Clawback

by J. A. Jance

  “Will you please just shut the hell up?” Jeffrey demanded. “If you’re so worried about all this, maybe you’d better let me handle it.”

  They waited, standing side by side, until the van stopped with the sliding passenger door directly in front of them. It was a nondescript older-model Dodge Caravan that someone had taken the time and trouble to turn into a wheelchair-accessible vehicle. Slowly the rear door rolled open. Next a silver-haired man, seated in a wheelchair and wearing cataract-style sunglasses, appeared in the doorway. When he pressed a button, a heavy-duty metal plate emerged from the floor of the vehicle and then gradually lowered both man and chair to ground level.

  “Are they dead?” he asked.

  That had been part of the deal. Even if Dan Frazier had told them exactly where the SD card was and handed it over, the contract had stipulated that neither Dan nor his wife would live to tell the tale.

  Jeffrey stepped forward, assuming the role of spokesman. “They’re gone,” he said. “We saw to it.”

  “No witnesses?”

  “None. We did it right.”

  “Weapons?”

  “Knives,” Jeffrey said. “We got rid of them along with the gloves and the gowns.”

  “Great. Where’s the drive?”

  “Got it right here, sir,” Jeffrey said deferentially as he pulled the tiny device out of his shirt pocket. He was relieved to see that the man was empty-handed. There was no laptop visible. He wouldn’t be able to check on the drive until after Alberto and Jeffrey were well on their way.

  Jeffrey studied the other man’s face as he stepped forward and dropped the drive into the man’s waiting palm. There was no hint that the guy had any concern about their playing him or deceiving him. Alberto was doing the same thing—watching the man’s face. Neither of them noticed as the figure of a shooter materialized around the edge of the minivan’s passenger door. Neither of them heard the bark of a firearm as two carefully aimed shots echoed off the walls of the gravel pit.

  Alberto and Jeffrey didn’t hear the gunshots for one very good reason—they were both already dead.

  11

  Utterly astonished, Jason McKinzie could only sit and stare at the bloodied fallen bodies. Jessie had shot them both front and center before either man had a chance to react. Yes, they’d talked about the fact the guys she’d hired for the job were most likely expendable, but Jason sure as hell hadn’t expected her to gun them down in cold blood right there in front of him. That was the whole appeal of white-collar crime. No blood.

  Jason had read about the pink spray in novels and seen it occasionally in particularly violent movies, but never in real life. As for Jessie? He’d been warned before he’d hired her that underneath that helpless-blond-bimbo façade lurked a vicious attack dog, but this was more than Jason had bargained for—way more.

  He watched as she walked over to one of the bodies and placed the weapon she’d used—a handgun of some kind—in the hand of one of the dead men—the Hispanic one—before pulling his fist closed around the handle. After peering briefly into the parked pickup truck, she turned and walked back toward Jason, nonchalantly peeling off a pair of latex gloves as she did so.

  “I told them to make it look like a burglary,” she said. “Looks like they got that right. There’s quite a haul in the back of that crew cab.”

  Overcoming his initial shock, Jason finally found his voice. “Did you have to do that right here and right now?” he demanded.

  Jessica glanced around at the empty gravel pit and then shrugged. “Seems like as good a place as any,” she observed. “Besides, letting them go didn’t seem like an option. Neither did paying them. Isn’t that what you meant by the word ‘expendable’?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “But nothing,” she said. “Now come on. We need to get the hell out of here.”

  The wheelchair had been intended as nothing more than a disguise, but right that moment, Jason doubted his ability to stand on his own. He sat there, unable to tear his eyes away from the two fallen victims.

  “Shouldn’t we bury them or something?” he asked. “And when they’re found out here in the open like this, won’t the trail lead right back to us?”

  “No,” Jessica said. “It won’t. That trail will lead right back to Dan Frazier and nobody else. I used Dan’s .38, by the way. It’ll have his DNA and fingerprints on it, and now it has Alberto’s. There’s nothing out there in the electronic world that links you and me to them—no e-mails, no texts, no cell phone calls or GPS trails, either. As far as the authorities are concerned, your phone went dark last weekend somewhere in Mexico City. Mine’s at home in Phoenix. What that means in law enforcement terms is that we’re not here.”

  “Okay, then,” Jason said, feeling somewhat reassured.

  He got out of the chair and reentered the van, leaving Jessie to load both the chair and lift back into the van. “But are you sure they did it?” he asked, once Jessie was back behind the wheel. “They said Dan and Millie are dead, but are you sure it’s true?”

  “I’m sure,” Jessie replied. “I’ve been monitoring my scanner, and that’s what they’re saying. There’s all kinds of chatter about two unidentified homicide victims found in Sedona—one male and one female. There’s also word that a suspect has been taken into custody, which means the cops are looking at someone else entirely. Couldn’t be better.”

  Jessie started the van and drove out of the gravel pit the same way they had entered, leaving behind the abandoned pickup as well as two newly dead bodies.

  “Aren’t you worried about leaving tracks?” Jason asked.

  “Not in the least,” Jessie answered with a confident smile. “That’s why I set the meet for here. A gravel road leading to a gravel pit means we’re leaving behind no usable tracks.”

  Jason couldn’t help being taken aback by her calm demeanor. She had just gunned down two people with what seemed like utter indifference, and now she was as calm as if it were a completely ordinary set of circumstances. Perhaps for her it was.

  Jason reached for the leather case that held his laptop. Pulling it out, he booted it up and then inserted the card. A moment later he exploded in anger. “Damn it all! The drive is empty!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. There’s nothing on it. It’s completely blank. Either Dan gave them a dud, or those incredible assholes were trying to rip us off!”

  Jason heard the rising panic in his voice and wished it weren’t there, but with the drive still out there loose in the world, he understood that everything he’d worked for was at risk.

  His long-unsubstantiated suspicions about Dan Frazier had finally come to a head on Friday morning. He’d watched the whole thing play out on the security footage. Late Thursday night, 10:39 p.m. according to the time stamp, one of the members of the cleaning crew—someone with access to Jason’s private office—had allowed Dan inside. He had walked over to the desk as though he owned the place. He’d had zero trouble unlocking the desk and then had gone straight to the drawer containing the laptop. Within seconds, Dan had booted up the computer, inserted the drive, and started the download. He’d been in and out in a matter of minutes.

  Jason often left his computer in the office, in the mistaken belief that it would be better off in his locked office than entrusted to the parking valets at his many evening social engagements. Obviously he’d been mistaken about that, but having seen Dan in action, Jason drew the only sensible conclusion. Dan Frazier had most likely gone rogue and was attempting to gather incriminating information against him, probably in advance of going to the feds.

  If Jason McKinzie had been any less OCD, he might never have been any the wiser. In this case, however, his obsessive-compulsive disorder operated in his favor. Despite the fact that he had never used a fountain pen in his life, Jason nonetheless kept a plush leather-bound desk-blotter on his desk. The last thing he did each night, after clearing and locking the desk, was to align the blotte
r perfectly with the edge of the desk—a desk all cleaning ladies were forbidden to disturb in any way. Friday morning, when Jason had noticed the blotter was slightly out of alignment, he’d gone directly to the security footage.

  For months Jason had worried that Dan Frazier had become his weakest link. That was the whole reason he’d hired Jessica Denton in the first place—to keep an eye on Dan. Once Jason knew it for sure, he and Jessie had set about pulling the various triggers designed to make both the business and Jason disappear in a puff of smoke. Unfortunately, many of the pieces of Jason’s well-thought-out exit plan were now loaded onto that missing Micro SD card, the one Alberto and Jeffrey had failed to retrieve. Some of the files Dan had stolen were merely password protected. The most sensitive ones were encrypted, of course, but they were still out there, and Jason was frantic to get them back. Naturally he had turned to Jessie, his right-hand man, as it were, for help.

  Jason had hired her initially as a monitor for Dan. In the months since, however, the woman had wormed her way into both Jason’s heart and his bed, making herself damned near indispensable in the process.

  She had used some of her underground connections to help create the complex network of safe houses they’d be able to use when it was time for them to go bye-bye. When Jason had explained the need of trashing OFM’s financial records in advance of a possible raid from the feds, Jessica had used her dark web contacts to find an IT guy capable of doing the job. She’d also located the Jason McKinzie look-alike who had flown out of Sky Harbor to Mexico City, on Friday night, using Jason’s own valid passport and taking his cell phone along for good measure.

  Those were all strategic measures Jason appreciated having in place. On Friday morning when he’d been in a blind panic, Jessica had been dead calm. “Don’t worry,” she had said. “I’ll handle it, but I’ll need to use some of the cash you gave me to get everything done.”

  “Get what done?”

  “It’s clear that Dan’s about to turn state’s evidence. That means he has to go and so does Millie. It’s as simple as that.”

  Jason was stunned. “You mean go as in permanently?”

  “Exactly,” she said. “And I already have someone in mind for the job.”

  “But can this person be trusted?” Jason asked.

  “Enough to get the job done,” Jessie had answered.

  The guy who had first recommended Jessica to Jason had hinted that she wasn’t afraid to handle what he called the “rough stuff,” on occasion, but today in the gravel pit was the first time Jason had glimpsed what must be the real Jessica Denton. She had trusted her hired killers enough for them to do the job, but not enough to let them walk away afterward.

  “So where’s the real drive?” Jason asked.

  “I’m betting Dan hid it somewhere and gave Alberto and Jeffrey the blank. They would have had no way of knowing if it was real, and I don’t think either one of them would have been smart enough to make the switch themselves.”

  “Damn Dan Frazier anyway.”

  “I’ll find it,” Jessica assured him. “By now both of Dan’s residences are most likely locked down as crime scenes, but I happen to have keys, remember? I also have the combinations to their in-house safes. I’ll check out both places tonight and have a look-see.”

  “Is that a good idea?” Jason asked. “What if you get caught?”

  “I won’t,” Jessica replied. “I’ll be in and out without anyone being the wiser. If it turns out the drive can’t be found either place, there’s always another possibility.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Dan might have handed it off to his office manager up in Sedona.”

  “I didn’t even remember there was an office manager.”

  “Believe me, she exists,” Jessie said. “Her name’s Haley Jackson. He always raved about how dependable she was and how he could always count on her in a pinch. Just to be sure, while I’m up in Sedona, I’ll see to it that she and I have a chat.”

  It took the better part of forty-five minutes to get from the gravel pit, over Loop 303, and then back to the 60, giving Jason plenty of time for reflection.

  “What if they were going to do more than just rip us off?” he asked.

  “There you go, then,” Jessie responded. “Better them than us.”

  That was true. For right now, Jason was incredibly grateful to have Jessica Denton in his life. He suspected that from here on out, he’d be dealing with situations where having an ever-present bodyguard—one with her particular skill set—would be a lifesaving necessity rather than an option.

  The first scheduled way station for Jason’s disappearing act was an anonymous rental property on a golf course in Peoria. The neighborhood was upscale enough to be comfortable, but it wasn’t the kind of area where people were likely to stand around chatting back and forth over backyard fences.

  Although it wasn’t officially a 55+ kind of development, there were enough retirees hanging around the area that an aging, nondescript minivan bearing a handicapped sticker wasn’t at all out of place. People glancing inside would have noticed that the silver-haired gentleman riding in the passenger seat wore a pair of oversized cataract sunglasses, making him somewhere close to older than dirt. That also meant that the young woman at the wheel of the van was most likely a paid caregiver of some kind. All those things taken together rendered Jason and Jessica not only completely uninteresting but also invisible.

  As for the cookie-cutter house with the red tile roof where they were staying? It was the kind of place where the old Jason McKinzie wouldn’t have been caught dead, and that was the whole point. No one would think of looking for someone like him in a run-of-the-mill housing development. At least no one had so far. The prospect of sitting around watching TV for what seemed like days on end may have been boring as all hell, but being bored was preferable to being caught.

  Besides, being stuck here wasn’t exactly a life sentence. This was only the first of his hidey-holes. The next one was scheduled to be at a secluded oceanfront condo in Belize.

  Once they reached the house and in order to maintain the fiction, Jason used the wheelchair to lift himself out of the van and onto the floor of the garage. “You’re sure there’s not enough time for a roll in the hay?” he asked plaintively as Jessie walked past him toward the relatively new, bright yellow VW Beetle parked in the second stall of the two-car garage.

  “Not if you want to see that drive anytime soon.”

  “All right, then,” he agreed reluctantly. “But when will you be back?”

  “When I have that drive in hand,” she answered, “and not a moment before.”

  “And I’m supposed to sit here and wait until then without so much as a single phone call?”

  “That’s right,” she told him. “No incoming calls and no outgoing ones, either. Maintaining radio silence makes us that much harder to track. But knock yourself out. Watch all the on-demand movies you want. By the time the bill comes due, we’ll be long gone.”

  He sat in the garage and watched her reverse down the driveway, then, as the garage door closed, he rolled himself into the house.

  Jason McKinzie had known plenty of women in his life. As one of the Phoenix area’s most eligible bachelors, he’d been a staple on the charity ball circuit, spending years squiring dim but beautiful women to one sumptuous event after another. He’d also been active on any number of dating Web sites.

  As far as Jason was concerned, the women he’d found along the way had proven to be arm candy—great as subject matter for the steady stream of photo ops that kept his name and face front and center. A few of the women were somewhat amusing for a time, although eventually he had tired of them all.

  The thing was, none of them could measure up to Jessica Denton. Yes, he’d been warned she was dangerous. After today he knew firsthand that was inarguably true, but being dangerous was also a big part of Jessica’s appeal—better dangerous and smart than safe and dimwitted.

  It t
ickled Jason’s fancy to think about entering some fabled room—like the Monte Carlo Casino for instance—with Jessica on his arm. Everyone else would see just what they were supposed to see—a somewhat older gentleman accompanied by a beautiful and much younger woman. What they wouldn’t grasp was that Jessie, in addition to being young and beautiful, was also a lethal weapon.

  12

  Back in the interview room after visiting the restroom, Hank placed another unopened bottle of water on the table in front of Bob. “As I said earlier, I’ll be recording this interview, Mr. Larson,” the detective said.

  Bob nodded. For a fleeting moment it occurred to him that maybe this was the moment when he should ask for an attorney, but he didn’t. The guys who were guilty were always the ones who lawyered up. Besides, Hank was from his old Cub Scout pack and his Boy Scout troop, for Pete’s sake. How bad could it be?

  Once the recording equipment was activated and Hank had supplied both his name and Bob’s, the detective kicked off the interview.

  “Why don’t we start by your telling me exactly what happened this morning and how you happened to be the first one on the scene?”

  “Edie and I . . . ,” Bob began. “My wife and I were clients of Dan’s and have been for years. When he suggested that we move our IRAs to a different company, over to Ocotillo Fund Management, that’s what we did. It’s an outfit that has an office—had an office, that is—down in Phoenix. They billed themselves as a wealth management company.

  “This morning, while I was watching the news, I saw that the company had suddenly gone belly-up—that the SEC had come in and shut the place down. I could barely believe my ears. Not only were Edie’s and my IRAs there, so were the proceeds that came from the sale of the Sugarloaf. After all, we’d been with the company for years, and we were getting good returns—on paper, anyway—so when we sold the restaurant, we plowed most of the money from that over into OFM as well.”