J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds Mysteries 3-Book Boxed Set, Volume 1: Web of Evil, Hand of Evil, Cruel Intent (72 page)

“No,” Dave assured her. “Not as in eyewitnesses, no. The ME’s preliminary report says Morgan Forester died shortly after she put the twins on their school bus this morning. But if there was something going on in the house—if Bryan and Morgan Forester were feuding in some fashion—I’m guessing those girls
know all about it. That’s one thing I learned from dealing with Crystal this past year. Kids know a lot more about what’s going on with their parents than they’re willing to let on.”

The door opened, and Chris bounded into the room in a burst of cold air. “Hey, Dave,” Chris said. “Did Mom tell you the good news—that Athena and I are engaged?”

Grinning, Dave gave Chris a high five. “That’s great,” he said. “Congrats!”

“We’re having a little get-together at the high school gym tomorrow night before the game,” Chris continued. “You’re welcome to come.”

“We’ll see,” Dave said. “I’m up to my eyeballs in a case right now.”

“The Forester murder?” Chris asked.

Dave sent a questioning look in Ali’s direction.

“It’s not my fault,” she said. “I didn’t tell him, not one word.”

“I just heard about it from Athena,” Chris explained. “Mindy, Athena’s roommate, called and told us about it while we were outside. She couldn’t believe it had happened.”

“Mindy?” Dave asked.

“Mindy Farber,” Chris answered. “She teaches second grade at the school in the village. Both the Forester girls are in her class.”

“And the teacher is Athena’s roommate?” Dave asked.

Chris nodded.

“I’ll need that phone number, then,” Dave said, “so I can talk to her as well.”

Chris recited the number, and Dave jotted it down. Watching him, Ali knew it was necessary, knew he was doing his job, but she hated the idea of someone going through those little girls’ lives. Bryan Forester’s daughters had already lost their mother.
And if Dave was able to get the goods on their father, they could be destined to lose him as well.

Chris said good night and headed for his room. Dave turned back to Ali. “Can you think of anything else?” he asked.

Ali gave him an appraising look. “I like Bryan Forester,” she said. “I’ve been working with him for months now. I’ve never heard him raise his voice on the job. I’ve never heard him swear. He works hard, and he does a good job. I don’t think he’s a killer.”

Thoughtfully, Dave closed his notebook and dropped it into his pocket. “The problem is,” he said, “most killers don’t wear sandwich boards announcing the fact. And as you and I both know, just because a marriage looks solid to outside observers doesn’t necessarily make it so.”

“Do you know for sure that the Foresters’ marriage was in trouble?” Ali asked.

Dave shook his head. “The two of us have been through a lot,” he said, “but I’m sure you can understand that I can’t reveal details of an ongoing investigation—not even to you. I will tell you, though, that some details have come up that give us grounds to be suspicious of Bryan Forester.”

“Those poor little girls,” Ali murmured.

“Poor little girls indeed,” Dave agreed. “Their mother was murdered in an act of homicidal violence. This wasn’t random, Ali, it was personal. Morgan Forester’s killer was someone operating in a blind rage. And if Bryan Forester is the perpetrator here—if he’s capable of that kind of violence—I’m honor-bound to see that his daughters don’t fall victim to it as well.”

Reluctantly, Ali found herself nodding in agreement. Dave was right. If, behind his smooth facade, Bryan Forester was a cold-blooded killer, then someone had to stand up for his daughters. That someone was Detective Dave Holman.

“I’d best be going,” Dave said.

Appalled by her own bad manners, Ali realized she hadn’t offered him anything to drink. “What about a cup of coffee?” she asked belatedly. “It won’t take long.”

Dave shook his head. “No,” he said. “Sorry. First forty-eight and all that.”

Ali, like most American TV viewers, knew what he meant: If a homicide isn’t solved in the first forty-eight hours after the crime, the likelihood that it will never be solved increases dramatically.

Dave started for the door.

“When you come to talk to Bryan’s crew,” Ali suggested, “you should probably plan on talking to the film crew as well.”

“What film crew?” Dave asked.

“They’ve been taping the entire remodeling project for a possible series on Home and Garden TV.”

“Oh,” he said. “I see.” He gave her a cursory kiss on the way out. Clearly, his mind was elsewhere. Like a bloodhound hot on a trail, he refused to be distracted.

Ali watched him as far as his car, then turned off the porch light and locked the door. She leaned her forehead against the door, and a sense of disappointment passed over her. Women always expected to juggle more than one thing at a time—family, work, relationships. Obviously, men did the same thing, but their priorities were entirely different. For Dave, duty came first. Being a good father had detracted from his ability to be a good lover. And now, with Morgan Forester’s homicide case taking precedence, Ali worried that the fatherhood part might be losing ground as well.

Ali wondered if maybe the same thing was true for Bryan Forester. She could speak to the fact that the man was a consci
entious worker, someone whose word was his bond. But what if being good at his job made him a bad husband or father? What then?

As for Bryan’s two little girls? Ali was dismayed to realize that she didn’t even know their names. Saddened by the reminder that real evil was alive and well in the world, Ali went into the bedroom.

After changing into her nightgown, she gently shifted Sam off her pillow and crawled into bed. Long after she turned out the light, though, Ali was still wide awake. At last, she turned on the light. While Sam stalked out of the bedroom in a huff, Ali took her computer out of the nightstand drawer and booted it up.

I
n the aftermath of losing both her job and her marriage and encouraged by her son, Chris, Ali had started Cutlooseblog. com. Much to her surprise, what she had written about her own travails had resonated with plenty of other women. They had written in, sharing their own difficulties, their triumphs and tragedies. Some of those women, like the dauntless Velma T of Laguna Niguel, California, an eightysomething tough-as-nails cancer patient, Ali counted as friends.

But as her own life changed, Ali had found that Cutloose hadn’t. Every few months a brand-new crop of women seemed to cycle through the website, dealing with the same kinds of issues Ali had already dealt with, drowning in their own pain, trying to put their lives back together. When Ali’s direction changed, when she went from agonizing about her life and times to something else—like remodeling the house or choosing plumbing fixtures, for instance—many of the people who continued to visit Cutloose weren’t interested. Her previous readers didn’t want to learn about architectural drawings or getting permits or battling dry rot or sistering joists or any of the other countless new things the Manza
nita Hills house was bringing to Ali’s attention on a daily basis. It didn’t take long for Ali to realize there was a looming disconnect between her own life and those of her readers. Once she did, she had done the only honorable thing—she cut Cutloose loose.

Months earlier a woman named Adele Richardson, aka Leda, had written in. Her history with a philandering husband paralleled Ali’s in many ways. At a time when Ali’s criminal defense attorneys were advising her to take a break from blogging, Adele had offered to step in and pinch-hit. Ali hadn’t accepted the offer, but later on, when she realized she really did need to step away from the blog, she had contacted Adele once more. The transition had been seamless and relatively painless. Ali had written a farewell blog in which she announced she was handing the reins over to someone else, and Cutloose seemed to have gone on quite nicely without her, thank you very much. That was one thing the past few years had taught Ali Reynolds in spades. She was nothing if not expendable.

It had been true for her job and for her marriage and, apparently, for Dave Holman as well. Things happened. Circumstances changed. Life moved on. And as Ali logged on to Cutloose that night, it wasn’t because she felt a need to revisit or wallow in her own misery. In fact, it was exactly the opposite. She had journeyed a long way from the awful pain she’d been in when she first started the blog. She went there now knowing that the stories she was likely to find would allow her to count her blessings.

For old time’s sake, she scrolled through that day’s postings. The stories were achingly familiar.

Go to work,
Ali thought.
Get a job. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

As she scanned through the string of reader comments, she saw that was what the other writers were saying as well: Don’t sit around blaming your husband; be responsible for yourself; get a life. Some of the correspondents couched their suggestions in less confrontational ways, but they were all pretty much of a piece—a course in tough love; self-love seasoned with ample amounts of good common sense. Obviously, Adele was keeping Cutlooseblog.com on track, staying true to Ali’s original mission.

Ali was interested to see that Cutloose seemed to have attracted a fair number of male readers.

The posts that followed that were a mixed bag. Two amazingly angry women declared in no uncertain terms that men were ALWAYS the perpetrators and NEVER the victims in domestic-violence situations. But one correspondent included a toll-free number where men could call to locate family-style shelters in their geographical area that would take male victims and their children right along with women.

Get another job,
Ali thought. Again the accompanying posts echoed that sentiment, some of them with the added proviso of:
Quit drinking!!!

Ali found it all interesting, but more as a trip down memory lane than anything else. She really had moved on, and she wondered how long her successor would be able to keep it up before she, too, would need to hand Cutloose off to someone else—to new blood, as it were.

Leaving Cutloose behind, Ali logged on to the virtual edition of Phoenix’s daily newspaper, the
Arizona Reporter.
There, in the statewide news section, she found an article on Morgan Forester’s homicide.

That’s not entirely true,
Ali thought.
Dave Holman definitely has a person of interest in this case.

The problem is, Dave Holman can imagine such evil very easily,
Ali thought,
and now so can I
.

Bad things really did happen to good people. Ali Reynolds herself was a case in point. Her husband had abandoned her to father out-of-wedlock children with not one but two other women. As a result, when he had been trussed in the trunk of a car and left on a railroad track to be run down by a speeding freight train, she had immediately been viewed as a prime suspect.

But all that worked itself out eventually,
Ali told herself.
Dave Holman may be a less than perfect father and lover, but he’s a good detective. If Bryan Forester is innocent of murdering his wife, then Dave is the one who’ll sort it out. It’s none of my affair.

Ali looked at the clock and was astonished to see that while she had been staring at her computer screen, several hours had
zipped by unnoticed. She logged off, shut down her computer, closed it, and put it away.

As soon as she turned out the light, Sam relented. The cat returned to the bedroom and to her spot on the side of Ali’s bed, landing on it with a soft thud. As Sam curled up and settled down, Ali reached out and put one hand on the purring cat.

“Not our business,” Ali said aloud as she drifted off to sleep. But Sam wasn’t listening. Unfortunately, neither was anyone else.

Sleepless, Matt Morrison lay in bed and tried to figure out what had happened. For the thousandth time that day, he asked himself the same question. Why had Susan stood him up? After all, she was the one who had come up with the idea of meeting in the first place. Susan Callison—Suzie Q in her profile—was thirty-seven years old, married, had no children, and sold real estate. She had told him in their many online encounters that her fantasy was to meet up with a guy and “do it” somewhere they weren’t supposed to be—preferably in somebody’s model home. By seven
A.M.
that morning, an eager Matt had been at the appointed place sixty miles south of Phoenix, parked in the driveway of one of the model homes in a new planned-living development called Red Rock Ridge.

For someone like Matt, who had always followed the rules and kept his nose to the grindstone, Susan’s explicit online chats had made the whole idea sound amazingly daring and out there. Making love with a stranger in a strange bed or elsewhere was something totally out of character for him, which was why he had jumped at the chance. It was why he had gone. He had driven down I-10 anticipating the idea that for once in his incredibly
boring life, he was about to have the kind of sex he’d read about in books and seen in movies—something that would literally knock his socks off.

He had shown up early, a good twenty minutes before he was expected, but beautiful blond Suzie Q hadn’t showed. Anxious minutes had ticked off one by one while he waited and waited. Worried that she might have been in an accident somewhere along the way, he would have loved to call her, but she had never given him her number. “Better not,” she had counseled in an instant message. “Too dangerous.” So he hadn’t been able to call, and without his computer, he couldn’t e-mail or instant-message her. Instead, he had waited for the better part of two hours. When construction workers at some of the other houses on the street had started giving him funny looks, he had driven away.

At first he’d had a hard time deciding where to go. Having left word at the office that he was on his way to Tucson, he couldn’t very well show back up without some kind of explanation. He couldn’t go home, either. Eventually, he’d made his way back to a truck stop in Eloy. There he’d sat at the counter and swilled several cups of coffee and thought about the call of the open road. What would life be like if he had become a trucker instead of an auditor? He tried to see himself at the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler with nothing ahead of him but mile after mile of blacktop. What if he didn’t have to come home each night to a woman who barely tolerated his presence?

Unable to stand the suspense any longer, Matt had driven back to the office and told his supervisor that his appointment had been canceled at the last minute. In the privacy of his cubicle, he logged on to his personal e-mail account. His department maintained a zero-tolerance policy on personal e-mail, so
he didn’t send or open any, but he did scroll through his new mail, looking for a message from Susan. Nothing.

After work, he had hurried home, gone into his study, and fired up his home computer, where he had been disappointed to find there was still no e-mail from Susan, and she wasn’t listed on his buddy list.

He had immediately dashed off a quick note:

That one seemed too brusque. Unable to unsend it, he had written another:

And then a third:

Matt had sat at his desk for a long time, staring at his computer screen and hoping in vain to hear the sound of an arriving message. Finally, startled by how much time had passed, he had hurried out to the kitchen to start dinner. He had just put the chicken pot pies in the oven and was starting to fix the salad when Jenny arrived.

“Dinner’s still not ready?” she asked. “Did you forget that I have book club tonight?”

Matt had forgotten all about her meeting, but he had been thrilled to hear about it. If she was going out, that would give him a little peace and quiet for the evening, and maybe, with any kind of luck, a chance to hear back from Susan Callison. Just a single kind word from her, that was all he wanted.

Now, though, it was one o’clock in the morning. Jenny was back home, asleep in the bedroom, and snoring like a steam engine. Matthew Morrison was wide awake. Susan still hadn’t replied.

Monday-night shifts were usually fairly quiet in the ER. Sometimes Peter could even duck into the lounge and grab a nap. But not that night. The place was a zoo all night long, from the beginning of his shift to the end. It took some doing for him to manage to dispose of the damning needle as well as the bloodstained scrubs, booties, and hanky. Once that was done without anyone in the ER being the wiser, he felt a rush of euphoria. Soon, however, it seemed as though the nervous energy that had sustained him through the day abandoned him completely. Fatigued beyond bearing, he could barely stay focused on what needed to be done. When his shift ended two hours late, Peter scared himself by almost nodding off a couple of times on his way home from the hospital. When he got there, he did the only thing he could do: He stripped off his clothes, fell into bed, and fell sound asleep.

By that time, a bedraggled Matt Morrison was already in his cubicle. He had never been much of a drinker, but this morning, lack of sleep had left him feeling like he’d overdosed on Captain
Morgan rum and Coke. Matt felt sick to his stomach. His head ached. His ears rang. All because Susan hadn’t gotten back to him.

By now he had sent her a dozen different messages. As each interminable moment of Matt’s workday ticked by, he knew with heartbreaking certainty what he had already known in the driveway of that model home in Red Rock—he would never again hear from Suzie Q. Susan Callison was the one good thing that had ever happened to Matt Morrison, and now she was over—completely over. For Matt, the saddest part about his erstwhile affair was that it had ended before it even started.