Desert Rage: A Lena Jones Mystery (23 page)

The floor drain got interesting again.

“Uh, mostly.” She didn’t look up.

I sighed. “Define ‘mostly.’”

“Well, he, uh, after a while he left again.”

When she didn’t explain further, I asked, “What time was this?”

“A little after we, um, we had a fight.”

“A fight. About what?”

Her face went red again. “Can’t remember.”

“Don’t hand me that ‘can’t remember’ bullshit, Ali. What was the fight about? Did you hit each other?”

“No! Kyle never hit anyone! And I didn’t either. We just, we just yelled a lot.”

“And what did you two yell at each other about?

“Dunno.”

If I hadn’t liked her so much, I would have smacked her upside her lying little head. “If you want to get Kyle out of trouble, you’ll start telling all of the truth, not just part of it. Do it. Now!”

She shrank back at the sound of my raised voice, the mysteries of the floor drain forgotten as the words spilled out of her between gulps. “It was all my fault ’cause I yelled that I was starving, I mean…I mean all I’d had to eat since breakfast was the Fritos and Mountain Dew and…and why had he been all that worried about a dog when I was there starving to death, so why didn’t he stop at the Circle K on the way back and…and get me something, like, some more Fritos and Slim Jims or Twinkies or something. And he yelled back that I was selfish and never thought about anything but myself and I…I…I told him I was going to leave him there in that nasty old house all by himself and go home and get something to eat so he said all right he’d go get me something and…and then he left.”

She hung her head, a perfect portrait of misery.

“This Circle K, where is it?”

“Corner of Scottsdale Road and Indian Bend. It’s kind of halfway between the party house and mine.”

“And?”

“And, what?”

“How long was Kyle gone this time?”

Silence.

“Ali?”

“He, uh, he didn’t come back.”

Not good news, that. “So what did you do then?”

“I felt really bad for the things I said to him and…and when he didn’t come back in a long while I was afraid he was so mad at me we’d break up so…so I went looking for him to tell him tell him I was sorry and that I promised not to ever be selfish again.”

“Did you find him?”

Eyes back to the drain. “Yeah.”

“Where did you find him, Ali?” As if I hadn’t figured it out already.

A tiny voice. “At my house.”

There was little more to say after that, so I stood up. “Thank you, Ali. And don’t worry, you’ve been a big help. If everything works out like I think it will, there’s a good chance you won’t have to spend much more time in here. If I don’t see you again before then, I’ll see you at the funeral.”

She blanched. “Funeral?”

Oh, hell. She didn’t know. I sat back down and softened my voice. “It’s Tuesday, Ali. Your attorney is arranging for you to be there.”

She looked at the drain, studied it for a while. I waited, let her take her time. Several shoulder heaves later, she faced me again. “Okay.” That was all she could say.

I couldn’t help myself. I reached over and stroked her hair. “I’ll be there, in case you need me.”

Maybe it was my imagination, but before I got up to leave I thought I saw a hint of relief on her face.

As the Jeep pulled out of the detention center’s parking lot, I reflected on what I’d learned so far. Dr. Cameron was nobody’s Dr. Feel Good. Ali probably hadn’t killed her family. Kyle had the beginnings of an alibi, but hardly an iron-clad one. And Alexandra Cameron, the good and beautiful woman everyone so admired, a woman who had had so much difficulty getting pregnant that she needed the services of egg donors in order to have children? She kept a stash of condoms. The only reason an infertile woman needed condoms was to protect herself from STDs, but Dr. Cameron’s autopsy showed him to be free of sexually-transmitted disease. Being infected by her own husband wasn’t what Alexandra worried about.

It sounded to me that the good and beautiful Alexandra Cameron wasn’t so good, after all.

Chapter Eighteen

Kyle

I’m going to die in here. I know I am. I’ll die without ever seeing Ali again, but that’ll be okay as long as they let her go. I’m going to keep saying I did it did it did it as long as it takes because nothing matters anymore without Ali. As long as I know she’s all right and they let her go I’ll let anything happen to me that needs to happen. Maybe I’ll even write a note saying again exactly how I did it and then kill myself. They’d have to let her go then, wouldn’t they?

Ali is all the goodness in the world and no matter what she did to her folks, nothing’s going to change my mind. For her, I’ll keep saying I did it until the day I die and if I’m lucky that’ll happen soon. Maybe one of the bangers in here will do it for me.

If I could only see Ali one more time. Just one. I’d die happy.

Life is a lonely place. I’ve always known it, even before I came here, but I didn’t know it like I know it now. There’s all this noise, all this pain, all this hate and fear, and so many people walking around all the time shouting mean things at everyone, just shouting and shouting and shouting. I didn’t think anybody could be lonely in a loud place like this but it’s true. The louder it gets the lonelier I feel.

I miss Ali.

I miss Mom Fi and Daddy Glen.

I miss Aunt Edith.

I wonder if Aunt Edith feels as lonely as I do? But if I let her visit it’ll upset her and she’s so old and sick she could die if she gets upset and then they’ll take Pit Bull away and put him to sleep and I can’t let that happen.

I can’t let anyone else die because of me.

Chapter Nineteen

Lena

On the way to the Newberrys’ house, I called Kyle’s foster mom and told her to get from him the name and address of the woman who lost her dog during the July 4th fireworks. She promised to visit Kyle later that day and would call me immediately thereafter. Next, I called Ali’s attorney and updated him on my progress so far, then did the same with Juliana Thorsson. Unlike Zellar, whose end of the conversation was hurried and brief, the congresswoman seemed inclined to keep me on the phone, even though from the clamor behind her, she was at another fund-raiser. Not that she was running for Senate, of course.

“My money’s on one of those Hoyt creatures,” Thorsson said, after I described the Queen Creek family’s bat-wielding performance.

“Didn’t know you were a gambler, Congresswoman.”

I was temporarily diverted from her questioning when a red pickup truck belching oily exhaust swerved in front of me, almost clipping the Jeep’s bumper. Only the fact that he immediately ducked onto an off-ramp kept me from giving him the finger.

“I never mind taking a flyer on a sure thing, Ms. Jones,” Thorsson said, bringing my attention back. “By the way, pretend you don’t know me at the funeral Tuesday.”

“What!?” My turn to swerve, but at least I stayed in my own lane. More or less. “Surely you’re not going!”

“Dr. Cameron and his wife were my constituents.”

I doubted that she went to all her constituents’ funerals. “Need I remind you that if the press happens to be there, you’ll be spotted? Besides that, do you really think attending is a good idea, given your, ah, electoral situation and all?”

“If the press is there, I’ll give them the same explanation I gave you, that I care for my constituents. As for whether it’s a good idea or not, that’s my business, not yours.”

No one can talk politicians out of doing something they want to do, whether mismanaging campaign funds, hiring call girls, or sneaking peeks at biological daughters, so I didn’t try. “Just don’t try to talk to Ali.”

“Give me credit for at least minimal brains, Ms. Jones.”

With that, she hung up.

Twenty minutes later I pulled into the Camerons’ cul-de-sac. Parked in front of their house were two vans, each bearing the legend, COYOTE CLEAN-UP: DISASTER TO DELIGHT. Regardless of their motto, I doubted things would ever be delightful again at the house.

I climbed out of my Jeep and walked over to the Newberrys’. Margie didn’t appear happy to see me.

“Make it quick,” she said, looking less lawyerly in a ripped tee-shirt and baggy jeans. “I’m in the middle of packing.”

“Changed your mind about attending the funeral, then?”

“I’ll be there, along with the rest of Alexandra’s friends. But Monty and I are flying out right afterwards, and I expect I’ll be upset, and so I…Ah, I’d like to point out to you that we’re letting the air-conditioning out, so if you must talk to me right now, step inside.”

I stepped. “Could you spare me a drink? Water, whatever, anything will do. I’m roasting.”

She made an exasperated noise, but innate Arizonan courtesy made her head for the kitchen. I followed, entering a large kitchen/family room combination brightly lit by a wall full of sliding glass doors that led out a park-sized backyard. The Newberrys sure weren’t hurting for money.

“Must be a hundred and ten out there,” I said.

“July in Arizona, surprise, surprise.” She opened the refrigerator and poured me a tall glass of trachea-freezing tea.

When I chugged half the glass, she poured some more. “Where’s your husband?” I asked.

“Down at some camping gear store buying things we don’t need.”

No chugging this time, just a sip because I wanted to make the refill last. “As long as I’m here, there are a couple of questions I’d like to ask.”

“ As long as you’re here,’” she mimicked. “Oh, please. I wasn’t born yesterday. What new information have you garnered that brings you back to interrogate me on this balmy summer day?” She motioned toward the breakfast bar. “We might as well sit down so we can both be comfortable during the interrogation. And set your digital recorder on the bar so I can make sure its precious little red light is off.”

I did as I was told and sat down on one of the tall bar stools grouped around the granite counter. Looking longingly at my now nonfunctioning recorder, I asked, “What makes you think I’m going to interrogate you?”

“The look on your face. Want a peach?” After sitting across from me, Margie gestured toward the filled fruit bowl on the granite bar. “I’ll have to throw them out before we leave, anyway.”

“Is it poisoned?”

“Try one and see.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” I picked the largest and fuzziest and took a big bite. Juice ran down my chin. “Yum”

“In around twenty minutes, you’ll die in agony.”

I took another bite. “It’s worth it. Why did Alexandra Cameron keep a box of condoms in her sweater drawer?”

She looked away. “For the usual reason, I expect.”

“Not to prevent pregnancy. Alexandra couldn’t get pregnant on her own, remember.”

“There are other reasons to use condoms.”

“The autopsy showed that neither she nor her husband had contracted STDs”

“Worked, didn’t it?”

I took a final bite of the peach, then dropped the pit into a half-filled trash container by the counter. “Let’s stop dancing around, Mrs. Newberry. Who was Alexandra’s lover?”

She looked me straight in the eye. Unlike when Ali did it, I knew she was revving up for a lie. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” she said.

“That’s interesting. Alison described you and Alexandra as, ‘besties.’ If I’m as up on teen-speak as I think, that means ‘best friends.’ And best friends tell each other everything. After all, you’ve already admitted that she and Dr. Cameron were having trouble.”

“Yup. But I still don’t know who her lover was, mainly because there was no ‘lover’ in the commonly accepted sense of the word.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Have some more iced tea. And another poisoned peach.”

There being no point in pushing my luck, I declined both. “What aren’t you telling me, Mrs. Newberry?”

“Oh, what the hell. Poor Alexandra is dead, so it hardly matters now.” She reached over, took a peach, and bit into it. After swallowing, she snapped, “And cut the ‘Mrs. Newberry’ crap. My name’s Margie, as you well know. By now you and that sly hacker partner of yours have found out the brand of syrup I like on my pancakes and which color I prefer for my mani-pedis. What I’m telling you, Lena, dear, oh ye of the suspicious expression, is the God’s honest truth. I have absolutely no idea who Alexandra was sleeping with. Alexandra didn’t know, either, since she never learned their last names. But if the names ‘Tony,’ or ‘George,’ or ‘Stu’ or whatever will help in your investigation, have at it.”

I tried to keep my eyes from boggling. “Multiples?”

“Gee, you can count.”

“But…”

“But what?” She took another big chaw of the peach. Hers was even juicier than mine, and she had to dab away the juice running down her chin.

Outside, two emerald-colored hummingbirds were fighting over the rights to a feeder, while from a nearby olive tree’s top limb, a red-tailed hawk watched intently. From its posture, I figured one or both hummers had seconds to live. A sudden, brown-flashing dive and a subsequent explosion of green proved me correct. Dinner secured, the hawk flew away with its prize, leaving the surviving hummer fleeing in the opposite direction.

“Was Alexandra moonlighting as an escort?” I asked Margie.

She brayed a laugh. “You’ve been watching too many art flicks. Or porn. No, my ‘bestie,’ as you so charmingly call her, was no escort.” The harsh humor on her face disappeared, replaced by solemnity. “She was a normal woman trapped in a marriage with a man who either couldn’t or wouldn’t return her affection, so she took her pleasure where she could find it, mainly when she was travelling for BKDB.”

I’ve always had trouble with acronyms. “What’s BKDB? I never heard of it.”

“Big Kids Dream Big, a charitable organization to which Monty and I are major contributors. BKDB does for healthy but financially-strapped children what Make-A-Wish does for sick ones, helps them achieve their dreams, which in some cases, means paying school fees, or in other cases, funding trips to summer camp. As you might imagine, keeping such a large organization going entails a lot of bookkeeping, among other things, and that’s where Alexandra’s background as a CPA came in handy. She pre-audited their books on a regular basis, while I watched Ali and Alec whenever she was out of town. Along with Eldora, of course.”

“Their maid. Yes, I talked to her. But what’s a pre-audit?”

“A check for discrepancies before things got out of hand. Or criminal. As I’m sure you know, fraud, or shall we say, ‘irregular disbursements of funds,’ can happen with any charity, especially one that size. A few times a year Alexandra would travel to BKDB’s various offices—they have branches in almost every state—to look over the books. She’d spend a couple of nights at a local hotel, and visit the bar. Every now and then, if things had been particularly bad at home, she’d take a new gentleman friend to her room. Being a wise woman, she never told any of her playmates anything about herself and she didn’t bother learning anything about them, either. She wasn’t looking for friends, just what the Bruce Springsteen song describes as ‘a bit of that human touch.’”

Having walked a few miles in those moccasins myself, I could relate. Still, such behavior never comes without risk. “Did you ever warn her that what she was doing could be dangerous?”

“On a regular basis.” A wry smile. “That’s what ‘besties’ are for, aren’t they? She claimed she took precautions, and not just of the condom type.”

I stifled a groan. These days, all a bad guy needed to do to find out everything about you was to sneak a peek inside your purse. Or bribe the hotel night clerk to get your name and home address, not to mention shadow you as you went about your daily business. Alexandra Cameron might have been a smart woman, but she wasn’t a wise one.

“Did she ever conduct any of these, ah, affairs, closer to home?”

“Depends on how close you mean.”

“Tucson. Flagstaff.”

“A couple of times.”

“Each place?”

“Yeah.”

“How about Phoenix?”

A flutter outside the glass doors made Margie turn around on her bar stool so she could see better. The lone survivor of the hawk attack had returned to lap sugared water from the feeder. “Aren’t they pretty?” she said, ignoring my question.

I tried again. “Margie, did Mrs. Cameron have sex with a man other than her husband here in the Valley area?”

Still watching the hummingbird, she said, “One time, at the Wigwam Resort, way out on the west side. Nice place. They say Frank Sinatra stayed there once.” A look of longing briefly appeared on her chiseled face; maybe she was remembering freer days of her own. Straightening her shoulders, she said, “Anyway, after that, she kept her adventures, as she called them, farther away.”

“Why?”

“Because as she was leaving the hotel, she saw one of her husband’s colleagues walking out of the bar. A Dr. Bosworth, I think she said.”

I made a mental note of the name. “Did this Dr. Bosworth recognize her?”

“She wasn’t sure, but the encounter spooked her enough that she never went there again.” When Margie turned away from the hummingbird, her eyes were bleak. “Not that it made any difference in the end.”

I let silence filled the air for a few seconds until I decided it was safe to bring up something else that had been bothering me, yet another inconsistency in a very inconsistent case. “The last time we talked, you told me that Alexandra was upset because she suspected her husband of having an affair. If she was being unfaithful to him, wasn’t that rather hypocritical of her?”

With an expression of deep unhappiness, Margie shook her head. “All right. I admit it. I was covering up for her, not wanting to tell you what was really going on over there. And I wanted to place the blame for their trouble squarely on Arthur, not her. Yeah, I was covering up, but so what? Alexandra was my ‘bestie,’ remember. What she really told me was, since neither she nor Arthur could be faithful to each other, it was probably best to end the marriage before more damage was done. Then a few days later—Alexandra being Alexandra—she told me she’d changed her mind, that the children deserved an intact home. She decided to try harder to make Arthur happy enough that he wouldn’t roam, and she in turn would stop having her ‘adventures,’ regardless of how lonely she felt.”

“That’s a pretty masochistic philosophy, don’t you think?”

She actually laughed. “There’s a single woman talking.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Marriage is marriage, and life is life. Neither is perfect. If a woman leaves her husband because there’s something about him that drives her crazy, chances are good she’ll pick another man who’s even worse. And after one divorce, the second one comes easier. And the third. And the fourth. Before she knows it, she’s racked up a small fortune in attorneys’ fees, yet her life isn’t one bit better. Ali has a friend whose mother is like that. Married three times already, she’s still looking for Mr. Right, and what’s it got her? A drinking problem, that’s what, and trouble with the law for giving alcohol to minors. So, no, Alexandra’s decision was not masochistic. For all her flaws—and she certainly had them—she chose the wiser path. And, considering the children, the more compassionate one.”

Also, the more depressing. I thought back about my own love life. Dusty. Warren. The men before them. The good thing about being single was that when you decided to pack it in, you just left. No legal proceedings required. If you didn’t want to go crazy, you had to believe that somewhere out there was someone right for you, someone you’d never get to know if you stayed in your current bad situation. If you wound up alone, so be it.

But Margie’s revelations gave rise to another suspicion. “When Alexandra decided to stay with Dr. Cameron, did she clear the slate by telling him about her one-night stands?”