by J. A. Jance
The porch light flashed back on, a dead bolt turned in the lock, and the door swung open. Marliss, dressed in a robe, her makeup marred and her hair in more than its usual disarray, stood in the doorway with her arms folded across her ample chest.
“What do you want?” she demanded.
“How long have you and Ralph Whetson been getting it on?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“You’re wrong,” Joanna said. “It’s very much my business. My department is dealing with a major incident, and confidential details of our investigation have been leaked to the media. Considering you and Mr. Whetson are clearly involved in some kind of romantic entanglement, it’s not too difficult to determine who might be the source of all that unauthorized information.”
“I’m a reporter. I’m just doing my job.”
“No,” Joanna said, “you’re actually interfering with our investigation. So are you inviting me in or not?”
Grudgingly, Marliss stepped aside. “I suppose you can come in.” She allowed Joanna into the house, but they went no farther than the entryway, and no invitation to have a seat was forthcoming.
“What’s in your column for tomorrow?” Joanna asked.
“That’s none of your business, either.”
“Does it by any chance mention one of our homicide victims by name?”
“What if it does?”
“Does the publisher of the Bisbee Bee approve of revealing the name of a homicide victim prior to the notification of the next of kin?”
“But I thought . . .”
“Ralph told you that Dr. Baldwin asked me to do the next-of-kin notification, and you thought it was done. Unfortunately, Amelia’s grandmother, the woman who raised her, doesn’t have a telephone and has not yet been notified. If your column reveals our victim’s name prior to that notification being made, I’ll go straight to Richard Warren and lodge a formal complaint.”
Not that that would do any good. Joanna knew Richard Warren to be a mealy-mouthed little wuss who let his star reporter run roughshod over him most of the time. Still, it was enough of a threat to get Marliss’s attention.
“I’ll take the name out,” she conceded.
“Speaking of names,” Joanna said, “Jack Carver’s name better not show up there, either. He’s a confidential informant whose contribution to our investigation has been invaluable. He’s also a juvenile, and I have it on good authority that if you reveal his connection to this case in a fashion that in any way jeopardizes his future, his mother will take you to the cleaners.”
“She wouldn’t dare.”
“Have you ever met June Carver?”
“Well, yes,” Marliss admitted, “we spoke briefly, but—”
“She’s not an attorney, but she’s extremely conversant with the law and litigious as well.”
“I had no idea.”
“For the record, I believe that anyone dumb enough to tangle with her would do so at their own peril. Understand? As for Ralph, I’ll be reporting your little dalliance to Dr. Baldwin first thing in the morning. If there are any additional instances of unauthorized leaks coming from that quarter, I’ll see to it that he’s terminated. Is that clear?”
With that, Joanna turned on her heel and took her leave. When she got back to the Enclave, Sage hadn’t stirred. As she started the engine, however, her phone rang, with Butch’s name in caller ID. She answered it through the audio system.
“Where are you?” he demanded. “Why haven’t you responded to any of my texts?”
A glance at the face of her phone gave her the answer. Butch’s thread of messages had all come in while her phone was recording the briefing.
“Sorry,” she said. “I was at the office.”
“I know,” he fumed. “All I wanted was to tell you that the afternoon library event in Santa Fe was terrific. When I couldn’t get you to answer, I finally called Carol. She told me you’d gone in to the department for a briefing. Did you really take Sage along for that?”
“I did,” Joanna admitted. “I couldn’t very well leave her at home, and I needed to be there. I was the one who’d done the next-of-kin notification, and it was my responsibility to introduce Amelia’s Aunt Rosa to the investigation team. We were using my phone to record the interview when your texts came in. Sorry. I didn’t see them until just this minute.”
“Are you back home now?”
“Not exactly. I’m just leaving Marliss Shackleford’s place in San Jose Estates. I stopped by to read her the riot act.”
“About?”
“Somebody’s been leaking information on our investigation, and tonight I found out who that somebody is. It turns out Marliss is having a fling with Ralph Whetson.”
“Really? That roly-poly guy from the M.E.’s office?”
“One and the same.”
“Okay,” Butch said, sounding a lot less peeved and a whole lot more interested. “Now that you have my undivided attention, maybe you should bring me up to date.”
Chapter 27
JIMMY ARDMORE’S FIVE-AND-A-HALF-HOUR DRIVE FROM YUMA TO Road Forks had been uneventful, but it seemed to take forever. The headache was a killer and still pounding away. He got to his double-wide in midafternoon. He had planned on walking over to the café and having a bite to eat, but he felt too punk. Instead he went into the house and flopped down on the bed. Rather than simply rest for a while, he fell into a deep sleep. When he woke up, it was dark outside.
With a couple of nosy neighbors around, Jimmy needed the cover of darkness to transfer the dog food and toilet paper from his big truck into the smaller one, a beefy RAM 3500. He was surprised to find that moving even a twenty-five-pound bag was more of a struggle than it should have been. He seemed weaker somehow, as though his body wasn’t quite right.
By the time he finished, it was almost ten o’clock at night—more than twelve hours since his breakfast in Yuma. The twenty-four-hour café at the truck stop was still open. He could have gone there and grabbed a burger, but the waitress who worked the night shift was an uncompromising bitch who reminded him too much of his mother. He raided his fridge for a bottle of beer and a couple pieces of string cheese. Then, with a bottle of Jameson along for the ride, he headed out.
Checking his jacket pocket to make sure he hadn’t misplaced his car keys, his fingers landed on the packet of pills. There was a joint not far from the warehouse in L.A. where, for a price, you could buy pretty much any kind of pharmaceutical on the planet. Some customers were looking for meth or opioids. Not Jimmy. He’d gone there hoping to score some little blue pills.
He’d never expected that he’d be one of those guys who couldn’t get it up. He was still shocked to realize that he hadn’t been able to perform with Amelia, and he was going to do everything in his power to make sure that never happened again. That was the real reason he’d stuffed the girl in the freezer—because he hadn’t been able to get an erection, and she knew it. Nothing he did or she did made it work. Using his leather belt to beat the crap out of a woman was usually enough to bring him to the edge, but not that time.
The unsatisfactory session had ended in total humiliation. When it was time for Jimmy to take Amelia back down to the basement, he was damned if he was going to turn her loose so she and Latisha could sit around talking about him and laughing behind his back. Being laughed at was something James Edward Ardmore did not tolerate.
He had bought the pills in anticipation of his hunting trip, a hunting trip that had also turned into a complete bust. From his point of view, this had been a long dry spell, and he was ready for it to be over. That night, before he ever put the truck in gear to leave Road Forks, he shook three pills out of the clear plastic packet his supplier had given him, washed them down with a mouthful of Jameson, and got under way.
Jimmy headed for Calhoun just as the moon came peeking over the horizon. As he drove, he took the occasional swig of Jameson. On these back roads, the chances of having some cop picking him up on
an open-container violation were next to nil. Had this been open range, he might have been more worried. The RAM was tough enough that hitting the occasional deer wasn’t much of an issue, but hitting a stray steer or a cow was another matter entirely. Then you didn’t just have to deal with cops, you had to contend with some pissed-off rancher. So yes, he drove along sipping his Jameson and appreciating that unending line of fence posts on either side of the road.
As a general rule, Jimmy Ardmore wasn’t someone who believed in signs from above, but maybe that failed mission to bring Megan home had been exactly that—a message sent to him directly suggesting that it was time to consider putting his exit strategy into play—time to take the ghost of Arthur Ardmore with him, hang it up, and disappear.
He wasn’t so egotistical as to think he’d never be caught, and he’d been putting pieces in place that would make it possible for him to vanish. Arthur’s passport still had eighteen months to go. Just as with the driver’s license, the spooky resemblance between him and his late half brother made Jimmy’s ability to use the passport to leave the country without detection entirely viable.
During his time on the road, he’d made the acquaintance of some pretty dodgy individuals, ones who had proved to be helpful when it came time to transfer sums of money out of the country and into numbered accounts where he alone would have access to them. That had to be done by dribs and drabs, because transferring large amounts might have raised too many red flags. He bought pieces of property on foreign soil—retirement condos mostly—and sold them again immediately, not caring if he took a loss. After all, the whole purpose of the purchases was to launder money. When the properties sold, whatever proceeds came in from the sale were already outside the country, and that’s where they stayed.
By now he had enough of Arthur’s money stashed away here and there that he would be fine no matter what, but the question was, where should he go? The near miss with Megan in Venice Beach still troubled him. It was possible that she’d reported the incident to the authorities and cops had launched a search for him. With that in mind, he needed to have a suitable destination in mind—a retreat the U.S. Marshals Service couldn’t get to, somewhere that didn’t have an extradition treaty. That way if the cops finally sorted things out and realized Arthur was dead and Jimmy was the one on the lam, there wouldn’t be a damned thing they could do about it.
Time was when Venezuela would have been a good refuge of choice, but the government had pretty much wrecked that one. Jimmy didn’t want to live in a place where people went Dumpster diving just to find food to eat. And it didn’t seem to him as though any of those countries with “-stan” on the end of their names would be a good fit for him, either. Mexico was out, too. These days the U.S. Marshals and the federales were far too chummy. For proof positive of that, just ask Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
At the moment Jimmy’s first choice was Cuba. He wasn’t someone who cared about politics. If the people who lived there were all a bunch of commies, so what? Since planeloads of tourists were flying there from the States these days, getting there wouldn’t be such a big problem. Staying there on a permanent basis might be, but if the people were poor enough, a little bit of money out there greasing palms would probably go a very long way.
Halfway to Calhoun, Jimmy began feeling agitated. The pill was starting to work. He put the pedal to the metal. He wanted to be home and have a go at Latisha before whatever was propping him up ran out of steam.
Chapter 28
THIS TIME THERE COULD BE NO DOUBT. THE ACHING TOOTH WAS what woke Latisha rather than her throbbing toes. The whole right side of her face felt like it was on fire. Maybe when she saw the Boss, she should ask him to pull it. After all, he liked to hurt her, didn’t he? Surely pulling a tooth without benefit of novocaine would hurt like crazy, but she knew he wouldn’t. If hurting her might somehow help her, he would refuse to do it.
She got up and made her way to the toilet. She was alone. There was no longer any need to check if anyone else was already there. Once the flushing tank refilled, she scooped up some water and drank it down. Then she refilled the cup once more and used that water to wash the sore on her leg. She wrapped the heavy metal clamp with another thick layer of toilet paper. She couldn’t see for sure if it was helping, but the pain in her leg seemed to be subsiding.
She was on her mattress again, staring up into the darkness, when she heard the familiar sound of his approaching truck. The Boss was coming home. He was back. She hated it, while at the same time she was relieved and grateful. Roiled by a storm of countervailing emotions, her whole body began to quake. Now that he was here, he would probably replenish her dwindling supply of kibble. That meant she wouldn’t starve to death. The power would stay on. The water would keep on flowing. She wouldn’t die of thirst, either, but Latisha was pretty sure she was going to die.
If he had brought another girl home with him, chances were that he’d take her first. Sandy had told her that was how he usually operated. However, if he chose Latisha instead, at least she’d have a bath—at least she’d be clean—and whatever came after that would happen. Would he stuff her in the freezer, too? Not so long ago, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have been able to fit inside it. Now things were different. She had seen her sagging skin and sallow complexion in the pockmarked mirror up in the bathroom. For months she’d eaten nothing but kibble. Latisha was literally just skin and bone.
She heard the upstairs door open. Heavy footsteps pounded across the planked floor. They stopped moving on the far side of the room, and something heavy fell to the floor with an ominous thump. What was that? A body, maybe? Had the Boss carried the new girl into the room and dropped her on the floor rather than putting her on the bed. Had something bad happened to her on the way home? Was she already dead?
Latisha held her breath, listening for the sound of voices or conversation—anything that would indicate if the new arrival was dead or alive. She heard the creaking of bedsprings, as though he had sat down on the edge of the mattress, but aside from that there was nothing. Yet then, after what seemed forever, the springs creaked again and footsteps thudded across the room, heading for the top of the stairway. A moment later the upstairs door was yanked open and the lightbulb flashed on.
Latisha had grown accustomed to the momentary blindness that always followed that initial stab of light. Once her vision returned, she saw first his work boots and then the legs of his jeans, slowly making their way down the stairs. When he got to the bottom, she saw he was empty-handed. If he had brought someone home with him, he hadn’t forced her to go downstairs. That meant he was definitely coming for Latisha.
He took an unsteady step forward, but then he stopped and had to lay a hand on the freezer in order to steady himself. She knew he drank. She had smelled it on him sometimes, so was that what was happening here? Was he drunk?
“Hey, Latisha,” he called. “Long time no see. Did you miss me?”
Drunk, she realized, most definitely drunk.
He let go of the freezer and staggered toward her. He always kept the key to the shackles in his right hip pocket. Usually he had no trouble locating the key or operating it, but this time he had difficulty extracting the key from his clothing and fitting it into the hole, cursing and swaying from side to side as he tried to do so. And yes, she could smell the booze on his breath. How drunk was he?
Latisha lay perfectly still while he struggled with the key. Any movement from her would be deemed resistance. Any offer to help him would mean she was belittling his efforts or making fun of him. In either case the punishment would be swift and severe.
As last he got the key to work. The lock clicked open, and the clamp came loose. “Okay, now, girlie,” he said, tossing aside her blanket and then standing there leering at her. “Let’s get ourselves upstairs. Daddy’s got a surprise for you tonight—a big surprise.”
Latisha struggled to her feet. Rising from the floor had always been difficult, but months of disuse had rob
bed her of muscle tone, and that formerly simple maneuver was growing ever more challenging. Once she was upright, walking wasn’t easy, either. Without the weight of the chain on her leg, it was as though she had to learn to walk all over again. Making her way across the room toward the bottom of the stairs, she realized she was probably staggering as much as he was, but for very different reasons.
Latisha had to use the handrail to help drag herself up the stairway. By the time she reached the top, she was winded and gasping for breath. Looking around the room, she noticed a bag of dog food lying on the floor just inside the door. It appeared to have fallen close to the same place where she’d heard that earlier thump, so maybe the noise had been the dog food falling, not a body.
He had gone hunting for another girl and had come home empty-handed. That meant there were just the two of them here now—Latisha and the Boss.
He brushed past her, stumbled over to the bed, sat down heavily on the bare mattress, and attempted to remove his boots. That was odd. Usually he walked her as far as the bathroom door and locked her inside. For the time being, she stood where she was and waited for him to walk her to the door. Instead, after untying his lace-up work boots, he made two halfhearted attempts to remove one of them. Finally, giving up, he looked up and glared at her.
“Come help me with these damned boots!” It was an order, one not to be disobeyed.
Each time Latisha approached that bed of horrors, she wanted to avert her eyes, but she couldn’t help herself. The faded and filthy surface of the mattress was dotted with stains—some yellow and some rusty red. The original flower pattern of the mattress surface had long since faded into oblivion, while the stains seemed to grow ever more vivid. Latisha understood those stains because some of them belonged to her. Each of them offered mute testimony to some awful act of violence, and each of them was a visible reminder of terrible suffering.
