looked at her watch. Given the holiday traffic, she estimated it would take an hour to make it from Salton City to the airport. She had flown in and out of Jackie Cochran on occasion. The general aviation terminal there would have a place where she could work while she waited for Detective Morris to arrive.

  The terminal had something else that was high on Ali’s current list of priorities—decent restrooms. After swilling down all those cups of coffee, restrooms were more than a priority, they were an absolute necessity.

  48

  Grass Valley, California

  Gil got off the phone, shaking his head, convinced that this Ali Reynolds character was one pushy broad. She wanted him to “pack a bag”? Really. It wasn’t like he didn’t have a suitcase or two. Since the chest of drawers from Target was still in the box, his clean clothes were still in the battered old suitcases on the floor of his bedroom. He picked up the one filled with his underwear and dumped the contents of that into what he thought of as his “sock suitcase.”

  He gathered up a pair of socks, clean underwear, and the last of his clean shirts from the laundry and stuck those in the now-empty suitcase. He added in his shaving kit, his own Kevlar vest, and a stack of spare note cards. He put his bottle of ink in a Ziploc bag, cushioned it with some of his new paper towels, and hoped the bottle didn’t leak. He put that in a side pocket so it wouldn’t rattle around, but when he closed it, the suitcase was still more empty than it was full. Even adding in a second vest wouldn’t make much difference. This was traveling light in the extreme.

  Then he remembered he’d barely eaten all day. When he’d first come home from shopping, he’d had a bowl of cereal from his new box and made a pot of coffee. Now though, thinking it might be a long time before he saw another square meal, he made himself another bologna sandwich with bread from the new loaf. He packed the sandwich in his suitcase as well—in yet another Ziploc bag in another side pocket.

  He closed the suitcase, hefted it, and laughed when he heard things rattling around inside.

  “Gilbert, Gilbert, Gilbert,” he laughed to himself. “You are certainly one sophisticated son of a bitch!”

  He was relieved that the parking spot reserved for the chief of police was empty when he pulled into the departmental parking lot. Leaving his suitcase in the car, he hurried inside. Sergeant Andersson looked up in surprise.

  “I thought you were gone for the day.”

  “I am,” he said. “I just stopped by to pick something up. Do you happen to have a fax for me?”

  Sergeant Andersson turned her chair around and plucked a stack of papers off her credenza. “More like War and Peace than a fax,” she said. “It came in a while ago. I hadn’t gotten around to putting it in your box.”

  Taking the fax with him, Gil used a key to let himself into the armory, where he signed out one of the spare vests. Sergeant Andersson was talking on the phone when he headed back out. He waited in the doorway until she hung up.

  “You might want to let Chief Jackman know that I won’t be in tomorrow,” he told her. “I’ve been called out of town. You can mark it down as a comp day.
I understand I have several of those coming.”

  She was making a note of it as he hurried out the door. He doubted she noticed the extra vest. Better to explain later than to ask permission.

  He drove to the Nevada County Air Park and went looking for Airpark Aviation. He found a place to park and went inside, carrying his still-rattling suitcase. A young woman seated behind a counter looked up at him and smiled.

  “Flying today?” she asked.

  Gil nodded.

  “What’s your tail number?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “The only aircraft we have coming in in the next little while is a You-Go Aviation CJ1, flying from here to Palm Springs.”

  “That must be it, then.”

  “Do you need help with luggage?”

  He held up his single suitcase. “Got it. Where do I park?”

  “Wherever,” she said. “Don’t worry about parking. Do you want some coffee? Popcorn?”

  “No, thanks,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  I’ve got my very own bologna sandwich.

  Gil took a seat by a window, opened his suitcase, and pulled out the stack of faxes. He was interested to see that two sections of material were devoted to Richard Lowensdale. For right now, though, he needed to know everything there was to know about Ermina Cunningham Blaylock.

  He made his way through the material. Without the call to Detective Laughlin in Missouri, Ermina would have seemed entirely harmless. And understandable. Mina and her husband had overextended in order to buy Rutherford International, but they had bet on a losing horse and now they were busted. They had lost their house in La Jolla, lost their fancy cars, lost their golf course membership. They ended up living in a house in Salton City that the county tax assessor said was worth $45,000. That was a big comedown, but nothing he read did anything to explain the relationship between Richard Lowensdale and Ermina.

  The only connection Gil could see had to do with the money he had found squirreled away in Richard’s pristine garage. If that was what the killer was looking for—and Gil thought it was—where had it come from? Was it possible Richard had been blackmailing Ermina? Given the situation in Missouri, that wasn’t such an oddball idea. Maybe Mark Blaylock didn’t know about his wife’s somewhat questionable past. But if Richard was blackmailing Ermina, where was she getting the money to pay him?