J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds Mysteries 3-Book Boxed Set, Volume 1: Web of Evil, Hand of Evil, Cruel Intent

by Jance, J. A.

  Without really thinking about it, Ali typed “Singleatheart” into her computer’s search engine. Just then Chris came trotting upstairs from his basement studio. “It’s my night to cook. I thought I’d fix some grilled-cheese sandwiches before we go.”

  Guiltily, Ali closed her computer before Singleatheart’s home page appeared on the screen. On the night they were due to celebrate her son’s engagement, she didn’t want to spoil his happiness with tales of other marriages that had foundered and come to grief.

  “Don’t bother,” she replied. “I’m sure there’s going to be plenty of food at the gym.”

  “What kind of food?” Chris asked. “I thought we were just doing cookies and punch.”

  Ali laughed. “Guess again,” she told him. “You invited your grandmother, remember? Just plain cookies and punch won’t cut it. They aren’t in Edie Larson’s vocabulary.”

  In terms of the abundance of food, Ali’s prediction proved absolutely on the money. Out of deference for the hardwood floor, the engagement party wasn’t in the gym proper but in the tiled lobby right outside. A cloth-covered table inside the door sagged under a load of goodies. The centerpiece was a decorated white sheet cake. Bright red frosting roses were stationed on each corner, while in the middle, resting on a red frosting heart, were a pair of entwined frosting wedding rings.

  That eye-stopping cake was only part of Edie Larson’s caloric overkill. There was a tall German chocolate layer cake and a seven-layer straight chocolate cake along with six homemade pies—two each of lemon meringue, pumpkin, and pecan—without a single “storebought” cookie in sight. Those showed up a few minutes later, when Athena arrived followed by a young woman Ali didn’t know. The newcomers came into the room carrying several brimming grocery bags. Ali caught the look of momentary shock on Athena’s face as she took stock of the overloaded table. After some quietly exchanged words, Athena and her friend removed plates, napkins, and plastic forks from the bags and then tactfully stowed everything else under the table.

  Once the storebought foodstuffs had disappeared, Athena went over to Edie Larson and gave her a hug. “You shouldn’t have,” she said.

  “I couldn’t help it.” Edie was beaming. “I wanted it to be a real party.”

  Athena turned questioningly to Ali. “Don’t look at me,” Ali said. “It’s not my fault. I’m responsible for the flowers, and that’s it.”

  As the festivities got under way, they soon turned into a real party, starting with a series of Hawaiian Punch toasts. After that, by mutual consent, community-league basketball was canceled for the evening while the erstwhile players swilled punch or coffee and filled up on Edie’s scrumptious collection of sweets. Someone found folding chairs in a closet and set those around the room so people had somewhere to sit while they juggled plates and paper cups. Toward the end of the evening, Ali wandered into a conversation where the young woman who had helped Athena bring in the groceries was speaking with her and two other high school teachers, Lois Mead and Gail Nelson.

  “The whole thing just breaks my heart,” the young woman was saying. “Lindsey will be fine, but what about Lacy? She’s already so…breakable. I can’t imagine that she won’t shatter into a million pieces.”

  “Lindsey and Lacy?” Ali asked. “You mean the Forester twins?”

  The young woman nodded. She seemed close to tears.

  “I’m sorry,” Athena said. “Have you two met?”

  Ali shook her head. “I don’t believe so.”

  “This is my roommate, Mindy. Mindy Farber,” Athena said. “She teaches second grade over in the village. The mother of two of her students was found murdered yesterday. And this is Ali Reynolds, my future mother-in-law.”

  Mindy mumbled a polite acknowledgment and then went on talking. Ali already knew more about the situation than she cared to admit, but she stayed on, listening to what Mindy Farber had to say.

  “Lacy has issues,” Mindy said. “She’s afraid someone might touch her books, so she carries all of them back and forth with her every day. She never leaves anything in her desk. She doesn’t talk, either, not at all. Maybe she talks at home, but not in school. Last year the principal separated the two girls for first grade. He thought that would force the issue, but it turned into a complete disaster. This year they put them both in my room. Most of the time it’s not a problem. Lacy may not say anything, but Lindsey more than makes up for it. That girl never shuts up. But they’re both smart. And as long as Lacy can write out the answers instead of responding orally, she’s a straight-A student.”

  “I heard they’re the ones who found their mother’s body,” Lois Mead commented.

  Mindy nodded. “It’s true. They found the body on the front porch after the bus driver dropped them off at the end of their drive. Lindsey was smart enough to call nine-one-one and report it.”

  “Do the cops know who’s responsible?” Gail Nelson asked.

  “If they do, I haven’t heard,” Mindy said.

  “I’ll bet it’s the father,” Gail said. “Isn’t that usually how it turns out? The mother gets murdered, and the father or boyfriend ends up going to jail.”

  “If the father did do it, what will happen to the two little girls?”

  Mindy shook her head. “I have no idea,” she said. “They’re so young to lose both their parents. Maybe there are other relatives who can step in and help out, but the whole thing makes me sick to my stomach.”

  Me, too, Ali thought. Excusing herself, she wandered back over to the table where her mother was sorting leftover cakes and pies into a collection of Styrofoam take-home containers she had brought along from the restaurant.

  “Aren’t they a lovely couple!” Edie exclaimed, beaming at Chris and Athena, who were across the room bidding departing partygoers good night.

  Ali nodded.

  “And I hope they’ll be very happy.”

  “So do I.”

  “Have they said anything to you about setting a date?”

  “Not to me,” Ali replied.

  “June is very nice,” Edie observed. “I think we could have a very nice June wedding. If we wait until July or August, it’ll be way too hot.”

  Ali knew that her mother had a weak spot for weddings, and it was sounding as though, after turning Chris and Athena’s “intimate” engagement party into a major function, she was determined to do the same thing for their wedding.

  “Shouldn’t we leave that up to them?” Ali asked circumspectly.

  “Absolutely not,” Edie declared. “We have way more experience with these things than they do. By the way,” she added, “here’s Dave’s pie. Make sure he gets the whole thing. I wouldn’t put it past that son of yours to try stealing a piece.”

  CHAPTER 6

  A few minutes later, pie in hand, Ali left the gym. Shaken by her mother’s over-the-top interference, Ali was glad to have her assigned pie-delivery errand as an excuse to bug out early. When she pulled up in front of Dave’s rented house, she saw that his battered Nissan Sentra was parked on one side of the driveway, but the county-owned sedan that was usually parked next to it was nowhere in sight. That meant Dave wasn’t home, but since lights were on inside, Ali figured his daughters were.

  She parked in the street and carried the pie to the front porch, where she rang the bell. Seconds later, Crystal, Dave’s older daughter, pulled the door open but only as far as the length of the security chain.

  “Ali,” Crystal said, peering through the crack. “Dad’s not here. He got called out on a case.”

  Ali didn’t bother asking what case. She already knew. Well into the first forty-eight hours after Morgan Forester’s homicide, there could be little doubt that the officers charged with solving her murder—Detective Dave Holman especially—would be working pretty much round-the-clock.

  “I’m not here to see your father,” Ali announced. “I come bearing gifts. My mother baked a pie for your dad and you. I’m here to drop it off.”

  “A pie?�
�� Crystal asked, undoing the chain and opening the door the rest of the way. “From the Sugarloaf?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Can we eat it?” Crystal asked eagerly. “Or do we have to wait until Dad gets home?”

  “I don’t see your father’s name on it,” Ali said. “Just don’t eat it all.” She waved at Cassie, Dave’s younger daughter, who had appeared beyond her older sister’s shoulder and was hovering in the background.

  “Do you want to come in for a while?” Crystal asked.

  “No, thanks,” Ali said. “I appreciate the invitation, but I need to get home, and you and Cassie should probably go to bed.”

  “I know, I know,” Crystal grumbled. “It’s a school night.”

  A few months earlier, Crystal had been in full-bloom adolescent rebellion. The idea that she was concerned about getting to bed at a decent hour on a school night struck Ali as remarkable progress.

  “Right,” Ali said. “A school night.”

  She was happy to leave it at that.

  Back home on Andante Drive, Ali was sitting with Sam purring in her lap, and still thinking about her mother’s performance, when Christopher arrived home. He looked unhappy.

  “Nice party,” Ali said.

  Chris gave his mother a disparaging look. “Thanks,” he said. “But Athena’s all bent out of shape about it.”

  “She is? How come?”

  “Because Grandma managed to turn it into a circus,” Chris said.

  She did, Ali thought. And I was right to be worried.

  “It was supposed to be this casual, fun time with our friends,” Chris continued. “By the time Grandma finished her baking spree, it turned into something else entirely. Athena didn’t make a fuss about it at the time, but she’s worried that Grandma will try to hijack our wedding into some kind of huge event. That’s not us, Mom. It’s not what Athena and I want.”

  “What do you want?” Ali asked.

  “Something small,” he said. “Something private and nice.”

  Ali had suspected as much. “Here’s the deal,” she explained. “Back when Mom and Dad got married, times were tough, and they couldn’t afford much of a wedding. There were the two of them, Aunt Evie and her then-boyfriend, and a justice of the peace. That was it—the five of them. I’m afraid Mom has been trying to make up for that deficit ever since. It’s a total blind spot for her. I doubt she even realizes she’s doing it. When your father and I got married, she tried to pull the same stunt with us. If I’d let her have her way, our wedding would have been an out-of-control extravaganza.”

  “But you stopped it?”

  Ali nodded.

  “How?”

  “By putting my foot down and taking control,” Ali told him. “You and Athena will have to do the same thing. Tell your grandmother no and mean it.”

  “But how can you stop something when you don’t even see it coming?” Chris asked. “By the time we got to the gym tonight, the food was already there. Mountains of it.”

  Ali understood far better than Chris that food was the coin of her mother’s realm. That was how Edie dealt with the vicissitudes of life, with both the good and the bad, the triumphs and the tragedies. Arriving babies or returning soldiers were greeted with cakes and cookies and immense bread puddings. Hospital stays called for soups or casseroles. Rounds of chemo meant plenty of mashed potatoes and bowls filled with red Jell-O. Deaths and funerals brought back the soup/casserole theme.

  “Try turning it into a chess game,” Ali advised her son. “You win at chess by anticipating what your opponent is going to do several moves in advance. You’ll need to learn to anticipate what your grandmother is going to do as well, then you’ll have to come up with suitable countermeasures.”

  “Easier said than done,” Chris grumbled.

  “Don’t be so grumpy about it,” Ali said. “After all, that’s what you get for being the apple of your grandmother’s eye. You and Athena will have to sit Mom and Dad down and have a serious talk with them, but in order to make it stick, you’ll have to present a united front, diplomatic but absolutely firm. By the way, Athena was exceedingly diplomatic tonight,” she added. “She came in with her bags of groceries, but as soon as she saw what Mom had brought, she deep-sixed the grocery bags. I never heard her say a cross word.”

  “There were plenty of cross words for me,” Chris complained. “As far as Athena was concerned, the whole engagement-party extravaganza was my fault.”

  “Dealing with difficult relatives is one of the hazards of getting married,” Ali said. “And your grandmother isn’t the only one who’ll pull that kind of stunt. It turns out I’m putting together a little extravaganza of my own.”

  Chris rolled his eyes. “What kind?”

  “Thanksgiving.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re cooking.”

  “Be nice,” she told him. “But don’t worry. Leland will be supervising the cooking, if not doing most of it himself. So this is my official notice that you and Athena are invited, as long as you don’t have any other plans.”

  “Okay,” Chris said. “Sounds good. We’ll be there.”

  “Wrong,” Ali said with a laugh. “We’re talking Rules of Engagement 101 here, Chris. Don’t fall into the old trap of making unilateral holiday decisions. If you want to be happily engaged and end up happily married, you won’t accept any invitations without first consulting your significant other.”

  “You mean I should ask Athena and then let you know?”

  “Exactly,” Ali said. “If you know what’s good for you.”

  “If she’s even speaking to me,” Chris added gloomily. He went off to bed then, leaving Ali absently petting Sam and reflecting on the conversation.

  Where do I get off dishing out marital advice to anyone? she wondered. When it comes to being married, my own track record isn’t much to write home about. For instance, when she had told Chris he needed to put his foot down about his grandmother hijacking the wedding plans, it had been a case of “do as I say” rather than “do as I do.” Or did. Back when she and Chris’s father had been in a similar situation, Ali hadn’t exactly confronted the problem head-on. Instead, once the wedding arrangements had threatened to careen out of control, she and Dean had taken the path of least resistance and eloped to Vegas. No fuss; no muss. Edie had been furious, but despite the instant wedding, Ali and Dean had been a match made in heaven—right up until his death from cancer a few short years later.

  Ali’s much later wedding to Paul Grayson had been far more to Edie’s liking. It had been a splashy Beverly Hills social event even in a milieu where outsize weddings were the order of the day. Edie and Bob Larson, a little out of their depth, had sat proudly in front-row seats when Paul, dressed in an impeccable tux, had stood in front of several hundred other invited guests and had solemnly vowed to love, honor, and obey.

  In spite of all the lavish arrangements, Ali had learned, to her regret, that it had all been for show. Paul hadn’t meant a word of what he’d said, and he’d made a mockery of his wedding vows. In the dark of the night, sitting there alone with her aging, scruffy cat, Ali couldn’t help feeling a small chill tingle her spine as she realized Morgan Forester had done the same thing. She, too, had made marital promises that she had been unwilling or unable to keep. And now the young wife and mother was every bit as dead as Paul Grayson.

  Ali went to bed a short time after that, but it took hours before she fell asleep. Awakening the next morning to the sound of Chris’s car pulling out of the driveway, she wandered out to the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee.

  While she had been lying awake, she’d kept going back to Morgan Forester’s involvement with the Internet dating site Singleatheart.com. What had compelled a supposedly happily married woman to sign up for something like that? And what kind of people had she hoped to meet there?

  Other cheaters, no doubt, Ali thought. Other people whose word couldn’t be trusted. So why had Morgan thought one of them would have mo
re to offer than her hardworking husband, Bryan?

  Without necessarily making a conscious decision, Ali retrieved her computer and dragged it over to the dining room table. Within a matter of minutes, she had surfed over to the Singleatheart website. At least she had arrived at the welcome page. In order to see more than that, she would have to register. To simply surf through the site or post a profile would cost a hundred dollars. To make a connection with one of the profiled parties was an additional four hundred.

  Ali hesitated. She had no interest in posting a profile, but she wanted to know more about the people who had. She waffled briefly, but before long, her natural curiosity won out. In order to register, she had to provide both her name and a screen name. Fortunately, Babe, her Cutloose handle, worked very nicely. Her names, along with a working credit-card number and billing address, allowed her to log on.

  Her browser was set to limit pop-up ads, but once Ali was inside Singleatheart, her computer screen was immediately besieged by a cascade of competing images. Unremittingly explicit sexual scenes sprang to life on either side of her screen. As a news broadcaster, Ali had done two separate news stories related to commercial porn sites. She had expected a dating site to be somewhat less graphic, but it wasn’t. There were ads for sex toys that came in more varieties, shapes, colors, and sizes than she ever could have imagined. The lingerie for sale was outrageous, and the ads promoting it were even more so. This was a long, long way from eHarmony!

  The middle of the screen contained an old-fashioned Mercator projection of the world with an arrow and a guide that advised visitors to click on a particular location in order to narrow their search. By the time she landed on the map for Arizona, she was told that the section contained 2,364 profiles. That many? she thought. Just in Arizona?

  Ali whistled aloud. At a hundred or five hundred bucks a pop? You didn’t have to be a math whiz to realize that Singleatheart meant big business. Even if you disregarded the lower-priced subscribers who were website visitors only, the people who ran Singleatheart were raking in piles of Internet dough.