Deadly Stakes

by J. A. Jance

  Leland held her at arm’s length as if not trusting her words and needing the reassurance of seeing for himself that she wasn’t injured. “He’s not dead,” Leland said at last, “but I fear he’s going to wish he were.”

  “Did you see what he did? He killed her,” Ali said. “He shot her right in the face!”

  Leland nodded. “I know,” he said, “and I did see it.”

  By then, he was reaching into the pocket of his pants. Pulling something out, he handed it to her. “Here,” he said. “Wipe this down to remove my prints, then turn it on and put it somewhere on your person.”

  Ali looked down. She was holding an iPhone. Even in the starlight, she could make out the bright red nail-polish E she had written in the upper corner of the glass face. It was the phone she had given her mother to use during the campaign. She had designated it EXTRA.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because we need a way of having found you that won’t reflect badly on Mr. Ramey and Mr. Simpson. I’m afraid some of their methods may have been slightly beyond the pale.”

  Without further argument, Ali did as she’d been told. Once the phone was wiped clean and turned on, she stuck it safely in her bra.

  Leland nodded in satisfaction. “Good,” he said.

  “You still haven’t told me how you managed to take him down like that,” Ali said.

  “I had to hit him,” he said with a shrug. “With you out there hiding in the dark, I couldn’t risk taking a shot.”

  “I saw you sneak up on him. It was impressive,” Ali said wonderingly. “He never saw you coming.”

  “I should think not,” Leland said. “They may have used me as a cook, but I was trained to be a Royal Marine. You know what they say. Once a Marine, always a Marine.”

  On the ground beside them, Barry Handraker groaned.

  “Oh, dear,” Leland said. “He seems to be coming around. Fortunately, I happen to have just the thing.”

  Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a roll of duct tape. “This is almost empty,” he said, “but I believe there’s enough there to do the trick. If you don’t mind, I’ll keep the gun on him while you do the honors.”

  Before Barry managed to come all the way around, Ali knelt down and secured his hands behind his back. Intent on her task, she was aware that a helicopter was circling overhead, blowing clouds of dust everywhere. She was relieved when it rose up and flew off in another direction, heading back toward the road, where it landed on the far side of the crippled Mercedes.

  Seconds later, B. was running toward her, a phone pressed to his ear as he ran. “Yes, yes, Stuart!” he was saying into the phone. “I can see her now. We’ve got her. She’s alive. She’s okay, and so is Leland!”

  The next thing Ali knew, she was in B.’s arms, and they were both crying like babies. “They gave me something,” she sobbed, “some drug that knocked me out completely. Then they locked me in the trunk.”

  “Sounds like the same thing that happened to Gemma.”

  Ali nodded. “It was the same thing, done by the same people, and in the same way, and I believe I know why. Doris noticed that one of her necklaces went missing. Gemma was supposed to go to the house on Tuesday morning to help look for it. Since she was murdered before she had a chance, I’m guessing that necklace isn’t the only thing missing from Doris Ralston’s house.”

  “It’s far worse than that,” B. said quietly. “The whole house is missing. It burned to the ground earlier this afternoon.”

  Ali’s jaw dropped. “No!” she said in horror. “It’s completely gone?”

  “Completely.”

  “What about Doris?”

  B. bit his lip before he answered. “I’m afraid she’s missing, too,” he said. “Given what we’ve seen here tonight, I’d say missing and presumed dead.”

  33

  When the first Mohave County deputy showed up at the crime scene, it was immediately clear to everyone that they were in for a very long night. An ambulance was summoned to take Barry Handraker to the hospital in Bullhead City to be checked out for a possible concussion; he went in handcuffs and under a police guard.

  While homicide detectives were being summoned to the scene from Kingman, some forty miles away, yet another ambulance was sent on Ali’s behalf. The EMT who examined the cuts and scratches on her bloody feet urged a trip to the ER for her, too. Ali tried to object, but she was overruled by B. and Leland acting in accord.

  “You’re going, and I’m going,” B. said in a tone that brooked no objection. “Leland can stay here and talk to the cops. I’ve already talked to the helicopter pilot. I’m sending him back to pick up Dave Holman. It would take him three hours to drive. This is his case. We need him here sooner than three hours.”

  Once they reached the ER, they were in for an almost two-hour wait before they could see the doctor. Ali used the time to call home. First she told the story—as much of it as she could remember—to Chris and Athena. Then she had to turn around and repeat the whole thing to her parents. Chris and Athena generally told her, “Way to go!” Her parents fussed and fumed and said they wished she wouldn’t keep putting herself in danger.

  When the ER doctor finally showed up, she examined and disinfected the cuts on Ali’s feet and arms. X-rays revealed several slivers of glass that had to be removed before the wounds could be covered with a liquid bandage and then wrapped with gauze. Once Ali’s feet were swathed in an outside layer of elastic bandage, it was time for the obligatory tetanus shot.

  “I want a blood draw,” Ali insisted. “They gave me something—blew a powder of some kind into my face—and I want to know what it was. I’ll bet if they send a CSI team back to Gemma’s house, they’ll find traces of the same thing.”

  The doctor looked askance at the request but nodded. “Okay,” she said. “You’re the boss.”

  While Ali was hanging around in the ER, B. had arranged to rent a car, which was waiting outside when Ali, barefoot except for the bandages, was wheeled out of the building. She was grateful when B., seemingly effortlessly, picked her up and deposited her in the passenger seat.

  “I also rented a hotel room at the Lake Mohave Resort,” he explained. “I tried Laughlin, but they didn’t have any rooms available. We can’t go to the hotel just yet. First we need to visit the sheriff substation so you can talk to the detectives and answer some questions. By the way, about the phone Leland gave you, the one we supposedly used to find you?”

  “You mean the phone that’s currently in my bra?” Ali asked with a smile. “I’m pretty sure Barry and Molly Handraker thought I was only a one-phone girl. They missed that one completely.”

  “Thanks,” B. said. “Stuart pulled out all the stops to find you, most of which could land all of us in very hot water. We’re saying we found you using your device location from iCloud. If the phone’s in your pocket when the detective asks about it, they probably won’t give it a second thought. They’ll assume it was with you the whole time.”

  “This sounds like a variation on ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’” Ali observed.

  B. nodded. “With the added advantage that none of us gets caught lying to a police officer.”

  34

  As far as Lucy was concerned, it felt like a date. With the prospect of a whole free evening, she was carefree and lighthearted. Nana had the kids. She and Tommy were on their own with her new friend Doris safely stowed in the backseat of Tommy’s Ford Explorer. The old woman sat dozing, her head resting against the closed window and her treasured photo album clutched tightly to her breast.

  Tommy’s friend in the state patrol had given him Doris’s home phone number, but when they tried calling, no one answered. The original plan had been for Tommy and Lucy to retrieve Doris’s car from the impound lot and tag-team it back to the house. The hitch in that program came along when the towing company required full payment and an impound fee before releasing the vehicle. Yes, a purse had been found in the abandoned Jaguar; yes, the photo ID
clearly belonged to Doris Ralston. Unfortunately, of the several credit cards stashed in the old woman’s wallet, there wasn’t one that was valid. They had all been canceled.

  “Okay, then,” Tommy said. “We’re not paying it. Somebody who’s driving around in a Jaguar can cough up towing charges a lot easier than we can. We’ll just take her home and drop her off. After that, I’ll take you to Applebee’s for dinner.”

  Dinner together without the kids? Lucy thought. What could be better?

  Seemingly worn out by her adventure at Burger King, Doris slept the whole way home.

  “I still don’t understand how she wound up on I-8,” Tommy said. “If she was going to Palm Springs, like she said, why wasn’t she on I-10?”

  “She probably got confused at one of the freeway interchanges,” Lucy said. “When they stack one road over another, it’s easy to get mixed up.”

  The guy at the towing company had been kind enough to give them printed MapQuest directions to follow back to Doris’s house. As they were going up the hill from Lincoln Drive, Doris sat up in the backseat. “Almost home,” she said, looking around. “It’s just a few more blocks.”

  Except when Tommy tried to turn off Upper Glen Road, they found the driveway blocked by a fire truck and an officer who told them they couldn’t proceed.

  “What is it?” Doris asked, alarm in her voice.

  “There’s been a fire, ma’am,” the officer said. “No one’s allowed on the property until after the fire investigators finish their work on the scene.”

  “But that’s my house,” Doris insisted. “I live there.”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, ma’am. I’m afraid nobody lives there anymore. What was your name again?”

  “Doris,” she said firmly. “I’m Doris Ralston.”

  “Well, I’ll be!” the officer exclaimed as a smile spread across his face. “If you’re Doris, I need to call the detective right away. Everybody thought you were dead!”

  Doris bristled at that. “As you can see, I’m not at all dead. Now, if you’ll just get in touch with my daughter, we can straighten all this out.”

  Except it turned out that wasn’t the least bit true. It was another hour before Tommy and Lucy were able to divest themselves of Doris and her problems.

  “She told me she was scared of someone,” Lucy told the detective who came to collect her. “She said she didn’t want to go home. And she said something had been stolen.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the detective said. “We’ll look into it.”

  It was almost ten o’clock by the time Lucy and Tommy stopped at Applebee’s on their way out of town.

  “Thank you for helping me with Doris,” Lucy said. “A lot of guys wouldn’t have bothered with a poor old woman like that.”

  “Yes,” Tommy said with a grin. “I don’t think your pal Richard from work would have lifted a finger.”

  “Are you kidding? That jerk was ready to call the cops on her for sitting in the booth and not buying food, like she was trespassing or something. But what’s going to happen to her now?” Lucy worried. “With her house gone and her daughter missing, who’s going to take care of her?”

  “I don’t know,” Tommy said. “We did what we could. Now we need to look after us. What would you like to eat?”

  “Anything at all,” Lucy Ramirez told him with a smile, “just so long as it isn’t a Whopper.”

  35

  Dave came hurrying to meet them as Ali and B. limped into the substation’s conference room. “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “A lot better than I could have been,” Ali said with a laugh.

  “I’ve got a piece of good news for you,” he said. “Several pieces, as a matter of fact. I just heard from Detective Carson at Phoenix PD. Doris Ralston has been found alive.”

  “Where?” Ali demanded.

  “It seems she went AWOL in her own Jag. She was trying to drive to Palm Springs but ended up on I-8 instead of I-10. She ran out of gas. After walking away from her vehicle, she was given a ride into Gila Bend, where she spent the afternoon at a Burger King. One of the people there took pity on her and gave her a ride back home, where they discovered her house had been burned down.”

  “Does Chip Ralston know?”

  “Yes,” Dave said. “He does now, because I told him. Based on what we’ve learned tonight, I’ve notified Cap Horning that Dr. Ralston and Lynn Martinson need to be released immediately. Shortly after you left the crime scene, a woman showed up looking for Barry Handraker. She had photo ID, including a passport, that said she was Molly Handraker. Only, as you already know, Molly Handraker is dead.”

  “He was two-timing Molly?” Ali asked.

  “I’m sure she had no idea. Fortunately for us, the faux Molly has been in here talking her head off. She says she’s been living with Barry in Vegas the whole time Molly has been in Phoenix looking after her mother. It sounds like they’ve been systematically stripping everything of value out of the house and pawning what they could. They’ve also moved most of Doris Ralston’s considerable funds to a bank in Belize. That’s one of the few countries where you can still open an offshore bank account without showing up.”

  “With Molly gone, Barry and Faux Molly go to Belize and live off the fat of the land while Chip rots in jail charged for a homicide that Barry and the real Molly Handraker committed.”

  “I’m guessing Chip had no idea that they were systematically stripping everything of value out of his mother’s life.”

  Dave nodded. “True,” he said. “I already asked him.”

  “Why bother to drag me halfway across the state to kill me?” Ali asked.

  “Doris was supposed to die in the fire,” Dave said. “That was the plan from the beginning. It was going to be a grease fire caused by her cooking something on the stove. I’m not sure how a fire could have gotten that far without an alarm going off . . .”

  “The alarms had all been disconnected,” Ali said. “Molly told me so. She said they’d had to shut them off due to too many false alarms.”

  “So the first fly in the ointment was Doris taking off on her own. The second one was you showing up and asking questions about some missing necklace.”

  Ali nodded. “The same necklace that got Gemma killed.”

  “Barry couldn’t afford to leave you behind,” Dave explained. “He decided to bring you along. Faux Molly said that Barry told her their car, Doris’s S550, had broken down and that if she’d come pick him up, he’d fix it so it looked like you and the real Molly got into a gun fight and shot each other. Fortunately for all of us, that didn’t happen, either.”

  Ali thought about what she’d been told. “If they’ve been stripping out the valuables and assets, that means they’ve been working this gig for a long time. Months. Probably since Doris’s husband died.”

  “Most likely since before James Ralston died,” Dave corrected grimly. “Faux Molly tells us that the elder Dr. Ralston was given a bit of a chemical boost on his way out. Barry is a former pharmacist. He’d know how to pull something like that off without arousing suspicion, and since James Ralston was in a hospital and under a doctor’s care, they could be relatively certain no postmortem would be done, especially in view of the fact that a proper DNR was posted in James Ralston’s room.”

  “Contemptible people,” Ali muttered. “Truly contemptible.”

  “Yes,” Dave agreed. “Scary people. Greedy people, and picking on someone who’s mentally deficient like that . . .” He shook his head.

  “She may not be,” Ali said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think they’ve been dosing her with low levels of the same drug they gave me and most likely Gemma Ralston as well.”

  “If they’ve been dosing her all along, that’s probably one reason why Molly was so adamant about keeping Chip away from their mother.”

  Ali nodded. “He might have recognized that her confusion was something other than what they were pretendin
g it was, namely Alzheimer’s.”

  “I’ll let him know,” Dave said. “Tell him that he should probably have his mother checked out.”

  “Earlier, you said you had several pieces of good news,” Ali pointed out. “What else?”

  “Oh, that kid you were worried about—the one with the strongbox full of gambling chips.”

  “A. J. Sanders? What about him?”

  “He’s in the clear. A woman walked into the North Las Vegas Police Department this afternoon and turned herself in. Said she was the one who killed James Sanders.”

  “What woman?”

  “Abigail Mattson.”

  “The executive director of the Mission?”

  “That’s the one. She claimed that she and James Sanders had a thing going, and he knew what a struggle she was having keeping the place afloat. Recently, when he came into a bunch of money, he gave her a chunk of it to help out. It pissed her off that, instead of using his windfall to grubstake her pet project, he decided to give the lion’s share of it to his kid.

  “That was when the whole thing went deadly. Abigail admitted to putting a GPS device—an illegal one—on his car, in hopes of grabbing the money before he dropped it off. Fortunately for Sanders’s son, James beat her to the punch. She also said she planted the murder weapon at A.J.’s house to implicate him, but when one of the cops in Las Vegas started asking too many questions, she crumbled. A.J. said Gemma Ralston mentioned someone named Dennis just before she died. We’re trying to sort out if he’s an associate of Barry and Molly’s.”

  “I’ll bet he isn’t,” Ali said. “I’ll bet he doesn’t exist. Gemma was drunk out of her head the night she died. Between the booze and whatever drug they gave her, I’ll bet playing tennis with Molly is the last thing she remembered. Tennis/Dennis.”

  “Makes sense,” Dave said. “But for the time being, we’ll keep looking for him, just in case.”

  Ali leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. The doctor had given her something for the pain, and she was starting to feel drowsy. “You’re right,” Ali said at last. “That’s all good news.”