Deadly Stakes

by J. A. Jance

“It didn’t ring here,” Chip said once she had explained the situation. “Are you sure you had it with you last night?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Maybe it’s not turned on,” Chip suggested. “If you accidentally hit the off switch, or if the charge ran down, it wouldn’t ring, and I wouldn’t hear it.”

  “I took it off the charger last night when I was heading for your place,” Lynn told him. “It should have had plenty of battery power, and I would have remembered turning it off.”

  “Probably fell out in the car somewhere,” he concluded. “Maybe it slipped down between the seats or it’s on the floorboard and slid under the car seat. Have you looked there?”

  “Not yet. I called you first. I’ll look there next.”

  “Sorry you lost your phone,” he said, “but I’m glad to hear your voice. I miss you already.”

  The words made Lynn smile. “I miss you, too,” she replied.

  Beatrice emerged from the bedroom in time to hear the last comment. “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she said. “Isn’t it a little early for the lovebirds to be at it again? Don’t you have something better to do than to stand around whispering sweet nothings?”

  While her mother bustled around the kitchen making breakfast, Lynn went into her room and searched there, even though she was sure she’d had the phone in the car on her way to Chip’s the night before. She tried calling her cell again, in case Chip was right. No dice. Then she remembered that she had stopped for gas on the way home. It was one of those places where you got a free wash with a fill-up.

  The car had seemed dustier this morning than she remembered. She had opted for the free wash. It could be that the phone had fallen out while she was dealing with that, or else with the self-service gas pump, or maybe she had left it on the counter when she went inside to pay. Pulling the receipt out of her wallet, she located the gas station’s phone number and called. The clerk reported that she hadn’t seen an abandoned cell phone anywhere, not on the counter and not out by the pumps. If someone had found a lost cell phone, they hadn’t bothered turning it in.

  “Great,” Lynn said with a sigh. “I guess I’d better plan on going out and getting a new one.”

  Lynn and her mother had fallen into a pattern where Beatrice did most of the cooking and Lynn did most of the cleaning up. Once the breakfast dishes had been cleared away, Lynn went out to the garage and performed a thorough search through her Ford Focus—to no avail. The rest of the morning, she dialed her own number periodically in hopes that, wherever the phone was, someone might hear it ringing and answer. Each time, however, when it switched over to voice mail, Lynn hung up. There was no point in leaving a message that she most likely would never be able to retrieve.

  Once her mother left the house, Lynn searched everywhere again—in the house, in the car. She even went outside and pawed through the Dumpster. Finally, giving up, she forced herself to sit down at the computer. She was determined to find a job that would enable her to move out of her mother’s house, and she devoted several hours each day, Saturdays and Sundays included, to diligent searching.

  She had sent out dozens of résumés to dozens of school districts in hopes of finding an administrative position. Once, years ago, she had been a high school English teacher. She wasn’t wild about going back to the classroom, but in this economy, even beginning-teachers’ jobs were hard to come by. She also wasn’t really comfortable with the idea that job searches were now conducted almost entirely online.

  Her ill-fated online romance with Richard Lowensdale—he of the many interchangeable last names—had left her with the belief that everybody lied when they were on the Internet. She suspected that school districts overstated their needs as well as their pay scales, while applicants inflated their educational accomplishments as well as their job histories. Disheartening as the process had proved so far, Lynn refused to give up. Today she decided that at three o’clock she’d reward her diligence with a quick excursion to the mall to find a new phone. If she did that while her mother was off playing golf, she might never have to admit that she had misplaced the old one.

  A few minutes before three, the doorbell rang. When Lynn looked out through the peephole, she was surprised to see a man in a suit and tie standing on the porch, holding up a law enforcement badge of some kind for her inspection.

  Lynn’s heart fell. Convinced that her mother had suffered some kind of health issue out on the golf course, she flung open the door in a blind panic. “Oh my God,” she managed. “What is it? Has something happened to my mother? Is she okay?”

  “I’m Detective Larry Cutter with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department,” the officer explained, handing her one of his cards.

  Lynn studied it for a moment, then clutched at the doorframe in an effort to remain upright. “It says here that you’re with homicide?” she demanded in a shaking voice. “Does that mean my mother has been murdered out on the golf course?”

  Detective Cutter frowned. “May I come in?” he asked. “Does your mother’s name happen to be Lynnette Martinson?”

  Lynn stepped aside and allowed him to enter. “No,” she told him. “That’s my name. I’m Lynnette Martinson. My mother’s name is Beatrice Hart. What’s this all about? If my mother is all right, has someone else been murdered?”

  Uninvited, the detective settled his lanky form on the sofa in the living room, where he studied Lynn with a kind of grim appraisal as she stumbled awkwardly into a nearby chair. His unreadable expression was nothing short of disquieting.

  “What’s this about?” Lynn’s voice came out as a quaking squeak. She couldn’t help it.

  “When did you last see her?” Cutter asked.

  “My mother? She went golfing with her friends. They left shortly before noon.”

  “Today?”

  Lynn nodded.

  “Then I’m sure your mother’s fine,” the detective said.

  Relieved, Lynn let out a sigh. When she noticed that her hands were trembling, she gripped the armrests to steady them. “Tell me what’s going on, then. Your card says you’re homicide. That means someone has been murdered. Who? And why are you asking me about it?”

  “The victim, a female, has not yet been identified,” Cutter answered. “However, a telephone listed in your name and with an Iowa prefix was found at the scene. We were able to obtain this address from the cell phone provider because it’s listed as the billing address. Does anyone else besides yourself have access to the phone?”

  “No, no one else uses it—or,” Lynn corrected, “let’s say no one else is supposed to use it. The problem is, I lost the phone sometime overnight, either last night or early this morning. I’ve been looking for it everywhere and calling it, too, all morning long. I thought maybe I left it at the gas station when I filled up the tank on my way home, and I was hoping whoever found it would answer my call.”

  “On your way home from where?” Cutter asked.

  “From my boyfriend’s house in Paradise Valley,” Lynn answered. “I spent the night there.” She blushed when making that admission, though there was no reason to be embarrassed. After all, Lynn was a consenting adult, and so was Chip Ralston. Her love life was no one’s business but her own; still, blush she did, and realizing that her face had reddened under Detective Cutter’s unsmiling scrutiny made it that much worse.

  “Do you remember the last time you used it?” he asked.

  “Yesterday sometime. Late in the evening. I remember calling Chip to let him know I was on my way to his place.”

  “After that, it disappeared?”

  “As I said, I didn’t notice it was gone until after I got home this morning.”

  “You have no idea who might have been using your phone? Is it possible that you lent it to someone?”

  “No,” Lynn said firmly. “As I told you before, I lost it. In fact, I was about to go to the store to see about getting a replacement, but you still haven’t told me who’s dead.”

  “That’s the p
roblem,” Detective Cutter said. “We don’t know who the victim is. No identification was found on the body, and so far, no one matching the victim’s description has been reported missing anywhere in the Phoenix metropolitan area. We initially thought that finding the owner of the phone would lead us to the victim.”

  “But I’m not dead,” Lynn objected.

  “I noticed,” Cutter agreed, giving her a tight smile. “Let me ask you this. Do you have any friends or relations or acquaintances living in the Camp Verde/Sedona area?”

  Lynn shook her head. “No one,” she said definitively. “No one at all. I know about Sedona, of course. At least I’ve seen photos of it. I’ve heard that the red rocks are very beautiful, but I’ve never been there. I came to the Phoenix area a little over a year ago. My parents retired here, and my father’s health was failing. When I lost my job, the only silver lining was that I was able to come here to help my mother. There wasn’t any time or money for traveling while we were caring for him. Now that he’s gone, maybe I’ll be able to get around to some sightseeing.” Realizing she was talking too much, Lynn paused and took a breath before asking, “Is that where the dead woman was found—in Sedona?”

  “Near Sedona,” Cutter corrected, “but closer to Camp Verde.”

  “We need to find whoever it was who took the phone,” Lynn said.

  “Yes, we do,” Cutter said. “In the meantime, you say you were with your boyfriend last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “All last night?”

  “From ten-fifteen on.” She didn’t want to admit to the detective that she had timed her arrival for an hour when she could be confident Chip’s mother had gone to bed.

  “What time did you get back home?”

  “I was here by six or so. I stopped for gas on the way and got a car wash while I was at it, so I must have left Paradise Valley around five-fifteen or so.”

  “Your boyfriend will verify that?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good, then,” Detective Cutter said. “Thank you for your help.”

  Lynn fully expected the detective to take his leave. Instead, Cutter reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a notebook and a stubby pencil. He opened it to a blank page and then sat there with his pencil poised to write. “I’ll need your boyfriend’s name, then,” he said, “and his number.”

  Lynn hated to think that her having stupidly lost her phone was about to drag Chip into some kind of unpleasantness, but there was no dodging it. “His name is Ralston,” she answered. “Dr. Charles Ralston, although everyone calls him Chip.”

  That was a silly thing to say, Lynn thought self-consciously. A cop wouldn’t call him Chip. A cop would call him Dr. Ralston.

  “He’s a psychiatrist specializing in Alzheimer’s patients and their families,” she added. “That’s how we met. He was caring for my father—for both my parents, really.”

  “His phone number?”

  Lynn was torn. She didn’t want to reel off Chip’s cell number to a visiting cop. That didn’t seem right. “His office is just off Highway 60 in Sun City,” she said. “I don’t know the office phone number off the top of my head, but I’m sure you can find it.”

  “I’m sure I can, too,” Detective Cutter said, pocketing the notebook and rising. “I can let myself out.”

  Lynn followed him to the door anyway. “I hope you find out who she was,” she said. “More than that, I hope you find out who did it.”

  “That makes two of us,” he said.

  “What about my phone?” she asked.

  “What about it?”

  “When will I get it back?”

  “It’s evidence in a homicide, ma’am,” Detective Cutter said. “It could take months or years for it to be released, if ever. I’d suggest that you do what you said you were planning to do earlier—go to the store and get yourself a new one.”

  Lynn stood in the doorway and watched Detective Cutter walk back to his unmarked car. As soon as he drove away, she returned to the house and sank down into the same chair in the living room where she’d been sitting during the interview. It was a little late for her to come to that conclusion, but she understood that was what it had been—a homicide interview, only without the two-way mirrors and the video camera that they were always showing on those true-crime cop shows.

  She couldn’t believe what had happened. How was it possible that her cell phone was considered evidence in a murder investigation? Moments later, she pulled herself together. Reaching for the landline, she dialed Chip’s cell. She found herself holding her breath while the phone rang. When he answered and she heard the sound of his reassuring voice, she burst into tears.

  “Lynn, what’s the matter? Is something wrong? Are you all right?”

  “You’re not going to believe it,” she said. “A cop just left here.”

  “A cop? Why? What’s going on?”

  “It’s my phone,” she blubbered. “Someone’s been murdered up by Sedona, and they found my phone at the scene of the crime. I’m pretty sure the detective came here thinking I was the victim—the woman who’s dead. Now he may think I had something to do with it.”

  “Did he come right out and say you were a suspect?”

  “No, but he asked me where I was last night. I told him I was at your place, so he’ll probably be calling you to verify that. What I can’t figure out is how my phone got all the way up to Camp Verde.”

  “I can’t, either,” Chip said. “Camp Verde’s got to be close to eighty miles from here. When’s the last time you remember using it?”

  “I called you last night to tell you I was coming over, remember?”

  “Just a sec,” Chip said. “Let me check.” A moment later, he came back on the line. “Yes, I see in my call log that you called me on your cell around a quarter to ten. What time was the woman killed?”

  “I don’t know. Sometime overnight, I guess,” Lynn said. “The detective didn’t tell me that much, just that my phone was found at the scene. The only thing I can think is that I must have lost it when I stopped at the gas station on my way home this morning. Do you think I need an attorney?”

  “Can you afford an attorney?”

  It was an unnecessary question, because Chip already knew the answer.

  “Not really.”

  “Well, then,” he said reassuringly, “since we both know you weren’t involved in anything, we’ll just have to let things play out.” Lynn heard a buzz in the background, followed by a woman’s voice. “Gotta go,” he said. “Tina tells me there’s a detective Larry Cutter out in the waiting room.”

  Lynn sat with the phone in her hand for several long moments after Chip hung up. She couldn’t help but be grateful for the reassurance she had heard in his voice. After the whole ego-shattering mess with Richard Lowensdale, Lynn hadn’t expected to fall in love again. For one thing, she hadn’t expected to find a man she could trust, but she had, and Chip Ralston was it.

  Lynn had come on the scene at a time when her father was so far gone that he had been beyond help. Her mother was the one who needed care and support, and Chip—Dr. Ralston to all of them then—had been sympathetic and supportive and incredibly understanding. Lynn had been more than a little attracted to him from the beginning, but she had never expected anything to come of it. After her father died, she was impressed when Dr. Ralston showed up for the memorial service. When he had called her a month or so later, asking how her mother was doing, she had thought it was just that—his being solicitous of her mother. It was only when he came courting that she was gratified to learn he had something else in mind.

  Lynn was astonished to discover that what she’d thought was a one-sided attraction was reciprocated. Now this kind, caring, well-educated, and dependable man was part of her life—her scatterbrained life.

  With that thought in mind, Lynn put down the landline phone and went looking for her purse. It was time to go to Verizon and get a new phone.

  7

  By
the time the ten o’clock news came on that night, A.J. was glued to the television set in his bedroom. Somehow he had made it through his two-hour shift at work and through dinner without blowing apart. His mother had made carne asada burritos. That was his favorite meal and usually he gobbled down several. That night he barely managed to eat one.

  “Since when did you stop liking carne asada?” his mother asked.

  “I’m just not hungry,” he said.

  “I made the amount I always make,” she said. “So we’ll have the same thing for dinner again tomorrow night.”

  A.J. helped with the dishes and then went into his room, ostensibly to do homework, but the words on the pages made no sense. What he kept seeing in his mind’s eye were those vivid green eyes staring blankly up at the sun.

  Who was she? A.J. wondered. Who killed her and why?

  He wasn’t at all surprised when news about the Camp Verde homicide was the lead story on the broadcast.

  “The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department is investigating an apparent homicide near I-17, south of Camp Verde,” the news host reported with a white-toothed smile that A.J. found completely inappropriate. “Our reporter Christy Lawler has been on the scene. What can you tell us, Christy?”

  Another smiling face appeared on the screen. “Around noon today, officers responding to a 911 summons arrived at a location just off General Crook Trail, where they discovered the body of an unidentified woman. The death, which has been labeled a homicide, occurred inside Yavapai County, and the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department is investigating. Mike Sawyer, spokesman for the Sheriff’s Department, told me earlier that officers are following up on clues found at the scene in hopes of identifying the victim.”

  A young man with a serious expression appeared in front of a bank of microphones. “Homicide investigators are actively seeking the identity of the person or persons who sent a text message to 911 operators, letting them know the location of a seriously injured person. By the time help arrived, the person who sent the message was no longer at the scene. That Good Samaritan, also unidentified at this time, is not considered a suspect in the case, but he or she is regarded as a person of interest. We are urging that person or anyone who knows who that person might be to do the right thing and contact the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department.”