J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds Mysteries 3-Book Boxed Set, Volume 1: Web of Evil, Hand of Evil, Cruel Intent (80 page)

“Mom,” Ali said, “are you crying?”

“Well, maybe a little,” Edie admitted. “I’m so upset, though, that I can’t help it. Your father sent me home. He said he didn’t want me making a fool of myself in front of all the customers. He’s right about that, of course. Fortunately, the restaurant isn’t busy, and Jan is holding down the fort.”

Jan Howard was the Sugarloaf Café’s long-term waitress. She and Edie handled the front of the house while Bob Larson handled most of the kitchen chores.

“Hold on,” Ali said to her mother. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

For someone wanting to dodge Jacky Jackson, Edie’s call was heaven-sent. “Sorry,” Ali said, turning back to Jacky. “Family emergency. I’ve got to go.”

“But—” Jacky began.

Ali didn’t give him a chance to finish. “It’s my mother. I’ll catch you later.”

Before he could build up to full-whine mode, Ali walked briskly away. She got into the Cayenne and drove down the hill. She went straight to the Sugarloaf and parked next door to the little house at the rear of the building where her parents had lived for most of their married life. Ali found her mother in the living room, plopped in the recliner usually reserved for her husband. A trash basket full of sodden tissues sat on the floor next to her.

“Just tell me,” Edie demanded tearfully as Ali entered the room. “What did I do that was so wrong?”

Honesty’s the best policy,
Ali told herself. “You did too much,” she said.

“Too much,” Edie echoed. “All I did was bake a few things…”

“You baked more than a few things,” Ali corrected. “I’ve seen whole bakeries with fewer pies and cakes. Chris and Athena wanted a small party. You turned it into a big party. They wanted to keep it simple and do it themselves. From their point of view, you took over. You made their party your party.”

“But Chris is my grandson,” Edie objected. “Why wouldn’t I want to make it special?”

“You have to remember that Chris is only half of this equation,” Ali told her. “The other is Athena. She’s been married once before, and it didn’t turn out very well for her. I can understand why she might be feeling a little glitchy about doing this the second time around.”

“And then there’s her physical situation,” Edie suggested. “That might be a factor.”

“No,” Ali corrected firmly. “I think you’re wrong there, Mom. I don’t believe Athena’s missing arm and leg have anything to do with it. But if they do, so what? She’s a grown-up. She went to
war and served our country. She’s paid a hell of a price for wanting to do things her way—not your way or Dad’s way or my way, but her way. Athena’s way. She and Chris get to conduct themselves the way
they
want to.”

“But still—”

“No,” Ali said. “No buts. I could have raised a fuss when I found out that Chris went to you and Dad about the engagement ring instead of coming to me. But I didn’t. It was Chris’s decision. This is the same thing, Mom. He and Athena are a couple. We’ve got to let them live their own lives.”

“So I suppose you’re going to light in to me, too?” Edie asked. “Is that why you’re here?”

“No,” Ali said. “I’m here because you were crying on the phone. As far as I can remember, that’s never happened before. I’m here because you’re upset, but I happen to know Chris and Athena are upset, too. They’re at a delicate point in their relationship. They’re trying to figure out how to pull away from us and be a family of their own. That means that even though we have the very best of intentions, you and I need to back off. Not only that, I’ll make you a deal. If you’ll tell me when you think I’m meddling, I’ll do the same for you. Maybe we can spare ourselves and everyone else a lot of grief.”

“It’s just like when you and Dean eloped, isn’t it?” Edie said as a new spurt of tears coursed down her cheeks.

“Pretty much,” Ali admitted.

“I never meant for that to happen, you know,” Edie said, blowing her nose one last time. “I just wanted to be a part of it.”

Ali leaned over and gave her mother a hug. “I know, Mom,” she said. “And I’m sorry, too, so let’s see if we can both do better this time around.”

When Edie had recovered enough to go powder her nose, Ali
left her alone. Realizing she had skipped breakfast, she walked across the parking lot and into the restaurant.

“How’s she doing?” Jan asked after taking Ali’s order for French toast. “That poor woman baked like crazy all afternoon yesterday, and for what?” she added. “So she could be bitched out about it today? I swear, there’s no pleasing kids these days.”

So that’s it,
Ali concluded.
A generational divide.

As far as Jan and Edie and probably even Ali’s father were concerned, Edie had been trying to “help.” From the point of view of Chris and Athena, however, that help had come across as unwanted interference. Ali realized it would fall on her shoulders to negotiate a peace treaty, and it wouldn’t be easy.

I’m stuck in the middle,
Ali told herself.
I’ll be ducking shots from both sides.

W
orking four ten-hour days gave Peter Winter a lot of time off—three whole days he could devote to other things and to his other life. He tried to get in at least two rounds of golf a week, not because he liked the game all that much but because it was expected. Besides, playing golf was good cover. The rest of his free time went to Singleatheart. Sometimes he went prowling on the site for the hell of it, checking to see if any of the newly arrived profiles suited his particular fancies. Now that he was in the market for a new playmate, his search had taken on greater urgency.

Peter’s private system automatically captured all incoming profiles and credit-card info and sent him those bits of information. Each week he made it his business to go over all of it in detail. You never could tell when something might prove useful for creating yet another virtual man or woman, as he had with the lovely and now departed Susan Callison. As far as Peter Winter was concerned, having a never-ending supply of virtual identities at the ready was essential.

Most of the time he used a stolen identity only once or twice
before shedding it the same way a molting snake discards its skin. As long as he was careful to keep any resulting bills under five hundred dollars, no one paid much attention—not the cops and not the banks, either. The banks quietly wrote off any and all disputed bills, mostly because they didn’t want to let on that their supposedly secure systems were being breached.

At Hertz, Peter had used a phony credit card belonging to Matt Morrison to rent the vehicle he had driven to Sedona. He had done so in hopes of adding another possible suspect to the investigative mix into Morgan’s death. Now that the damage was done, he wouldn’t use it again; he ran the card itself through his shredder.

So far the only major exception to Peter’s use-it-and-lose-it identity philosophy was Manny Wilkins, Peter’s first fully cyber offspring, a fictional creation who was proving to be exceptionally successful in the real world. Manny Wilkins had come into being through a complex trail of fake and official documents it had taken Peter two years to pull together. Known as a canny businesman with a Las Vegas address, Manny was listed as the founder and CEO of Wilkins LLC and also as the bottom-line owner of Singleatheart.com. It was Manny who received all the checks and paid all resulting expenses and taxes before moving any remaining monies to numbered accounts in a series of offshore banks. Other identities came and went. Manny remained because, to Peter’s astonishment, Singleatheart had turned into an inadvertent gold mine, and as long as all resulting taxes were paid on time, no one looked too closely.

The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Peter. He owed much of his good fortune to Rita—poor, dear departed Rita, who had stupidly refused to give him a divorce—or at least the divorce he had wanted. She had told him once that the only way he would
get rid of her was over her dead body, which was exactly how he had done it—by making sure Rita was dead.

Their hike up Camelback Mountain had been part of a carefully orchestrated reconciliation after a period of marital turbulence. There had been no witnesses when Rita fell several hundred feet to her death. She had been so surprised when Peter had turned on her with a drawn weapon in his hand that she’d leaped backward and fallen all on her own. He’d made sure there was no one around to say Rita hadn’t tripped and fallen exactly the way her grieving husband claimed she had.

Had Peter carried a big insurance policy on Rita, things might have been different. That would have given him a motive. As it was, after a fairly cursory investigation, Rita’s death was declared an accident. That was done over the objections of Rita’s mother, who insisted Peter had killed her daughter. The mother-in-law couldn’t prove it, however, and neither could anyone else.

Rita had been gone for ten years now. Peter’s friends at work kept telling him that he needed to get over her and move on. They kept trying to fix him up with someone else, but Peter wasn’t interested in another wife. In fact, he was hung up on something else entirely.

Peter had liked how he felt as he watched Rita go tumbling helplessly down the steep hillside, flopping like a limp rag doll as she flew from one boulder to the next. He had exulted in hearing her fading screams as they melted into the far distance, and he had known right then that he would kill again when the first opportunity presented itself—even if he didn’t know exactly how or when.

In contemplating this new compulsion, and before taking any action, Peter had become a student of murders. He searched out as many cases as he could find and sorted out
who got away with it, who didn’t, and all the hows and whys in between. As he researched his newly chosen field, Peter was struck by one recurring theme: how many stupid killers, mostly men lacking in imagination, killed first one wife or girlfriend and then another in exactly the same way. Later, once the hapless killers were caught, they were always astonished that some detective or other happened to pick up on the obvious similarities between cases.

Peter Winter was a doctor. That meant he was smarter than the average bear to begin with. Determined not to make the same kinds of fatal errors, he realized there was no need to kill his own cheating wife when he could always murder someone else’s.

Peter had earned his way through school by being a geek. Putting his well-honed technical skills to work, he set about creating Singleatheart. In doing so, he discovered that the world was full of women just like Rita, all of them admitted cheaters and all available for the taking. Their numbers alone had been an amazing wake-up call. It turned out they were everywhere. As Peter scanned through the various profiles each week, that was what he went looking for—geographically diverse women who looked like carbon copies of Rita and deserved what was about to happen to them. By murdering women who bore an amazing resemblance to Rita Winter, Peter was able to do away with his wife over and over without ever getting caught.

Peter had covered his tracks by working through websites based in Russia. When it became apparent that he’d need a U.S.-based server farm, he had chosen one in Deadwood, South Dakota, for three reasons. For starters, the name appealed to him. Deadwood had a certain ring to it, and that was how he liked to think of cheating women in general—as so much dead
wood. He also liked the fact that Deadwood was a hell of a long way from his home and respectable lifestyle in Phoenix, or from Manny Wilkins’s phony condo office just off the Strip in Vegas. As long as Peter was careful to avoid attracting the attention of the feds, crossing multiple jurisdictional lines made things far tougher on the cops and easier for him.

Third, the server’s South Dakota location was attractive for economic, moneygrubbing reasons. With gold mining not exactly booming at the moment, local city and state officials had enacted a series of changes designed to attract and keep new businesses. The resulting tax savings meant that the IP server Manny had chosen was able to do the same job for a lot less money than vendors in other locations.

Securing Singleatheart’s business had been carried out by one of Manny Wilkins’s minions—Peter Winter in yet another cyber guise. Once the site was up and running, all Peter had to do was sit back and rake in the dough and the occasional victim.

On that particular Wednesday morning, Peter turned to his computer with no inkling that something was amiss, not until he went scrolling through the credit-card information from that week’s server-farm data dump. What jumped out at him from the very first listing of the day wasn’t the person’s name, Alison Reynolds, but part of her address—Sedona. The place where Peter had driven on Monday morning. Where he’d used a hammer to beat Morgan Forester’s pretty little face to a bloodied pulp. Where he’d managed to leave the murder weapon in the back of the victim’s husband’s pickup truck.

Was it merely a coincidence that someone else from Sedona was venturing through the Singleatheart website barely two days later?

No,
Peter Winter told himself.
There are no coincidences.

But there was something about the name Alison Reynolds that was spookily familiar. Just for argument’s sake, Peter went ahead and Googled the name to see what might come up. There was far more material than he’d expected, and none of it was good news for Peter Winter. A former TV anchor, Alison Reynolds now claimed to be a different kind of journalist—a blogger with an extensive following of fans. Over the course of the past two years, she had been involved in several high-profile homicide cases in Arizona and California. She had a concealed-weapon permit, and she was evidently well acquainted with a Yavapai County homicide detective named Dave Holman. And she was remodeling a house with Build It construction—the company owned by Bryan Forester.

The light came on in Peter’s head. That was why Ali Reynolds’s name was familiar: He had seen it mentioned somewhere in Morgan Forester’s computer files.

That’s not good, either,
Peter told himself.
Not good at all.

Was she nosing around because Morgan had confided in her, or was she doing her snooping on behalf of Morgan’s husband? Either way, Alison Reynolds was a woman who would bear careful watching.

From past experience, Peter knew that often the best way to watch someone like that was through her computer. A less adept man might have unleashed the dogs of war. Peter Winter didn’t need to. Ali Reynolds had unwittingly wandered into the world of Singleatheart, so she had also opened her computer files to the Trojan horse he kept hidden there. The next time Ali Reynolds opened her computer, he’d be there, too, able to follow her every keystroke.

Peter didn’t have a doubt in the world that observing what she said and did there would tell him everything he needed to know.
And though he was tracking her activities online, he knew that if he needed to, he’d be able to take her out the old-fashioned way—just like he had Morgan Forester.

After dealing with her mother’s meltdown, Ali had no intention of going back to see Jacky Jackson. When she left the Sugarloaf, she headed for Andante Drive. She had just parked and walked inside when her phone rang. Glancing at caller ID, Ali saw a Cottonwood number in the window. “Hello?”

“Is this Alison Reynolds?” a strange woman’s voice asked.

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Nelda Harris, Haley Marsh’s grandmother. I found your business card on a table in the living room last night. I believe you must have stopped by to see her sometime yesterday afternoon.”

Great,
Ali thought.
Now I’ll probably be caught in the cross fire on this as well.
“Yes,” she admitted. “I did stop by.”

“May I ask why?” Nelda asked.

“Haley didn’t tell you?”

“No, she didn’t, and that’s why I’m calling—to find out. As her guardian, I need to know what’s going on with her.”

“I came to offer her the chance of a scholarship, Mrs. Harris. A scholarship she could have used to attend any college of her choice. She turned it down. She says she wants to go to work for Target.”

“An Askins scholarship?” Nelda Harris asked.

“That’s right. It would have paid her way to virtually any school in the country. I suggested she might want to talk this over with you. She seems to be under the impression that she’s a burden to you somehow. She wants to make her own way in the
world, and she’s afraid that going to school will mean you’ll be stuck with her and her little boy for that much longer.”

“Whatever would give her that idea?” Nelda demanded. “I never said she was a burden to me, or little Liam, either. I wouldn’t.”

“And I’m sure you didn’t,” Ali agreed.

“Liam,” Nelda said, “stop that. Come away from there.” Speaking into the phone once more, she added, “Do you believe in good and evil?”

For a moment Ali thought the woman might be referring to her granddaughter’s cute little toddler. “I’m not sure—” Ali began.

“Not just good and bad,” Nelda interrupted. “I mean real good and evil.”

Earlier in her life, Ali might have been able to answer that question clearly in the negative—at least so far as evil was concerned. But now that she had met and unmasked Arabella Ashcroft, now that she had seen beyond the skin-deep physical beauty of April Gaddis, the young woman who had come within hours of marrying Ali’s former husband, real evil did have a presence in her life, and often a very human face.

“Yes,” Ali replied at last. “I suppose I do. Why?”

“Liam, please. Grandma’s on the phone. Come here and be still for a moment.” Nelda sounded exasperated, as though the toddler was taking advantage of her being on the phone to get into all kinds of mischief.

“Let me ask you another question, Ms. Reynolds…”

“Please call me Ali.”

“All right, Ali. I know you said Haley turned down your offer, but if I could convince her to change her mind—if we could convince her—would the scholarship still be available?”

“She doesn’t actually have the scholarship at the moment,” Ali corrected. “When she said she wasn’t interested, I took her at her word. It’ll most likely be awarded to someone else.”

“Please,” Nelda said as though she hadn’t heard. “I’d really like to discuss this with you, but not right now, when Liam’s driving me crazy. I need to put him down for a nap, but once he wakes up, we could drive up to Sedona to see you.”

Ali looked around her house. Aunt Evie’s very breakable knickknacks were still scattered here and there, well within reach of a toddler. And then there was Sam. A temperamental cat who didn’t do well with most adult strangers would probably have a complete meltdown if faced with a busy-bee little boy. And if this house wasn’t kid-proof, the construction site at Manzanita Hills Road was even less so.

“I’ll tell you what,” Ali said. “Do you know where the Sugarloaf Café is?”

“Of course,” Nelda said.

“Great,” Ali said. “Call me at this number when you head out. I’ll meet you there. We can have lunch. My treat.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Nelda said. “Liam and I can eat before we leave home.”