Deadly Stakes (6 page)

“I’ve got some water in the car,” he told her. “I’ll go get it.”

He was gone for only a matter of seconds—the time it took for him to race back to the Camry, retrieve the half-empty bottle of water he had left on the car seat, and make his way back. She needed water. Now wasn’t the time to wonder if she’d object to drinking from a bottle with his germs on it. By the time he returned to her side, however, he could tell it was too late for water.

She tried to say something. “Dennis.”

“Dennis,” he repeated. “Who’s that? Your boyfriend? Your husband?”

She didn’t answer; she was gone. The light went out of the bright green eyes. Open and empty, they stared sightlessly into the blazing sun. For a moment, waiting to see if she would breathe again, A.J. found it hard to breathe himself. When she didn’t, he dropped both
the cell phone and the open water bottle and fell to his knees beside her, agonizing about what he should do. He wondered if he should try to revive her, but compressing her chest would have meant burying his hands in the bloody mess, and he couldn’t bring himself to do that.

A.J. was a month and a half past his seventeenth birthday, but this was the first time he had ever seen a dead person. Sure, he’d seen pretend dead people in movies and on TV shows, but never like this. He knelt there, sick and dizzy, as the breakfast burrito he had eaten at a fast-food joint in Black Canyon City threatened to erupt from his gut and the spilled water disappeared into the parched earth.

A.J. stayed where he was, swaying on his knees, until he could breathe again; until he could quell his roiling stomach; until the sharp stones biting into his kneecaps got his attention. Then he staggered upright.

He needed to think, and he needed to put some distance between the dead woman and himself. When his head cleared, he had only one thought—to get away. Once the emergency responders got there, to say nothing of the cops, there would be all kinds of questions: Was A.J. the one who had placed the 911 text? Who was the woman, and who was he? If he didn’t know her, what was he doing there? Why wasn’t he in school? Eventually, the whole story would come out—the lame story about his father’s fool’s errand to find a buried treasure. If that emerged, so would all of A.J.’s other secrets—the ones he’d been carefully keeping from his mother.

Half sick to his stomach, he made it back to the car. Because he wasn’t thinking straight, he did something incredibly stupid. He turned the key in the ignition, shifted into gear, swung the Camry into a tight U-turn, and drove away. He was opening the metal gate to let himself back onto the highway intersection when he realized he had left the shovel behind. He was tempted to go back and get it, but he didn’t dare. Out here in the middle of nowhere, he had no idea how long it would take for emergency responders to arrive, but he was sure they were well on their way. If he went back for the shovel, they’d find
him at the crime scene, and then he’d be stuck answering all those difficult questions. So he went through the gate, closed it behind him, got back in his car, and drove like a bat out of hell.

He hadn’t gone over a mile on the freeway when he saw the flashing lights of an approaching state patrol car speeding north on I-17. As the cop car flew past, siren blaring, A.J. breathed a sigh of relief. He had made the right decision in not going back for the shovel. Had he done so, they would have caught him there for sure.

That was what he was thinking as he drove back to Phoenix with plenty of leeway for making it to work on time. No one had seen him come or go, and as long as he didn’t tell anyone about it, no one was likely to find out. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut. As far as his mother knew, he was at school, and when he turned in his excuse tomorrow, school would think he had been at home with a sore throat.

It wouldn’t take long, however, for A. J. Sanders to realize how wrong he had been. It turned out that leaving the scene of the crime was the worst possible thing a Good Samaritan could have done, and once the cops did come looking for him, his entire future would be hanging in the balance.

5

E
die Larson’s election-night party in the rec room at Sedona Shadows should have been a disaster. After all, by the time the TV station in Flagstaff started scrolling election results across the bottom of the flat-screen TV on the wall, there was already a two-hundred-vote margin. As later results came in, that deficit narrowed, but not enough. The looming loss didn’t seem to bother Edie, and it had zero effect on her high spirits. It looked to Ali Reynolds as though her mother were having the time of her life.

One of Bob Larson’s new friends, a fellow resident from Sedona Shadows, was providing the music. Mike Baxter, a mostly retired DJ, played his music the old-fashioned way—on vinyl records. He had been widowed after fifty-three years of marriage, and his kids had suggested that taking care of the family home was probably too much for him. Mike correctly read the situation and realized that his kids weren’t nearly so worried about upkeep on the old place as they were about seeing it turned into ready cash. They had wanted him to hand it off to an overeager residential developer who just happened to be his son’s good pal. Resisting what he regarded as underhanded pressure, Mike had opted to sell the place to someone else, back when suburban Chicago property values were booming. He then departed the Midwest, taking with him a neat profit in real estate as well as his primo collection of vinyl records, gathered one by one over sixty-plus years. Once in Arizona, he settled happily into a new downsized life that included several years with a new wife.

For years Mike had supplemented his retirement income by spinning the old records at events for those he liked to call golden-agers. The music he brought had nothing to do with YMCA, rap, or disco and everything to do with crooners like Frank Sinatra, Patti Page, and Rosemary Clooney as well as the pioneers of rock and roll. Widowed a second time, he downsized yet again. This time he left the heat of Phoenix in favor of cooler Sedona. Even though he was on his own, he had taken a two-bedroom unit in Sedona Shadows. One bedroom was for sleeping, and the other was reserved for his record collection.

Once a week now, Mike did a Saturday-afternoon Sock Hop for the benefit of the facility’s residents and any members of the public who cared to venture inside. His sidekick in the operation was Ali’s dad, Bob Larson, who handled the electronics and the sound system while Mike handled the platters and the patter. Over the months the two of them had become good friends, and it had been Mike’s idea that there should be music at the election-night party.

Ali had thought that was a good idea when she hoped for a victory celebration. It had turned out to be an even better way to celebrate defeat. So were the several cookie sheets of Sugarloaf Café sweet rolls Edie had ordered from the new owners of the diner that once was the Larson family’s livelihood. Edie herself cheerfully dished them out to everyone who showed up at the party, even though Ali suspected some of the attendees hadn’t been among Edie’s supporters.

The sweet rolls were gone, but the party was going strong. Bob and Edie had again taken to the dance floor when Ali’s son, Christopher, stopped by to chat with his mother while his four-year-old son, Colin, snoozed on his shoulder.

“Grandma seems to be taking this all in stride,” Chris observed. “How are you doing?”

Ali shrugged. “Losing by fewer than two hundred votes is a respectable loss,” she said. “I think we’ll be able to hold our heads up. It’s not like we took a complete drubbing.”

“You look tired, though,” Chris said. He was a great son, but diplomacy had never been his strong suit.

Ali kissed the tip of Colin’s nose and then smiled at Chris. “That’s because I
am
tired,” she said. “Running a political campaign is hard work. Truth be told, I think your grandmother had a lot more fun running for office than she would being in office, because then she would have to deal with all the various oddball factions out there.”

“You mean like the anti-contrails folks?”

“That’s one,” Ali said.

Chris laughed. “Grandpa says he thinks they’ll try outlawing gravity next.”

Ali laughed, too. “Grandpa’s opinions are part of the reason it would be tough for your grandmother to hold office. She’d have to learn to deal with one extreme out in public and the other extreme at home. It probably would have driven her nuts.”

Just then Ali’s daughter-in-law, Athena, showed up with Colin’s twin sister, Colleen, in hand. Colleen, the far more gregarious of the two, was going strong at nine-thirty and had to be led from the dance floor.

“Do we
have
to go home?” she demanded. “I’m having fun.”

“Yes, we have to go home,” Athena said firmly. “Preschool tomorrow.”

Colleen made a face but didn’t make a fuss. She looked up at Ali. “Sorry Grandma didn’t winned,” she said.

Ali smiled at her granddaughter without trying to straighten out that pesky irregular verb. “No, we didn’t, sweetie,” she said, leaning down to collect some night-night love. “Maybe next time.”

As Chris and Athena left, Dave and Priscilla Holman took their places. Dave, a Sedona native, was the chief homicide detective for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. Years earlier, when Ali had come back home to Sedona after the collapse of her marriage, she and Dave had been an item for a while, but the demands of his being a single dad with sole custody of his kids had proved too much
for their budding romance. At a time when kids and work were his two top priorities, their love life had placed a very distant third. Their breakup had been amicable, and they had managed to remain friends. Ali had taken up with B. Simpson, and when Dave’s kids had gotten old enough, he had hooked up with and eventually married Priscilla Morse, a savvy businesswoman who owned a local chain of nail salons.

Living in a small town meant there were very few secrets. From the beginning, Priscilla Morse Holman had known about Dave’s previous relationship with Ali, but she had also been one of Edie Larson’s staunchest supporters in the campaign for mayor. Initially, there were a few awkward moments between Ali and Priscilla, but the kinks had worked themselves out over the course of several months. Although the two women weren’t exactly close friends, they weren’t rivals, either.

“Sorry we’re late,” Priscilla said. “He was working,” she said, sighing and sending a pointed look in Dave’s direction. “Give this guy a murder case to work on, and he’s like a dog with a bone—he just can’t let it be.” The sweet smile she sent in Dave’s direction took some of the edge off what might have been considered bitchy criticism. “Now, where’s that mother of yours?” Priscilla asked, looking around the room. “I assume she’s got a handle on being a good loser?”

“See for yourself,” Ali said, pointing to the dance floor, where Bob and Edie Larson were doing a credible job of rocking to Bill Haley and his Comets’ iconic “Rock Around the Clock.”

“I heard there were sweet rolls,” Dave said, glancing hopefully in the direction of the refreshment table.

“Sorry,” Ali said. “They’re gone.”

“All of them? Too bad!” Dave’s disappointment was obvious. As a single guy, he had been a regular customer at the Sugarloaf Café and a devoted fan of Edie’s sweet rolls, which the new owners still made according to Edie’s recipe and specifications.

“You snooze, you lose,” Ali said. “All that’s left is coffee and punch
and maybe a Girl Scout cookie or two. But what case?” she asked, leading him toward the coffee urns. “I’ve been so buried with election doings that I haven’t paid attention to anything else.”

“It just happened this morning,” Dave said. “So you haven’t missed much. Someone sent a text to 911 about an injured woman found off I-17 near General Crook Trail. By the time we could get to her, she was already dead, and whoever placed the call was long gone, too. No ID on the body, but we found a cell phone; we hoped it would lead us to the victim’s name, but that turned out to be a dead end. The owner of the cell phone is alive and well and living down in Surprise. She claims that her cell phone disappeared overnight sometime last night, so that puts us back to square one on IDing our victim. The autopsy is scheduled for tomorrow morning in Prescott. I’d like to know who she is before the ME cuts into her, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“Maybe someone will file a missing persons report,” Ali suggested.

Dave nodded. “Let’s hope,” he said.

At one time Ali had been on track to serve as a sworn officer with the Yavapai Sheriff’s Department. After passing a challenging police academy course, she was disappointed when a budget shortfall had caused her to miss the cut. She was officially listed as a reserve officer with the department, although in the months leading up to the election, she had done no shifts. Had Ali been an ordinary civilian, Dave probably wouldn’t have spoken so freely about the difficulties of the new investigation. In listening to him, Ali felt the tiniest twinge of regret—jealousy, almost. Dave Holman was working a case. Ali Reynolds wasn’t.

At the table, Dave snagged the last remaining Thin Mint and a pair of Girl Scout badge-shaped shortbreads. “Missed dinner,” he added, reaching for a coffee cup. “We were out working the crime scene until just before dark, then I had to go into the office.”

Yavapai County covered over eight thousand square miles and was only slightly smaller than the state of New Jersey. The Investigations Unit worked out of the departmental office in Prescott,
eighty miles away. That meant that between leaving the crime scene and arriving at the party, Dave had done about 160 miles’ worth of driving. No wonder Dave and Priscilla had arrived at the party late.

“But Priscilla would have had my ears if we hadn’t made it, so here we are.” Dave reached for one of the last remaining shortbreads.

“If she hadn’t, I’m sure my mother would have,” Ali said with a laugh.

“Your mother would have what?” a beaming Edie Larson asked, arriving on the scene with Priscilla and Bob Larson trailing behind her.

Dave grinned at her. “You would have taken off my ears if we hadn’t shown up for the party.”