Deadly Stakes

by J. A. Jance

  “Which means she may end up being charged with first-degree homicide,” Ali suggested.

  “That’s correct. I was explaining that there may be some budget constraints in my office’s ability to launch a full-scale investigation. Ms. Hart suggested that if I needed any investigative work done, you were a detective she would be glad to hire. We just Googled you, Ms. Reynolds. You appear to be extensively involved in a scholarship program of some kind, but I don’t see anything that would lead me to believe you’re a private investigator. Are you?”

  “No,” Ali said at once. “I’ve done some investigative work as a journalist on occasion, but I’m not a licensed private investigator. That takes years of law enforcement–based investigation experience that I don’t happen to have.”

  “I was afraid that might be the case,” Paula Urban replied, “but Ms. Hart may have come up with a work-around. Hang on for a moment. I’ll let her explain.”

  While Ali waited on her end, B. returned to the bedroom with a mug of coffee gripped in each hand. “What’s going on?” he asked. He passed one of the cups to Ali and then returned to the love seat.

  “It’s Lynn’s attorney,” Ali explained. Gratefully, she accepted her cup of coffee and perched on the edge of the bed.

  A moment later, Paula Urban came back on the line. “Ms. Hart wants to discuss her proposal with you directly. If you don’t mind, I’d like to put you on speaker.”

  A moment later, Beatrice’s voice came on the line. “When I got to town last night, I was told I wouldn’t be able to talk to Lynn until this morning, so I called her attorney to see if there was anything I could do to help. When she mentioned being worried about hiring an investigator, I immediately thought of you, but by then I felt it was too late to call. Instead, I called one of my friends in Surprise. She tells me the going rate for a private eye these days is eight hundred dollars a day plus expenses, and I’m fully prepared to pay that. Lynn may need the services of a court-appointed attorney, but she doesn’t have to settle for a court-appointed detective, not if I have anything to do with it.”

  Ali more than half expected Paula Urban to take exception to Beatrice’s dismissive remark about court-appointed attorneys, but she didn’t.

  “I’m sorry,” Ali said, jumping into the uncomfortable silence. “Even though I’d like to help, I can’t. As I just told Ms. Urban, I’m not a licensed detective.”

  “But you’re a journalist, aren’t you?” Beatrice Hart asked.

  “Was,” Ali said. “As in used to be. I’m not anymore.”

  “I want you to do what Brenda did for Lynn and all those other poor women. I want to hire you to tell the story of what’s going on in Lynn’s life right now, and if you happen to pass along what you learn to Ms. Urban, so be it.”

  “Are you hearing this, Ms. Urban?” Ali asked, expecting the attorney to object.

  “Works for me,” Paula said.

  “As I said before,” Ali insisted, “I’m not a licensed private investigator. It’s very generous for you to offer to pay me, but I can’t take your money. It’s out of the question.”

  “How about if I make a voluntary donation to your scholarship fund?” Beatrice offered. “Surely you couldn’t object to that. And if you happen to report your findings to Ms. Urban before you get around to writing whatever it is you’re going to write for me, then it would be all to the good, don’t you think?”

  Across the room, B. was saying nothing, but he was grinning into his cup.

  “What kind of investigative help do you need, Ms. Urban?” Ali asked, saying yes without really meaning to.

  “You’re aware that another homicide victim was found near the first one?” Paula asked. “Near where Gemma Ralston was found?”

  “Yes,” Ali answered.

  “So far, all I’ve been able to learn is the man’s name,” Paula said. “James Mason Sanders. I need to do a complete background check on him to see if we can find out whether he had any possible connections to Gemma Ralston or Dr. Ralston. Lynn claims she’s never heard the name. I also need to know everything there is to know about Charles and Gemma Ralston. I’ve been told that they were involved in long, drawn-out, and very messy divorce proceedings, but I don’t know any of the details. I need complete background information on them as well, individually and as a couple.”

  Ali glanced in B.’s direction. At the mention of background checks, he nodded. Can do, he mouthed silently.

  “All right,” Ali said into the phone. “Providing three sets of background checks sounds pretty doable. I’m assuming that whatever I find should be turned over to you?”

  There was a pause during which Beatrice Hart was evidently considering Ali’s question. “I’m not very computer-literate,” she said. “I have a cell, but I hardly use it. Would it be all right if Ms. Reynolds interacted with you, Ms. Urban? Then you could collect the material and send it along to me.”

  “That would probably work,” Paula Urban agreed.

  The faux-journalist story gave all of them a thin veneer of cover; enough, Ali hoped, that should she be found operating as a private investigator without appropriate state licensing, she’d be able to dodge any resulting class-one misdemeanor charges.

  “What’s the situation with Chip Ralston?” Ali asked. “Any word on whether he intends to turn state’s evidence?” Ali knew if that happened, it would be a game changer as far as Lynn’s situation was concerned.

  “No word so far,” Paula said. “I’m not sure if that’s good news or bad news.”

  Beatrice’s voice came back on the line. “I don’t know how to thank you enough,” she said. “Should we draw up some kind of official contract for the article or story or whatever it is you’re writing?”

  “No,” Ali said. “That’s not necessary. We’ll consider this a handshake agreement. If I end up doing anything helpful, I’ll leave it up to you to decide if you’re going to make a contribution to the fund and how much that should be. But I’ll need complete contact information for both of you. And, as suggested, I’ll send my progress reports to Ms. Urban, with the understanding that she’ll forward them on to you.”

  When Paula Urban ended the call, Ali turned back to B., who was still grinning.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “To quote George Bernard Shaw, ‘We’ve established what you are, now we’re merely haggling over the price.’”

  “Right. What happens if I go to jail for operating without a license?”

  “Then I guess I show up, checkbook in hand, to bail you out,” B. said with a smile. “I’m also willing to put Stuart Ramey at your disposal.”

  “Really? You’re sure you don’t mind?”

  “No, I don’t mind,” B. said. “He’s gotten a real kick out of back-stopping some of your escapades in the past, and I’m sure he’ll be glad to do it again.”

  “But why—” Ali began.

  “Because I heard you tell Beatrice Hart last night that I’m your partner. How about if I start acting like it?”

  “Are you sure?” Ali asked.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I am. As your mother is so fond of saying, ‘Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.’ And speaking of sauce, Leland was close to putting breakfast on the table when I picked up the coffee. You’d better get a move on.”

  12

  As soon as breakfast was over, Ali headed for High Noon’s corporate offices in Cottonwood. Having been given a warning call by B., Stuart Ramey conducted her into a conference room and left her to read the mountain of material he had already accumulated, including the fact that for the past five years James Mason Sanders had lived and worked at a halfway house in North Las Vegas called the Mission, where people fresh out of jail could get three hots and a cot. According to the Mission’s fund-raising newsletter, Sanders was the facility’s on-site manager.

  The back story on James Mason Sanders, as culled from newspaper articles, related the tragedy of a bright kid pulled into a college-age prank that we
nt awry. A group of Arizona State University fraternity brothers had decided to see if it was possible to use their newly honed computer skills to print their own money. With Sanders doing most of the artwork and one of the other guys laying hands on a ready supply of the right kind of paper, they had printed up and spent a considerable amount of phony twenty-dollar bills. Had they been serious about the project, they probably would have moved on to printing hundreds.

  Once the students were caught, the feds didn’t see anything funny about it. The four perpetrators were tried separately. Two, Robert McDowell and Kevin Owens, were found innocent of all charges. It was clear from reading the articles that the two who got off came from families who had been able to pay for name-brand defense attorneys. The two who took the fall, James Sanders and Scott Ballentine, were represented by court-appointed attorneys. Scott, who procured the paper, got off with a five-thousand-dollar fine after agreeing to testify against James Sanders, who was considered the creative genius behind the project.

  Sounds familiar, Ali thought, thinking about Lynn Martinson and Chip Ralston.

  At the end of one article, Ali discovered a nugget of information:

  At the conclusion of the sentencing hearing, where Sanders was given a sentence of twelve to fifteen years, he was led stony-faced from Judge Mathison’s courtroom without exchanging so much as a nod with his weeping wife and their infant child.

  Ali picked up the phone and dialed Stuart Ramey. “What became of Sanders’s wife and child?”

  “What wife and child?” Stuart wanted to know.

  Ali read him the passage.

  “I missed that one completely,” Stuart said, “but I’ll look into it.”

  “How did you find out all the details about the Mission? When we were talking to Detective Holman last night, he claimed that Sanders had dropped off the grid after he got out of prison.”

  “I have my ways,” Stuart said, “some of which you’re probably better off not knowing. For as long as he’s been at the Mission, he’s maintained a checking account at a Wells Fargo branch in North Las Vegas, under the name Mason Sanders. I’ve studied the records for that account for the past three years. His paychecks come and go through that on an automatic deposit. Except for a blip two years ago, when the balance bumped up briefly to twenty grand and then went back down, it’s stayed the same ever since.”

  “What about phone records?” Ali asked. “Wouldn’t that be the easiest way to tell if he was in touch with either Chip Ralston or Lynn Martinson?”

  “It would be if he had a phone listed in his name, but he didn’t. No cell and no landline, either. What that probably means is that he used a phone at the Mission for making both business and personal calls. It’ll take a while longer to locate those records and go through them. At first glance, I didn’t spot any calls or texts to or from anyone in Las Vegas on Chip Ralston’s phone records or Lynn Martinson’s. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection. It just means I haven’t found it yet.”

  “Have you spoken to anyone at the halfway house?” Ali asked.

  “That’s not my thing,” Stuart said. “I’m great at backdoor data-mining, but I’m not much good at the direct approach of picking up the phone and asking questions.”

  “You’re implying I’d be better at that than you are?” Ali asked.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Give me a name and number,” Ali said with a laugh.

  “The executive director is listed as Abigail Mattson.” Stuart reeled off a phone number, and Ali jotted it down.

  “What am I looking for in particular?”

  “For whatever changed,” Stuart said. “Sanders worked at the Mission for years without any record of his ever having a driver’s license or owning a vehicle. Last week he evidently went out and bought a vehicle from a private party, paying for it with a handful of cash. The next thing we know, he’s been found three hundred miles away, shot to death in that same vehicle, a ten-year-old Lumina, which is still registered to the original owner. How come he suddenly needed a car when he evidently hadn’t needed one in years? And how did he suddenly have enough money to pay cash for the vehicle—seventeen hundred bucks—when there’s no change in the balance of his bank account? The money had to come from somewhere.”

  “What’s the going rate for knocking off a troublesome ex-wife these days?” Ali asked.

  It was Stuart Ramey’s turn to laugh. “Beats me,” he said. “I’ve never had a current wife, to say nothing of a troublesome ex.”

  Once Ali was off the phone with Stuart, she sat for a moment, looking at the phone in her hand, while she considered what she would say and how she would say it. Straying too far from the truth probably wouldn’t be a good idea. When she dialed and the phone rang, it was answered by a woman who sounded relatively young. “Ms. Mattson’s office.”

  “My name’s Alison Reynolds,” Ali said. “I’m from Sedona, Arizona. I’m looking into the death of James Sanders. I believe Ms. Mattson was his supervisor. Is she in?”

  There was a sharp intake of breath. “Are you a reporter?” the young woman asked.

  Once Ali would have had to answer yes to that question. “No,” she said. “I’m not a reporter. And you are?”

  “I’m Regina, Ms. Mattson’s secretary. Ms. Mattson isn’t in today. She was so upset by what happened that she called in sick. She’s taking the rest of the week off, but she gave me specific instructions that I’m not to discuss the situation with any reporters.”

  Without bothering to attempt a lame denial, Ali simply forged ahead. “Did you happen to know Mr. Sanders?”

  Regina immediately burst into tears. “Of course I did,” she sobbed. “Everybody here knew Mason and loved him. He’s such a nice guy. Not like some of the other creeps who come through here.”

  “Through the Mission. You mean the clients?”

  “I know we’re here to help them, but some of them are such no-good losers,” Regina declared. “They don’t want any help. They don’t want to make their lives better. Mason may have started out the same way years ago, but he wasn’t like that at all, and what he did for me last week was just unbelievable.”

  “What was that?” Ali asked.

  “I had fallen behind on my car payments,” Regina said. “Way behind. One day while he was here in my office, sweeping and dusting, the finance company called me again. He heard the whole thing. Afterward he asked me about it. I told him how, every morning when I got up, I was afraid the repo guys might have come to get it overnight.

  “The very next day he came into my office, stopped by my desk, and gave me what looked like a box of candy—See’s peanut brittle, my favorite. When I looked inside there wasn’t just peanut brittle in the box. There was also enough money to pay off my car loan—three thousand bucks. I told him he shouldn’t have, but he just grinned at me. He said he’d had some good luck and he wanted to share the wealth. He asked me not to tell anyone, and I shouldn’t have told you, either, but you can’t imagine what a miracle that was in my life.”

  “He gave you that much money in cash?” Ali asked, wishing she weren’t thinking about the counterfeit twenty-dollar bills that had landed James Sanders in prison in the first place.

  “Not in cash,” the woman answered. “In tokens. From the MGM Grand. Three thousand-dollar tokens. Over the weekend, I went to the casino and cashed them in. On Monday I was able to pay off my car loan. I could hardly wait to show the paperwork to Mason and to thank him, but he wasn’t here on Monday, and he never came back to work. I sent him an e-mail thank-you note, but I don’t know if he ever saw it.”

  “So he had an e-mail account?”

  “Ms. Mattson let us use our Mission addresses for personal e-mail. I don’t have a computer at home, you see,” she added. “This was Mason’s home, and he didn’t have a computer of his own, either.”

  “So Friday was the last day you saw him?”

  “Yes, like I said, he wasn’t at work on Monday. Ms. Mattson report
ed him missing on Tuesday. Last night someone called and told her he’d been found murdered somewhere in Arizona. I can’t believe he’s dead. I just can’t.”

  While Regina dissolved in tears once more, Ali was busy doing the math. In the week before he died, James Mason Sanders—a man whose checking account balance rarely made it over the thousand-dollar mark—had handed out close to five thousand dollars in cold cash without causing any appreciable movement in his bank balance.

  “Did Mr. Sanders earn much money working at the Mission?” Ali asked.

  “Minimum wage,” the young woman answered. “That’s what we all get, but he told me once that he didn’t need much as long as he had a roof over his head and important work to do.”

  “What do you think he meant by that?”

  “He believed in what the Mission does—helping people find their way, stay out of trouble, make something of themselves. I think he believed in it more than anyone else. He said that working here gave him a purpose in life.”

  “What about the three thousand dollars that he gave you? Did he mention where it came from? Was he a gambler, for instance?”

  “Not that I know of.” Regina paused. “Well, maybe he was, because how else would he get those tokens? I’ve heard of thousand-dollar tokens, but those are the first ones I ever saw. They’re usually reserved for really high-stakes games.”

  “What exactly did Mr. Sanders do at the Mission?”

  “He checked people in and out. Made sure the room and the bedding were clean when someone moved in. He swept the halls. Emptied the trash. Made sure people weren’t smoking in their rooms. Replaced the batteries in the smoke alarms. Fixed leaky faucets. You know, stuff like that, but don’t think he was just a glorified janitor. Ms. Mattson runs the place, but Mason was the glue that held it together. She was the one who was out in public, raising funds. He was the guy doing the hands-on work.”

  “So you’re saying they were partners?”

  “I guess,” Regina said. “Not officially, maybe, but yes.”

  “Was he good friends with anyone else there?”