Hand of Evil

by J. A. Jance

  “I will,” Jane said. “I always do,”

  Crystal was strangely subdued on the drive back to the hospital. Lost in her own thoughts, Ali let her be. Having heard Kip’s story through Jane Braeton’s point of view, Ali felt a whole lot more empathy for the man. He had come home from Vietnam damaged. Even without knowing that Amy Sue was playing him for a fool with her shotgun wedding routine, the added trauma of surviving the fire in which so many of his buddies had perished had been more than Kip could handle. His fragile ego had shattered, and he had spent decades wandering in the wilderness until Bob Larson had offered him a way out.

  “They’re nice people,” Crystal said.

  At first Ali thought she meant Bob and Edie Larson.

  “I mean, they asked us in and gave us food and everything. While we were out in the kitchen, he was asking me about school. Did you know Jane is a teacher?”

  “No,” Ali said. “I didn’t.”

  “English,” Crystal said. “Junior high.”

  That figures, Ali thought. What else would someone named Jane Eyre do?

  “Kip Hogan ran away, too, didn’t he?” Crystal said thoughtfully.

  “Yes.”

  “How old was he?”

  “I’m not sure,” Ali said. “I don’t know how old he is now. He was probably in his twenties or thirties.”

  “So grown-ups run away sometimes, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “And his family is still mad at him about it.”

  “Mad and hurt both,” Ali said.

  “How come?”

  “How come they’re mad?” Ali asked.

  “I mean how come he ran away?”

  Since Jonathan Braeton had respected his wife’s right to privacy, Ali could hardly do less.

  “There was an accident,” she said. “An accident and a huge fire and lots of firemen died. Kip was working in the fire department at the time, and a lot of the people who died were friends of his.”

  “So he was mad at himself for not dying, too?” Crystal asked.

  Coming from someone Ali had dismissed as being totally self-absorbed, it was a very perceptive question.

  “Pretty much,” Ali said.

  “But nobody did anything to him? Nobody hurt him?”

  “I don’t think so,” Ali said. “You heard what happened. Even after all these years, his mother’s on her way to the hospital right now to see him.”

  “So, she still loves him.”

  “So it would seem.”

  “Oh,” Crystal said.

  Ali’s phone rang. A glance at the readout told her it was Dave Holman. She tossed the phone to Crystal. “It’s your dad,” Ali said. “Why don’t you talk to him.”

  “Hi, Daddy,” Crystal said. “We’re on our way back to the hospital. We just finished talking to Kip Hogan’s daughter.”

  Not exactly, Ali thought. But close enough.

  “She was nice,” Crystal said. “And so was her husband. She’s going to pick up Kip’s mother from somewhere and take her to the hospital so she can see him. Where are you? Really? A big fire? Will it be on the news?”

  “What’s on the news?” Ali asked.

  Crystal waved her hand for Ali to be quiet.

  “Are you coming back to the hospital then?” There was a pause followed by Crystal’s disappointed, “Oh. Okay. Here she is.” Crystal shoved the phone in Ali’s direction. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “What fire?” Ali demanded.

  Crystal didn’t answer. Dave did. “We managed to locate Curt Uttley’s Explorer, or what’s left of it anyway, but I’m afraid we were a day late and a dollar short. The Explorer was parked in the garage of a house that burned to the ground late this afternoon.”

  “Whose house?” Ali asked.

  “The house belongs to some well-to-do guy from Minneapolis named Karl Gustavson. He bought it for his son, Jason, who’s going to school at ASU. According to the neighbors, the kid lives there with two roommates.”

  “What happened?”

  “Gas leak. At least that was what the Tempe Fire Department had said on a preliminary basis. Now they’re saying that there could have been some explosives involved as well.”

  “Does Lee Farris know you’re there?”

  “He wasn’t happy about it when I turned up a few minutes after he did, but he’s over it now.”

  “How bad a fire?” Ali asked.

  “Very,” Dave said. “The home is gutted, a complete loss. One of the firefighters told me they know of at least one fatality. We’re waiting for someone to go inside and check. Right this minute, what’s left is still so hot and so unstable that no one can get near it.”

  “If no one’s been inside, how do they know there’s a fatality?”

  Dave sighed. “Believe me,” he said, “there are ways to tell. I had planned on coming back to the hospital, but right now, I don’t know when I’ll get away. Depending on the time, I’ll either come there or else go straight back to Prescott.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ali said. “Crystal is with me, and we’ve got it covered.” She closed the phone.

  “He always does that,” Crystal said. “The cases he’s working on are always more important than we are.”

  Ali couldn’t help leaping to Dave’s defense. “I’m sure that’s not true,” she said.

  “Yes, it is,” Crystal replied. “Coach Curt is dead. If Dad doesn’t care about me either, I could just as well go back to Vegas.”

  Ali had no idea how to respond to that. If Coach Curt was a preferred alternative to going home to Vegas, Crystal’s family life back home with her mother had to be far worse than anyone knew.

  It was almost ten by the time they returned to St. Francis Hospital, where they discovered that getting inside the facility at night was a lot more difficult than it had been during the day. A seemingly humorless security guard had set up a check-in stand just inside the sliding lobby doors. All visitors arriving between the hours of 10 P.M. and 6 A.M. had to present valid identification, sign in, list the name of the patient they intended to visit, and be issued a visitor’s pass. Since Crystal was only thirteen, she had no photo ID available.

  Ali was still trying to argue her way past the gatekeeper when Jane Braeton showed up pushing a wheelchair. In it sat a tiny, white-haired woman who had to be Kip’s mother, Elizabeth Barrett Browning Hogan.

  “What’s the problem?” Jane stopped the chair directly behind Ali.

  “Crystal doesn’t have any ID,” Ali explained. “They’re not going to let her in.”

  “Who are these people?” Elizabeth wanted to know, turning her head back and forth in the direction of each of their voices. “What’s wrong?”

  “These are the people I told you about, Nana,” Jane said. “The ones who drove down this evening to let us know what had happened to Kip. This is…” She paused, having forgotten Ali’s name.

  “Alison Reynolds,” Ali supplied, reaching out and taking Elizabeth’s trembling and icy-cold hand. “And this is my friend, Crystal. The problem is, she’s thirteen and, as a consequence, doesn’t have any photo ID. They won’t let her into the hospital without it, so I guess we can’t go up.”

  “Who won’t let her go up?” Elizabeth asked.

  “The security guard here,” Jane said. “The one who issues the visitor’s passes.”

  “Where?”

  Jane had maneuvered the chair so it was parked directly in front of the desk and then began searching for her own ID. Elizabeth, in the meantime, moved her head around until she found a spot where her macular degeneration still allowed her some degree of sight.

  “Young man,” she said briskly. “You are a young man, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said with an uncomfortable grin. “Yes, ma’am, I suppose I am.”

  “And these people here, the woman and the girl with no photo ID, are people I’ve only just met. They drove all the way from here down to Chandler to let me know that my son has been injured and
is in your hospital. Do you have any children?”

  “Yes, I do,” he replied.

  “And how old are they?”

  The guard looked ill at ease, as though he was uncertain whether or not he should answer his pint-size wheelchair-bound inquisitor. Finally he did. “One is four and the other is six months,” he said.

  “And you,” she said. “When were you born?”

  The security guard turned to Jane, hoping for assistance. Aside from holding up both her own and her mother’s photo IDs, she wasn’t giving him any.

  “Well?” Elizabeth prodded. “When?”

  She may have been old and blind, but she was still sharp. Evidently her years of practice in herding high school students had made Elizabeth Hogan more than a match for the hapless security guard.

  “Nineteen seventy-seven,” he said.

  “See there?” she crowed. “I haven’t seen my son since July the fifth, nineteen seventy-three. That was before you were born—longer ago than you are old. Until today, that is. Today I have a chance to see him again, and that wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for these very kind people. These women aren’t criminals—as you can plainly see—especially this young girl here. And they’re not here to harm anyone, either. I can vouch for that personally. Now, are you going to let them come into the hospital or not? Because if you don’t, I’m afraid I’m going to have to take this matter up with your superiors.”

  Since keeping unwanted visitors out was the security guard’s primary function, reporting him to his superiors for actually doing his job seemed like an idle threat. Much to Ali’s surprise, the man caved.

  “Who is it you ladies are going to be visiting?” he asked.

  Elizabeth beamed at him. “My son,” she said. “Rudyard Kipling Hogan. I call him Rudy, but you may have him listed as Kip. He always hated his given name.”

  “And what’s this young lady’s name again?” he asked, peering across the desk.

  “Crystal,” Ali supplied quickly. “Crystal Holman.”

  The guard took the other names off the sign-in sheet. “Mr. Hogan is up in the third floor ICU,” he said as he finished filling out the set of four stick-on badges. “There you go.”

  With Ali leading the way, they headed for the elevators.

  The downstairs lobby had clearly received a recent upgrade that made it seem more like an upscale hotel lobby than a hospital. Renovations had not yet made their way to the ICU waiting room. It was as small and unremittingly grim as all the other hospital waiting rooms in Ali’s experience. It was also surprisingly chilly.

  There were only three people gathered in the room, no doubt prepared to maintain a long, overnight vigil. The first, Sandy, sat at a small table in the middle of the room. A Bible lay open on the table in front of her, but her chin rested in her hand and she appeared to be dozing. The second was a middle-aged woman, a few years older than Ali, who sat in the farthest corner of the room, knitting frenetically. The only sound in the room came from the industrious click of her needles. The third occupant, a balding, potbellied man, sat on a stiff-backed chair staring up at a wall-mounted television. The set was on and tuned to CNN, but the volume was muted. The lips of the broadcasters moved but nothing emerged. The only news available was whatever scrolled silently and with endless repetition across the bottom of the screen. Still, the man watched it with avid attention, as though his very life depended on what he saw there.

  Something alerted Sandy to the newcomers’ arrival. She blinked awake and made as if to rise, then glanced down at her watch and subsided back into the chair.

  “Hi, Ali,” she said wearily. “Thanks for coming back. I must have dropped off for a couple of minutes. It’s too soon to go back in. They only allow visitors in to see patients for ten minutes at a time once every hour.”

  Ali looked around the room. “Where’s your brother?” she asked. “I thought he was coming to be with you.”

  “Phil’s heart’s in the right place,” Sandy said, excusing him. “But he’s never been very dependable.”

  “Is this her?” Elizabeth Hogan asked from behind Ali. “Is this Rudy’s girlfriend? Move me closer, please, Jane. I want to get a look at her.”

  While Jane Braeton obliged, Sandy sat up straighter in her chair and tried to smooth her hair. “Rudy?” she asked.

  “This is Elizabeth Hogan,” Ali explained. “Kip’s mother, and Jane Braeton.”

  “So you’re Kip’s daughter?” Sandy asked, looking questioningly at Jane Braeton.

  Jane glanced in Ali’s direction and shook her head. “Not really,” she replied.

  She had parked Elizabeth’s chair so the old woman’s knees were almost touching Sandy’s. Elizabeth leaned forward. Once again she moved her head from side to side as if trying to find a place where Sandy’s face would be in focus.

  “Has Rudy been good to you?” she asked.

  “You mean Kip?”

  “My son, yes.”

  Sandy’s eyes filled with tears. “Yes, he’s been very good to me, Mrs. Hogan. And he wouldn’t have gotten hurt and wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t been defending me. That’s why those punk kids attacked him. I feel like this is all my fault.”

  Elizabeth reached out and touched Sandy’s knee. “I’m sure that’s not true,” Elizabeth said kindly. “These things happen and they’re nobody’s fault. What do the doctors say?”

  “To me, very little,” Sandy replied. “After he came out of the OR, Ali’s mother talked them into letting me come up here to wait. They’ve let me go in to see him, but since I’m not a blood relative or his wife, they won’t tell me anything about his condition. What I do know is he hasn’t regained consciousness yet, and that’s probably a bad sign.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “You may be right,” she agreed. “It isn’t a good sign, but let’s go see about getting some real information, Janie. Which way is the nurses’ station?”

  Sandy pointed. Watching Jane and Elizabeth’s progress toward a glassed-in window, Ali noticed the red-lettered sign posted above it: NO CELL PHONES NO EXCEPTIONS. Since Ali’s computer air card was essentially a cell phone, technically that meant no Internet access, either.

  Crystal plucked an extra blanket from a stack on a table by the doorway. Then, stuffing her earphones in her ears and turning on her iPod, she curled up in a chair as far from everyone else as she could manage.

  Meanwhile Sandy studied the two women who were speaking in low tones to the woman stationed behind the glass partition. “She’s the charge nurse,” Sandy explained. “What about the one pushing Elizabeth’s chair? Is she a nurse, too?”

  Ali simply shook her head and didn’t really answer. “Long story,” she said.

  The other woman in the waiting room checked her watch, put down her knitting, and went over to the swinging door that led back to the unit. She paused. “Are you coming?” she asked the man in front of the silent television set.

  “Not right now,” he said. “You go ahead. But you need to think about what the doctor said,” he added. “You need to think about letting him go.”

  A look of absolute fury washed across the woman’s face. “No,” she said. And then again, more fiercely. “No!”

  Abruptly she turned and disappeared behind the swinging doors. The man stayed where he was and as he was, still gazing up at the TV, oblivious to the fact that the discord between him and his wife had been witnessed by a roomful of strangers.

  “They’re divorced,” Sandy whispered to Ali. “It’s their son. Motorcycle accident. He and Kip had the same surgeon.”

  Jane Braeton turned away from the window and gestured for Sandy to join them. As Sandy left the table, Ali sat down next to where she’d been sitting. Part of a discarded Arizona Reporter lay there. Out of a lifetime’s habit, she picked up the local news section and scanned the headlines. A small article near the bottom of the page caught her eye: DRAGGING VICTIM REMAINS IDENTIFIED.

  A homicide victim who had been dragged behind a vehicle a
nd whose body was found on a deserted roadside in South Mountain Park on Tuesday morning has been identified by the Maricopa Medical Examiner’s officer as California real estate developer William Cowan Ashcroft, III.

  The familiar name leaped out at Ali from the printed page. William Ashcroft? As in Arabella’s nephew, William Ashcroft, the one she had called Billy? Instinctively Ali reached for her phone, but then, mindful of both the cell-phone-use prohibition and the lateness of the hour, she left the phone where it was and returned to the article.

  Phoenix Police Department spokesman Shannon Willis said that Mr. Ashcroft had been visiting the area on business for a number of weeks prior to his death. So far detectives working on the homicide have acquired few leads.

  Mr. Ashcroft was reported missing by his business partner on Wednesday after he had failed to appear at a meeting scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. Anyone with knowledge of the victim’s activities in the days prior to his death is asked to contact the Phoenix Police Department.

  The words brought back Arabella’s mysterious phone call from earlier in the afternoon, the one where she had suggested things had changed and it was no longer necessary for Ali to read the diary she had entrusted to Ali two days earlier. Billy—the nephew who had tried to extort Arabella’s money—was dead. Was that what had changed Arabella’s mind?

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Ali reached into her bag and extracted the small, leather-bound volume.

  Since so much had happened between the time Ali had read the first entry, and now she reread it. She expected that other entries would deal with the incest situation in detail. They did not. Going on, Ali was surprised to discover that most of the month’s worth of entries that existed in an otherwise blank book dealt primarily with Arabella’s birthday present, her prized parakeet, Blueboy.

  Evidently Miss Ponder, the governess, had been enlisted to help in the process of teaching Blueboy to talk. She had also encouraged Arabella to do some research into the proper care and feeding of parakeets—covering their cages at night, making sure that their water and feed were fresh, cleaning the cages—something Arabella had clearly prided herself in doing on her own. The Ashcroft household Arabella had grown up in appeared to be long on servants and short on loving familial connections. In that world of old-fashioned educated-at-home wealth, the arrival of a blue-feathered parakeet had been a cause for celebration in the life of what must have been a very lonely little girl.