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.

  Not that Jose had a quota, at least not officially. Unofficially? That was another story, and the retirees who frequented the relatively lowbrow Kino Ridge were more likely than the more upper-crust folks at Amado or Rio Rico to shut up and pay their fines than they were to hire criminal defense attorneys. Every deputy in the department had been told—off the record, of course—that when fines got paid without involving costly court cases, it helped keep the fiscal wheels turning in the Santa Cruz county government.

  In southern Arizona, where border security was a top priority, it was also an incredibly divisive issue. People lined up on either side of the illegal-immigrant divide. Some wanted a completely airtight border, while others wanted to open the floodgates. Jose’s boss, Sheriff Manuel Renteria, had staked his claim on the tiny sliver of middle ground between the two opposing factions.

  As a relatively new officer on the force, Jose chafed under Renteria’s “majoring in the minors” approach. He had campaigned for office as a law-and-order man, with a small L and a small O. It seemed to Jose that Renteria was far more concerned with keeping the state roads free of speeders and drunk drivers than he was with stopping the drug or people smugglers. The sheriff wasn’t as interested in making a big name for himself as he was in maintaining the status quo by doing the little jobs of law enforcement rather than the big ones. Renteria had let it be known that problems related to the somewhat diminished flood of illegal immigrants and drug cartel smugglers flowing across the border and making their way up and down I-19 were Homeland Security’s problem, not the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department’s.

  Jose wasn’t wild about his agency’s low-key serve-and-protect focus, but he went along with the program, quietly and without a whole lot of enthusiasm. Nearly three years out of the academy, he had plenty of people counting on him, including a wife and two preschool-aged stepdaughters as well as a boy due to be born within the next few weeks. That meant Jose was grateful to have a job. Lots of the people he knew from the academy weren’t that lucky. They had either been laid off or had never found jobs to begin with.

  So Jose kept his mouth shut and his nose clean and did his job. This night it meant sitting there, waiting and resting. Once he picked up a speeder or a drunk driver, he’d be home free. Unless there was some kind of emergency call, hours of paperwork would help fill the time until the end of his shift, when he could go home.

  Home. Jose was inordinately proud that, a year earlier, he and Teresa had been able to buy a three-bedroom double-wide mobile home on a one-acre plot just outside Patagonia. Jose considered Nogales a less than perfect place to raise kids; he had always dreamed of raising them in a country setting. When they found the place in Patagonia, Teresa hadn’t been wild about the location, because it was closer than she liked to her former in-laws, but the price had been more than right—something they could afford on one income without Teresa having to go back to work.

  It turned out that Teresa’s concerns about her ex-in-laws had been totally unfounded. She hadn’t heard word one from Olga and Oscar Sanchez. From what Jose knew about Teresa’s vocal ex-mother-in-law, that was just as well. Jose was prepared to let that sleeping dog lie indefinitely.

  Buying a house was a big deal for Jose. Both his grandfather Raúl and, later, his father, Carmine, had worked in Arizona’s copper mines. Jose remembered growing up in low-cost company housing in San Manuel. At first Carmine had worked underground. Later on he had labored in the smelter in temperatures so sweltering that, on a few occasions, his hard hat had melted.

  Both Carmine Reyes and his father before him had been “dusted,” the copper miner’s term for the lung diseases that plague miners the world over. Both Jose’s father and paternal grandfather, neither of whom ever smoked, had succumbed to emphysema in their forties. Ill and dying, Carmine had returned to Santa Cruz County. On his deathbed, he had grasped his teenage son’s wrist and begged him to find something to do besides kill himself working in a mine, and to live someplace where he wasn’t stuck in company housing.

  For a while after high school, Jose had walked on the wild side without ever getting into any serious trouble. He’d reached his mid-twenties before he got serious about his life and enrolled in Santa Cruz Community College to study criminal justice. He had just received his two-year degree when he met Teresa Sanchez. Recently widowed and pregnant with her second child, Teresa came with a ready-made family that included a toddler named Lucia. A beautiful child, Lucy had wormed her way into Jose’s heart right along with her mother. When an opening turned up at the Sheriff’s Department, Jose had jumped in with both feet. After being hired, he had spent the next month and a half attending police academy training in the Phoenix area.

  He and Teresa had married shortly after Jose graduated from the academy and a month before her second child, Carinda, was born. As far as Carinda was concerned, Jose was her father, the only one she had ever known. Since Jose was the one who had driven mother and daughter to and from the hospital, he regarded Carinda as his own. Given the unfortunate circumstances surrounding Danny Sanchez’s life and death, Jose was thankful neither Lucy nor Carinda had any real memory of their biological father.

  Now. Almost two years later, Teresa was expecting again. This would be her third child and Jose’s first. They knew the baby would be a boy, and they had decided to name him Carmine, in honor of his grandfather. Jose was looking forward to having a boy in the family, another male presence in a house that he teasingly told Teresa was overpopulated by females.

  Jose hadn’t been physically big in high school, but he’d been quick and smart. Years of weightlifting had given him strength that belied his size so that, as a senior, he was named outstanding quarterback on that year’s all-state football team.

  Since Teresa was tiny—just over five feet—Jose expected their son would be on the small side. Even so, Jose hoped he could raise the boy with the sense that you didn’t have to be a big bruiser in order to make your mark in the world. He wanted to instill in this child the same things he had learned from his father and grandfather—that you worked hard, raised your family, kept your promises, and met your obligations. Jose wanted his son to be proud of him the way Jose had been proud of his father and the way Carmine had been proud of his father before him. That was the family legacy he hoped to pass along to his baby boy.

  While Jose had been sitting there, several vehicles had come and gone. Two of them had edged up a couple of miles an hour over the posted thirty-five mile-an-hour limit, but that wasn’t enough of a margin to get excited about, nothing that made them worth pulling over.

  Then another pair of headlights swung into view, coming down the road behind him rather than from the golf course entrance. Jose already had his radar gun in hand, but even before it registered fifty-three he knew he had a live one. By the time the car, an older Buick, surged past him, he was turning on his lights and slamming the Tahoe into gear.

  As the car sped past, Jose had the odd impression that he had seen it several times over the course of the evening, although there had been nothing about it then that had aroused his suspicion. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the driver, whose head was covered with a scarf and whose face was half covered by a gigantic pair of post-cataract-surgery, glare-stopping sunglasses.

  “It’s nighttime, lady,” Jose told himself as he swung the Tahoe onto the narrow pavement. “Time to ditch the shades.”

  Already in pursuit, he tried radioing in his position, but the dispatcher was busy with some other problem. Since this was a routine traffic stop of a solitary speeder, Jose didn’t worry about the communications situation all that much, though it did annoy him that the driver didn’t pull over immediately. In fact, she didn’t seem to notice he was there, even when he came right up on her back bumper with his lights flashing overhead.

  What’s wrong with her? he wondered. Is she half blind or half deaf?

  When Jose let out another squawk from the siren, the Buick swerved in a slight jiggle that sho
wed the driver was aware of his presence. Although the Buick slowed down, it didn’t stop. Instead, the signals came on, and the Buick turned right onto a small unpaved side road where, after a quarter mile or so, it came to a stop in a cloud of dust.

  It was only then, as Jose was opening his car door, that dispatch got back to him. He spat out his location, said he was making a routine traffic stop, and left his vehicle. He approached the Buick as he’d been taught, walking up to the driver’s side, hand on his holstered weapon, calling out instructions.

  “Hands where I can see them,” he ordered through the open window. Except by the time Jose actually saw the driver’s hands, one of them was holding a drawn weapon—a handgun.

  Jose closed his fingers around the grip of his own firearm, but before it cleared his holster, a point-blank gunshot caught him full in the gut inches below his vest and sent him sprawling backward onto the soft shoulder, where he tumbled head over heels down a steep brush-covered hillside. At the bottom, his body crashed into a man-size boulder before coming to rest facedown in the rocky dirt.

  For a moment or two he lost consciousness.

  When his brain came back online, Jose was dimly aware of noises coming from far above him. Warning signals beeped in the night, indicating that car doors had been opened while keys were in the ignition. Doors thumped open and closed while noisy footsteps scurried between at least two vehicles. Those noises were soon followed by the sound of something being smashed, something metal or maybe glass being beaten to pieces.

  What the hell is she doing? he wondered. Wrecking my car?

  He tried to sort out whether she was alone or if someone else had driven up to help her. Or maybe an accomplice of some kind had been hiding in the backseat. If there was someone with her, neither of them spoke, but Jose didn’t need to hear any words to understand the gravity of his situation. It was no accident that the woman had pulled off on the deserted road. He’d been deliberately lured into a trap. But why? Were they after his patrol car or something in it? Did someone want him dead?

  Far above, a car door slammed shut. The night went totally quiet as the insistent beeping of the ignition alarm was silenced. Footsteps rustled through dried weeds and grass on the shoulder above him, then the blinding light from a flashlight cut through the night. Jose knew that whoever was up there was looking down at him, getting ready to finish the job.

  Injured and helpless, Jose could do nothing except lie there waiting for the kill shot he knew was coming, It was only in that final extremity that Jose Reyes remembered Miss Swift, the drama teacher in his senior year at Nogales High School. She had been new to town, a first-year teacher who was also surprisingly good-looking. Jose, along with half the guys in his senior class, had a crush on her.

  Wanting to make a good impression on the townsfolk, Miss Swift had decided to bring some culture to town by staging a production of Hamlet. Jose had been chosen to play the part of the doomed Ophelia’s brother, Laertes. At the very end of the drama, after a fierce sword fight between Laertes and Hamlet, the stage was littered with the supposedly dead bodies of several characters, including Queen Gertrude, the king of Denmark, Hamlet, and Laertes.

  During rehearsals, Miss Swift had gotten down on the floor with the actors and coached them on how to slow their breathing and maintain the pose in which they had fallen. All those years later, lying at the foot of the steep bank, that was what Jose did. He stifled the urge to groan in agony. He forced his breathing to slow. He lay still. This time it wasn’t make-believe. This time Jose’s very life depended on it.

  Above, the rustling footsteps came as far as the edge of the ravine and then stopped. The beam from the flashlight circled around and around until it landed on him, catching him and pinning him in an eerie orange glow. When the beam stopped moving, time stopped, too. Jose had no idea how long the killer stood there, peering down into the darkness with the flashlight raking back and forth across his fallen body.

  “All right, then,” a raspy voice said aloud. “That’s that.”

  Jose couldn’t tell if the speaker was talking to herself or someone else. If so, they seemed satisfied by what they saw. The flashlight clicked off. Darkness returned. Another car door slammed. An engine turned over. Headlights came on. Jose waited until the sounds of the retreating vehicle—a single one, it seemed—faded into the night. Only when the insect-humming silence of the desert night reasserted itself did Jose allow himself to take a full breath. And only then, with one danger gone, did he realize the full gravity of his situation.

  Jose understood that his life’s blood was gradually seeping into the thirsty sandy bottom of the wash that had cushioned his fall. Even if people came searching for him, they weren’t likely to spot him lying here in the dark. Jose could tell that with fear-fueled adrenaline no longer pumping into his system, he was in danger of drifting into shock. He fought it, tried to focus. Far away in the distance, he could hear the busy chatter of the police band radio coming from his own vehicle.

  The overworked dispatcher must have realized that Jose's radio had gone silent, but how long would it take for her to understand that the situation was serious enough to send people looking for him? And would they arrive in time?

  Jose tried to move his right hand, hoping to find his weapon, but that small gesture was accompanied by an astonishing stab of pain. His right arm was broken at the wrist; useless. With agonizing slowness, Jose reached his left hand across his bloody belly. How could there be so much blood but not much pain? Nothing like the pain in his arm.

  It occurred to him dimly that not feeling any pain might not be a good thing, but he pushed that thought aside. Jose managed to extract his personal cell phone from his pants pocket. He punched the green button twice, trying to call Teresa. She usually turned the phone to vibrate or silent once the girls went to sleep, so he didn’t expect to reach her directly. All he wanted was the chance to say goodbye and to tell her one last time that he loved her. Gritting his teeth, he held the phone to his ear. Nothing. When he checked the readout on the glowing screen, he saw there was no signal.

  Groaning in despair, he let the phone fall away. The last thing Jose Reyes thought as he lost consciousness was the final line of the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

  6

  8:00 P.M., Friday, April 9

  Sedona, Arizona

  It was dark and cold when Ali pulled into B.’s driveway. As she walked up to ring the bell, the large, rustic front doors looked curiously forbidding. The first time Ali entered the house, it had been little more than a well-carpeted computer lab, with tables and wiring everywhere and banks of computers lining every wall. Soon after, the computers had been banished to the company HQ.

  Once the electronics were gone, B. had hired one of Sedona’s premier interior designers to transform the place. In the living room, angular side tables and sleek black leather van der Rohe sofas and chairs slung on chrome tubing set a masculine tone. What might have been a cold space was warmed by a two-sided gas fireplace and lots of Navajo rugs, in colorful contrast to the high-gloss birch flooring. Bright red acrylic cubes alternated with leather ones that functioned both as drink tables and, if needed, additional seating.

  The stark lines of the furniture were further softened by subdued lighting that, when dimmed, glowed like candlelight. At night, a few brightly colored cushions and several blown-glass pieces provided a cozy and colorful shimmer to the room. During the day, the panoramic two-story windows came alive with unimpeded views of Sedona’s red cliffs.

  Ali liked the house, which she thought could be featured as a photo shoot for Architectural Digest. Although his house and hers were both aesthetically pleasing, hers was long on chintz and natural-grained wood. Based on furnishing style preferences alone, cohabitation in the near future looked unlikely, and maintaining their separate homes seemed like a good idea.

  After greeting Ali with a breezy kiss, B. led her into his kitchen, where a red-and-white-c
hecked tablecloth covered his round glass table, lending warmth to what was essentially an oversize stainless-steel catering kitchen. The table was set for two, complete with proper Bordeaux wineglasses. Ali handed over her bottle of wine—a 2004 Amarone bottled by Guiseppe Campagnola from grapes grown in the Caterina Zardini vineyards.

  B. examined the bottle and laughed. “This should certainly do justice to Pago’s pizza.”

  While he opened and poured the wine, Ali loaded plates with slices of pizza and mounds of Caesar salad.

  “What did you do today?” B. asked.

  “Sorted through the nominees for the scholarship,” she answered. “Once again I ended up with two winners.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” B. said with a grin. “What are their names?”

  “Autumn and Olivia,” Ali answered.

  He raised his glass in a toast. “So here’s to Autumn and Olivia, your two new Askins scholars.”

  “Thanks,” Ali said, touching her glass to his. “Let’s hope they do well. And what about you? When do you have to leave?”

  He glanced at his watch. “I fly to D.C. tomorrow at four. I’m the Sunday-morning breakfast speaker at an international congress of security geeks. After the conference, I have meetings scheduled for most of the rest of the week. Should be back late Friday. If your dance card’s not too full, maybe we can spend the weekend together.”

  Ali knew better than to ask for more detail. Most of what B. did these days was classified. Though he had a grueling travel schedule and work consumed most of his waking hours, he also clearly enjoyed what he did. He certainly didn’t do it for the money.

  Truth was, Ali envied his passion for his work. She remembered having that fire in her belly before it got extinguished, or rather, diminished, by a series of betrayals, both professional and personal. She knew now that she felt best when she was helping people.