Clawback

by J. A. Jance

  Half an hour later, Jeffrey emerged from the drugstore with his purchase in a plastic bag. Once they finally extricated the drive itself from its plastic packaging, Alberto was amazed. “That tiny little thing?” he asked. “What the hell could be on something like this that would be worth dying for?”

  “Beats me,” Jeffrey said. “You’re right. It doesn’t look like much from here, but we’re not the ones calling the shots and paying the fare. Now, what say we stop off and have a burger before we get back on the freeway? It was a long night, and I’m starving. Besides, we need to keep up our strength. I’m thinking we have another long drive ahead of us later tonight.”

  4

  Ali Reynolds held the phone away from her ear as the woman droned on. “As I already told Ms. Fletcher yesterday, her sister’s children cannot and will not be admitted to schools in our district.”

  During Ali’s years in the television news business, first as a reporter and later as an anchor, she had dealt with plenty of recalcitrant mid-level bureaucrats. Now in her fifties and long retired from her television newscast days, she currently performed administrative and PR duties as well as occasional investigative work for her husband’s cyber security company, High Noon Enterprises. Most of the time, unfailing courtesy and a bit of humor could break through bureaucratically enforced barriers. On this occasion, however, those remedies didn’t seem to be working.

  It didn’t help Ali’s frame of mind that Adele Harris, the woman drawing lines in the sand, was speaking to Ali in an archly superior manner that suggested her listener was something less than all there. “We are unable to enroll any children whose parents don’t present properly certified birth certificates. A notarized photocopy of a page from a family Bible simply doesn’t cut it as far as district policy is concerned. No exceptions.”

  Ali sat back in her ratty, definitely nonergonomic desk chair, closed her eyes, and did her best to keep from grinding her teeth. An old-fashioned electric clock hung on the far wall of her grim little office. As the hour hand landed on eleven, she realized she had spent twenty minutes waiting on hold to speak to this faceless school district official located several hundred miles away most likely in an equally grim office in far-off Albuquerque, New Mexico. Once Ms. Harris came back on the phone, Ali had wasted another twenty minutes while attempting to explain, in great detail, why the three Johnson children—ages seven, five, and three—had no officially issued birth certificates. None of the children from The Family, the polygamous cult from which the Johnson brood had been liberated some three months earlier, had been given officially sanctioned birth certificates. Records of live births in The Encampment had been kept in family Bibles and nowhere else.

  Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, Ali continued to hold herself almost wholly responsible for the fact that Christine Johnson and her now fatherless brood had been cast out into the cold, cruel world and into a twenty-first century that they were ill-prepared to face.

  In the aftermath of the bloody massacre that had put an end to The Family’s lucrative human trafficking business, Ali, along with numerous others, had devoted countless hours trying to aid the survivors. The bloody shootout on a cold March night on the outskirts of Colorado City had displaced approximately thirty separate polygamous families. The death toll left behind at least a hundred women bereft of husbands along with two hundred or more fatherless children. All of the survivors had been deprived of home and hearth. They had lost everything familiar. With almost no preparation, they were thrust out into a strange new world which, from the survivors’ points of view, might just as well have been another planet.

  Ali had done her best to explain all of that to Ms. Harris, but her detailed recitation of the facts had left the school official unmoved and unfazed. “As I said before, our district policy requires that we must have proper documentation for all our—”

  Ali hit end on her phone, cutting the woman off in mid–bureaucratic doublespeak. Then, after scrolling through her recent calls list, she pressed one of those. The phone rang twice before being answered by a pleasant-voiced receptionist.

  “Governor Dunham’s office.”

  “Ali Reynolds here. Could I speak with the governor, please?”

  “She’s on another line right now, Ms. Reynolds. I don’t know how long she’ll be.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll hold.”

  While Ali waited, she checked the computerized list that contained the names of all the women and children who had been dispossessed by what people in the media still persisted in referring to as the Dunham Massacre. What Governor Virginia Dunham had intended as a bloodless preemptive strike to recover evidence of The Family’s human trafficking had been anything but bloodless. It had, instead, turned into a slaughter that left more than two dozen dead and the governor herself gravely wounded.

  Working out of a repurposed utility room turned office, Ali spent two to three days a week as a volunteer trying to iron out some of the thorny reentry issues faced by The Family’s dispossessed women and children. In the meantime, the governor was working on locating the funds Bishop Richard Lowell, The Family’s charismatic former leader, had hidden away for his own benefit in any number of offshore accounts. Governor Dunham was intent on tracking down the funds so they could be used to meet the ongoing economic, educational, physical, and emotional needs of the cult’s traumatized survivors, many of whom could barely read and write and who had few, if any, marketable job skills.

  As for the children? The cult’s so-called homeschooling had been appalingly deficient, leaving the kids completely at sea in grade levels commensurate with their ages.

  Having lost patience with only the most recent of several unhelpful school functionaries, the one in Albuquerque, Ali had resorted to bringing out her big gun—Governor Dunham herself.

  “Hey there, partner in crime,” Virginia Dunham said cheerfully, coming on the line. “How are we doing in the exploding microwave department? Any more electronic casualties to report?”

  Exploding microwaves weren’t exactly a laughing matter among The Family’s struggling refugees. As the women moved first into emergency housing and now into more permanent facilities, coping with modern appliances had become a major problem. There were no electrical appliances back home at The Encampment, and the women were at a loss as to how to use them. Microwaves in particular had been a problem. To date four of them had been lost—three to meltdowns caused by overheated tinfoil and one to a very messy six-egg explosion.

  “No,” Ali said with a laugh. “The microwaves are all fine as far as I know. This is a school enrollment problem.”

  Governor Dunham sighed. “Another of those? I’m guessing that means we’re up against the old missing-birth-certificate bugaboo.”

  “Yup, that’s it,” Ali replied.

  Governor Dunham’s tone went from cordial to all-business. “Who’s the client?” she asked. “And where’s the school district?”

  “Christine Johnson is the client. The school district in question is Albuquerque Unified, and the woman dragging her bureaucratic high heels is one Adele Harris.”

  Ali heard the governor keying information into her computer. Ali and the governor worked with a shared Dropbox file devoted to The Family’s refugees. It contained the names and current addresses for all the affected women and children. It also included medical, dental, and vaccination records. Getting all the kids vaccinated had been another roadblock to enrolling them in schools. Once Ali had seen to that, she thought they were home free, but the missing birth certificates had proved to be an equally pressing issue.

  “Okay,” Virginia Dunham said. “Got it. Christine Johnson. It says here that she and her children, ages seven, five, and three, were taken under the wing of an older sister, Edith Fletcher, who somehow managed to escape from The Family several years ago.”

  “That’s correct,” Ali said. “From what I can tell, the sister landed on her feet and is now pretty squared away. She’s made arrangements
to have learning assessments done on both of Christine’s school-age kids. She’s also arranged for private tutoring this summer to bring them up somewhere close to appropriate grade levels.”

  “Are we paying for that?” Virginia asked.

  “I offered,” Ali answered, “but Edith said there was no need—that she would handle it.”

  “Getting back to Ms. Harris, it sounds like I’ll need to find a way to go over her head, then,” Virginia observed.

  “I was hoping you would,” Ali answered. “Thank you. But before you go, can you tell me what’s happening on the financial front? Any news on that?”

  Governor Dunham had personally taken charge of overseeing the untangling of The Family’s complicated financial situation. “Not much,” she said. “We’re still working the problem. With the help of your husband’s firm, we’ve managed to locate many of the offshore accounts, but getting the money back from those and then sorting out the distribution of funds to the proper heirs and beneficiaries is a mess that will take years.”

  Ali’s husband, B. Simpson, and High Noon Enterprises, had been involved in the problem from the get-go. Ali and B. had been together in Governor Dunham’s Sprinter the night of The Family’s bloody shootout. Since then, B. had devoted plenty of the company’s pro bono time and effort toward tracking down the cult’s purloined funds.

  Finding the money had proved to be the easy part. Figuring out who should inherit was another issue entirely. In a polygamous community, the question of who was related to whom and how wasn’t always clear-cut. The records from the family Bibles weren’t always complete, either, since daughters who ran away or even attempted to do so were simply stricken from the record. Several of those supposedly errant daughters may have been disavowed by their families, but the rule of law outside The Family’s compound meant that, in the absence of properly drawn wills, they were still legitimate heirs.

  “When it comes to sorting that stuff out,” Ali said, “better you than me. Besides, my total focus right now is making sure all the school-age kids are enrolled in suitable situations by the time September rolls around.”

  Ali’s phone buzzed in her ear. A glance at the screen identified the incoming call.

  “My mom’s calling,” she said into the phone. “I need to take this.”

  Governor Dunham laughed. “You have one of those, too? While you talk to her, I’ll tackle the governor of New Mexico.”

  “Fair enough,” Ali replied. She ended the call and switched over to the other line. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hello yourself,” Edie Larson said. “Have you heard from your father?”

  “No, why? Has he gone missing?”

  Ali intended her comment as a joke, but for Edie this wasn’t a laughing matter.

  “He and that rusty bucket-of-bolts Bronco of his were MIA by the time Betsy and I got back from water aerobics first thing this morning,” Edie complained. “He went off in such a hurry that the TV was still on and the remote was on the kitchen counter along with a half-empty coffee cup, which he didn’t bother to rinse out, by the way.”

  Ali’s parents had run the Sugarloaf Café together for years with very little squabbling. Now that they were retired and living in a small two-bedroom unit at Sedona Shadows, Ali had noticed that, on occasion, they tended to get on one another’s nerves in what B. referred to as a perpetual case of cabin fever.

  “I’m in charge of this month’s birthday list,” Edie Larson said, continuing her rant. “Bobby was supposed to pick up Wanda Farmer’s birthday cake from the bakery at Safeway and have it here before lunch. So here it is, almost lunchtime. Bobby’s nowhere to be found and neither is the cake. I’ve been calling and calling, but he doesn’t answer. I finally called the store to check. Turns out the cake is still there. That means I’m going to have to fire up the Buick and go get it myself. You’d think I’d know better than to trust a man to do a woman’s job.”

  Ali knew that her father served as the self-appointed guardian to a homeless enclave in the Mogollon Rim woods halfway between Sedona and Flag. Many of the guys who lived out there were veterans with medical and or mental issues. Ali understood that if one of “my guys,” as Bob Larson liked to call them, was in some kind of difficulty, her father would move heaven and earth to fix it. Considering how long her parents had been married, it shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise to Edie that on Bob’s list of what was and wasn’t important, a scheduled birthday cake delivery might easily have fallen to the bottom.

  “One of his pals is probably in some kind of difficulty and he’s up on the rim helping out with that,” Ali suggested. “I know from personal experience that cell phone service up there is mighty spotty.”

  “Right,” Edie grumbled. “And the old fool probably drove that rattletrap Bronco of his straight up Schnebly Hill Road to get there. For all we know, he might have driven off a cliff somewhere, and he’s lying out there dead in a spot where only the buzzards will find him. Wouldn’t you think he’d have brains enough to leave me a note telling me where he’s going? I swear, sometimes I think that man is going to drive me to drink.”

  “After fifty-odd years of marriage, I doubt that’s going to happen anytime soon,” Ali observed, saying the words with a smile she was glad her mother couldn’t see.

  “No,” Edie agreed. “I suppose not. I’d better head out and pick up that blasted cake, but if you hear from your father before I do, you tell him from me that he’s in hot water.”

  “I will,” Ali agreed. “I’ll let him have it with both barrels.”

  “Good,” Edie said. “He might just listen to you.”

  When Edie ended the call, Ali glanced at her watch and saw that it really was almost noon. After being shut up in a dreary, windowless space all morning long, she decided that a brisk walk was in order. She stopped off in the break room long enough to pick up the egg salad sandwich her majordomo, Leland Brooks, had made that morning and sent along for her to have at lunch. With sandwich and a Diet Coke in hand, Ali left the building and stepped out into the warm sunshine.

  It was June. There were no clouds dotting the bright blue sky overhead. How did that almost forgotten old poem go? Ali recited part of it aloud as she marched along, not caring if passersby thought she was nuts and talking to herself. It didn’t matter:

  “And what is so rare as a day in June?

  Then, if ever, come perfect days . . .”

  As far as Ali could see right then, it seemed like a perfect June day, and it kept right on being perfect—until the moment it wasn’t.

  5

  Delayed by countless phone calls, it was late midmorning before Haley finally arrived at the office. By then the strip mall’s parking lot was already loaded with cars, including two separate media vans, one from a television station in Flagstaff and the other from one in Phoenix.

  A disorganized crowd of people had gathered on the sidewalk outside the front door, milling restlessly on either side of an unmarked delivery truck parked directly in front of the agency’s main entrance. The door itself had been propped open. Under the direction of Agent Ferris, two men in matching coveralls were busily carrying armload after armload of Bankers Boxes out of the office and packing them into the truck. It was all Haley could do not to break down and weep. In no small way, those boxes represented her life’s work.

  As Haley moved through the crowd, people began hailing her by name and shouting angry questions in her direction. She knew most of the hecklers by sight. Some were insurance customers only, worried about what would happen to their coverage if Frazier Insurance went out of business. Several of them, folks she knew to be OFM customers, had arrived in full protest mode, carrying handmade placards that said, “HEY, DANNO. SAY IT AIN’T SO!”

  Frank Merrick, one of the placard-bearers, waved his sign directly in Haley’s face, forcing her to retreat.

  “What’s the matter?” Frank demanded. “Is Dan Frazier such a coward that he can’t come out and talk to us himself? He had t
o send you?”

  Haley had never liked Frank Merrick. Because he was a customer, she forced herself to tolerate his frequent bouts of rude behavior. She often ran interference for the other girls in the office by handling Frank’s visits herself rather than subjecting other employees to his routine boorishness. Even under these difficult circumstances, she did her best to be courteous.

  “Good morning, Mr. Merrick,” she said. “I’m here because I’m supposed to be here. This is where I work.”

  Unfortunately, by then Merrick had succeeded in getting the crowd’s undivided attention. The people gathered around him fell unnervingly silent, listening to Haley’s reply.

  “Where’s Dan?” Merrick insisted.

  “Not here at the moment, as you can see,” she said mildly. “How can I help you?”

  “How come the office is shut down?” The question came from someone near the back, someone Haley couldn’t see. “Who are these people? Why are they emptying your office? Are you leaving?”

  “We’re closed today, and I’m not exactly sure when we’ll reopen. No doubt you’ve all heard about the situation with Ocotillo Fund Management. The files are being removed, temporarily, as part of an ongoing SEC investigation. We should be back up and running in a day or two. In the meantime, for those of you who have insurance coverage, please be assured that there will be no lapses in your coverage.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Frank interjected. “If there was cheating going on with the investment side, what are the chances the same thing was happening on the insurance side? What if we all think we have coverage but we really don’t? And what about you, Haley Jackson? Are you being paid to be here? If so, is your paycheck coming straight out of our money? You’re part of all this mess. Dan cheated us, and I’ll bet you did, too.”

  Haley’s face flushed with shame. In her heart of hearts, she knew it was true. She hadn’t knowingly cheated anyone, but she had sent some of her insurance clients to OFM. If their investment money was gone, she was certainly partially responsible.