by J. A. Jance
|CHAPTER 39|
PRESCOTT NATIONAL FOREST, ARIZONA
Inching along on the ground, Cami was aware of every tortured ache and pain. The fall from the back of the truck seemed to have done more damage than she’d realized, and there wasn’t a spot on her body that didn’t hurt. Her lips were parched. Her strength was flagging. Each bit of forward movement had to be followed by a period of rest. During one of those, she heard a flurry of vehicular traffic coming from the road. There was no way anyone in those passing cars could see her, but knowing there were people out there gave her hope that Harvey McCluskey wouldn’t be among them. The last thing he’d want would be for his truck to be spotted anywhere on Pine Flat Road.
Then, to Cami’s amazement, she heard a car door slam as a man’s voice began calling her name. “Cami—Cami Lee, are you here? Can you hear me?”
Holding her breath, Cami froze to the ground. She couldn’t tell for sure if it was Harvey’s voice, but the caller knew her name? The only person who could possibly know she was here was her kidnapper himself, and if he was within hearing range right now, how long before he found her?
Krav Maga training or not, Cami knew that in her current physical condition there was almost nothing she could do to defend herself. Still, almost nothing was better than nothing at all. Desperately tearing off one of her makeshift mittens, she felt around until she located a sizable rock. With that gripped tightly in her bloodied fist, she prepared to resist to the best of her ability. Then she lay still and waited. A moment later the man called out again.
“Cami, it’s Deputy Tommy Morales with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. Are you here?”
Could this be real? Cami wondered. Was a rescuer really at hand, or was this Harvey trying to trick her into revealing her location? Believing it to be the latter, she didn’t respond or move. The speaker was near enough now that she could actually make out his footsteps, coming closer and closer. Yards away they stopped.
When the deputy spoke again, he wasn’t speaking to her but shouting into his radio. “Deputy Morales here! I’ve got her! Repeat, victim is found, due south of my patrol car. Appears to be in rough shape. Send EMTs!”
Suddenly Cami felt a hand close around her wrist, the gentle fingers probing for her pulse. “Yes, she’s alive,” Deputy Morales continued into his radio. “She appears to be seriously injured but definitely alive.” Then, suddenly, the hand that had checked her pulse moved to her shoulder.
“Hold on, Cami,” he said quietly. “I’ve got you now. Help is on the way, and the EMTs should be here any minute.”
With that, Cami opened her bloodied fingers and let the rock she was holding slip harmlessly from her grasp. She might have been parched, but there was enough moisture left in her body to allow tears of gratitude to flow from her eyes and drip down into the dirt.
Somehow help had found her, and she really was safe.
|CHAPTER 40|
PRESCOTT NATIONAL FOREST, ARIZONA
Outside of Mayer, South Jefferson Street became Pine Flat Road, a stretch of primitive roadway that was in actuality little more than a Forest Service road. B.’s Audi was in the lead, but due to the rough, washboarded surface of the street, the sedan was forced to move at a crawl. Ali glanced away from her phone screen long enough to notice that sheriff’s department patrol cars were parked here and there along the shoulder. In other words, Dave Holman had done more about deploying assets to the scene than just summoning an ambulance.
Behind them a siren wailed. On a straight stretch of roadway, the ambulance surged past them, leaving the Audi in a swirl of dust. At the same time, Ali’s phone rang. Sheriff Holman’s photo was on the caller ID, so Ali switched over to speaker.
“Hello?”
“One of my deputies found her,” Dave said. “That’s where the ambulance is going.”
“How far?”
“A little ways up and on the right. It sounds like she’s in pretty rough shape.”
Minutes later they pulled up behind the flashing lights of the now-stopped ambulance. Ali could see a group of men clustered together off the road to their right. As soon as the tires stopped moving, she was out of the car and running in that direction. Dave pulled over and leaped out of the Interceptor. He pounded after her, but he didn’t bother telling her to stop. It would have been a waste of breath.
Ali didn’t ask for permission to join the group of EMTs surrounding a loaded gurney. She simply pushed her way through. Cami lay faceup with her bloodied and swollen hands resting on a foil-topped warming blanket while someone attached an IV drip to one arm. Her eyes were closed, and her scraped and battered face was barely recognizable. One ear was swollen to twice its normal size.
“Cami,” Ali breathed. “Are you all right?”
Dark eyes flashed open, and Cami looked up at Ali with her usual self-deprecating grin. “Not exactly,” she whispered, “but I’m better now than I was a little while ago.”
An EMT was speaking into a radio. “We’re giving her liquids,” he reported. “One leg’s broken and may need surgery. Her hands look like she’s been in a prizefight. We’ll be transporting her to Prescott Community shortly.”
“Harvey McCluskey, right?” Ali asked.
Cami simply nodded.
“Do you want me to call your folks?” Ali asked.
“Not really,” Cami replied. “They’ll be pissed. But you’d better call them anyway. I’d do it myself, but I lost my phone.”
And very nearly your life, Ali thought. “Your phone isn’t lost,” Ali said reassuringly. “I’ll reach out to your parents.”
“Excuse me, ma’am,” one of the EMTs said, shoving Ali aside. “We need to get her out of here.”
It wasn’t a question of rolling the gurney over the rough ground. Several people simply stepped forward and carried it. B. appeared at Ali’s side as the group headed for the ambulance.
“How is she?” he asked.
Rather than answering, Ali turned to him and melted against his shoulder. Then, after a moment, she held up her phone, dialed Stu’s number, put the phone on speaker, and replied to B.’s question over that.
“Cami’s alive and on her way by ambulance to Prescott Community Hospital. She’s got a broken leg and some other injuries, I’m not sure how serious. But you know our Cami. She’s pretty tough.”
“Thank God,” Stu murmured, “although I don’t think the word ‘tough’ quite covers it.”
“She asked me to call her folks. Could you have Frigg forward their numbers to me from her contacts list?”
“Will do.”
“And please call Lance to let him know.”
“No need to call him,” Stu told her. “He came back to the office and is grabbing some z’s on the daybed out back. He was pretty beat. I’ll tell him as soon as he wakes up.”
With that, Ali and B. headed for the Audi. Soon a series of texts came in from Frigg supplying the contact information Ali had requested, but she wasn’t ready to make those difficult calls immediately. She needed some time to gather herself.
“Cami’s parents are going to be fit to be tied,” Ali told B. “I know from things she’s said in the past that both of them disapprove of her taking the job with us. This will make the situation that much worse.”
B. nodded. “Even so, you need to call them.”
“But what should I say?”
“Tell them as much as we know,” B. replied.
Ali tried the landline home number first, but no one answered. On a weekday morning, that made perfect sense. Next she tried Cami’s father’s office and cell phones. Cheng Lee didn’t answer either, but when Ali dialed Sue Lee’s office number, someone picked up after only one ring.
“Professor Lee,” came the stiff, off-putting greeting.
“This is Ali Reynolds from Cottonwood,” Ali said into the phone. “I’m Cami’s boss.”
“I know who you are,” Sue Lee snapped. “Why are you calling me? What’s happened?”
“How badly is she hurt?” Sue Lee asked curtly.
“At least one broken leg,” Ali said. “She was evidently severely dehydrated and has lots of cuts, scrapes, and bruises. She could have some internal injuries as well.”
“Does this have anything to do with that job of hers?” The sneering disapproval in Sue’s voice was obvious. And the question cut right to the heart of the problem.
“Probably,” Ali answered after a pause. “Her attacker has been identified as a man named Harvey McCluskey. He’s a former tenant in our office complex. I was in the process of initiating eviction proceedings against him.”
“So this is your fault.”
Ali sighed. “Probably,” she admitted. “Cami wanted me to let you know what’s happened. But, Mrs. Lee, if you’re flying into Phoenix and need to be picked up at the airport, I’ll be glad to come collect you and bring you to the hospital, or if you prefer, I can send someone else. Just let me know which flight.”
“That’s Professor Lee,” Sue insisted, “not Mrs. As far as Camille is concerned, whatever has happened to my daughter is due entirely to her own foolishness. I have classes to teach and office hours to keep. I’m not going to disrupt my life to go flying off to Arizona just because she’s gotten herself into some kind of trouble. You might check with my husband, though. Cheng has always coddled her. He may be interested in coming to her rescue, but I am not.”
With that, Professor Lee hung up.
Almost unable to believe her ears, Ali stared at her phone for a moment before turning to her husband. “Did you hear that?”
“I certainly did,” B. said. “I think now we have a pretty good idea why Cami is working for us here in Arizona rather than for someone closer to home in Silicon Valley.”
“Yes we do,” Ali agreed, “in spades! She needed to put some distance between herself and an extremely toxic mother.”
Just then there was a sharp tap on the window behind Ali’s head. When she turned to look, Dave Holman was standing outside the Audi. Ali buzzed down the window. “What’s up?” she asked.
“That BOLO paid off big time,” he announced.
“You caught him?”
“No, but we’ve located Harvey McCluskey’s vehicle. It was sitting partially submerged in the All-American Canal west of Yuma just off I-10. A suicide note was found inside, but so far no body has been located.”
“Do you really think he’s dead?” Ali asked.
“I do not,” Dave replied grimly. “I believe he faked the whole thing. I’ve asked the Imperial County Sheriff’s Office to bring in tracking dogs to see if they can pick up his trail after leaving the vehicle. My best guess is that he’s on his way to Mexico. I’ve contacted Border Patrol. They’ve alerted all sectors and are distributing his photograph to all personnel and posting it on their facial-rec systems. If McCluskey tries to escape U.S. jurisdiction by crossing the border, you’d better believe someone will grab him.”
Dave walked away then, and Ali closed the window.
“Where to?” B. asked.
“Prescott Community Hospital,” Ali replied. “On the way we’ll pick up a Burger King Whopper Jr. patty for Bella. She won’t mind waiting in the car.”
|CHAPTER 41|
COTTONWOOD, ARIZONA
When Shirley arrived at the office on Monday morning, Stu introduced her to Mateo and then quickly brought her up to speed on everything that had happened overnight. Calm in the face of the ongoing crisis, Shirley spent some time helping Mateo negotiate the stack of employee-intake paperwork required to bring someone new onboard. When that was finished, she came into the lab area and worked with Stu and Mateo to create a new workstation. That’s what they were doing when Ali’s call came in telling them that Cami had been found alive but injured and was being transported to the hospital.
An hour later they were in the process of reallocating computer keyboards and reinstalling wall monitors for Mateo’s use when Lance emerged from the back room smoothing his sleep-rumpled hair.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
Stu told him, and Lance gave Mateo an appraising look. “If Cami’s on the disabled list for the time being, we’d better get you up and running in one hell of a hurry.”
“That’s the whole idea,” Stu said.
Once Mateo’s hardware was in place, Lance, claiming he had rested long enough, took over the responsibility of showing Mateo the ropes, acquainting him with the various monitoring procedures, schooling him on how to respond to alarms indicating actual breaches or possible incursion attempts, and giving him brief introductions to the many arrows in High Noon’s tech quiver that could be used to successfully counter such events.
During their practice sessions, Stu went back to performing the actual monitoring. In the meantime he kept an ear tuned to his police scanner. If anything turned up in the search for Harvey McCluskey, he wanted to be the first to know.
|CHAPTER 42|
MEXICALI, BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO
Adelina Muñoz Padilla, a widow, was born in Mexicali and had lived there all her life. She had two sons: Alfredo, the older one, and Gabriel, the younger. Alfredo was a police officer with the Mexicali Police Department, and Adelina lived with him, his wife, Lupe, and their three kids.
Fredo had always been on the beefy side. In school he’d played rugby, while Gabe, smaller in build and much faster on his feet, had preferred soccer. In high school he was recruited—possibly illegally—to come to the U.S. on a full scholarship to a private high school to play on their team. Thinking her son would have access to both a better education and better opportunities in the States, Adelina had been only too happy to send him along.
What she hadn’t seen coming was that while Gabe was in the U.S. on a student visa, he would fall in love with an American girl, Melinda, who would end up getting pregnant. They had married soon after the birth of their first child and had two more after that. While Melinda went back to school to earn a teaching degree, Gabe had been hired on with the U.S. Border Patrol to support the family. Once Melinda had her degree in hand, she’d been recruited to teach English at Calexico High School. After a couple of years of fighting red tape and to Adelina’s great joy, Gabe had managed to be transferred to Calexico as well.
No one made homemade tamales the way Adelina did, and all her kids and grandkids adored Nana’s tamales. Every Sunday afternoon, either Lupe or Fredo would drive her to the border, where she would walk across, dragging a small Rollaboard behind her. Inside the Rollaboard was everything needed for an overnight stay, along with a plastic bag filled with freshly made tamales. Once across the border, either Gabe or Melinda would pick her up and take her to their home. On Monday mornings the process was reversed, sans tamales.
Adelina’s crossings were uneventful because everyone on both sides of the border knew her. They always smiled and waved her through. In fact, she was treated as something of a local celebrity. In all of Mexicali, she was the only woman who had sons working on both sides of the border fence—Fredo with the municipal police on the Mexican side and Gabe with Border Patrol on the U.S. side. Once upon a time, they might have checked the contents of her bag whenever she crossed the border, but not anymore.
That week was spring break in the Calexico school district, so rather than wake up early to ride with Gabe in the morning, Adelina was able to sleep in and get a lift back to the border from Melinda. Paying no attention to the surveillance cameras aimed in her direction, Adelina crossed over the traffic lanes and entered the guard shack to chat briefly with Gabe, who was stationed inside.
She hadn’t even noticed that a man was following close on her heels as she approached the border, but the surveillance equipment overhead did. Sudden
ly an audible alarm chirped inside the shack. Gabe, realizing that someone suspicious had just registered on their facial-rec software, swung into action, pushing his mother aside.
“Hey, you!” he shouted at the man hurrying by. “Stop!”
But the man didn’t stop. In fact, he broke into a run, which was a stupid thing to do, because not ten yards away and just on the far side of the official line Alfredo Padilla stood waiting. He’d been expecting his mother and watching for her arrival so he could call Lupe to come pick her up. He heard Gabe order the man to stop and then saw the guy make a break for it.
Fredo was seven years older than Gabe. He had started in the police force years before Gabe joined the Border Patrol, but Gabe was already a step or two up the ladder in terms of rank. For Fredo, however, there was good reason he stayed right where he was, content to be assigned to the border detail. And what was that reason? More than anything Alfredo hated paperwork with an abiding passion, and in this instance he understood exactly what was at stake.
If someone from the U.S. actually succeeded in making it across the border, the paperwork required of whoever had the misfortune of taking him into custody was an absolute nightmare, so Fredo decided on another course of action. He was just as burly and every bit as tough as he’d been in high school, so when the fleeing suspect came racing in his direction, Fredo did what rugby players do—he stepped forward, planted his feet, and stood firm.
When the suspect slammed into him at full speed, the force of the collision was enough to send the guy flying backward across that invisible line in the sand that Alfredo knew full well was there. Meanwhile Gabe raced forward to take the stunned suspect into custody.
Much later surveillance video would reveal that both Harvey McCluskey and Gabe Padilla were still on the U.S. side of the line when Gabe snapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrist, while Fredo stood smiling on the Mexican side with his arms folded across his chest.
A kid in the back seat of a passing vehicle happened to capture all the action on his cell phone, and the resulting video went viral on both sides of the border.