by Betty Webb
“So what do you want me to do? Stand up and sing the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’?”
That smarmy smile again. “I’ve been contracted to help Chelsea see the error of her ways. As for Gorsky, his wife is your client, not mine. I’m giving you this photograph out of the goodness of my heart.”
I felt torn. I was duty-bound to let the poor woman know her husband was alive and well, but feared that as soon as I did, Clint would show up on her doorstep singing songs about expensive “extractions.”
“Forcibly extracting an adult from a cult—if that’s what Kanati is, although I doubt it—is still kidnapping. This is a free country, Clint, and people are allowed to make their own choices about how they want to live. As long as they’re of legal age and their lifestyle choices don’t result in violence or holding by force, there’s nothing anyone can do about it.” I finished my lecture by giving Harold Slow Horse a stern look.
Which he ignored.
“See you later,” I told Jimmy, when we locked up at the end of the day. “I’m driving over to Marie Gorsky’s to give her the news about Roger.”
“Let’s hope she shows better sense than Harold does.”
People don’t always react the way you think they will. Before Harold had begged us to get Chelsea out of Kanati, I would have sworn he wasn’t dumb enough to hire a convicted felon to perform another felony. That belief was now blown. So who knew how Marie Gorsky would take the news of Roger’s whereabouts? Tears of joy? Curses? Whatever, she deserved to know her husband was alive and well, although playing croquet with a hot redhead.
“Why, doesn’t Roger look wonderful!” Marie enthused, when I showed her the photographs.
Compared to the three-hundred-plus pound behemoth he had been before his disappearing act, Roger did look wonderful. But why wasn’t Marie expressing outrage at him for putting her through an entire year of pain, of not knowing if her husband was dead or alive? When she had hired us, she’d been so overwhelmed I had talked her into joining a grief counseling group.
We were sitting in her decorator-appointed living room at her hilltop Paradise Valley estate. Like the exterior of the house, it was done up in Territorial Modern, which meant that a house less than two years old was trying hard to look more than two hundred. The only thing giving it away was the peach-colored lighting glowing across the peach leather sofas, a sound system playing an R. Carlos Nakai’s flute composition, and the four rescued greyhounds ticking their silver-painted nails back and forth on the white-and-peach marble flooring. Then there was the turquoise pool in the xeriscaped backyard being tended to by a yummy, bathing-suited pool boy, and twin blue-eyed Siamese cats sneering at me from Mrs. Gorsky’s lap while she smiled fondly at the photograph.
“You’re not, ah, angry with your husband?”
Like her husband, Marie had lost considerable weight since we’d last met and no longer looked like the sweet-faced grandma she’d earlier resembled. Giving a teenage-ish wriggle, she piped, “Oh, no, I’m thrilled! I can divorce him now, instead of waiting seven years to have him declared dead.”
One of the cats turned its sneer away from me and up toward Marie in irritation. Thinking only of itself, as Siamese are prone to do, it wanted her to stop wriggling.
“You’re going to divorce him.” My voice sounded as flat as I felt.
“Of course I am. Wait just a second.” With admirable delicacy, she sat the two cats aside on the peach sofa, where they immediately began clawing at it, and walked briskly through the sliding glass doors that led to the backyard. She called out to the person I’d thought was a pool boy, who was netting stray bougainvillea petals out of the pool. “Glen, could you come in here a moment, please?”
Seconds later a fit, still-handsome man somewhere in his fifties, wearing a wowser of a Speedo, strolled in and gave my client a less-than-platonic hug. I received a brief nod of acknowledgment.
“What’s up, Hot Stuff?” he asked her.
“Lena’s found Roger.”
“Still alive, I hope.”
Grinning ear to ear, she showed him the photographs.
“Yup, that’s him all right. The dog! Oh well, his loss is my gain.” With that, he patted her on the rump and returned to his pool cleaning.
“We met in that grief-counseling group you told me about,” Mrs. Gorsky explained, setting the cats back on her lap, where they went to work destroying her peach crepe de chine dress. “He wanted to hold up on moving in here until we cleared up my legal situation, but this means he’s free to put his house on the market. Since it’s a four-bed, five-bath in Biltmore Estates, it should move quickly. We’d invite you to the wedding, but we’re just going to shack up.”
I covered my guffaw with a pretend coughing fit.
She looked at the pictures again and sighed. “I hope that redhead likes Roger as much as he so obviously likes her.”
More pretend coughing.
For some reason, a mantra I’d once heard during a New Age church service had been running through my mind recently, and here it came again. “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”
All things being pretty damned well at the Gorsky residence, I bid my former client farewell and headed home to a man who would never leave to get a pack of cigarettes and not come back. First of all, because he didn’t smoke.
And because Jimmy wasn’t that kind of man.
Chapter Six
On my way in to Desert Investigations the next morning, my cell phone yelped the first few bars of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightnin’” and Juliana Thorsson’s name popped up on the display screen. Ordinarily I would have let the call roll over to voice mail, but this time I answered.
“Make it quick, because I’m hemmed in between two semis and a Ferrari,” I told her.
“Ali ran away. That quick enough for you? I’m at home. Get here as soon as you can.”
She hung up.
Feeling sick, I called Jimmy’s cell and alerted him, finishing with, “…so cancel all my appointments. I have no idea when I’ll make it to the office.”
A sigh. “Guess I’ll see you when I see you.”
By the time I made it to Juliana’s condo, I had conquered my nausea, only to find the U.S. senatorial candidate looking like something Snowball had barfed up. Her eyes and nose were red, and she was wearing a red paisley-print shirt with brown corduroy slacks and pink house slippers. Compared to her, I was overdressed in my black tee-shirt and jeans.
“Calm down,” I told her when she began to pick at her cuticles.
“Haven’t you ever noticed that when you tell someone to calm down they get even more upset?” Juliana pulled at a piece of loose skin, making the cuticle bleed onto the white piece of paper she handed me. “She left this note.”
MOM –
SINCE YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT OUR HAPPINESS, KYLE AND I ARE MAKING OUR OWN PLANS. SEE YOU AGAIN SOME TIME, MAYBE.
ALI
P.S. WE BORROWED SOME MONEY BUT WE PROMISE TO PAY YOU BACK. P.P. S. PLEASE TAKE CARE OF MISTY FOR ME.
The mixed-breed mutt in question lay snoring on a blue armchair in the corner of the living room. At least someone around here wasn’t borderline hysterical.
“Oh, Lena, the little brat couldn’t even sign it ‘Love, Ali,’” she wept. “But she worries about her dog!”
I tried being the voice of reason, a challenge for hot-tempered me. “Ali’s not so little anymore, and she’s not actually a brat. You know how she feels about Kyle. She thinks the world’s going to end if they get separated. Have you talked to his parents yet?”
She blew her nose. “First thing I did after the school called to report she didn’t show up again this morning.”
“And?”
“The Etheridges got a note, too. Not only that, they’re missing the money they kept under the towels in
the linen cabinet. And some credit cards.”
This was actually good news since credit cards could be tracked unless the Etheridges had already cancelled them. “How much in cash?”
“About two hundred.”
“Did Kyle skip school yesterday, by any chance?”
“That’s what his mother said.”
Kyle’s background was as tragic as Ali’s. After being removed from his biological mother’s home because of extreme abuse, CPS had fostered him out to the Etheridges. This arrangement lasted for several years until they received the good news that his troubled mother had signed away her parental rights. They immediately adopted him, yet this was how he’d repaid them. Not that I could judge. I had been a fostered teenager too, and my own behavior had often been every bit as shortsighted.
Skipping school probably meant that Kyle had been delegated to take care of the details of the duo’s upcoming escape, but he was only a few months older than Ali, and, given his weedy build, he looked younger. With all the standard methods of escape—planes, trains, buses, etc.—demanding several forms of ID these days, their choice would be limited to “borrowed” automobiles.
“Are the Etheridges missing a car?” I asked.
Juliana blew her nose again. “Some old Hyundai, white, I think.”
I’d been hoping for something more noticeable, like a purple Kia Soul, but because of Arizona’s paint-fading sun, most cars here were white, and every other car was a Hyundai. “I take it your own car is still in the garage?”
She nodded.
“Wherever you’ve stashed your emergency cash, better go check so we can see how much they’ve got on them. Make sure you still have all your credit cards.”
While she was searching, I phoned the Etheridges and told them not to cancel their cards yet, because those were easy to track. For the meantime, they agreed. “But if those kids rack up too many bills, we’ll be forced to,” Glen Etheridge told me. “We’re not millionaires.”
After getting their Hyundai’s license plate number, I hung up, leaving Kyle’s parents to comfort each other. From where I stood in the living room, I could see Juliana as she rummaged through a hollowed-out book in the bookcase, a coffee can in the kitchen, and an old shoe in her bedroom closet. The expression on her face when she returned told me she’d been cleaned out.
“Four hundred and fifty-something gone,” she said. “But at least my credit cards are still in my handbag.”
“That means they’ve got something like six hundred and fifty in cash between them for the moment, and some cards, but I’m betting they already hit the ATM. Okay, here’s what we need to do. First, clean yourself up and change clothes. We’re going to drive around for a quick search of the obvious places, and if anyone recognizes us, I don’t want them to think their senatorial candidate is on a bender.”
We hadn’t yet called the police. Despite Juliana’s genuine maternal love, she was still a political animal, and knew it would not be wise to give Gerald Simpson, her opponent for U.S. Senate, more ammunition to use against her. As cynical as it sounded, she was right.
The first place we looked was the abandoned house the two had once holed up in during the hunt for Ali’s family’s killers. The windows and doors had once been poorly secured with cheap plywood, but these days the house was ringed by chain-link fencing, and the plywood replaced by stout wooden panels. The sign in front said SOLD. Probably for another flip.
“There’s one more place we need to check,” I said.
“You don’t mean…?”
“Kids in trouble almost always run home, Juliana. Or to a place that once felt like home.”
“But that house…” She didn’t finish the sentence, her horrified expression speaking for her.
A year earlier, Dr. Arthur Cameron, his wife Alexandra, and their son Alec—Ali’s brother—had been found slaughtered in their house in an upscale Scottsdale enclave. After the crime had been solved and Ali was adopted by Juliana, her other biological mother, I hadn’t bothered to keep tabs on the murder house. Part of me hoped it had been abandoned, but the group of college-age boys shooting baskets at the hoop attached to its garage showed me the house was very much lived in. No white Hyundais were visible on the street. This was Mercedes country.
Because of the Pima symbols painted all over my Jeep, it has always drawn an admiring male crowd, so I didn’t have to knock on the door to ask my questions. “Any of you guys see a couple of fifteen-year-olds, blond girl named Ali, and a dark-haired boy named Kyle?” I asked, once they’d converged on the Jeep. “They’re driving a white Hyundai.”
A sandy-haired string bean wearing a maroon ASU sweat shirt, said, “Nope. Just a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses hawking The Watchtower. We told them we were all Satanists.” When his buddies laughed, he grinned. “Say, that Jeep a ’48?”
“Part of it. Mostly a ’45, and some ’46, with contemporary upgrades.”
“Sick paint job.”
In ever-confusing teen parlance, “sick” currently meant “terrific,” so I thanked him for the compliment. Handing him my business card, I said, “Do me a favor. If you see anyone matching their description, give me a call.”
He studied the card. “Desert Investigations. You’re a detective?”
“Something like that.”
In an instant, his face changed. “Does this have anything to do with what happened in this house before?”
The Cameron murder case had made headlines around the country. The murder of a beautiful woman, her young son, and her famed physician husband were guaranteed fodder for the local newspapers. But when the national press got wind that the suspected murderess—Ali—was the product of eggs sold to a fertilization clinic by a one-time Olympic medalist and currently rising politician, CNN, MSNBC, and FOX NEWS had had orgasms over the story, as did all the syndicated talk shows. Therefore, it came as no surprise that Mr. ASU knew his house’s history.
“The girl lived here,” I told him.
“And she’s gone missing?”
“Afraid so. We’re trying to find her.”
He switched his gaze from me to Juliana. “You’re her, uh, mom?”
Juliana nodded and waited for the barb; there had been so many. But none came. For a moment the boy hung his head, apparently thinking about something he didn’t want to make us privy to, but when he looked back up, his eyes were grave. “If I see her, I’ll call.”
“That was interesting,” I said to Juliana as we drove out of the cul-de-sac, leaving the boy staring after us. “You know what we have to do now.”
“Tell the authorities.” From the expression on her face, I could see she was kissing the U.S. senatorial seat goodbye.
Being a political high flier, however temporary, does have its benefits. Rather than wait for Juliana to complete reams of paperwork, the officer in charge at Scottsdale PD headquarters immediately issued a BOLO on the Etheridges’ white 2009 Hyundai Elantra.
That done, he said, “Last time seen?”
“This morning,” Juliana said. “I thought she was on her way to school, but a couple of hours later they called and told me she’d never shown up.”
Having sat through similar statements with other clients, I knew I wasn’t needed, so I gave Juliana a pat on the shoulder and went back to the reception area to wait. On the way out, I passed Detective Sylvie Perrins. When I blew her a kiss, she stuck out her tongue.
I took a seat in reception and prepared myself for a long wait.
Instead, Sylvie showed up bearing a cup of coffee.
“For little ol’ me?” I asked.
“You think I drink this shit?”
I took a sip and found the coffee strong enough to run for its own election. “Mmm. Just the way I like it.”
“What’re you doing here with the Princess?” Like most cops, Sylvie didn’t like politici
ans.
“Her daughter ran away.”
“I hate kids,” she lied.
“So do I,” I lied back.
Sylvie allowed a rare look of compassion onto her sharp-featured face. “Not that the poor thing doesn’t have a reason. First her birth mother gets murdered, then she winds up in juvie, then she gets adopted by her supposed real mother—a politician, for fuck’s sake—then learns that every move she makes for the rest of her life will be put under a microscope. If I were that kid, I’d run away, too.”
“Same here.” Actually, I had run away several times during my years under the kind auspices of CPS.
“How you holding up, Lena? I know you’re her godmother.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are such a liar.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“I’m never having kids.” Despite being single, Sylvie had been trying to get pregnant for the last three years. Of late she’d been talking about IVF, the very procedure that had ushered Ali into the world.
“I’ll never have kids, either.” I told her, not knowing if that was a lie or not.
“All they do is rip out your heart.” This statement was so self-evident it needed no reply.
Sylvie’s glum face tightened. “Hear anything else about that body you found on the Rez yesterday?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing.”
“Well?”
“The answer’s nada, Sylvie. But just think. Reservation Woman has the same general description of Unicorn Woman—the gal at the office park. That’s around two miles away, right? Woman in her twenties, light brown hair, wearing a blue dress. The only difference is that my gal was a fresh dump and hadn’t been dined on yet.”
