by J. A. Jance
“Ali?” Helga asked. “Are you talking to me?”
“This jerk behind me won’t…”
Just then something slammed into her back left-hand fender. For what seemed like an eternity, as metal screeched against metal, the front end of the Cayenne swung sickeningly toward the left. As the median rushed toward her, Ali gripped the wheel and desperately twisted it to the right. Too late she realized that by then the other driver had veered away. Without the pressure against the rear of the Cayenne, the front of the vehicle suddenly snapped straight again. Ali knew instantly that she had overcorrected.
With terrible clarity, Ali saw the Cayenne swerve back to the right, aiming dead-on at the steel guardrail that lined the right-hand edge of the pavement. Invisible beyond the pavement was a sheer two-hundred-foot drop-off.
Wrestling the wheel, Ali tried to compensate for the overcorrection, but there wasn’t room enough. Or time. Instead there was a sudden grinding explosion of steel on steel. Lost in a blinding curtain of air bags, Ali felt the disorienting sensation of spinning. Then, with the Cayenne still astonishingly upright, it came to a sudden stop.
The driver’s side air bag had blown Ali’s hands free of the steering wheel. Side-curtain bags had protected her head. But now, as the passenger space filled with smoke and dust, Ali sat stunned and gasping for air, trying to piece together what had happened.
Off in the distance, hidden somewhere in the wreckage, she heard Helga’s voice. “Ali! Ali! What in God’s name happened? Are you all right?” Then, there was a sudden sharp pounding on the car window next to her ear.
Fighting her way through the empty air bags, Ali saw the face of a bearded man peering in the window. Behind him, parked on the freeway, sat a gigantic idling semi.
“Lady, lady,” he shouted through glass. “Are you all right? What the hell was the matter with that woman? She tried to kill you.”
“I think I’m all right,” Ali managed, but since she could only summon a whisper, he probably didn’t hear her.
“Can you unlock the door?”
Eventually Ali complied, and the man wrenched it open. “Come on,” he said. “My buddy’s stopping traffic. He’s calling the cops, too. If you think you can walk, let’s get you out of there in case something catches on fire.”
Once Ali was upright, the good Samaritan took one look at her battered face and backed away in horror. “My God, woman, you really are hurt! I’d better call an ambulance.”
Ali laughed at him then. She couldn’t help it. She laughed because, no matter how awful she looked, she wasn’t dead and she should have been. She laughed so hard she finally had to sit down on the pavement to keep from falling over.
An Arizona Highway Patrol car showed up while Ali was still laughing.
“I think she needs an ambulance,” the truck driver told the officer. “She’s gone hysterical on us. Maybe she’s in shock. Did you catch the woman in the other car?”
“We’re working on it,” the officer replied. He turned to her then. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “No problem.”
“License and registration?”
But she wasn’t fine enough to retrieve the paperwork herself. For an answer, Ali pointed back to the wrecked Cayenne. “In there,” she said. “Registration’s in the glove box. My cell phone’s in there somewhere, too. If you could find it…”
The cop reached into the vehicle. He emerged a few seconds later, holding a piece of paper and the cell phone along with the loaded Ziploc bag she was using for a purse. To her amazement the bag was still fastened.
“This?” he asked dubiously.
Ali nodded, and then she began to laugh again. “Those Ziploc bags are something, aren’t they?” she asked before dissolving in a spasm of giggles. “Maybe they could use this in a commercial.”
When the EMTs from the Black Canyon City Volunteer Fire Department arrived, none of them was prepared to take Ali’s word for it that she was fine. Instead, they loaded her onto a gurney, strapped her down, stuffed her into an ambulance, and took off. The ambulance hurtled forward for what, in Ali’s disoriented state, seemed like a very long time. Suddenly it slowed almost to a stop, but still it kept moving forward, siren blaring.
“Are we there yet?” she asked the young attendant at her side.
He shook his head. “Not yet,” he said. “There’s a problem on the freeway. We’ll get through it, though. Don’t worry.”
Don’t worry, Ali thought. That’s what I told Chris. I’ve got to call him. But she couldn’t. Someone had taken her phone.
Eventually they arrived at the John C. Lincoln Hospital in Deer Valley. For the second time that week, a no-nonsense ER nurse, armed with a scissors, came in and began snipping off Ali’s shirt and bra.
“Do you have to do that?” Ali asked. “I’m going to run out of bras pretty soon.”
Shaking her head, the nurse went right on snipping. It took three hours of poking, prodding and X-raying, before the ER physician finally shrugged and shook his head.
“Okay,” he said. “I think you really are fine, but I’m keeping you until this evening for observation. Now what about the cops? There are at least three of them out in the lobby waiting to take a statement. Think you can handle talking to them now?”
Ali nodded. “Send them in.”
To her amazement, a grim-faced Dave Holman led the way, followed by two uniformed officers and another in plain clothes.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded. Her first thought was that the county attorney had decided to prosecute her after all.
“The incident occurred inside the Yavapai county line,” he said. “It’s our jurisdiction.”
“She tried to run me off the road,” Ali said. “It’s a miracle I didn’t go right over the edge. What was the matter with that woman…”
“You saw her?”
“No,” Ali said. “All I saw was the car, but that’s what the truck driver told me, that the driver was a woman. You did catch her, didn’t you?”
Dave shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m afraid we didn’t.”
“Why not?” Ali demanded. “She was right there on the freeway. What happened? Did she just disappear into thin air?”
“She’s dead,” Dave said.
“Dead?”
Dave nodded. “DPS had reports about the incident with you and that the perpetrator was headed southbound. They put up a rolling roadblock just north of Black Canyon City. She tried to go around and went off the highway and off a cliff. She didn’t make it.”
“So was she drunk?” Ali asked. “On drugs? What?”
“No,” Dave said. “It doesn’t look like drugs or alcohol, at least, not at this time.”
“But she tried to kill me,” Ali objected. “Why?”
“That’s what we hoped you’d tell us.”
Ali was mystified and becoming slightly annoyed. “A total stranger—a maniac—tries to run me off the road, and you want me to tell you why? How on earth would I know?”
“Because she wasn’t a stranger,” Dave answered quietly. “I believe you knew her quite well. We’ve tentatively identified the victim in the second vehicle as Breezy Marie Cowan, Reenie Bernard’s sister.”
“Oh,” Ali said. And for the moment, that was all she could say.
Chapter 20
The interview took the better part of the next two hours. Ali told them everything she could remember about her meeting with Bree Cowan as well as what she’d gleaned from reading through Reenie’s accumulated e-mails, including Reenie’s fruitless meeting with the manager at First United Financial’s Phoenix branch.
About noon, Dave Holman’s cell phone rang. “We’ve located Mr. and Mrs. Holzer,” he said grimly, once the call ended. “I need to go talk to them.”
He left, taking one of the uniformed officers with him. Ali was still answering questions from the other two when Edie Larson bustled into the ER followed by Kip pushing Bob in his wh
eelchair. The two officers stepped aside to let them through.
“What have you done this time?” Edie grumbled, leaning down to kiss her. “It’s becoming very tiresome you know. All I seem to be doing these days is driving from one ER to another.”
Ali was surprised to see either one of her parents right then, to say nothing of both of them. “I didn’t call on purpose,” she said. “I knew you were working and…”
“Dave Holman called us,” she said. “And don’t worry. Everything at work is under control. We borrowed a cook from Tlaquepaque to finish up the day. The manager there owed us from when we helped him out last Christmas.” Having said that, Edie Larson heaved herself into the chair next to Ali’s bed and promptly burst into tears. “You’ve got to quit scaring me this way, Ali. I just can’t take it.”
Bob patted his wife’s hand. “Come on now, Edie,” he soothed. “Dave told you she was fine, and you can see for yourself that it’s true.” He looked at Ali. “Do the Holzers know what’s happened?”
Ali nodded. “By now they do. Dave left a little while ago to go tell them.”
“But why?” Edie asked, drying her tears. “Why would Bree come after you that way? It makes no sense.”
“Dave thinks it may have something to do with some trust accounts that were set up for Matt and Julie. Bree has evidently been looting them. He thinks Reenie was starting to figure it out. Fear of being exposed must have pushed Bree over the edge.”
“And Reenie, too,” Bob interjected. “What kind of car did you say Bree was driving?”
“A Lexus,” Ali said. “A bright red Lexus. Why.”
After parking Bob’s chair next to the bed, Kip Hogan had retreated to a spot near the door and as far away as possible from the two officers still standing inside the curtained alcove. With some difficulty, Bob turned and gave Kip a meaningful look.
“Tell them, Kip,” he said. “Tell them what you told Edie and me on the way down.”
Kip looked at the cops warily and then cleared his throat. “There was a Lexus on the mountain that night,” he said. “The night Ali’s friend died. Two cars came through onto Schnebly Hill Road, a white SUV and a red Lexus. The white one, a Yukon, drove down the mountain. Pretty soon the man came walking back up the road, got in the Lexus, and they drove away. Me and a couple of my friends saw the whole thing, but when the cops came around asking questions, we didn’t want to get involved, so we more or less melted into the woods. But now…” He shrugged. “I guess I am involved.”
“Who was in the red car?” Ali asked.
“A man and a woman.”
“What did they look like?”
“The woman had dark short hair,” Kip answered. “The man was dark-haired, too. Little bit of a goatee.”
All this time, in the back of Ali’s mind, she had imagined that somehow Jasmine Wright and Howie were responsible for what had happened to Reenie. But the people Kip Hogan had just described could be none other than Bree and Jack Cowan. They had motive and opportunity and had been seen at the scene of the crime.
“Does anyone have Dave Holman’s cell phone number?” Ali asked. “We should probably give him a call.”
cutlooseblog.com
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
I’m not sure why emergency room personnel insist on cutting off perfectly good clothing instead of letting patients take their clothes off over their heads. But they do, and I’m running low on bras. Yes, that means I’ve paid a visit to yet another emergency room—a different one this time. That’s twice in one week. I’m beginning to think being a freelance blogger is a risky occupation.
Because that’s how I ended up in the ER—by being a blogger. The questions I was asking about Reenie brought me up close and personal (way too close it turns out) with the people who most likely killed her. The same questions also brought me far too close to a guardrail overlooking a sheer two-hundred-foot drop.
Yes, I know for sure that my friend was murdered. So do the police officers who have now, reluctantly, reopened her case. She was most likely unconscious when she was placed in a vehicle that was then driven off a cliff.
Most people are murdered by someone they know and love, and that is true in Reenie’s case, as well. All along I suspected her husband might have had something to do with what happened, but it turned out I was wrong. It is now believed Reenie was murdered by her younger sister. And what was the motive? What else? The root of all evil—money.
Police believe that Reenie somehow discovered that her sister, Bree, was possibly looting trust accounts of monies that had been set aside to benefit Reenie’s children. Rather than having the embezzlement exposed, Bree, with the help of her husband, allegedly turned to murder.
It’s possible that money missing from the trust accounts is only the tip of the iceberg. Bree has worked in her father’s company for years. Recently, due to her father’s ill health, she’s been in charge. It appears she also had been siphoning money out of the business without her father’s knowledge or consent. How much damage she’s done to him remains to be seen.
Bree has already answered for her crimes. She went off a cliff while trying to elude a police roadblock. She’s dead. Her husband is in jail, being held without bond on suspicion of homicide.
That means Reenie’s parents will be having yet another funeral this week—a second funeral for their second daughter. The first one, for Reenie, was an outpouring of public grief. The second one will be a private affair—family members only—as two fine, upstanding people try to come to terms with their own nightmare version of Cain and Abel.
It makes me wonder? How do parents cope with a tragedy like this where one of their children stands accused of murdering another? How do they find the courage to go on?
I don’t know, but I’m sure they will. They have to. Because their grandchildren, Matt and Julie, are coming to live with them while the children’s father goes off on a yearlong sabbatical.
Taking his girlfriend with him, Ali thought, but she didn’t put that in the post.
Which means Sam will be staying on with me. And that’s all right. Neither one of us liked being together much to begin with, but I think we’re going to be friends.
Speaking of parents, mine have decided not to sell the Sugarloaf—or rather the buyer decided against making the deal. I guess his restaurant consultant advised him against it. My father is bummed about it; my mother is delighted, so I guess they’ll work it out.
As for me, will I stay in Sedona? I don’t know. But I think I will keep blogging. Dangerous or not, I’m beginning to like that, too.
Posted 12:28 A.M. by Babe
About the Author
J.A. JANCE is the New York Times bestselling author of the Joanna Brady series, the J.P. Beaumont series, and the interrelated novels Day of the Dead, Hour of the Hunter, and Kiss of the Bees. She was born in South Dakota, brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, and now lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.
Readers can visit her online at www.jajance.com.
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Praise for New York Times bestselling author
J.A. JANCE
“IN THE ELITE COMPANY OF SUE GRAFTON
AND PATRICIA CORNWELL.”
Flint Journal
“[Jance] will keep the reader up nights.”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“[Jance creates] characters so real you want to reach out and hug—or strangle—them. Her dialogue always rings true.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Jance’s [novels] show up on bestseller lists …One can see why.”
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Jance delivers a devilish page-turner.”
People
“Jance brings the reader along with suspense, wit, surprise, and intense feeling.”
Huntsville Times
“JANCE JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER.”
Traverse City Record-Eagle
Books by J.A. Jance
Joanna Brady Mysteries
DESERT HEAT • TOMBSTONE COURAGE
SHOOT/DON’T SHOOT • DEAD TO RIGHTS
SKELETON CANYON • RATTLESNAKE CROSSING
OUTLAW MOUNTAIN • DEVIL’S CLAW
PARADISE LOST • PARTNER IN CRIME
EXIT WOUNDS
J. P. Beaumont Mysteries
UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY • INJUSTICE FOR ALL
TRIAL BY FURY • TAKING THE FIFTH
IMPROBABLE CAUSE • A MORE PERFECT UNION
DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE • MINOR IN POSSESSION
PAYMENT IN KIND • WITHOUT DUE PROCESS
FAILURE TO APPEAR • LYING IN WAIT
NAME WITHHELD • BREACH OF DUTY
BIRDS OF PREY • PARTNER IN CRIME
LONG TIME GONE
and
HOUR OF THE HUNTER
KISS OF THE BEES
DAY OF THE DEAD
EDGE OF EVIL
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, and dialogue are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
EDGE OF EVIL. Copyright © 2006 by J.A. Jance. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books™.
