Deadly Stakes (2 page)

When Gemma’s makeover was complete, Roxanne led her into the greenroom, where it was time to hurry up and wait. Rachel had disappeared into the studio before Gemma’s makeup was finished. While she waited, Gemma pulled out a hard copy of the script she intended to use. It was supposed to be three to five minutes long and would be transferred to a teleprompter before the actual filming. She had struggled with what to say. She wanted to hit all the right notes—breezy, fun, lighthearted. She didn’t want people to think she took herself too seriously. Guys who were interested in fun and games weren’t looking for serious.

“I’m Gemma,” the script read. “With a name like that, it’s only natural that I have a soft spot for gems, two in particular: emeralds because they match my eyes, and diamonds because diamonds really are a girl’s best friend.”

It seemed to her that simple introduction made it clear she was looking for someone with dollars in his wallet that he’d be willing to spend on her. Cubic zirconia? Thanks but no thanks! Not her type.

The script continued, “I’m looking for companionship, but I have
no interest in getting married again.” (Lose out on her hard-earned alimony? Not on your life!) “And I’m definitely not interested in kids. If I had wanted kids, I would have had my own. If you’ve got kids, I’m sure they have mothers who don’t need any competition in the motherhood department. I’ll be glad to meet your kids, but I don’t want to raise them or take them away from their real moms.

“Without kids or marriage on the table, my age is none of your business. I believe in being open-minded as far as age is concerned, in both directions, up and down. If you’re looking at this video and thinking I’m probably too old for you or too young, then you’re probably right. So let’s not even go there.

“By now you’re probably wondering,
So what does she really want
?

“In a word—fun! I’ve spent enough of my life knowing that tomorrow would be a repeat of today. I want to be able to expect the unexpected. I want adventure. A white-water rafting trip down the Colorado? I’m there. An African safari? Yes; have passport, will travel. A sunset walk along a sandy beach, yes. A quiet evening of reading books in a snowbound cabin? Yes to that, too. Maybe you’re into long-distance bicycling and would like to help me train. I’d also like to try my hand at ballroom dancing and bowling.

“In other words, the boring day-to-day stuff is fine for me to do by myself, but when I’m with you—whoever you are—nothing that sounds like fun is off the table, and the sooner we get started, the better.”

Noelle emerged from the studio looking perplexed. “Sorry for the delay,” she said. “Rachel looks great, but she keeps freezing up the moment the camera starts recording. It shouldn’t be long, but the director was wondering if you brought along a copy of your script. If so, he wants me to start loading it into the teleprompter.”

“No problem,” Gemma said, smiling and handing it over. “I’ll be ready when you are.”

With that, she settled in to wait. She knew she looked good. She knew that before long, she’d have men groveling at her feet, but she also knew who to thank for it—her grandmother Natalie Hooper.

Gemma didn’t remember the roach-infested hovel from which her
grandparents had rescued her as a two-year-old, although her grandmother, also known as Nana, had told her about it so many times that she could see it in her mind’s eye. Two days after Gemma’s second birthday, Nana and Papa had gone to war with their drug-addicted daughter, Caroline.

Born with what should have been a silver spoon in her mouth, Caroline Hooper was the daughter of a small-town physician and a stay-at-home mom. Money was never an issue in their Lake Havasu home. In grade school and junior high, things were fine. Caroline got good grades and was considered an exemplary student, but once she got into high school, that all went south. By the time she turned fifteen, she was a pot-smoking dropout. By the time she was eighteen, she had an out-of-wedlock baby and a serious drug problem. For a time, Natalie and Daniel Hooper had done what they could to care for both their struggling daughter and her baby girl—paying rent and utility bills; sending money and gift certificates for groceries.

Caroline had told them that she was having a birthday party on Gemma’s birthday, and it would be too complicated to try to include her parents. Two days later, Natalie and Daniel had turned up unannounced, expecting to deliver a stack of tardy birthday presents. They knocked, but no one answered, even though they could hear Gemma crying from somewhere inside. Finding the door unlocked, they let themselves into a nightmare. The apartment was filthy. The place was littered with empty pizza boxes. Cockroaches scurried out of sight as the door opened. There were flies circling a garbage can overrun with dirty diapers. Natalie went straight to the wailing baby and found Gemma dirty and hungry and inconsolable in a crib. Daniel found Caroline on a bare mattress on the floor in the second bedroom. She was passed out cold with a syringe lying on the floor next to her.

Natalie stayed with the baby while Daniel went looking for a police officer. Natalie wanted to change Gemma’s diaper, but Daniel told her to wait. He wanted to be sure the authorities knew how bad it was, and he was right. The cops came, and so did social services.
Child Protective Services was only too happy to turn the child over to a pair of responsible grandparents. A grant of temporary custody was soon made permanent.

Gemma stepped out of that filthy crib and into what previously was her mother’s life. Caroline’s room became Gemma’s room. The playhouse that once was Caroline’s was now Gemma’s. Caroline’s piano teacher became Gemma’s piano teacher. Most important, Caroline’s parents became Gemma’s parents—Natalie her caring but disciplining mother and Daniel her doting father.

Soon after Gemma’s arrival, the household’s economic situation took a hit when Parkinson’s forced Daniel into early retirement and he had to give up his medical practice. It was essentially the same stable home with the same two loving parents, but the results with Gemma were very different. She was bright and beautiful but cooperative, whereas her mother had fought her parents and teachers every step of the way. As far as Natalie and Daniel were concerned, raising Caroline had been a nightmare; raising Gemma was a piece of cake.

Unlike her mother, Gemma breezed through high school and graduated near the head of her class. When it came time for her to leave for her freshman year at Arizona State University, Natalie Hooper offered Gemma her own road map to success.

“When your mother was your age, Caroline was out smoking dope, protesting the war, and burning her bra. You can see how well that worked out for her,” Natalie counseled Gemma. “So do what I did. Find yourself some dependable young man, preferably a premed student, and marry him. You can see that worked for your grandfather and me. Daniel was only a GP. You’d be better off finding yourself a surgeon. Those are the guys who make the big bucks.”

Unlike her mother, Gemma listened to every one of her grandmother’s words and took them to heart. Unfortunately, because she really was Caroline Hooper’s daughter, she put her own particular spin on Natalie Hooper’s heartfelt advice. Daniel Hooper’s pet name for Gemma may have been Sugar, but she knew that when it came to
sugar and spice and everything nice, she didn’t come close. She also understood that it was entirely possible to
act
nice without actually
being
nice, though it was the best way to get what you wanted.

Growing up, Gemma had understood her mother’s mistakes, and she had no intention of repeating them. As she packed her possessions to head to Tempe, Gemma instinctively accepted the idea that her grandmother had laid out an excellent game plan.

It was left up to Gemma to work that plan to the best of her ability, and she had done a masterful job. Now, after years of making the best of what she had come to consider a useful starter marriage, she was ready to reap some of the rewards.

Yes,
she thought, sitting back and waiting her turn at Video-Glam.
It’s about time.

1

S
everal miles across town, Ali Reynolds sighed and looked at her watch. She had known when she had agreed to do the shoot at the Phoenix FOX affiliate that it would be the same day and time that her mother, Edie Larson, would be speaking before a luncheon meeting of local Sedona Rotarians as part of her run for mayor. Edie had done a number of informal coffee-hour appearances, but this would be her first major speaking engagement, one in which she would be going head to head with her thirtysomething opponent. As Edie’s campaign manager, Ali felt she needed to be there to handle the background issues and put out any fires that cropped up. Unfortunately, the scheduled shoot for FOX’s new
Scene of the Crime
news magazine had been chiseled in granite.

“You go do the shoot and don’t worry about me,” Edie had assured her daughter earlier that morning. “Brenda Riley is counting on you.”

“But so are you,” Ali had objected.

“You can’t afford to miss the taping,” Edie said firmly. “Besides, with Brenda’s book due to come out the same week the show is scheduled to broadcast nationally, she has a lot more riding on this than I do. I’ll be speaking to that bunch of Rotarians, most of whom I know on a first-name basis. How bad can that be? Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

Ali shook her head in resignation. What her mother wasn’t saying was that both candidates had been invited to speak at the luncheon,
and this was the first time Edie would be trading campaign rhetoric with an opponent socked with a supply of well-rehearsed replies.

“Why do I always end up with people counting on me?” Ali asked.

Edie smiled. “Because that’s the way your father and I raised you,” she said, “and we love you for it.”

As a consequence, Ali had left her house on Sedona’s Manzanita Hills Road a little before noon on that Tuesday morning to drive down into the sunbaked oven known as the Valley of the Sun. Since it was already pushing the nineties in Sedona, she knew Phoenix would be a scorcher. She didn’t even attempt to put on camera-ready makeup for the drive down. Instead she took along the traveling makeup kit she had used back in the old days, when she was an on-air reporter and later a television news anchor.

For the better part of two years, she had known that her friend Brenda Riley, also a former newscaster, had been working on a book about a cyberstalker named Richard Lowensdale who, operating under any number of aliases, had victimized dozens of lonely women from all over the country, romancing them with digital sweet nothings that had promised the world and delivered only humiliation and heartache.

Richard’s preferred victims were vulnerable women considered high-profile in their various communities. Ali had first met Brenda Riley when they were working as news anchors, with Ali at a news desk in L.A. while Brenda was at a sister station in Sacramento. Brenda had been drawn into Richard’s clutches in the aftermath of a difficult divorce, along with a sudden sidelining from her newscasting job when she outlived her on-camera shelf life. For Brenda, those two major losses had resulted in a booze- and drug-fueled midlife crisis. Ali had been dragged into the fray when Brenda asked for help in doing a simple background check on the new man in Brenda’s life. Unfortunately, that supposedly simple check had uncovered the existence of Richard Lowensdale’s full contingent of fiancées, all of whom, like Brenda, had been wooed through cyberspace.

That revelation, coupled with all the other losses, had been
enough to send Brenda off on an almost fatal series of benders. When Brenda finally sobered up and wised up, she set out to expose the man for what he was. Before she could do so, however, someone else beat her to the punch. Unfortunately for Richard, one of his erstwhile victims, Ermina Vlasic Cunningham Blaylock, happened to be a serial murderer in her own right. She had lured him into doing an illicit engineering job with the promise of a large payday when in fact she had every intention of taking him out once he was no longer useful.

Ermina had carried out the cold-blooded killing with utter ruthlessness, leaving evidence that should have put the blame for Lowensdale’s murder at Brenda Riley’s door. All of that might have gone according to plan had it not been for the timely arrival of Ali and a Grass Valley homicide detective named Gilbert Morris. Brenda’s mother had alerted Ali to the fact that her daughter had gone missing. Between Ali and Detective Morris, they not only managed to capture Ermina, they also rescued Brenda, who was found, close to death, locked in the trunk of Ermina’s rented Cadillac.

Their timely rescue had been good for Brenda but not so good for an FBI surveillance team also on the scene, intent on bringing down both Ermina and the drug cartel movers and shakers who were the intended end customers of her illegal stock of supposedly dismantled drones. When offered a possible plea deal, Ermina arrogantly refused. Rather than walking away with what would have been a hand slap on three separate charges of homicide, she chose to go to trial. As a result, juries in two different California jurisdictions and one in Missouri all returned guilty verdicts.

Two years later, some legal maneuverings continued, but with Ermina sentenced to life without parole in two different states, Brenda Riley, now married to the retired detective Morris, was free to publish the whole story.
Scene of the Crime,
a new televised true-crime weekly magazine, was prepared to give the story full-court-press treatment for its premiere show, and Ali had agreed to go on camera to tell her part of the story.

It wasn’t until she arrived at the television studio in Phoenix that
Ali discovered one of Richard Lowensdale’s cyberstalking victims, Lynn Martinson, formerly of Iowa City, Iowa, was now living in the Phoenix area and would be filming her segment with the same crew in the course of the afternoon.

Lynn—in her mid-forties, at least, a bit on the frumpy side, and incredibly nervous—was already in the greenroom when Ali arrived. A receptionist had just given her the unwelcome news that the film crew and host were delayed, having missed a flight connection. If Ali had known about the delay earlier, she could have stayed for part of the luncheon meeting and driven to Phoenix immediately afterward. Now that she was here, there was nothing to do but wait. She went into the greenroom powder room to reapply her makeup, then settled in to wait.