Moving Target (3 page)

Ali heard the wistfulness in Leland’s voice. Only Jeffrey’s return, as he was blown back inside with a blast of cold air, caused her to stifle
a sympathetic comment that, under the circumstances, she doubted would be welcome.

Jeffrey ushered them out to the curb, where a distinctive London-style cab waited. The driver loaded the luggage in front while the three passengers piled into the back with Jeffrey facing them on the fold-down seat.

“That’ll be the Langham?” the cabbie asked, confirming what he’d already been told.

“Yes, please,” Ali said.

“So how was your flight?’ Jeffrey asked once they were settled. “I hope you were able to get some rest. Since you’re here for such a short time, it would be a shame if you lost a whole day to jet lag.”

“The flight was quite comfortable,” Leland said, “and I was able to sleep on the plane with no difficulty.” Since he didn’t mention that they had traveled in first class with a full-length flat bed to sleep on, Ali didn’t mention it, either.

They left the airport in a whirling shower of snow. It was falling but not sticking.

“Are you sure you want to drive to Bournemouth tomorrow?” Jeffrey asked. “I have a court appearance then; otherwise I’d be more than happy to drive you there. If you take the train, I can come down and fetch you at the weekend.”

Ali and Leland had discussed that and come to the conclusion that they wanted their own wheels available so they wouldn’t be dependent on anyone to take them where they wanted to go. To that end, Ali had used B.’s platinum Hertz card to rent a Land Rover that would be delivered to the hotel by ten the next morning. “No, thanks,” she said. “We’ll be fine on our own.”

“You’re from Arizona, aren’t you?” Jeffrey asked. “If it’s still snowing, will you be able to manage the drive?”

Like many people who had never visited Arizona, he most likely envisioned Arizona as a vast, cactus-dotted wasteland. During Ali’s years
at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where the elevation was close to seven thousand feet, and while she had been living in Chicago and on the East Coast, she had done more than her share of winter driving.

“Don’t worry about that,” Ali assured him. “I’m fine in snow. I’m more concerned about driving on the left side of the road.” She didn’t add that she was also concerned about being in the car with Leland in a reversal of roles. At home in a vehicle, Leland was generally at the wheel. Now that he was beyond the age where rental companies would allow him to drive, Ali would be driving him. Leland had almost balked at going on the trip when he learned about that unwelcome bit of age discrimination. It had taken a good deal of cajoling on Ali’s part to bring him around.

“Do you have plans for dinner this evening?” Jeffrey asked. “If not, my partner and I would be delighted if you’d come to our place. Charles is the most marvelous chef.”

He made that statement tentatively, as though unsure what Leland’s or Ali’s reaction would be to the telling admission. Ali wasn’t privy to all the gory details, but she knew in general that Leland’s homosexuality was the reason his older brothers, Langston and Lawrence, had prevailed on their father to disown him. He had been run out of town in disgrace when he returned home to Parkstone after his stint with the Royal Marines during the Korean War. Now, it seemed, his great-nephew was following in Leland’s footsteps.

Ali stole a quick glance in Leland’s direction. Nothing in his demeanor indicated that he had known anything about Jeffrey’s sexual preference in advance of their arrival.

“I’m sure we’d be delighted,” Leland replied, “unless . . .” He paused. Ali realized that he was struggling to resist calling her Madame Reynolds. “Unless Ali here isn’t feeling up to it,” he finished finally.

It was touching that Leland was concerned about Ali’s welfare while she, in turn, worried about his. “How far is it from the hotel?”

“We’re just in Knightsbridge,” Jeffrey said. “Not far at all.”

Ali nodded. “As long as it’s not too late. I suspect we’re going to be ready to bail pretty early.”

Jeffrey frowned briefly, struggling with her American usage, and then he brightened. “Oh,” he said. “I see. You mean you’ll want to make an early night of it. Of course. Time zones and all that. Perfectly understandable.” He pulled out his mobile phone and punched in a number, then spoke into it. “It’s a go. They’ll come to dinner. As long as it’s early. Seven?” He raised one eyebrow questioningly in Ali’s direction.

As far as she was concerned, six would have been better, but she wanted to get off on a good foot with all these folks. Earlier she had e-mailed the hotel with a request for an early check-in. The staff had not yet responded, but if they could get into their rooms, perhaps there would be time for a quick nap before dinner. She nodded. “Seven will be fine.”

She glanced down at her watch. Ali had switched it to local time when the flight attendants made the time announcement on the plane. Once they got to the hotel, she’d try to be in touch with the important people in her life. She thought it was most likely late at night in Tokyo, where B. would be for the next three days, and it was sometime in the early morning back home in Sedona, where wedding planning was no doubt going on apace. On her iPhone, Ali had a world-clock application that would translate London time to Tokyo time or Phoenix time. The problem was that until she had a chance to exchange the SIM card for the one B. had given her to use on the trip, the phone was virtually useless.

Jeffrey interrupted her thought process. “Charles needs to know if either of you has any food allergies or objections to Chinese food. That’s his specialty, you see, and it’s also what he serves in his restaurants—Charlie Chan’s. He has three restaurants scattered around London. He also owns a catering company that specializes in hosting those campy murder-mystery dinners, complete with trunks full of fabulous period costumes. They’re great fun.”

When Ali looked at Leland, she saw that he had dozed off with his chin resting on his perfectly knotted tie. Consequently, she answered for both of them. “No food allergies at all,” Ali replied. “Chinese food will be perfect.”

Jeffrey heaved a relieved sigh before passing along her message. When he ended the call, he turned back to Ali. “So glad you said yes,” he said. “Charles makes the most marvelous Peking duck. He was already cooking up a storm—a busman’s holiday, as it were—with the expectation that you’d come to dinner, but we had agreed in advance that if it turned out you hated Chinese, we’d eat the duck as leftovers and take you somewhere else.”

Ali looked fondly at Leland, who was still dozing. If the other relatives turned out to be this pleasant, this trip would be a walk in the park.

T
raffic was barely moving, and it took a long time to reach the Langham. As Ali and Leland stepped out of the cab, Jeffrey joined them in the driveway while they unloaded their bags. “Do you want me to come back for you this evening?” he asked.

“No,” Ali said. “That’s not necessary. Just give me the address. We’ll call a cab.”

She ended up walking away with a handwritten note that the doorman jotted on a pad he pulled out of his pocket. Their early check-in arrangements still held, although the slow trip through traffic had rendered them unnecessary. Once they’d been delivered to their adjoining rooms, Ali stripped out of her clothes and took a leisurely shower. Then she put on the pair of lounging pajamas handed out by the flight attendants to passengers in the first-class cabin.

Ali was about to address the SIM card issue when the landline phone rang on the writing desk. When she answered, she was surprised to hear B.’s voice. “What are you doing still up?” she asked, glancing reflexively at her watch. “Isn’t it the middle of the night there?”

“Good call,” B. admitted. “It is the middle of the night. I can’t sleep, so I thought I’d see if you and Leland got checked in to your rooms all right.”

That was unusual. B. was someone whose work took him across multiple time zones and the international date line with wild abandon. Most of the time, he did so seamlessly and without seeming to suffer from jet lag or sleep-related problems on either end of his travels.

“My room is great, and I’m sure Leland’s is, too,” Ali told him. “Leland’s great-nephew Jeffrey met our plane and rode in the cab with us as far as the hotel. We’ll be joining him and his partner for dinner at their place a little later this evening. But what’s going on? Why can’t you sleep? You usually fall asleep the moment your head hits the pillow. Pre-wedding jitters got you down?”

“It’s not about the wedding,” B. said gloomily. “I’m not worried about that at all. I’m upset about a kid named Lance Tucker.”

Ali had to think for a moment before she remembered hearing B. mention the name previously. Lance was some kind of juvenile computer wunderkind who had gotten himself into major difficulties when he managed to hack into his school system’s server. High Noon had been called in by the school district’s systems manager to consult on tracking down the culprit and plugging the resulting security breach. Ali knew that B. had come away from the incident with a more than grudging respect for the kid’s computer abilities.

“I remember,” Ali said as the pieces slipped into her mind. “Wasn’t he the kid from Texas who broke into the local school district’s computer system?”

“That’s the one,” B. answered. “He shut down the school district’s server as a protest because they were instituting a program that would require everyone in the school district—students, teachers, and employees—to wear tracking chips that would allow them to be located on or off campus. Lance was part of a group of activists who claimed their constitutional rights were being violated. When the courts found against them, Lance took it upon himself to shut down the district’s server.”

“All that happened months ago,” Ali observed. “Why are you worrying about it now?”

She heard B. sigh into the phone. “Because Lance Tucker is in Austin
Memorial Hospital with two severely broken legs and second- and third-degree burns over half his body.”

Ali knew something about burn injuries. They were ugly and terrifically painful, and recovery was a long and difficult process. “That’s terrible,” she said. “How did it happen?”

“The local sheriff’s department has been investigating the incident,” B. replied. “At first it was assumed this was an inmate-on-inmate attack, and the facility was put on lockdown. Yesterday afternoon investigators released a report saying they’ve determined that Lance’s injuries were self-inflicted. They claim Lance sprayed himself with some kind of aerosol and then used a cigarette lighter to set himself on fire.”

“Why on earth would he do that?” Ali murmured.

“Why indeed?” B. replied. “What I’ve been told is they think he did it as a way of getting released early, but that makes no sense, none at all. His eighteenth birthday is less than a month away, at which time he would have been released automatically. I’ve met Lance. He’s a smart kid. I can’t imagine that he’d do something this stupid.”

“What are you saying?” Ali asked.

“I think someone inside the facility—either a fellow inmate, a visitor, or one of the guards—managed to set him on fire.”

“You think the sheriff’s department is involved in some kind of cover-up?”

“It’s possible,” B. said, “and since I was involved in helping put him behind bars, I’m feeling like what’s happened is all my fault and that maybe I should do something to fix it.”

“Wait a minute,” Ali said. “I remember High Noon was involved in finding the kid and in gathering some of the evidence used against him, but that doesn’t mean you’re in any way responsible for what happened.”

“I still feel responsible,” B. countered bleakly. “High Noon was part of the investigation. We’re the ones who helped track the intrusion back to Lance’s computer. I was even called to give evidence in the case. The problem is, it was a first offense and a one-time thing. There was
no reason to go after the kid as though he were the second coming of Al Capone, but the school superintendent went absolutely ballistic and insisted on having Lance prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

“Was he the only one involved?” Ali asked.

“There were other people who made public objections to the tagging system, but Lance was the only one who was charged with disrupting the server. Shortly after Lance was convicted, his computer science teacher—a man who was also publicly opposed to the proposed tagging system—committed suicide.”

“Was the teacher ever charged?”

“As far as I know, the teacher, Everett Jackson, was never officially mentioned in any of the court proceedings, and his involvement was never proved one way or the other. If he was in on it, Lance never ratted him out. There were people who speculated that he must have been involved, because they didn’t think Lance was smart enough to do it on his own. I know better. The kid is brilliant.”

“A brilliant kid wouldn’t set his own pants on fire.”

“That’s my take on the situation.”

“What about the hospital bills?”

“I think that’s a big part of why the investigation came back as self-inflicted. This way, the facility dodges that liability, and the hospital bills—which will be huge—will be on the family’s nickel. In the meantime, someone else is getting away with assault, at least, and maybe with attempted murder.”