by Betty Webb
At the table nearest the sandbox, a young Hispanic couple watched their identical toddlers digging away like miniature archeologists in search of dinosaur bones. A small girl with a cast on her arm approached the twins. She said something—we were too far away to hear—and the two moved far enough to the side to let the girl in, whereupon she joined the dig with her uninjured arm.
“Isn’t that the kid we saw at the police station?” Jimmy asked.
I nodded.
“Where’s her mother?”
Squinting across the playground, I saw a woman sitting alone at a picnic table, watching the girl. She was so far away from us I couldn’t tell whether she’d collected another bruise. “She’s over there. By the…”
Before I could finish, a large, sandy-haired man hurried down the grass berm straight toward her. The setting sun was in his eyes, making it difficult to interpret his expression. He was either grimacing from the light or was in a rage. As he approached the woman, he pointed to the little girl. His mouth moved, but his words were indistinct.
The woman shrank back. Her voice was lower, so I couldn’t hear her reply.
Whatever she’d said, the man didn’t like it. He grabbed her arm and yanked her to her feet. Jimmy and I both stood up, but the father of the sandbox twins was already walking toward the couple.
“That’s one big man,” Jimmy said. “Let’s wait and see what happens.”
The Hispanic had a couple of inches and about forty pounds on the other. At his approach, the bully drew the woman to him in what now looked like an embrace. With one eye on the Hispanic, he kissed the woman quickly, then let her go. Clapping his hands cheerfully, he offered up a shit-eating grin to the Hispanic. The woman tried a wobbly smile. Words were exchanged, nothing else. After a few seconds, the bully walked up the berm alone, the splendor of sunset at his back. The Hispanic watched him go, then scooped up his twins and returned to his own wife. He stroked her hair and murmured something I couldn’t hear. She shook her head, but the tension left her face.
By the time this played out, the bruised woman and her daughter had left the park in the opposite direction the bully had taken.
“What did we just see?” Jimmy asked.
“An abuser caught in the act. From his reaction when the Hispanic guy broke it up, it looks like he doesn’t want people to know about his home life. Wonder why? Most abusers don’t bother disguising their behavior. Nothing we can do about it now, though. I gave the woman my card. Maybe she’ll call.” I forced a note of optimism into my voice.
“I’m not hungry any more,” Jimmy said, pushing away his grilled chicken with an expression of distaste. “Ready to hear what I found out?”
No longer hungry myself, I tossed our uneaten dinner into a nearby waste can, where three starlings flew down and began fighting over it.
I pointed to the laptop. “Start with Mia Tosches.”
“I was going to, anyway. She’s quite the bad girl, our Mia, or at least she used to be.” He tapped a few keys, bringing up a newspaper article from The Apache Junction Gazette, dated fifteen years earlier. Daylight was fading, but I had no trouble reading the headline on the laptop’s bright screen.
TEEN GANG APPREHENDED
Friday afternoon six teens, ages ranging from 13 to 17, were apprehended at the Superstition Springs Mall for allegedly shoplifting from a J.C. Penny’s store. Several of the teens, including the 17-year-old girl suspected of being the group’s leader, had been arrested at the same mall last month and are already facing trial in juvenile court. Because they are minors, the Gazette will not release their names.
The stolen items included makeup, scarves, costume jewelry, and a fur-trimmed jacket valued at $345. The older girl was allegedly wearing it when apprehended.
“My daughter’s a good girl,” the teen’s mother, a widow, protested when interviewed at her Apache Junction home. “She would never do anything like this. She’s very popular, and the other kids at school have always been jealous of her, so I think she was set up.”
When asked to explain her statement, the teen’s mother said she’d heard it on good authority that store security had been tipped off to the group’s actions by two of the 17-year-old’s classmates who were shopping in the store at the time as the alleged shoplifters.
I turned to Jimmy. “What makes you think Miss Teenage Thief was Mia Tosches? There aren’t any names here.”
“I have the police report.”
“Those kids were minors, Jimmy. That report would have been sealed, along with every court document concerning the case.”
He looked at me with pity. “Oh ye of little faith. Trust me, I have the report. Mia’s maiden name was Albright, as stated on her first Las Vegas marriage license.”
First? “Maybe it’s another Albright.”
“Living at the same home address as listed on the police report?”
Jimmy’s computer talents being varied and mysterious, I stopped arguing. “Okay, so it’s Mia. But she was seventeen. Kids can turn around.” After all, I had.
“That was her first run-in with the law, at least the first where she was caught. I’ve only studied about half the information on her, and I’ve already uncovered several other incidents. She and her cohorts—you’ll have noticed she was referred to as the group’s leader—received suspended sentences. But, yes, you’re right about some kids turning around. The others have stayed out of trouble, at least from what I could tell. But Mia was arrested again two years later for walking out of a jewelry store in Scottsdale with an eighteen-thousand-dollar ring. Her excuse was that she’d been trying it on when she remembered that she was supposed to meet a friend for lunch at Applebee’s, said she forgot all about the ring when she left the store with it on her finger.”
Behind me, the starlings were arguing so loudly that I had to raise my voice. “Was she ever convicted?”
“Charges dropped after her mother paid for the ring.”
“Paid for it? That’s a lot of cash.”
“Her mother took out a second mortgage on her house. It got foreclosed on a couple of years later after she had to hire another criminal defense lawyer, who got Mia off by the skin of her teeth in a second jewelry store heist.”
I sighed. “What’d her precious darling daughter steal that time?”
“Another ring. A bigger one this time. Apparently she likes bright, glittery things.”
I remembered the huge solitaire I’d seen Mia wearing. The light bouncing off it had almost blinded me. “Did she ever do time?”
“Never.”
“Must be nice to have a mother who bails your crooked ass out of jail.”
“Not really. It means you never learn your lesson.”
True enough, given the fact that Mia’s crimes had escalated. “Did any of her crimes involve violence?”
“None I’ve found so far. Like I said, I still have a lot of work to do.”
“A minute ago you said something about Mia’s first Las Vegas marriage license? First? She married there twice? Come to think of it, that newspaper article, it’s dated fifteen years back. If she was a high school senior then, she’d be thirty-one or thirty-two now.” Silly me, mistaking a grownup for a child bride.
“Thirty-two and a half. And yeah, each of her three marriages took place in Las Vegas. She moved there after barely graduating from high school. Before you ask, yes, you have to be twenty-one to work at a Vegas casino, but that’s not what she did. In fact, there’s no record of her ever working anywhere under any name. She fell off the radar for a couple of years, and who knows what she was doing to support herself, but we can guess. Then the marriages started. Jardine, her first, was a Baccarat dealer at Caesar’s Palace. Graumann, the second, owned Sweet Rides, a car dealership. She finally hit the big time with Tosches.”
A loud squawk made me turn my head. Two starlings had grabbed opposite ends of a chicken breast; neither wanted to let go. As they jerked it back and forth, a cactus wren swooped down, picked
off a small piece of fried skin, and departed with it. The starlings dropped the breast in shock and flew off after the wren. Greedy bastards.
“Any financial settlements after the divorces?” I asked Jimmy.
He shook his head. “Not from the Baccarat dealer. When she split from Graumann, she cashed in to the tune of a little more than two hundred thousand in property, plus spousal support until she remarried. Comfy, but no fortune. She took care of that quickly enough, though. Six months after her divorce, she snagged Tosches, who was in town for a golf tournament. It was one of those gimmicky charity deals where all the caddies were babes in bikinis. Did I mention that our girl was once Miss Bikini Las Vegas? And knew a three-wood from a driver?”
Vegas golf courses are great places to meet men, especially when you’re spilling out of your bikini. I wondered if Tosches had run a background check on his darling bride. Probably not. When it came to bikinied hotties, most men thought with Mister Friendly.
“Nice to see a woman move up in the world. Have you come up with anything concrete between her and Ted?”
Jimmy’s usually open face closed down, signaling a forbidden subject. “Ted would never have an affair with someone like Mia Tosches.”
It was all I could do not to harrumph. In my experience, women who married for money were like tigers prowling the jungle on the lookout for vulnerable prey. Once they’d slaked their appetite for bright shiny things, they turned their attention to the more sensuous pleasures. Handsome Ted, still grieving over his wife’s death, would certainly have been vulnerable enough.
“How about Tosches himself? Any dirt there, besides the dirty uranium mine on the Navajo rez?”
“Some,” he said. “But not as much as you’d expect, considering everything he’s been involved in. Then again, he’s a local, and this town tends to protect its own.”
Tosches, the only progeny of a wealthy copper mining couple whose private holdings included the land the Black Basin was on, had increased his inheritance tenfold by judicious investments that remained unaffected by the current economic downturn. He’d used some of his fortune to develop Sunset Canyon Lakes, and had already doubled his investment.
“He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and he turned it into gold, metaphorically speaking,” Jimmy said. “On the civic responsibility side, not much, other than being the president of the Walapai Flats Chamber of Commerce and a member of the National Mining Association. Oh, and he’s an avowed enemy of the Sierra Club, as well as V.U.M. No surprise there, since he believes land is meant to be developed, not looked at.”
“Nothing at all suspicious?”
“No wants, no warrants, no record of drunken nights at bordellos or associations with mob figures. But I couldn’t find any record of large bequests to any charity, either, and given the amount of money the guy has, that’s surprising. And…” He turned the laptop around again, letting me scroll through newspaper accounts of OSHA investigations regarding injuries incurred during the building of Sunset Canyon Lakes. One man had fallen to his death while working on the six-story timeshare building; another had his leg amputated after a similar fall. Both victims’ families accepted settlements so miniscule I found them shocking.
“Tosches has good attorneys, doesn’t he?”
“The best.”
“I’ll bet he has an iron-clad pre-nup with Mia.”
Jimmy’s mouth tugged at the corners. “No pre-nup at all, Lena. The guy was crazy in love. Or lust.”
Oh, Mr. Friendly. How foolish you can be.
“Don’t worry, I’m not giving up on the Tosches,” Jimmy said. “I already have so much material it’ll take days to sift through. Moving on, you also asked about Olivia Eames.”
“The reporter. I saw her covering the demonstration today, so I guess she’s the real deal.”
Renewed squawking signaled the return of the starlings. This time there were seven of them, and they busied themselves in the trashcan so deeply that I could only see their tail feathers sticking out. As they bitched and fought over the chicken dinners’ remains, a crumpled napkin flew out of the trash and bounced toward me. I picked it up and returned it to the trash. Unfazed, the starlings continued gorging.
When I sat myself back down at the picnic table, Jimmy said, “Olivia got her start at the Silver Ridge newspaper.”
“Silver Ridge? That old mining town over by the freeway?”
“Correctomundo, kemosabe. When she graduated from Silver Ridge High, where she was editor of the school paper, she received a scholarship to the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. After getting her bachelor’s, she lit out for the East Coast, served an internship at the Boston Globe, and from there, moved on to—surprise, surprise—the New York Times and some pretty meaty stories.”
Apparently the Times had a more relaxed dress policy than I would have guessed. “What kind of meaty stories are you talking about? Political stuff?”
“Not exactly. An investigative piece on an outbreak of E.coli she managed to trace to an upstate packing house. She wrote another piece on defective pacemakers that wound up putting one of the manufacturer, another New York company, out of business. She’s quite respected in the journalism community, won several awards.”
“Pulitzer?”
“Not yet, but I’d say she’s on her way. She did snag a George Polk Award for the meatpacking story. I wonder why she’s hanging around Sunset Canyon Lakes and not in Silver Ridge, where she’s from? Maybe she didn’t come out here to renew familial ties. I mean, if she did, she’d have bunked with her folks, wouldn’t she? Or if they were full up, she could have found a closer place to stay. There are two motels in Silver Ridge, and both look nice. I checked them out online.”
“She’s working a story, Jimmy.” I was willing to bet Olivia had wrangled her way into Nancy Donohue’s book club not so much for her love of books, but because of the Black Basin Mine connection. Nancy was, after all, married to the mine’s public relations expert. Or was, until he was snuffed. The only question was, considering the fact that the East Coast had plenty of scandals of its own to investigate, why had she come all the way out here to dig up Arizona dirt? Maybe she thought the Black Basin flap was Pulitzer-worthy and couldn’t pass it up; journalists could be obsessive that way. But if the mine was the reason for her visit, why now? Why not a year earlier, when Ted’s wife was murdered?
But maybe she did. “Jimmy, did you find anything to indicate that Olivia came out here after Kimama Olmstead was shot?”
“Nope. She didn’t. I checked.”
“What about her personal life?” Not that reporters had much time for one.
An expression I couldn’t read flickered across Jimmy’s face.
“What?”
“Well, I did do a little light digging, and…Sure you want to hear?”
“Stop being coy.”
“It’s sad, Lena.”
Jimmy’s continued hesitation, combined with the stiffening breeze and the lowering light, was beginning to annoy me. “How sad?”
“Sad as in being gang-raped. Sad as in losing her fiancé in the World Trade Center.”
Mercifully, he only gave a brief summation of both horrors. While Olivia was covering a story in the East Village one night, a group of men dragged her into an abandoned warehouse and raped her over a six-hour period. The men were never caught. Four months later—on 9/11—her fiancé, a policeman, was killed at the World Trade Center while attempting to rescue a woman in a wheelchair.
As soon as I could speak, I asked, “And she’s still sane?” more rhetorically than anything else.
“Two-day stay in the hospital following the rape, then back to job, she even wrote about the rape, campaigned for better lighting and a heavier police presence in the neighborhood. She got what she wanted and the instance of sexual assaults dropped. During the terrorist attacks, she continued to work that story, too, even after she found out her fiancé had been killed. She filed an article a day for twel
ve days, and didn’t take a day off for two months. At Christmas, she took a week’s vacation and came back to Silver Ridge for a week, stayed with a distant cousin.”
“But she’s not staying with her family now.” I frowned, thinking hard. Olivia was working the Black Basin Mine story; I’d already seen evidence of that.
Misreading my expression again, Jimmy said, “Families are odd creatures, Lena. They can hold tight during a crisis, then split apart over something minor.”
Like Jimmy’s.
Time to change the subject. “I was thinking about the mine, not families. Did you get any info on Nancy Donohue?”
It was his turn to frown. “I’m haven’t gotten to her yet, but I will.”
“See if you can find out what kind of insurance policy her husband carried.” I described Nancy’s threadbare furniture and the duct-taped recliner in the den.” I left out her cold heart.
“Sounds promising,” he said. “She wouldn’t be the first woman to kill for money.”
Due to the darkening sky, most people had deserted the park. I checked my watch. Visiting hours at the jail began in twenty minutes.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Can’t wait to start standing in line.”
After I’d stowed my .38 and my digital recorder in the Trailblazer’s glove compartment, we climbed the stairs to the government complex, where my joking premonition proved true. Because most people visited their loved ones after dinner rather than mid-morning, the check-in process took much longer than it had this morning, and by the time we reached the actual visitor’s area, visiting hours were almost over. Also thanks to the later hour, I saw more family visitors—spouses, grandparents, and children—visiting their loved ones. Children being children, some loudly voiced their displeasure at being told to sit down and shut up while Mommy visited Daddy. Fortunately, no screamers sat next to us, just an elderly couple on one side, and a weeping woman on the other.
