Desert Shadows (9781615952250) (26 page)

Chapter 31

Time for the dirty work.

A quick call to the Hacienda the next morning revealed that Zach was back from Iowa but was too busy meeting with editors to see me. No problem. I didn't want to talk to him quite yet, either. Next, I dialed Captain Kryzinski's number to tell him to prepare for an arrest in the Gloriana Alden-Taylor case. I struck out there, too, only getting his answering machine. Loath to leave the details on the tape, I said that I'd figured out who had really killed Gloria Alden-Taylor, and that it wasn't Owen.

Then I hung up and told Jimmy.

“But…but Zach seemed like such a nice guy, Lena!”

Jimmy had always been too trusting. “That's what he wanted everyone to think. But after he inherited Patriot's Blood, he revealed his true colors. Believe me, Mr. Nice Guy he ain't.”

The real Zach would kill his grandmother to inherit. The real Zach would ignore his pregnant wife and, in true Alden-Taylor fashion, follow his own obsessions. Not for money. Not for power. Just for the sake of a literary imprint. Obsession didn't have to be carried in the genes, after all. It was a virus, infecting everyone it touched.

You didn't have to be a true Alden-Taylor to be a sad excuse for a human being.

I should know.

I'm the expert on sad excuses.

***

When I went out to the Neon, I noticed that the early morning clouds had scuttled away, revealing a sky so blue it looked phoney. I stopped for a second to enjoy it. To the north, Mummy Mountain rose green and purple against the far-off McDowells. A gentle breeze whispered in from the south. These days of grace were why we Arizonans put up with our 120-plus-degree Julys and August monsoons.

I closed my eyes and smelled sage, damp earth.

Then I opened them again, aware that all I was doing was killing time.

I didn't want to do what I had to do, which was to ask Zach my final questions, then tell him what I already knew. There was no danger because Zach would hardly try to kill me in front of Rosa, Megan, and a pack of editors. But the visit would give me a chance to advise him to call his lawyer and arrange a deal. If he turned himself in voluntarily, he would be able to plead down, maybe even to Manslaughter Two. What would he get then? Fifteen years? Ten? With good behavior, he could be out in seven. It was all ridiculous, of course, for murderers to serve so little time, but that's the way the court system worked, and not only in Arizona, either. Selling a little weed could get you thirty years, but stone cold killers had their hands slapped if they bought the right attorneys.

As I drove up the dirt road to the Hacienda, I realized that Megan would not look upon a seven-year absence from Zach as a mere hand slap. Yet there was nothing I could do. I could only hope that when I got to the Hacienda, she would be out rescuing another stray. I didn't want to see her eyes when I confronted her husband with my knowledge.

Part of my wish came true. By the time I arrived at the Hacienda, Megan was gone. But so were Zach and the Patriot's Blood editors.

“No more business today,” Rosa told me. “Mr. Zach and Miss Megan, they went to visit at the hospital. Miss Sandra, she gonna get released tomorrow. I think they gonna hire a nurse to take care of her until she can do for herself, then they say they gonna help her move.”

“Move?” For one wild moment, I had a picture of Sandra, Caroline, and John-John moving into John Brookings' trailer at Wigwam Court. But then I remembered that under the terms of Gloriana's will, Sandra had inherited enough to buy a house. How nice for Brookings.

I thought about the will again. Would it be declared null and void once Zach was convicted of murder? Probably. Then again, Arizona did not have an automatic Son of Sam law, the law New York state had once enacted to keep killers from profiting in any way from their crimes. As usual, legal matters were more complicated out here in the Wild West. There was a remote chance Zach could be found guilty of murder and, with some fancy-footed legal maneuvering, still claim part of the inheritance through a blind trust. It had been done before. The greatest likelihood, though, was that once his guilt had been confirmed through trial, Sandra would successfully challenge the will. That would make her mother and aunt happy.

But where would it leave Megan?

I looked around the Hacienda's courtyard at Megan's menagerie—the dogs, the cats, the rabbits, the pig, and the llama—and decided not to think about it. I couldn't bear to.

“Thanks, Rosa,” I said. “I'll go to the hospital and see them there.” Still safety in numbers. I started to turn away from the door, when Rosa's voice stopped me.

“They been gone two hours already, Miss Lena. They probably already up at the parcel by now.”

“Parcel?” My confusion must have shown on my face, because Rosa explained.

“The land Miss Gloriana own near Pinnacle Peak. Mr. Zach, he said they were meeting some real estate guy up there after he and Miss Megan leave the hospital.”

The land Megan and Zach had such different plans for.

I asked Rosa for directions and limped back to the Neon. With the new freeway completion, the trip should take no more than a half hour. Which was exactly why the Pinnacle Peak area, at one time so remote, had skyrocketed in value. A small building lot now could cost as much a completed home in other areas of Scottsdale or even Paradise Valley. How many acres had Zach inherited? I searched my memory and came up with forty. Then I did some quick math, whistled. The sale would buy a lot of decaf mocha lattes at Starbucks.

Or a stack of really dull experimental manuscripts for Patriot's Blood Press.

***

The drive to Pinnacle Peak took longer than I'd planned, due to a nasty wreck south of the Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard exit. As the EMTs scraped bleeding suburbanites out of a Lexus and a Beemer, I sat in the Neon, wondering why people wanted to live so far away from their jobs. My own situation was perfect; business below, apartment above. No dangerous commute to work, only a walk downstairs. Thinking about the stairs set my feet a-tingling, so I turned the engine off and flexed them. Still sore, but better than yesterday. There was a good chance I would be back to normal in another week. Well, normal for me, anyway.

By the time the police redirected traffic around the carnage, I'd been massaging my feet for almost half an hour. I hoped that by the time I reached Gloriana's acreage, everyone would still be there. The fact that a real estate agent had been thrown into the mix complicated things, but I could work around that. I'd ask Zach a couple of pointed questions, then tell him I needed to have a private meeting with him and his attorney this afternoon at my office. There was no reason to involve Megan.

Following Rosa's instructions, I left the blacktop and its surrounding subdivisions behind and drove east along a primitive dirt road for almost a mile. Then I cut north again at an almost invisible fork and headed toward the McDowell Mountains. After bumping along the road for ten minutes, I finally saw a familiar pickup truck parked along the shoulder. But I did not see a realtor's car. He was probably long gone.

Megan would be there, though, enough protection. Besides, I was packing. I put a reassuring hand on my carry-all and felt the comforting weight of my .38 and the rattle of handcuffs.

I pulled the Neon alongside the pickup and got out.

“Zach? Megan?” I called.

To my consternation, I could not see anyone, merely miles and miles of sand and cactus. Overhead, two hawks circled, their shrill cries competing with the sighing wind.

“Zach?”

“Over here, Lena!” Megan's voice.

I finally found her walking along a shallow gully that had probably been a raging torrent the day before, carrying the runoff from the rains in the McDowells.

“Better get out of there,” I called down to her. “It might start raining again up north.” Getting caught in a flash flood was a leading cause of accidental death in the Southwest.

She smiled up at me, the shadows gone from under her eyes. “You're right. I'm being stupid.”

I would have helped her all the way up, but my feet were still so sore that I didn't trust them. When she neared me, I put down my carry-all and held out my hand. With some difficulty—Lord, she was
so
pregnant—I hauled her up the rest of the way.

When she was up on safer ground, I asked, “Where's Zach?” I looked around, expecting to see him emerge from behind one of the many saguaros behind me.

“He stayed at the hospital. I've been dealing with the real estate broker myself.” Her eyes were not only lighter, but they positively gleamed. She looked rested, too, as if she had finally managed a full night's sleep.

“So where's the broker?”

Her smile grew. “Gone. He already has a buyer, a developer from Tucson. Poor Gloriana, she loved this place and had even talked about turning it over to the Nature Conservancy. But Zach and I will put it to better use.”

Money for manuscripts? Money for the Hacienda? Why should that have made Megan look so happy?

Perhaps seeing the puzzlement on my face, she answered my unasked question. “Zach changed his mind. I told you he would.”

“Changed his mind?”

She nodded in satisfaction. “Yes. When he got back from Iowa last night, we had a long talk. The manuscripts hadn't been as good as he'd been led to believe, just pages and pages of self-involved angst. You know. ‘Life is cruel but I'm the only one who's sensitive enough to care.' Just the usual Creative Writing 101 drivel.”

Since I knew life would soon turn cruel for Megan, I didn't smile. “So you're getting your mystery imprint after all?”

“Oh, yes! Not only that, since I know more about that kind of thing than he does, he's going to let me help choose the manuscripts. I know I can make it work. The imprint will more than pay for itself; it'll make enough money to let Zach buy all the experimental stuff he wants.”

I looked off across the desert, at the gently rolling land leading up to the spectacular mountains. Forty acres. Forty very expensive acres. “So now the money from the land sale goes for…?”

Her smile was blinding. “For my no-kill shelter, of course! Zach told me to go ahead and find some land and have an architect start drawing up plans. Oh, Lena! It's what I intended all along.”

What I intended all along.

Her face changed. “I meant, what I
wanted
all along.”

With a sick feeling, I realized her first statement had been the most accurate. What she'd
intended
all along. What she'd
intended
when she put the water hemlock in Gloriana's salad.

“Uh, that's wonderful news, Megan,” I told her, inching toward my carry-all, which was now closer to her than me. “But, well, I drove up here to talk to Zach, and since he's back at the hospital, I'd better.…”

With astonishing agility for someone in her condition, Megan bent down and plucked my .38 out of the carry-all. She'd obviously used a gun before, because when she aimed the barrel at my chest, her hand didn't waver.

“I screwed up, didn't I, Lena? I talked too much, like I always do.” She didn't look so beautiful any more, just deadly.

Maybe there was a way out of this. “I don't know what you're talking about, Megan, but you'd better give me that gun. It could go off.”

Her laughter held little of its former joy. “Well, I hope to God it can go off. Now that you know what I did, I'm going to have to kill you, too.”

She stood with her back to the edge of the gully. With rising optimism, I realized I might be able to rush her and tip her backward into it. I shifted my weight forward.

But she saw the plan in my eyes and drew the hammer back on the .38 with a practiced movement. “You'll be dead before you're halfway here. You're still limping pretty bad.”

I raised my hands. “Megan, you don't want to kill me.”

The laugh again, the half-crazy laugh of the obsessed. “You're right, I don't want to. But it's you or.…” Tears welled in her eyes, but her jaw remained firm. “It's you or me. Why couldn't you leave things the way they were? Owen would never have gone to prison, not with that expensive attorney I made Zach hire for him. If you hadn't become involved, Gloriana's death would only have been another unsolved Arizona mystery.”

“Not
death
, Megan. Murder. You murdered her.”

“Gloriana was a terrible person. Those books, those games, they were pure evil.”

I did not think this was the right time to discuss the pros and cons of the First Amendment, so I kept quiet.

She tossed her head, and in that moment, I saw an echo of Gloriana's blind self-righteousness. “What kind of person would publish books that ruin lives, that only add to the world's misery? Just so she could save a house? Gloriana had no love in her, none at all. Maybe what I did was wrong, but what I did, I did for love. Gloriana never cared anything for anyone, just the Hacienda and her stupid pedigree. She didn't even care for Zach after she got the DNA results back. Oh, you don't know what she was like, Lena! That day she came screeching up to the house, kicking those poor animals out of the way, yelling that Zach…that our baby…that they'd never get a dime, that she'd rather leave his share to the Nature Conservancy! Thank God he wasn't there to hear it.”

She jabbed the gun toward me for emphasis. “She…she called him a
bastard.
And she called our baby a bastard's bastard!”

“Where was Zach when all this happened?”

“Up at WestWorld, helping set up the SOBOP display. It would…it would have killed him if he'd heard the way the old bitch talked about him!”

As Megan howled with grief and outrage, I saw her finger tighten on the .38's trigger. I had to keep her talking.

“Tell me how you did it.” Murderers liked to share, especially those who killed for love. They wanted you to
understand.